Excellent article. I appreciate the author's take on Bitcoin. I like bitcoin, gold, real estate, land, hard assets, etc but think something that is particularly missing in the bitcoin community is trust. So much of it is atomized and anti-social. One thing to mistrust faceless governments/corporations but we need to be able to trust our neighbors, friends, associates. Think the author does a good job arguing for such people in the network.
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I did not see an acknowledgement of the plan by Wall Street and Bessent to use BTC and a smattering of stablecoins as a weapon to subsume the national debt—along the lines of the warnings being offered by Whitney Webb.
BTC offers very little true privacy and could very easily serve as an overlay for the surveillance state.
I would be happy to hear Webb’s position countered, but most information about BTC—even in right-wing forums—is just maximalist repetition.
If I was the CIA, I would invent BTC and the stablecoins so that no one would be able to do anything without the knowledge of that big computer facility the NSA runs out in Utah.
BTC is not private and it’s going to be used by Wall Street and Treasury to disappear the public debt at the expense of anyone who doesn’t hold it.
Family though is more important than money. That said there's a way to use family to advance all while not succumbing to the lure of greed, as the Capetiens did in the Medieval period and the Carolingiens before them.
A balance of morality and pragmatism as you pointed out are necessary. This is the sort of thing I try to portray in some of my darker fantasy serials.
Character matters in power. I’m with you there. The idea that wealth and influence, when stripped of virtue, accelerate societal decay isn’t just true, it’s practically an iron law of history. And yes, the argument around family and long-term thinking strikes a nerve too; anyone paying attention can see how the slow erosion of those foundations has hollowed out culture from within.
But the bulk of this piece veers into deeply flawed territory.
First, there’s an over-romanticisation of “nobility.” The past aristocracies weren’t universally virtuous guardians of civilisation. Many were exploitative, parasitic, or staggeringly indifferent to the well-being of the people they ruled. Wealth, inheritance, and titles have never guaranteed virtue; they often insulated vice. To suggest that lineage naturally incubates excellence is to mistake the accident of birth for the cultivation of character.
The Trump example only reinforces this confusion. Far from embodying the ideal of noble stewardship, Trump represents the very moral bankruptcy the piece warns against: a man who inherited capital he didn’t create, treated institutions and truth like costumes, and leveraged populist grievance to mask elite detachment. If anything, he is the logical end of what happens when you tie power to spectacle rather than substance.
Moreover, the sweeping dismissal of democracy as some kind of failed experiment ignores the critical role it plays (however imperfectly) in diffusing power and checking abuse. Historically, it’s been democracy, not hereditary rule, that has dragged societies closer to broader prosperity and rights. Romanticising a return to an aristocracy of "builders" (presumably by self-appointment) risks ignoring the long, bloody ledger of those who ruled without accountability.
There are real insights buried here, but to build a future worth living in, we need more than nostalgic yearning for imagined pasts. We need new models of power rooted in accountability, moral seriousness, and yes, long-term thinking, but ones that recognise virtue must be constantly cultivated, not inherited.
I would say that this shift from aristocracy to bureaucracy happened first and most dramatically in the American North. It has become a great misfortune that Northerners became universalist in their mindset, acting as sculptors of a global system rather than straightforwardly advancing the interests of their own families. Read more here:
That was a very well reasoned article. I think that the decline of the gentleman has had far-reaching effects on other human endeavors as well. Here is my article regarding the effects of this change upon science:
Excellent article. I appreciate the author's take on Bitcoin. I like bitcoin, gold, real estate, land, hard assets, etc but think something that is particularly missing in the bitcoin community is trust. So much of it is atomized and anti-social. One thing to mistrust faceless governments/corporations but we need to be able to trust our neighbors, friends, associates. Think the author does a good job arguing for such people in the network.
Congrats Will! Enjoy your honeymoon.
Thank you! Yes, I largely agree!
Congratulations! May your union be full of love and happiness.
Thank you very much!
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but I did not see an acknowledgement of the plan by Wall Street and Bessent to use BTC and a smattering of stablecoins as a weapon to subsume the national debt—along the lines of the warnings being offered by Whitney Webb.
BTC offers very little true privacy and could very easily serve as an overlay for the surveillance state.
I would be happy to hear Webb’s position countered, but most information about BTC—even in right-wing forums—is just maximalist repetition.
If I was the CIA, I would invent BTC and the stablecoins so that no one would be able to do anything without the knowledge of that big computer facility the NSA runs out in Utah.
BTC is not private and it’s going to be used by Wall Street and Treasury to disappear the public debt at the expense of anyone who doesn’t hold it.
Family though is more important than money. That said there's a way to use family to advance all while not succumbing to the lure of greed, as the Capetiens did in the Medieval period and the Carolingiens before them.
A balance of morality and pragmatism as you pointed out are necessary. This is the sort of thing I try to portray in some of my darker fantasy serials.
Character matters in power. I’m with you there. The idea that wealth and influence, when stripped of virtue, accelerate societal decay isn’t just true, it’s practically an iron law of history. And yes, the argument around family and long-term thinking strikes a nerve too; anyone paying attention can see how the slow erosion of those foundations has hollowed out culture from within.
But the bulk of this piece veers into deeply flawed territory.
First, there’s an over-romanticisation of “nobility.” The past aristocracies weren’t universally virtuous guardians of civilisation. Many were exploitative, parasitic, or staggeringly indifferent to the well-being of the people they ruled. Wealth, inheritance, and titles have never guaranteed virtue; they often insulated vice. To suggest that lineage naturally incubates excellence is to mistake the accident of birth for the cultivation of character.
The Trump example only reinforces this confusion. Far from embodying the ideal of noble stewardship, Trump represents the very moral bankruptcy the piece warns against: a man who inherited capital he didn’t create, treated institutions and truth like costumes, and leveraged populist grievance to mask elite detachment. If anything, he is the logical end of what happens when you tie power to spectacle rather than substance.
Moreover, the sweeping dismissal of democracy as some kind of failed experiment ignores the critical role it plays (however imperfectly) in diffusing power and checking abuse. Historically, it’s been democracy, not hereditary rule, that has dragged societies closer to broader prosperity and rights. Romanticising a return to an aristocracy of "builders" (presumably by self-appointment) risks ignoring the long, bloody ledger of those who ruled without accountability.
There are real insights buried here, but to build a future worth living in, we need more than nostalgic yearning for imagined pasts. We need new models of power rooted in accountability, moral seriousness, and yes, long-term thinking, but ones that recognise virtue must be constantly cultivated, not inherited.
I wrote more about this tension (between nostalgia, decay, and the longing for something nobler) in my piece Downton Abbey is Not a Governance Model: https://open.substack.com/pub/noisyghost/p/a-note-to-the-man-who-misses-the?r=5fir91&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I would say that this shift from aristocracy to bureaucracy happened first and most dramatically in the American North. It has become a great misfortune that Northerners became universalist in their mindset, acting as sculptors of a global system rather than straightforwardly advancing the interests of their own families. Read more here:
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/the-northerner
Very interesting.
Here are my thoughts on that, if you are interested: https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/the-death-of-the-gentleman-and-the
That was a very well reasoned article. I think that the decline of the gentleman has had far-reaching effects on other human endeavors as well. Here is my article regarding the effects of this change upon science:
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/the-gentleman-scientist
Thank you! I will check this out when back from my honeymoon! Looks very good