D̶o̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶t̶ ̶ Tell lies that the crowd loves shall be the whole of the law

Sam Bankman-Fried as the postmodern cultural machine's Cassandra moment

Confessing that the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from here on) is my favourite story for many years.

I also sense that it's big. Meaning BIG. As in bigger than things like Covid-19, the invasion of Ukraine or any of the other 'hyper objects' that consume our attention a lot of the time.

Pick your metaphor.

It's a moment that reveals the house of cards that crypto represents. A moment when it's not just little people, who carry no cultural clout, who can point at the Emperor's nakedness without being scolded for not knowing the social rules.

Delightfully, it settles the harshest possible searchlight beam on the essential emptiness of cleverness and relentless moralising among those who reject all but base material understandings of how the world works and what it means to have a worthwhile life.

SBF was right up there in the Thelemic pantheon. (If you don't immediately think of Aleister Crowley's attempt to start a religion when you watch the social creep of American tech culture and radically capitalist social progressivism, take a look at that).

A pudgy scruffy 20-something, openly addled on stimulants while onstage with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the son of distinguished Harvard academics who are infinitely superior beings to you or me, who lives in a polyamorous cult arrangement in the Bahamas, who is (or was, until 5 minutes ago) famous for being insanely rich while driving a Toyota Corolla and becoming insanely rich just to give it away to good causes. Featured on all the best magazine covers and on all the smartest podcasts (I remember listening with a kind of detached bemusement when he was on with Sam Harris) and of course helping the 'good' party win the 2022 mid-terms as their second largest donor.

Such a mensch. What a good and clever young man, with his heart in the right place.

The very best moment so far, in this unfolding story, is from a Twitter DM conversation with Kelsey Piper of Vox.

KP: you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers.

SBF: ya

SBF: hehe

SBF: I had to be

SBF: it's what reputations are made of, to some extent

SBF: I feel bad for those who get fucked by it

SBF: by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us

That exchange seems to me to capture the essence at the heart of our discourse under the influence of the postmodern post-enlightenment re-imagination of reality.

We say what we wish to be true, rather than what is true. And we do it for the benefit of the crowd, because we seek good-standing in a hyper-networked world. Status.

We tell lies because nothing is sacred in this culture, except perhaps the worship of smartness. All that matters is posting the right memes to ensure you're sorted into the correct group. The lies can be small, but with big and material consequences, or they can be so big that no one really even understands them.

We say 'trans women are women' so that the crowd won't bully us, so that we are not rendered irrelevant in a changing world. We say things like that to keep up with the Joneses. Rob Henderson's Luxury Beliefs theory describes this perfectly.

We get into crypto, which doesn't actually exist in any real sense, without caring that it's more of a story than a store of wealth.

And SBF discovers that he can buy a Bitcoin on a US exchange for $10,000 and sell it on a Japanese exchange for $11,000, makes $1,000,000 a day doing this for a while and then sets up a Ponzi scheme, 'lends' himself billions of dollars (which may still be somewhere) and just turns out to be a crook.

The oddest thing about this story of $ billions being wiped out is the silence so far among investors who, one might reasonably assume, must include people who have lost a lot more than they can afford.

This is what characterises our postmodern utopian culture; silence. Which I guess is driven by fear of being seen as an old-fashioned curmudgeon who just doesn't get it.

I know people who do get it though.

The Wonderland Rules

is currently celebrating getting it, for example.

SBF was, of course, the poster boy of Effective Altruism.

It's not for me to get into the strangeness of Effective Altruism beyond saying that I'm wary of Utilitarianism (and indeed all normative moral theories) for its inhuman quality. Any ideology that attempts to erase all recognition of the sacred in favour of the 'rational' and what can be tamed or controlled always seems to end up doing things that I don't favour. They either leave a void where we would otherwise find meaning or kill millions of people.

There's no shortage of fascinating accounts of the still unfolding story of the young archetype of our gloriously rational era and how he has caused (so far) uncalculated harm and this piece was never designed to add to them.

It's just that I drifted off to sleep last night realising where SBF fits in with the reasons I started writing Rarely Certain. One of which was that I don't like feeling duped and pressured to go along with being duped by the prevailing culture. And another, which is that reality means more to me than theory.

Then I woke up this morning and listened to

Luke Burgis

Anti-Mimetic Salon discussion, from the other day, featuring other readers and Dr. Hollis Robbins, Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah, discussing SBF.

I'm afraid that one's for paying supporters of Luke only, but credit where it's due - it helped to bring my thoughts together.

More to come on all this. Because how SBF is handled from here on will be deeply relevant to understanding the culture as well. This story is a window onto something akin to a cultural sickness that many people are at last noticing and I'm loving it for that.