Hi everyone—I’m so glad to have you here. What a week.
We’re sitting squarely in that festive and twinkly time of the year full of rituals rooted in belief and celebrated with consumption, when wish lists mix with prayers in a yearly collaboration between secular and religious.
It’s a time to want new things, but also a time to appreciate what you have.
A time of comforting routines and a time of exciting novelty.
A time to both give and receive—each side of the coin of commerce.
Modern culture has largely blended together holidays (“holy days”) and festivals (from feste; “feast”). The former are times of worship in honor of a significant event or milestone of a religion, while the latter is a celebratory feast day following a period of ritualized fasting, and both tend to borrow pagan elements involving equinoxes and seasons to culminate in a time of almost utopian inclusivity. Everyone pretty much gets to celebrate whatever they want, as long as we’re all exchanging food, gifts, and camaraderie.
The point is, this line between spiritual and sensible is a blurry one. The values of each drift into the other’s as the hyper-rational find themselves actively participating in shared belief systems related to abstract concepts, while the deeply devout engage in rational sense-making and explanation that conform to human systems of logic. But neither is fully aware of when one side is active or when the other becomes salient. It’s simply a sort of fluency of balance that we all intuitively learn as members of an active, exchange-based society.
This has everything to do with finance.
It’s not uncommon for people to deride ambitious capitalists as “worshiping” money or for cryptocurrency proponents to be “part of a cult.” These aren’t just metaphors. Notions of belief, worship, ritual, and sacrifice run deep in market societies. In a way, they have to. Without some sort of shared belief—an interoperable grammar of understanding based on words we trust—there’s no common ground on which to coordinate actions.
This is where the role that money serves as society’s most tradable good, and its value is used to convey signals of trust with one another. But Yuval Noah Harari has written famously about how the idea of money is also a kind of shared fiction. A collective delusion on top of which all of society rests.
One way to think of religion is as the human enterprise of determining the best framework with which to engage reality. This is the same role that the discipline of economics plays in a world of trade and commerce. Each of these pursuits are ultimately aimed at one thing: having a source of truth in which to place our beliefs.
While the spiritual look to deities with their good & evil (or yin & yang), and the secular look to science with its matter & energy (or positive & negative), the economic look to ledgers with credits & debits. Only when things are in balance, with each side of the ledger accounted for, can we trust it to be true.
This is why we balance our checkbooks, and have a bank account balance. This word is not arbitrary, as the idea is widely accepted to be the very arbiter of truth.
The tension between this duality of things is the common thread linking the religious with the financial—the idea of reciprocal exchange and compensation. Balance.
The importance of balance is also why double-entry accounting was such a revolutionary invention in the history of human civilization. In single-entry accounting you have one list and simply add/remove entries that represent items of value, but this opens the door to the risk of fraud and manipulation since there is nothing to hold the owner of that list accountable for its accuracy. Double-entry accounting introduced the idea of assets and liabilities, where each are tracked on separate sides of the ledger and tallied to confirm a truthful balance sheet.
If one side is out of balance then that ledger is either incomplete or contains a fraudulent entry, and therefore can’t be trusted. Sure, an accountant can manipulate one side of the ledger, but it means they would have to manipulate the other side as well in order to hide their tracks… in which case the net result is as if they hadn’t manipulated anything at all.
If there were such a thing as triple-entry accounting it would involve an extra check on the veracity of those lists of assets and liabilities, placing that entity in the super-natural oversight position of confirming the entire system.
“Bitcoin is more sound than gold due to triple-entry accounting. Everyone can see the ledger.”
—Lawrence Lepard, Managing Partner at Equity Management Associates
Ideas of God and gods have always been bound up with the idea of balance. So too have the actions of fallible humans been tied to notions of being out of balance and in need of centering. The word “sin” actually comes from the world of archery and literally means “to miss the mark.” And we “atone” for our sins to achieve a state of more balanced “at one”-ment.
Sacrifice is also a balancing mechanism, whether it’s an offering placed on an altar or the delayed gratification of a youngster trying to be on his best behavior to be worthy of gifts. Scapegoats serve a similar sacrificing function in culture, being someone or something we exile from a group to take the blame and atone for all our sins. (For more on this and the fascinating work of René Girard, check out Luke Burgis’ recent book Wanting)
Whatever we hold to be a good, honest, and absolute source of truth tends to be worthy of sacrifice and embody the balance and veracity attributes of a ledger.
Which could be why so many of our deity-like myths and characters are also the holders of balance, truth, and lists.
So by now maybe it comes as less of a surprise that people attribute quasi-mystical properties to ideas and concepts that seem to allow for the kind of profound trust and truth usually attributed to gods, especially when that idea happens to also be a ledger.
I can appreciate the deep purpose religion has served for humans when its systems and rituals aren’t being wielded in service of self-interest at the expense of others. In the same way, I can appreciate why our central bank-led fiat monetary system had to emerge from a more honest hard money standard, and how it came to be corrupted as a source of great imbalance and, therefore, harm as well.
But I can also appreciate the rituals themselves. The customs, the myths, the stories. I think our ability to willingly share in fictions as instruments for getting at a deeper truth is part of the cognitive sophistication that we as a species take for granted. That we can slip so easily between worlds of fact and fiction for the fun of it and not lose purchase on our underlying grip to reality is pretty astonishing.
The trick, of course, is balancing the two. And it never hurts to check them twice.
Until next time 🤙,
Recommended Resources For Plan ₿
Swan. I became an official Swan partner because I love them so much. So if you're like me and just want an easy, automated way to buy bitcoin on the regular with the lowest fees in the game, head to https://swanbitcoin.com/Mulvey to get $10 in bitcoin for free ✨
Fold Card. Earn bitcoin on everything. You can win up to 100% back on every purchase, and every swipe is a chance to win a whole bitcoin. I use my own Fold card to pay for almost literally everything. If you use this referral link you get 5,000 sats free ✨
Share this post