As a professor of political science and the author of several fairly influential books on political thought, I’m naturally reluctant to publicly admit how little I care about electoral politics. It’s embarrassing, but I’m pretty much completely uninterested. While everyone else is in the grip of election fever, it’s inevitable that the cacophony of excited conversations in the back of my ears will give way to the hushed guitar riff and stirring lyrics of Harry Nilsson’s 1969 “Everybody’s Talkin’,” a version immortalized as the theme song to the classic film “Midnight Cowboy.”
Everybody talks to me
I can’t hear what they’re saying
Just an echo of my mind.
The seeming contradiction between my profession and my dogged indifference to electoral politics disappears when you understand that I am a political philosopher, an academic fundamentally preoccupied with theory rather than practice. Philosophers like to focus their attention away from the everyday. They are masters of escapism, always wanting to connect their ideas to abstract, eternal principles somewhere else rather than to the messy, brute reality of the here and now.
I’m going where the sun keeps shining
In the pouring rain
Go where the weather suits my outfit/
Against the northeast wind
Sail on the summer breeze
And leaps like a stone over the ocean.
As a concrete example of the theoretician’s strange predilection, consider the contrast between a philosopher and a businessman. The businessman may ask, “How can I make more money?”, focusing on the practical implementation of things, but the philosopher asks a completely different question: “What is the meaning of money? What is the essence of money?” Such theoretical questions are unrealistic questions. In fact, from a practical point of view, they are stupid questions.
So imagine how shocked I was when this issue itself became an election policy issue. Not after demonetization, not in the just-concluded Indian elections, but in the ongoing US presidential elections. The two major party candidates, former President Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden, have recently started to take up Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a major election issue, fueled by the instigation of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is turning voters away from the two major party candidates. Before Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the two major party candidates had ignored and even avoided cryptocurrencies. Fearing an independent candidate’s rising popularity, especially among libertarians and undecided voters, Trump has cleverly plagiarized one of RFK’s key policies and now calls himself “President Bitcoin.”
Trump recently posted on social media: “Vote for Trump! Bitcoin mining may be the last line of defense against CBDC. Biden’s hatred for Bitcoin only empowers China, Russia and the Radical Communist Left. I want all remaining Bitcoin to be American made!!! That way we will have energy dominance!!!”
Side note: Given that there has been no public debate in India about the meaning of money, despite demonetization and the Reserve Bank of India’s introduction of a digital rupee, it may be necessary to explain that CBDC is a central bank digital currency. Liberal-minded voters are opposed to CBDCs because of the radical surveillance features the government is building into them. We will cover how bitcoin mining can help stabilize and secure the energy grid in a later post, at which point we will also need to take a moment to lament India’s total disregard for AI, which is closely related to cryptocurrency mining in terms of computation generation.
President Biden, acknowledging the effect of Trump’s actions in alienating voters from both RFK and the Democratic Party, has begun taking steps to court the support of the crypto base. The Block recently tweeted, “BREAKING: Joe Biden Campaign in Discussions about Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations!”
Bitcoin’s emergence as a mainstream issue in American electoral politics has suddenly taken me from indifferent to interested. This is not for any practical reason, not because I’ll be able to make more money if cryptocurrencies go mainstream, but because the philosophical questions at the heart of Bitcoin have gone mainstream: what is the nature, meaning and essence of money? Theoretical questions, metaphysical and ethical, that will soon be pondered and debated by the general public. There are ontological questions: is Bitcoin money? What is money? And there are normative questions: should Bitcoin be money?
Political philosophers feel vindicated whenever theoretical conundrums slip into everyday life like a Trojan horse. I hope that one day this will happen in India too. Until then…
Everybody talks to me
I can’t hear what they’re saying
Only the echo of my heart /
People stop and stare/
I can’t see their faces
Just the shadows of their eyes.
Published June 15, 2024 19:49 IST
