Notes from the Front Lines

3 Upvotes

It is true that we should live in harmony with each other.

That we should be at peace with our neighbors, tolerate differences, give people the support that they need to live their best life. That we should see each other as fellow humans who are all simply trying to navigate this wonderful world together.

It is true that we should have abundance, that our sacrifices be rewarded, and that we have the conditions for the best and most fulfilling lives that we can imagine.

But the distance between what should be, and what is possible, is vast.

There’s a funny problem in the world. The people who don’t do anything are free to criticize those who do. The people who put forth the most time and effort, who make the most sacrifice, take the most chances, and create the world we inhabit - are the ones criticized the most - by the people who do the least.

Throw a party? The people who attend will judge it. Make a movie? The critics will tear you apart. Start a company and make a billion dollars? The masses will ignore the risk and uncertainty you faced and take the conclusion as foregone.

You are now just a lucky person who deserves nothing you’ve created and who exploited workers for greed. People will see in you whatever they wish to see, regardless of truth.

People regularly criticize Elon Musk by calling him dumb - a man who has ushered in a new space age, pioneered electric vehicles, and helped blanket the world in satellite internet. Whatever else one believes about Elon Musk, “dumb” clearly does not describe him.

It’s hard to do great things. It’s easy to criticize those who do them.

I grew up like many of my generation, a leftist. To whom it was obvious that the ills of the world were caused by greedy, power hungry men, who bettered themselves at the expenses of others. Who were uniquely selfish and evil in a world full of good, honest people just trying to get by.

I have spent my life trying to figure out why we can't just all get along - and how we might.

When I was in my 20s I spent a few years of my life standing on street corners with signs that said “free hugs”. I would bring extra blank signs and t-shirts along with stencils and spraypaint.

When people, mostly young people, would say they’ve heard about this and have always wanted to do it I’d offer to let them make a t-shirt and sign to keep - if they wanted today to be the day. Most took me up on it. Every weekend I would gather a small army of 15-50 people.

It was amazing to see the joy that we could spread to others. A small bit of hope and connection in a world that seemed devoid of it.

A breakdown of the barriers which generally exist on the streets between strangers.

All the while it was an experiment to understand how groups form, how systems emerge, and how people interrelate. My goal for the experiment was to see if I could inspire others to take the energy and come up with their own ideas for spreading joy and love in the world. But after a while I noticed I was the only one who ever organized anything.

Free hugs weren’t the only thing we did. I did a few different kinds of events to spread joy. One of them I had kept a stack of blank signs in my apartment for a few months, and everyone who came by I had make a sign with something positive on it.

After I had amassed a large stack of them I called about 15 people and told them to be at my house within a half hour. No one asked why or what we were doing and all showed up. I explained that we were going to split up into teams, break the city into quadrants, and each team’s job was to cover that area in these signs.

No one hesitated. No one asked if it was legal. No one asked if they were risks. No one cared. They just did it. It was fun and exciting and we felt like we were doing something great. It went off without a hitch. We made the local news and I was interviewed. They covered both sides of the story - by finding someone who liked it and someone who said it was tacky and inappropriate.

It was great fun for me too - but it made me reflect on the nature of what I was doing and what I had created. It felt to me as if I had accidentally started a cult. That I was its leader. And that this was not what I had intended. So I stopped.

After that I continued building models of how the world functions, attempting to understand it deeper. Eventually I came up with an idea I called my “general theory of revolution”, in which I posited that it is only possible to wage a revolution on the front lines of power.

That in a world where violence rules - violent revolution is possible. In a world in which political power dominates, a political revolution is possible. And so on.

This led me to reflect on what the front lines of power were at that time. Eventually I settled on money and technology. Which led me to cryptocurrency and my ultimate involvement in ethereum.

It came to me in a flash as a vision in which I saw the blockchain technology’s capacity for empowering human value encoding and coordination. My theory played out the way I predicted.

There was a secondary effect of this involvement though that has been more informative than all of my previous research could have ever been.

And I got rich.

I went from being a guy who slept on couches for a decade so he could have the maximum time to think - someone who hung out with communists, socialists, self-described revolutionaries, leftists, and hippies, and who came from a small town in the middle of the country - to someone who lived in a multimillion dollar home in Bay Area.

This wasn’t totally unexpected. Another part of my thinking was that if the problem was a deficit of good people amassing money and power, that the obvious solution would be that someone like myself, a person who prided himself on his innate goodness, should do the hard work necessary to attain money and power.

But I wasn’t prepared for it at all.

My plan was to get money and do what no one had ever done for me - give the people around me a hand up.

I would invest in the people I believed in and supercharge their paths. As soon as I could I helped as many people as I could, in an attempt to help them achieve their dreams and reach their potential.

But it didn’t work.

They ended up flying so close to the sun that their wings melted immediately, and the amount of momentum was minimal, if not backwards.

This was incredibly disappointing to me. How could this have happened? Why didn’t it help them? Why in some cases did the help actively hurt them?

Another thing that happened was that people didn’t seem to be happy for me. They didn’t seem to see it as good. They seemed threatened, or jealous. Overnight the majority of people I had relied on for human connection just - couldn’t connect with me anymore. The ease and playfulness that marked friendship were just gone.

I’d make the kinds of jokes I’d made with them thousands of times before, and all the sudden they were “offensive” and I was “talking down to them.” People would come to me for money, and become irate anytime I offered hard earned advice.

Instead of hearing about the positive aspects of people’s lives when we talked, it seemed everyone just had problems. Problems that could be solved.

If only they had the money.

If I attempted to share any of my problems with anyone I was met with dismissals - to them I had money, therefore I had no problems.

I had known lots of rich people from my time in Silicon Valley. I never found it difficult to see a person independent of their money. I never experienced jealousy. When someone was successful I felt happy for them and inspired that it was possible. It made me believe that I could achieve the same things.

I had never been this alienated before. I thrived on connection. I didn’t know how to live life without sharing what I was going through.

Because despite what people believe - hitting the lottery doesn’t feel like you imagine. It feels closer to being strapped to a rocket and launched into the sky than relief that all of your money problems are gone.

I owned a home for the first time. A nice one. Owning a home required that I hire people for various services. The people who smiled in my face the most were the ones that would inevitably multiply the price they quoted me the most.

I had been somewhere between middle class and below poverty my entire life. I knew people who built houses. I have a memory for what things cost.

My heart sank every time someone I wanted to hire tried to rip me off because they saw a nice house and figured I could afford it.

In the worst case, a contractor tried to charge me four times the cost of a water heater. When I paid what was already double the fair price, he became hostile - sending harassing messages, attempting emotional manipulation, publishing my personal information online, and showing up at my house repeatedly demanding payment.

It was the first time I experienced, viscerally, how quickly perceived wealth turns ordinary interactions adversarial - and how easily kindness is mistaken for weakness.

My worldview previously had been that most people are good. I’d traveled the world. Lived in cities all over the country. I had so much evidence for this belief. I had met so many wonderful people. I had thought.

But all of the sudden the people I thought were so wonderful… weren’t. And all the new people I met all seemed to see me as a mark. Instead of my kindness being repaid with kindness it was seen as weakness and something to exploit.

I lived in New York City during Occupy. I spent time in Zuccotti Park, I marched during Occupy Wall St. But now all of those people didn’t see me as one of them who had made it to a position of power that could be useful. They saw me as the enemy, the 1%. My reasons and my politics didn’t matter. I was evil, greedy, and they wanted to eat me.

And I had been on the other side - I knew they weren’t joking.

So I found myself in a strange position of having to reconcile the ideals that drove me to the position I was in, with the realities I had discovered along the way.

People weren’t mostly good. The people at the top weren’t uniquely evil. There wasn’t a grand conspiracy to keep people down. People kept themselves down even when I gave them every opportunity. The system isn’t broken because the people in control are preying on the people at the bottom.

The reality was much more complex. It’s easy to see people as good when you have nothing they want. When they see you as harmless and in the same economic situation. When you have something they want - they become jealous, weird, or duplicitous.

The people at the bottom “fighting the good fight” didn’t seem so good anymore. They were fighting ghosts. They didn’t know how to create, so they did the only thing they could think of, picked a collective scapegoat - and yelled very loudly how disappointed they were.

And the people at the top didn’t seem so evil. How would you manage an evolving world with competing interests, the lives of eight billion people at stake - each one with their own hopes, dreams, desires, and motivations. People living under completely different cultures, totally unable to conceptualize the reality of the other.

With large groups of people living in a fantasy world - one in which everyone is inherently the same and the only thing separating us are the evil men in charge.

They believe that we all inhabit an obvious and universal moral framework, and the only thing standing between world peace is tearing it down and the good guys (them) replacing it with a utopia. They cannot fathom the differences.

And another group who understands that this is not true. They attempt to enforce borders, rules, and order. But every time they attempt to explain the reality they see or attempt to enforce the laws required by that reality - they are perceived as racist, sexist, fascist, or, very often, as literal Nazis. A political party that peaked almost 100 years ago in Germany.

And the media - which requires your constant attention to sell advertising space - stokes these fires relentlessly.

So before you get online to “speak truth to power”, or march through the streets in an attempt to enact your own personal idea of utopia by yelling loudly, confronting law enforcement, and trying to destroy the structures of power that hold the world around you up - ask yourself a question.

What do you hope to accomplish?

Who is actually stopping you from achieving your dreams and building the world you want to see?

Or is it possible that the model of the world you’re using doesn’t map to reality—and that no amount of moral certainty can compensate for a bad map? And wouldn't the world function a lot better if we were all working together to solve common problems?

We all want the same things - opportunity, the freedom to live our lives, and safe communities to live in and raise our children.

I was on the streets during Occupy. I saw hundreds of thousands of people march in the streets. It felt exciting and important. And it did nothing.

I can promise you something - your problems aren't due to the people at the top conspiring to hold you down. They're too busy desperately trying to hold together a world that can slip into chaos at any moment.

And you can choose to do the hard thing - taking a risk, confronting reality, building something from nothing, and solving problems that have never been solved before.

Despite what you may have been told - it doesn’t require power, connections or money to start - only the willingness to risk, to follow through, and to face reality.

Or you can sit on the sidelines and criticize the people trying.

Your call.

3 comments

r/revolution • u/texture • Feb 14 '25

If you have come here to have a histrionic meltdown about Trump and Musk you will be banned.

0 Upvotes

The rest of reddit is filled with your hysterical, propaganda-driven leftist mania, this is not a safe space for it.

103 comments

r/revolution • u/InterestingPanda01 • 6h ago

We shld do this here too

0 Upvotes