Brett Scott, the monetary writer and former finance-sector insider who publishes the Substack Altered States of Monetary Consciousness, argues that liberal capitalism issues two incompatible instructions at once: outcompete everyone, and also be a good person who cares about the unemployed and the environment. Discussing his essay Making Capitalism Bad Again, Scott places the good-capitalism scene within the older tradition of liberal reformism, in which elites alleviate the system's damage rather than change it, and points to ESG investing, social finance and the philanthropic posture of figures like Bill Gates as its current forms. He describes spending two years working inside the financial sector as a deliberate anthropological experiment, and his irritation at being labeled a reformed banker afterward. Pinchbeck raises Grace Blakeley's writing and the collapse of liberal media framing.
Guest: Brett Scott
In brief
- Scott argues the contradictory demand to compete hard while also being ethical produces widespread cognitive dissonance and guilt, which leaves liberalism politically weak and open to right-wing attack.
- Scott says Trump's appeal works partly by targeting that guilt, offering permission to abandon the good-person half of the message.
- The good-capitalism scene of the early 2010s, including ESG and social finance, is a modern incarnation of nineteenth-century liberal reformism rather than something new.
- Scott cites the Marxist critique that reformism alleviates capitalism's worst effects mainly in order to extend the system's life.
- Scott quotes James Schneider, a communications adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, describing liberalism as the face capitalism wears when it feels relaxed and secure.
- Scott says his current work covers peer-to-peer credit systems and the dangers of a cashless society.
Full text
The big point is that liberal capitalism has an inherent contradiction in it in the sense that it simultaneously tells society a contradictory message which is to be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time. All right? So you're told under a liberal capitalist sort of ideology that you should still carry on with basic market processes. You're supposed to compete against other people. You're supposed to out compete them. You're supposed to innovate. You're supposed to be competitive. But you also simultaneously have to be a good person. You're supposed to care about the people that you're putting out of business. You're supposed to care about the unemployed.
You're supposed to care about the environment. And actually, these two messages create cognitive dissonance in society. And a pervasive sense of guilt. This pervasive sense that you're failing to fulfill this impossible ideal of being a capitalist also being person promoting a just and sustainable society. And that is politically weak because it allows the the right wing to actually at certain points target that which is what Trump has actually in many ways done. Yes. I was, you know, I enjoyed that article of yours on liberalism. I thought that could be good jumping off point. And then I went and read the Grace Blakeley article that I don't remember too well.
Uh, and I guess like part of my um in trying to sort of figure out what's happening, nothing really matters at this point, but um yeah, it feels like the sort of liberal perspective has completely cratered um and um you know, partially because of its dominance of like media and uh framing capacity and so on. the right wing has just um you know money I guess has just sort of taken over. Um but we know that more more people than not are still against it. So uh yeah I don't know maybe talk about your your current thinking in regards to these topics. I mean I can talk about that article that you you enjoy you like.
Yeah. To give uh people who are watching some sense of sense of what that was. It was called making capitalism bad again and it was actually partially based upon my own experiences in the so-called good capitalism scene. Um, part of my background is I actually I come from a left-wing background, but just before the financial crisis hit, I kind of went on an anthropological adventure into the financial sector. um which is I basically went in because I was kind of tired within left-wing scenes of the uh maybe the lack of connection with actual practical experience with capitalism kind of like wanted to be able to like feel that system to say you know what is it like to actually be in the financial sector what's the lived bodily experience of being on a trading floor that kind of thing so I had this anthropological background and I kind of designed an adventure where I went into the financial sector and spent two years there and in the process I kind of corrupted myself a bit right so I went kind of quite gonzo sort of went native as it were um and kind of threw myself into it and allowed myself to sort of experience the I don't know the sort of vibes of finance like uh coursing through my my being but I sort of I sort of spent two years in that space and then after I left I started working on these activist campaigns around finance basically applying my knowledge I'd learned to these different types of um campaigns to help change the financial sector and at that time I'd have these people who would refer to me as being a reformed banker right they'd say oh you were this person who once did bad now you're a person who's trying to quote unquote do good and it really irritated me irritated me a a lot this sort of idea that you know there was a sort of binary morality in the world and you know now you're trying to do good.
Um but I did know a bunch of people who did think of themselves like that. you know, I started getting involved in some certain scenes, uh, hang around certain scenes like sustainable finance for example and social finance where there were lots of these people who previously worked in the financial sector who were then thinking about themselves as trying to do good or like create a good type of compassionate capitalism. All right? And so you know this whole kind of scene let's say around 2012 2013 2014 of people trying to say you know we could use capitalism for good provided we design it in that way. Um and in many ways some people still are arguing that even now.
Yeah. Yeah. It's actually a very old tradition. Yeah. Um it's actually it's a it's a tradition that comes out of liberal reformism. Right. So liberal reformism is a type of let's call it like a social attitude particularly among higher socioeconomic classes where they seek to alleviate the bad effects of capitalism you know so like in the 18th or in the 19th century this might take the form of like an aristocrat saying you know we need to make conditions better for the working class or so you know or else it's you know about extending rights um and you'll always have conservatives fighting against liberal reformism but often the conserv conservatives and the liberal reformers are actually coming from the same strata of society, right?
So, it's a kind of battle between elites in in the capitalist system. Um, and historically, you know, Marxists and people like that are deeply skeptical and suspicious of liberal reformism because they often view it as a kind of superficial attempt to alleviate the bad things that happen out in capitalism and in so doing kind of like extend the life of a system. Um but anyway 2012 you have you know a modern incarnation of that which is a sort of the ESG scene or environmental social and governance scene um which is about responsible investments. It's all about these kind of capitalists attempting to be good. Um and then there's also these other types of exemplary liberal business heroes like Bill Gates who are people who basically come out and say you know we will use our powerful good we will use it to help the bottom billion right and this is the kind of liberal vibe or the sort of liberal face of capitalism and in the article I I there's a friend of mine called James Schneider who's one of Jeremy Corbin's uh political advisers or communications advisers And you know, the way that he will describe liberalism is to say, you know, it's it's the face that capitalism puts on when it's feeling relaxed and secure.
You know, when it's feeling chilled out, it can sort of put on this more chilled out face. Um this this kind of face as it were. Um but the big point is that liberal capitalism has an inherent contradiction in it in the sense that it simultaneously tells society a contradictory message which is to be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time. All right. So you're told under a liberal capitalist sort of ideology that you should still carry on uh with basic market processes. You're supposed to compete against other people. You're supposed to out compete them. You're supposed to innovate. You're supposed to be competitive.
You're supposed to basically be an at some level, but you also simultaneously have to be a good person. You're supposed to care about the people that you're putting out of business. You're supposed to care about the unemployed, supposed to care about the environment. And actually, these two messages create cognitive dissonance in society. Um, and a pervasive sense of guilt. This pervasive sense that you're failing to fulfill this impossible ideal of being a capitalist whilst also being person and sustainable society. All right? And that is politically weak because it allows the right wings who actually at certain points target that which is what Trump has actually in many ways done um by pointing out the hypocrisy of the liberal vision and saying actually you don't need to square that circle.
You don't need to be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time. You just need to be a bad boy. All right. So that's the kind of the drill baby drill type of ethos. It's just like attempting to be a good person. just be the person you're supposed to be under a capitalist system. Forget about the contradiction. Um, and he sort of frames that in positive terms as being the kind of warrior ethos. And it kind of creates this sort of euphoric um upwelling of just people being kind of feeling the sense of freedom from the contradiction. And that's basically what that that piece was about.
Um, we can unpack some of that if you want, but yeah, interesting to hear your reflections on that. No, that that that that seems sensible to me. Um Um Yeah, that all makes sense. Um I know you talked about Mark and Dreon's tech optimist manifesto in there a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Kind of example. Um yeah, because his No, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, because Mark Andre's 2023 Mek Optimist Manifesto is an example of one type of uh response basically saying that attempts to create this sort of nice capitalism or compassionate capitalism or stakeholder capitalism, whatever you want to call it, is holding back the kind of vigor of the market.
Yeah. And this is like a very typical free market thing to say. They say, you know, you should never, you know, stand in the way of the natural workings of the market because it kind of neuters you or like emasculates the market, right? So all the the language and the techno optimist scene, the accelerationist scene was all about like release the forces of the market. Um, you know, take off that mask of trying to be compassionate and just go ahead and like screw the world, right? But of course it's more complicated than this because they don't like to present, you know, everybody wants to believe that what they're doing is the right path, right?
They don't want to think of themselves as being an So they reframe that sort of screwing the world narrative as innovation or as being forwardlooking or embracing progress. That's where this whole effective altruism ideology is very useful for these guys. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you could argue that sure you might kill a few million or even like you know a bajillion people today. Uh but if you're going to be the one who gets humanity out into the galactic infinite there'll be trillions of human beings you know populating the galaxy because of you um then you are completely justified in doing that. That's very interesting. I actually made that connection but yeah totally for sure.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because the big thing I hate that's what Musk's ideology is. That's why he feels entitled to lie and put out all this far right-wing propaganda because he believes that if he is helping humanity, I mean, this is, you know, one level of their ideology. People can also have like paradoxical uh I mean I I also saw Peter Teal recently say that he doesn't believe Musk no longer believes that we're going to get to space. So that's also why he's focus more focused on on Earth right now. But yeah, basically basically the idea would be like um you know, sure, you know, 12 million kids die because you've destroyed US aid and people in Gaza are, you know, exterminated and all these terrible things happen, but you build the rockets and you get the minerals and you get the AI and you make it to Mars and and and Venus and Pluto and all that stuff and then you're you're great, you know, you're a hero.
Yeah. Actually, it's part of what connects together people like Mark Andre uh and all the tech lords with the manosphere or the kind of men's rights scene because within that scene they also imagine that forms of compassionate capitalism or sustainability or environmentalism are a kind of emasculating feminine force that is preventing them from doing what they're supposed to do, which is to move forward and dominate, right? So they they're saying, you know, we've been told to hold back and conserve rather than move forward and dominate. And this is creating problem for my identity. And so a lot there's always been this kind of attack on environmentalism from within the man the men's rights scene for that purpose.
And basically Mark Andre spells it out. He's basically like you're allowed to do environmental stuff, but it has to take the form of technological innovation that's thrusting forward. You can't do anything that involves holding back or conserving. It has to always be framed in this masculine way as a kind of like thrusting action, right? Um, and you're kind of seeing us now in people like Pete Hen who's obsessed with like the warrior ethos, right? This whole idea that somehow you got to reclaim this sort of right to be this like dominating figure. Um and you know this is actually touching me personally in various ways because you know I've over the years in my work and stuff I get these different like young guys coming to me and you can see them being affected by this stuff.
You know, even recently on Substack, there was a guy who contacted me asking him to asking me to be on his men's rights men's rights podcast, right? This guy is like in his early 20s and he's like become this sort of Christian conservative and he and his feed is full of all this like crusader ideology stuff like you know the the world is a is a is a series of battle between civilizations and we no longer must hold back from the thing that you need to do which is to go out and battle right so he's taking on that kind of excess mentality um and I guess part of the thing is that that the conditions for that have been partly created by the dissonance in the liberal capitalist vision. Yeah. I mean um yeah there's like a you know multiple levels or dimensions of analysis about what's happening right now and why you know the sort of rapid disintegration you know potentially into even like something like genocide in the US. Um but one one one level of it is um yeah kind of gender rage you know like um over the last you know decades women have been flourishing uh in you know peaceful western economies and because you know when you have a you know sustained period of peace and you also have a level of technological you know advanced communications infrastructure you know women tend to do well because they're they're really good at building effective networks and effective relationships.
men are more like loners and you know I think it's like 70% of college graduates in the US have been women recently uh and so a lot of men are suffering kind of like status loss and they're like not able to get out of their parents' basement or playing all these like you know warlike video games and they're becoming like incelss or uh crusaders I guess. Um yeah, they don't they they don't feel that they don't feel that society is structured anymore to give them what they want or what they've been they've been taught to want. Uh which includes like a romantic partner and um enough money to build a life and so on. So they've decided to that, you know, they taken into their hands to like tear apart the structure and and and and um that's just become like a major Yeah. force right now, you know.
I think it' be worth if you're interested in speaking to Sarah Jaffy. I'm not sure if you know Sarah Jaffy. She's a later journalist in the US. Um she's done spent many many years on the front lines of union struggles and stuff like that. She wrote a book called Work Love You Back, a couple more recently. Um but her latest thing she's working on, she's working on a book on precisely this stuff around the um I guess sexual politics or how a lot of men just basically what you just said there, right? How lots of men are have perceived relative loss in power over time and a relative sense of being unable to fulfill their social roles.
Um and of course that type of anger gets directed towards people like you know Kamala Harris or your sort of your classic kind of liberal business heras like Cheryl Sandberg or Oprah Winfrey these types of people who is kind of like the sort of nice face of capitalism again the kind of nice feminine face of capitalism um but you know that's seen more generally which includes you know sort of the Bill Gates and stuff it's all about this having compassion within capitalism All right. Um, and so yeah, there's this kind of a gendered aspect to the fight against the contradiction in liberal capitalism, right? Because in many ways that sort of the if you go back to the 1900s and you look at alleviation narratives, right, which is like how do we alleviate the conditions in capitalism? The original alleviation stuff often applies to workingclass men, right? It's like, you know, give them more rights, give them the ability to vote, this kind of stuff.
Then it only slowly moves into um, you know, suffocets and things like that. Um, so there's a kind of but in many ways the kind of modern incarnation of the liberal alleviation stories is all about women's empowerment and business. And, you know, Cheryl Sanberg's book, Leaning In, was kind of like a pinnacle of that sort of vibe. I don't know if you know that book. Of course. I never read it but I know all about and know about it. Yeah. It's very much like hey I'm a big business woman you know you two you can also be and basically being like you know capitalism can be nice for everyone you know no real structural analysis no real analysis of actual power in that system.
So yeah. Yeah. I mean a lot of people have noted that even in the US where we only have these two parties that they're kind of inherently gendered in themselves. It's like the right wing is like the abusive paternal father. Uh and the the left wing is kind of like the cloying, you know, nurturing mother figure uh that is somehow um insincere in some way. Uh and in fact, like I was just reading a review of Camela Harris's memoir and it just sounds very cringy. uh the way she talks about her, you know, her going on these, you know, the she's so self-conscious about her appearances on these things and her, you know, the lighting and the makeup and, you know, she's sort of very much trapped in ego and and not really um engaging, you know, maybe with um the need of the moment, which was just for a a real authenticity, you know, uh which people just didn't feel from her at all.
you know, even people who voted for her voted for her with a sort of stale feeling of like this person is so insincere and inauthentic. Um, so I guess that's like um, you know, it sort of feels like the liberalism uh, thing has kind of collapsed at this point like this sort of ESG like yeah people are still doing it and climate week like people were still you know uh, but like you know I have a lot of friends I mean I couldn't even make myself go to the climate week stuff because I just knew they would be so avoidant of the rise of fascism you know and it's like I mean I had friends who were in this sort of you know consciousness green kind of like movements and um you know that one of them wrote a post to her group where she was like oh you know I think that you know left and right are just ego and red and blue and you know that stuff doesn't really matter and I'm like well actually does matter I mean not that you know I'm not a Democrat but uh what you know Trump is completely destructive for the for the um system u planetary ecology if you care about that. Um yeah, I mean um what do you see as I mean I guess I have some ideas around this but the kind of economic um kind of underpinnings of what's happening now with um uh the sort of extreme shift in the US um um because usually you have like the rise of fascism in Nazi in Nazi Europe or whatever uh you know it might probably confusing for people in it at the moment, but then after the fact, everyone was like, "Oh, of course it was like hyperinflation and you know, you know what I mean? It's it's so so so you know, but here here it seems a little bit um I mean we can sort of identify a lot of the factors, but um it it really the the the the virolence of the hostility and the the sort of blood lust um feels uh excessive, let's say, in terms of how people were experiencing I mean, I think in very crude terms, a generalized stagnation of the like your wages of your lower and middle classes in relative in international terms. I mean, there's a reason why like the big bogeyman used by Trump is China, right?
in rel in slow relative terms players like China are basically slowly eroding US power right and that's a kind of big thing and of course the other big thing is AI like automation there's just been a mass um transfer of wealth to tiny elites in the tech sector right it's quite notable that the tech elites made very very sure to get very very close to Trump right because of course Steve abandon and these types of people are actually very sketchy about the likes of the tech tech lords. Um, and I mean the tech lords basically want to automate the out of everything. All right? They don't care about employment at all. In fact, they're the ant they're the like the antichrist of that.
They like destroy the jobs and have like hyper acceleration and singularity. I mean, they are obsessed with that Um yeah, they also don't they also Yeah, they're also um they have no interest in national sovereignty or the nation. Exactly. And it shows in their obsessions that it shows it shows in their obsessions around space. Yeah. And longevity. The only time the only situation in which a human being cares about space exploration is if they're in a tiny disconnected elite where the the sort of um requirement for joining that cultural circle is to talk about absurd things that make no sense to anybody else. All right. The only circles where fantasizing about space travel makes sense is in like highly elite tech circles.
Everyone else is like what are you talking about? Right. So in those groups I yeah I don't know if I 100% agree. I do feel there's like an innate know kind of yearning within human beings for there to be like something greater up ahead and and you know either that has to be an external thing or an internal thing and the ultimate external thing our trackre or something you know I'm not denying the science fiction wonderment that human society more generally can experience but when that becomes a priority in your social group you can tell that they're very disconnected right um so yeah sure everyone has some sense of wonder about the wide universe but like the vast majority of people are not prioritizing it as their immediate thing they really feel that they should do right whereas that is actually priority longevity research all that stuff is a very is a hallmark of billionaires in Silicon Valley right and they basically means they don't give a about about national stuff they're they're a global floating elite they can go anywhere they want right they can even leave the planet so for them their interests are really not about economic nationalism which is interesting why they've like sort of tied themselves to Trump almost maybe to like hide in a sense right that's a deep structural thing that's occurring so did you read the book uh the sovereign individual uh uh Jacob Ree Smog's dad um I haven't actually read it but I know about it uh Peter Teal wrote the forward for the reissuing of it and both he and Mark and say that it's you know one of their main influences and um the book basically says that because and it was written in 97 so it's a while back you know ultimately because of you know the new digital technologies the nation state is done centralized currencies are done and uh the future is going to be uh sovereign individuals who are able to control kind of like mini fiftodoms of what he talks about as commercialized sovereignty so kind of like the freedom cities that um TL and these people are trying to create uh in different places around the which they want to do in the US. What's that?
Network state stuff. Network state bali is also completely an authoritarian cities. What's that? Charter cities. Yeah, exactly. But but basically it's it's um I mean I think that um you know they had these sort of like chat groups the private chats with Curtis Yarvid and Servon and all these people and they were in them for like 10 years and it was sort of like they developed this kind of secret thing and then it became a fanatic sort of ideology around I mean you know because basically if you look at this is kind of what I was get trying to get at before when I was asking you about how you were analyzing the economic thing there's like seems like Trump and his people are you know, very much intentionally trying to destroy not only US hedgeimonyy but the US economy, you know.
Um, so for instance, the tariffs are basically ruining the middle class because if you have like a small factory or a business where you import goods or whatever, you can't plan for the future. You can't do anything. I know a few people whose businesses have already failed because of that. So, you know, then we're seeing now with farmers in the Midwest, um, you know, well, first of all, they don't have any workers anymore because all the illegal immigrants are are running away or hiding out. Uh, and second of all, US aid bought a lot of their grain, uh, and was like a stop gap that then distributed it to, you know, strife torn regions.
And then third of all, they sold 12 billion a year of soybeans to China. And uh China because of the tariffs isn't taking any US soybeans. And now America, the government has created a $20 billion bailout for Argentina. And as a result of that bailout, which was done because Trump and his friends are connected to the dictator there and also some of Trump's cronies or big investors in this new economy, which has already totally failed. Uh but because they now have that $20 billion bailout, they are cutting their export tariffs on soybeans and China is essentially buying all the soybeans from Argentina that it used to buy from the US.
So it's like insanity basically about you know the the bank what's that? It's like they're trying to essentially plan the global economy through this kind of black deal making. Well, you you by bankrupting I don't know if it's centrally planning, but the idea is that because if they they gain if you bankrupt all these local farms, then you have these equity firms or or investment firms that buy all those farms up and sometimes they rehire the same farmers, but now they're kind of like surfs working for the sort of uh investment consortium. And in fact, JD Vance is a is a big investor in at least one of these companies that are very like tech driven. Um um so yeah I mean I think you maybe are on to something.
I wouldn't have a strong opinion. I haven't analyzed all the network structure flows of the global economy right now because I mean there's an official story about what they say which is basically they want to like re-industrialize the US right by reversing the trade imbalances and stuff like that. Um, that's a kind of a story. It's an ideological tale told and it has this sort of harking back to the 1950s when there's like the working man with his job and his wife and kids and sort of like stable existence. Um and so there is this like attempt to build this picture of a earlier America being rebuilt not only economically but also actually socially with the sort of attack on all the kind of liberal um beliefs right around sexuality and gender roles and everything.
So there is this attempt to do that but but of course like that's an official ideology. I'm sure there are weird interests going on. For example, like the private credit industry has a big role in the Trump administration. That's the private equity firms. All these basically these like non-public finance firms have a big stake in the Trump administration. They're big backers of Trump. So, yeah, they've got a bunch of agendas going on there. I don't fully understand them necessarily what those agendas are, but um certainly something I'd like to grapple with more. Um but yeah I think there's one other thing I wanted to mention quickly though which the um the stories around ESG right because um we can go back to global structural analysis if you want but I wanted to say this before we before we we moved on um which is the ESG community has never had any power whatsoever right it's always been a facade in modern capitalism So maybe just explain ESG in case no somebody doesn't understand what it is.
So ESG refers to um environmental, social and governance indicators. So like back in let's say 2012 2013 if you were hanging around the financial sector every financial firm would have some small very very small department which would try to um think about you know how would you use finance or how would you be like do like non-dickish finance basically. you know, sustainable, responsible in finance. So, they'd have these types of catch words, but relative to bank the banking sector's overall uh profitability, this was a tiny tiny community, but they used to like they used to showcase it on their corporate social responsibility pages. They liked to talk about it.
They like to say, "Oh, well, we're trying to be good even if none of their revenues actually came from that, right?" So they they they kind of pasted this sort of ESG mask over themselves. Um a bit like they pasted the rainbow flag over themselves or pasted like diversity talk over themselves, right? They they they kind of put this mask on. Um so ESG, the actual real ESG community is a very small community. It managed to make small incremental gains over time, but still to this day, it's a it's a very very marginalized community within the actual financial sector. But symbolically, it's very very important for people like Trump because the ESG community represents the contradictions of liberal capitalism very in a very extreme sense, right?
It's like, oh, we can do capitalism for good. It kind of like encapsulates that sort of, you know, imagined hypocrisy of the liberal elite in many words. It's like, oh, you you're being told to be good and bad at the same time and then they on you when you can't do it, right? Um, and so ESG got singled out by Trump and by all these kind of people and kind of got demonized in actually quite a similar way to how the trans or the trans community gets uh demonized. The actual trans community is a very very very small minority, right? But they get outsized levels of hate, right?
As if it was some gigantic movement, right? Similarly with ESG, it's a tiny community, but it got super targeted by the Trump campaign, right? And it became this kind of like moral panic among the rightwing about this imagined ESG takeover of capitalism, what they call woke capitalism, right? But like woke capitalism has always just been a facade that put over real capitalism. Um so to this day all the banks are funding oil and like dictators like they've always done right like nothing has really changed among in the banking sector. Um and this is very very quickly being seen as like as Trump launched its attack on so-called work capitalism.
It's been very very easy for all the corporations to pivot back to normal capitalism because it was always shallow, right? So they're like, "Okay, we just take the mask off now. Now we're back to what we were doing originally, right?" So it's quite interesting to see the symbolic use of the ESG community for political purposes. Um, and in a way then also empowering the oil industry, people like that, you can now basically say, you know, we're back to capitalism as normal. Screw all the renewable energy people. screw all the kind of like attempts to do um you know we're back to old school captions. Totally. I mean here we're in New York in October and it's maybe like 80 degrees out or something like that.
I mean um you know the the the the sort of willful push against the reality of what's happening uh e ecologically is um impressive um you know to maintain that short-sighted because players like China won't ignore it. Right. I mean um yeah I mean you talked about how they're they're pretending that they're going to restore the manufacturing base here but in practice they're not doing that at all. In fact, Biden had helped create like a whole new renewable energy industry industry in the US, mainly doing the manufacturing in red states to benefit ironically the economy of of like poor red states and Trump immediately dismantled that. So that was like an effort on our part to kind of like at least you know keep pace to a certain extent with China and that that's gone now.
uh which also makes us more dependent on um you know I mean the US is still I think the largest producer of oil but we also import tons of oil from Saudi Arabia and so on who you know are big backers of Trump and are putting billions of dollars is crypto. Uh let's talk about uh crypto a little bit and how that's playing a role in uh what's happening. What's that? I love talking about crypto. Yeah. I mean, um, it's sort of like, you know, he has, you know, a lot of Trump's technological advisors, um, are huge crypto people like David Saxs, um, and obviously, I mean, Musk, obviously, I don't Teal, but, um, there's kind of a there's a lot of scuttlebutt um, that, you know, because I mean, Trump's whole, you know, kind of like uh, history has been around bankruptcies, right?
he he bankrupted himself six times. Uh and in a sense it seems like they're trying to drive, you know, the US towards uh some kind of default. Although, of course, you can't really default because you'd always print more money. But if nobody wants the money or, you know, then that turns into hyperinflation, I guess, and then you really do have um kind of a collapse. But um I guess the the idea is that they they want to kind of like create some kind of like great great you know rock and roll swindle with uh crypto and sort of transfer the debt to you know cryptographic assets or something.
Do you have any thoughts about that or what what what do you see the role that crypto is now playing? I mean in in a sort of system here there's two big stories. One story is about the ideological use of Bitcoin. The other story is about the use of stable coins to extend US dollar hegemony. Right? Those are two separate stories. Um but they're both seen as important by the Trump government. Um, firstly, at some point, I think Trump realized that he had an ideological alliance with the crypto industry or could do like a collab with them as it were to kind of like share followers to say, you know, hey, um, because the crypto industry, particularly the the Bitcoin industry, um, has for a long time cultivated a very particular kind of ethos, which is all about winners and losers And uh this kind of like quite sort of scruffy sort of day trader culture which is all about you know it's you against the market and you got to be strong and you got to be faster than other people and they lean very very heavily on a bunch of libertarian mythology right but the short story is it basically it appeals to a certain type of young male psyche um especially in a world where people have become um isolated through you know digital media and also separated through, for example, the dissolving of unions, things like that.
You don't have forms of collective solidarity anymore. So, you start to kind of retreat into this idea of like, well, you can gamble your way out of um procarity, especially when lots of young people don't have access to houses like their parents did, you know, or like other forms of assets that would appreciate in value. So this whole kind of like sort of populist finance thing among young men was around okay well we get to have our kind of speculative asset that we can use to get out of you know procarity and this is a similar vibe in the meme stock mania you know this kind of idea like you know we'll all we'll get to somehow beat the big players with this populist finance so so the crypto industry has long cultivated this and they make a lot of money cultivating that image um but also they had a natural ideological alignment with Trump because Trump tries to create that same sense of, you know, you've been screwed over by the traditional system and, you know, you're the underdog and, you know, come with me and you'll be a winner in the the battlefield of capitalism, right? So, Bitcoin serves that role, right? It's this kind of um the sort of preferred speculative asset of the the MAGA movement.
Um it's also had a sort of secondary role there which is like as you're undermining the social security structures of the US by attacking you know players like Doge for example as you're as you're attacking the social security structures you're basically making people more precarious. So you then need to have a another story which is like well you're getting more precarious but at least you can speculate on crypto to get rich right like we're opening up the gambling houses for you right which is what Trump's trying to do now with opening up the 401k pensions to crypto speculation and stuff like that. Um so there's a whole kind of story there about the use of Bitcoin to sort of uh play create ideological support for what's ideologically aligned with Trump. Um and there's one last element of it which is actually that it's also been used to distribute patronage. Right?
So part of the insider kind of joke in those communities is like if you follow the big daddy, he will reward you and enrich you by pushing up the price for you. Right? So all the crypto traders were like if we get in on this, we're going to Trump's going to push up the crypto markets and reward his followers. She's been slowly being trying to do right different ways. There's a second story which is about stable coins which is like totally different. Okay, very quickly. What's that story? The stable coins is about how do you get people around the world to use US dollars as US dollar hegemony starts to climb, right?
So that's like um for example as the US tries to um uh go against a sort of trade imbalances I mean this is a very crude story but for the rest of the world to be dependent on the US dollar they need to accumulate US dollars right and that often means running a trade surface with the US right so that's how you kind of end up as a reserve currency at least it's one of the ways you end up as a reserve currency, but if you try to get that change the balance of the situation, you can undermine the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency for the rest of the world, right? Um, and so people like Steven Myin and stuff been trying to think about other ways to extend US dollar hegemony as stuff changes basically, right? So the stable coin markets are now one of the new ways they're thinking about. So I'll give you a concrete example. So, for example, my family in Zimbabwe, um, Zimbabwe's currency imploded in the '9s, right?
And they dollarized the economy, but they had to basically bring cash, US dollar cash into the economy to use it, which was actually quite hard to get across to Zimbabwe and so on. So, it was this um fairly limited system. But if you can suddenly now use a US dollar voucher in digital form within the borders of Zimbabwe, it's much much easier. Right? You can have these crossber forms of a US dollar trade. So lots of countries in Latin America, lots of countries in Africa now have people starting to use US dollars in stable coin form. This is a big problem for the national monetary authorities because it's basically undermining their monetary sovereignty.
But the US wants that. US actually wants citizens and countries to start dependent upon the US dollar via stable coins for everyday transactions. So it's part of an economic contingency plan to secure the power of the US dollar in the future. I mean it's kind of a complex topic but it's it's it's definitely one of the big things going on. Yeah. Um is that like like Tether and so on as a stable coin or circle circle this thing. This is this this a very important thing also one of the reasons why the US is attacking people like uh attacking countries like Brazil ostensively it's about you know the sort of the way they treated Golsinaro and stuff but if you look between the lines and you dig down uh actually one of the big things is the fact that for example Brazil has dealt Visa and Mastercard a blow by building their own national system digital payment system called Pix.
All right, which bypasses the cloud networks and actually creates this system which is cheaper than the cloud networks within Brazil. All right, and Brazil's now trying to push this into India as well to help Modi build a similar thing. And Visa and Mastercard are themselves about this because basically it would mean that these two massive American corporations no longer get to control the payment system these countries which means the US government doesn't get the data from that. All right. So when Trump's attacking the BRICS nations saying you know you don't believe in the US dollar it's it's these sort of veiled threats about you just stop them building these types of parallel systems that don't rely upon Visa and Mastercard.
So there's a big thing going on in the background about maintaining US dollar hegemony in a world where it's slowly starting to to decline. Uh there's a long technical stuff but yeah it's complicated. Uh I mean so you know essentially it feels like yeah certainly in the US I mean unevenly elsewhere we're seeing this kind of like you know movement towards the right and towards more authoritarian uh methods which also seem to be you know somewhat more they're you know tacitly accepted just maybe people don't even know what else to do about it. I was just reading about Greta Thurberg apparently having been treated very poorly, potentially even like tortured to a certain extent um by her Israeli captives and so on. Um and we're seeing this really um ominous ramping up uh in the US and how ICE is treating protesters and American citizens.
I mean Steven Miller who is kind of defi, you know, basically he seems to be the you know as Trump's mind is disintegrating. Steven Miller seems to be the one who's calling the shots. He's like like the worst kid that you couldn't stand in high school, you know? He's he's that meymouth horrible What's that? Super racist basically. No. So, but just I think this morning or or yesterday he said something like, you know, peaceful protests are just illegal from now on. And anybody who's protesting a full outcat. What's that? A fullout autocrat. Yeah. So um you know that is very destabilizing and um we don't know exactly where that's going to lead to but it it does like you know there is a possibility that it suggests that you know as fearsome as this whole thing is it also has an insecurity or fragility uh in it because they are they seem to be moving like too rapidly to consolidate and um you know Trump in the US and I know I'm focusing on the US because I haven't been very focused on the US right now.
I have no idea what's happening in Germany right now. Tiny ideas about some things that are happening other places but um um yeah like they Trump just is last week you know issued a directive which said that basically you know domestic terrorism you know as a as a category is is hugely expanded. Uh so that includes anybody who might have anti-American anti- capitalist um you know stuff going on and basically that not only people who are you know conspiring to commit violent crimes even somebody who you know from their analysis might in the future commit violent crime. It's kind of like they're like a minority report like pre-rime kind of a thing. So they're they're really trying to um yeah legalize disscent and protest in all of its forms even on like a thought level.
And um hiring Larry Ellison to help with that. Well, Larry Larry Ellison is in deep. I mean, Larry Ellison is um you know, they have this thing called Stargate, which is Sam Alman and Larry Ellison. It's like hundred billion dollars. And Ellison has said explicitly that he wants to create a um kind of total surveillance system in the US that keeps quotequote keeps everybody on their best behavior. And Ellison has also just bought a CBS, which includes uh you know, Paramount, which includes CBS. Uh and he's also on the verge of having a majority stake in US Tik Tok. So, you know, not only so you'll have you'll have like a new media empire that's actually big or bigger than Murdoch's which will be louder a little more pony capitalism that that stuff just handing that stuff out to these to the supporters that deal.
Sure. But I mean I mean yes it's terrible but then you know my my concern is that um this just is you know I don't you know unless there's some kind of break aparting of you know breaking apart of the whole thing soon people just get locked into this you know logically intellectually because the media just becomes this surround sound environment which is the sort of scary thing is whether there's this kind of like freezing where people are kind of like a rabbit in the headlights they don't there's too much stuff happening and they don't kind of know how to what to sort of strategically do and then it just sort of happens around them and they kind of forget what it was like before right so you kind of have this sudden shift in your of perception of reality or like what you should expect from society and it all kind of collapses um but you know the other thing I was saying earlier about the sort of the liberal face of capitalism is you know my friend James Schneider was saying this something like you The liberal face of capitalism is when capitalism is feeling secure and uh relaxed. But the illiberal the ill the sort of fascist face of it starts to emerge when it's feeling um insecure and anxious. And when I say it, I'm talking about like a sort of the structural kind of mesh of all the players. Okay?
Because capitalist system is a vast like network structure with all these players, right? So it's like there is a generalized anxiety within the system. All right, due to probably a bunch of structural features, right? As and as that that anxiety increases your your ability to run kind of fascist programs increases basically people are more prepared to tolerate them. People are more prepared to go along with it. Say okay well maybe you know maybe we just need this right now to survive right and that's the sort of the big thing. And then the main difference nowadays of course is that unlike old fascist regimes which still had relatively limited technological powers, new fascist regimes have got insanely powerful technological means at their disposal, right?
Including Larry Larry Ellison's like AI to go and like um you know do your pre-rime and stuff which old fascist regimes didn't have. So there is a greater um threat of lock in even though people can sort of see it happening right getting locked into these structures. Um but at the same time the sort of hopeful strand of it is that as the kind of you know liberal center gets followed out um you know there are these sort of a lot more energy going into the leftwing actual leftwing movements right the kind of original leftwing movements are getting at least in some areas they're starting to actually get invigorate seeing opportunities right um so I don't want to overplay that but that is a story that's really emerging. I mean the other day like few days ago in the Financial Times the Financial Times wrote wrote a big feature piece about the rise of the far left in the US. I mean that's not something that the the FT would normally have done you know what 10 years ago they're now they're now featuring it.
They're like this is happening. I missed that piece. Check it out. Yeah if you can I'll try to look for it. Yeah. Uh yeah, I mean um you know that would that would only make sense uh I mean I think we may have even talked about this before that um you know I mean it's pathetic that people call the Democratic party the left um because they're very like a neoliberal centrist kind of party and basically in the 60s you know there was an emergent organic left in the US but the sort of military-industrial intelligence complex refused to allow that to develop and that's why they you know targeted you know, Black Panthers with assassinations and assassinated a lot of the the leaders, civil rights leaders and so on.
So, they kind of in shot, you know, kind of peaceful protesters at Kent State. So, they really tried to corral all that everybody back into the mainstream, which ultimately they they kind of did. Um, yeah. any um any uh ideas of what's going to happen in the next few years or what are you thinking about from particularly in your areas of like monetary policy and uh altered states of finance and so on. It does feel very altered states right now. Yeah. I don't know. Um, I feel like I'm only right now kind of getting over the sort of uh blitz creek of the first few months of the sort of Trump thing, right?
Because it's just so so much stuff happening all at once. I think it takes a while to do sense making around it, start to get a sort of sense of what's actually going on. Um, so yeah, you know, actually that piece making capitalism bad again was probably my first sort of serious attempt to start to actually engage with that. But I guess a followup of that is to say um you know and I guess the sort of high level summary of that piece was like liberal capitalism asks you to be good and bad at the same time. Trump just asks you to be bad but reframes it as like a warrior ethos.
Yeah. Um and then the sort of open question from there is like what does the actual left do? All right. So steering clear of the cognitive dissonance of the sort of liberal centrist story but providing a strong counter to that story that Trump's providing because that story that Trump's providing is basically kind of a disguised uh attempt to creating a new sort of gilded oligopoly elite right at the expense of American working people that um so yeah I'm going to put myself towards that task of forming the counterpower to that um in terms of the monetary system um I think there's a lot of work to be done to dismantle the ideology or the ideological functioning of what Bitcoin's used to do which is to promote austerity mindsets in society and to and to replace that with a much more progressive or or sort of um anthropologically driven vision of how you could create peer-to-peer money that doesn't have this fixation upon being a commodity that the Bitcoin have. So, I'm working on these sort of alternative credit type systems.
Um, peerto-peer credit, which is a cool thing. Um, and yeah, I yeah, that's that's kind of me right now. Sounds great. Sounds great. Now, watch from a distance as you as you battle against all the like crazies and and Silicon Valley guys and stuff. And uh I'm glad that you're out there on the front lines. Ah, whatever. Uh how do people uh connect with you and your work and what should they look out for and all that stuff? Uh well my uh substack is uh asamokco or altered states of bunch of consciousness which is www. asao asamo. co. Cool. I'll write it out. Um as and you're you're doing a You Tube series on kind of like financial instruments.
I'm working on a new You Tube channel. Yeah, exactly. So you can find me on Brett Scott on You Tube. Um it's kind of a fairly new thing for me doing the uh the You Tube, but I'm quite enjoying it. So uh check that out if you're interested. I'll have a new one coming out in a few days about the dangers of cashless society. Awesome. This will also pop up on You Tube. And in fact, if you happen to be watching it on You Tube and you made it this far, which would be somewhat miraculous, uh please like and subscribe uh to this channel and all that stuff.
Yeah. Um okay, Brett, it's an hour. We're good. It was great to hang out and chat with you. I hope to see you in Berlin soon. Uh and yeah, I'd be very, you know, as you develop the um idea of where the left can can take things at this point, uh I'd love to have more discussions with you. Maybe even some three-way chats. We did I did one three-way chat with uh Grace Blakeley and Naf Amed and it was really good actually. So I'd love to do some more stuff like that. Yeah. Cool. Grace was great. Yeah. Uh all right. Have a have a good one.
We'll talk soon. All right. Cheers.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.