Why Reason With One Who Can’t Reason?

All week, the old man was in a liminal state between quitting his violin and practising for his orchestra’s first rehearsal for the year. He had sprained his wrist from lugging their travel bags on the streets of Venice and Rome. There, he discovered that cobbled stones were romantic to walk on but presented real risks for someone of advanced age to trip or slip and fall. The castor wheels of his bags groaned loudly on the uneven surface and transmitted the bumps onto his wrist, he reckoned as he clenched his fist and winced. His Mrs said he played badly and that was the reason why he felt like quitting. True, his attempt to express the pain he felt for the misery and death in Gaza through John William’s music in Schindler’s List was dour and sour, a pale version of the depths of despair he felt and heard inside his mind.

“Don’t play in front of baby Bach,” she said and warned that his scratching sounds would turn her seven-month-old nephew off classical music.

“Don’t play when Murray is around,” she said and pitied the family’s dog who would hide his ears under a pile of blankets.

His feeling of liminality had spread to his love for writing also. New ideas of topics to write were still seeding in his mind but the inclination to sit down and type the first word had simply vanished. There was the urge to write about Truman and Eisenhower, how both men warned against the CIA and the military industrial complex in America. The former created the CIA whose aim was for it to be the eyes and ears of the state but later warned against its second function as the private army for the President. The old man had the idea to write about the revelation that the Ukraine war could have ended in April 2022 with peace talks so advanced that both warring party delegations were pleased with the outcome in Turkey. The US, displeased with the concession by Ukraine to end NATO expansion, sent their British stooge, Boris the Bozo Johnson to cull the peace talks. Joe Biden had turned out to be the worst President of the US ever, presiding over conflicts in so many countries in a mere three years. Why reason with someone who can’t reason? What was the reason behind that?

Meanwhile, in Davos, the WEF had gathered together in January 2024 with the theme ‘Rebuilding Trust’. They had a shaman on stage who rubbed her hands as if with glee to make certain invocations before blowing bad breath, presumably, onto the heads of the dignitaries who were seated in a line like school students; was that a way to appease all the different religions and their factions and to instil trust in these billionaires and power-hungry elites by looking at the past and what our ancestors wished for in order to look to the future? Trust once lost will take a long time to be regained.

The world had been under sustained attack since the pandemic, with trust of our governments being the main casualty. The world had become a place where misinformation was really disinformation, conspiracy theories were proven correct, gender had become a major issue when for the past millennia it was just a simple matter of man or woman, Emmy awards and Oscars were not won based on quality of performance but on meeting DEI criteria of diversity, equity and inclusion. Can there be trust when mRNA vaccines don’t stop the spread of a virus and don’t offer immunity? In a world where excess fatality rates exceed 30% and the authorities do not address the reasons why? Where young and healthy individuals are dropping dead suddenly and highly respected oncologists are reporting the high incidence of turbo cancers? Turbo cancers sounded like a disease equipped with a super fast gas turbine engine. Where people cannot reason with their government leaders who cannot reason? Where Canadian protesters end up with their money being seized by their government? How do they rebuild trust when they steal our money in broad daylight through taxation, debasing our money through reckless printing and inflation?

It was precisely the realisation that our governments are stealing our money that the old man started reading up about Bitcoin. Over the many millennia, humans had valued rocks, glass beads and seashells as money. Fiat money, comparatively, is a young form of money. Introduced by President Nixon in 1971, money was no longer backed by gold but by government decree or fiat. In the last quarter of 2023, the US Federal Reserve printed two trillion dollars out of thin air. Yet, it would be the same people who claimed Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value. The most vocal in recent times was Jaime Dimond of JPMorgan Chase, a bank that benefited greatly from government handouts during the 2008 global financial crisis. Dimond said Bitcoin was “a pet rock that does nothing”, that lacks economic intrinsic value. Dimond could say the same about diamond, I suppose. The old man was angry. He said a successful banker such as Dimond would lead many people astray with his bad advice. Why reason with someone who can’t reason? What was undeniable however was many central banks that distrust the USD had reverted to investing in gold in their treasuries. Gold, like many other rocks, have regained favour amongst shrewd investors who prefer to store their wealth in commodities found in rocks such as lithium, oil and copper.

For the first time in history, we ordinary people have the opportunity to front-run the institutions and wealthy individuals and invest in a rare commodity whilst the price is still low. The old man, demonstrating a heightened level of caring for his friends, had been orange-pilling them, sharing his knowledge of Bitcoin’s special properties and benefits and the idea that it would one day be the global reserve asset. His Mrs had warned him not to behave like a fool. The wise woman advised him no good would come from it – if they lost money, they would blame him, and if they made money, they would only credit themselves with their investment decision. Besides, the woman had long argued against Bitcoin, believing all the FUD reported in the news ever so often. The fake news, uncertainty and doubt dished out by his siblings had also convinced her it would be a disaster to put any of their savings in it. The recent weakness in its price had further galvanised her opposition to Bitcoin as a safe form of investment.

“You said the institutions are coming!”

“You said it’s basic maths, supply and demand. Price will surely go up,” the maddening woman said, putting on her most cynical voice.

“You have rocks in your head!” she shrieked, in a shouting match with the old man. The old man had yet to win one of their shouting matches. His raspy sandy voice, a perpetual liability many decibels lower than hers, and his slowness in forming ideas, always detrimental, often unconvincing, ensured he lost the debate that afternoon.

The Bitcoin price went down two days after the ETFs were approved. The old man lost his argument. It was as simple as that.

“Here, go read the Bitcoin Standard,” was all he said to her as she strutted out of his study after yet another victory.

She had not read any books about Bitcoin, nor had she come across the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. She plugged her ears with her pointy fingers when he talked about Bitcoin ETFs and Gary Gensler’s SEC admission he only approved the ETFs because the federal appeals court forced him to.

“What ETF and SEC? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!” she said loudly, pretending those letters meant nothing to her and believing that the one with the louder voice always wins the argument.

“Why reason with someone who can’t reason?” I asked, but the old man simply shrugged his shoulders.

Why do people try to reason with someone who can’t reason? People are high in EQ but low in IQ, that’s why.

“People are stupid?” I asked, without expecting an answer. The old man stopped to wonder out loud why people without any knowledge of the topic they were arguing about would argue strongly based on nothing but on their own uninformed opinions.

The difference between the rich and poor is that the rich have a lot more moneyErnest Hemingway

Bitcoin is the best money that humans have created. It is money that is durable, portable – digital and not physical, divisible – 100 million satoshis to a Bitcoin , unseizable and totally sovereign, does not require trust in a third party and perhaps most importantly, extremely rare and impossible to forge. It is powered by thousands of computers all over the world, having recently hit an all time high hash rate of 500 exahashes per second in January 2024 or 500 times more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputer, according to Yassine Elmandjra of ARK Funds.

Discussions about money always bring out the worst in us. As Seneca said in his On Consolation to Helvia, the rich are restricted by the baggage they can carry when travelling abroad and in a hasty situation, they will abandon their entourage. That is the truth about money. No matter how much we value money, it does not solve most of the problems people without it seem to think it will.

“Money isn’t everything but everything needs money,” the old man countered.

The old man’s mother came for lunch that Saturday afternoon. It was their routine for many decades, to bring her home for the day. Not surprising that it had been decades – their mother was, after all, a hundred years old. They filled their weekends with their mum’s presence. She had been a powerhouse in their family. The matriarch dictated most things, even what they cooked and in the manner they cooked. I suppose it’s alright, since they cooked her favourite dishes for her to enjoy and when she finally lacked the strength or stamina to chew properly, they cooked soft foods such as tofu, rice broth and fish. Every weekend, if not Tuesdays which was the norm when their father was still alive, she came. Their father died in 2007. He was a beautiful man, a handsome man with a heart of gold or Bitcoin in today’s parlance, who never made them feel guilty for being his imperfect children. She, on the other hand, was always a challenge to please, often challenging them about the stuff they buy, interrogating them about where the jewellery she gave them had gone to, checking their grocery receipts for any overpayment, rummaging through their fridge like a tax auditor, checking the kitchen bin for food scraps that could be salvaged.

She looked great for her age. Hoary but not deathly white, with a nice pinkish hue on her face that was absent of a cobweb of deep wrinkles, a common trademark of old age. Refusing all offers to upgrade her wardrobe for many years, she still wore her rather worn clothes smartly and with style. Her kids were slow to understand she was losing her mind to dementia. She had become forgetful and then confusing, but all they saw was that she was wrong and unreasonable. They relished that she was wrong – she no longer was the authority who shall be obeyed. They argued against her and challenged her recollections and some of them resented her accusations. Without any understanding of dementia and how it makes a sufferer confused, delusional and angry, they allowed themselves to be injured emotionally and scarred psychologically by their own mother. And so, they argued and argued with their mother and in doing so, they hurt her and belittled her, diminished her authority and rendered her powerless.

“Why do we try to reason with someone who can no longer reason?” the old man asked.