• Crying Into the Algorithm
• Why Education Makes You Blind
• The Core Illusion
• The Cartel in Plain Sight
• When Everyone Feels Like a Genius
• The Life They Were Sold
• The Exit
• The Question That Changes Everything
• One Person at a Time

§Crying Into the Algorithm

Scroll through TikTok or Instagram Reels for more than five minutes and you will likely encounter a face that is tired, earnest, and often close to tears, delivering a variation of the same testimony. The rent went up again. The groceries cost twice what they did three years ago. There are two jobs, sometimes three, and still not enough. The degree hangs on the wall. The debt hangs everywhere else. Since 2020, this genre of confession has proliferated into its own digital subculture; the economics-of-despair video, shot in fluorescent kitchens and car parks, broadcast to millions of strangers who hit the like button because they, too, are drowning.

These are not lazy people. They are not stupid people. The majority are college-educated, diligent, and fully committed to the rules of the game as they understood them to be. They went to school, accumulated credentials, entered the workforce, and followed the script with religious devotion and yet here they are; financially suffocated, bewildered by their own predicament, and desperately searching for someone to blame. 

What is most striking about these videos, what should unsettle anyone willing to look closely, is not the suffering on display, but the total and systematic failure to diagnose its cause. These people have been failed twice. First by the system that impoverished them, and second by the education that was supposed to equip them to understand why.

The blame is distributed generously. Boomers are indicted for hoarding wealth and pulling the ladder up behind them. Politicians are prosecuted for their corruption and incompetence. The rich are arraigned for their avarice. Immigrants are scapegoated for absorbing opportunities that were allegedly reserved for someone else. Finally even capitalism itself stands accused, the entire market system charged with crimes that, upon closer examination, were committed by its precise opposite. 

Notice, however, who is never in the dock. Notice the institution that is never named, never examined, never blamed. The central banking cartel! The institution that controls the price of money, expands the money supply at will, and quietly redistributes wealth upward with every policy decision, remains invisible, unquestioned, and entirely secure. The masses are too busy fighting each other to turn and look at who is really picking their pockets.

§Why Education Makes You Blind

Before we can anatomize the central banking cartel’s role in engineering this crisis, we must first confront a more foundational but troubling question: how is it possible that millions of educated adults cannot diagnose a problem that is right under their noses? How did the world come to accept an annual minimum tax of 2%, rebranded as “inflation” and administered not by a legislature but by an unelected committee of economists without protest? How do adults with functional brains simultaneously believe that the cost of living should remain stable and that the supply of money can grow without limit? How do they expect the state to solve a housing crisis that state monetary policy directly manufactured?

None of this is rocket science nor does it require an advanced degree to understand. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if more money chases the same number of goods, each unit of money buys less. If the government makes it expensive to save and cheap to borrow, people stop saving and start speculating. If houses become the primary savings vehicle for a population whose currency is being debased, house prices will rise until the young are permanently excluded from ownership.

These are not controversial heterodox claims but are simply the consequences of policy decisions that have been made openly, documented publicly, and celebrated by the financial media. Yet they remain almost universally invisible to the educated public. Why?

Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act.

— John Taylor Gatto

The modern schooling system was never designed to produce independent thinkers capable of interrogating the institutions or systems that govern their lives. Its Prussian roots ensured that it could only produce obedient, punctual, docile participants in an industrial economy. Workers who show up, soldiers who comply and consumers who spend. The factory model was adapted, rebranded, and universalised across a century of compulsory education policy and it worked magnificently. 

The institution has evolved in its rhetoric while remaining constant in its function. It produces people who are excellent at absorbing received information and catastrophically ill-equipped to reason from first principles about the systems that determine their material reality.

The miseducation is intergenerational in its transmission and begins at home, delivered by parents who are themselves victims. Parents who believed in the system, who followed the rules, who perhaps even prospered for a time under conditions that no longer exist, and who passed their obsolete map of the world to their children as gospel. It is then codified by twelve or sixteen years of formal schooling that never once asks students to examine what money is, where it comes from, who controls it, or what it means to live under a predatory, debt-based monetary system.

It is then amplified and entrenched by a media apparatus that has every financial incentive to promote the system, ridicule its critics, and redirect public anger toward convenient political targets. By the time a person reaches adulthood and begins to wonder why their financial life does not resemble the one they were promised, the mental architecture that would allow them to ask the right questions has been systematically dismantled.

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans — anything except reason.

— Thomas Sowell

§The Core Illusion

Once your mental model for understanding the world is fundamentally flawed, every decision you make based on that model will compound the flaw. A house built on sand does not collapse because of any single storm, but it collapses because of what it was built on. The tragedy of the TikTok generation is not that they made bad decisions. It is that they made perfectly rational decisions according to a map that does not correspond to the territory they actually inhabit.

§The Cartel in Plain Sight

The political theatre that surrounds this machinery has been carefully engineered to prevent its exposure. Every four years, the electorate is invited to choose between competing sets of politicians who differ loudly on cultural and social questions while agreeing almost entirely on the monetary architecture that governs their shared economy. The central bank transcends electoral cycles. It transcends governments. It is immune to the populist winds that swing the political pendulum from the authoritarian right to the utopian left and back again with metronomic regularity. 

The arithmetic of this invisibility is staggering especially when you consider that the US dollar has lost over 97% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was established in 1913. More than a century of quiet, unlegislated, unchosen taxation and the institution responsible for it has never once faced an electoral consequence.

While citizens fight passionately over immigration, identity, and the culture wars, the institution that controls the price of their money, the availability of credit, and the long-term trajectory of their purchasing power continues its operations undisturbed. The anger is real. The targets are almost entirely wrong and the cartel remains untouched.

The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency.

— Murray Rothbard

§When Everyone Feels Like a Genius

The fiat monetary system, in its mature form, is a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is an arrangement in which returns for earlier participants are funded by the capital of later participants, sustained by the perpetual recruitment of new believers, and guaranteed to collapse the moment the pool of new entrants can no longer cover the obligations to the old.

The fiat economy, built on an ever-expanding money supply that requires perpetual growth to service perpetual debt, operates on precisely this logic. New money is created to service the debt generated by old money. Asset prices are inflated by the expansion of credit. The entire edifice depends on the belief and crucially, on the continued participation of the people within it.

This is why financial crises always seem to arrive as a surprise, even when their preconditions were visible to anyone willing to look. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 is an example of this phenomenon. For years, a culture of sub-prime lending, securitised mortgage debt, and leveraged speculation had constructed an enormous and structurally hollow edifice of apparent wealth. 

The participants from the mortgage brokers, to the investment bankers, to the homeowners flipping properties on borrowed equity were not simply greedy. They were rational actors within a system that had made gambling and investing operationally indistinguishable. When the returns are flowing, when prices are rising, when every position appears to be winning, the distinction between speculation and prudence becomes psychologically impossible to maintain. Everyone feels like a genius in a bull market. The financial media confirms this feeling daily, calling the accumulation of systemic risk a “bull run” and the people feeding it “sophisticated investors.” 

When the music finally stops, and it always stops, the talking heads act surprised as they start screaming of unforeseen crisis, recession, contagion, and collapse. As if the seeds were not sown in plain sight, in the years of celebration that preceded the fall.

Meanwhile, the ordinary saver, conditioned by every institution they trust to believe in the virtue of prudence; deposits their income in accounts that return less than inflation, invests their retirement savings in index funds that are long the same monetary system extracting value from them, and purchases a home at prices inflated by decades of cheap credit, telling themselves it is an investment rather than what it actually is: a survival response to the impossibility of saving in a currency designed to lose value. 

With everyone’s pensions, retirement accounts, and brokerage portfolios concentrated in the same basket of financial assets, stocks that in real terms are often destroying capital while propping up their valuations through share buybacks and the inflation of earnings, the appearance of collective prosperity masks a structural hollowness that only becomes visible when the cycle turns.

Money is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society.

— Murray Rothbard

§The Life They Were Sold

Back to my crying TikTokers. They did everything right. That is the most important thing to understand about them and the most important thing to challenge. They did everything right according to a set of instructions that was designed to benefit someone other than them. The advice to pursue credentials, seek employment, accumulate consumer debt, take on a mortgage, contribute to a pension managed by the same financial institutions whose interests are structurally opposed to theirs, is not innocent guidance passed down through generations of collective wisdom.

It is a curriculum of dependence, refined over more than a century, that binds its graduates to the financial system through taxes, debt, and inflation, and ensures that the value of their labour and savings flows steadily upward to the institutions that sit at the front of the Cantillon queue.

They were trained to trust a system that was designed to impoverish them slowly and with the appearance of generosity. They were given access to credit that functions as a sophisticated form of indentured servitude thus enabling them to consume now in exchange for surrendering a portion of their future productivity. 

They were given investment vehicles that create the sensation of participation in wealth creation while primarily enriching the managers of those vehicles. They were given a housing market that functions as a transfer mechanism from the young and asset-poor to the old and asset-rich, underwritten by monetary policy that made it impossible to build wealth any other way. They were given an electoral system that offers them a theatrical choice between different managers of the same machine, ensuring that regardless of their political convictions, the machine continues to operate on their behalf, or rather, at their expense.

They are not falling behind despite doing everything right. They are falling behind because they did everything they were told and the people who told them had every incentive to keep them exactly where they are.

The economic desperation documented throughout this essay does not confine itself to complaint videos and political rage. It metastasizes into the culture itself, reshaping the most intimate dimensions of human life in ways that rarely appear in any macroeconomic report. Consider one data point that the financial press prefers not to examine alongside its inflation charts. Between 2019 and 2024, OnlyFans grew from 13 million subscribers to 377 million, a 27-fold increase in five years. The number of creators on the platform rose in parallel, from 348,000 to 4.6 million over the same period. These are not merely statistics about a controversial website but these numbers are actually a civilisational thermometer.

When the cost of building a conventional life; a home, a family, a future is priced beyond reach by decades of monetary debasement, human beings do not simply tighten their budgets. They restructure their aspirations. They monetise what remains available to them and what remains available, when wages stagnate and dignity becomes a luxury, is the body.

This trend does not exist in isolation. It runs precisely parallel to the collapse in birth rates among millennials and Generation Z, generations that, by every conventional measure, are the most educated in history, and by every material measure, the least able to afford the life that education was supposed to purchase. While the connection between the two is not causal, it’s definitely not coincidental.

A monetary system that makes the future unaffordable does not only impoverish people financially. It impoverishes them existentially. It dissolves the conditions under which people choose to form families, build communities, and invest in a horizon beyond their own immediate survival.

When a currency is debased, it is not only purchasing power that is destroyed. It is the willingness to believe that tomorrow is worth building toward. OnlyFans is not only a symptom of moral decay; it’s also a symptom of economic despair wearing the mask of entrepreneurship and the central banking cartel, which manufactured the conditions that made it inevitable, will never appear in a single headline about it.

Once again we have to ask ourselves, how did so many people end up inside a system this destructive without ever recognising it as such? The answer is that they were handed a map at birth and told it was the only one that existed. The middle-class playbook of a degree, job, mortgage, pension, is not a path to financial freedom. It is a path to financial serfdom secured with the chains of monthly obligations. The crucial distinction that the system’s curriculum never teaches is the difference between an asset and a liability, more precisely, the difference between things that generate income and things that consume it while appearing to build wealth. 

A house purchased with a thirty-year mortgage, in a market inflated by cheap money, in a currency losing purchasing power annually, is not straightforwardly an investment. It is, for most of its occupants, an expensive liability that locks a person’s primary savings into an illiquid, highly leveraged bet on the continued expansion of credit. A bet that can only pay off if the next generation is willing and able to borrow even more than you did to buy you out.

We have been taught — that is, schooled — in this country to think of ‘success’ as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, ‘schooling,’ but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense.

— John Taylor Gatto

§The Exit

This is where Bitcoin enters the argument and it is important to be precise about how it enters, because Bitcoin is not a get-rich-quick scheme, not a speculative instrument for the technologically adventurous, and not a solution to every dimension of the problems described above. It is the first monetary technology in human history that removes the money supply from the control of any institution, government, or cartel. It cannot be gatekept by the institutions that currently sit at the front of the Cantillon queue, skimming value from everyone downstream.

To understand why Bitcoin matters is to first understand what money actually is, not what the school system taught you it is, but what it actually is: a technology for storing and communicating value across time and space. The quality of that technology determines how efficiently an economy can coordinate production, how fairly value can be allocated, and whether the people who produce real goods and services can preserve the fruits of their labour across time. 

Fiat currency, issued at will by central banks, is a deeply defective monetary technology not because it fails to function as a medium of exchange in the short term, but because its capacity for unlimited expansion makes it a systematically leaky vessel for storing value over time. Every year, the vessel leaks two percent or more. Over a lifetime of working and saving, this is not a rounding error, but it is a catastrophe. It is the difference between building and being slowly drained.

§The Question That Changes Everything

What would it mean to save in a currency that could not be inflated? What decisions would you make differently if the money you set aside today would purchase the same amount, or more, a decade from now? What would it mean for a family in the developing world, whose national currency has been destroyed by its own government, to have access to a monetary network that no government can debase? Bitcoin is not merely a financial instrument. It is a question about what kind of money human beings deserve and what kind they have been given.

This is not a promise that Bitcoin will eliminate poverty, resolve every political dysfunction, or compensate for the damage done by decades of miseducation. It will not pay off student debt or bring down the rent in the short term. What it offers is something more fundamental and more durable: an exit. Not a political exit, not a candidate to vote for or a party to join or a petition to sign. An opt-out from a monetary system that was never designed with your interests in mind. 

The discovery of Bitcoin is, for many people, the beginning of a genuine financial education not because the technology itself is the lesson, but because understanding why Bitcoin exists requires understanding everything the system never wanted you to know about money, inflation, central banking, and the architecture of financial dependence.

§One Person at a Time

The path out is not political. The path out is cognitive first, and it begins with the destruction of the mental models that have kept the majority in financial bondage for generations. The miseducation must be actively, deliberately dismantled. Not by governments because governments have no interest in producing citizens who understand what governments do to their money. Not by schools because the school system is a product of the same institutional logic that produced the financial system it serves; but by individuals willing to do the uncomfortable intellectual work of unlearning a century of received wisdom and reasoning, from first principles.

This is the kind of hope that has real substance, not the fleeting but euphoric hope of the campaign rally, built on the promise that the right person in power will fix what is broken, but the hope of genuine understanding. The hope that comes from recognising the mechanism that has been extracting value from your life, naming it precisely, and taking concrete steps to opt out of it. This kind of hope is not naive. It does not ignore the difficulty of the terrain or the power of the institutions defending it, but it’s grounded in something that political hope almost never is: truth. 

When the diagnosis is correct, the treatment becomes possible. When the mental model corresponds to the actual structure of the world, decisions begin to compound in your favour rather than against you.

The transformation happens one person at a time, and one family at a time. It deepens through the realisation that the financial decisions most people make by default like keeping savings in fiat, borrowing in fiat, investing in fiat-denominated assets, building a life within the architecture of a system designed to slowly redistribute their value upward, are not neutral. They are acts of participation in their own impoverishment. 

The faces on the screen are not wrong to be angry. They are wrong about the target. Redirect the anger. Do the work of understanding that no institution will do for you. The system is not going to fix itself because it is not broken. It is functioning exactly as designed. The curriculum of serfdom has one fatal weakness, it only works on people who never find out what it is.