The gavel hit the podium at Christie’s of New York, declaring the sale of what seemed to be a mere JPEG digital image. The buyer, who goes by the alias Metakovan, won the collage “Everydays” by the American artist Beeple with a staggering bid of $69,346,250. This was not an obscure event, hidden away in an auction house in the Bronx. More than 22 million pixel-watchers virtually attended the final minutes of the bidding on Christie’s website.
Back here on earth, what are we to make of this vote of confidence in the virtual art world? Money was designed to be a network for assigning value to people’s labor and the things they create. With art, however, every piece is unique and valued for how it makes us feel. For the Bitcoin cognoscente and many traditional economists, $69M for a contemporary work of art is evidence of eroding support for the dollar — the so-called global reserve unit of account. More generally, the hammer price for Beeple’s work indicates the disappearance of value in what is known as government-issued fiat money.
Before we proceed, a bit of history is in order. In August 1971, Richard Nixon severed the direct convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold. This act was the culmination of the long-dying standard of the tying dollar issuance to gold reserves, whose phasing out began in the 1930s with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since then, the dollar in its post-1971 state draws exclusively on an immaterial source of value. No longer finding its worth in the “gravitas” of the ür-mineral gold, the dollar has become an ür-meme, an economic idea that replicates and mutates in a culture based on the confidence people have in it. The notion of the meme was hatched by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, and like the gene, the meme of money has helped to nurture selfishness itself within individuals.
As a result of Nixon’s declaration, governments now have the power to issue more money to fuel economic growth. The most recent deluge of money creation has fueled tremendous inflation in assets over these last couple of years. In so doing, however, the meme of money has begun to tire, to become more clichéd, so to speak, with every additional unit printed. Its memetic power is spread thinner and thinner and as a result, the demand people have for money over assets decreases. In other words, each unit of money means less as we see more of it in circulation.
Here’s where I agree with the interpretation of the Bitcoin-cognoscente economists: the $69M spent on Beeple’s “Everydays” is clear evidence of how far fiat money has fallen and perhaps it marks a usurpation of fiat by a more democratic type of money secured by blockchain. That being said, as I reflect on the philosophy of Bitcoin as a decades-long thinker about the nature of nothing, this fall of fiat is a perfect inflection point in human history for us to see how the value of money is born out of a specific genus of nothing.
We have an opportunity to identify the mistake we made by placing so much confidence in fiat money and how it morphed into a belief in an abysmal nothing — a nothing that is indeed an abyss. If we see money as it is — as a means towards a greater end — and if we can understand the actuality of nothing, we will not put our belief in the abysmal nothing of money, but save it for the buoyant nothing of the divine.
A Silly Syllogism
Premise 1: “One Dogecoin is more valuable than nothing.”
Premise 2: “Nothing is more valuable than total happiness.”
Conclusion: “One Dogecoin is more valuable than total happiness.”
In the first premise of my silly syllogism, we have Dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency that carries little market, exchange, or use value. That being said, it certainly has some monetary value. A penny in your pocket is not much but it’s better than not having anything in there at all. At the moment, one Dogecoin is worth approximately a quarter of a dollar.
The second premise extols an essential human maxim: happiness is something we all generally strive for. All else has value in as much as it contributes to your being happy. This premise reminds me of the epigraph at the top of a book I recently published, Nothing and nothingness: Toward an Apophatic Science, “In this phase of life, nothing is more essential to us than academic career, professional respect, and reasoned science.” Hopefully, achieving these three goals will lead me to be a happy person.
Combining these two premises lead to a seemingly farcical conclusion: “One Dogecoin in the bank is more valuable than total happiness in life.” This conclusion would mean that a quarter dollar is more valuable than being happy! Of course, this is a non-sequitur but a non-sequitur that points to a mistake people are actually making. Many individuals value money over happiness and make the pursuit of money the end goal of their lives. Bitcoin may be a more open, honest, and democratic form of money but it is still a pathway to valuing an abysmal nothing.
Seven Nothings
My silly syllogism also has considerable implications; it is only silly if the term “nothing” is read with the same static meaning in the two premises and the associated conclusion. Obviously, we cannot make that mistake. If instead, we differentiate between the ways “nothing” is put to work in our common English parlance, we forge a useful tool — a heuristic, as we say — for understanding what we have termed an abysmal nothing in contradistinction to a buoyant nothing. There are at least seven kinds of nothing, seven nothings that each have their own domain of relevance.
1) Nondescript Disclaimer: This nothing permeates everyday banter. It is tossed off in our conversations to convey that no great shakes have gone down. This type of nothing has two forms. A perfect example of the first form is the American TV sitcom, Seinfeld. Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer could sit around the apartment, or yell and scream, or kiss and dance. No matter what they were doing, it was still a “show about nothing.” The second form of nondescript disclaimer is the rather off-handed negation of any positive avowal statement, such as: “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon is the best for late-night talk.” “No way, there is nothing that can be better than the original Johnny Carson version.”
2) Scientific: This nothing points toward an experimentally verifiable empty condition of the manifest world. Here, nothing is approached via what I have termed “The Rarefying Principle,” which states that the nature of created things is revealed more and more by the shedding of excess matter. The scientific pursuit of the essence of the atom highlights this principle: from corpuscles floating about in a sort of ooze, to electrons flying around in empty space surrounding a massive center, to an airy center composed of quarks that come in flavors such as “charm” and “strange,” to a center constituted by vibrating strings of zero dimension; matter is reduced to vibration. Very rare indeed!
3) Mathematical: Around 300 BCE, the first inception of zero appeared in Babylonia. It is important to note that when zero first appeared in ancient mathematics, it acted as a vacant space into which a digit could be placed. It was essentially an unknown quantity similar to what mathematicians now reserve for variables like “X.” It took over a thousand years for zero to be recognized as a number in its own right, but it remains a number without quantity. Rather than carrying its own value, it serves to move all other numbers to their proper place, so that their proper quantity can be determined.
4) Philosophical: If philosophy is the study of the nature of the universe with no divine presence and theology is the study of the nature of the universe with a divine presence, then we can understand the philosophical nothing as “not anything at all.” Armed with this definition, clearly this nothing is not to be discovered within the realm of imagination or rational comprehension. Yet, contemplating nothing serves a positive function for philosophers. It stretches the mind to learn and discover more; I refer to this stretched state as “outsight”.
5) Existential (i.e. The Abysmal Nothing): The existential question asks: what is the nature of the person and the place of the person in life? Jean-Paul Sartre, the idol of Existentialism, gives us a rather grim answer: there is no metaphysical realm above, under, or behind the daily world. Sartre declared that he would not waste time arguing the non-existence of God, as his existence or non-existence was irrelevant in the end. Further, there is no built-in meaning for a human being, rather we must create our personhood and life through our choices. According to Sartre, we often sense that our chosen life is superfluous. So, the existential nothing posits that there is no meta-realm to the mundane, no God, and no meaning beyond that which you imagine for yourself.
6) Metaphysical: Metaphysics is comprised of the questions at the edges of philosophy, questions about the nature of the universe with no divine presence. It seeks to know the nature of existence beyond the manifest physical world. The metaphysical nothing refers to a state beyond existence, a state of meta-existence. If “is” implies existence and nothing — according to metaphysicians, by definition, cannot exist — then the metaphysical nothing is simply not.
7) Theological (i.e. The Buoyant Nothing): Recall that theology is the study of the nature of the universe with a divine presence. I carry on a 1,500-year-old tradition of theology called apophasis: the negative way. The foundational tenet — lying just over the cliff edge, beyond all the continuums of the world — beyond materiality, beyond personality, beyond rationality — lies the divine nothing who/which is not a thing or person and evades description.
Fortunately, this tenet does not deny the verity of the divine. Yes, I declare the divine nothing and note its/his/her gravity; I am pulled toward the divine nothing. Also, the divine nothing is essential to manifest life: “Nothing makes the world real. Nothing makes the world work.”
For me, it is truly fine to think about the divine, but in so doing, I miss the subject of my inquiry or end up speaking of something other. I would be grappling with the image and not the original, reminiscent of how Beeple’s art sells for $69 million whereas a right-click-save JPEG of the image has no value at all (*For the sake of brevity, we will avoid discussing what makes a certain copy of a digital artwork provably unique). Instead of succumbing to this mistake, I must find a way to think around the divine nothing. Were it possible to locate the event horizon of consciousness — an absolute limit to my awareness or even potential knowledge — that is where I could be free to believe and have faith in the divine nothing, cognizant that my thoughts can take me only to the cliff edge.
Real World of the Divine Nothing
The three most essential lessons that I have learned about the value of money from the heuristic of the seven nothings:
First, a lack of confidence in government leads to a lack of confidence in its fiat money, which, by extension, is its most powerful arm. The lack of confidence in government fiat in the contemporary landscape has driven many people to Bitcoin, the token of greatest confidence. Thousands of other cryptocurrencies have also been born from a similar disillusionment with fiat and perhaps a little greed. However, people in the cryptocurrency space (Bitcoiners) need to relax their Bitcoin binging and schedule a few moments to reflect on their beliefs. They may be surprised to see at the bedrock of their culture lies the meme of money, giving us certainty about the price of everything and the value of nothing (or not anything at all).
Second, returning to our silly syllogism, recall it carries importance if we understand that the term “nothing” is employed with two different meanings. With my presentation of the seven nothings, we see that the premise, “One Dogecoin is more valuable than nothing,” employs the mathematical nothing, i.e., zero is its own number representing a null quantity. The second premise, “Nothing is more valuable than total happiness,” employs the Nondescript Disclaimer as an off-handed denial of any notion of happiness having a “greater.” By employing the heuristic of seven nothings, we can immediately see that the conclusion that “One Dogecoin is more valuable than total happiness” is without meaning (beyond the humor of it all). It is without meaning because of how we arrived at the conclusion, falsely assuming both nothings to be equivalent. If we can be confused by nothing, arguably the simplest concept of all, how sure can we be about any of our academic descriptions of reality? By putting the heuristic of the seven nothings to work, we can avoid the acceptance of erroneous conclusions with respect to “nothing” in daily, philosophical, theological, and scientific parlance.
Third, with the heuristic of the seven nothings, we can appreciate exactly how the historical error regarding the value of fiat money is being replicated again with Bitcoin. We can put a stop to this error while we remain at this inflection point in history. In my opinion, Bitcoiners are living in the space where the existential nothing reigns. The people in the space tend to miss the value of the world outside of the prices of things. They also have no divine presence or spiritual advisor to attune their sensibilities, instead opting to be islands of personhood without anchors to an absolute arbiter of truth. Sadly, Bitcoiners have chosen to impute the value typically reserved for an absolute to the “next best thing.” This next best thing is something objective, backed by indisputable mathematics, and revered in the trinity of Bitcoin — the protocol, the network, and the medium of exchange. Carried by different currents in culture and epoch, Bitcoiners have committed the same error as our ancestors in falsely valuing fiat money. They have chosen (remember Sartre) the existential nothing, which is an abyss with no bottom, for its validation of the here and now.
This error in valuation is not yet fully rooted in our culture and can be deracinated, not through a better existential choice, but through a clear outsight that humans actually live in a reality in which the theological nothing reigns, not by fiat, but as fact. Our reality declares a divine nothing just beyond the cliff edge of all continuums that pull us in. I call this world a reality because, unlike the virtual reality of existential Bitcoin, the presence of the divine nothing makes the world real and makes the world work. The theological nothing buoys us!
Deification of Money
It may help some readers to understand the differentiation of a virtual existential nothing from the reality of the theological nothing if we hearken to Biblical language. Matthew 6:2 (New Living Bible) reads, “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other. You will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”
“Money” here is a translation of the Aramaic “mammon,” which generally refers to material wealth. Over time, Christians have begun using mammon as a pejorative, a term used to describe excessive greed.
Now, when the Bible declares that you cannot serve both God and mammon, I have the following outsight: if one fails to lend oneself to the reality of the theological nothing, then one chooses to serve money and to reside in a virtual world of your own creation — a world filled with price tags and an abysmal nothing. With this choice, the market becomes a trans-personal being — a deity. It moves intelligently with global reign, setting the balance of accounts for all material wealth while it insidiously works to place a value on human beings as well.
In the end, I would like my readers to understand that the value of money is simply confidence in a meme, a belief, and a breath of life exhaled by a community. This is true of fiat money as well as Bitcoin; we do not need to differentiate between their workings of valuation. Yet, it is essential to differentiate the worlds inhabited by those who lend value to money. For those living in the space of the existential nothing, the value of money is [wrongly] chosen to be inherent, real, and divine. In utter contrast, for those living in the reality of the theological nothing, there is no choosing the divine. For them, the divine is present in reality. The divine is inherent and not dependent on community, government, or cultural meme.
So, at this inflection point in our history when fiat money is losing value, our moment in time when the source of money’s value is so clear, we must not make the mistake again of idolizing money — of worshipping mammon, which is an abysmal nothing. We must respond to the pull of the theological nothing, that/who makes the world real, makes the world work, and buoys our lives.
