Hopium

What's the most mentally-devastating sound you'll ever hear in your life? A sound so shrill and excruciating that thoughts of stabbing yourself in the jugular seem less vulgar than attempting to survive the audio assault? That's right, someone's colicky baby screaming next to you in a plane. I know, I know, it's not the baby's fault, and I don't hate kids much, but there's just something primal about the way a screaming baby gets into your head, manifesting thoughts like: What am I doing wrong? Why does the baby hate me? Would they miss him?

We are programmed to respond with complete abandon to rectify whatever suffering that child is enduring; whether it be emptying little Mr. Poopy-Pants, playing a few rounds of peek-a-boo, or the inimitable 'magical' soother. Nothing can shut down a screaming demon baby like a rubber placebo nipple; just like taking said nipple away can launch a baby into renewed hysterical screams. It's almost like the baby knows, by screaming as loud and alarmingly as possible, they'll eventually impose their will upon supposedly much more intelligent people, to procure their 'entitled' affections of the moment. This is the first stage of human consciousness, one of pure selfishness, completely devoid of intelligence, using shameless hostile screaming to assert their presence. If you don't quickly address their needs, you will be endlessly punished with hate-filled audible torture.

Addiction

It may be a stretch, but one could abstractly categorize a soother as a 'drug', in the same way one could identify many things that artificially provide pleasure. When something that has zero benefit to our perspective or physical health, is applied in a manner consistent with providing pleasure, or relief from stress; this creates the setting for an 'addiction' or 'dependency'. The easy examples are illicit chemicals, but with a little reflection, one could see how dietary supplements, religion, fitness, and dare I say it..crypto, could also be considered drugs, providing artificial pleasure because of their exaggerated promises we choose to believe in.

Now many people would say, what's the harm in an addiction if it doesn't kill you? It's a really good argument, one that I've pondered heavily from both sides, and the truth is, unless you've been to both sides, you aren't qualified to judge, or prosecute, or especially encourage. It's only from having experienced both sides that one could say there are objective pluses and minuses, and it really comes down to an educated personal choice.

Cave People

So where does such Libertarian thinking go wrong? Enter the Troglodyte hordes!!! (hordes... hordes...). This demographic isn't just that asshole neighbor of yours, nor is it just that dickhead that you work with, nor is it all poor people (though few troglodytes are rich), or foreigners, yes every single sports fanatic, etc. By my estimate, a full 70% of the global human population, are troglodytes.

What's a troglodyte? In this context, which is the literal context, I mean people that if it weren't for the advantage of being born into civilization and being buoyed/forced to assimilate into a socially-acceptable menial existence, their lineage would result in simple primitive cave-dwellers. They don't have the 'spark' that separates modern man from homo erectus, instead operating and perceiving at a much more base instinctual level.

In a troglodyte's brain, it's like the 'primate' part of the brain responsible for spatial visualizing, or mathematical inclination, or prejudicial pattern-matching, or deductive-reasoning, is just plain dormant, or even non-existent if we're to subscribe to some genetic pretense. They lack the 'tribal' organizational instincts that would create the foundation for civilization to emerge. Couldn't even fabricate a flint spearhead if someone didn't show them first.

Being part troglodyte is a purely genetic outcome, for all of us; a physical and hereditarily-determined potential, that is all. There are no life experiences that create troglodytes, in fact, we all start life as troglodytes, as the screaming baby exemplifies, but not everyone completely matures out of a troglodyte mindset to become a fully-sentient self-aware being. That requires the benefit of the primate brain; or the 'internal eye' as I like to perceive it.

Instinct

Now, this isn't to say we ever fully escape the more primal lizard/mammal brain's instinctual pulls, no. In fact, these instincts define our motivations in life, and it's with the benefit of the primate brain that we can accomplish those goals in a much more civilized/intelligent manner. Still, we are always bound to our basic instincts no matter how smart we are, because that's where the pleasure/pain regions are, and everything we do is in some way asking the lizard brain to give us a jolt of pleasure or relief from pain/fear.

The modern day troglodyte operates nearly completely on lower-order instincts, gravitating to anything that produces stimulation from the lizard/mammal parts of the brain, but they execute these strategies 'without' first consulting the higher-order logical primate brain to condition those behaviors; no, they let emotions guide them, allowing emotions to decide right or wrong, truth or fallacy, credible or full of shit; always skewing information (confirmation bias) to their interests rather than accepting what may be fact or not. In summary, Troglodytes 'feel' their way through life wearing rose-colored glasses, rather than 'thinking' and facing reality.

The potency with which they pursue these instinctual placations is nothing short of bestial and obsessive; because, like a junkie seeking their fix, behind it lies an incredibly potent addiction to the prospect of the reward they seek. If there's no contribution from the higher-order primate brain (logic and reasoning) to dilute the intensity of the lower-order instincts (greed, ego, etc.), then the thoughts/actions surfacing from those lower instincts will be quite irrational and aggressive.

I'll be the first to personally acknowledge my frequent and very large presentation of the troglodyte aspect of my psyche, and upon which's desires I operate vigorously to satisfy a colossal ego, a massive appetite, my aggressive pursuit of dominance, and {further details omitted for the sanctity of this blog's focus}. I am quite a bit of a troglodyte, I recognize that, and I embrace it like one embraces an ugly tattoo. You can't change that which is most primal within you.

That said, I try to vindicate my animal-side with contributions from my higher-order primate brain. The balance isn't always met, but it comes in the form of intelligent contributions, deep analysis, oppression of the ego-derived musings, and most of all, lots of failed but continued attempts at civility (my greatest personal challenge. I have even vowed to start slapping myself every time I cross this particular line). I am a failure as my imagined ideal, but we probably all are, and perhaps that's a reflection of the current state of human evolution.

Troglodytes, however, don't have these introspections. For them, the world is their oyster, they are always right even when they know they are wrong, defending from a position of insult rather than facts, and as long as their emoting instincts are telling them their behaviors and thoughts are A-ok, then there will be no one that stands in their way.

I'll say it again, 70 fucking percent of humanity are troglodytes. I've never seen an exception to this rule, not in rich countries, or poor countries, or any specific culture, or race, or gender. 7-out-of-10 random people, are cave people. It's easy to dismiss such a high percentage as exaggerated, particularly if you are a troglodyte-in-denial, but even those that have matured into sentience may have a hard time accepting this ratio, especially if most of your time is spent among your intellectual peers, such as at your office of employment, or your friendship circle; but like anything else, it's those you don't see that complete our reality.

Society constructed itself around this stratification of human psyches, manifesting in the form we see today where we've largely enslaved troglodytes to perform much of the labor for us. We've also constructed elaborate mechanisms to obscure this fact from troglodytes so they remain confused and blinded, as we hang carrots of hope in front of them to suggest they may strike it rich and escape the drudgery. Put another way, we offer hope in the form of unquantifiable riches; whether that be lotteries, promotions, or... crypto (I know, FINALLY to the point).

Crypto Addiction

Alright, so I've dragged you through the anthropological precursory foundations that lead into the next points I want to make.

When a sentient person encounters crypto, they are just as attracted to its potential for wealth as a troglodyte, but they also have an innate desire to actually understand what's going on. So the sentient person will research and learn and experiment, and spend enough time doing these things till they are comfortable with what they put their money into.

Troglodytes on the other hand, visualize a shiny object (the potential for great wealth), that they must have, and this artificially stimulates their pleasure center (the drug effect), which leads to addiction. They have a particularly pronounced susceptibility to "hopium" addiction, where they obsessively 'hope' for a lofty reward, like absurd crypto profits for example. Once they have globbed onto something they want, the primal instincts treat it like their last meal, and they imagine themselves disemboweling anybody that threatens to relieve them of this prize. Crypto no longer represents a simple mathematical construct, it becomes personal, an obsession, a..religion.

Defection

When the statistics started emerging that Bitcoin is mathematically doomed, it was a challenge for me to accept, but the numbers don't lie. I moved to Ethereum, but the statistics there also didn't lie (though the pending sharding feature is worth noting, but I digress). I really took my time finding a successor and finally landed on XRP. It was like David Schwartz and Ripple as a whole, read my mind to deliver the perfect coin. Every detail, every nuance, even the motivations behind their design decisions firmly elucidated how clearly they saw the challenges, and how accurately they addressed them. The result is an incredible technology that touches me in places I didn't know I wanted to be touched.

I got pretty excited, particularly since I understood that these complex aspects of XRP and its synergy with Ripple would be far over the heads of most people, even those adept at Bitcoin tech. For me, understanding XRP was like knowing which horse at the race track is jacked up on steroids and has bionic hooves. I put all my fucking money on that horse.

However, now that the race has begun and the XRP/Ripple horse's muddy rooster tail has tore a mile-long canyon in the race track to reel in Bitcoin, and is now sniffing the tapped-out Bitcoin horse's buttcrack, all of those belligerent Bitcoin troglodytes (and other coins as well) have started to recognize the only thing they understand, the smell of ass, and XRP's ass is starting to smell pretty good.

In the past year, we've all witnessed the XRP Community begin with intellectuals and academics, praising its virtues and contrasting it against the pathetic lineup of competing coins. The Bitcoin troglodytes laughed at and mocked us, berated our 'foolishness' for supporting a banker's coin, endlessly GIF'd us with troglodyte-level memes; but then something happened.. The Bitcoin clatter slowly started falling off, whilst simultaneously, imperceptibly at first, but ever-increasingly, the XRP community expanded. Thousands of very vocal Bitcoin enthusiasts, plus many other coins, defected to the now much shinier XRP camp. We were winning the war on FUD! Or so we thought..

Dilution

I'm not sure when it began, but the original smaller XRP community, the ones that found XRP because of its merits, not popularity, had modest realistic expectations, and we were all very excited when a new Ripple partnership would be announced. We would rejoice at every technical advancement and communication from Ripple, but never did we indulge in sheer imaginings, like where XRP could be in 20 years, or even pretended there were ways to predict it. We all agreed XRP will be small at first, but slowly and steadily, XRP/Ripple's magic formula would win the race by sheer attrition.

That all changed. With the influx of troglodytes chasing after the new shiny thing they see in XRP, they also brought their staptacular zingdingaling twists on reality to dilute it with. $589 EOY, SDRs, that magic-pot of NDAs that supposedly keep us from knowing the truth, Ripple fixing the price, egregious dot-connecting of FUCKING NOTHING, AUGH!! And the synchronicity with which they all light up on the leanest of information, leading to literally hysterical XRP-valuation predictions that could theoretically serve as an indication of brain-damage. It's been nothing short of fucking stupid.

Now we have a similar demographic diversity to what Bitcoin has, with lots and lots and lots of troglodytes. They don't want to have a technical discussion, they wouldn't understand it anyways, insisting their cursory overview grants them ample comprehension to warrant radical projections. They'd rather load up their hopium syringe with moon juice and blast off into their mindless tripe of incredibly asinine assumptions and baseless dot-connecting, seeing whatever the fuck they want to see, and hiding behind the convenient notion that nobody can PROVE them wrong, even though they offer no rational proof whatsoever that they could be right. Don't even waste your time showing them math, the script of heretics.

It is a fool's game to operate from a position of hope. The entire concept of a stock/crypto market exists PRECISELY because of the consistency of troglodytes' complete failure to understand the mechanisms employed to separate them from their money. False hope, and unwarranted fear, are the corralling walls that reliably trigger troglodytes' fierce blind-loyalty instincts to force them to behave in predictable, vulnerable ways, with no intelligence to help them bypass these emotional triggers. If it wasn't bad enough that we enslave them all, now we even shamelessly eat their motivational carrots right in front of their eyes.

Even worse, is they self-elect their own prophets that can speak in their primal tongues, appealing to their lizard brains, giving them a religious conduit by which to fill their moon-juice hopium syringes. These prophets merely need to profess the obscurest of credentials in even just one discipline, and in the eyes of the moonbabies, that then qualifies them as an incontrovertible XRP sage; vigorously defended by their cracked-out troglodyte "followers" as if even the notion of questioning their prophet's preachings is itself a crime punishable by violence. Any attempt to take them down from their hopium "high" is perceived as an attack and will be met with the most venomous hatred-filled response, like taking a soother away from a baby...

RAGE

As with anything that becomes beautiful, the inevitable XRP cult has formed; a cult that collectively lacks higher-order thinking capacity and this in fact IS the determining factor that binds them; Group Stupid. If you belong to Group Stupid, I can only imagine your bloodlust after reading this, lol. Oh how you'd love to exercise your primal instinct of murder, or your primal instinct of oppression and force me to shut up, or torture me in some way to bring my unbridled arrogance under your fascist control. FEEL it. Let the seething hate wash over you. You must be shaking.

Do you enjoy feeling like that?

Let me paint a picture: you've probably been feeling similar hate your whole life in many different scenarios. It's part of your character right? This extreme of emotion/passion/hate is the go-to reaction of a troglodyte, and is the very PROOF that you don't think rationally, and are not likely to understand that you are CONSTANTLY BEING TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF!!! Particularly by YOUR OWN PROPHETS!!! I am not your enemy, and never have been, but you've been lead to believe so by those whose credibility I question. I am merely an objective scientist, and I can promise you that the only way to see into the future is with legitimate math, not the Frankenmath these prophets use to calculate preposterous valuations. I try very hard to bring you reality, not a vial of a bad drug that makes you stupid.

If these labels make you angry, then they are justified and applicable to you. However, if what I write makes you feel sad/ stupid/ insecure/ ashamed/ embarrassed/ exploited, then take heart my friend, for you are not one of them; troglodytes don't experience these emotions. You simply just don't know who to trust and fell victim to their delusions. I'm not asking you to trust me, I'm asking you to trust yourself. You don't need prophets to give you wet dreams, you can learn what you need to know and ascend above the troglodytes. Some of these concepts are hard, very hard, but don't turn your back to the challenge. Don't succumb to these ridiculous fantasies that these megalomaniac false prophets spin; they are only espousing such incredible nonsense because they make money off of your back from your tips and their ads. They are lying to STEAL from you. Watch them disappear or move the goalposts when EOY predictions snap like a broken twig in their faces.

Moderation

All signs are pointing towards XRP being WILDLY successful, beyond comprehension, but still grounded in reality, as Ripple's incredible efforts and further global domination continues, but it will take time. Will it make everyone a millionaire? Of course not; but in the greater scheme of things, it's well-positioned to outperform everything else eventually. It's one thing to be optimistic that some rewards will come to you for your investment; it's entirely another to aggressively assault those that downplay fantasy. If you're fighting a holy war that you don't truly understand; it's time to take that needle out of your arm, and come back to the real world; for the longer you remain all jacked up on hopium, the harder the crash will be.

The real enemy is blind allegiance. You're better than that, and there's a lot of people that'd be more than happy to help you truly understand crypto so you're not a sitting duck for these hopium dealers that fill your mind with shit to keep you coming back for more. So let's light up the primate brains and take the first steps towards being sentient (and for the record, I repeatedly fail every one of these points, often):

1. Learn to agree to respectfully disagree. Not every debate has to end with a winner and loser, so wherever the debate ends up after everything has been said, walk away; there's nothing more to be done.

2. Argue a point with facts, not desires/whims or by simply regurgitating other people's gibberish that you don't fully understand. If you can't explain what you are saying, then don't say anything.

3. Don't ever resort to, "You always think you're right!! Mr. Arrogant Know-it-all! Nobody can possibly know what will happen in the future! History will repeat itself, I choose to believe blah blah blah". This is the troglodyte mating call. If this is your answer to people challenging the nonsense you espouse, then you're just being lazy and throwing a tantrum like a stupid kid in hopium withdrawal, whaaa whaaa! The truth is YOU always think you're right, fucking moron. (Yes, I slapped myself, and I liked it)

4. Don't cherry-pick data to support your position. Look at all the data.

5. Don't be a simpleton and judge something for what it is today, denying its future potential.

6. If you sincerely want to have a LEGITIMATE debate, then fight the urge to initiate ad hominem (personal) attacks, or resort to bullying ("Let's meet face-to-face tough guy!"); nothing is more troglodyte than this. You can be as angry as you like (most debates get to this level) but don't cross that insult line. Once this line is crossed, it usually triggers everyone into a pissing match. Tensions are really high in a debate, don't be the asshole that makes it personal. I have blocked 'hundreds' of assholes that launched into personal attacks, and I'll keep blocking as new assholes appear. I choose peace and owe you nothing, so if you want to be heard, show respect and I promise you will be heard, but don't come at me, bro. I have never ever once blocked anyone just because they support a contrarian viewpoint to mine, no matter how much I may disagree.

7. Ask questions from all respected resources, and don't limit yourself to one "expert" no matter how much hope they may make you feel. In other words, don't be a "follower" in the mindless hopium-addict sense of the word. Be a diverse student of many teachers so you too can be a teacher.

8. You're not entitled to: recognition, credibility, inside information, profits, be heard, demand, oppress, insult, or otherwise owed anything you didn't earn through legitimate hard work. Nobody wants to hear about how disappointed you are at Ripple's inability to make you rich, nor entertain conspiracy theories that they are giving what should be your money to all their partners instead. Be grateful you even know about Ripple at this stage of the game.

9. When someone challenges your incredibly ignorant statements ($589 EOY, SDRs, etc.), don't get all self-righteous and morally superior Ms. Pissy. It's not a personal attack so don't turn it into one. Getting into "You need to show more respect for people. They are way smarter/experienced/educated than you. Why do you have to be so rude? Why can't people be allowed to say whatever they want without being challenged??" are the cries of a junkie that just had their hopium taken away. What you don't understand is that you can RUIN PEOPLE'S FUCKING LIVES SPREADING THIS SHIT!! People will jeopardize their financial security on these false hopes!! That fact makes it perfectly valid, nay NECESSARY, to disagree with and slam any information that is incorrect, your feelings be damned. If you're going to throw crap into the mix, you better be prepared to defend it because there's nothing worse than leaving the rest of us to try to undo the hysteria after all the hopium junkies have started worshipping it. You'd be the first to call the police if you saw someone selling drugs on your street, right? The sooner you see the parallel to spreading false Hopium, the sooner you'll see how your addiction is making you a hypocrite.

10. No matter what your position is, or what anybody else's position is in a debate, none of these discussions will matter to the potential for XRP's success. You can't take credit for it, and you certainly cannot hold anybody else responsible for XRP's failure to perform as you'd like it to.

It's easy to pretend we're all so important, and that what we say or do has significance, but that's just our stupid lizard brains puffing up our primal egos, it's not reality. Never lose sight of the fact that we are merely bugs on a leaf, watching the XRP sunrise. So let's just chill, and watch it together.

---

Comments welcome on Twitter (No tips please, and apologies in advance for not responding to compliments for brevity's sake. I will respond to any questions or constructive criticisms)

Previous Article

Next Article