The Spiral and the Fracture
Ours is an age of noise and fracture. Trust in institutions has collapsed. Money is manipulated, language is gamified, culture is commodified. What once served as the centre, composed of shared truths, coherent values, stable foundations for participation, has dissolved into a haze of simulations. The sacred has been displaced by the transactional; the true, by the trending.
The poet W. B. Yeats saw something like this more than a century ago. In his apocalyptic poem The Second Coming, he warned of a world spun outward in widening gyres, where “the centre cannot hold.” That image has become cliché, but it still speaks with eerie accuracy. Our era feels centrifugal, stretched to breaking point, untethered.
But the gyre is not the only image of history. There is another; the spiral.
As Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, “The spiral is a spiritualised circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.” Unlike the gyre, which tears itself apart, the spiral remembers. It returns again and again, but never to the same place. It ascends through recurrence, carrying the past forward into a higher integration.
This essay takes the spiral as its orienting shape. Across centuries and disciplines, four thinkers in particular –  Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian economists, Robert Pirsig, and Carl Jung – each saw that freedom, value, and coherence arise not through imposition, but through participation. Each, in their own way, intuited that life is structured not by domination, but by order freely entered, discovered, and enacted.
Today, a new structure has emerged that crystallises their insights: Bitcoin. Though often dismissed as merely digital money or speculative asset, Bitcoin represents something deeper. It is a moral architecture. A protocol of sovereignty. A mirror held to modernity’s soul. By design, it encodes responsibility, transparency, and freedom without permission, not as promises, but as structure.
To place Bitcoin within this spiral is not to glorify it as utopia. It does not solve the human condition, nor erase its contradictions. Rather, it asks a radical question: Can we design systems that reflect truth rather than distort it? Can freedom be enacted in form rather than slogan? Can value be revealed rather than decreed?
What follows is not a white-paper or a manifesto. It is a meditation on coherence in an incoherent age. We will turn through Steiner’s philosophy of freedom, the Austrians’ vision of voluntary order, Pirsig’s metaphysics of Quality, and Jung’s archetypal psychology. Each offers a gesture, a turn of the spiral. Together, they converge in Bitcoin, not as an end, but as the latest form through which truth, freedom, and value may once again become participatory.
The spiral is turning. The question is whether we will turn with it.
Rudolf Steiner: Freedom as Moral Participation
Modern people speak endlessly of freedom, but often in shallow terms. Freedom is equated with choice among products, or with the absence of constraint. At its most ideological, it becomes little more than a slogan shouted louder than one’s neighbour. For Rudolf Steiner, this conception of freedom was not only inadequate, it was false.
In his Philosophy of Freedom (1894), Steiner proposed something far more demanding. Freedom, he argued, is not a given condition or political entitlement. It is an achievement; the fruit of inner work. To act freely is not simply to do as one pleases, but to act out of insight. It requires the alignment of thought, feeling, and will, so that one’s deed flows from clear, moral intuition rather than impulse, conditioning, or coercion.
Steiner outlined this process with the precision of a mathematician. First comes pure thinking, the capacity to hold thoughts not as associations or echoes of opinion, but as living insights. From this arises moral intuition, the perception of what is right in a given situation. Next comes moral imagination, the creative act of shaping this intuition into a concrete possibility. Finally, there is moral technique, the deed itself – action in the world. Only when all four are present can one act truly free.
In this sense, freedom is not freedom from responsibility, but freedom for responsibility. It is the capacity to will the good because one has seen it. “The deeds of free men,” Steiner wrote, “are the most moral in the true sense of the word.”
This vision distinguishes itself from both utilitarian calculus and ideological conformity. It rejects the reduction of ethics to rules, outcomes, or social pressure. Instead, it situates morality in the individual’s living relationship with truth. Freedom, then, is not arbitrary will but disciplined participation; a resonance between inner clarity and outer action.
Steiner later expanded this insight into a broader vision of society, what he called anthroposophy. But even in his earliest work, the foundations were set. The human being, he insisted, is not a passive product of biology or culture. Nor are we machines to be programmed by instinct or ideology. We are capable of truth, and, therefore, we are capable of freedom.
This conception of freedom is radical in its implications. It means that the true source of order in society is not external law or centralised authority, but the cultivation of individuals capable of acting from moral imagination. Coercion may create compliance, but it cannot create coherence. Only freedom, rightly understood, can do that.
But if freedom is to exist in the world at all, it requires structure. The inner act of moral intuition must find form in outer life. Here, another tradition picks up the thread. The Austrian economists – often caricatured as technocrats or market fundamentalists – in fact articulated a vision of society where freedom is preserved not by slogans, but by the very structure of voluntary action itself.
The Austrians: Human Action and Voluntarism
If Steiner revealed the inner life of freedom, the Austrian economists traced its outer form. Their project was not the cold utilitarian reduction of life to numbers. It was, at root, a moral defence of voluntary order; of human beings acting purposefully in a world that naturally resists central control.
Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action (1949), began from a deceptively simple axiom; humans act. To act is to be dissatisfied with the present and to strive toward an imagined future. From this premise, Mises derived a radical conclusion; value is not objective in the sense of being decreed, nor is it arbitrary. Value is revealed through choice. When an individual decides, in context, what matters enough to act upon, value comes into view.
“All rational action is in the first place individual action,” Mises wrote. “Only the individual thinks. Only the individual acts.” This was not a denial of society but an insistence that systems are downstream of persons.
Friedrich Hayek deepened this insight by exploring how knowledge is distributed in society. In his classic essay The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), he argued that no central planner, however intelligent, can ever grasp what is known only locally, tacitly, and contextually by millions of individuals. The only way to honour this distributed intelligence is through a structure that allows for decentralised coordination; what he called, the price mechanism. Prices are not arbitrary signals. They are bits of condensed information, allowing society to cohere without compulsion.
Murray Rothbard took this further into ethics. In The Ethics of Liberty (1982), he argued that coercion is not just inefficient; it is wrong. To initiate force against another person is to violate their sovereignty. True justice, he maintained, arises only from voluntary interaction, grounded in property rights and the principle of non-aggression.
From Mises to Hayek to Rothbard, the Austrians advanced a vision of freedom that is neither utopian nor naĂŻve. Freedom is not an abstract ideal imposed upon the world; it emerges from the very structure of voluntary exchange. It respects the dignity of the actor, acknowledges the limits of knowledge, and distributes power in parallel rather than upward.
Seen in this light, the Austrians were not economists in the narrow sense, but philosophers of participation. They understood markets not as machines but as ecologies; living systems of coordination, discovery, and cooperation. Their insight, like Steiner’s, is that truth and order cannot be imposed from above. They must be realised through participation from within.
Yet in the twentieth century, their vision was largely eclipsed. Central banks replaced voluntary exchange with monetary decree. States inflated, surveilled, and distorted the very signals that once allowed individuals to act coherently. The Austrians could describe the structure of freedom, but the world offered no field in which it could truly exist.
That changed in 2009, when Bitcoin appeared – not as theory, but as code. Before we turn to it, however, we must first understand how value itself discloses reality. For this, we turn to Robert Pirsig, who proposed that value is not simply measured, but is the very fabric of being.
Robert Pirsig: Quality as Reality
Where Steiner spoke of freedom and the Austrians of action, Robert Pirsig asked a more fundamental question; what makes anything worth doing at all? His answer was unsettling, because it overturned the foundations of Western thought.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), and later in Lila (1991), Pirsig dismantled the old dualism between subject and object. Reality, he argued, is not split between a perceiving mind and a mute world of things. What lies at the root is Quality; the felt sense of value that precedes both subject and object. Quality is not an attribute added to things. It is the moment of contact in which the self encounters the world as meaningful.
“Quality,” he wrote, “is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality.” Before we categorise or measure, we already sense better from worse, harmony from discord, care from neglect. This is not an illusion. It is the ground of reality itself.
From this perspective, to live well is not to impose one’s will on the world, nor to withdraw from it. It is to cultivate attention, to act with care, to discover meaning in the act of doing itself. The craftsman repairing a machine is not merely functional, he is moral. The writer shaping a sentence is not merely technical, she is participating in truth seeking. Freedom, in this view, is not infinite choice but alignment with Quality.
This philosophy is radical precisely because it is ordinary. Everyone knows the difference between something done with care and something done carelessly. Everyone feels the pull of meaning in moments of beauty or precision. For Pirsig, this felt sense is not subjective preference. It is reality disclosing itself through us.
And so, he argued, the task of life is not control but cultivation. Not endless choice, but disciplined attention. Quality becomes a driving force for authentic living, suggesting that true freedom comes from aligning one’s actions with an inner sense of purpose or excellence. “A person," he wrote, "isn’t free until he is doing what the best part of himself tells him to do”.
Quality cannot be faked. It must be lived.
In this light, Bitcoin becomes more than an economic protocol. It is a topology of Quality. Proof-of-work encodes the Pirsigian ethic; i.e. only real effort produces real value. Mining requires energy, time, and attention; it cannot be simulated. The act of holding, delaying gratification in a world of immediacy, is not greed, but discernment. Even running a node is an exercise in care; verifying, maintaining, witnessing.
Bitcoin does not reward exploitation or manipulation. It rewards patience, prudence, and truthfulness. It cannot be bent to ideology, because its rules are incorruptible. In this way, it embodies Pirsig’s insight; that value is not imposed or invented, but revealed through practice.
If Steiner saw freedom as the alignment of thought and action, and the Austrians saw markets as an ecology of voluntary choice, Pirsig showed that the very ground of reality is value. And yet, even this is not the deepest layer. For beneath the conscious perception of Quality lies something older, stranger, and archetypal – the symbolic structures of the psyche itself. To uncover this, we turn to Carl Jung.
Carl Jung: Archetypes and the Unus Mundus
Carl Jung did not see the psyche as an isolated consciousness floating in the skull. For him, the self was porous, layered, and deeply connected to symbolic structures older than the individual. Beneath personal memory lies what he called the collective unconscious; a vast reservoir of archetypes comprised of primordial patterns that shape our dreams, myths, and behaviours.
The hero, the shadow, the mother, the sage – these are not inventions of culture, but recurring forms that arise again and again across history. They are structures of becoming. To live well is not to repress them, nor to be ruled by them, but to integrate them. Jung called this process individuation; becoming whole by reconciling the opposites within.
Importantly, this is not a linear ascent. Jung described it as a spiral, or what he called the “circumambulation of the self.” Each descent into shadow, each confrontation with archetypal reality, leads not to regression but to deeper integration. “We do not become enlightened,” he wrote, “by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
In his later work, particularly with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung proposed something even more radical; the unus mundus – the “one world” underlying psyche and matter. Here, mind and world are not separate domains but two expressions of the same reality. When an inner image resonates with an outer event, he spoke of synchronicity; meaning not as coincidence, but as participation in the deeper unity of being.
This vision turns modern assumptions upside down. Meaning is not something we construct, but something we participate in. The unconscious is not chaos, but cosmos misunderstood. Symbols are not illusions; they are disclosures of reality.
Here, the resonance with Bitcoin emerges unexpectedly. For many, Bitcoin first appears technical; a protocol, a network, a cryptographic breakthrough. But for those who live with it, Bitcoin often takes on a symbolic dimension. It behaves like an archetype – incorruptible, impersonal, resistant to ego. It does not flatter or bend. It demands transformation.
To save in Bitcoin is to confront one’s time preference. To run a node is to participate in verification, not trust. To face its volatility is to wrestle with fear and shadow. These are not merely financial behaviours, they are disciplines, initiations into responsibility. Bitcoin is not just money. It is, in a Jungian sense, a symbolic mirror; a structure that reflects back the ethical coherence, or incoherence, of its participants.
It even carries a flavour of the unus mundus. Bitcoin is at once abstract code and concrete energy expenditure. It is both idea and matter, psyche and machine, woven together in a single form. Like Jung’s vision of unity, it collapses the false separation between mind and world, showing that meaning can be encoded into structure itself.
Thus, Jung’s psychology reveals the deepest layer of the spiral. If Steiner spoke of freedom, the Austrians of action, and Pirsig of value, Jung shows us the archetypal ground in which all of these are rooted. And it is precisely here, at the intersection of psyche and structure, that Bitcoin appears not as invention, but as revelation; as the spiral incarnate.
Bitcoin as the Spiral Incarnate
By the time Bitcoin appeared in 2009, much of what Steiner, the Austrians, Pirsig, and Jung had intuited seemed lost to modernity. Freedom was reduced to consumer choice. Markets were engineered and distorted. Value was simulated. Symbols had thinned into entertainment. The spiral seemed to have broken into fragments. And then, quietly, a pseudonymous figure released code that embodied these old truths in a new form.
At first glance, Bitcoin looks like technology. A digital network. A novel solution to the “double-spend” problem. But underneath its cryptographic exterior lies something deeper; a moral architecture. It does not preach values. It encodes them.
Consider its three ethical dimensions:
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Transparency without surveillance. The Bitcoin ledger is open for all to inspect, but no one can manipulate it. Truth is uncovered through verification, not granted by authority. This echoes Hayek’s insistence that knowledge is dispersed and must be coordinated without central command.
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Sovereignty without violence. In the traditional order, property rights are secured by legal fiat, backed by coercion, at best. In Bitcoin, they are secured with mathematics, cryptographically by private keys. To hold Bitcoin is not to be granted permission, but to accept responsibility. There are no bailouts, no appeals, no undo buttons.
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Participation without permission. Anyone, anywhere, can run a node, mine a block, or broadcast a transaction. The only requirement is to abide by the rules, which apply equally to all. Participation is voluntary, but the structure is incorruptible. This is the Austrian vision of voluntary order made manifest.
These are not technical conveniences. They are ethical constraints. They remind us that value must be earned, not simulated; that freedom without form is chaos, but freedom within structure is coherence.
In this way, Bitcoin becomes a living synthesis of the traditions we have traced. Steiner argued that freedom is not license, but moral action arising from insight. Bitcoin creates a structure where such action can matter; where clarity and responsibility are rewarded, and coercion is excluded. The Austrians argued that value is revealed through voluntary choice, and that markets are ecologies of dispersed knowledge. Bitcoin provides the first truly global arena where this vision can unfold without distortion. Pirsig claimed that Quality is reality itself, and that life is a matter of cultivating attention and care. Bitcoin encodes this ethic in proof-of-work – effort that cannot be faked – and in the discipline of saving, verifying, and maintaining. Jung revealed that archetypes shape us, and that wholeness requires confronting incorruptible form. Bitcoin behaves like such an archetype, confronting ego with a law that does not bend.
In short, Bitcoin is the spiral incarnate.
Each block mined is an act of memory and integration, carrying forward the chain of truth. Each halving cycle speaks of rhythm and return. Each node is a point of sovereignty, a reminder that coherence emerges from participation. Bitcoin does not offer utopia. It offers form. And within form, it offers freedom.
In an era defined by gyres of chaos – accelerating without centre – Bitcoin remembers. It is not progress for progress’s sake, but growth with memory. It spirals upward, returning again and again to the same questions: What is value? What is freedom? What is truth? And each time, it answers not with ideology, but with structure; don’t trust, verify. Participate, don’t demand. Save, don’t squander.
Bitcoin is not the end of the spiral. It is the axis around which it turns.
The Spiral Turns
History is rarely linear. It bends, it breaks, it doubles back. Sometimes it seems to accelerate outward like Yeats’s gyre, until the centre cannot hold. But always, and especially when the conditions are ripe, it spirals, returning to what was forgotten, integrating it at a higher level.
Bitcoin belongs to this latter motion. It is not simply a monetary invention, nor a speculative asset class. It is a turning of the spiral. It gathers insights scattered across philosophy, psychology, and economics, and instantiates them in form. From Steiner it recalls freedom as moral action. From the Austrians, voluntarism as structure. From Pirsig, value as reality. From Jung, the archetype of incorruptible law. Each strand coheres in a protocol that asks nothing more than this; participate with integrity.
This does not mean Bitcoin is salvation. It does not resolve the contradictions of the human condition. It does not erase fear, greed, or folly. What it does, more modestly and more profoundly, is hold a mirror. It reflects our choices back to us, without distortion, without appeal. It shows us who we are by how we act within it.
That is why it feels uncanny, even spiritual, to many who encounter it deeply. Not because it is mystical, but because it restores alignment. It enforces coherence where the world has grown incoherent. It makes truth participatory again –  not through ideology, but through structure.
The spiral, then, is not complete. Bitcoin is not its summit. It is the new axis around which the next turn begins. Whether that turn ascends or unravels depends not on the code, but on us. On whether we act as Steiner envisioned, with moral imagination; whether we respect voluntarism as the Austrians defended; whether we cultivate care, as Pirsig urged; whether we integrate our shadows, as Jung demanded.
Bitcoin does not promise to make us free. It requires us to be.
The spiral turns. The question is whether we will turn with it.
This is a condensed version of a longer thesis still under construction, which contains deeper explorations into all of the featured thinkers above, as well as Plato, Hermetics, the Tao, and spirit-cognition as the true axiom of human action. A draft version is available for review (reach out to me if you want to read it). I'll finish it proper, soon.
Many thanks go to <<DJSENIOR@primal.net>>, <<zazawowow@primal.net>>, cosmocrixter@nostrplebs.com, Scott Dedels, <<rhodlr@nostrplebs.com>>, and many others who have lent their eyes and minds to reading early drafts and chaotic rambling to help shape them into coherence.
Discover Bitcoin, Spiral out 🌀🔶👀
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