Thread

One of the most corrosive plagues of modern society is celebrity worship. Authority is confused with competence, visibility mistaken for intelligence, and influence treated as a proxy for wisdom. We live in the influencer age, where every product, ideology, and political movement must be endorsed by a famous face before it is allowed to exist. Reality itself now requires validation from those with the largest platforms.

The logic behind it is crude but devastatingly effective and it goes something like this; “Celebrity X uses Product Y; therefore, if you admire Celebrity X, you should use Product Y to absorb their essence by osmosis”  Never mind the fact that Celebrity X was paid handsomely to hold that product for thirty seconds while pretending to care. Never mind that they'll shill a competing product next quarter. Whether Celebrity X actually uses the product is irrelevant, because it is a psychological hack designed to short-circuit reasoning. 

Endorsement has become detached from belief, and belief detached from evidence. Opinions are rented and convictions are sponsored; despite everyone knowing this, the strategy persists because it works. Millions are spent each year to manufacture desire, obedience, and imitation, turning the public into a docile audience mesmerized by status rather than substance.

This disease has metastasized far beyond commerce. Politics has devolved into Hollywood for ugly people, where substance is also buried under glossy campaign ads designed to manufacture demigods rather than elect competent administrators. The modern politician is no longer evaluated by competence or outcomes, but by performance.

Campaigns resemble movie trailers; dramatic soundtracks, heroic lighting, empty slogans delivered with cinematic confidence. Governance is reduced to branding, while failure is obscured by vibes. As standards of living collapse and costs of living soar, politicians cultivate cult-like followings not because they deliver results, but because they perform. The statesman has been replaced by the rockstar.

The Assembly Line Of Obedience

The rot runs deeper than just social media and political theater. This pathology did not spontaneously happen in a vacuum, but it is the logical output of an education system that long ago abandoned the cultivation of independent thought and replaced it with obedience training. Our education system isn't designed to produce thinkers but it's an assembly line for producing compliant, standardized commodities who mistake mimicry for intelligence.

For many decades, schooling has transformed human beings into interchangeable units trained in parrot-like mimesis rather than original reasoning. Deviation is punished, conformity is rewarded and creativity is permitted only within pre-approved boundaries.

Original thought isn't just discouraged but it's systematically hunted down and destroyed. The entire academic apparatus is built on the premise that all worthy ideas have already been thought, that innovation ended sometime in the distant past, and that your job as a student is to properly cite the correct dead authorities rather than generate anything genuinely novel. Academic referencing isn't a tool for building on existing knowledge, it's a control mechanism, a way to ensure that every new idea must be tethered to and approved by the old guard. Knowledge thus becomes an exercise in deference to authority and repetition of prevailing dogma rather than discovery.

This is why we posthumously worship geniuses of the past while ridiculing and dismissing the geniuses in our midst. Dead revolutionaries are safe because they can't challenge the current power structure. Living visionaries on the other hand, well, they're dangerous. They threaten the carefully constructed hierarchy of approved thought. They suggest that maybe, just maybe, the emperor has no clothes and the institutions we've been taught to revere are intellectually bankrupt.

The education system doesn't create leaders. It creates followers, obedient drones who navigate reality not through first principles thinking, but through social proof and appeals to authority. People are taught no coherent framework for understanding reality but only how to navigate institutions. Actions become divorced from outcomes.

Truth isn't determined by evidence or logic but by which credentialed authority figure declared it so. Whether that authority is the state, Anthony Fauci, Jerome Powell, or the editorial board of some legacy media outlet is irrelevant. What matters is the endorsement, the official stamp of approval that signals you're allowed to believe something.

The Invisible Third Parties

This is where the idea of trusted third parties must be understood far more broadly than finance alone. Trusted third parties are not just central banks, custodians, or payment processors. They also exist in the psychological and cultural realm. They are the celebrities, CEOs, experts, and influencers whose opinions we gulp down without a second thought; whose approval we subconsciously seek before permitting ourselves to hold a view. In this sense, celebrity culture functions as a form of custodial control. It doesn’t hold our money but it also holds our judgment.

This is why the problem of trusted third parties is far more psychological than we realize. Long before monetary sovereignty was outsourced to banks, intellectual sovereignty was outsourced to authority. The habit of obedience precedes the institution. Central banks merely formalized a dependency that already existed in the mind. Remove the bank, but leave the idol, and nothing fundamental has changed.

This conditioning explains far more than people are willing to admit, especially when it comes to Bitcoin. This manufactured helplessness, this desperate need for permission from authority, is why so many people, particularly those in traditional finance, struggle to grasp Bitcoin. It's not that they can't understand the technology or the value proposition. Many of Bitcoin’s loudest critics understand its mechanics well enough. What they lack is the permission to think differently. 

The FUD. The fence-sitting. The hand-wringing about whether Bitcoin is "legitimate." None of this is genuine intellectual inquiry is simply parrots repeating what their Wall Street high priests have told them. Bitcoin must be a fraud because Jamie Dimon says so, and until Jamie Dimon recants or until Goldman Sachs issues a ceremonial blessing, their opinion cannot change. It can't be real money because the Federal Reserve hasn't blessed it. It's too volatile, too risky, too different from what the approved authorities have sanctioned…on and on it goes. Not only is this dangerous group-think, but it’s also intellectual serfdom. 

This is the real product of modern education, adults with advanced degrees who are functionally incapable of thinking for themselves. People who've outsourced their entire cognitive framework to authority figures, who need experts to tell them what to believe about everything from monetary policy to medicine to technology. They're intellectually dependent, addicted to the comfort of consensus, terrified of being wrong because they've been conditioned to believe that wrongness equals social death.

The Fiat Mind Virus In Bitcoin

Tragically, this same pathology has infected parts of the Bitcoin community itself. Scroll any timeline on social media and the symptoms are unmistakable:

 “Fiat CEO X says Bitcoin to $1 million #bullish."

“Bankster Y calls Bitcoin an interesting asset #bullish.”

“Institution Z finally gets it #bullish.”

These headlines are treated like divine revelation, as if Larry Fink or some other Wall Street fossil has discovered a hidden property of Bitcoin that the rest of us missed. As if these corporate mannequins possess some oracle-like ability to peer into the future with supernatural accuracy. The absurdity reaches fever pitch when the same people change their tune or dump their holdings, and suddenly Bitcoin's price crashes because, shockingly, the market hung its hopes on the opinions of people who don't fully understand or even like Bitcoin!

Why?

Well, because many Bitcoiners, despite their rhetoric, have not fully exited fiat culture. They’ve swapped central banks for celebrities, but kept the same mental model: important people must know something I don’t. The old priesthood wore suits and ran central banks; the new one runs hedge funds and tech companies. Larry Fink’s opinion is treated as “smart money.” Elon Musk’s tweets become market signals. Their words are weighed not for their truth, but for their perceived authority. This is precisely backwards.

It's the residue of a lifetime spent in systems where gatekeepers determine legitimacy, where you need permission slips from the correct authorities before your ideas have value. It's learned helplessness masquerading as sophistication. Bitcoin was designed to destroy this entire paradigm. It's a decentralized, permissionless protocol that doesn't care about your credentials, your net worth, or your follower count. The network doesn't bow to celebrity. Bitcoin's value proposition isn't dependent on institutional blessing, it exists precisely because institutional approval is corrupt and irrelevant.

Free markets don't worship kings. Decentralized networks don't need permission from the old guard, and yet here we are, celebrating when the ancien régime deigns to acknowledge what we've known all along, as if their tardy recognition somehow validates years of conviction. This is Stockholm syndrome of the highest order. If your conviction in Bitcoin rises and falls with the opinions of fiat CEOs, you don’t actually understand what you own. You’re still outsourcing judgment. Still craving approval, still trapped in the psychological architecture of the system Bitcoin was meant to destroy.

Breaking The Chains

Bitcoin doesn't need heroes. It needs users who understand that decentralized money means decentralized authority, that the whole point is to opt out of systems where a handful of anointed elites determine value, set policy, and shape reality for everyone else. The revolution isn't about replacing Jamie Dimon with Michael Saylor as your financial overlord. It's about recognizing that you don't need overlords at all.

Bitcoin's design is so radical precisely because it eliminates trusted third parties not just from transactions, but implicitly demands you eliminate them from your thinking. You cannot truly understand Bitcoin while still operating in a mental framework that requires permission from authorities. You cannot grasp decentralization while centralizing your cognitive process around celebrity opinion. You cannot advocate for trustless systems while trusting Wall Street executives to tell you what to believe.

True sovereignty, both financial and intellectual, means running your own node and running your own mind. It means understanding that the only trusted third party you can never eliminate is yourself, and therefore the only opinion that genuinely matters is the one you've formed through direct engagement with reality, not mediated through someone else's approved narrative.

Don't trust, verify, and that also includes verifying whether you're still letting celebrities and institutions intermediate your understanding of the very technology designed to eliminate intermediaries. Decentralized money requires decentralized thinking. Everything else is just fiat culture in Bitcoin clothing.