Economic anthropologist Brett Scott, the author of Cloud Money, talks with Steve about libertarianism’s big lie. Or lies – plural.

From a class perspective, libertarianism is largely an ideological tool that protects elite power by promoting a false narrative of individualism and "free" markets. It serves as a smokescreen, concealing the mechanisms of power in a class society. What worse, it’s presented as neutral. As if all citizens are on an equal playing field. Market transactions replace the natural interdependence at the core of societies. 

Brett and Steve look at leftwing alternatives, including the potential of mutual credit systems and alternative economies as counter-narratives to mainstream economic structures.  

They also discuss libertarians' obsession with commodity money (like gold), which stems directly from their flawed view of society. They see money as a neutral tool for trade between independent agents. In reality, modern money is a credit system—a network of social promises and debts that reflects power dynamics. 

Brett Scott is an author, journalist, and activist, who explores the intersections between money systems, finance, and digital technology. He’s the author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. His latest book is Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. Find more of his work at https://alteredstatesof.money/ or on Substack.

@Suitpossum on X

Alright, folks, this is Steve with macaron cheese. It's been a bit since we've talked to my next guest, Brett Scott. Last time we talked, we riffed.

I love this riff term.

We riffed of the movie Civil War and trying to understand what happens when you kind of break down a country and now all of a sudden you're left with no monetary system or you're left with starting over again.

And it was just really, really interesting to see what the world might look like and how it might rebound and how it might rebuild an economy in a post civil war state. And today we're going to talk, interestingly enough about libertarianism. And my guest, Brett Scott, is a cash activist, author of Cloud Money.

He is the author or the host of the substack Altered States of Monetary Consciousness, otherwise known as Asamoko, and an economic anthropologist. And he's also a friend. It's been a while and I'm really happy to have him back on. So with that, Brett, welcome to the show, sir.

Great to be back, Steve. It's been a while, but it's always fun.

It has been a while. It's been too long. But I guess distance makes the heart grow fonder because I was really looking forward to this.

And so I'm really happy to have you on here with me this subject that we're going to touch on today. I was a former libertarian. I don't even know how to put that. It was more of a Ron Paul bot. I was definitely a Paul bot back in the day.

I wasn't bought into all the Murray Rothbard stuff, but I found Ron Paul to be enticing. He had the anti war approach. He had the anti drug war approach, which very much appealed to me.

And there were just certain things that he stood for that in the absence of more knowledge about systems and stuff like that, he sounded like he had his act together.

I've grown up since and I would like very much to kind of suss out the libertarian mind and understanding, not just the libertarian mind, but also understanding the libertarian view of money and kind of understanding better where some of the fetishes that go along with the libertarian mindset come from and what they look like in real terms.

I think a lot of people see the current situation in the world, especially in the United States, where you've got like this weird blend of Christo, fascist and libertarian coming together with another astroturfed version of Make America Great again.

And it's left a lot of questions because if you don't understand what people are saying, if you don't understand where they're coming from, it's pretty hard to build a bridge, or it's even harder to understand the rules of engagement. So I'm curious if you can break down what your understanding of libertarianism is just off the cuff, help us all understand.

Well, in a sense, I think you probably have a better understanding of American libertarianism where you have a stronger lived experience of it. My encounters with libertarianism probably have been initially, actually, for example, in the financial sector.

When I was working in the financial sector, you would get sort of straightforward free marketeer type people who were quite conventional in terms of their sort of lifestyle and things like that, but who believed in a bunch of free market ideas.

Which of course is always ironic with bankers and stuff, because banks are heavily backed by or supported by state structures and they're part of the state money system and so on.

But there's a lot of kind of that sort of the sort of general private sector business realm, you find some kind of libertarian type of ideologies going around.

But then of course, I got involved to some extent in alternative money scenes, and there would be, especially in the crypto space, a whole lot of like, hard libertarians, anarcho capitalists who are much more kind of doctrinaire about it, and also from a sort of monetary perspective. I come from an economic anthropology background and lots of the sort of libertarian ideas of money are very dominant in economics. Right.

So there's a sort of generalized libertarianism even among people who do not self identify as being libertarians in the sort of way that people think about money. Economic anthropology will often counter that and has different narratives about how money works. Yeah.

So the other complexity is that the US feels it has a very particular history with libertarianism. It feels like the one country where libertarianism kind of makes sense in some way.

When I think about, for example, Europe, Europe has hundreds of years of feudal history. When you're standing in a European city, you really get this feeling of like, this has been around for a long time.

Right.

And people are very, very aware of these sort of ancient structures and feudal hierarchies.

And I can't imagine a moment in history where people could detach from Europe as refugees or as immigrants and arrive in the US and have a self perception of being free individuals and have this imagination of being these kind of like solo types of atoms floating around and engaging in contract with each other and stuff.

I feel like the US is a particular sort of historical situation that makes libertarianism seem appealing to people, even if libertarian ideology is generally detached from the reality of how human society actually works. And so, yeah, there's quite a few different strains of libertarianism, I guess.

But yeah, I guess as a person who promotes more credit based ways of thinking about money, I often get attacked by people who self identify as libertarians because lots of libertarians hate the idea that money is some kind of credit structure. They want money to be a commodity and so on. So I get a lot of just general libertarian ambience directed towards me in my day to day work.

It's been a kind of a long and interesting encounter for me. But I've also encountered many different variants of sort of libertarianism. It's a bit hard to have singular views on it.

I remember when I was living in London, I got invited to speak at this thing called Liberty League Freedom Forum. And you can hear by that name. It just has all the sort of cultural markers of libertarianism.

Liberty and freedom is all this kind of invoking of this kind of stuff. And I remember going there and finding it incredibly boring. It was so stiff.

And it was very interesting because I had come from lots of left wing spaces, anarchist spaces and things like that, which are not stiff at all, they're very like grungy and people play music and it's quite party orientated and stuff like that. So it actually has more of the sort of what you would call quote unquote, freedom, right?

Whereas the Liberty League Freedom Forum was all these like young people because it was sort of youth conservatism movement.

And they were young and they were all wearing suits and they all had business cards and they had these pamphlets where they're talking about like Murray Rothbard and free markets.

But I just remember being like, this is so weird because there's all this language of freedom, but everyone's very stiff and quite strangely like Puritan, I'd say. You could see how conservative it was. They felt like old men to me.

And then there was one stand, I remember they had a bunch of these pamphletting stands, but there was one of them that was a bit detached from the rest, which was a kind of more social libertarian guy who was promoting marijuana and more Stuff about social freedoms. And you could see she was marginalized and isolated from the guys who were like, we don't want to pay taxes because we're business owners.

So I remember that was quite a stark example of the different forms of libertarianism trying to coexist alongside each other. But yeah, it's a tricky one sometimes.

I remember when we talked years ago about things like mutual credit and mutual credit systems and considering ways of doing things outside of the government and within the local community and allowing one another to survive and thrive in this kind of a mutual aid arrangement, if you will, like a public library of checking out a chainsaw, checking out a bicycle, and each sharing what each other had and just gifting to one another in a sense, but it never being given, just sort of allow for use, like a library of stuff. And it was really powerful.

And I could envision at some level this being more of an anarchist approach than a libertarian approach, but it did get me thinking, because the idea here is they don't want government in their way. They don't want to be bothered with rules, regulations, anything. But they definitely want their contracts upheld.

They want the strength and law of all the power of the state when it comes to making sure that they get theirs. But that's the beginning and the ending of what they want the state to do. They want the state as an enforcement vehicle.

Yeah, I mean, this is the way economic anthropology can be quite useful in this regard because one of the big differentiators between economic anthropology and economics is that economics forms in the context of European cities.

And one of the defining experiential features of living in a capitalist economy is that you feel like an individual. You are like a floating atom that bumps against other random strangers in markets. So the lived experience of being in a capitalist city is like that.

So a lot of economists would start to just think of the world like that because they were actually having an experience of the world like that. But anthropologists, by contrast, would often end up in situations where they were in pre capitalist societies.

They would be outside of the Western context and they would be experiencing societies that really didn't actually have that structure.

So you start to see the primal reality of societies, which is the primal reality of all societies, regardless of whether it's capitalist or tribal or whatever, is that the basic feature is interdependence okay? In a small scale hunter gatherer society, the interdependence is very visible. It's right in your face.

You can see who you depend upon and how you survive. But of course, in a super large scale capitalist economy, it's much harder to see because it's much more diffuse and it's much more fluid.

Both of those societies are interdependent and that people are relying upon each other. You're relying upon people on the other side of the world for your breakfast cereal. That's interdependence for you.

But you're not experiencing it as cooperation. You're experiencing it as in this very cold, distant kind of way.

So there's a lot more experience in a capitalist society of this detached form of interaction. And that can lead you to imagine that you are an individual. This becomes especially powerful.

Or this really starts to get catalyzed by large scale nation states which will start to underpin interactions between strangers.

Or large scale nation states will in a sense catalyze large scale markets, which in turn will catalyze the perception of yourself as being a solo individual. In a weird way, what we call libertarianism is a type of mentality that emerges after a capitalist market emerges.

Whereas what we sometimes call left wing anarchism or libertarian socialism is sometimes the word used for it, which is associated with what the mutual credit systems and community currencies and things like that is actually something that tries to get a bit more towards a pre capitalist state of being. Where what they're saying is we want to build small, closely enmeshed groups of people and that's how we're going to bypass the state.

Whereas libertarians tend to be, we want to have solo individuals and that's the natural order of things. And that's how it's supposed to be. But that type of mentality that emerges in the libertarian culture really didn't exist long time ago.

There isn't perceptions of individualism that exists in hunter gatherer societies, for example, there's no exit from the society. You can't be like, screw you guys, I'm a solo individual. It's just this doesn't exist in old societies.

And you think about the kind of lessons that were passed on for these homesteaders that were out there panning for gold and invading Native American lands and dealing with being killed on the prairie or dying of disease, or getting bit by rattlesnakes or bandits coming through and burning your home down. It was kind of a every man for himself mindset.

And that strained post civil war and even pre civil war, at least in the U.S. which, you know, as you said, is kind of a weird libertarian model factory of sorts, given that it doesn't have the European history, it had an indigenous history here in the United States that was erased through genocide. But so the new immigrant colonizer version of nation building that happened here was very much survival of the fittest.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. This is why, again, libertarianism is hard to talk about because there are these particular US Strains that exist.

But it's not actually only the US it's settler culture more generally. For example, and I'm from South Africa, that exact same form of libertarianism exists in Afrikaans culture in South Africa.

And so there was the Dutch colonial authorities who were basically sitting in Cape Town because they were trying to monopolize the trade routes from Netherlands to East Indies, like Malaysia and Indonesia and stuff like that. So their stopping off point was Cape Town.

But then these poor Dutch settlers started to settle around the region, and then some of them started to go feral.

And the Dutch colonial authorities were a bit like, there's this crew of people that we now call the Afrikaners, who are like these sort of feral Dutch people who've gone into the wilderness. They're seeking their fortune by just trying to farm out in the middle of nowhere.

Now, if you were part of Afrikaans, because Afrikaans is a language that deviates from Dutch, it basically became a dialect that emerged.

And basically Afrikaners started to have the self perception, which is, we're out alone in the wilderness in Southern Africa and it's us against the world. We only have God on our side and we're under attack by native people and we got to crush down upon them, otherwise they're going to crush down on us.

And so they have this whole kind of like drama in their mentality. About being lost people in the wilderness. That's some way similar to what you'll find in Israeli settlers right now.

And they built this whole kind of national idea of almost like victimhood in a sense, but also of self resilience and internal to Afrikaans culture.

You'd often have this incredible hard communitarianism at a small scale level, but then hardcore libertarianism at anything towards any kind of stranger. You know, this is one of the ambiguities in this type of stuff, like Afrikaans culture. If you go into it, I'm actually a quarter Afrikaans.

It's very communitarian. It's very much about hospitality and solidarity with your neighbors and this kind of stuff.

But then it has a very sort of libertarian ethos when it comes to thinking about stuff outside of your sphere.

And that's a little bit like rangeland rancher libertarian kind of thing that you find in the US you get in lots of places and often it goes along with a bunch of racism as well, because the people feel like they're under attack and they're having to just survive out there. That's obviously very, very different to some Silicon Valley tech bro who's like spouting in random.

It's a very different vibe, even though they might have some similar talking points of some sort.

Right.

Right.

So the more like mainstream libertarian type of stuff, you'll find among, let's say Tep Bros is more kind of free market, city, urban capitalism kind of thing, which is like we are powerful people who want to deny that we are interdependent so that we can deny our responsibility to other people even though we extract from those other people. All right. There's a kind of a different feeling to it.

Whereas I can almost more intuitively understand the libertarianism that comes out of, hey, I'm alone in the wilderness with my family and like, I got to depend on myself, that kind of thing. It makes a bit more sense in a sense.

Sure, absolutely. When you look at monetary systems as we tend to do here, obviously I want to talk to you about tax and stuff like that.

But this is one of the key elements of libertarian lifestyle.

As much as they talk about rugged individualism and kind of me, myself and I approach to the world volunteerism more generally, it tends to circle back to the monetary System. What is it about the monetary system that fetishizes in their brains this kind of libertarian ethos?

Yeah, I don't claim to understand every libertarian impulse of every person, but.

Well, of course.

Okay, so it's worth noting. Maybe we should talk about the libertarian ideology that's inherent within capitalism. Yes, let's do it in mainstream capitalism.

I don't know if this even applies to like your kind of ranchland settler libertarian type of person, but let's talk about just like mainstream the, the 80s, like free market thought. All right, sure, free market thought comes out of the form of libertarianism, right?

But one of the crucial things that's going on with free market thought thought is at an elite level, it's a smoke screen. So at an elite level it functions as a smokescreen.

It takes a economic system that's laden with power differentials and presents it as if it's a flat system that's just a bunch of equals interacting. Okay. That is a politically loaded way of presenting a capitalist system.

And you'll even find that in mainstream economics this is like a generalized vibe you have going through like the economics of discipline more generally. And then at a sort of everyday level among ordinary people, the same kind of thing can function almost like a coping strategy.

So almost like an emotional coping strategy which just says, I'm stuck in a very, very large system that I have very little power within, but I can tell myself that if I work really hard and if I just hustle enough, I'm going to carve out a small island of stability for myself.

So there's a kind of almost like a self help libertarianism which can be seen as a type of emotional coping strategy if you're stuck in a very large and alienating system. And that self help narrative can be perpetuated by elites precisely because it's a useful story for them as well.

So Elon Musk, for example, tells you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You might find that inspiring. It's like crap, right, in terms of how capitalism actually works.

But it could be a sort of a self help way of seeing the world and also benefits somebody like Elon, because you can just say, you know, I'm just like another person in society and everyone can be like me. Even though the structure of capitalism would never allow that. The structure of capitalism is inherently hierarchical.

For somebody like Elon to exist, there have to be billions of others who don't have that position. Much like for a pyramid to get built, you need hundreds of thousands of low level Workers who are going to bow down to a pharaoh.

The pharaoh is not going to make the pyramid himself. Right, right.

So for somebody like Elon Musk to exist, you actually structurally have to have a whole bunch of people who are structurally subordinated. So for him, a libertarian ideology makes a lot of sense politically because you can just say, oh, you know, everyone's in an equal situation.

And again, that also then functions as a kind of self help narrative to people to make sense of their lives. So this is a sort of generalized. The political use of libertarianism is quite interesting and nefarious in many ways.

But in a strange sense, when you're watching libertarians, often they are channeling what you'd call like an ideal type imagination of capitalism. So they imagine a type of capitalism that doesn't actually exist. Right. But they claim that it does exist or it should exist.

So for example, when it comes to the monetary system, you'll have a whole bunch of libertarians being like, the fiat money system is based on violence. And it's, yeah, no shit, that's why it works. That's how the structure of the whole underpinning of capitalism is based on violence.

Capitalism has always been. It's a system that emerges out of feudalism. Right. Feudalism was a highly unequal society.

There has never been an ideal version of capitalism that somehow exists on a level playing field. It's always been underpinned by state power, it's always been underpinned by elites.

It's always been underpinned by small groups of people accumulating large numbers of assets and then getting other people to work those assets for them. The whole structure of the system has always been hierarchical. There's never been a free market version of capitalism that's ever existed.

So a lot of these imaginations in libertarianism are of a kind of fantasy version of capitalism that does not exist. But if you say that, they kind of imagine that you're sort of a person who's endorsing the violence. So for example, the, the MMT movement.

Person in the MMT movement will just describe how the money system works. They're like, well, look here, the state demands taxation and this is what happens.

But libertarians have this moral panic or moral horror at that, as if it's. That's either not the case or they don't want that to be the case. But the fact is it is the case.

There's a moralizing that goes on in libertarianism, almost like they're wanting capitalism to work without the foundations of capitalism being present. And that's part of that sort of smokescreen structure as well. You're glossing over the actual violence in our system.

And that's a very important function in libertarianism. For example, the Koch brothers and stuff in the 80s, these guys who would fund all these libertarian think tanks, these are big titans of industry.

These guys are hardcore capitalists. They know that capitalism is in the free market.

They know that capitalism is underpinned by state power, then it's inherently linked up with cronyism all the time. The reason why they fund the libertarian think tanks is as a smokescreen to project a sort of romanticized vision of what it is.

And so when it comes to the monetary system, this often involves the projection of an imagined ideal form of money that exists, which is supposed to be some kind of apolitical commodity. And the reality of the monetary system is a highly political structure, and it always has been and it's underpinned by state power.

A lot of this horror among the rank and file libertarians at the sort of fiat money system comes from this imagination that capitalism is supposed to be something that it isn't actually. The money is supposed to be a commodity, but it is not. And that therefore is a giant fraud and it's as evil deceit. Yeah.

And so they will also then fetishize an entire imagined history of gold which they have no experience of.

Can I jump in momentarily?

Yeah.

From the MMT perspective, I find one of the most challenging things in presenting these concepts to libertarians, and quite frankly, even within the MMT space is they don't talk nearly enough about what that power of coercion really is, the tax, and how they maintain the monopoly power of the currency and the monetary system. And I think people on both sides, the libertarian strain, just randomly doesn't want that.

Like you said, the moral outrage, the ideological, it can't be real, even though it is actually real. But then on the flip side, though, a lot of MMTRs, I think, Ms.

The class element of the state and the ruling elite that maintain the cultural hegemony, if you will, and the institutions of power that make these things seem like common sense.

Yeah.

And so as a result, I think a lot of Pollyanna on the MMT side tends to forget that the coercion, the asymmetric relation, the power of the tax and the enforcement of the tax, etc. Is not we the people doing that. That is a ruling elite and a hierarchical structure.

And they have somehow or another created a world in their head anyway, that, that is. Oh, it's just us. It's we. It's just us little people making these decisions. And it couldn't be further from the truth.

You can certainly understand why someone would reject the kind of Pollyanna approach to explaining the coercive nature of the fiat system run by the state, when the state is, in fact, an arm of oligarchy, an arm of the elites, et cetera. Yeah, in a way.

And the key to breaking all this stuff is to start with a realistic description of capitalism without any kind of, like, hysteria or sort of moralizing. Yeah, let's be like, okay, let's look at what capitalism is. It's like feudalism 2.0.

It's not like society restarts on a level playing field or something. As the structures of feudalism break down in the late medieval period, you just have a morphing of a structure that slowly becomes more marketized.

The best way to think about capitalism is that. I mean, this is a bit of a crude way of putting it, but your sort of aristocrats morph in a feudal system.

You've got the structured hierarchy with aristocrats, and then you're kind of like peasants at the bottom.

But in the capitalist system, your aristocrats morph into large owners of capital, and your peasants morph into a sort of drifting urban working class. That's what the original structure of capitalism, the kind of Dickensian capitalism is.

And from that perspective, you look at the state as what was the state in this context? The state worked for capitalists. The state was always a capitalist institution.

And then things like socialism and communism were attempts to wrest control of the state, to work on behalf of the working class of a society. So it was an attempt to take a structure that was essentially designed to protect elite interests and to somehow democratize it in certain ways.

And that was the story of communism that attempts various ways to do that. I'm not saying that was actually how communism played out, but that was the theory that was going on behind that.

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It's interesting. When libertarians are thinking about capitalism, they often imagine it as a sort of antithesis to communism.

They're like capitalism versus communism.

The reality of the way you should be thinking about it is like feudalism and capitalism were on the same Page as each other, with the state as the enforcer of elite interests. And then there's been various radical movements that attempt to change that situation with greater or lesser degrees of success.

And so the modern state has been pacified to some extent, but it's always about to act in the interest of elites.

For example, with an MMT movement, you're saying, okay, let's try to get the state to work more or use its power of coercive taxation more for the interests of ordinary people. That's a kind of a big element of anti austerity type movements. But yeah, again, economic anthropology is pretty good for this stuff.

People like Carl Polanyi, for example, which is Hungarian scholar who wrote the Great Transformation, this was all about what he was talking about. He's like, economists have this weird sort of fairy tale story they tell about how capitalism forms, but capitalism's created by states.

It's underpinned by states. The monetary systems are state creations. Large scale markets are state creations. They don't exist apart from this.

Sometimes when I'm thinking about libertarianism, I think about a teenager who's on their bed and they pissed off at their parents, right? And they're like fuming away, like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave home, screw my parents. And their parents are like the state in the market.

I don't know if that metaphor entirely works, but libertarianism is a kind of mentality that emerges when capitalists who have basically been empowered by state infrastructures that enable markets to form, when they start to fantasize about detaching from the state foundation of the market, they're like, the real market exists, is like somewhere else out there and I will exist apart from state systems. And the most extreme version of this is anarcho capitalism, where they totally imagine the absence of any kind of like state institutions.

But somehow capitalism keeps going. So yeah, that's in a way kind of libertarian vibe.

But as I mentioned, when you go to the left wing anarchist spaces, it's a very different feeling because the left wing anarchist movements, what they think they're like, the real problem of the state is that it dissolves our ties of solidarity between ourselves. The state is an elite institution that acts on behalf of capitalists historically.

And it dissolves our ties of trust and solidarity between ourselves and dissolves us into individuals.

So to counter that, to counter the power of the state and the market, because left wing anarchists would see this as part of the same structure, we got a band into small groups together. That's why if you ever hang out with left wing anarchists, all the imagery that they use is all about solidarity.

They talk about solidarity, all their imagery is like people holding hands and that kind of stuff. Whereas you go to libertarian spaces, all the imagery is liberty and it's very abstract. It's like freedom, liberty. They almost like polar.

They're quite antithetical to each other, even though they both are anti state.

And I made a shift, a slight pivot into being a bit of a normie Democrat here in the United States with a nondescript, non ideological view of the world. Just going along with whatever was popular. Didn't really have a deep understanding, honestly.

And hats off to the heterodox world and the monetary anthropology people who have taken the time to educate me. And over the years I've become much more left wing and I find myself now in a place where I no longer make excuses for the state.

I no longer make excuses for elite capture and stuff like that that I just assumed were common sense. Of course, it's just the way it is. What do you mean? Why, of course?

We just need a few good progressives in there and they'll make everything all good.

And it's only been really truly understanding the nature of the state and understanding the nature to some degree, of class relationships and the fact that as much as I always thought of myself as free, I realized I'm really not free at all. There's certain little. Maybe I can choose Spearmint Gum over Juicy Fruit, or maybe I can choose a Toyota 4Runner instead of getting a Tesla.

Or, you know, I can choose to ride a bicycle versus walk. But at the end of the day, they've got a system that keeps you very disciplined. You've got to work, you've got to earn, you've got to pay bills.

You don't do it, you go to jail, you lose things, you know, your family loses things. And so you're not free. There's not freedom here. There's not a way of relief. It is a different form of slavery without the cage, maybe.

And for me it's. I don't know what to do with this now.

Like, everything that you think of as a possible solution to this malady feels like you're a teenager sitting on your bed pouting against your Parents. And at the same time, you know, it seems unrealistic and impossible.

And yet reconciling the relationship that I mentally had, emotionally had with the state versus where I am today is radically different. And it's happened way before the Trump administration. I want to be crystal clear on that. But it has impacted me.

You could see how the United States has really devolved into an overt fascist state, an overt kind of Silicon Valley broligarch kind of oligarchy.

And this freedom loving folks that have no interest in people actually being free are large and in charge right now and stifling dissent and stifling any kind of thought outside of whatever it is that they're advancing.

So without devolving into a child, without becoming like that teen angst kind of adult, how does someone process where we're at today as their mind becomes open to seeing the state for what it is?

I don't necessarily know.

It's just riffing here for me. I think the hard part is you start out with hopes and dreams.

You think of things through, hey, we'll just vote for this and everything will be better.

Yeah.

And you start realizing it's not really there. You got study after study showing that within capitalism and within the United States, which is where I live, so it's where my focus is.

You can probably extrapolate it out elsewhere, like South Africa, but within that space, it's quite clear that you get a popular movement going and nothing changes politically. In fact, we just move further to the right, which tells you something's going on.

This might sound a bit trite, but the kind of. The main impulse for dealing with it is probably to build community and solidarity.

Because the prime kind of ideological tool in a large scale capitalist system is a kind of myth of independence or individuality. As you say, you live with this idea that you are free, but the reality of the network structure of capitalism is that you're not.

So the prime difference in a capitalist system to, for example, like a feudal system. A feudal system, you have a distinct hierarchy, all right, but you're also very secure.

You have this very hard hierarchy, but you can know what your place is, and you actually weirdly guarantee that place in many ways, you know, in modern society, using the term peasant is imagined as some kind of like, insult or something like that. But for a peasant, and you know, in Middle Ages, you can actually have in some ways a secure life, because you know what your position is?

A rental contract relationship with a landlord who's exploiting you. But it's A sort of secure form of exploitation. Okay? And under capitalism, you basically have the same thing, except it's much more fluid. Okay?

So, like, you have fluid systems that are hierarchical, they're intensely hierarchical, but because there are certain forms of mobility, the hierarchy gets disguised. So you can live under the illusion that actually as long as you hustle hard enough, you can somehow make it up the ladder. And maybe you can.

Sometimes you can do that, but on average you don't. And as you do that, other people are often going to have to get pushed out.

So in the capitalist system, you have the same structure of interdependence, but it's much more fluid. And that creates a particular anxiety in life. Constantly.

You're constantly having to compete to stay in the survival structure, which is different to a hunter gatherer band, it's different to tribal society, and it's also different to feudalism. Those societies, you have a guaranteed spot in many ways, whereas in a capitalist society you don't.

So you constantly have this low level, haunting fear that you're about to get pushed out of the society. And the way that is spun by the elites in a society like, oh, that's going to inspire you.

That's good, you've got to be an innovative go getter and hit life and grab life by the balls. And the ones who get to the top are the ones who work the hardest and all this kind of stuff.

And so that kind of libertarian ideology is a big part of the power structure of luck or the ideological power structure of a capitalist system. And if you look at, for example, the Trump administration, they heavily play into this idea of you can be a winner if you on the winning team.

And you can see how it operates on different fractal levels as well.

Lots of the kind of Trump vibe, at least as an outsider watching from the outside, often has this, like, appeal to being on a winning team, but against losers. Just very overtly states, some people are losers and others are winners.

And so it's like a really like blatant kind of market ideology, but it operates in these different scales, which is there's Team U, which is like you in the market fighting against other people. And then there's like team your family. It's like you as a family man fighting for your family. And then there's like team country.

It's like our country better than the other countries. And then eventually, like, it's some God or something like that, the Christian God versus the other gods.

It's got this whole fractal competitive structure to the whole style of thinking, all right. And then it's imagined as some kind of great golden age emerges from this.

A lot of the stuff that Trump promotes, like things like bitcoin and crypto, has that exact same ideological structure.

Those communities have always worked on this idea that you're going to be a winner and if you're too stupid and slow to catch the market, you deserve to be poor and stuff like that. The bitcoin community, for a long time their mantra was like, have fun staying poor.

They would say to anybody who didn't buy into the ideology, it had it very much, you're a loser. And this is why ideologically aligns with that Trump thing, where they're pushing this idea of like, fight each other.

But you can see how that plays into elite interest, because it's like you at the bottom fight each other while we at the top are your inspiring leaders. And you can maybe become us at some point. So the way you fight that really is you have to rebuild ties of solidarity between people on the bottom.

But that's historically that was done through things like unions and stuff like that, which have all kind of been dissolved and broken in many ways. Ways, yeah. I guess the big thing is around figuring out how you create that sort of bottom up stuff. Can I riff on monetary systems as well?

Absolutely. Please.

Beyond the Trump world, because Trump's a whole like current virulent version of capitalism respawning itself in some new way. It's important with the money stuff to see why libertarians are triggered by credit style thinking on money.

And one of the reasons is that ideologically commodity money aligns with the libertarian presentation of how capitalism works. And there's a bunch of political uses of that. But the way that the libertarian thought structure and money works is that you start off.

And when I say libertarian here, I'm just talking about, I guess, a kind of free market kind of person.

I'm not claiming that every person and every libertarian strain has this exact structure, but a basic thing is like, you start off with the perception of people as individuals and it has this like every man an island. So you start off with this vision of self sufficiency. Essentially each person is a self sufficient island by themselves.

And then you imagine what a society is, a whole collection of these islands in proximity to each other. But they're not fundamentally interdependent, they're sort of independent, but they recognize that if they interact, they can gain benefits.

So it's like you're spying the next island and you're like, well, if I do a trade with that person, my self interest could be bettered. All right? So they have this vision that what trade is is human beings trying to better themselves individually.

So if you're picturing two islands, they row out on their canoes and they meet in the middle and they like dangle goods in front of each other. And this is how they imagine the market.

They imagine these individuals who are coming together to dangle goods and then to try to convince each other to trade for their mutual benefit.

And they might try to screw each other in this process, but it's basically imagine that once that trade's completed, you retreat back to your island and you're back to square one. You're the solo individual again, all right? And with that thought structure in place, they basically don't believe a society exists.

She's like, what do you call a society is just a whole bunch of individuals living in close proximity. They're not actually a society, they're separate people. So she was denying interdependence and saying everyone is actually independent.

And so every interaction between those people is voluntary. There's no such thing as involuntary interaction between people who depend upon each other. Every action is voluntary.

And so with that in place, if you're trying to then imagine how a monetary system works, you're going to have to often imagine it as some type of special commodity because it's the only way you get that thought structure to work. You say we have all these people who are like living in close proximity.

They're all independent, they're all self sufficient, but they realize they'll better themselves if they trade, but they don't know how to facilitate that process because it's hard for them to do barter with each other. This is where the barter imagination emerges, right?

Because if you imagine a whole bunch of self sufficient people walking around with their self sufficiently produced goods, you start to fantasize about barter. It's like, oh, all these people are trying to trade, but it's very hard for them because they don't have money.

And so then the next part of the thought structure is to imagine that what happens is that everyone chooses some commodity to become the money system to unblock all the trade between themselves for their self betterment. Basically in, for example, Austrian economics, the Way they will. Austrian economics is a very prominent branch of libertarian economics.

The way they imagine this is they do something through the regression theorem where they're like humans basically choose the most useful and widely accepted commodity and that then becomes the money.

There's variants where you'll say something like, we can have some kind of like social contract theory thing where you say everyone kind of gets together and decides that something's going to be the money. But the basic point is that they imagine that money is some special commodity that holds all these individuals together.

And from that they then fantasize about what the ideal form of this, this hypothetical money should be. And then this is what leads to imaginations of gold. In the libertarian imagination.

They're like, you need this thing that's going to do X, Y and Z to facilitate trade between all these solo individuals, and this thing is going to have to be something that's universally recognized as valuable. And this must be gold. Okay?

And this is how that thought structure which leads to an imagination of gold is entirely based upon priori assumption that human beings are independent agents that don't exist in a society. And this is why it's so messed up, because that is a totally flawed starting position. Economic anthropology would say that is a fantasy.

No human being in society has ever existed as an individual. You can't even get to like age one unless you have people constantly looking after you.

Yes.

Even as a fully grown adult, you're constantly dependent on people. There's no such thing as being an independent island. It doesn't exist.

In which case you don't need something like some commodity to dangle in front of people to convince them to trade with you. People have to trade with you. It's how they survive.

Yes.

It's not an optional path. It's not something you have to sort of convince people to do. So this is why credit theories of money is not to look much more seriously at this.

And this is starting with anthropology, where it's like looking at how actual structures of informal reciprocity and credit between people work, which is like for a person to survive, they have to go into debt. There's no such thing as a debt free person. You always are going in and out of debt to other people. That's how you literally survive.

And there's nothing wrong with that. And interestingly you'll note that in libertarian imaginations, they have a terrible moralistic way of seeing debt. They believe it's an aberration.

And the reason for that is that starting position that they start with where they imagine that what a real person is somebody who's self sufficient and isn't dependent upon other people. Therefore if they're in debt, they're somehow morally inferior because they've negated that starting position.

They've become dependent upon somebody and they've stayed dependent and they're not an independent person. And they will imagine that the creditor is morally superior because that person is more self sufficient in a sense.

So libertarians hate debt, which is what this. At a moral level, they have this sort of slight moral horror at it.

Whereas of course, economic anthropology, chartalism, all these types of thoughts see debt as normal and as. And constituents and a building block of how actual societies work. All right? And then of course, at a very large scale, debt can become very toxic.

It could become a tool of power and extraction. But you don't seek a society that's free of debt. You seek a society where you manage the debt in a humane and egalitarian way.

That's my end of my spiel about this.

No, I think it's fantastic because I'm straying more into the socialist side of the world, as I think about it, and in their world, and I gotta be honest with you, I'm not sure I agree with some of it, right. Is that they just fantasize about a world in which money doesn't exist. And money can come in a lot of different forms.

It's not just the piece of paper, even though that cash is something you are king about, it's all sorts of different means of tracking ledger balances to make sure that like, even if you and I were only allowed to have 10 pieces of chocolate a month, there would be something somewhere that would be decrementing that we've taken our 10 pieces of chocolate. You can call it whatever you want, but there was something that was done to make that transaction occur.

And if you were out of credits or certificates or whatever, you wouldn't get chocolate.

I'm curious, even though libertarianism has been the soup du jour, what are some of the other ideas here where people envision this kind of voluntary exchange where there's no, there's no monetary element to it and it's just not even barter per se. It's more of a. A quota system, if you will, from each their own ability, to each their own need, or however that saying goes. I'm butchered it again.

Yeah, there's been many variants of this stuff. And actually, interestingly, in having just ranted about a sort of generic libertarianism, Again, there actually isn't really.

There's a lot of variance in libertarian thought and actually some traditions of what you might call utopian socialism come out of quasi libertarian type thinking.

People like the sort of French anarchists like Pudon and people like this all have this forms of a lot of what we call alternative economy movements like mutual credit cooperatives and things. Some of them have forms of libertarian thought in them.

But it's more communitarian version of libertarian thought where the objective is like you want to rebuild small scale community in the face of large scale states of corporations. But yeah, the mutual credit systems are quite an interesting sort of field to study in terms of people who have an alternative vision of money.

I'm not sure if I'm answering your question here entirely, but we're getting there because the basic intuition was mutual credit systems because you know, a modern fiat money system is a large scale, multi tiered, hierarchical credit structure administered by massive institutions.

But you can imagine a flattened version of that where the credit processes are horizontal rather than vertical, these sort of banks and states and things. So a lot of the imagination of kind of communitarian mutual credit is like, let's not fetishize money as some kind of commodity.

We'll accept that money is actually these systems of promises and credit between human beings. It's not some sort of strange abstract gold or something. It's these systems of Internet networked credit.

But we're going to try to administer it between ourselves at a horizontal, local level. So that a lot of those kind of communities have that sort of feeling of really accepting human interdependence and indebtedness between people.

That's very different to say, for example, like gift economy type movements or types of, like you were describing, basically a communist impulse, which is where you say, from whoever has the most, whoever has the least, a communist impulse has a different moral structure to the reciprocity impulses of mutual credit.

So a communist impulse is a moral principle that exists in all societies where it basically says if you're in a position of power and somebody is in great need and you have the ability to help them without it really impacting yourself too much, you should do it.

So a communist impulse, for example, is like, there's a person on the street, they're in a rush, they're flustered, they ask you directions and you just tell them with the directions. That's a communist impulse.

You basically saw a person in need, they asked something of you, you were in a position to give it without it like impacting your day too much until you just did it and then you never see them again. All right, that's the. From he who has the most to the person who needs the least. That's, that's that principle in play at a small scale.

So we have that as a daily principle in all our lives. And there's no attempt at trying to call something back from the other person. There's no attempt at reciprocity, essentially.

So reciprocity is a sort of separate moral principle in economics or on economic anthropology, where there'd be that sense of balancing scales. If I do something, eventually somebody else should do something as well. And there's different forms of reciprocity.

And so like a mutual credit system is a reciprocity based system where it's like we will have these sort of horizontal networks of credit between people. They're going to be measuring people going in and out of debt to each other, like these scales being balanced.

And it's imagined that that's better than the hierarchical credit systems that we have in our normal system.

But basically it's like a lot of what we call alternative economy movements will be trying to play with these principles or rewire them in certain ways and.

Yeah, all right, so as we wind down, I want to just thank you for the time. I appreciate it immensely. What can we do with the final word, if you will? Overall, how would you summarize this?

I mean, just to have a key takeaway, what do you think is most important to pull from this conversation?

From my perspective, I think it's important to recognize the political use of libertarianism rather than its surface appearance. Libertarianism speaks about capitalism as a peaceful system where people are solo individuals and so on. Right.

So, so there's some libertarians can even be quite idealistic in a strange way. Like capitalism is supposed to work in a certain way.

But that story functions as a means to disguise how capitalism actually is, which is not like that. And so there's a strange, potentially willful naivety within libertarianism which can actually serve to protect elites.

This actually applies to economics as well. Often mainstream economics also has this element going on. So that's one big thing I think people need to reflect upon.

And a second thing is a lot of those libertarian thought structures actually exist in people who don't self identify as being libertarians. Right. Lots of people in our society, for example, fantasize about money being a commodity.

The fantasy of money as a commodity comes out of libertarian thought. And sometimes it's generated by the situation you were in a Large scale capitalist society where you feel like a solo individual.

If you find yourself fantasizing about commodity money, it's probably likely that you're being influenced by the same kind of libertarian mindset. And that's worth deconstructing that and understanding, like, how that works in your own mind, I guess.

It's fantastic. All right. Well, Brett, this has been wonderful. Tell everybody where we can find your work.

I appreciate the way you share it.

I am avidly sharing Asimoco around, but tell folks about that.

My substack, which is basically where I do most of my stuff right now, is asamoco, or Altered States of Monetary Consciousness.

You can get that on www.asomo.co or else if you've typed in Brett Scott into the substack search engine, you probably will find it or something like that. That's where I mostly do most of my stuff right now. I've also actually started a little YouTube channel, which I'm sort of experimenting with still.

I don't know. I Quite enjoy doing YouTube actually, but quite a lot of work. It's more at an experimental stage right now.

But you can find me in Brett Scott on YouTube as well, where I sort of riff on things and do visualizations of stuff.

So, yeah, I think it's great. Everything you do is gold to use a commodity and moment.

That's good. I'll take it. Yeah. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for being supportive of my work as well. It's always appreciated.

Well, you're always with us.

Keep up all your great stuff too. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, man. I appreciate it as well. All right, let me take us out here, folks. My name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro and Cheese.

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