What determines a person’s value?
I lived most of my life without questioning how my national culture answers that question. I grew up in a poor family where the question was never spoken, but the answer was lived as, “Not what we do. Not who we are.”
You see, my nation, the United States of America, answers this question with, "a person’s contribution to the interests of the corporate and/or military powers." Meaning, the more you contribute to the power and profit of those entities, the more you are rewarded with an assessment of value yourself. This assessment of value is what grants you access to the resources you need to live.
My family was a family of secretaries, seamstresses, mechanics, and carpenters. All working people, but in service to everyday people very far from the levers of power. We were so many orders of magnitude away from the center of “value creation” that we had little meted out to us, and so we also had little currency available to us for things like food, utilities, housing. We struggled. We worried. We went hungry. We were the working poor.
I can still remember seeing my mother cry because she'd finally gotten the money together to pay the electric bill so that the electric wasn't turned off, but didn't have enough left to buy the stamp to mail it.
(You might say, "Well in some countries most families don't have electric at all." But really, it is the relative deprivation that hurts the poor parent, that feeling that they SHOULD be able to provide some basic utility of life for their children because all the other parents are doing so. And this is part of how government run economic systems coerce people into playing along with the dominant value system. Everyone is trying to keep up with the next parent, at least in whether they can live up to what they think their responsibilities are as a parent. Any of you who are parents know that the deepest sense of despair comes when you feel like you're failing your children, and so this can be used very effectively to manipulate people.)
We accepted our lot, because we didn’t even know to ask the question, let alone see the answer for what it was. Had we spelled it out as clearly as I'm doing now, we would have challenged the assumptions behind the currency of our nation. We are not a family that praises the war machine or the riches of Wall St. Yet even then, we would have still been acculturated to essentially accept the status quo.
That’s because we were also raised within a religious teaching system that said that suffering and sacrifice was a virtue. That hard work was a virtue. That “the Devil makes work for idle hands.” We were taught that not only does a person have no intrinsic value, but that they must earn their keep in each moment or surely be punished, whether in this life or the next.
But is it wrong to profit without laboring to earn that profit? Is it exploitive? Extractive? Does it deserve to be punished if one is happy and prosperous without having sacrificed first?
Most people carry lots of ideas about their sense of purpose and fulfillment in life, their relationship to money, and their ability to allow in all the things they want, either with or without labor.
It’s good to have thought about these issues and come to some conclusions, but I promise that when one starts investing in cryptocurrency they will quickly get an education on their true relationship to all those things!
We can anticipate it triggering all our conditioning about scarcity, the virtue of hardwork and sacrifice, and the moral depravity of enjoyment or reward without that hardwork and sacrifice. It is, after all, a way of putting in say $1,000 and a few weeks later having $2,000 without having done any work. (Or depending on recent trends, putting in $1,000 to a few weeks later have $500, but I digress.)
Those of us who are very spiritual in our worldview and very focused on our service mission in life can particularly experience a lot of inner conflict around so much coming to us so easily. We have been trained to see the systems of quick and plentiful wealth generation as corrupt and abusive because they have always been tied to a system of value that is! And yet, here we encounter what may be an exception to all of that, and don’t quite know how to relate to it.
What is Cryptocurrency and What Does It Have to Do with One’s Mission?
In the most simplistic terms, cryptocurrency uses technology called blockchain to take governmental authorities out of the equation for how monetary value changes hands. Instead of fiat currency issued by bodies like the Federal Reserve and moved from one person to another by banks, we have only the people who own the currency controlling it.
For example, instead of a bank saying, “Yes, you had this money and gave it to this person, so you no longer have it and now they have it,” you have a public record of all transactions that everyone can see and verify that you gave the money to this other address, so no longer have it to give to anyone else. So in a nutshell, it is proof of where the money is that we all guarantee instead of needing a central authority to guarantee it for us.
This is decentralization, the heart of cryptocurrency and a key aspect of economic justice and financial liberation to those whose who first created crypto.
Which brings me back to mission….
Now I don’t know what a given person's mission actually is, but if it has anything to do with more access to resources for more people around the world, less economic inequality, more efficient distribution of renewable resources, more personal freedom and privacy, access to the internet that can’t be blocked by governments, and a host of other issues related to how money or technology affect our lives, there is a crypotcurrency project that is working to solve that problem.
Not only that, but it offers a related system of value as an alternative to the system of value behind say the US dollar. Again, the system of value behind the dollar is that your labor has more value the more it benefits corporate or military interests. The more it benefits those interests, the more money you get.
But what happens when we don’t believe in that system of value? What if our idea of value is more related to supporting renewable energy, and we think that the more someone contributes to that objective the more money, aka access to resources, they should get? That is the option all these different cryptocurrencies give us. We can each “vote” for the system of economic value we believe in by investing in those cryptocurrency projects that reflect our values.
Living One’s Values
I went into the world of cryptocurrency wanting to decouple my own financial well-being from the value the market placed on my labor, and help others do the same. I didn’t want to keep competing for value by the standards laid out for me by society, but I also didn’t want to live the physical hardship caused by lack of access to resources I had grown up with.
Alleviating physical suffering born of economic inequality is a huge part of my mission. Giving people the option to live their values, even when it comes to money and the physical sustenance money is often needed to secure, is also of high value to me.
I believe that we must create a world in which the value a human being has to society is not dependent on the value their work has within the world of commerce or military expansion. We don’t have to benefit the corporations or the state to have value. We have intrinsic value with which we were born, and it is high time we create a resource allocation model that reflects that deeper truth.
Equanimity (or lack thereof) & Spirituality
And yet, even with such lofty ideals, I was surprised to encounter the places in myself where I haven’t actually advanced as much as I’d thought I had within my spiritual practice of equanimity.
I found myself sometimes thrilled by a 50% gain within days, and eager to put in more money to see those gains applied to larger sums. I found myself fretting the inability to invest larger amounts. I found myself experiencing guilt about not having gotten involved when I first heard about the entire industry years ago, or taking the final steps needed when I started the process just a year ago. (An action that would have turned $500 into $20,000 by the time I finally did act.)
Clearly none of these reactions have anything to do with the mission that led me into crypto investing in the first place. And it wasn’t just attachment that got triggered. The other bain of equanimity is aversion.
Most surprising of all, I sometimes found myself expecting loss, because I felt that I hadn’t earned the money through labor and sacrifice, so didn’t deserve it. As much as I know (and teach) about the Law of Attraction, I simply couldn’t expect the blessing to keep unfolding or allow it in! In reality, cryptocurrency is an incredibly volatile market, so there really will sometimes be periods of losses. But it’s the feeling that one DESERVES those losses whenever things are going “too good” that is the issue reveals our unconscious conditioning to believe we have no intrinsic value or right to happiness.
Say what you will about to what degree we create our own reality, but it so happens that at about the time I started expecting the gravy train to end, the market started contracting. Now there are lots of practical reasons it contracted that I won’t go into here, but the timing coincided perfectly with the rise of my own resistance to financial abundance flowing so easily into my life.
Conscious Crypto
In the end I have decided to take full responsibility for what I’m creating in my involvement with cryptocurrency, just as I would in any area of my life. That means that I do keep investing, because I do believe in its potential to bring about many of the good things I want to see in the world and see in my own life.
But it also means that I prioritize finding those crypto options that are fully in alignment with my values, rather than just looking at the prospects for maximizing profits. It means I pass on some projects because they empower the current system of economic violence (Ripple) and take a chance on others because they endeavor to solve important problems (Omisego), regardless of which would multiply my investment quicker. I notice my grasping impulse, my attachment to results, and I consciously choose more wisely. I make this technological revolution be for me what holds the most value to me.
If you are someone who makes active compassion a part of your spirituality and of your service mission in this world, then I invite you to look past the Vegas-like furor that dominates the crypto conversation online and instead focus in on what it could mean for you personally.
What can cryptocurrency teach you about how ready you are to allow your mission to be fulfilled with abundantly flowing resources that you did nothing to earn through your labor? Are you willing to aim higher than mere profits, and insist that your crypto investments also reflect your value? Can you allow something so perfect into your reality? Really?
Resteems always appreciated!