I never thought I’d go through an intimate therapy session on my podcast… and I just did…!
Helena Andrejko is a wise therapist, anthropologist and writer whose work examines how the architecture of monetary systems, fiat and Bitcoin alike, shapes human perception, behaviour and our sense of sovereignty. Born in the Czech Republic and raised under communism, she lives in Sydney, Australia where she practises as a therapist specialising in trauma. We discuss her recent keynote, "Bitcoin Cures Stockholm Syndrome", which analyzes the monetary system and maps the symptoms of an abusive relationship directly onto fiat. We also dive deep into trust, decentralizing the mind, and Helena’s upcoming new book. Enjoy this highly thought-provoking, raw and real dialogue.
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AI-Generated Takeaways:
Money stopped being money the moment it started requiring permission. If every transaction can be observed, judged and blocked, what we are holding is a permission slip issued by the state, and calling it currency only makes the arrangement easier to live with.
The most effective abuse is the kind that is too large to look at directly. Helena described how a child blames himself rather than accept that her protectors want to hurt him, and the same self-protective blindness scales perfectly to an entire population living under a monetary system.
Endless issuance does something to us that goes far beyond prices. When money has no beginning and no end, we lose our sense of where limits are supposed to sit, and a power without boundaries feels natural rather than alarming.
Trust that cannot be withdrawn was never trust. Distrust is the flip side that makes trust real, and any system that removes your ability to walk away has quietly swapped trust for obedience while keeping the nicer word.
Every warning sign we teach people to recognise in a violent relationship is present in the monetary system. Possessiveness, gaslighting, financial control, surveillance, punishment, the threat of force. We simply never thought to run the checklist on something that large.
Complexity functions as a control mechanism. The fiat architecture is not accidentally impossible to follow and the language around it is not accidentally impenetrable. Verification has been made expensive by design, which is exactly why so few of us ever attempt it.
Bitcoin’s real gift may be the proof of concept it actually is. If resistance turned out to be possible in the one domain that looked most locked down, then resistance is buildable everywhere else. What remains is the work of building it.
“Waking up” in one area does not transfer automatically to the others, it takes work and energy. I realize that most people can endure change in small increments, which explains why some people who “woke up” during Covid then regressed, because the pressure never stopped, if anything it intensified, and nobody has infinite capacity.
Protection and suppression can be the same act. Efrat’s parents hid the gifted school results to keep her modest, and they genuinely believed they were doing right by her.
The state took the parent role and we accepted the child role, including the loss of privacy that comes with it. Children are monitored for their own safety and criminals are monitored for ours, so being watched by default means we are either treated like kids or criminals.
Nothing you build stays healthy if the root system is poisoned. You can be the most conscious person alive about food, land and health, and still run your entire life on money that someone else controls and can switch off at will.
Acceptance comes before change, and that holds for systems as much as for people. You cannot fix what you are still busy defending, which may be why the first honest look at how bad the money really is tends to be the moment everything else becomes possible.
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— Support my work —
I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
