Prometheus, the Original Mineral
We find wealth and sublimity all around us, but most importantly, within us.
A Priori
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the word was God.”
The logos. The original intent. The primordial sense for beauty; a priori and non-contingent.
Each of us possess this quality. It is the internal generator of the image of our psyche we imprint onto the world, an instinctual genius. There is a spirituality intrinsic to scientific, artistic and technological discovery which is the upstream locomotive of all creative endeavor.
It is this faculty which allows us to endure and persevere. It is uncovering and bringing this faculty into alignment with our earthly lives which generates integrity. It is the fighting for this integrity which we are psychically compelled to do, and which makes Man a heroic being.
The projection of a spirit held in our psyche to imprint our technological vision onto the world. When we create tools and new ways of being in the world, we are fundamentally emanating from a kind of imago — a kind of philosophical, ideological and poetic vision of the world. This vision is the deepest, primordial libido dominande. A deterministic, generative, optimistic agency in creative endeavor as a manifestation of this inner spiritual resource which has an image we seek to imprint and project onto the world. So it is a spirit which dominates through making, not through taking. The ancients anthropomorphized this psyche as Prometheus.
Man is a heroic being. By honoring this prefiguring vision, he builds civilization. Through this he maintains the constitution to accept short term losses for the sake of a positional advantage in the future. He maintains this discipline in the face of all the uncertainties of the world, despite the pains this causes. He is proverbially chained to the rock, to be devoured then regenerated.
To maintain this constitution he must have a discipline of loyalty to principles and to cultivating anew the primacy of this vision despite the many tribulations of the world. This discipline is like following the Dharma. Because of the indestructible mineral of life’s uncertainty, he must accept initial losses and setbacks to make progress in the distant future. This roundabout disposition is indispensable in business, economics, investing and technology development. By focusing on the long-term and withstanding the desire for immediate payout, battles are won, capital and energy is allocated more responsibly, and we may survive the ruthless laws of nature.
Prometheus in the World
It is this basic element of Mankind which is sacred. It must be uplifted and it must be defended. There seems often to be no limit in the forces which threaten or attrite this sacred element. Enslaving political ideologies, invasions, unconsidered mass-consciousness inducing technologies and cultural trends.
This is to say, to master the world is to master the psyche. To harness our deeper instinctual vision is the path to generative creativity in our local lives and as the new method of global dominance. Today because our globalized economics are driven by big data and financialization, we are no longer in the kind of world where mechanistic muscularity and military power are the main vectors of competition. To be a warrior in this age is to be a spiritual warrior like no other time in history.
Our civilian elected governments are no longer relevant. What controls the world are technological networks and corporations. Majorities don’t make history. Focused, coherent minorities make history. This makes the Promethean psyche of our own intrinsic heroism more alive and relevant today than it has likely ever been. It makes embracing this capacity to enact our poetic and technological vision in the world that is much more threatening to fragile legacy regimes which rely ever more heavily on propaganda, our learned helplessness and codependent conformities.
For my own person, my primary motivations come down to two simple points:
1) To instill in others the belief they are heroic, creative beings and to defend them in that realization
2) To create great wealth by producing the most transcendent value for others to express their heroic purposes
In practice, the zero-sum game of the markets, despite its deep fascinations, I came to discover was an incompatible environment with an ideology of creative heroism that wanted defending on moral grounds.
To create and support a new form of trustless money by generating raw electrical energy and translating it into pristine collateral for the most wide-ranging array of human purposes is the most valuable way I can appreciate to honor this directive and generate wealth. Sound, borderless, censorship resistant money unlocks agency in ways which preserve hard-won value and allow our energies to translate across the earth and into deep time. It is for this transcendent properties and the way it restores a degree of Promethean agency that it is so valuable.
Meanwhile, to restore and re-vivify unfabricated old architecture into romantic and spiritual homes where people may come back in touch with the sublime is a kind of artistic equivalent to sound money. To more deeply identify with a sublime, poetic vision of one’s self in a more sense-driven way better re-acquaints people with their internal heroic properties and reminds us that creatorship doesn’t only serve horsepower and technology, but beauty.
Epimetheus, the indistinct chaos-unleashing brother of Prometheus, gave animals a nature that uses every material advantage to get ahead. If they have to lie or steal or whatever, they’re just being themselves. Their wellbeing is merely a derivative of the wellbeing of their surrounding ecology. But when we as humans no longer participate in the universal, the moral, in beauty, in the divine, but instead as derivatives of their environment or as someone else’s subjects, then of course they lose their agency as a creators. This is true when we are engaged in extraction, predicating our activity on the health of a status quo as generated by others. We all possess creative genius, but we also most often subvert that genius to our environment or to others.
And so Prometheus gave us something orders of magnitude more powerful. He gave us techne — that creative force which transcends the dichotomy of art and mechanics — and he gave us the power to see over the horizon of time in order to know nature as a process, not necessarily as a tyrannical master. We find him in Boddhidharma, Padmasambhava, Iron John, Ludvig von Mises, Thomas Paine, Henry Ford and Satoshi Nakamoto. We must find him in ourselves as well.
About Ross Calvin
Ross was the CIO of Agrigentum Capital, Ltd., a private investment manager focused on transitional macro themes and volatility. He is now the founder and CEO of Thermahash, a blockchain infrastructure provider.
