Pay attention plebs, because this matters.
This is clear evidence of something most people refuse to internalize: societies change, political systems mutate, ideologies rise and rot, but human behavior stays boringly consistent. Predictable. Almost mechanical.
Through Bitcoin and a broader obsession with history, one pattern keeps screaming back at me: put humans in similar conditions and they behave the same way, century after century. Wealth, religion, culture, political labels are mostly cosmetic.
Politicians are the easiest case study. You elevate people into positions meant to serve the many, and over time their stated principles dissolve into performance. Ideology becomes theater. Commitments turn conditional. Power doesn’t reveal character so much as it strips away the illusion.
You can’t even blame them that much. This isn’t a moral failure; it’s biological inertia. Genes move at a glacial pace. We changed our tools, our cities, our communication, but internally we’re still running the same firmware as humans from 100,000 years ago. Tribal instincts, survival heuristics, loyalty until it becomes inconvenient. When a real threat appears, allegiances evaporate instantly.
So don’t put faith in politicians. Given enough time, they’ll fall for everything and stand for nothing. The position practically guarantees it.
The current situation is ironic, but entirely predictable in hindsight. The West aligned with the Bolsheviks to eliminate a greater threat. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” has always overridden moral consistency. Evil is tolerable as long as it’s not the most evil in the room.
This realization has uncomfortable implications everywhere - from Bitcoin governance to society itself. Incentives are never neutral. What aligns one group distorts another. You don’t fix systems by “fixing incentives” in the abstract, because the core problem remains unchanged: humans.
The best you can do is make it harder to disrupt things that already work. Even that isn’t foolproof. Some people will always find a way to turn safeguards into attack surfaces.
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