Hanging Witches
A Currency Induced Mass Psychosis?
Salem 1692
The Salem Witch Trials are a dark time in American history. In a bizarre period of history, the state of Massachusetts hung innocent women for being witches. More than 150 women, men and children were accused of practicing witchcraft. Court trials (yup an actual court and jury) sentenced 20 “witches” to death by hanging.
The witch trials began after a group of young girls became ill, having violent fits and uncontrollable screaming (scary stuff for the parents). A local Doctor diagnosed them with bewitchment and 3 women were charged with being witches. 2 of them pleaded innocent while the 3rd confessed to it all and claimed there were many witches all working for the devil in the area. Presumably she did this to get a lighter sentence as an informer. Instead, this triggered a wave of mass hysteria that lead to more arrests and a grizzly part of American history.
Why Though 🥴?
There are many theories that academics like to champion but a lot of them look more like post justification to us. One such theory suggests that the local area was suffering from a fungus ergot (found in rye and other wheat cereals) which toxicologists say can cause symptoms of delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms. While this might explain away the symptoms of the young girls who were initially diagnosed with ’bewitchment’, it does not explain why a whole society jumped onto the crazy train.
Crazy stuff like this does not happen when a population feels safe and secure in their environment. You need an unstable environment and buckets of fear/uncertainty to make people desperate enough to believe in crazy ideas.
Imagine you are feeling happy and secure in your life. Someone points to your neighbour and accuses them of making a child sick using witchcraft. You don’t believe the accuser because their accusation is crazy. Now imagine you are unhappy and stressed about your life and the future. You are worrying about the future and are scared about what it can bring. Fear encompasses you like a oppressive mist. Someone accuses a neighbour of using witchcraft. You listen because maybe that would explain why you are feeling so scared and uncertain. Maybe its not your fault, maybe its the witches cursing you too! Maybe the witches have been cursing everyone! You discuss it in your community and everyone feels the same way (scared, isolated and fearful of the future). The witch could have caused all of this, it might be best to kill the witch. When the witch is killed you don’t feel any better but someone identifies another witch! You start to panic that they are everywhere and are targeting you and your family. You decide to hunt them down to rid the world of their evil.
Change ‘witch’ for ‘antivaxxer’ or “Russian” and think back over the last few years and even to today… Yeah, it happens all the time.
You need a frightened population in an unstable environment to whip up mass hysteria, and that is exactly what Massachusetts was like in 1692. Life was harsh back then. The community was suffering the after-effects of a British war with France, a recent smallpox endemic, attacks from nearby Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with more affluent communities.
Massachusetts was also the first place in the Western Hemisphere to issue a paper (fiat) currency…
A Government Backed Paper Money With No Value
Massachusetts Bay company first issued fiat currency in 1690
My.. my.. my.. would you look at that… The “First” ever Paper Currency was issued in the Western Hemisphere in 1690 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This was the first paper currency in the Western Hemisphere. Britain and France were typically paying soldiers in coins but shortages in coinage and metals in the Massachusetts Bay Colony forced them to use IOU’s, Cut Playing Cards and other forms of delayed payment tokens. With the face of potential mutiny from the lack of trust in the Colony over the lack of real “money” the General Court of the Bay were forced in winter (December 1960) to issue a Government Backed Currency to pay the soldiers.
A few months later in 1961, with tax season approaching (wink wink) a law was passed removing the limit on how much currency could be printed. Through a course of now obvious actions and progressions the Currency of the Bay Colony subsequently lost trust and value through mass counterfeiting (printing). By the end it was only really used for paying the “taxes” expected and nothing else.
Breakdown of the vibrational underlying principle of Value
If you break the trust that a currency has value, everything starts to wobble.
We, along with many others in the “bitcoin” community point to the link between physiological value and the currency you price that in.
Throughout history we have seen multiple examples of currency debasement leading to civil unrest. The general collective consciousness of the population, especially those that are most affected by the price movement, lose their psychological stability once their mental yardstick for measuring value becomes unreliable. From this you get changes in perceived value, fairness, desire, outcome, time, hope, future planning and participation.
When you break the mental unit of trust you wobble society and the sub-sequential knock on affects usually lead to very bad outcomes until normality is restored. Debasing a currency attempts to hide the problems that society is facing. If you can’t see what is causing the problems you will naturally grow tense and paranoid because you know something is wrong but you can’t explain why.
Stability in the currency is reflective of the health of a nation. Go look anywhere that the currency is being debased heavily and you will see what we mean (Lebanon, Venezuela, Zimbabwe etc)
Back to the witches
1690 - formation of Bay Colony paper currency ( a specific geographical region started its own currency)
1691 - counterfeiting through removing law to print (destroying the colony unit of trust)
1692- Hanging witches (mass psychosis through fear as society is wobbling in the area)
We would argue that the destruction of the currency in an attempt to maintain the status quo put a huge psychological burden on the population, causing them to grow stressed and feel under pressure and to leap on the first band wagon that explained their misery. Also note that geographically surrounding the colony there were no witch hunts, showing that it was an isolated incident within an isolated fiat currency economy experiment.
Sound too far fetched?
Go and look at any money printing episode of note in history and look what follows:
Slow prolonged debasement - Fall of Rome (long periods of clipping coins)
Medium term debasement - WW2 caused by WW1 reparations making Germany hyper inflate the currency and fall into desperate times leading to the election of an angry little prick who blamed a marginal group for all life’s problems. You know the rest
Fast Debasement - March 2022
- Mass psychosis : people swimming in masks, people wearing masks to walk to their table in a restaurant before removing them when they sit down.- People reporting their neighbours to the police for having parties.
Makes you think huh!
Change the money, change the world
BITCOIN can’t be printed!
Till Next Time
The Wealth Gap