The Collapse of the Future: A Monetary Theory of Structural Violence
How fiat money, broken time horizons, and sound money connect to the mental crisis we are living through
Our current society is experiencing a surge in despair, alienation, and extreme acts of violence, and most of the public conversation about it remains stuck at the surface. We argue about guns, politics, social media, or culture, but those debates miss the deeper force that shapes all of them: our relationship with the future. In my previous essay on Bitcoin and the mind, I argued that fiat money creates a chronic psychological environment of instability that turns ordinary stress into widespread anxiety and depression. The same broken time horizon that destabilizes the individual also destabilizes families, communities, and, ultimately, the entire culture.
When money steadily loses value, it quietly teaches people that the future cannot be trusted. Saving becomes harder, long-term planning becomes riskier, and everything in life shifts toward immediacy. That economic pressure does not stay in spreadsheets. It moves into homes and relationships. Couples under financial strain fight more, families fracture more easily, and children grow up in environments shaped by uncertainty rather than stability. Over time, this produces a generation that struggles to see their lives as part of a long story with meaning, continuity, and consequence.
At the same time, indicators of youth distress have risen sharply over the past several decades. Depression, anxiety, social withdrawal, and self-harm are far more common than they were in the middle of the twentieth century. Extreme acts of violence are still rare, but they emerge from this wider field of hopelessness and disconnection. Many of the young men who commit these acts share histories of family instability, social isolation, and chronic stress. These conditions do not mechanically cause violence, but they make despair more likely, and despair makes destructive behavior easier to imagine.
This is not about blaming individuals. It is about incentives. A society that runs on short-term economics produces short-term psychology. When people do not believe they can build a stable future, their behavior changes. They take more risks, feel less responsibility to tomorrow, and are more easily pulled into nihilism or rage. Institutions then step in to manage the fallout. Some young people are medicated, some are labeled, and some are simply ignored. These interventions can help at the margins, but they do not repair the underlying damage caused by a system that keeps shrinking the future.
This connects directly to the argument that Bitcoin is not just a financial tool but a psychological one. In the first essay, I argued that fiat money creates a civilization-wide anxiety disorder by destroying the conditions that allow people to plan, save, and take responsibility for their lives. Here we see the same mechanism operating at the social level. When the future is unstable, families weaken. When families weaken, children lose the structure that anchors them. When that structure disappears, despair and alienation fill the gap.
Sound money does not magically make people virtuous or heal every wound, but it restores something essential: a credible future. When people can store the value of their labor without it being quietly erased, saving makes sense again. Long-term thinking becomes rational again. Building a family, a career, and a life rooted in responsibility becomes possible again. That shift changes how people behave, how they relate to one another, and how much they believe their actions matter.
A society with a future worth protecting does not eliminate tragedy, but it reduces the conditions that manufacture hopelessness at scale. When time is no longer broken by inflation, the mind gains room to breathe, and the family gains room to endure. In that space, fewer people feel driven to burn everything down, because there is finally something real to build toward.