Value, Action, and Bitcoin’s Quality Framework (a critique of Robert Breedlove's interview with Sevilla King)

• Normally, I have a qualifier here: "My 'briefing notes' summarize the content of podcast episodes; they do not reflect my own views."
• However, I found this interview to be so far off the mark (Robert Breedlove, not Sevilla King) that I decided to do use the briefing note as a jumping off point for my counterpoint to Breedlove's linking Pirsig's concepts to Austrian Economics.
• The normal briefing note follows; my views are down the bottom, after the summary of the pod.

Summary

The September 01, 2025 episode of the What is Money podcast features Sevilla King exploring Robert Pirsig’s ideas on the Metaphysics of Quality with Robert Breedlove. The discussion links Pirsig’s emphasis on value and dynamic–static balance to Austrian economics, free speech, therapy, and Bitcoin as a high-level social pattern of value. These themes highlight the risks of symbol inflation, the need to protect discourse, and the opportunities for Bitcoin to align money and meaning.

Take-Home Messages

1. Quality as Primary Reality: Pirsig’s framework treats value as ontologically prior to subjects and objects.
2. Dynamic–Static Balance: Societies require both freedom and structure; extremes lead to chaos or rigidity.
3. Bitcoin’s Role: Bitcoin functions across biological, social, and intellectual layers as a high-quality social pattern.
4. Symbol Integrity: Money and language degrade when detached from lived value, threatening cooperation.
5. Free Speech: Open discourse enables dynamic quality to enter culture and strengthens resilience against crises.

Overview

Sevilla King emphasizes that Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) treats value as the foundation of reality, where “quality events” occur before categories or models. She contrasts this with subject–object dualism and introduces the idea of “transjectivity,” where meaning arises in the relationship between perceiver and perceived. Dynamic quality represents freedom and innovation, while static quality preserves continuity and order.

Breedlove connects Pirsig’s framework to Austrian Economics, stressing that human action is the expression of value. He argues that theories shape perception, citing Copernicus as an example where unchanged data was radically reinterpreted. Together they stress that openness to new frameworks is essential for resilience and accurate judgment.

The speakers apply this lens to money and language, highlighting how both fail when detached from underlying value. Breedlove draws parallels between monetary inflation and terminological overload as cases of symbolic drift. King stresses the need to reground symbols in real experiences and preserve feedback mechanisms.

Bitcoin is framed as a living example of Pirsig’s principles, converting energy into trust and embodying layered value across domains. Breedlove presents it as a level playing field fostering individual sovereignty and collective order. King interprets Bitcoin as a superior social pattern when it balances freedom with necessary constraints.

Stakeholder Perspectives

1. Policy makers: Concerned with preserving free discourse while managing risks of disruptive technologies like Bitcoin.
2. Central banks: Focused on safeguarding money’s symbolic integrity and evaluating Bitcoin’s potential role in reserves.
3. Educators: Tasked with teaching interpretive frameworks and showing how lenses shape perception and decision-making.
4. Bitcoin developers: Responsible for sustaining credibility through governance that balances structure with openness.
5. Civil liberties advocates: Defend free speech as a conduit for dynamic quality and societal adaptability.

Implications and Future Outlook

Dynamic quality requires open channels of feedback, yet censorship, fragile monetary symbols, and rigid governance can suppress adaptation. Ensuring freedom of speech and maintaining strong ties between symbols and lived value will determine whether institutions remain resilient. Societies that integrate these lessons are more likely to weather crises without systemic collapse.

Bitcoin offers a working example of a system that grounds symbols in transparent, costly production and open verification. Its layered value expression demonstrates how individual incentives and collective trust can align through stable rules. Wider adoption depends on policy environments that recognize Bitcoin as both a technological and cultural innovation.

Institutions that embrace frameworks connecting value, action, and meaning will find new pathways to legitimacy. Conversely, those that cling to outdated subject–object assumptions risk cultural irrelevance and operational fragility. Future stability may hinge on balancing structural continuity with the openness needed for dynamic quality to enter.

Some Key Information Gaps

1. How can societies design systems that preserve the balance between dynamic freedom and static order? Avoiding both chaos and rigidity is essential for sustainable governance and institutional legitimacy.
2. How can Bitcoin’s layered value expression be studied to assess its long-term social impact? Empirical analysis is needed to understand Bitcoin’s cross-domain role in economic and cultural systems.
3. How can monetary and linguistic systems be safeguarded against symbolic inflation and loss of meaning? Ensuring symbols remain grounded in value is critical for cooperation and trust.
4. How can societies preserve freedom of speech to ensure the flow of dynamic quality into cultural life? Protecting discourse ensures innovation and resilience against crises.
5. How can Austrian economics and the Metaphysics of Quality be synthesized into a coherent framework of human action and value? Interdisciplinary synthesis can expand research into governance, economics, and philosophy.

Critique

Pirsig ≠ Austrian Praxeology

Now we are to the point where I need to start my critique of Robert Breedlove's attempt to align Robert Pirsig’s MoQ with Austrian economics and praxeology. Pirsig was foundational in my intellectual development: his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, came out when I was a teen. In my view, Pirsig's ideas connects far more naturally to pragmatist philosophy and institutional economics traditions than to Austrian reasoning from first principles.

Breedlove’s alignment equates Pirsig’s “quality events” with Mises’s axiom of “purposeful action.” This move collapses Pirsig’s non-dual, experiential starting point into a narrow deductive system. MoQ emphasizes the dynamic-static interplay of experience, the layering of values across inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual domains, and the role of empirical surprise in shaping knowledge.

Praxeology, however, begins with a single axiom and derives universal laws through deduction, treating them as immune to empirical revision. Praxeology collapses inquiry into a closed deductive system, while pragmatism expands inquiry into an open, adaptive process. Praxeology:

• Begins with the axiom that all human action is purposeful: people use means to pursue chosen ends.
• Treats this as a priori and self-evident, not open to empirical test.
• Builds out a system of economic “laws” through deduction.
• Assumes ends and preferences are fixed and private, leaving little room to question where values come from.

For me, this recasting of MoQ into Austrian categories misses its grounding in radical empiricism and plural ontology (radical empiricism is a term coined by Pragmatist philosopher and 'father' of modern psychology, William James).

Breedlove’s Narrow Interpretation

Breedlove's misalignment of quality and purposeful action was on display in his conversation with Sevilla King. He repeatedly reframed Pirsig’s ideas through the lens of Austrian economics, treating quality as equivalent to purposeful action and value as reducible to praxeology. King did not resist directly but she clearly preferred to situate MoQ within traditions of meaning-making, therapy, spirituality, and relational metaphysics. Her emphasis on meditation, transjectivity, and the ineffable quality of experience pointed toward Pirsig’s mystical dimension and resonated with the social level of values that others have interpreted as having democratic implications. Breedlove’s approach was more reductive: wearing Austrian filters so tightly that he was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to consider MoQ on its own terms. This narrowness foreclosed richer interpretations and flattened Pirsig’s pluralism into a single economic doctrine.

King borrows the term “transjectivity” from John Vervaeke, whose work on the meaning crisis is closely tied to Jordan Peterson’s intellectual circle. While this framing helps her connect Pirsig to contemporary debates, non-dual insights are hardly new. From Advaita Vedanta in India, to Taoism in China, to Tibetan Buddhism and even pre-Buddhist Bon traditions, nearly every religious or pagan cosmology has carried some version of this truth. As David Loy notes in his comparative study of non-duality, these traditions consistently emphasize that subject and object are not separate realities but arise together in lived experience.

William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience made the same point: mystical states dissolve the subject–object divide and reveal relations as part of experience itself (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a short primer on how James relates to more current thinking). What Peterson and Vervaeke call “transjectivity” is less an invention than pop culture rebranding.

Seen in this longer arc, pragmatism - especially James’s radical empiricism - is the most natural modern philosophy to follow from non-dual insights.

Epistemology

Pragmatism advances knowledge through abduction, the creative generation of hypotheses when surprise disrupts settled habits, followed by testing and revision within communities of inquiry. It treats all beliefs as provisional. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, gave abduction a central role as the logical process by which new hypotheses are formed in response to doubt and surprise. This was the essence of James’s radical empiricism and Peirce’s account of abduction: knowledge advances by following experience wherever it leads.

Austrian praxeology, in contrast, insists that its laws can be known a priori through deduction from the axiom of purposeful action. Daniel Bromley noted that this reliance on deduction insulates Austrian economics from meaningful engagement with lived reality, reducing it to tautology rather than inquiry. The two approaches are fundamentally incompatible: pragmatism is fallibilist and experiential; praxeology is foundationalist and deductive. Bromley's position is one of evolutionary relativism:

• Recognition that humans act volitionally, but always within social and institutional contexts.
• Beliefs and rules are provisional and adaptive, tested against experience.
• Institutions - the 'rules of the game' - are evolving frameworks for resolving uncertainty and contesting value claims.
• Multiple, competing interpretations of value are possible, including relational and nondual perspectives.

Ontology of Value

Pirsig proposed a layered ontology of value: inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual patterns, each with semi-autonomous logics and conflicts. These layers explain how institutions, norms, and intellectual structures matter in their own right. Austrian methodological individualism collapses this richness into a single dimension of individual preferences expressed through market exchange. Bromley criticized this reductionism, emphasizing that economic life must be understood as volitional - shaped by collective judgments about what futures are worth pursuing - rather than reducible to aggregated private wants.

Institutions

Pragmatism and old institutional economics both emphasize that institutions are evolving rule-systems shaped by contestation, adaptation, and collective problem-solving. They acknowledge that governance structures co-produce value and that democratic institutions can adjust to shifting beliefs. Austrian economics, by contrast, often treats institutional interventions as distortions of a “natural” market order. Bromley was especially sharp here: he argued that Austrians cling to a mythical self-regulating market, denying the volitional, experimental character of institutions that craft and sustain real economic life.

Democracy

For Pirsig, as for pragmatists such as John Dewey, democracy is not just a formal political structure but an ongoing process of intelligent inquiry, deliberation, and adjustment. Pragmatism aligns with pluralism, contestability, and deliberative democracy, making citizen inquiry central to governance. Austrian economics, when it relies on reasoning from first principles, has little room for these commitments: its focus on the deductive truths of market exchange leaves democratic participation at best incidental, at worst a source of error. Bromley’s volitional pragmatism reinforces that democratic deliberation is not a distraction from economics but the essence of how societies choose among competing futures.

Property, Coercion, and Collective Action

Bromley also highlighted a deeper flaw in Austrian thought: its treatment of property and coercion. Austrians tend to treat existing property rights as natural givens, framing coercion as any state interference with those rights. However, property itself is a political construct, defined and enforced through institutions that inevitably involve collective choice and coercion. To reify the status quo is to deny the ongoing political contest over whose interests property rules serve.

This critique links directly to Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, which stressed that citizens are affected by policies even if they do not recognize it. Austrians’ self-focused frame misses these diffuse externalities and the need for cooperative responses. In a prospective Bitcoin world, decentralization will require not just private sovereignty but voluntary cooperation, norm-building, and civic responsibility. As Vincent Ostrom argued in his work on American federalism, self-governance depends on citizens actively engaging in the creation and maintenance of rules. If Austrian thought reduces society to “my property, my sovereignty,” it cannot sustain the collective dimension that decentralized systems demand.

On Bitcoin

Seen pragmatically, I have argued that Bitcoin is best understood as a “surprise generator,” a technology that disrupts habits, raises doubts about prevailing narratives, and forces individuals and communities to revise beliefs. It can serve left-leaning progressive goals (climate mitigation, human rights, poverty alleviation) and right-leaning libertarian goals (self-sovereignty, property rights) simultaneously. What matters is not whether Bitcoin validates a pre-existing ideology, but how inquiry and adaptation can guide humans and institutions toward higher-quality futures.

Placement on the MoQ Spectrum

If we were to map Pirsig’s legacy as a Venn diagram - with the mystical (quality as ineffable, Zen, transcendence), the philosophical (quality as ontological category), the social/institutional (quality as guide for governance and cooperation), and the economic-deductive (quality as purposeful action) - Breedlove sits firmly in the deductive sphere. Sevilla King appears, by contrast, to inhabit the junction of mystical and social: affirming quality’s ineffable character while also recognizing its guidance for democratic life. Their exchange revealed this divergence clearly.

My Personal Journey

For me, these contrasts are not abstract - they map directly onto the arc of my own life. Pirsig was the original spark: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance helped me first, at age 16, understand that the world is more entangled and uncertain than tidy categories admit. That small purple book I read as a teenager opened the path to inquiry; for any good pragmatist - even when you don't realize that's what you are - once curiosity is lit, the only honest response is to follow it and extinguish any doubt you held. For me, that first led into left-leaning libertarianism and anarchism, environmentally-responsible work, and much time in the mountains.

Later, in grad school in the late-1990s with Elinor and Vincent Ostrom at Indiana University, I was formally introduced to Pragmatism and the institutionalism economics that later shaped my academic career. Looking back, the value of Pirsig's work was not the metaphysics he tried to codify in Lila, but the example he provided that philosophy is not abstraction but is all about lived experience. That lesson carried forward into everything else.

Still later in 2010, on an overland trip across China, I discovered - literally as we crossed the border into Tibet - that I was a natural born Buddhist (I was reading a book by Jetsun Pema, the Dalai Lama's sister, at the time and it was full of language that almost mirrored Pirsig).

Pirsig’s claim that “quality precedes experience” echoes the Dzogchen view that the ground of reality is the ever-present field of awareness, the clear light that we experience as vivid consciousness, within which all appearances arise. From this perspective, consciousness is not a byproduct of subjects encountering objects but the very fabric in which both subject and object exist.

What Pirsig called “quality,” Dzogchen recognizes as the natural state: self-existing, non-dual, beyond judgment, already complete, and perfect as it is. Ccompassion and awareness infuse the ground; Dzogchen is radical in its insistence that nothing needs to be added or taken away, and that quality is already here prior to all human labeling and conceptualizing.

The future

Pirsig’s claim that “quality precedes experience” also resonates with strands of current consciousness research: leading theories such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) probe the neural and informational structures that might underlie awareness, while philosophical interest in panpsychism has resurfaced. More speculative work, such as Penrose and Hameroff’s Orch-OR model, continues to explore the possibility that quantum processes in the brain may collapse into conscious experience. Taken together, these approaches suggest that the scientific imagination is inching closer to perspectives that converge with nondual traditions rather than oppose them. And in doing so, they exemplify William James radical empiricism: the willingness to treat relations and experiences themselves as part of reality, and to keep questioning our assumptions wherever inquiry leads, even if it overturns the dualisms we once took for granted.

Bitcoin, too, should be - and perhaps can only be - understood through the lens of radical empiricism. Just as James argued that inquiry must follow experience wherever it leads, even when it unsettles our categories, Bitcoin keeps surprising us and forcing a rethinking of money, coordination, and evolving human values.

In my own writing I have argued that Bitcoin's adoption has already yielded unexpected outcomes - from reducing methane emissions to supporting human rights under repression - outcomes that challenge the caricature of Bitcoin as merely speculative or destructive. These surprises are exactly what a pragmatist lens anticipates: the world discloses new possibilities as we experiment with it. Bitcoin is less the confirmation of Austrian deduction than a living experiment in radical empiricism, a tool that exposes unforeseen pathways for cooperation, resilience, and institutional evolution in a world we cannot fully predict.