THE NEO-REACTIONARIES Good argument because it’s on-message, and avoids the luna

http://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/01/24/the-neo-reactionaries/RE: THE NEO-REACTIONARIES

Good argument because it’s on-message, and avoids the lunatic fringe.

I tend to position Propertarianism as within the NRx movement, and I make use of the “Cathedral Complex” arguments. But my preference is not to criticize the reproductive strategies of other subcultures, but instead, to talk about why we failed to defend ourselves from pseudoscience and deception via rationalism wither it was from the cosmopolitans (Socialist, Neocon, and Libertine), the german rationalists, or the anglo neo-puritans.

The secret of the west was that – by an accidental by-product of the cavalry tactics of our self-financed warriors – we discovered truth and how to tell the truth. This gave us testimony, jury, rule of law, which evolved into science and reason. But more importantly, when people speak the truth, and when the law can evolve means of suppressing new means of fraud and theft as fast as people file suits under common law, then economic velocity can operate at its maximum potential without institutional limitations that plague other cultures.

So NRx produced an excellent and correct criticism (along with Kevin Macdonald). What it did not produce was an explanation of our uniqueness (truth-telling and the high-trust society), nor a solution to it (reconstruction of the common law, and the requirement for truth telling, by treating the informational commons as a shareholder asset open to defense under universal standing). This is what I have tried to supply the movement with.

But to hold people so accountable requires a means of distinguishing truth-telling from deceit. We cannot know the complete truth – perfect non-tautological parsimony is forever invisible to us – but we can warranty that we have performed due diligence: that our statements are internally consistent, externally correspondent, operational possible, and moral: voluntary.

But it turns out that we have been warranting our investigations for over two thousand years: we call the discipline of truth telling ‘science’. If we add to the discipline of science, the requirements that (a) like science all political arguments are operationally expressed, and (b) all statements are free of moral hazard – meaning transfers are productive, fully informed, voluntary, and produce only externalities meeting the same criteria – then we can at the very least punish the kind of lying that has been the source of all pseudoscientific and rationalist attacks on the west, and we can restore grammar, rhetoric, logic and morality to equal standing as the investigation of the physical sciences.

We will not restore the past. The future of theory will look more like classical liberalism than socialism or anarchism. And those of us merging the NRx criticism, with Libertarian economic arguments, with classical liberal institutions, will provide it.

Cheers.

Curt Doolittle