PSYCHOHISTORY vs NATURAL LAW and HUMAN LAW (reposted for archival purposes) Natu

PSYCHOHISTORY vs NATURAL LAW and HUMAN LAW

(reposted for archival purposes)

Natural Law is that which is necessary for cooperation.

But there are other Human Laws of behavior. Whether we categorize these as natural laws as well is a matter of demarcation for the purpose of clarity.

I tend to avoid all psychologism, and I see psychohistory as damaged by freudianism.

But the concept that there are regular laws or cycles to human behavior seems a fertile ground for Human Laws.

I believe all these human laws can be expressed as property, acquisition, defense, and retaliation, and thereby escape the universalism, monopoly, and totalitarianism of freudian framing.

As such I see the basis of what is called psychohistory as correctable and arguable as objective and distributed, rather than subjective and divergent from fallacious monopoly norms.

When David introduced me to the subject I was only thinking in terms of incentives of each generation in the generational cycle.

But we can combine human, cultural, generational, and technological incentives into a hierarchical set of dependencies that should at some point of precision produce a predictable (within limits) set of trends in human behavior.

At present I think we are coalescing on the general theory that man’s behavior actually changes very little, that he adapts to incentives, and that all we have done is increase the information content of collective memory until we are able to produce general rules of action.

Curt