A JOURNAL OF ARISTOCRATIC GOVERNMENT
We learned art criticism in college. We learned to debate in college. Both were required in the rather socratic program they taught at the time. I improved my debate skills first in bulletin boards, then on Compuserve, then in internet forums, then websites, and Facebook. Debate is an art.
I’ve always given up on these forums though. They peak. And after that, newbies are too frustrating to mature into peers, and you rapidly exhaust the abilities of the top people. Intellectual equivalent of flocks of birds. Schools of fish. Forming and reforming.
But the virtues of these little microcosms is that they are both ludus and circus for training in debates with passionate and interested people of similar interests. Since anyone can enter these debates one becomes familiar not so much with the academic arguments, but with the moral, analogical, and traditional arguments of ordinary people.
The “Cathedral” is so ensconced, as is the fallacy of the enlightenment (the aristocracy of everybody, the equality of everybody, and therefore the discount of the frictions of diversity ), that academic debate all but outlaws arguments constructed on refutations of the Cathedral’s fallacies. So we are at present stuck with criticizing the cathedral, largely from outside of academia.
As such the only venues available are blogs, magazines, and forums.
So what I am proposing is to fund a conference and a journal of aristocratic egalitarian studies. I believe I can pull this off, at least for the first five years. If my business investments play out then I can fund it essentially in perpetuity (although I suspect I will not have to.)
However, I would like to separate the publication into sections by form of argument. Meaning, I would prefer to include only scholarly level works, but to provide forum for moral arguments (and propertarian arguments). There is a particular wisdom to providing this contrast: it engages both the professional, public intellectual and amateur constituencies.
However, I am vehemently against pseudoscience and it’s philosophical equivalent in continental rationalism. And my interest is in promoting works that provide not a justification for aristocracy, but a serious analysis of the structure of formal and informal institutions necessary within aristocratic egalitarian societies.
Liberty in our lifetimes.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
Kiev Ukraine