—“I know that myself and others would be interested to read what you have to say about some big names on the alt right. I am assuming you are familiar with the work of the following: Jonathan Bowden, Guilliame Faye, Julius Evola, Alain DeBenoist.”—

Chris, (all)

Great Question Chris.

We can communicate using different technologies. Some of these technologies are nonsense, some are meaningful, some are preferable or not, and some are decidable or not. I work with the DECIDABLE. As such while there might be justification and wisdom in literary authors they do not produce social science that can be expressed as decidable law in matters of dispute between people of different interests.

The answer is that I consider all conservative work outside of law to be literary justification and perhaps intergenerational wisdom, but it’s not science or ‘true’ in the scientific sense, so I cannot use it.

Part of this problem is caused by the concept of monopoly that has been with us since our days as tribal hunter gatherers. It was hard to teach people to use markets – humans thought they might be immoral, and some groups still do. It is just as hard to teach people market government rather than monopoly government.

And these authors generally hold to monopoly thought. So they are of little or no use to me. Why? ‘Cause I know a lot of history. I don’t need it put into a moral narrative for me.

Does that mean I wouldn’t recommend them? Not at all.

The way to learn any subject is to find a Cliff Notes or Spark Notes version of the subject so that you can learn by association with what experiences you possess. I tell mothers and teachers that the best way to introduce a subject is through a children’s story or myth or fairy tale, then a biography, then a history, then SCIENCE. We need a path from our extant knowledge based upon experience, and new knowledge based upon layers of analogy to experience.

These authors provide an intuitionistic and experiential framing of the world which we can then use to recognize that a scientific statement provides explanatory power. So these authors are a gateway for most people. (although not me sorry to say).

I see the history of conservative and libertarian thought as an attempt at rational restatement of religious and cultural history, because they failed to discover the science behind their cultural and institutional evolution.

Since we have that science, now, and science has emerged as the universal language of attempted truth speaking, then I prefer to work with the science, rather than be distracted by what I consider largely literary justification mixed with fancy – even if there is truth there.

But that doesn’t mean there is no value in pedagogical evolution. There is. I just don’t consider it subject for debate or discussion because it’s not debatable, because it’s not scientific – it’s merely illustrative. And for the purpose of pedagogy illustration may be necessary prior to learning the science.

(As for Bowden he didn’t write anything that I would consider meaningful. My interest in him is novel curiosity: why did he have his nervous breakdown? Why do so many deep thinkers have them? Does it place unnatural stress on the mind and body to continually engage in interpreting reality by some model or other? A ‘model’ is a bit of an obscurant non-operational term. But it means that we have produced a set of general rules from construction of properties, categories, relations, commensurability, decidability and explanatory power. We might call such a model ‘a frame’ depending upon its level of completeness. )

I hope this helps.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev,