Criticism of David Friedman’s “Folktale” Cosmopolitan Libertinism

(trigger warning. accusatory. critical. direct.)

Abstract: As part of my ongoing efforts to overturn the failures of the anglo, german, and ashkenazi enlightenment that have undermined western civilization, this is the first of a series of criticisms I will levy against the work of David Friedman – the cosmopolitan libertine I disagree with least. In this first post, which covers on the first few pages of his book, I first demonstrate the errors, second provide what I believe is the correct interpretation, then I demonstrate how Friedman, like boaz, marx, freud, mises, rothbard, block and numerous imitators use a fairly simple but effective technique of telling half-truths that rely upon suggestion invoking altruistic responses in the listener, which circumvents our skepticism, evidence and reason. This technique evolved in the religious era and is central to the success of the cosmopolitan programs of marxist-socialism, libertinism, Misesian (Askenazi Ukrainian) Economics, and straussian neo conservatism, as much as the outright propagandism of the neo-puritan, continental social democratic, and ashkenazi Frankfurt school.

*NOTES:

(A) Notice the difference between suggestive language that appeals to your sense of altruism VS analytic statements using amoral language of rational incentives. Once you have begun to identify it, you will always notice suggestion as what it is: a sophisticated deception.*

PART 1 – CHAPTER 1, PAGES 1-10

—“The central idea of libertarianism is that people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish.”—

PROPERTARIANISM: PERMISSION

One cannot possess liberty by permission. It’s a logical impossibility. One can possess liberty only because it cannot be taken from him, because he possesses the means by which to defend it. Historically we have possessed liberty only by entering into a contract for reciprocal defense of all property. By entering the contract for reciprocal defense of property with all who will exchange it with us (aristocratic egalitarianism) we increase our numbers sufficiently that the costs of imposing costs upon us is disproportionately expensive to the losses incurred in attempting to do so.

The central content of the term ‘liberty’ is that those who govern (those who organize the construction of commons) shall act according to the same morally toward individuals, as individuals act toward each other. The etymology of the term liberty originates in the acceptance of rule in exchange for obtaining access to a market and the market’s defenses, under the condition that local custom (norm) is retained. More often than not, this translates to the preservation of local rents and privileges on the one hand, and local myth and ritual on the other.

To complete this analysis, the etymology of freedom originates in the Sumerian (return to mother, once the service to the state – ie:tax – has been paid). Then the grant of sovereignty to the individual who can be responsible for his upkeep without engaging in the parasitism and predation upon others. While the democratic and christian anti-aristocratic mythology positions the aristocracy as parasites, instead, the aristocracy consists of professional warriors who incrementally suppress unproductive behavior. Joining the category of free ‘civilized’ men, meant accepting the same responsibility for the suppression of parasitism, and the construction of defense, production, and market – which were a competitive advantage over the barbarians. The history of the domestication of man rather than the history of the exploitation of man.

[pullquote]End the lies. No more lies from the political platform. No more lies from the Academy’s Lectern, No more lies from the intellectual’s media. No more lies from the priest’s pulpit, or temple’s altar.

End the lies. End the century of lies. The cost will be as great as teaching literacy and science. But the alternative is extinction of the only civilization that ever invented truth telling.[/pullquote]

PROPERTARIANISM: LIBERTY, MORALITY, PROPERTY, COOPERATION, SUMMARY

This next section consists of a series of an analytic construction of the definitions of liberty, morality, property, cooperation.

PROPERTARIANISM: LIBERTY

OBVERSE: The principle of liberty, (‘principle’ meaning means of providing decidability) is that the members of the government are bound to act as ethically and morally with the citizens, as the citizens are bound ethically and morally to act with one another. REVERSE: The members of the government are prohibited from imposing involuntary costs upon the citizenry. As such, Liberty is synonymous with morality. You and I act or do not act morally. When members of the government act morally, they preserve the condition of liberty. When they act immorally, they reduce the condition of liberty.

PROPERTARIANISM: MORALITY

OBVERSE: Those prohibitions on action that are necessary for preservation of the disproportionate rewards of cooperation. REVERSE: Those requirements that we impose no costs upon the property-en-toto of others.

The Criteria for Morality: That all transfers:

(a) are productive

(b) fully informed,

(d) voluntary

(e) exchanges

(f) free of imposition against the property-en-toto of others by externality.

PROPERTARIANISM IMMORALITY

Immorality then includes:

Murder, Violence, Theft, fraud, fraud by omission, unproductive exchange, externalization of costs, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy (statism), competition in norms, competition in laws, competition through conversion, competition through immigration, competition through invasion, competition through colonization, competition through conquest, competition through genocide.

IMMORALITY DOES NOT INCLUDE:

Competition in the seizure of opportunities (first use), since (a) this is the purpose of constructing commons: constructing a division of knowledge and labor, concentrating opportunities, the reduction of opportunity cost, and transaction costs producing opportunities which may be seized.

PROPERTY: PROPERTY

OBVERSE: That which I have born costs to obtain without imposing costs upon that which others have acted to obtain, which they in turn, have obtained without imposing costs upon that which others have acted to obtain. REVERSE: That which I have born costs to obtain that I will retaliate against the imposition of costs upon.

DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY (PROPERTY-EN-TOTO)

Humans demonstrate that they retaliate against the following categories that the seek to inventory:

***”Those properties in which we have invested our forgone opportunities, our efforts, or our material assets, in order to inventory capital of every conceivable use.”***

Types of property based upon observations of what people consider to be their property:

I. SELF-PROPERTY

Personal property: “Things an individual has a Monopoly Of Control over the use of.”

a) Physical Body

b) Actions and Time

c) Memories, Concepts and Identities: tools that enable us to plan and act. In the consumer economy this includes brands.

d) Status and Class (mate and relation selection, and reputation.)

II. PERSONAL PROPERTY

a) Several Property: Those things external to our bodies that we claim a monopoly of control over.

III. KINSHIP PROPERTY

a) Mates (access to sex/reproduction)

b) Children (genetics)

c) Familial Relations (security)

d) Non-Familial Relations (utility)

e) Consanguineous property (tribal and family ties)

IV. COOPERATIVE PROPERTY

a) Organizational ties (work)

b) Knowledge ties (skills, crafts)

V. SHAREHOLDER PROPERTY

a) Shares: Recorded And Quantified Shareholder Property (physical shares in a tradable asset)

b) Commons: Unrecorded and Unquantified Shareholder Property (shares in commons)

c) Artificial Property: (property created by fiat agreement) Intellectual Property.

VI. INFORMAL INSTITUTIONAL PROPERTY:

a) Informal (Normative) Property: Our norms: manners, ethics, morals, myths, and rituals that constitute ur social portfolio and which make our social order (cooperation) possible.

VII. FORMAL INSTITUTIONAL PROPERTY

a) Formal Institutional Property: Formal (Procedural) Institutions: Our institutions: Religion (including the secular religion), Government, Laws.

DEFINITION OF COST: THE DIFFERENCE IN OPPORTUNITY COSTS BETWEEN SETS OF ACTIONS THAT PROVIDE:

The greatest return,

given:

The least effort.
The least time.
The least uncertainty.
The least risk.
The least negative externalities.

)

PROPERTARIANISM: COOPERATION

The Evolution of Cooperation:

Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce, humans must acquire and inventory many categories of resources, and evolved to demonstrate constant acquisitiveness of those resources.
Property: The scope of those things they act upon, or choose not to act upon, in anticipation of obtaining as inventory (a store of value), constitute their demonstrated definition of property-en-toto.* (See Butler Schaeffer) “That which and organism defends.”
Value: Human emotions evolved to reflect changes in state of property-en-toto.* As such nearly all emotions can be expressed in terms of reactions to property. (imposed costs here, pre-moral, but also pre-cooperation, and only defense and retaliation, not cooperation)
Non-Conflict: That which humans act to obtain without imposition upon in-group members they evolved to intuit as their property, and demonstrate this intuition by defense of their inventory, and by their punishment of transgressors.
Cooperative Production: That which humans act in concert with one another to produce. (Important take-away is that the purpose of cooperation is material and reproductive production.)
Moral (cooperative) Intuitions(instincts): Moral intuitions reflect prohibitions on free riding by members with whom one cooperates in production and reproduction. (This is where free riding enters.)
Distribution of Intuitions by Reproductive Strategy: Moral intuitions vary in intensity to suit one’s reproductive strategy. This intensity and distribution of moral intuition varies between males and females, as well as between classes and between groups.
Variation By Family Structure: Moral rules reflect prohibitions on free riding given the structure of the family in relation to the necessary and available structure of production.
Resolution of Disputes: Property rights were developed in law as the positive enumeration in contractual form, of those moral rules which any polity (corporation) agrees to enforce with the promise of violence for the purpose of restitution or punishment. Conversely, any possible property rights not expressed, the community (corporation) is unwilling to adjudicate, restore or punish, or has not yet discovered the need to construct.
Instrumentation: Property rights are necessary for the instrumental measurement of moral prohibitions because of the unobservability of changes in human emotional states, and our inability to determine truth from falsehood. And as such we require an observable proxy for evidence of changes in state.
Family: As a general rule, as the division of knowledge and labor increases, so must the atomicity of property rights, and as a consequence, the size of the family must decline {Consanguineous, Punaluan, Pairing (Serial Marriage), Hetaeristic, Traditional, Stem, Nuclear, Absolute Nuclear}.
Transaction Costs: As the division of labor increases, relationships increase in distance from kin, increase in anonymity, decrease common interest, and the incentive to seize opportunities rather than adhere to agreements increases. This decrease creates the problem of trust, which increases costs of insuring any agreement is fulfilled, and decreases the overall number of possible agreements and the number of participants in any structure of production.
Trust (ethics in production): As a general rule, for the size of the family to decrease, and division of labor to increase in multi-part *complexity* then trust must increase, and trust can only increase with expansion of property rights to include prohibitions on unethical actions. Mere ostracization, boycotting and reputation are insufficient to preserve agreements (contracts).
Moral Competition (ethics in political production): (morals property rights, cheating) As a general rule, the scope of moral prohibitions expressed as property rights, must increase to limit demand for authority.
Demand for Authority: As a general rule, if a delay in the production of property rights evolves, then demand for authority will fill the vacuum with some form of authority to either suppress retaliation (conflict) or to prevent circumstances leading to conflict, or both.

THE REASONS FOR THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION

INGROUP COOPERATION

The disproportionately high return on cooperation.
The differences in abilities at different ages.
The difference in reproductive role and strategy between the genders.
The differences in abilities among men.
The local structure of production: the division of knowledge and labor.
The local structure of the reproduction: family and inheritance rights.
The distribution of property rights between the individual, family, group and the commons.
The degree of suppression of, and intolerance for, free riding both in and out of family.
calculative, cooperative technology available for economic signaling and coordination. (objective truth, numbers, money, prices, interest, writing, contract, and accounting).
The use of formal institutions to perpetuate these constraints.
The competition from groups with alternate structures of production, family, inheritance, property rights, free riding, cooperative technologies, and formal institutions.

OUTGROUP COOPERATION

The geographical distribution of nature-given factors of production. (note that this is last.)

PROPERTARIANISM: PROPERTY RIGHT

OBVERSE: A prohibition on the imposition of costs against those categories of property that in-group members are willing to enforce by means of organized violence.

REVERSE: a warranty by peers (right) that they will either enforce restitution for impositions of costs upon certain categories of your property, and/or that they will not retaliate against you for your acts of retaliation or restitution for such impositions.

RESULT?

(i) PROPERTY: that which we demonstrate that we have born costs to acquire without imposing costs upon others with whom we cooperate.

(ii) COOPERATION: constructing an asymmetry of incentives such that we choose to concentrate efforts by dividing labor in order to obtain the disproportionate rewards of doing so versus the alternatives.

(iii) MORALITY: that which we require in order to rationally cooperate.

(iv) RIGHT: Sanction of retaliation in case of abridgment. OBLIGATION: Requirement of performance.

(v) LAW (PROPERTY RIGHT): that which we promise to one another to insure.

—END OF ANALYSIS–

—“We totally reject the idea that people must be forcibly protected from themselves. A libertarian society would have no laws against drugs, gambling, pornography —and no compulsory seat belts in cars. We also reject the idea that people have an enforceable claim on others, for anything more than being left alone. A libertarian society would have no welfare, no Social Security system. People who wished to aid others would do so voluntarily through private charity, instead of using money collected by force from the taxpayers. People who wished to provide for their old age would do so through private insurance.”—p5

Or, more honestly stated, the author, on behalf of those with preferences for liberty, rejects contributions to the commons, while obtaining dividends (benefits) from the physical, normative and institutional commons. He rejects moral payments (forgone costs of self-gratification by imposing costs upon others). He rejects contributing to the signaling economy which supplies necessary information about who to aspire to through imitation. He rejects payment for the defense of the commons that succors him. He rejects insuring one another in that commons against hardship.

While we do not wish to pay for commons we do not use, do not want, or disagree with providing is different from prohibiting the construction of those commons altogether – especially when they are a demonstrable competitive advantage.

The central problem here is that property rights themselves are a commons, constructed and paid for as a commons. They must be. Especially since they vary so much from group to group.

—“People who wish to live in a ‘virtuous’ society, surrounded by others who share their ideas of virtue, would be free to set up their own communities and to contract with each other so as to prevent the ‘sinful’ from buying or renting within them. “—-p5

And conversely, those that wish to act parasitically and predatorily will be ‘allowed’ by neighboring communities to exist? Except that empirically that never occurs. We exterminate parasites whenever possible (pirates), and tolerate them only in very limited conditions (gypsies). As Benjamin Ginsberg illustrates, the tendency of jews to form an alliance with state against the host population pays early benefits at the to cost of eventual suppression. These are just facts of human existence. It is irrational to ask people to act contrary to their incentives.

—“Those who wished to live communally could set up their own communes. But nobody would have a right to force his way of life upon his neighbor.—p5

This is a meaningless statement that conflates a moral justification with a contractual right. 1) A right can only be obtained in contractual exchange. 2) A moral justification means only that third parties will not retaliate against acts of forcible restitution in response to impositions of costs.

In the case of neighbors with varying moral codes, a contract would need to be negotiated, or, one would have to behave toward neighbors according to whichever had the objectively highest moral standard. Otherwise violence (retribution) would ensue. In all cases we know of the parasitic community – meaning the one with lower suppression of parasitism, is usually exterminated by the one with higher levels.

—“The difficulty comes in defining what it means to be ‘left alone’. We live in a complicated and interdependent society; each of us is constantly affected by events thousands of miles away, occurring to people he has never heard of. How, in such a society, can we meaningfully talk about each person being free to go his own way?”— p5.

Society is not complicated at all. Of extant societies, some are objectively more moral (Germans and Finns) and some are objectively less moral (Pakistanis and Gypsies). Some societies have been able to suppress parasitism in nearly all walks of life (germans) and some have been unable to eliminate it at all, much of arabic africa, as well as most of the middle east, and some actively construct parasitism through dual ethics (Gypsies and to a lesser degree, Jews).

—“The answer to this question lies in the concept of property rights. “—

That is a presumption that merely justifies the conclusion, rather than empirically or logically determining how people can and must live in proximity with one another (or cohabitate) and cooperate without conflict and retribution. The answer may or may not be reducible to a contract of property rights, but as yet the author (DF) has failed to identify the reason such rights would be rationally exchanged in a contract between more moral and less moral parties, or even between any parties.

Instead, the answer to the question is how we prevent retaliation between objectively higher moral groups, and objectively lower moral groups. Objectively more moral groups appear to attempt to conquer less moral groups who in turn appear to prey upon their more moral neighbors. In effect, property rights were constructed by force as a means of extending higher morality to people with lower morality. The world was ‘settled’ or ‘civilized’ by the forcible imposition of property rights upon those who wished access to markets that were defended by warriors or soldiers.

The first question of politics is ‘why don’t I kill, enslave, conquer, or steal from you by some combination of violence, deception and remuneration? The answer is that at least over the long term, cooperation is disproportionately rewarding assuming a marginal indifference in our ethics and morals. Otherwise whether we cooperate or conquer, or exterminate is merely a question of cost and benefit. Cooperation, even if limited, is usually preferable the alternatives, assuming the long term does not produce an accumulation of costs that outweigh the near-term benefits. (Weaker people tend to place greater weight on not offending (provoking retaliatory sentiments) upon others, even by the use of truthful speech. And stronger people are only concerned with cost and benefit analysis. This difference largely mirrors the differing reproductive strategies of the genders and mirrors male and female intuitions developed during our evolutionary history. (Hence why females do not defend borders and males do.)

—“The vast majority of income is the result of human actions.”—p5

This statement, like that of Mises proposed Axiom of Action, is meaningless. That we must act tells us nothing other than that we can move in time and space – not why we act. Man is an extremely expensive creature as life forms go. And as such man must acquire resources. So man must acquire. He acts to acquire. His prosperity is determined by the return on his actions to acquire.

Cooperation in a division of knowledge and labor is a disproportionately rewarding action – so much so, that without it, it’s nearly impossible to survive, and with it, and increasing numbers of it, we prosper. So, instead of income being the result of action, it is the result of action to acquire, and the most valuable thing one can acquire is cooperation, and opportunity for cooperation, and debts of cooperation.

The vast majority of income is the result of using incentives to voluntarily organize production in a complex division of knowledge and labor. The central problem of any group is determining how to organize the inter-temporal invention, production, distribution, trade, and consumption for the purpose of intergenerational persistence. Everything beyond that is mere luxury. This is why capitalists, entrepreneurs, managers and project managers are rewarded more so than the laborers. The hard task is not the production itself, but the organization of that production given the resources with which to provide incentives to engage in production. This is the reason why managers and investors and generals (law makers) are more highly compensated for their actions than laborers. Labor is a constant, and individually nearly valueless commodity. Organizing it is where increases in productivity are created. One can attempt to organize it by gossip (religion) under threat of ostracization. One can forcibly organize it through threats of harm. Or one can voluntarily organize it through remunerative incentives.

—“Two facts make property institutions necessary. The first is that different people pursue different ends. …”—p7

Like the ‘axiom of action’ vs “man must acquire, and act to acquire”, and like ‘non-aggression’ vs ‘non imposition of costs against whatever others acquire by the same principle’, the statement ‘people pursue different ends is also meaningless.

All creatures pursue different ends. That tells us nothing about man, just as ‘man acts’ and ‘non-aggression’ tell us nothing. Just as the null statements “man acts”, “non-aggression”, and “scarcity” these concepts use loading and framing, as a means of distraction and to perform suggestion to overload our reason. In other words, these half-truths appeal to our European intuitions, to fill in what is unstated, but if the unstated is stated, then these half truths are obviously falsehoods.

Instead, the unique property of man is that we can choose to cooperate, choose to not cooperate, or choose to parasite, or choose to conquer or kill. Just as we usually create mixed economies, we also create mixed polities: we exchange cooperation and insurance while others press the limits of both.

—“The second fact is that there exist some things which are sufficiently scarce that they cannot be used by everyone as much as each would like.”—p7

Scarcity is a universally unknowable, marginal indifference because I cannot know it and act on it. Cost is particular, knowable, and decidable because of marginal differences. It is praxeologically existential. I can know and act on it. I know only that the cost of acquisition is lower or higher by one means or another.

Scarcity is a necessary constraint between states, that need not reduce local transaction costs, but which must avoid conflict despite differences in in-group (local) rules.

Morality is important between individuals, because they must reduce transaction costs sufficiently to engage in production in a division of knowledge and labor. Morality prohibits free riding, and is determined by costs that are knowable by the actors.

Polities must form laws (rules) of cooperation, that mix the necessary rules of morality (prohibition on free riding), with the rules necessary for the production of commons, with the utilitarian allocation of privileges (norms) that assist in either parasitism or the organization of production or both.

Cosmopolitans have been trying to justify separatism as a means of avoiding contribution to the commons. They have not described necessary properties of cooperation; nor the necessary properties of rule of law, under which a group of people can cooperate without allocation of discretion to individuals with authority.

—“The only assertion of rights of property that I have run across is the assertion by some conservationists that certain objects—a redwood tree, for instance—have an inherent right not to be destroyed. If a man bought land on which such a tree stood, asserted his right to cut the tree down, and was opposed by a conservationist acting, not on any right of his own, but in defense of the rights of the tree, we would truly have a conflict between ‘human rights’ and ‘property rights’. That was not the situation envisioned by those who coined the phrase.”—p7

Two errors in this paragraph:

(1) It is true that a tree cannot ‘have’ rights any more than man ‘has’ natural rights. The tree cannot enter into cooperation, and man must obtain rights in exchange with another who offers them. Neither right is existential. We merely use the verbal convenience that man ‘has’ rights and that the tree ‘has’ rights as a convenient deceit. But since we start with the deceits of natural rights, and human rights, then by extension, anthropomorphized entities ‘have’ natural rights by deceitful analogy as well. So the deceit of natural rights, as a consequence has led to the development of the deceit of anthropomorphic rights.

(2) Demonstrated Property exists prior to cooperation. Engaging in cooperation leads to both (a) a subset of demonstrated property that the group are willing to enforce restitution and punishment for; and (b) the construction of new property rights from the results of cooperation that we call ‘commons’.

Since a social order is constructed, must be constructed, and since land is held, and is only held by means of organized violence; and since we are all dependent upon land, sea, air and information, then groups determine what rights are granted to the land property. In almost all cultures obtains one or more of the following rights to land: “Transitus(transit), Usus(use), Fructus (fruits of),Mancipio(transfer), and Abusus(consumption)”.

((

NOTE: See:

– Usufructus Under Propertarianism: http://www.propertarianism.com/…/usufructs-under-propertar…/

– Limited Market Monopoly Rights : http://www.propertarianism.com/…/rights-of-limited-market-…/

))

In practice all groups limit rights of Transitus, Mancipio and Abusus, and as such rights of Usus and Fructus require the preservation of the inter-temporal value of land. But the question is why? The answer is that the tree exists as a good, that you did not construct, and which you wish to privatize. In other words you did not improve the land, and therefore you did not earn its fruits. Had to created an orchard and wished to harvest it you would have a claim. As we see throughout human history, groups require contribution (production) in order to obtain benefits. Otherwise one is merely a parasite. If the group later protects the tree after your purchase of the land, then they may offer you compensation or not depending upon the length of time that the matter has been under consideration.

One cannot escape the cost of defense. He who determines the allocation of property in a territory is its owner. Everyone else has permission. If the owner is a class, that class owns it, and the rest do not. If the owner is militial, then all are its owners by necessity. If the order is produced voluntarily then by definition all are shareholders in the territory. We only obtain

REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES

We all follow our reproductive strategies. Males evolved to work in tribes of brothers to eliminate other tribes of brothers, and to acquire their females. Females within these tribes must co-habitate with various other females such that they and their offspring survive. The male strategy is to hold territory and females against competitors. The female strategy is to place the burden of care of her offspring upon the tribe. And to maintain that burden through gossip, care-taking, affection and sex. Male strategy is martial and conservative: seeking to preserve the strength of the tribe over generations through hierarchy, order and purity. Female strategy is collective: use sex, affection, care, gossip, rallying, and shaming to control the influence of and dominance of alphas, so that they can increase the pool of resource-providers by trading various forms options on care, affection, and sex, and control their reproduction even if bound by desirability as a mate by “pairing-off”. Male strategy is is to conquer when necessary or possible, acquire and produce constantly as demonstration of status so he obtains best pairing off opportunities – or near dominance of the gene pool at extremes. Female strategy is to avoid conflict, acquire as parasitically as possible without undermining her safety, collect allies for gossip rallying and shaming, and to control consumption and distribution of resources to offspring.

Most of us, being neither god-like or goddess-like, practice our reproductive strategy between these two ends of the masculine and feminine spectrum. This reproductive meritocracy is still very visible in western man because we never had to develop centralized government in order to manage the problem of irrigation: our lands are wet enough to farm without substantive infrastructure investment, and we have nearly constant proximity to fishing, and we held sufficient livestock for survival on the same limited plots of land. Instead of central governments we developed manorialism: controlled allocation of lands to those capable of producing and organizing production on them. We near-bred, and maintained pairing off by attraction in most cases. And it was pairs (married couples) that obtained access to land and therefore production and reproduction. Western eugenic civilization (what we call conservatism) had operated by this process for at least the past two thousand if not the past four thousand years.

Diasporic jews rely on the female strategy: survival within a host by privatizing the commons, parasitic consumption, and controlling that host through gossip, rallying, shaming, on one hand, and undue praise, unwarranted advocacy, on the other. Their numbers being small this technique was of limited value aside from retaining members and ensuring group cohesion, until the advent of inexpensive written media, then mass market written media, then finally movies, radio, and television, which functioned as an amplifier for their gossip,

Some group evolutionary strategies are superior in tactics but inferior in results (Islamic war by erosion, immigration, conquest, and manufacture of ignorance.) Some are inferior both in tactics and in results (Judaism and Gyspies both of whom exist only because hosts signal status by not dispelling them). Some are superior in tactics but inferior in results (Anglo Christendom). And some superior in tactics and results (Germanic Christendom). And most are weak in tactics and weak in results (China, Russia, Catholic Christendom, all of the Southeast Asia).

What separates these groups is their success or failure at producing trust: the extension of kinship love to extended relations, and the extension of it to **customers** of their goods and services. This is the central proposition of Christianity: extirpation of hatred from the human heart, and the extension of kinship trust to all.

But our extension of kinship trust pre-dates Christianity. For the same reason that we do not suffer from the authoritarian hierarchy and inbreeding of competing cultures: we never formed central states and large armies until Rome in the ancient period, and until Napoleon gave us ‘Total War’ in the modern. Prior to that period, the militia (every armed man) constituted the main body of soldiers, and a small group of heavily armed professional warriors the leadership. Men supplied their own training and weapons and lived or died by both. Families funded their men’s armor and equipment. So fighting was not industrialized but analogous to an organization of small business leaders. More importantly, their battle tactics, relying on small numbers, required coordination, and a promise to bear losses on behalf of the group if necessary. So out of the ancient initiatic brotherhood of soldiers we developed oath, truth-telling and trust. And because these men had to convince their fellow ‘brothers in arms’ to use one tactic or another, and because these debates were not over trivialities such as the meaning of words, or the interpretation of scripture, but over matters of life and death, … so every man woman and child in at least the middle and upper classes understood truth-telling, even if they abused it.

Germanic Christianity amplified the existing aristocratic ethos much of which was Mithraic already. Christianity owes more to Mithraism practiced by soldiers than it does to dual ethical, separatist and rebellious Judaism. So much so that it troubled early church thinkers.

Truth telling is a western invention. Truth is a western invention. Science is merely the application of truth telling to the analysis of the world beyond our direct observation. We use the scientific method to cleanse error, superstition, bias, imagination, wishful thinking, loading and framing, and deception from our words.

PROPERTARIANISM: SELF REFORM RATHER THAN CRITICISM OF OTHERS

Unlike other authors I do not complain about the use of a reproductive strategy by any group – that would be illogical. I complain about my group’s failure to resist a competing and parasitic or immoral reproductive strategy. I argue that we should return western man to his successful group evolutionary strategy: the one that has raised man out of ignorance and poverty in both the ancient world and in the modern. And that it’s terribly easy to return us to that status with minor changes in our classical liberal government.

PHILOSOPHY IS AN EXCEPTIONAL VEHICLE FOR LYING BY LOADING, FRAMING, AND OVERLOADING

Rationalist philosophy has been an exceptional vehicle for lying, deception, and the source of death and destruction – just as has mystical religion has been. Abraham, The early Church, Aquinas, Kant, Marx, the entire socialist movement, the entire postmodern movement, Mises, Popper, Rothbard and Hoppe attempted to construct internally consistent half truths as means of deception by overloading.

SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF TRUTH-TELLING

Once we understand that western thought is the record of the struggle to speak the truth for peoples whose social order relies upon a judge and jury of peers rather than authority, it becomes clear that scientists and mathematicians were the most successful in their niches, and but that these fields constitute only subsets of properties necessary for speaking the truth.

If we unify Science, Social Science, Philosophy, Morality and Law, it is much harder to conduct this scale and complexity of lying.

AGAINST LIBERTINISM – ESCAPING PAYMENT FOR COMMONS, and LIVING PARASITICALLY – THE FALSE FACE OF LIBERTY

Pacifist (peasant and merchant) libertarianism is little more than gossip: begging at the foot of the state, trying to get PERMISSION to enjoy some analogy to liberty. Aristocratic Egalitarian Libertarianism actively denies others the possibility of infringing upon liberty by the constant threat of violence should they attempt it. There is no difference between morality and liberty except the person we address with it: an individual in the private sector, or a member of the public sector.

Or put in Propertarian terms, whining, whimpering, pleading, chastising and justifying are just excuses to do nothing to advance liberty and feel good about it, or send signals about it, or relying upon ‘faith’ while waiting to get liberty at a discount, rather than pay the high cost of denying others access to your property. It’s just another version of the christian ‘waiting for the savior’ expressed in secular language. Liberty will not arrive by divine fiat with any greater certainty than any other savior.

The source of liberty is, and can only be constructed by, the organized application of violence by every living soul that desires it. And liberty is only earned by those willing to use violence to deny others the ability to infringe upon our liberty.

The cause of moral intuition is the prohibition on free riding: harm, theft, cheating, and trying to get something at a discount at other’s expense.

For millennia one gained property rights by fighting for them or committing to fight for them. That is the only means of possessing property rights – by obtaining them in exchange from others who are willing to fight for them. This is the only existentially possible construction of liberty.

Everyone else is a free-rider – a thief. If they possess liberty, then it is only because those willing to use violence to deny others access to property give it to them. Pacifist libertarianism is IMMORAL by that objective standard.

This operational construction of liberty by organized violence then, is a DESCRIPTIVE ethic. Rather than all the Continental verbalisms that cosmopolitan libertarians rely upon by taking cues from the obscurantism of the French, the Germans, the Marxists, and Socialists. In other words, it is the difference between violent action, and critical gossip.

One does not ask for permission from liberty any more than he asks bricks to organize themselves into a wall. That wall is constructed out of many deliberate actions which result it its standing or not. Liberty is constructed by the organized application of violence to suppress every instance of parasitism whether physical, verbal, external, or conspiratorial.

TRUTH IS ENOUGH: END THE LIES

The secret of the west was our demand of truthful testimony from one another as part of the initiatic brotherhood of warriors. From that testimony all science, medicine, philosophy, and law arose – and caused our rapid success in both the ancient and modern world.

Truth is enough to stop the various complex lies that arose in each era. With science we defeated religion – the first and tragically successful conversion of the west. with science we are in the process of defeating a century of pseudoscience in the social sciences – the second attempt at converting the west.

While the last centuries conservatives and libertarians failed to solve what they called the problem of the social sciences, we are no longer bound by that limitation. It is just as possible to hold people accountable for their speech in the commons as it is to hold scientists accountable for their publications in the sciences, and just as it is possible to hold people accountable for their testimony in court.

Truth is enough. We invented truth. We were destroyed by the lies of monotheism. We will not be destroyed this time by the lies of pseudoscience, and rationalism as an obscurant technology of deception.

End the lies. No more lies from the political platform. No more lies from the Academy’s Lectern, No more lies from the intellectual’s media. No more lies from the priest’s pulpit, or temple’s altar.

End the lies. End the century of lies. The cost will be as great as teaching literacy and science. But the alternative is extinction of the only civilization that ever invented truth telling.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine.