[C]ultures are portfolios of property rights. The composition of, and distribution of those property rights, varies from culture to culture. In each culture, those rights are expressed as norms. Property rights themselves are a norm. Those property rights perpetuated by norms may be more or less beneficial than other portfolios of property rights. But any idiot who thinks that (a) formal institutions don’t matter – such as libertarians or (b) that formal institutions are sufficient – such as progressives, will have history prove him wrong to the chagrin of the people who understand (c) that norms are a form of property – conservatives. Norms are a commons that we all pay for. The tax we pay for them with is forgone opportunity to consume them, and absorbing the risk that no others will absorb them too. Aristocratic Egalitarian Culture (The West) prohibits not just fraud, theft and violence, but the more deceptive versions of fraud: profit from asymmetry of knowledge, and profit from involuntary transfer via externalities. Market competition itself, is an involuntary transfer via externality from people outside of the exchange (competitors). This is why humans naturally object to it, and must be trained to respect and practice competition. But this externality provides instruction and incentive to all in the market, such that we all seek greater variety and lower cost of production. It produces beneficial ends. But it is non-trivial to create the norm of respecting and practicing competition. That’s why so few cultures did it. [R]othbard was wrong. The market isn’t sufficient to maintain the norms against fraud theft and violence, and certainly not against externalities. The marginal impact of reputation in the market is lower than the marginal impact of fraud. That’s why only the west developed the high trust society – by out-breeding such that the entire nation to be an extended family – at least within it’s social classes. Without excessive out-breeding that destroyed the perception of extended family through common physical properties, and common normative behavior. In order to retain the sense of extended family, both physical properties and normative properties must be similiar enough that signaling is consisten within the group, and only class (selection quality) within the extended family differentiates between group members. Trust. The extension of familial trust to all possible exchange partners, by prohibitions on externality and asymmetry, when backed by warranty, is the composition that creates the high – trust society. Only AFTER these informal institutions are enforced by formal institutions, even if only the formal institution of the common law, will trust develop. And with trust, the velocity of trade that makes extraordinary marginal wealth possible for a group, because that group is more competitive than other groups.
Author: Curt Doolittle
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The Economist Magazine Is Wrong On Oligarchs: Flaunt It. Flaunt It Everywhere. Always.
The Economist: Don’t Flaunt It*That’s what a Republic is. A Natural Rotation Of Oligarchs.* [E]very country has an oligarchy. Oligarchies are NECESSARY and they are unavoidable. The question is which composition of people do you want to be governed by: (a) soldiers, (b) priests or (c) commerce? Why that list of three? Because there are only three forms of coercion avalable for humans to use in building organizations: (a) violence, (b) ostracization from opportunity and (c) exchange – or, technically, remuneration. If, as we have seen, people DEMONSTRATE that they UNIVERSALLY prefer to live under conditions of wealth, and only ONE of these three coercive sets CREATES wealth, then it is only logical, that china DUPLICATES the rise of the West’s aristocracy – which is the SOURCE of western prosperity – by having government run by people who udnerstaand commerce. And in particular, who understand nationalism as a commercial strategy. THEY DO IT RIGHT. WE DO IT WRONG NOW. Our leaders are priests of egalitarianism – who assume business will succeed and that they can simply plunder business at will. They are Not aristocrats responsible for the economic welfare of their citizens. China is doing it RIGHT. They’re doing it RIGHT by imitating the rise of the WEST. The rise that we were programmed by the left to believe was evil, colonial, oppressive, masculine. When in fact, we dragged all of humanity out of pervasive ignorance and poverty with our aristocratic christian ethics, technology, and culture. FLAUNT IT. FLAUNT IT EVERY DAY. AND CHEER THOSE WHO FLAUNT IT.
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The Economist Magazine Is Wrong On Oligarchs: Flaunt It. Flaunt It Everywhere. Always.
The Economist: Don’t Flaunt It*That’s what a Republic is. A Natural Rotation Of Oligarchs.* [E]very country has an oligarchy. Oligarchies are NECESSARY and they are unavoidable. The question is which composition of people do you want to be governed by: (a) soldiers, (b) priests or (c) commerce? Why that list of three? Because there are only three forms of coercion avalable for humans to use in building organizations: (a) violence, (b) ostracization from opportunity and (c) exchange – or, technically, remuneration. If, as we have seen, people DEMONSTRATE that they UNIVERSALLY prefer to live under conditions of wealth, and only ONE of these three coercive sets CREATES wealth, then it is only logical, that china DUPLICATES the rise of the West’s aristocracy – which is the SOURCE of western prosperity – by having government run by people who udnerstaand commerce. And in particular, who understand nationalism as a commercial strategy. THEY DO IT RIGHT. WE DO IT WRONG NOW. Our leaders are priests of egalitarianism – who assume business will succeed and that they can simply plunder business at will. They are Not aristocrats responsible for the economic welfare of their citizens. China is doing it RIGHT. They’re doing it RIGHT by imitating the rise of the WEST. The rise that we were programmed by the left to believe was evil, colonial, oppressive, masculine. When in fact, we dragged all of humanity out of pervasive ignorance and poverty with our aristocratic christian ethics, technology, and culture. FLAUNT IT. FLAUNT IT EVERY DAY. AND CHEER THOSE WHO FLAUNT IT.
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Are There Objectively Moral Statements?
“There is no such thing as objective morality only preferences and demonstrated preferences.” I’m not sure that’s true. [I]n every society, the portfolio of norms consisting of maners (signals of fitness for voluntary transfer), ethics and morals (prohibitions on involuntary transfer), vary considerably. But all of them are signals of fitness, signals of contribution to a commons, and prohibitions on involuntary transfer. Some of these suites of property rights produce superior economic outcomes, and some inferior. That’s true. But they aren’t preferences. Norms are not preferences they are artifacts of the process of evolutionary cooperation according to prejudices (pre-judgements). Given that human beings universally eschew involuntary transfer, in every possible culture and circumstance, and will act twice as hard to punish it as they will for their own interest, its clear that it’s not a purely subjective phenomenon. And in fact it is a necessary phenomenon which genetics must eventually enforce. So while the arrangement of property rights and obligations in any set of norms may vary, the fact that humans observe norms out of prohibition on involuntary transfer is entirely objective. So, moral actions are only a preference in those cases where normative codes, like laws, are general proscriptions, and where for specific circumstances, one’s actions do not create an involuntary transfer. Moral codes may correctly or incorrectly constituted at any given moment (because they are intergenerational habits and must be constantly re-tested by each generation). But as long as they are prohibitions on involuntary transfers, then they are in fact, objective. If members of a group observe a set of norms, and by observing those norms, forgo opportunities for gratification or self interest, then they have in fact paid for those norms. If others do not pay for those norms, and constrain themselves to signaling, then that’s not an involuntary transfer.if however, others choose to sieze opportunities created by the normative sacrifice of others, then that’s theft, plain and simple. This is a quick treatment of one of mankind’s most challenging topics, but hopefully it will at least give you a few ideas. – Curt BTW: ALSO a) an action is a demonstrated preference. b) a preference is a demonstrated bias c) a bias may or may not be subject to cognition d) a habit is not subject to cognition, thats’ the value of them. They’re cheap. e) a normative habit is rarely understood, but almost universally practiced. Which is the reason we even have this conversation in the first place. f) a metaphysical bias is not subject to cognition, it’s almost never understood by anyone in any culture.
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Property, Praxeology And Violence
[U]nfortunately, while humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption that is made possible by the combination of private property, the division of knowledge and labor, and the experimental innovation the market drives us to, humans also demonstrate an equal preference for violence, theft, fraud, omission, interference, free riding, privatization of the commons, socialization of losses, rent seeking, corruption, organizing for the purposes of extortion, and organizing for plunder and conquest via war. All of these forms of theft from the most direct to the most subtle, in the absence of the threat of violence, are easier means of competition than is the risky and personal act of speculative production we must engage in, if we choose to compete in the market for goods and services. Only a minority of us demonstrate a preference for the market, and by consequence, demonstrate a preference for private property: which is to eschew, at high cost to ourselves, the tempting portfolio of thefts – and instead work to consume exclusively via voluntary, informed, exchange that is the product of guesswork, planning, foresight and risk. For these reasons – these praxeologically obvious reasons – any portfolio of property rights, from the most collective, to the most individual, to the most totalitarian, and within that portfolio, the scope property ranging from simple personal possessions to complex anonymous contractual commitments; has been and must be imposed on a body of people by the threat of violence. [T]he concept and practice of liberty was created by egalitarian aristocrats who granted property rights to those who equally respected property rights of their peers, and who fought to preserve them at great personal cost. Moral arguments as to the utility of private property are specious. They are an attempt to obtain the right of private property at a discount – despite the fact that the majority do not favor those rights for either themselves or others. That the enlightenment’s emergent middle class philosophers tried to justify taking power from the aristocracy by fabricating moral and utilitarian arguments was a necessary political ruse at the time. But we if we desire to preserve our vestiges of freedom we should not confuse that ruse with the factual reality that all systems of property rights are imposed by the threat of violence. It is praxeologically illogical to suggest that those who would compete better in the absence of private property, should suffer lower state in order to yield to the desires of those others who may be more successful under private property. This makes no sense. As such, the only defense is the offensive application of organized violence for the purpose of implementing one system of property rights and obligations over another. [A]ristocracy is a functional synonym for private property – and private property a right gained in exchange for reciprocity both in the respect of private property and the obligation to use one’s wealth of violence to ensure the perpetuation of the portfolio of property rights that we call ‘private property’ at the expense and exclusion of all other possible portfolios of property rights.
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Statism And Corporatism vs Partnerships And The Common Law
[C]an you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development. If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions. The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts. Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution. [A]narchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so. We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.
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Reading: On Law As A Problem Of Calculation, Coordination, And Dispute Resolution, In The Face Of Necessary Ignorance And Diversity Of Interest
[T]he common law depends upon experience (scientific evidence), not logic or reason (untested theory), and is relatively impervious to authoritarian influence. In any reading list on Law, I don’t necessarily want to communicate the history of law, so much as emphasize the pervasive problems of the social cognitive biases: a) False Consensus bias, b) the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, c) Projection Bias, d) Trait Ascription Bias, e) the Illusion of Transparency, that are largely the product of the introduction of women into the voting pool, and their alliance with, and support of, marginal male groups who can obtain power by the use of the near universalism of these female cognitive biases, because these cognitive biases suit the reproductive strategies of females in our prehistoric, pre-agrarian phase of development. 1) Bastiat’s The Law 2) Epstein’s Simple Rules For A Complex World 3) Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (as well as Hayek and Popper on knowledge) 4) Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Common Law 4) Milsen’s A Natural History of The Common Law CLUES TO ADAPTING TO THE 21ST CENTURY 1) Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (Believe it or not), my interpretation of Johnson’s Three Methods Of Coercion (see my site), and Perhaps Arnold’ Kling’s pamphlet “The Tree Languages Of Politics”. In particular I love kling’s metaphors both in the Three Languages, and in his “Recalculation” description of recessions. These are both accurate categorical descriptions but they are not sufficiently causally descriptions. Haidt solves the problem of the three languages. I think in my works I’ve sufficiently combined these different perspectives and using Haidt and property rights, I’ve unified these systems into causal relations. (Which new, and is why people have trouble understanding what I’m trying to get across at present.) 2/2) I want to add here Rothbard’s Ethics of Private Property. But since his moral code is incomplete (and therefore false), and his definition of property incomplete, because he was creating an ethic of rebellion not one of civilization, I’ll just have to wait until I finish my own work on propertarianism which corrects those errors. Without this understanding of the relationship between group size (individualism), reproductive strategy, morality, and property it is impossible to adapt the common law to the complex heterogeneous society, because it relies, at least in the arguments of Melvin Eisenberg and perhaps Holmes, relies on assumptions about society, and norms that cannot survive moral scrutiny in our heterogeneous social order. 3) Epstein’s How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution. The canonical history of how the feminist, progressive, liberal, socialist, and communist movement was able to effectively destroy the rule of law under the constitution. 4) Barnett’s Restoring The Lost Constitution (I don’t believe that this is possible or advisable, and instead that we must create an institutional framework that supports a diversity of genetic strategies. But his analysis of what the constitution actually said, is exceptional, and therefore it is a prescription for how to articulate the rules of future institutions.) CAVEAT [I] don’t really want to spend a lot of my time with the law. I always feel that I’m slumming and need a shower afterward. But as an institution that we both require for calculative purposes, and an institution that must adapt to contemporary diversity and heterogeneity by expanding the concepts of morality and property. To do so, it’s necessary to articulate the impact on the system of common law, which shall remain the means of contract-making and dispute resolution under any more diverse propertarian model. FALURE OF CALCULATIVE INSTITUTIONS TO FACILITATE DIVERSITY OF INTERESTS, AND THEREFORE INCENTIVES AND CALCULATION Civilizations fail because their institutions can no longer calculate cooperation and the user of resources. (ie: Jarred Diamond is wrong. and I’m not so sure about Fukuyama’s and Acemoglu’s analyses have identified this problem correctly as one of property rights.) MORE DETAIL For more detail see Kinsella’s excellent list at mises.org which also addresses the historical development of the common law. In particular Tulluck’s criticism of the method of dispute resolution. A criticism I think is solved by Hoppe’s privatization and insurance model. Hopefully this was helpful to others. Cheers
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QUESTION: “How did you come up with your company and product names?” – Jean. Com
QUESTION: “How did you come up with your company and product names?”
– Jean.
Company name: Reality by Chanting.
Product name: Oversing.
BRAND VALUE
Music. Dancing. Rythm. Joy. Stuff we do together. Moving together in a coordinated way. This is fertile territory for a brand, because it gives us material to work with in a space that is overly financial and deprived of all of those positive values. Current logo work uses a sort of hyper enthusiastic conductor haling to the throng. That’s where we going with it.
We don’t want to look like a dot bomb era ‘efficiency’ snake oil salesman. Efficiency is a chimera. Technology is something you keep pace with, not an advantage. But your company culture can be the asset second only to your customer base. And we understand that in a business where employees often feel like street walkers, that creating a joyous and familial culture is a competitive advantage that ‘s hard to duplicate.
TERMINOLOGY
Reality by Chanting and Oversing.
Both terms are forms of self-deprecating humor.
In effect we’re saying:
…”If your job is leadership, try not to take yourself too seriously – we just have a job, that job is to lead, and to lead by storytelling. Storytelling creates a mythology. A mythology is necessary for any culture, from the very great scale of a civilization to the small scale of a business, to the smallest scale of a family – to the philosophy we tell ourselves as our rules to live by.”…
But in the end, they’re just stories. We need stories and myths to help us choose in the face of incomplete information, many seemingly equal choices, and risk and uncertainty. By giving a people a set of myths, we make it very easy for them to make a lot of very small decisions that are so similar that they need ‘tie breakers’ in favor of a collective end. In this way, we ‘fund’ our civilization, company, family and selves, toward long term goals, at very little cost to us, because those goals are accomplished as a byproduct of focus on very ordinary ends. This is why cultural values matter. It’s how we work together at low cost to make great things happen. 🙂
OVERSING
“OverSing” is a colloquial african-american term from the music industry which refers to a vocalist who is trying too hard, beyond his or her ability, and usually shouting rather than singing – and perhaps losing his or her voice as a result. I like this term because it means you’re trying too hard.
Our product ‘Oversing’ tries to accomplish the goals of the owners and leaders of advertising, marketing, and technology firms, which are to steer their organizations to serve customers and do so profitably without having them resort to shouting – often uselessly. 🙂 This steering is easiest if you have a mythology. Our software doesn’t so much tell a story as show people repeatedly what’s really going on, and therefore steering them to do what’s good for the business as a byproduct of doing whatever else that tehy are doing. Think of it as accomplishing goals by raindrops rather than tidal waves.
REALITY BY CHANTING
“Realty by Chanting” is from the advertising business, but it’s origins are in the Marxist, Socialist, Progressive, Postmodernist ideological principle that if you repeat something often enough people will believe it – even if it’s obviously false. I like this idea because it is what philosophers, politicians, public intellectuals, marketers, CEO’s , Coaches, teachers and parents must do: create a cultural reality – cultural ‘values’ by chanting them until they are so pervasive that they become real to the people who hear them.
This is somewhat different from ‘the big lie’ which was popularized by George Orwell’s book 1984. Orwell took it from the progressives the progressives from the Nazis, and the Nazis from the Communists, and the Communists possibly from Nietzsche, but most likely from monotheistic religions leading back to Abraham and Zoroaster.
The idea is that for any lie to be believable it must be ‘big’, and the bigger the better. Because very popular, very big lies, have an air of legitimacy that satisfies our cognitive biases sufficiently to make us desire them to be true.
THE PREVENTION OF LIES AND THE CHANTING OF TRUTH
With Oversing we prevent lies – even big ones, and make them unnecessary. Oversing is a very transparent way of running your business. We tell everyone in the company the truth, and do it transparently. By doing this we undermine the political structure of bureaucracies that makes people in companies, particularly middle management, become self-serving rather than serve the interest of their peers and their customers. And by accident, then, they serve the business and it’s owners.
Not the other way around. 🙂
So yes, I put a little of my own nerdy philosophical humor into my company. It’s better than just combining random syllables. 🙂 That’s what we did the last time. And it was boring. 🙂
Curt Doolittle, Keiv
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 12:57:00 UTC
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NUCLEAR FAMILY, AND RELIGION Great book. Few hours worth of reading. The author
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CAK3XO8/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkTHE NUCLEAR FAMILY, AND RELIGION
Great book. Few hours worth of reading.
The author doesn’t understand, I think, the origins of our special society in Aristocratic Egalitarianism (Aristocracy), but she gets the other half right: that family and religion are not separate institutions, but inseparable and they will decline in tandem.
Her hypothesis is that we will see a reawakening of religion in response to the failure of social democracy and its religion of Secular Postmodernism.
But I”m not sure we don’t need a reformation – the same reformation that the germans have tried three times and failed at: reincorporating paganism and history into christianity.
I’d hoped to live long enough to work on that problem but I’m having enough of a handfull working on fixing the problem of government now that he family and religion have collapsed.
🙂
Curt Doolittle Kiev,
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 10:20:00 UTC
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PEOPLE Exceptional, accessible, and compassionate read
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/former-people-douglas-smith/1111013783FORMER PEOPLE
Exceptional, accessible, and compassionate read.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 09:42:00 UTC
