FIRST TO GET THIS OFF THE TABLE
—“I wish I could assume that you are acting in good faith”—
Well I will tell you how I DO NOT act in good faith:
I dont have a classroom to experiment on students. I don’t have a research budget, and I don’t have graduate students (indentured labor) to conduct experiments for me. What I do have is access to a very inexpensive medium for experimenting with arguments.
In my process of inquiry, I work very hard to construct conditions under which I can obtain what I consider honest or truthful information, vs reported information.
I work very hard to understand how and why people hold positions, and to test my theories against those positions. So all my arguments are tests. I iterate these tests about ten times before they seem to be fairly good, and then over the next few years refine them until I can state them as aphorisms or series, or something incredibly dense – effectively as verbal proofs. I construct proofs.
This work requires that I ‘get inside the heads’ of the people who hold these positions, and then reduce those positions to a series of testable criteria (incentives) regardless of position.
And since I am a philosopher of science, and a falsificationist, I do this by attacking ideas until I see if and how they survive – or not. So I investigated sovereign monarchism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, neoreaction, and now the ‘nazis’ with sympathy to understand them then I attack those ideas to falsify them. And what remains is a set of ‘goods and bads’ from each model.
In other words, in some ways, because I treat everyone I interact with in business and intellectual life, as a participant in an experiment, I am continually operating under conditions that you might consider disingenuous in the moment but profoundly moral in the end result.
I learned most of this technique negotiating (i have bought a lot of companies, closed a lot of deals, and done deals that were meritous and some I regret today as immoral. But I see my chief problem in negotiation, simply living in a world full of relative upper class scoundrels, educated imbeciles and underclass zombies, and a middle and working class that appears to consist of the only moral people extant in western society, and they are the ones that least benefit from the current order – because they are being exterminated by it.)
Now, there are a good number of people who follow me that know exactly what I am doing. And I think it is this form of cunning they appreciate almost as much as the output of my work. But in my world I am literally nothing more than a scientist using verbal experiments to investigate the human mind so that I can construct a body of law that will reverse the beneficiaries of the western order, and restore them to the middle and working classes, and save my people and our priceless civilization in doing so.
So if that ‘disenginuity’ makes me immoral somehow in your world because I am ‘using’ people, when they are voluntarily engaging in these discussions, and I have to do nothing more than stand on the top of the hill and say I’m the king in order to get them to play this very elaborate verbal game, then I think you practice a woman’s morality, rather than a man’s. I take responsibiilty for not only myself, but for my people and for mankind, and I do so by asking people to play a game with me that they willingly play, are entertained by, and learn from.
Frankly, if I didn’t have so much respect for you I wouldn’t say this but I know you are a moral man. What actually bothers me is that in my view the cost of dealing with all these shitty selfish people in all these ridiculous niches of political masturbation tires the hell out of me. But just as we must go live among the animals to understand them, and bear the costs and risks of doing so, I must do the same with every shitty immoral, selfish, justificationary, eddy of the human political tidal pool.
That is the truth as I am most capable at the moment of speaking it.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute