Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/07/cognitive-biases-ideology-control.htmlTHE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT ANSWER:

Well, if we call upon William of Ockham’s advice to criticize your psychological attribution it’s much more likely that you are engaging in selection bias, as well as rationalization, in order to justify the use of your methodology, and its measures, to produce what it is that you measure, rather than what OTHERS are measuring.

In this case, they’re measuring the full portfolio of needs and you are not.

So let’s look at why:

Because your aggregates do not take into account the full cost of your recommendations: genetic, institutional, cultural capital is the most expensive investment we have made and you’re encouraging spending it in favor of increasing populations and increasing consumption despite the overwhelming empirical evidence that it doesn’t improve happiness.

Because there are a lot of voters who intuit if they cannot fully articulate, that the cost to the family, to the civic order, to the culture, to the civilization, to history and to kin, is far higher than any incremental benefit that you can promise from increases in productivity and consumption.

Because it has become obvious that the externalities produced by your policies have created an increasingly fragile social order that cannot survive shocks in a world in which we no longer have cultural, institutional, and technological advantages that allow our middle and upper classes and our militaries to provide asymmetric economic benefits to our working, clerical, and professional classes.

Because it has become obvious that the business cycle theory is correct, and that each attempt we make to soften the correction merely extends this correction as well as all corrections that follow.

Because it has become obvious that the American and European experiment have produced precisely the failure that the Chinese encountered in their post-warring-states period where the bureaucracy absorbed the professional class to a degree that the civilization increasingly stagnated.

Because a lot of reasons.

Now, you are resorting to what we call the rhetorical fallacy of “psychologism” which is the modern equivalent of the theological prohibition on sin, and nothing more.

People act in their rational self-interest, but their rational self-interest beyond a certain limited scope, is to preserve their status, family, and culture in contrast to other families and cultures.

The right (aristocratic) philosophy of the west is reducible to the Anglo-Saxon Bipartite Manorial mandate to produce great families as the central unit of policy, production, and reproduction.

The left (underclass) philosophy of the counter-empirical-enlightenment, is reducible to the attempt to remove the eugenic advantage of good families and to raise ‘bad’ families to equal footing.

Apparently, left-leaning economists do not study the consequences of Islamic expansion and slave trade on the civilization after 1100, and the decline of the near east and north Africa as a consequence.

So it is that people correctly intuit that their “portfolio of capital” is no longer being benefitted by leftist expansion. It is one thing to provide reciprocal insurance to near kin with shared history, and another to consume genetic, institutional, cultural, and historical capital for the sake of increasing consumption that has no material impact and merely returns our cities into medieval ghettos, and modern favelas.

When we just spent over thirteen hundred years trying to reverse those possibiliites where all other civilizations in human history have failed.

That is why.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine