Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

POPPER IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR GOD – HE FAILED TOO

(from elsewhere) (good piece)

Bruce. (All)

You’re a good guy. A moral man. But you do realize that Popper failed to complete his program – even the falsificationary program – and most of what he says is pseudoscience with moral loading?

If you cannot describe something as a series of actions, then you are engaging in pseudoscientific double speak – an error of aggregation not dissimilar from the averaging of averages. Popper’s double-speak is not as artful or complete as Marx’s pseudoscientific double speak (dialectic), but it is equally untruthful: claiming parsimony that it does not contain.

We may indeed face a kaleidic future but that’s immaterial. We divide our perception, cognition, knowledge and labor, and constantly try to outwit the course of events in a deterministic non-sentient universe, for our benefits: consumption. That future needn’t be known by anyone, and cannot be. It is not the individual perception of the future that matters, but the collective outwitting of the course of events, so that we can seize the difference and call it ‘production’.

It’s true that justificationism is dead. But Critical Rationalism was incomplete. Critical Preference is a logical, not empirical statement. In fact, it appears at least, that we can choose which avenue to pursue by that which requires the lowest cost. This is identical to the means nature uses. So the least cost route appears to be the most efficient route we can ever know. So it appears that critical preference is a moral argument – a bit of advice – rather than logical or empirical argument.

I am fairly certain at this point that you are somehow desperately trying to find a source of supernatural wisdom to replace the supernatural wisdom of scripture. But it’s not to be found in Popper. Popper and his entire generation of thinkers failed to solve the problem of the social sciences. All of them. Because they were logically attached to enlightenment egalitarian, equalitarian, universalism: an advocacy of monopoly if there ever was one.

We can never stop problem-solving. Never cease innovation. Never cease competition. We can never ‘relax’ and fall upon past wisdom. Because submission is not available to man. We are the only gods we know of in this universe. Those we imagine are merely those we aspire to be. And by that aspiration we achieve.

If there is any devil, any fallen god, any fallen angel, it is the one who whispers that there is but one god. If there is one evil scripture it is equality. If but one sin it is submission. We divide our perception, cognition, knowledge, advocacy and labor, and by exchange we collectively compute that which is necessary to persist.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine