THE FAILURE OF SOCIALISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
“Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice. “
Hicks, Stephen R. C. (2010-10-19). Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Kindle Locations 2183-2185). Ockham’s Razor Publishing / Scholargy. Kindle Edition.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-30 07:59:00 UTC
ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT AND ACCURATE
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 10:21:00 UTC
CONSERVATISM AND THE ANIMAL “RIGHTS” MOVEMENT
(chapter excerpt)
Conservative view of man’s relation to nature is heroic:
That nature is ours to modify for our benefit.
That nature is capricious and something we must pacify for our safety.
That the purpose of man’s life is to leave the world better for having lived in it.
This is an heroic view of man that is as ancient as the indo-european peoples.
Meaning:
(a) animals do not have ‘rights’ – this is an absurdity – they are not human. In conservatism (which means “european aristocratic egalitarianism”). Even humans must ‘earn’ rights – which is why we take them away if they misbehave. Animals can’t earn rights. (perhaps dogs to some minor degree.)
(b) that we should care for animals because we desire to, because our world is better to live in if we have them. True. This is the logical reasoning, not ‘rights’.
(c) that disregard for animals that we have normatively chosen to care for, and which are under our control,
(d) that laziness in caring for animals is likely laziness in caring for people. True.
(e) that cruelty to animals is likely cruelty to humans – and therefore you are unfit to live among humans. True.
Unfortunately, this is an argument to NORMS: demonstrating the human character necessary to possess ‘rights’. Conservatives place extremely high value on norms. Progressives do not. The progressive movement is largely an attack on conservative (aristocratic egalitarian) norms. And the progressive movement has managed to, at least in education and other major areas of life, discredit norms. And therefore the progressive movement has lost the ability to market policy that requires adherence to norms. And therefore has, out of necessity, used the specious argument of ‘rights’, because it is the only means of justifying legal action that they have available to them.
Of course, what may not be obvious is that:
(a) it is not possible for animals to possess rights – a right is something that can be reciprocally granted and animals cannot conceive of this (except perhaps for domesticated dogs..)
(b) that the word “right” is an attempt to load, or frame, animals anthropomorphically. in order to misrepresent the normative utility of protecting animals as a resource, as one open to legal rather than normative control. In other words, it’s common marketing fraud.
(c) that caretaking, even anthropomorpized caretaking, provides women with oxcytocin reactions, and that many females are addicted to this reaction. It is not rational. It is drug addiction. It’s just relatively harmless drug addiction. So our political policy is being driven by logically confused drug addicts using a deceptive marketing campaign, not reason. In which case we would simply sell off the management of wild animals to private firms who would specialize in it and figure out how to make it profitable (the way we have with deer hunting in america).
(d) that the female psyche evolved, and cooperation evolved, as a means of controlling alphas by gossip, complaint and excitement, to motivate the non-alpha males to organize against, and punish or kill the alphas, so that the females could control their own breeding rather than be the mere victims of alphas. And that there is a significant correlation between the female members of the animal rights movement and their reproductive status.
(e) That the anti-fur movement is absurd, and counter to the benefit of animals and man. It is a renewable resource. It encourages the protection of the species. It is inexpensive. It is excellent protection against the cold, and it’s beautiful. This same argument applies to hunting. And to wild animals. Because if wild animals were ‘owned’ rather than a ‘commons’ owners would protect them far better than governments do – just like we do with domesticated animals.
This is a fairly damning critique of REASONING USED by the animal rights movement. It is not however a critique of the conservative normative proscription.
The conservative (aristocratic egalitarian) proscription is that if you do not care for animals as if they are the commons that they are, and a commons that we have assumed responsibilty for from nature, that you have not EARNED the right from other humans to administer that commons on their behalf, and therefore they will withdraw your rights, which they reciprocally grant you, because you are unfit to live with rights, among others, who have them.
Conservatives are rational but their moral code is ancient and they speak of it in metaphorical terms not suitable for an era where scientific language has all but replaced metaphor. And this is why I write philosophy – to repair conservatism (aristocratic egalitarianism) by articulating it rationally.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 02:57:00 UTC
LETTER TO MATT B
(quite intelligent and literate fellow)
Matt…
Found you by accident. I was searching for comments on Veblen using google’s filter by advanced language. I suppose that is a compliment from Google on your writing.
I love your poetic language. I appreciate it. I appreciate it for its associations if not its imprecision. I have too scientific an understanding of man to agree with the actuality or possibility of what you write, but it does not mean that if it were possible I would not rather live in such a world. I would. But advocating for the impossible is not within my character or aspirations.
We have feelings for reasons. Most of them are positive toward plenty, cautious toward cooperation, negative toward scarcity, and vividly against involuntary transfers, by cheating, fraud or theft. In this sense, humans are rational creatures in so far as their abilities and cognitive biases permit them to be – and prospect theory seems to best describe our behavior.
But while nature guaranteed our progeny and perpetuation with oxytocin that provides us with good feelings from care-taking, that hormonal response is an insufficient method by which to provide people with incentives – in no small part because the distribution of sensitivity to these hormones varies considerably between individuals, groups and genders. The math is just against it.
That is the virtue of commercial consumption. In tribal society one set of stimuli evolved, and that is the one we naturally accomodate to. In early urban society, religions allows us to form uniform normative codes of action, across familial boundaries by relying on a non existent but allegorical family structure. In legal societies, these norms evolved into rules, where even some counter-intuitive rules can be enforced by threat of punishment. But neither care-taking, tribal, religious, or legal incentives provide us with sufficient incentive to act on risky ventures, and moreover, sufficient incentive to act in competition, and in the service of one another, in anticipation of long term benefit, as do credit and consumption. Further, consumption makes it possible for us to avoid the hard work of compromise that comes from the necessity of living in communal groups. This is why people choose spatial sovereignty – living independently with the ability to consume, instead of with others where compromise is necessary. In fact, we could argue that people demonstrate this preference at all times wherever it is economically possible – because they see the majority of human cooperation as rent-seeking, or free-riding not cooperation.
So I work in the world of *is* and *must* trying to solve political problems within those limitations. But that does not mean I wouldn’t rather live in your *ought* world if it were possible. I would.
Affections.
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-23 13:46:00 UTC
http://www.alternet.org/when-women-wanted-sex-much-more-menSEX : TIMES CHANGE.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-21 02:00:00 UTC
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21573606-rubber-stamp-billionaires-dont-flaunt-itTHE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE IS WRONG ON OLIGARCHS:
**FLAUNT IT. FLAUNT IT EVERYWHERE. ALWAYS.**
*That’s what a Republic is. A Natural Rotation Of Oligarchs.*
Every 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.
(Reposted with edits)
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 06:41:00 UTC
[C]onservatives speak in emotionally loaded, allegorical, (and therefore archaic) language. That does not mean that the content of their beliefs or allegories is irrational, only that it is arational. But it does mean that they can’t articulate their ideas rationally. And worse, it means that their arguments, and their way of life are perpetually vulnerable to criticism. It also means that conservatives cannot find practical solutions to problems that CAN be solved without violating the system of ethics and norms that creates the high trust society. They simply cannot understand their own ideas well enough to know where they apply, where they do not, and where alternative solutions can be found that accomplish a goal through preferred ends. This is the legitimate criticism of Conservatism: that conservative philosophers have, until we P came about, failed to find a solution to the problem of articulating conservatism.
[callout] [Because their language is allegorical, Conservatism does not contain the causal density needed to articulate conservative ideas. And as such] … conservatives cannot find practical solutions to problems that CAN be solved without violating the system of ethics and norms that creates the high trust society. [/callout]
People who follow my work know that this is precisely the problem I’m trying to solve: to articulate Conservatism (Anglo Aristocratic Egalitarianism) in rational terms. Which means Propertarian terms. Because only Propertarianism provides a rational means of discussing political systems and institutions. I have now spent a significant portion of my adult life on this problem and I finally understand how absolutely difficult that problem was to solve. As an example, I’ll use Krugman’s Straw Man Of The Day to illustrate why its hard for conservatives to defend themselves, by attacking a simple, usual meaningless jibe – but one that conservatives can’t easily defend against.
Conservatives and Sewers I see that some commenters on my traffic externalities post are speculating what Republicans would say about sewers if they didn’t already exist. Well, we don’t know about Republicans, but we do know what The Economist said, in 1848, about proposals for a London sewer system: Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient efforts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good. Sewers are socialism! It wasn’t until the Great Stink made the Houses of Parliament uninhabitable that the sewer system was created.
Now, we’re going to acknowledge that as usual, a conservative protestant Englishman doesn’t understand his own traditions well enough to articulate them. He can sense that something is wrong, with the circumstance, but not articulate what that is, nor how to find an alternative solution to the problem. And that’s understandable. I’m not sure without both Bastiat and Hayek, that we would understand them either. Without Rothbard and Hoppe, I wouldn’t know how to find solutions. However, that doesn’t mean that conservatives and libertarians can’t intuit that ‘something is wrong here’, even if they cannot articulate it. So, aside from the fact that Dr Krugman is a political propagandist, lets look at his logic, and articulate the conservative criticism of it: 1) It doesn’t follow that a one-time expense, followed by fees for usage is the same as redistribution that creates dependencies. Fees require action and therefore ‘ownership’ in the management of the [glossary:commons], the redistribution does not require action. The free-rider problem is different from the progressive-fees problem. Free riding is a negative [glossary:signal] that says free riding is a ‘right’, while progressive fees illustrate that this is not a ‘right’, but a ‘charity’. This sends ‘truthful’ signals to both parties. And truthful signals are necessary to retain the universal cultural prohibition on [glossary:involuntary transfer]s. 2) It doesn’t follow that investment in a commons is the same as state-mandated redistribution. If that was true, there wouldn’t have been factories, universities, churches and roads without a state. But there are. 3) It doesn’t follow that investment in a universal commons (infrastructure) is contrary to conservative dogma. Only that to do so out of charity at a cost, with nothing in exchange, is different from doing so out of opportunity for profit, or out of necessity for the correction of harm. (It doesn’t) 4) it doesn’t follow that taxes must be levied other than fees. (They don’t need to be.) 5) It doesn’t follow that taxes should be put into a general pool and open to use OTHER than the purpose levied. (they shouldn’t – that’s involuntary transfer – and fraud.) 6) It doesn’t follow that the monopolistic state is more efficient than competitive private administration. (It’s not. Ever.) The advantage that government provides is its ability to prohibit privatization of investments in the commons, and therefore make a commons possible. It is not that commons cannot be created without government. It is that the range of commons that can be created without privatization of them is very limited, and therefore very expensive. Since privatization of a common investment is a form of theft. The left is a kelptocracy. It is theft rather than exchange. That is the difference between the left’s vision of society and the right’s vision of society. THe right requires exchange, the left takes by theft. If conservatives understood this one idea, they would use it all the time and win arguments most of the time. Seeking exchange means that solutions are possible. Conservatism without solutions is simply a blocking agent. 7) It doesn’t follow that funding the bureaucracy won’t produce externalities that are of intolerable cost. (it does – one of which is forcing us to spend time defending ourselves against other people’s political movements, as they seek to control the predatory state) These criticisms are possible using Propertarian ethics. In fact, I often argue, that any ethical system OTHER than Propertarianism, is an attempt to obscure the transfers occurring in politics. And therefore arguing by means other than propertarianism (particularly using empathic appeals, and moral statements) is an act of fraud for the purpose of committing theft. CONSERVATISM TRADES STATUS SIGNALS FOR REDISTRIBUTION [C]onservatism is expressed in metaphorical language. And in that language, Conservatives have one ‘curse word’ with multiple meanings: “Socialism” – state control of property and production and b) “Democratic redistributive socialism” – state ownership of the proceeds from limited private control of property. This ‘curse word’ is a catch-all for ‘those people that use the state to destroy aristocratic individualism and the status signals that each of us gets from individualism regardless of our rank. And this is important. Conservatives do not feel victims, because they obtain positive status signals from other conservatives regardless of their economic rank. This status obtainable in human societies only through religious conformity and it’s consequences, or economic conformity and its consequences. Conservatives do not object to investment in the commons. Conservatism places higher value on delaying gratification than immediate gratification – the formation of moral capital – which is an inarticulate expression meaning training human beings to enforce a prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds. Conservatism includes the argument that we should not fund the expansionary bureaucratic state that out of deterministic necessity subverts our property rights and therefore our freedom, and therefore our ‘character’ – a euphemism for the prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds – because it is our universal prohibition on involuntary transfers both within our families and tribes and without, that is the source of western exceptionalism: the high trust society. Our high trust society is unique because we CAN trust others to avoid involuntary transfers, because of the pervasive prohibition on involuntary transfer that we developed under Manorailism by demonstrating fitness needed to obtain land to rent. Partly as a rebellion against the Catholic Church, partly because the church forbid cousin marriage and granted women property rights, in order to break up the tribes and large land holding families. Partly as an ancient indo-european tradition of personal sovereignty in the nobility, which became a status signal, and, thankfully remains a status signal in conservatives. Small homogenous polities are redistributive. Large heterogeneous polities are not. This is because trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities. And trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities because of the different signals used by different groups, and the fact that signals in-group are ‘cheaper’ (discounted) that signals across groups with differing signals. A strong state in a small homogenous polity that functions as an extended family and therefore with high redistribution, is entirely possible. But by creating a powerful state in a heterogeneous polity, it becomes necessary and useful for people to compete via extra-market means using the state by seeking redistributions and limited monopoly (legal) rights in order to advance their signaling strategy. (Which is what Dr. Krugman does, daily – advance an alternative strategy. A strategy that he does not recognize is from the Ghetto. And would cause a return to the low trust society. And **IS*** right now, causing a return to the low trust society. Because the low trust society is natural to man. That’s why it exists everywhere but the aristocratic west.
The so called enlightenment is a mental self deception for the purpose of obtaining signals at a discount and nothing more. The enlightenment view of man was a myth invented to justify the taking if power from the landed nobility. It was that aristocracy that created western excellencies that made us unique in the world, and that we now spend for signaling discounts. Enlightenment principles are genocidal. And we see that in the reproductive data. Liberals don’t breed.
To Ethan Walters: Re: http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/ [W]elcome to the Uncomfortable Enlightenment (or the Dark Enlightenment). History, Economics and Anthropology have addressed this issue for decades: RICHARD DUCHESENE: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization MARIjA GIMBUTAS: (Everything she has written) SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. KAREN ARMSTRONG: The Great Transformation (Or See the reading list at: propertarianism.com/menu/reading-list/) We’ve learned that our enlightenment view of humanity is flawed. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power from the landed aristocracy and the church, by the emerging middle class of northern european merchants. That political change may have been necessary in order to create the industrial society that we live in. However, the aristocratic view of man and mankind was accurate. And our ‘enlightened’ view of the perfect natural man if only ‘set free’ is simply an error. Man is an animal that must be trained to participate in one society of another. Our ‘progressive’ view of humanity is flawed as well. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power by women and the working classes. The ‘progressive view’ was put forth by Marx and Freud. But as Friedrich Hayek said, the trend in 20th century political ideology, which was the product of Marx and Freud, will eventually be seen as a new era of mysticism – with no basis in fact. In fact, counter-to-fact. And that will mirror the warnings of most of the great historians: Toynbee, Gibbon, Braudel, Spengler, Quigley, Durant, Burnham, McNeil, Keegan. That we are unique and unique for circumstantial reasons, and that all of science and reason are the product of our uniqueness. It has only been since the progressive ideology has become received wisdom due to the ‘revisionist history’ put forth by the last generation of academics, and then followed by the collapse of western economic uniqueness, that we have begun to see scientists, and a new generation of academics begin to undermine that ideological view of man. Welcome to the “Dark Enlightenment”: We are unequal and Western Civ is Unique and impossible to replicate. Western civ is the product of individualistic aristocratic egalitarianism caused by indo european battle tactics learned as pastoral radiers. Objectivity, debate and science, and the unique western solution to the problems of politics and market are the product of the need to obtain consent from other peers, rather than obey a chosen leader. Then, the church created individual property rights, and created the universalism which led to the high trust society when it tried to break up the noble families, outlawed cousin marriage, and gave women property rights. Western high trust is a produced within the Hanjal line and the Lotharingian kingdom at the bottom, and the english and scandinavians at the top. Manorialism: or the ownership of land, and the need for men to demonstrate their conformity and reliability, as well as participate in military when needed, in order to gain access to land, created the protestant ethic. It encourage the working classes to adopt the ethics of the nobility. Chivalry provided a means for men regardless of land-holding to demonstrate their socials status through service -which is a unique means of status achievement we thing of as ‘heroism’ that no other society has in such abstract, non-familial terms. The need to ‘keep the east at bay’ using the germans, and therefore preserving german militarism was a intentional choice of the catholic countries. The western high trust society is the product of this aristocratic egalitarian individualism. Culture is a set of property definitions, property rights, relying upon myths, traditions and rituals to propagate those rights. It is a set of rules for sending status signals. Status signals are those things that we imitate because they give us better access to mates and opportunities. Property definitions vary from the individual to the commons on one axis, and administration of it from the individual to the state on the other. Cultures matter. Our culture matters most. Cultures are not equal, and ours was (not is) unique. Northern European (protestant) Americans (at least to some degree) carry this ancient aristocratic tradition with them today. It isn’t well understood that the anglo-celtic and german populations were about equal in america until the progressive strategy to take over ‘white’ america through immigration was put in place in the 60’s. (But that’s why American english speech is flatter than UK english – it’s merged with the flatter german tonal structure.) Americans did not have an ‘aristocracy’ or a landed church to rebel against. There was no opportunity like in europe to create a popular “US vs Them”. We retained our distaste for government, where the europeans saw themselves as taking over the government from the aristocracy and church. Instead, it became feminists and the lower classes against white protestant male culture. This is one of the reasons why other cultures think our male-female relations are ‘businesslike’ rather than intimate and affectionate. And quite contrary to the revisionist progressive historians, it was not luck that made we westerners successful in our ‘great divergence’. The west was a poorer, less numerous people on the edge of the bronze age who used technology, cooperation, speed and strategy to give their inferior numbers the advantage against an east that was always more brutal, totalitarian, numerous and wealthy. Americans have the lock on the world’s speculative capital, because we are the people least likely to abuse it through various schemes of privatization. In abstract terms, we own the stock market. and the Brits own the Bond market. The brits lend and the americans risk. You can trust an english speaker or one of the varieties of german speaker with your money. But you pretty much can’t trust anyone else in the world. And that is a cultural value that runs back 4500 years. We westerners apologize for our conquest and colonialism, but we have spent the past five hundred years dragging humanity out of ignorance, mysticism, totalitarianism and dirt-scratching crushing poverty, hunger and disease. We should not feel guilty for it. We should instead, require others thank us for it. For while we did it sloppily at times, we did it none the less. (In essence, that’s the Dark Enlightenment philosophy.)
COMMENT ON HEIDEGGER You are teaching me about these nutty people, and it’s…. it’s awful. Its, well….. it’s like talking to a woman that’s trying to get you to engage with her emotionally so that she can manipulate you with those emotions. Like Huck Finn trying to gut us to a paint the fence. Just with more elaborate language. This is quite separate from the agreement to engage in argument for the pursuit of true statements – understanding the quality of an argument. Which is quite separate from the agreement to engage in argument for the purpose of cooperation: consent on property (action). You cannot read this nonsense without FIRST agreeing to the value judgements that he makes about experience. If man seeks to escape the sentimental and rise to the rational, whether the origins of those sentiments be biological, or normative, or uncommon events, he can give himself the option to experience what he wishes, and in doing so may train himself to wish what is good for him. But I can find no circumstance where feminine perspective is of value for other than circular argument. The feminine perspective exists only to forbid outliers (alphas) from gaining too much control and depriving them of choice of mates and survival of offspring. It’s not rational, it’s not a ‘good’ for rational creatures, and in an industrialized society it does nothing except promote dysgenia and overconsumption of the world’s resources. You can say that a thing is possible, and that it’s possible to gain pleasure from it. But that’s different from saying its a ‘good’ independent of our primitive senses. I mean we can all seek physical pleasures. We can seek it in liesure, in sex, in food, in acquisition of things, in acquisition of experiences, in conversation, in artificially induced states via drugs, in artificially induced states by repetition of experiences (most eastern tactics), or in artificially induced states by repetition of reason (the western model.) These states can all be achieved. We are happy to say that many drugs that give us great pleasure damage our bodies. We are happy to say that many sexual experiences give us pleasure at the cost of being ostracized from much of society. We can say that contravening norms gives us pleasure, at the cost of ostracization, and economic hardship. We can say that repetitive internal reflection minimizes the necessity of problem solving through cooperation with others, and therefore the minimization of rejection stimuli. WE can say that repetitive internal reflection can train us to habituate any number of our more primitive, and therefore ‘cheaper’ stimuli such as the feeling of euphoria from pack membership, or the ‘undiscovered valley’ of resource richness. But each of these actions has a short term cost and a longer term consequence for the individual and for the group. The feeling of using certain drugs is unreachable by any other experience but the body degrades quickly. On the opposite end of the spectrum, excessive training that allows us to obtain cheap internal pleasure has led all societies that operate by that mechanism to ignorance and poverty. The profit from learning to interact with the physical world so that we may transform it, and how to interact with others to cooperate in transforming it, has few consequences. So perhaps I do not understand the logic here. Other than from my perspective, like a manipulative woman, Heidegger attempts to seduce us into a form of consent before we know the terms and consequences of doing so. In other words, Heidegger us using deceptive language as a the intellectual equivalent of a date rape drug. -Curt (PS: Kinda doubt you’ll find that comment elsewhere.) lol