Category: Epistemology and Method

Think of the language of propertarianism like this:

Humans have possibly three emotional drivers: activation-rest, pain-pleasure, dominance-submission. And on top of those three we find our big five/six personality drivers – our sensitivity to those three emotional drivers. And on top of that the rather broad cacaphony of emotions you can see in diagrams of our emotinal ranges. And on top of that the combinations of all those emotions as we react to the complex symphony of emotions we feel when we percieve the any complex thing constituted in multiple causes and consequences.

But underneath all those layers is a very simple machine that wants to obtain access to a higher ratio of calories under it’s control than the cost to obtain and consume them.

And it turns out that the list of things we like to collect in our inventory, so that we find security and pleasure in our condition, is fairly small. We call it ‘property in toto’: those things people act to obtain, defend, transform, trade, and consume.

So, if we speak in the language of the gain or loss of property in toto, we circumvent the apparent complexity of those emotions, the lies and denials that accompany them, we can state all of human perception, cognition, knowledge, advocacy, and action as reactions to the changes in the state of their inventory – and nothing more.

it only seems complex to learn to speak in causes rather than experiences. But the causes are much more simply: “what is this person attempting to acquire, or defend, and is he doing it truthfully and morally or untruthfully and immorally?”

From this perspective, the argumentative power of propertarianism is so all encompassing because it relies upon first cause. But that said, it’s actually *very simple* compared to the arguments consisting of experiences, analogies, and deceits.