Category: Epistemology and Method

Q&A: CURT! HEY. WTF WITH ALL THE ‘-ISMS’???!

(updated with additional detail)

—“Curt, I love ya, but why do you add “-ism” to the end of every fucking word?”—-Jací Eugènè Esteban

OK – GREAT QUESTION – SO I WILL ANSWER IT.

WHAT’S AN ‘-ISM’?

—“-ism Suffix. A distinctive practice, system, ideology, or philosophy”—

WHAT DO THOSE WORDS MEAN?

—“An ideology functions, like literature, to inspire individuals to action under democracy. A philosophy provides methods of decidability in order to achieve a desired state of affairs. A formal logic provides language for the testing (criticism) of relations for internal consistency (falsification). A science provides a formal process and instrumentation for the elimination of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit.”— Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute, Kiev, Ukraine.

CAN YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC?

Yes, a set of related terms, properties, methods, and arguments, in support of a judgmental, ideological, philosophical, logical, or scientific end.

WELL MAYBE I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND?

Using ‘ism’ is a shortcut for a bundle of related ideas. Once you start collecting these ideologies, philosophies, logics, and sciences – just like in any profession – you start to categorize them by common names. Some of them refer to authors “Darwinian, Darwinism”, or “Aristotelianism”, and some of them by movement “libertarianism, progressivism”, some of them by method “empiricism, relativism”, and some of them by judgements “realism”, ‘naturalism”, “deism”..

So *names, movements, methods, and judgements* largely (I’m sure that there are others.) You can think of them as recipes for baking a complex ideas by different means: *recipes for organizing ideas for the purpose of organizing people in the furtherance of achieving ends*.

Or in simple terms, ‘ism’ means “thinking like those guys who think that way.” Rothbardianism = ‘thinking like rothbard thinks’. Aryanism = Thinking like the Aryan expansionists in europe thought: what we call “Aristocratic Egalitarianism”, or “Sovereign Heroism”. Where aristocratic egalitarianism refers to the fact that rule was maintained by a natural military aristocracy open to all who could accumulate the capital and fight with the rest. And where Sovereign Heroism refers to the judgements that these people made: they chose sovereignty(negativa) and heroism(positiva) as their balance of judgements (innovation). Just as the asians chose ying and yang for stable balance (stasis) as their balance of judgements.

HOW DO I LEARN THEM ALL?

Well, you know, you can just use wikipedia. lol.

And yes I understand its frustrating for you. But I am working in the realm of a great synthesis of ideas, across many fields, and across many cultures, and across many eras. I lose people in the weeds already. Can you imagine if I went into detail when I was talking about each movement and way of thinking? omg. There is no way to leave all those breadcrumb trails. It’s just impossible.

So this is just ‘how it’s done’. It”s how professionals in philosophy talk about ‘ways of thinking’. The fact that you can graduate high school without knowing intellectual history is actually kind of horrifying to me – because it didn’t used to be that way.

If you want something more arcane than intellectual history try medicine. or the absurd gyrations that software people go through to label different ‘ways of thinking’ about problems. Or the hell=hole of terminology: social pseudoscience, freudian pseudoscience, marxist pseudoscience, … I mean. That’s before we even talk about Theology and literary movements. omg.

So that’s why: It’s shortcut for bundles of ideas used by people, movements, eras, or methods.

Thanks for asking.

I get a lot of flack for this.

And no, I am not gonna be a Molyneux that is gonna make it easy for you.. He’s great at what he does. But that’s not what I do.

OK?

Cool. 🙂

Curt Doolittle