How Can I Learn About Propertarianism (Natural Law)
Our Advice
- Read the Overview – The Overviews page discusses key concepts and then refers you to our ‘short courses’ or collections of posts on the novel concepts.
- Watch The Videos – The Videos present hour long discussions of the novel concepts.
- Take the Courses – The Propertarian Institute is Offering Courses (Spring 2017) in Natural law.
What Else?
- Read the posts in the “Core” – The Core contains the full spectrum of Natural Law (propertarianism) and Testimonial Law (testimonialism), and Market Government (which I, tongue-in-cheek, refer to as ‘Market Fascism’).
- Learn to write and speak using “E-Prime” (it’s a bit hard). E-Prime will introduce you to writing ‘clearly’ by which we mean, in operational language.
- Follow Curt on Facebook – I tend to repeat central themes in order to make it easier for new people to latch onto something familiar
- Work your way through the Reading List – Our reading list contains the major works that will help you understand the different fields (this is a LOT of material).
- Work your way through thousands of posts on Propertarianism.com – There is no substitute for reading a lot of short posts that repeat the basic ideas in different contexts. Propertarianism is non trivial and repetition beats concentration.
How Long It Will Take?
How long would it take you to learn to program a computer in an object oriented language? To study Calculus? To Study Accounting? To Study Economics? To study the law? Any technical discipline with it’s own methods and terminology takes about a year to ‘learn’, two years to feel comfortable with, and three years to be effective with, four years to be creative with, and five or six years to master: the 10,000 hour rule. This is just a rule of thumb when discussing how long it takes for humans to learn anything at all. Some of us are faster and some of us slower, but in general, those who are faster can tolerate accumulating hours more so than those who are slower. But in the end, it’s hours.
That said, if you read the Short Courses and watch the Videos, in one month you will see how it all fits together, and in three months you will find that it has affected your thinking.
Our experience is that on average, if you read the articles, follow me, Eli, and a few others, that in six months you will ‘understand’ everything we say. It will take you about a year to ‘start thinking’ in Natural Law – and that’s when you’ll feel the explanatory power starts affecting your life. Then, sort of like a light switch, over a very short period of time, all human activity will ‘make sense’ in very simple terms. “Everything becomes obvious.”
If you have come to Propertarianism through the usual route: Constitutionalist or Classical Liberal > Libertarian > Anarcho Capitalist > NRx > Propertarianism, then your progress will be much faster.
If you have studied one of the hard sciences so that you are familiar with the scientific method and scientific epistemology, then your progress will be faster.
If you have at least some understanding of accounting, finance, or economics, then it will be much faster.
If you have a background in philosophy – it might actually slow you down: most of philosophy, like most of religion, is nonsense or outright falsehood: fantasy literature.
(If you have abnormal behavior and you’re looking for justification of it, you won’t find it here – you will find that there is a differences between tolerance and advocacy and abnormal behavior is not something that will be sanctioned in any society for long. Go see the left libertarians. They love deviant, selfish, anti-social behavior.)
But in general the more you know the easier it will be to learn.