Curt Doolittle

Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

  • Natural Law Isn’t Complicated

    Imagine you visit a totally alien island, and have no knowledge of manners, ethics, morals, traditions myths, rituals, laws, institutions, and metaphysical value judgments. History is replete with the difficulty of establishing communication, trust, cooperation, trade, and especially, non-conflict.

    But because of natural laws we can start from the lowest methods of communication: giving gifts, and avoiding threats, while maintaining capable defense. It is these lowest common denominators that we refer to with ‘natural law’. *Impose no cost, nor threaten to impose a cost, upon those who have expended efforts in the accumulation of whatever reproductive, productive, institutional, and territorial assets that they have.

  • A Rose By Any Other Name: Aristocratic Egalitarianism And Propertarianism

    —“Q&A: Curt, How Do We Refer To Your Work: Propertarianism or Aristocratic Egalitarianism”— In my view (which may or may not be right) I have written down in rational and scientific terms, the western group evolutionary strategy – the philosophy of the west.

    But it’s a very big scope of work. So what you call it depends upon which perspective you’re looking at it from. Culturally and civilizationally, it’s the philosophy of the west: aristocratic egalitarianism. a set of values: Aristocratic, and the criteria for membership: open to anyone who will fight. But if we are to ask what operations and processes do we use within aristocratic egalitarianism that refers to The metaphysics of action, Testimonial Truth and Epistemology, Propertarian Ethics, Market Government, and Aristocratic Ethics (excellence in man) To make things ‘simple’ for people to understand we use the term ‘Propertarianism’ as a shortcut, even though that only technically refers to the ethical component of Aristocratic Egalitarianism. We have debated using Testimonialism in order to place truth above property, but this term borders on the platonic, so we prefer the ‘real’ – propertarianism as a ‘common’ name for philosophical arguments that constitute the cultural strategy of the western indo European people we call Aryans: Aristocratic Egalitarianism. So that’s the full explanation. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute The Philosophy of Aristocracy Kiev, Ukraine

  • A Rose By Any Other Name: Aristocratic Egalitarianism And Propertarianism

    —“Q&A: Curt, How Do We Refer To Your Work: Propertarianism or Aristocratic Egalitarianism”— In my view (which may or may not be right) I have written down in rational and scientific terms, the western group evolutionary strategy – the philosophy of the west.

    But it’s a very big scope of work. So what you call it depends upon which perspective you’re looking at it from. Culturally and civilizationally, it’s the philosophy of the west: aristocratic egalitarianism. a set of values: Aristocratic, and the criteria for membership: open to anyone who will fight. But if we are to ask what operations and processes do we use within aristocratic egalitarianism that refers to The metaphysics of action, Testimonial Truth and Epistemology, Propertarian Ethics, Market Government, and Aristocratic Ethics (excellence in man) To make things ‘simple’ for people to understand we use the term ‘Propertarianism’ as a shortcut, even though that only technically refers to the ethical component of Aristocratic Egalitarianism. We have debated using Testimonialism in order to place truth above property, but this term borders on the platonic, so we prefer the ‘real’ – propertarianism as a ‘common’ name for philosophical arguments that constitute the cultural strategy of the western indo European people we call Aryans: Aristocratic Egalitarianism. So that’s the full explanation. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute The Philosophy of Aristocracy Kiev, Ukraine

  • Q&A: Covenant Communities?

    Q&A: CURT: HOW DO HOPPE’S COVENANT COMMUNITIES FIT WITH PROPERTARIANISM? (good piece) (for newbies especially) —“Hoppe’s advocating for so-called covenant communities seems a decent idea on paper, people establish communities based on contractual relations and setting rules based on the will of the community. Now I have seen videos of you talking about the “absolute nuclear family” and societies where everyone treated everyone the same and there was no difference between in-group and out-group trust, this seems like a rather vital part of propertarianism. Now my question is, does the idea of covenant communities fit within the propertarian framework? Because while it seems a decent idea, it does certainly look like it would create a major difference between in-group treatment and out-group treatment, seeing as these communities could, and probably would, have vastly different rules than the one next to them, so to say. Do you see covenant communities as an extension of Rothbardian ghetto/gypsy/Jewish ethics, or have I totally misunderstood either you or Hoppe?”— GREAT QUESTION. This is such a great question. Thank you for it. – Preamble – I consider myself a Hoppeian (although Hans would likely differ) in that all ethics and politics can be expressed as property rights. Part of what I tried to do in propertarianism was illustrate how the three empirical-rational cultures: English Empirical, German Rational, and Jewish Pseudoscientific, (and I suppose we could include the frech-pseudo-moral), tried to restate their group evolutionary strategy as universal ethics and politics – and all failed. So what you see is rothbard attempting to universalize jewish law, and cosmopolitan pseudoscience (of separatist disasporic people), hoppe attempting to universalize german rationalism (of homogeneous agrarian landed people), and me trying to use anglo-saxon empirical contractualism (of a trading naval people) as a universal – within which we can construct a variety of orders. So when my work differs from Hoppe’s it differs largely in the fact that he relies on’ justificationary rationalism’ (tests of internal consistency and subjective non-contradiction) using intersubjectively verifiable property as the basis for common law, and I rely on ‘testimonialism’ which is an advancement over scientific empiricism, for reasons that are complicated – but which are reducible to adding the tests of existential possibility when describing human actions, and the requirement for full accounting, assuming that man is NOT naturally moral, but naturally rational, and will choose immoral-unethical or moral-ethical actions based purely on intuitionistic estimation of costs and benefits. That paragraph is extremely loaded, (dense) with meaning. I would point you to my introductory writings to understand it if you need to. But in simple terms, that means that I consider my work a SCIENTIFIC restatement of hoppe’s reduction of all ethical, moral, political decidability to expressions of property rights, and the first cause of property rights non imposition of costs upon the property in toto of others that would cause them to retaliate in ANY way – this is in fact (as Butler Schaeffer has tried to show us) the meaning of ‘natural law’. Hoppe constructs his anarchism (german rule of law) on the lower standard of intersubjectively verifiable property, and fully voluntary production of commons. I construct my rule of law (anglo anarchism) on the higher standard of property-in-toto, and creating a market for the voluntary exchange of commons – much more like the stock market which is competitive, rather than the current houses of government which are monopolies. The reason I do this is because the west beat the rest with commons production – truth-telling, private-property, sovereignty, rule of law, and militia chief among them. The other reason is that communities that do not produce commons across the spectrum: normative, ethical, moral, legal, institutional, martial, and territorial, NEVER survive competition from competitors. because they cannot. They cannot positively because it is always preferable to give up liberties in order to obtain predictabilities needed for complex commercial production. They cannot Negatively because the only individuals suitabe for a lower trust polity based upon several property and lacking commons are thieves, pirates, and other predators. And so external groups always exterminate them. So anarchic polities without commons cannot survive. And this is evidenced by jews themselves, gypsies, and the hundreds of other societies that have been out-gunned, out-steeled, out-germed, out-bred, out-farmed, out-traded, and generally ‘out-civilized’. What we see with Rothbard and Hoppe’s higher standard, and my higher standard, is that Rothbard brings Jewish ethics of diasporic people, who want to privatize (parasitically consume) the commons that preserves parasitism via deception but prevents retaliation against it; Hoppe’s separatist ethics of the protestant evangelists who want to construct private commons only (civic society) but prevent all free riding (the opposite of Rothbard’s strategy) and my (Doolittle’s) imperial ethics (rule of law) that prohibits parasitism entirely. I might state it less charitably, as Rothbard and the cosmopolitans, Hoppe and the germans, and the enlightenment anglo-Americans all failed to solve the problem of creating a market for commons instead of a monopoly bureaucracy for the production of commons (anglo/german/french) and the civic production of commons (Hoppe). Whereas what I have tried to do is create a market for commons as the old English houses created, but failed to expand both on the enfranchisement of non-land owners (non-business owners, and those with diasporic or naval interests) and the enfranchisement of women (who have polar opposite ethics from the males entirely and want to marry the ‘state’ or ‘tribe’ again – obviating them from exchanging sex and care with males for survival.) So propertarianism includes covenant communities, but the standard by which these contracts are judged in matters of conflict is by property in toto: complete, not partial, non-parasitism. The anarchic model of Rothbard and Hoppe does not survive competition. That’s why it won’t work. Property rights are not something we ‘have’ but something we obtain ONLY in trade. The same is true for the survival of an anarchic community: you cannot choose a community by will, but by incentives. You do not choose the incentives, they are chosen for you by the nature of man. Civilization – complex cooperation outwitting the dark forces of time and ignorance – is the result of the incremental suppression of parasitism in all its forms by genetic, normative, ethical, moral, traditional, legal, political, and economic means: eugenics. When we remove all parasitism, what we are left with is truth, property, liberty, knowledge, and cooperation. And those are the torches that give us the time to light the darkness and eventually transcend into the gods we seek. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Q&A: Covenant Communities?

    Q&A: CURT: HOW DO HOPPE’S COVENANT COMMUNITIES FIT WITH PROPERTARIANISM? (good piece) (for newbies especially) —“Hoppe’s advocating for so-called covenant communities seems a decent idea on paper, people establish communities based on contractual relations and setting rules based on the will of the community. Now I have seen videos of you talking about the “absolute nuclear family” and societies where everyone treated everyone the same and there was no difference between in-group and out-group trust, this seems like a rather vital part of propertarianism. Now my question is, does the idea of covenant communities fit within the propertarian framework? Because while it seems a decent idea, it does certainly look like it would create a major difference between in-group treatment and out-group treatment, seeing as these communities could, and probably would, have vastly different rules than the one next to them, so to say. Do you see covenant communities as an extension of Rothbardian ghetto/gypsy/Jewish ethics, or have I totally misunderstood either you or Hoppe?”— GREAT QUESTION. This is such a great question. Thank you for it. – Preamble – I consider myself a Hoppeian (although Hans would likely differ) in that all ethics and politics can be expressed as property rights. Part of what I tried to do in propertarianism was illustrate how the three empirical-rational cultures: English Empirical, German Rational, and Jewish Pseudoscientific, (and I suppose we could include the frech-pseudo-moral), tried to restate their group evolutionary strategy as universal ethics and politics – and all failed. So what you see is rothbard attempting to universalize jewish law, and cosmopolitan pseudoscience (of separatist disasporic people), hoppe attempting to universalize german rationalism (of homogeneous agrarian landed people), and me trying to use anglo-saxon empirical contractualism (of a trading naval people) as a universal – within which we can construct a variety of orders. So when my work differs from Hoppe’s it differs largely in the fact that he relies on’ justificationary rationalism’ (tests of internal consistency and subjective non-contradiction) using intersubjectively verifiable property as the basis for common law, and I rely on ‘testimonialism’ which is an advancement over scientific empiricism, for reasons that are complicated – but which are reducible to adding the tests of existential possibility when describing human actions, and the requirement for full accounting, assuming that man is NOT naturally moral, but naturally rational, and will choose immoral-unethical or moral-ethical actions based purely on intuitionistic estimation of costs and benefits. That paragraph is extremely loaded, (dense) with meaning. I would point you to my introductory writings to understand it if you need to. But in simple terms, that means that I consider my work a SCIENTIFIC restatement of hoppe’s reduction of all ethical, moral, political decidability to expressions of property rights, and the first cause of property rights non imposition of costs upon the property in toto of others that would cause them to retaliate in ANY way – this is in fact (as Butler Schaeffer has tried to show us) the meaning of ‘natural law’. Hoppe constructs his anarchism (german rule of law) on the lower standard of intersubjectively verifiable property, and fully voluntary production of commons. I construct my rule of law (anglo anarchism) on the higher standard of property-in-toto, and creating a market for the voluntary exchange of commons – much more like the stock market which is competitive, rather than the current houses of government which are monopolies. The reason I do this is because the west beat the rest with commons production – truth-telling, private-property, sovereignty, rule of law, and militia chief among them. The other reason is that communities that do not produce commons across the spectrum: normative, ethical, moral, legal, institutional, martial, and territorial, NEVER survive competition from competitors. because they cannot. They cannot positively because it is always preferable to give up liberties in order to obtain predictabilities needed for complex commercial production. They cannot Negatively because the only individuals suitabe for a lower trust polity based upon several property and lacking commons are thieves, pirates, and other predators. And so external groups always exterminate them. So anarchic polities without commons cannot survive. And this is evidenced by jews themselves, gypsies, and the hundreds of other societies that have been out-gunned, out-steeled, out-germed, out-bred, out-farmed, out-traded, and generally ‘out-civilized’. What we see with Rothbard and Hoppe’s higher standard, and my higher standard, is that Rothbard brings Jewish ethics of diasporic people, who want to privatize (parasitically consume) the commons that preserves parasitism via deception but prevents retaliation against it; Hoppe’s separatist ethics of the protestant evangelists who want to construct private commons only (civic society) but prevent all free riding (the opposite of Rothbard’s strategy) and my (Doolittle’s) imperial ethics (rule of law) that prohibits parasitism entirely. I might state it less charitably, as Rothbard and the cosmopolitans, Hoppe and the germans, and the enlightenment anglo-Americans all failed to solve the problem of creating a market for commons instead of a monopoly bureaucracy for the production of commons (anglo/german/french) and the civic production of commons (Hoppe). Whereas what I have tried to do is create a market for commons as the old English houses created, but failed to expand both on the enfranchisement of non-land owners (non-business owners, and those with diasporic or naval interests) and the enfranchisement of women (who have polar opposite ethics from the males entirely and want to marry the ‘state’ or ‘tribe’ again – obviating them from exchanging sex and care with males for survival.) So propertarianism includes covenant communities, but the standard by which these contracts are judged in matters of conflict is by property in toto: complete, not partial, non-parasitism. The anarchic model of Rothbard and Hoppe does not survive competition. That’s why it won’t work. Property rights are not something we ‘have’ but something we obtain ONLY in trade. The same is true for the survival of an anarchic community: you cannot choose a community by will, but by incentives. You do not choose the incentives, they are chosen for you by the nature of man. Civilization – complex cooperation outwitting the dark forces of time and ignorance – is the result of the incremental suppression of parasitism in all its forms by genetic, normative, ethical, moral, traditional, legal, political, and economic means: eugenics. When we remove all parasitism, what we are left with is truth, property, liberty, knowledge, and cooperation. And those are the torches that give us the time to light the darkness and eventually transcend into the gods we seek. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Taleb vs Doolittle: Demanding Skin-in-the-Game vs Involuntary Warranty

    Nassim Taleb and I are working on the same problem, which we identified by similar means: designing models. He was inspired when he designed financial risk models, and I was inspired when I designed artificial intelligences for games in anticipation of the kind of warfare we are seeing emerge today. I work bottom up (operationally), and Taleb works top-down (statistically). But this is the same problem from two ends of the spectrum. (He publishes books on the mass market to make money, I build software and companies for a limited number of partners and customers.) I want to find the mechanism and he wants to quantify the effect. But we are looking for the same thing. What is it? Computers are useful in increasing our perceptions. The game of Life is an interesting software experiment in that if you vary the rate (time) you see different patterns emerge. If you vary the scale you see different patterns emerge. But in the end, these patterns, while they appear relatively random at slow (operationally observable) rates, turn out to be highly deterministic at faster ( consequentially observable) rates. And this single experimental game tells us a lot about the human mind’s limits of perception. We see what we can, and the longer we observe the more consequential the patterns are that emerge, and the more deterministic is any system we observe. We have all heard how few behaviors ants have but what kind of complexity emerges from it. During a vacation in southern Oregon one year I observed ducks for a few days as a way of distracting myself from business stress. Ducks are not smart like crows. They have just a few behaviors (intuitions is perhaps a better word). And their apparent complexities emerge from just those few behaviors. But if you watch them long enough you see machines that do about four or five things. And that’s all. So, there is some limit to our perception underneath man’s behavior that is ascertainable: the metrics of human thought. And I would suggestion without reservation that this research program is at least – if more – profoundly important than the research program into the physical structure of the universe. This mathematics is achievable, but we don’t yet know how to go about it. And I am pretty certain that it’s a data collection problem: until we have vastly more data about our selves we probably cannot determine it. (emphasis on probably). We may solve it by analogy with artificial intelligence. Or we may not. I suspect that we will. We will develop a unit of cognition wherein x information is required for every IQ point in order to create a bridge between one substantive network of relations and another. But Taleb and I issue the same warning – although I think I have an institutional solution that can be implemented as formal policy and he has an informative narrative but no solution – as yet. Although his paper last year that shows just how extraordinarily large our information must be once we start getting into outliers. We both use some version of ‘skin in the game’ as a guardianship against wishful thinking and cognitive bias. I use the legal term warranty and he uses the financial street name ‘skin in the game’ But the idea is the same. In Taleb’s case, I think he is more concerned with stupidity and hubris as we have seen in the statistical (non-operational) financialization of our economy. Whereas I am more concerned with deception, as we have seen in the conversion of the social sciences to statistical pseudosciences in every field: psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and (as I have extended the scope of political theory) to group evolutionary strategy. But whether top down or bottom up, statistical or pseudoscientific, skin in the game or warranty, hubris or deceit, the problem remains the same: It is too easy for people in modernity to rely on pseudoscience in order to execute deceptions that cause us to consume every form of capital, from the genetic, to the normative, to the ethical and moral, to the informational (knowledge itself), to the institutional, to built capital, to portable capital, to money, to accounts, to the territorial, and destroying civilization, and in particular the uniqueness of western civilization in the process. So to assert our ( Taleb and I) argument more directly: given that these people have put no skin in the game, and provided no warranty, but that we can impose upon them the warranty against their will for their malfeasance, what form of restitution shall we extract from them? Territorial, physical, institutional, traditional, informational, normative, and genetic? How do we demand restitution for what they have done? How would you balance the accounts plus provide such incentive under rule of law that this would never happen again? As for the Great Wars – all debts are paid. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Taleb vs Doolittle: Demanding Skin-in-the-Game vs Involuntary Warranty

    Nassim Taleb and I are working on the same problem, which we identified by similar means: designing models. He was inspired when he designed financial risk models, and I was inspired when I designed artificial intelligences for games in anticipation of the kind of warfare we are seeing emerge today. I work bottom up (operationally), and Taleb works top-down (statistically). But this is the same problem from two ends of the spectrum. (He publishes books on the mass market to make money, I build software and companies for a limited number of partners and customers.) I want to find the mechanism and he wants to quantify the effect. But we are looking for the same thing. What is it? Computers are useful in increasing our perceptions. The game of Life is an interesting software experiment in that if you vary the rate (time) you see different patterns emerge. If you vary the scale you see different patterns emerge. But in the end, these patterns, while they appear relatively random at slow (operationally observable) rates, turn out to be highly deterministic at faster ( consequentially observable) rates. And this single experimental game tells us a lot about the human mind’s limits of perception. We see what we can, and the longer we observe the more consequential the patterns are that emerge, and the more deterministic is any system we observe. We have all heard how few behaviors ants have but what kind of complexity emerges from it. During a vacation in southern Oregon one year I observed ducks for a few days as a way of distracting myself from business stress. Ducks are not smart like crows. They have just a few behaviors (intuitions is perhaps a better word). And their apparent complexities emerge from just those few behaviors. But if you watch them long enough you see machines that do about four or five things. And that’s all. So, there is some limit to our perception underneath man’s behavior that is ascertainable: the metrics of human thought. And I would suggestion without reservation that this research program is at least – if more – profoundly important than the research program into the physical structure of the universe. This mathematics is achievable, but we don’t yet know how to go about it. And I am pretty certain that it’s a data collection problem: until we have vastly more data about our selves we probably cannot determine it. (emphasis on probably). We may solve it by analogy with artificial intelligence. Or we may not. I suspect that we will. We will develop a unit of cognition wherein x information is required for every IQ point in order to create a bridge between one substantive network of relations and another. But Taleb and I issue the same warning – although I think I have an institutional solution that can be implemented as formal policy and he has an informative narrative but no solution – as yet. Although his paper last year that shows just how extraordinarily large our information must be once we start getting into outliers. We both use some version of ‘skin in the game’ as a guardianship against wishful thinking and cognitive bias. I use the legal term warranty and he uses the financial street name ‘skin in the game’ But the idea is the same. In Taleb’s case, I think he is more concerned with stupidity and hubris as we have seen in the statistical (non-operational) financialization of our economy. Whereas I am more concerned with deception, as we have seen in the conversion of the social sciences to statistical pseudosciences in every field: psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and (as I have extended the scope of political theory) to group evolutionary strategy. But whether top down or bottom up, statistical or pseudoscientific, skin in the game or warranty, hubris or deceit, the problem remains the same: It is too easy for people in modernity to rely on pseudoscience in order to execute deceptions that cause us to consume every form of capital, from the genetic, to the normative, to the ethical and moral, to the informational (knowledge itself), to the institutional, to built capital, to portable capital, to money, to accounts, to the territorial, and destroying civilization, and in particular the uniqueness of western civilization in the process. So to assert our ( Taleb and I) argument more directly: given that these people have put no skin in the game, and provided no warranty, but that we can impose upon them the warranty against their will for their malfeasance, what form of restitution shall we extract from them? Territorial, physical, institutional, traditional, informational, normative, and genetic? How do we demand restitution for what they have done? How would you balance the accounts plus provide such incentive under rule of law that this would never happen again? As for the Great Wars – all debts are paid. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • 3) destruction of the reciprocal local insurance under civic society increases u

    3) destruction of the reciprocal local insurance under civic society increases uncertainty and risk. Increases loneliness.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-30 08:08:02 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/781767545766502400

    Reply addressees: @JoshZumbrun

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/781157309145686016

    IN REPLY TO:

    @JoshZumbrun

    This is one of the most horrifying graphics I’ve ever seen:
    https://t.co/wM0VJZn0Wg https://t.co/qaUaNFtRPl

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/781157309145686016

  • Reciprocal insurance of life and property already covers survival conditions. If

    Reciprocal insurance of life and property already covers survival conditions. If you need water in the desert, others must give it to you, even if you have no money, although you must pay them back for it later.

    There is no altruism. Period. We can’t find it in nature.

    We find:

    1) Kin selection (kingroup morality)

    2) reciprocal insurance (ingroup morality)

    3) buying options on cooperation. (outgroup morality)

    4) defense against future retaliation (if you don’t give him water he and his might kill you for it) (pragmatism)

    There is no altruism.

    Source date (UTC): 2016-09-25 03:57:00 UTC

  • Limits Of Political Action

    No political action may be taken that is not reversible. Or framed alternatively: no action may be taken that one cannot pay restitution for the consequences. Or framed alternately: no government had the right to pursue immigration.