Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

–“Q: Curt: You say the science of the natural law of cooperation is a ‘via negativa’ that provides universal decidability in what not to do, don’t most people want a via-positiva: to know what to do?”–

That isn’t quite right. No.

(a) The law consists of the method, logic, and science of cooperation, providing universal decidability in matters of conflict.

(b) The law also tells us the optimum means of organizing human cooperation personally, socially, economically, politically, and geostrategically.

(c) However, this law tells us that if we want to maximize our condition in this world, and minimize our conflict, that we must pay, and continue to pay, high cognitive, psychological, and emotional costs of self-regulation to do so – and not all humans, and not all human groups are able, willing, and sufficiently genetically, demographically, culturally evolved to do so. We are in fact relatively petty creatures whenever self image and status is involved.

(d) As such a universal science of law and decidability cannot prescribe for people how they must live, but only advise them what the costs and benefits of their choices are and forever will be. We can only advise them to write constitutions that ‘do no lie’ about what is required (costs, consequences) of the preferences they choose. Because an illegitimate constitution means an illegitimate government that the people are right and just to overthrow and replace.

(e) So our solution is in two parts:
… i) “Let A Thousand Nations Bloom’ because different peoples do need different social, political, and economic systems that suit their state of development, and possible rate of change, with the population and institutions they have available to them.
… ii) We have proposed the optimum for Americans specifically, The anglosphere generally, and for Europeans broadly, because (ethnic) Europeans already practice most of these behaviors and pay the costs of them (even if we tease the southern italians and the greeks 🙂 ) – Americans certainly did pay these costs until the marxist-woke cult’s attempt at conversion from evolutionary truth and natural law to devolutionary lying and unnatural law.

(e) Even within European civilization, we have produced a constitution with a set of menu items, so to speak, that satisfy the needs of left and right within left and right polities (states, city-states) without the more demanding requirements or the right, or the lower demands and ‘problems’ of the left.

So it’s incorrect to say that we don’t recommend a via-positiva or a series of via-positivas, we merely say that you can create any polity you want, with the natural law you just may not lie to do it – so that people are fully informed that they will bear a lower standard of living and lower trust polity for having done so.

But as we know, many people prefer serfdom, where their basic needs are taken care of, and any ‘earnings’ from the competition in the market are used for nothing more than entertainment and status signaling.

Not all humans are fit for advanced market civilization. In fact – most aren’t. That’s the lesson of the European attempt to universalize the high trust rule of law nation-state to a world that can’t trust anyone outside of their family and so can’t take responsibility for the commons.

I hope this helps

-Cheers

Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation