Curt Doolittle

Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

  • All Three Political Orientations are Individualistic (Really).

    (By Eli Harman) In truth, all *three* of the principal western political orientations are profoundly and fundamentally individualistic. Leftism is individualism for those with instantaneous time horizons. Food and shelter and medicine and college and debt forgiveness and status and orgasms for ME, right now, regardless of the costs to others or to society or to my future self.

    Libertarianism is individualism for those with intermediate time horizons, who recognize some of the incentives and conditions necessary for engaging in production and exchange: so all of that *through* and *because* of property rights and markets over so many years as may be necessary to organize their production, without regard to the costs to tradition, culture, extended family, (ethnicity) commons or future generations. Rightism is individualism for people with very long time horizons, who recognize the full spectrum of conditions and incentives necessary to engage in production and exchange not just NOW, but for generations to come. So all of that for ME AND MINE, securely, now and for the future, by drawing on the hard won, evolutionary-gleaned wisdom of the past, and maintaining the various commons (things like public decency, good order, and common defense) that give us our competitive advantages over others who do not share our values or have our best interests at heart.

  • Why We Failed

    WHY WE FAILED. All men are comprehensible. All men are rational within their limits.

    And as rational we choose what is in our interests whether moral or immoral. And we create institutions that increase the cost of the immoral. So that it is rational to choose the moral. The problem of the twentieth century is that we eliminated the normative prohibition on libel, slander, ridicule, shaming, rallying, lying, pseudoscience, and propaganda. And caused the industrialization of profiting from error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, propaganda, rallying, shaming, and deceit. The reason for our failure is visible in retrospect as an inability to switch from traditional and moral justification in societies with relationships at human scale, to warranty of due diligence by thorough criticism of statements pertaining to cause and consequence when relationships exceeded human scale under the industrial revolution. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Why We Failed

    WHY WE FAILED. All men are comprehensible. All men are rational within their limits.

    And as rational we choose what is in our interests whether moral or immoral. And we create institutions that increase the cost of the immoral. So that it is rational to choose the moral. The problem of the twentieth century is that we eliminated the normative prohibition on libel, slander, ridicule, shaming, rallying, lying, pseudoscience, and propaganda. And caused the industrialization of profiting from error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, propaganda, rallying, shaming, and deceit. The reason for our failure is visible in retrospect as an inability to switch from traditional and moral justification in societies with relationships at human scale, to warranty of due diligence by thorough criticism of statements pertaining to cause and consequence when relationships exceeded human scale under the industrial revolution. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Sovereignty, Liberty, Freedom, Consumption

    SOVEREIGNTY, LIBERTY, FREEDOM, CONSUMPTION Sovereignty is the necessary objective. (Aristocratic Class) Liberty is the existential condition. (Bourgeoise Class) Freedom is the felt experience. (Working Class) Consumption is desired equivalent ( Dependent Class )
    Michael Churchill: Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / and a king ain’t satisfied with anything. As Mario Puzo said, the consolation of old age is power. But today it seems people get to old age with lots of wealth and no power. Perhaps they did not imagine well enough.

  • Sovereignty, Liberty, Freedom, Consumption

    SOVEREIGNTY, LIBERTY, FREEDOM, CONSUMPTION Sovereignty is the necessary objective. (Aristocratic Class) Liberty is the existential condition. (Bourgeoise Class) Freedom is the felt experience. (Working Class) Consumption is desired equivalent ( Dependent Class )
    Michael Churchill: Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / and a king ain’t satisfied with anything. As Mario Puzo said, the consolation of old age is power. But today it seems people get to old age with lots of wealth and no power. Perhaps they did not imagine well enough.

  • We Can Create a Perfect Government For Opposing Propaganda and Deceit

    —“Lying was industrialized by combining pseudoscience, propaganda, and diminution of standards of education by the elimination of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and economics from our education system. So we have the perfect storm: the ability to saturate the environment with propaganda, a population insufficiently educated to falsify it, and no means of juridical defense by which a minority can prosecute it. When we could create a perfect opposition: a population sufficiently educated to falsify it, a media with incentives to speak truthfully, and the juridical defense of the informational commons by which any minority can hold speakers accountable.”— Curt Doolittle —“There is no such thing as a “perfect” government – and many Classical Liberals (such a the Old Whig Edmund Burke) supported the old British Constitution as the best thing available.”— Paul Marks

    In the context a “perfect storm” and “perfect opposition” convey the meaning I intend them to: ‘sufficient coincidence of causes”. Aside…. I am not sure that’s an argument. It certainly isn’t a criticism of anything I said in the post above. Are you one of those people that confuses meaning as existential and open to deduction rather than normative and not? We can test normative meaning as we test any hypothesis, and by comparing it to like terms reduce normative meaning to what can only refer to necessary meaning. We can use allegory to inform, as long as we do not use allegory for consequent deductions. Now, next, let’s do a little analysis here. First, it really doesn’t matter what anyone in the past thought. The question is whether a government can in fact calculate and decide, producing optimum ends – and whether we choose deliberately eugenic, market eugenic, market dysgenic, or deliberately dysgenic criteria of ultimate decidability. (Because all competitions in the choice of political commons are reducible to eugenic or dysgenic strategies. (just as all questions of ethics are reducible to violence or not; just as all questions of personal choice are reducible to suicide or not.) Just as prices and incentives cannot be produced in combination by any other means, nash equilibrium cannot be produced by other means than voluntary exchanges. (Yet both Keynes and Rawls rely upon individual discretion under the assumption of Pareto optimums). Now this is a simple problem of the possibility of possessing such knowledge. We cannot produce prices and incentives by aggregate means and we cannot produce commons and satisfaction by aggregate means. So it is possible to produce an optimum government and a perfect opposition to the perfect storm. As long as we choose the market eugenic or the deliberately eugenic means of decidability. And as long as we create markets for production(goods and services), reproduction (family), commons (government), dispute resolution (law), market for policies (many small polities). So hopefully this helped clarify the argument a bit for you (at the expense of my time.) Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.

  • We Can Create a Perfect Government For Opposing Propaganda and Deceit

    —“Lying was industrialized by combining pseudoscience, propaganda, and diminution of standards of education by the elimination of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and economics from our education system. So we have the perfect storm: the ability to saturate the environment with propaganda, a population insufficiently educated to falsify it, and no means of juridical defense by which a minority can prosecute it. When we could create a perfect opposition: a population sufficiently educated to falsify it, a media with incentives to speak truthfully, and the juridical defense of the informational commons by which any minority can hold speakers accountable.”— Curt Doolittle —“There is no such thing as a “perfect” government – and many Classical Liberals (such a the Old Whig Edmund Burke) supported the old British Constitution as the best thing available.”— Paul Marks

    In the context a “perfect storm” and “perfect opposition” convey the meaning I intend them to: ‘sufficient coincidence of causes”. Aside…. I am not sure that’s an argument. It certainly isn’t a criticism of anything I said in the post above. Are you one of those people that confuses meaning as existential and open to deduction rather than normative and not? We can test normative meaning as we test any hypothesis, and by comparing it to like terms reduce normative meaning to what can only refer to necessary meaning. We can use allegory to inform, as long as we do not use allegory for consequent deductions. Now, next, let’s do a little analysis here. First, it really doesn’t matter what anyone in the past thought. The question is whether a government can in fact calculate and decide, producing optimum ends – and whether we choose deliberately eugenic, market eugenic, market dysgenic, or deliberately dysgenic criteria of ultimate decidability. (Because all competitions in the choice of political commons are reducible to eugenic or dysgenic strategies. (just as all questions of ethics are reducible to violence or not; just as all questions of personal choice are reducible to suicide or not.) Just as prices and incentives cannot be produced in combination by any other means, nash equilibrium cannot be produced by other means than voluntary exchanges. (Yet both Keynes and Rawls rely upon individual discretion under the assumption of Pareto optimums). Now this is a simple problem of the possibility of possessing such knowledge. We cannot produce prices and incentives by aggregate means and we cannot produce commons and satisfaction by aggregate means. So it is possible to produce an optimum government and a perfect opposition to the perfect storm. As long as we choose the market eugenic or the deliberately eugenic means of decidability. And as long as we create markets for production(goods and services), reproduction (family), commons (government), dispute resolution (law), market for policies (many small polities). So hopefully this helped clarify the argument a bit for you (at the expense of my time.) Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.

  • We Use The Rule We Can Afford

    —“most governments have been oligarchies – ruled by a minority, chosen either by birth, as in aristocracies, or by a religious organization, as in theocracies, or by wealth, as in democracies”— Will Durant

    CheapReligion: Theocracy. Socialism -> Poverty ExpensiveLaw: Aristocracy, Corporatism -> Market Capitalism – Wealth. Very ExpensiveCommerce: Democracy -> Totalitarian socialism -> Poverty The iron rule of oligarchy prevails.  Why?  Because a market for leadership will produce those leaders best able to control that market.

  • We Use The Rule We Can Afford

    —“most governments have been oligarchies – ruled by a minority, chosen either by birth, as in aristocracies, or by a religious organization, as in theocracies, or by wealth, as in democracies”— Will Durant

    CheapReligion: Theocracy. Socialism -> Poverty ExpensiveLaw: Aristocracy, Corporatism -> Market Capitalism – Wealth. Very ExpensiveCommerce: Democracy -> Totalitarian socialism -> Poverty The iron rule of oligarchy prevails.  Why?  Because a market for leadership will produce those leaders best able to control that market.

  • Monarchy Limits Demand for Power

    Under monarchy, without access to political power, those who sought power by market means, sought to limit the monarchy’s every encroachment. Under democracy, with access to power, everyone seeks it and to expand it.