Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

(quick thought) (serious) (important)

DARK ENLIGHTENMENT AND CONSERVATISM VS LIBERTARIANISM AND INCENTIVES

More on this later, but I see the problem that we are going to have with the conservatives and their fancy with biology.

If we remember that the conservative aristocratic method of thinking is very much one of reproduction and family. It’s tribal. It’s cognizant of BREEDING. A word that has been dropped, but was very common in aristocratic egalitarian history. Breeding was an important consideration both in the family and on the farm. Darwin just explained why. But BREEDING has always been part of our history.

The conservatives have latched onto epigenetic transmission. And I think it’s a rat hole. Even if it’s true, it tells us only that we can evolve FASTER. But it doesn’t tell us much about what changes and how much. Worse, it’s very hard to logically construct a reason why any such change is more significant than the formal and informal institutions that we can construct. Certainly literacy and law are faster means of adaptation than epigenetic transmission every would be.

So this is why our ideas are even more important. INCENTIVES. Our analysis of property rights and our praxeological analysis of incentives, tells us what institutions we can and cannot build because of incentives rather than relying on norms or intuitions.

But conservatives reject outright, as either specious or ‘evil’ any presumption that rational arguments such as incentives, are superior to intuitive arguments. (That’s crazy, I agree. But thats how they think.) And they are partly right because the vast majority of people rely on moral intuitions. its ONLY libertarians who rely on MORAL REASONING. If that sinks in. It will partly explain our failure to spread our arguments in the population.

So what I am not quite settled on – even given that Propertarianism makes all political, ethical and moral arguments commensurable, is how to construct an argument that conservatives will adopt, even if it suits their purposes, because rational arguments are NOT intuitive arguments and only intuitive arguments are ‘appreciated’ by conservatives.