Curt Doolittle

Form: Critique

  • OPINION ON TUCKER: MISSING THE BOAT (from elsewhere) —“What’s your current opi

    OPINION ON TUCKER: MISSING THE BOAT

    (from elsewhere)

    —“What’s your current opinion of Jeffrey Tucker?”—Johannesson

    Tucker is a decent fellow seeking income by popularizing libertinism.

    As a writer he is articulate.

    As a marketer of ideas he is quite good.

    As an editor he is even better.

    As a theorist he is as weak as the rest.

    As an entrepreneur he conflates his advocacy of his over-investment in his passion with the demands of the market: something no libertarian should fail to recognize. Ideology must satisfy market demand just as any other product.

    Like the MI he failed to see the dramatic sea change from hopeful and rebellious classical liberals combined with a few social misfits, to alt-right classical liberals and many socially con-formative. And by missing that shift, and holding onto prior intellectual investments, he has missed his opportunity to generate revenue by continuing WITH the stream, rather than now struggling against it.

    The world has moved on. The Alt-right owns the momentum because it attacks the lies and pseudoscience of the postmoderns head-on, rather than continuing the won-battle against socialism.

    The Libertine generation is over. Libertines cannot hold territory against invaders wishing to impose alternative normative and institutional ambitions. No one gets a free ride on liberty. The only means of obtaining liberty is the violent suppression of those who would take it from us.

    Alt-right is the only possible form of liberty, and therefore the only direction of libertarian investment.

    It is what it is. Adapt or perish.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-20 06:19:00 UTC

  • MISES – FROM BOETTKE’S PAGE —“Curt Doolittle and Chris Cathcart — I am not s

    MISES – FROM BOETTKE’S PAGE

    —“Curt Doolittle and Chris Cathcart — I am not sure I get your point that [Mises] will never get credit … he already does!”—Peter Boettke

    Well, we all agree that he gets credit for stating that socialism was impossible. The question is whether he did so using justification from axiom, or by analysis of available information, available operations, and rational incentives.

    I don’t think anyone argues that his insight was correct. What I argue is that he, like Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Marx, (Mises), the Frankfurt School and Rothbard, demonstrated the pervasive Cosmopolitan error of creating an authoritarian pseudoscience in justification of his priors, rather than engaging in science for the specific purpose of eliminating error, bias and priors, wishful thinking and deceit from one’s theories.

    All knowledge is theoretical because outside of trivialities and tautologies, no premises are certain. Einstein demonstrated that if we cannot count on a concept such as length or time, that no premise is informationally complete enough to deduce necessary consequences. An axiom is a declarative construction – an analogy to reality, and is informationally complete. But no non trivial statement about reality is informationally complete. It cannot be. (hence critical rationalism and critical preference). Science is not justificationary, it is critical: we do not prove something is true, we see if it survives criticism. And the only test of existentially of any hypothesis is operational construction. As such praxeological analysis tests whether a statement CAN be true. So we cannot deduce all of economics from first premises (particularly the incomplete sentence “man acts”). We can observe (empirically) the unobservable, and then construct the observation out of rational actions to test if it is a truth candidate. But we cannot deduce all candidate operations from first principles – demonstrably so.

    As such correctly positioning Mises in intellectual history as the another failure of the 20th century thinkers to complete the evolution of the scientific method from moral and justificationary to objective and critical.

    This demonstrates that mises was, like Brouwer and Bridgman and Popper, attempting to eliminate the evolution of 19th and 20th century pseudoscience that Hayek warned us was the advent of a new form of mysticism.

    Unfortunately, Bridgman and Brouwer did not understand Popper, Hayek could’t put the fields together because he started with psychology rather than ‘calculability’ and ‘computability’. Mises correctly understood calculation but not computability, nor the relation between computably and subjective human incentives. Mises missed the boat by trying to create an pseudoscience or authoritarian logic to suppress pseudoscientific innumeracy in economics.

    What none of them realized – Popper included – is that the scientific method is a MORAL WARRANTY of due diligence in the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit. And that what each of them had done was attempt to prevent the emergent pseudoscience of the Cosmopolitans and Postmodernists that for all intents and purposes functions as the second ‘christianization’ of Europe, this time, by pseudoscientific rather than mystical means.

    And that mises had incorrectly conflated logical necessity with adherence to the necessary morality of voluntary cooperation.

    This is a very profound insight into intellectual history.

    If I wanted to reform Mises I could. But that isn’t necessary. The world has moved on. Instead, the problem we face in our generation is not socialism, but postmodernism and lingering Cosmopolitan pseudoscience and innumeracy in the social sciences. We face pervasive mysticism, pseudoscience, innumeracy, propagandizing, and outright lying in politics and daily life after more than a century of diluting our education in grammar, rhetoric, logic, history and morality.

    Undermining Rothbardian fallacies is just as important as undermining socialist, postmodern, democratic secular humanist, and neo-conservatism.

    And unfortunately to undermine Rothbardian fallacies requires we undermine the fallacies that Rothbard depends upon in his arguments. And to some degree that means doing greater criticism of Mises than we might like.

    A philosopher’s followers can ruin his legacy. His did. There is Precious little Austrian in Mises to start with. He is from Lviv Ukraine, and a Cosmopolitan author in genetics, culture, and method of argument. He is not a scientist. He is attempting to write scriptural law. And he makes consistent errors of conflating law, hermeneutic interpretation in the construction of his insight: it’s not moral or true if it’s not constructible out of rational human actions, and it’s not calculable, moral, and true for human beings to attempt rational planning in the face of state-manufactured deceit. There is very little difference between postmodern propagandism and monetary manipulation. They are both disinformation campaigns designed to alter public behavior to state rather than individual, family, group and tribal ends. So it is not that state interference in the economy cannot be studied in the discipline of economics. It is that doing so studies disinformation, whereas the study of fully informed voluntary cooperation free of error, bias, wishful thinking and deception is the study of moral economics.

    In retrospect it’s not complicated.

    So while I partly agree with you, the damage done by his fallacies to the progress of liberty, and their amplification by rothbard/HHH/MI, have been far more harmful than good. LR at MI tried to use Alinsky’s model of creating propaganda and community. But this battle was above the heads of these people. Whether well intentioned or not.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-18 04:29:00 UTC

  • NO MISES IS NOT A HERO I love him but he was wrong. He conflates definitions wit

    NO MISES IS NOT A HERO

    I love him but he was wrong. He conflates definitions with demonstrated behavior and this is an example of why he was ostracized for his dogmatic verbalisms.

    His method of investigation, which he calls Austrian but is arguably Ukrainian instead, is reducible to the study of the means of improving the institutions that facilitate the voluntary organization of production by eliminating all possible frictions to economic velocity.

    Whereas the mainstream is reducible to the maximum consumption that can be generated by interfering with the voluntary organization of production without producing the disincentives that would increase frictions sufficiently to produce results counter to the ambition.

    When the differences between misesian and mainstream are one of morality and externality, not definition.

    Mises engaged in fallacies throughout his work. He makes consistent mistakes in the application of aprioristic logic of axiomatic systems to the proximal logic of theoretical systems.

    He discovered operationalism in economics just as Brouwer discovered it in math, and Bridgman in physics, and popper in philosophy.

    But none of them managed to put their efforts together into an innovation in the scientific method and the formal uniting of philosophy and science into a single discipline; and finally retiring moral discourse just as moral discourse retired religious discourse.

    This is perhaps one of the greatest failures of the twentieth century.

    Mises was a little right. But his dogmatism ended both his career and his potential to solve the problem not just if economics but if the social sciences.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-17 09:11:00 UTC

  • PSEUDOSCIENCE REIGNS Sorry, but it doesn’t fly. All costs are opportunity costs.

    https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/2014/10/causes-war-peace/ OBJECTIVIST PSEUDOSCIENCE REIGNS Sorry, but it doesn’t fly. All costs are opportunity costs. We can look at each war, and say, the accumulated effect of containing world communism, and estimate thh difference in costs. But the assumption that our condition would be equal or better than that of today is very hard to imagine. Objectivism is merely eastern european ashkenazi border-region philosophy. The reason the ashkenazi do not have eastern europe as a homeland, and the reason they did not hold israel as a homeland, and the reason they are losing israel as a homeland, is the same: they are unwilling to pay the high costs of territorial defense. If you want to live as a migratory pastoralist, or unlanded trader, you are welcome to. But you will be at the mercy of the warriors who give you permission. And you will never be, and can never be, free. Because liberty is not a matter of permission it is a matter of power.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-16 11:36:00 UTC

  • IT’S SIMPLE: READ CARLYLE (MORAL), READ DOOLITTLE (SCIENTIFIC). I can’t read a C

    IT’S SIMPLE: READ CARLYLE (MORAL), READ DOOLITTLE (SCIENTIFIC).

    I can’t read a Carlyle – or any other of the conservatives for that matter. I become too frustrated trying to translate their language into something scientific or analytic to work with. But some people need meaning: stepping stones. And Carlyle provides stepping stones. Hayek’s two essays on economics as information, and his Constitution of Liberty are good stepping stones.

    You know, Mencius was intuitively right. He just couldn’t provide a solution because he didn’t, as Carlyle didn’t, as Hayek didn’t, as Hegel didn’t, as all of the historians didn’t, understand the secret of western velocity: truth, commons, and the total suppression of parasitism by institutional means.

    Propertarianism repairs truth, science, philosophy, ethics and morality, law and politics, and erases and reconstitutes both psychology and social science.

    How do I make it into a course now? Can I do that? I am not sure I am good enough. I can finish the book. But can I make a course of it? Or do I need someone else to do that at some later point in time

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-15 09:17:00 UTC

  • CHOMSKY’S METAPHYSICAL FALLACY (Interesting post on understanding Chomsky via an

    CHOMSKY’S METAPHYSICAL FALLACY

    (Interesting post on understanding Chomsky via anglo vs jewish metaphysical assumptions)

    You know, at least Chomsky, unlike most lefties is well read. Or, rather, he’s well enough read that he at least makes partially rational arguments. But once you understand that his underlying metaphysical desire (or maybe assumption) is a cooperative world in which we are all shepherds of goats, sheep, merchandise, and information (information, myth, gossip, lies), roaming a desert, steppe, or ocean, paying no costs of landholding, and in particular no normative costs of landholding – instead of landholding farmers and capital producers that must constantly pay the high costs and normative costs of land holding – you see right through every single statement he makes as just another poor dimwitted fool indoctrinated into the nonsense metaphysics of religious ‘belief’. I mean, Jewish and Muslim cults are fascinating because they place a tragic and false conformity on their peoples: in the case of jews they are both conquered, diasporic, persecuted, because they do not grasp the central tenet of their faith: that they could not hold judea because they failed to transform from slaves, shepherds, and traders to land holders – because their ethic lacks the mandate that they pay the high cost of norms. They do not live in a world where the steppe, desert, sea, air, or even information system is ‘un owned’. So not only is their faith predicated on a lie (mysticism) but it is predicated on a suicidal falsehood: that they can parasitically exist off land holders who will eventually persecute them for their parasitism, and that they accumulate wealth merely by circumventing those real and normative costs, and indoctrinate themselves into land- holding. instead, they maintain group cohesion by threat of ostracization from internal insurance and advocacy, and the wealth effect of parasitic free riding on land-holders and land holder ethics.

    Well, now lets flip it around and see what errors we Anglos engage in – because it’s not dissimilar, just from the opposite end of the spectrum of land-holding vs migratory labor: an island fortress people, defended like Crete’s Mycenaean civilization by an accomplished navy. Or america, like Rome, entirely dependent for its culture on Athens(Britain) and Sparta(german), exhausting itself with conquest in pursuit of commercial wealth. Anglos live under the illusion that the aristocracy of everyone is either possible or desirable, despite the fact that the reason that the island of Britain developed a near-aristocracy of everyone, was through thousands of years of genetic pacification of the underclasses – leaving only the martial middle and working class, and the rotating upper middle classes alive (as is true throughout most of the hanjal/hanseatic civilization we fail to distinguish from its Mediterranean cousin. But which aside from being christian differs vastly in myths and norms. And then again, that Hanjal/Hansa civilization varies less from its Celtic civilization that was destroyed by the roman conquest of Europe(“Celtica”.)

    Now, look at how desperate the academy and state are to seek status by perpetuating the neo-puritan mythos…

    I mean, government is a ‘bad’ because it allows twisted people the power to do twisted things, for reasons that they don’t understand, but are always reducible to status seeking self interest.

    The Age of Political Empowerment (the Enlightenment era) has been every bit a catastrophe in politics, as the age of technology (the enlightenment) has been a success.

    We cannot revert to the past, we can only complete the transition and remove the folly of will from the state.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-10 07:48:00 UTC

  • I FIGURED OUT CHOMSKY’S BIAS It wasn’t that hard, but usually I can’t read or li

    I FIGURED OUT CHOMSKY’S BIAS

    It wasn’t that hard, but usually I can’t read or listen to him very long without getting angry. But in his speeches on AI I’ve been able to put together what he’s doing, and how it’s another hack of pathological altruism.

    I don’t disagree with a lot of his technical arguments – even if I don’t like the language he uses. But he’s definitely a cosmopolitan railing against the fact that he lives in a world that doesn’t tolerate free riders. And that his intuition is that the world would be better with free riders. Instead of the fact that his privilege is due to the systematic persecution of free riding in all three cultures that harbor him.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-06 06:50:00 UTC

  • NOTES ON JULIUS EVOLA’S RIDE THE TIGER (reason the european right fails) 1) EXPE

    NOTES ON JULIUS EVOLA’S RIDE THE TIGER

    (reason the european right fails)

    1) EXPERIENTIAL LANGUAGE SHOWS HIS LACKING. He has to use a lot of experiential terms because he does not understand the ‘scientific’ content of our ‘traditions’ that he ‘feels and intuits’.

    2) WE CANNOT RE-EVOLVE INTUITIONISTIC TRADITIONS, WE CAN ONLY IMPOSE OBSERVABLE LAW. Without understanding that content, one cannot impose the content of that prior (traditional) order by procedural, institutional, intentional means. The habituated, ‘unscientific’ mythos that the ‘traditional world’ evolved under cannot be institutionally reconstructed. In other words, while one can accidentally evolve, by trial and error, a set of myths, rituals, traditions, norms and habits, and institute them by the legislation; once the scientific . In other words, if content is ‘true’ then it can be imposed by rule of law.

    3) ARISTOCRATIC ACCUMULATION VS PROLETARIAN CONSUMPTION. He is speaking of the aristocratic mind, and how there is no longer a role for aristocratic mind in our ‘bourgeoise’ or better stated ‘consumer’ civilization, in which we signal by consumption rather than the production and paternal ‘farming’ of civilizational excellence: the true, the commons, and the beautiful. In other words, he is speaking as an aristocratic producer of commons, not a bourgeoise production of consumption, nor a mere consumer of production. He lacks the language (Propertarianism) to make his statements in what we would today call a ‘technical’ or ‘scientific’ language.

    That’s the IMPORTANT POINT: Conservative construction of commons vs progressive consumption of commons

    4) LACKING LANGUAGE MEANS LACKING THEORY. Through traditional lends, he uses antique terminology that misleads him (as do many french, german and Italian thinkers). Imprecise words (allegories) are an intellectual prison just as precise words (theories) are an intellectual key to intellectual freedom.

    5) VIRTUE ETHICS He is looking for a virtue ethics (as are most of us, since they are the easiest to understand and adopt with the least general knowledge), which evolves in response (as justification of) a set of metaphysical value judgements. But one cannot construct virtue ethics by institutional means. One can only justify scientific institutions by a means of virtue ethics.

    6) SAVIOR MYTH. As such, (like Hoppe), Evola’s solution is to preserve our literature and intentions, and seize an opportunity that MAY come in the future. Meaning he has failed to develop an institutional solution to restore the scientific (objectively good) content of our traditions. In other words, he is creating a christian “savior mythos” for himself. And not a solution for ourself. My solution is actually pretty simple: continue the evolution of the common law of non-imposition against any form of property, into a formal inviolable, verbalism-impervious, logic of cooperation.

    7) BELIEF WITHOUT MEANS OF PERSISTENCE VS INCENTIVES WITH MEANS OF PERSISTENCE. While as an intellectual I sympathize with and share sentiments and intuitions with, as well as aesthetic history, he provides little explanation of the incentives and institutions that allowed those traditional circumstances to arise, and he focuses as do most ‘philosophers’ upon what good ‘belief’ is (which is nonsense, since belief is justificationary). ‘Belief’ and ‘value’ are terms hungover from the age of mysticism. We need not believe incentives. They exist. They can be constructed. We can construct a high trust order. In fact, it’s not even complicated. Few recipes are complicated. It’s discovering them.

    8) MY OWN GERMANIC (PREWAR) BIAS. I realize that I am an anglo analytic (scientific) not a continental rational (moral), and that english is a technical language and that continental intellectual history is poetic, literary, romantic, moral and spiritual. They have the curse of norms that island people (the anglosphere) has in canada thanks to the french abuse of canada in the 70’s, but which americans and to some degree australians do not quite. In this case it is most obvious that America is a german country speaking the english language prior to the breakup of germanic civilzation into anglo and german wings in the 1830’s. And americans retain the pre-war germanic political culture, albeit in english language, more so than do either Britain or Germany today.

    9) NOTHING TO LEARN FROM HIM BUT POETIC LICENSE. Realistically, I just can get nothing from him. I have developed propertarianism and testimonialism to escape the limits of the ages of mysticism and rationalism, and to bring political discourse into the age of science.

    10) OTHERS MIGHT GAIN MEANING PRIOR TO PROPERTARIANISM. Perhaps for many others of the aristocratic (paternal) class, it is, and will be, easier to understand Evola prior to understanding Propertarianism and Testimonialism. Perhaps I am the product of my half century of science and computer science. Perhaps I have been trained to eradicate the subjective experience from my perceptions such that the subjective experience sounds to me as talk of gods will sounds to scientists and aethists. So becasue of that training, and my now near universal loss of appreciateion for fictional literature, and what I term justificationary moralizing, I can find no value in looking backward into less parsimonious political literature. But that does not mean others will not. It means only that like classical liberalism, anglo libertarianism, cosmopolitan libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, and Neo-Reaction, that Evola is a step in the intellectual history that many must go through, even though he has no solutions and provides us no means of achieving our ends – or even understanding what too seek and how.

    RESTATING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADVOCATIVE INFORMAL BELIEF AND PROHIBITIONARY FORMAL INSTITUTIONS.

    Belief and ‘value’ are not meaningful words in political philosophy. They are artifacts of religious mysticism and its half hearted reformation: rational philosophy. Adults today speak in terms of Institutions, incentives, economics, and law.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-05 04:15:00 UTC

  • The State of NRx and its Relation to Propertarianism

    AN ANALYSIS OF THE STATE OF NRx AND ITS RELATION TO PROPERTARIANISM
    (from elsewhere)

    RE: https://thespiritualsun.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/a-catalog-of-unforced-errors/

    [G]reat post. I’ve been looking for a way to riff off of someone else’s work. This is a good opportunity. Sorry if this is a bit long. I just went through the points and captured my thoughts as I went along. But I think it gets the point across.
    1) Scope?
    To what are you referring when referring to NRx? Do you mean Yarvin’s Critique? Do you mean the folks that claim to defend authority over arguments in that critique? Do you mean the body of people who participate in that set of criticisms and make use of those arguments? Do you mean the entire suite of arguments that suggest that the enlightenment experiment has failed?

    2) —What would a small measure of success look like for contemporary reaction? —
    Success would incrementally look like: (a) a body of language for signaling and ridicule of opponents (b) an ideological research program seeking post-democratic solutions (c) Awareness (mention) of the central criticism of the Cathedral Complex among the informed advocates of each of the three political compass points, (d) expansion of the pool of talent arguing the position of the criticism, (e) popular mention of the failure or success of democracy and the enlightenment project (f) The production of a set of solutions that were possible to implement, and therefore possible to demand, (g) proposal of policy and changes, (h) enactment of policy.

    3) Failure.
    —“Neoreaction has failed to obtain any wealthy patrons or even well-known proponents. For every serious, mature Neoreactionary there are ten juvenile snark-emitting anime avatars who use the hashtag. For everyone who uses the hashtag, there are probably twenty people who see the failure of progressivism and democracy, but are unwilling to be part of a “crab cult”. …. NRx has now retreated into a hermetically sealed inner circle which brooks no discussion with those who are critical.”—

    Reasons:
    (a) Yarvin’s critique of the failure of the enlightenment experiments is an instance of ‘critique’ not an actionable or scientific theory. The fact that one cannot reduce it like evolution to a theory is why it remains a critique. The world no longer operates on criticism except in the mass market. The world operates by scientific argument and popularization by moral loading. NRx does the opposite.

    (b) As such there is no means of obtaining political or economic power by a broad spectrum of the population which would include both those with money and those with time.

    (c) But there remains a moral criticism and a morally loaded criticism for those who require self-signals of moral righteousness to justify their separatism. It is this use of NRx for self-signaling by outcasts from the mainstream that you are observing.

    (I consider Propertarianism and Testimonialism post-NRx for these reasons.)

    4) Successes
    —” it’s worth acknowledging what NRx has gotten right. While there is no clear-cut consensus on many details, the general center-of-gravity acknowledges the irredeemable problems of Progressivism and Democracy, the unrealistic fantasy of Libertarianism, and the positive value of hierarchy and racial realism and sex/gender realism. “—-

    (a) I would love to see someone other than Yarin who has added content to NRx. I am not sure who has.

    (b) As I understand it, the criticisms are (i) that the enlightenment project seeking to extend the aristocratic franchise(political participation) and post-kinship-relations to all property holders, then to all men, then to all women, then to out-group members, has been a failure because the competing interests of each group cannot be satisfied by majority rule, and the result of majority rule was proletarian rule. (ii) And that the cathedral complex (state, academy, media, elites) have displaced the martial, judicial, and empirical complex, and have constructed a pseudoscientific and pseudo-rational mythology to replace the Aristocracy/Merchant/ChristianChurch+Academy and it’s division of responsibilities (jurisprudence, production, education) with a monopoly of state and academy supported by the media. Importantly: the west successfully resisted this centralization longer than all other cultures, and this is one of the many reasons for our technological, legal and military excellence.

    (c) Yarvin constructed his argument using critique. (Yarvin: Jewish criticism(gossip), Hoppe: German justificationary rationalism(philosophy), Doolittle: Anglo analytic-empiricism(science).)

    The criticism is largely correct. The solution (technology) is not. This is the problem with all philosophical Critique and Justifiationism. In failing to answer the why, the criticism alone provides no insight into the prior era’s success: extension of kinship trust and truth-telling to non-kin, and the extension of property rights(enfranchisement) by merit.

    —“Neoreaction wants a more stable, sustainable, anti-fragile society, one that is integrated and organic, with very little political activity, since politics is disruptive to the social fabric. Reaction has those same goals. The problem is that everything else in Neoreaction attenuates that one point of strength.”—

    Yes. The western tradition advocates Heroism/Truth/Honor while warning against Hubris/Vanity. And western hubris and vanity are demonstrated by our belief that our enlightenment visions have solved ancient problems rather than that we have been able to act hubristically because of the temporary wealth effect of our legal, financial, technological, and petrochemical innovations. As the world catches up to us, our advantage is no longer legal, financial, technological and petrochemical, but merely cultural: we still are the only high trust culture, and we are destroying it through that same legalistic hubris and immigration.

    5) Tech Culture
    —“A software system is fragile; a statesman has to be flexible. A software system is designed around a particular model of reality, and cannot “see” beyond that model.”—

    This is an excellent point but fails to get to the underlying problem:discretion. Rule of law requires decidability. The debate in economics for example is between the saltwater economists who seek to find opportunities to apply discretion; the freshwater economists who seek rules so that economic governance is articulated under rule of law (without discretion), and the Austrian economists who seek to reduce the frictions of cooperation by improving institutions of cooperation.

    Software requires decidable propositions. I am unclear as to whether Yarvin understands that he was trying to solve the ancient problem of rule of law. What I am clear about is that software teaches you the (low) limits of your knowledge, the requirement that you demonstrate your knowledge by creating algorithms, and that each step of which is decidable. And if you succeed then you have constructed the equivalent of well articulated law. In other words, rule of law should look very much like programming: lacking need for discretion (or in math what we call “choice” in a cases of arbitrary precision (lack of context)).

    So Yarvin intuits the approximately correct problem I think, and simply fails to come up with a solution. THe solution is that when we enfrancise new groups with different interests we can no longer rely upon majority rule, but require houses for each new group, within which majority rule may be practiced, but where trades can be conducted between houses and trades invalidated if illegal, rather than requiring assent. In other words, government should consist of a market for the production of commons between classes with dissimilar interests. (Genders, Social Classes).
    It is possible to develop this solution only because one does not rely on critique of failure, but reconstruction of success of the west. Criticism provides no insight. The success of the west requires we understand it.

    6) Social Darwinism

    I’m not going to criticize this paragraph (even though I should) but it’s not constructive or insightful. No ‘harmony’ no ‘positive assertion’ is knowable in cooperative matters, any more than it is in physical science. Western civilization has been practicing eugenics through at least three phases: (a) harsh winters (b) manorial allocation of property to capable married couples and (c) through hanging or killing .5-1% of malcontents annually. (So has China). As far as I can tell, the primary difference between the different tribal and racial groups is only in the degree of suppression of reproduction of the underclasses (how successful they were at eugenic culling), or in the case of india and south america, how successful the aristocracy was at creating a caste system. The problem is that reproductive suppression of the underclasses is least harmful, and produces superior distributions so that the pareto rule (80% of the property in the top 20% of hands) can place the means of organizing production in the hands of those most able to do it for profit rather than exploitation. (this is the problem facing india and south america.)

    So whether it is appealing or not, it’s true. The question is then, given the truth, how to best go about transferring reproduction from dysgenic to eugenic ends. And as far as I know, that’s only possible by paying the underclasses not to reproduce, and paying the upper classes (or at least the middle class) to reproduce.

    Right now we do precisely the opposite. Which since 1850 appears to have taken us from parity with ashkenazim to 1/2 standard deviation downward.

    6) Culture of Critique
    I think I’ve covered this already, but I agree wholeheartedly. This is because NRx, structured as Critique, attracts gossipers to easy criticism for the purpose of argumentative signaling, rather than serious intellectuals to the furtherance of challenging political solutions. It also explains the near absence of intellectuals in the NRx (and libertarian) movements. (Something I want to fix, by emphasis on solutions rather than criticisms.)

    7) No Constituency
    Correct. Gossip is used to rally, shame, and ostracize, not to organize solutions. Critique is merely advanced gossip used to rally, shame and morally outrage. Intellectuals and activists of above average ability, and those who are capable will pursue positive rather than critical ends. Leaving those who are less capable in the field. This is what has happened to libertarianism. Intellectuals have abandoned the field since the 70’s leaving only over-invested has-beens. (most of whom I know personally who I hope forgive the truth.)

    8) No Sacrifice
    —“There is no great spirit of sacrifice.”—

    I think this criticism should be restated as that there is no heroic call to action. But again, there is no call to action there is only call to moral indignation over being *lied to* for a century at so much expense.

    But your statement that individuals are seeking attention is probably not meaningful. This should be restated as the content of NRx is insufficient to advance a theory, so that individuals advance the criticism through rallying. Rallying requires leaders to rally.

     This is a natural consequence of the failure of Critique. At least the marxists proposed solutions, even if they were pseudoscientific. We lack the numbers (and women) for gossip (critique) to be distributed as is progressivism and political correctness, and we lack the incentives of the government (votes) academy (female student customers) and media (female and some male consumers) necessary to conduct rallying and shaming (although the alt-right is making some impressive progress in meme-generation that is certainly working).

    9) No Dialectic
    Well, I would argue that a ‘dialectic’ is an admission of failure, and a research program is evidence of success. Dialectic is an exceptional means of carrying upon deceit. Research programs are not. If you mean that an ineffective minority is trying to contain the discourse because they have no theoretical definitions to constrain it, then that is correct. But this is another example of consequence of the failure of the method, not that the criticism NRx puts forward is false.

    Unfortunately, moral rallying is more emotionally rewarding and easier to grasp than rational, legal, or scientific argument that by very nature eschew the subjective value of moral outrage.

    And this again presents an interesting problem since political power requires moral outrage, but in the scientific era it must be proposed as an actionable theory – we are no longer in the era of the french revolution or even the marxist and postmodern. The very reason we have the science to justify Reaction is the end of those eras and the current scientific era. Our arguments must depend upon the ratio scientific – which is why I am working to unite science, philosophy, morality and law. And I think (I am not yet certain) that I have done so.

    I do not matter however. I am irrelevant. What matters is whether the theory survives. And I think it will survive for many generations: truth (in the scientific sense I put forward) is enough to prevent and reverse the second levantine lie: the combination of cosmopolitan pseudoscience and anglo puritan and neo-puritan utopianism.

    10) Apocalyptic Mentality
    This is an ideologically necessary technique for implementing political change. See Andrew Heywood’d Political Ideologies : An Introduction. And they’re not wrong. This problem is indeed culturally and genetically apocalyptic. There is no reason to prevent yet another dark age. There have been multiple in our history. And in both the sea peoples, the classical period, and the contemporary period, they were caused by population migration by inferiors into established cultures.

    11) Metaphysical Foundations
    Well, that’s certainly true but I have almost as certainly corrected that, leaving the NRx criticism as ‘true’ and Testimonialism and Propertarianism as explanations and solutions. So this merely strengthens the NRX critique. I see NRx as the ideological incentive for revolution, while my work as the solution that we must demand to either reform or replace the enlightenment.

    12) Amorality
    I am not sure I should try to correct this paragraph. You mean to say something but I am not quite sure what it is. I think I would restate it as people need to feel moral justification if they are to forcibly implement change, but the NRx community is not giving people that justification in actionable terms.

    FROM MY PERSPECTIVE

    (a) People are already associating my work with the radical right even though my solution is certainly progressive by any measure. I see this as threatening the viability of my work just as Nietzche’s works were threatened. So I am reluctantly pleased that traditionalists see the value in my work as explaining why their civilization outpaced all others everywhere at all points in time, but equally nervous about casting me as anything other than a social scientists seeking economic prosperity and non-conflict. (I hate conflict)

    (b) I tend to disassociate myself with NRx because it is as you suggest, a fairly immature movement and aside from Land (who is himself an elegant practitioner of rational meaning in the continental tradition not an analytic philosopher in the scientific and critical rational traditions) it is a very lonely place to be. I don’t want to be labeled on the down side.

    So: Classical Liberal->Libertarian->Ancap->NRx->Testimonialism/Propertarianism seems to be the trajectory I follow.

    We have taken the classical liberal program, criticized it for its incremental failures in each generation, and now have produced a sufficient criticism that we can REFORM the classical liberal program such that we restore the ability for houses of government to represent various classes and to conduct contractual exchanges between them (legislation) but that they cannot make law. This process of pacification first uses centralized government to suppress local parasitism and decrease transaction costs producing economic velocity, at the cost of an increasingly self-serving monopoly bureaucracy. But it is our generation’s function to now eliminate the cost of self serving monopoly bureaucracy, and to return western government to the function of producing commons within the limits of the civic society that we so uniquely developed in this world.

    (c) The rate of revolutionary incentive and consensus is accelerating, but a revolution without an objective that provides everyone who agrees with our moral incentives and not is much more difficult to bring into fruition. There were generations of thinkers prior to the last revolutionary era. The world moves faster now and our generation needs to complete a political solution that can be implemented in law without the need for ‘belief’ or ‘shared values’ which are code-words for monopoly of opinion, if we are to achieve the restoration of our civilization.

    CLOSING
    I hope this was helpful as a means of giving those who are sympathetic to the NRx movement some ideas about why they’re both right but insufficient, and where they might turn next, given that they’re insufficient. I find no reason to really attack the NRx movement as I have the cosmopolitan libertine (ancap) movement. However, my preferred objective is that if we recognize these movements as failures, that we can all unite behind some variation which gives each of us most of what we desire, and our opposition much of what they desire. The reason being that in game theory while no one achieves all his wants, the best wants that all can achieve are the best wants POSSIBLE to achieve.

    Truth is enough. It’s the source of western exceptionalism. We just need to put truth into law. Aristocracy is an empirical means of government. We assert no positives other than that if we prevent negatives then all of mankind is free to experiment by trial and error. And that is the very definition of ‘scientific’.

    Ancap was a step. NRx was a step. One foot in front of the other, we soldier onward.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)
    http://thespiritualsun.wordpress.com/…/a-catalog-of-unforc…/

  • The State of NRx and its Relation to Propertarianism

    AN ANALYSIS OF THE STATE OF NRx AND ITS RELATION TO PROPERTARIANISM
    (from elsewhere)

    RE: https://thespiritualsun.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/a-catalog-of-unforced-errors/

    [G]reat post. I’ve been looking for a way to riff off of someone else’s work. This is a good opportunity. Sorry if this is a bit long. I just went through the points and captured my thoughts as I went along. But I think it gets the point across.
    1) Scope?
    To what are you referring when referring to NRx? Do you mean Yarvin’s Critique? Do you mean the folks that claim to defend authority over arguments in that critique? Do you mean the body of people who participate in that set of criticisms and make use of those arguments? Do you mean the entire suite of arguments that suggest that the enlightenment experiment has failed?

    2) —What would a small measure of success look like for contemporary reaction? —
    Success would incrementally look like: (a) a body of language for signaling and ridicule of opponents (b) an ideological research program seeking post-democratic solutions (c) Awareness (mention) of the central criticism of the Cathedral Complex among the informed advocates of each of the three political compass points, (d) expansion of the pool of talent arguing the position of the criticism, (e) popular mention of the failure or success of democracy and the enlightenment project (f) The production of a set of solutions that were possible to implement, and therefore possible to demand, (g) proposal of policy and changes, (h) enactment of policy.

    3) Failure.
    —“Neoreaction has failed to obtain any wealthy patrons or even well-known proponents. For every serious, mature Neoreactionary there are ten juvenile snark-emitting anime avatars who use the hashtag. For everyone who uses the hashtag, there are probably twenty people who see the failure of progressivism and democracy, but are unwilling to be part of a “crab cult”. …. NRx has now retreated into a hermetically sealed inner circle which brooks no discussion with those who are critical.”—

    Reasons:
    (a) Yarvin’s critique of the failure of the enlightenment experiments is an instance of ‘critique’ not an actionable or scientific theory. The fact that one cannot reduce it like evolution to a theory is why it remains a critique. The world no longer operates on criticism except in the mass market. The world operates by scientific argument and popularization by moral loading. NRx does the opposite.

    (b) As such there is no means of obtaining political or economic power by a broad spectrum of the population which would include both those with money and those with time.

    (c) But there remains a moral criticism and a morally loaded criticism for those who require self-signals of moral righteousness to justify their separatism. It is this use of NRx for self-signaling by outcasts from the mainstream that you are observing.

    (I consider Propertarianism and Testimonialism post-NRx for these reasons.)

    4) Successes
    —” it’s worth acknowledging what NRx has gotten right. While there is no clear-cut consensus on many details, the general center-of-gravity acknowledges the irredeemable problems of Progressivism and Democracy, the unrealistic fantasy of Libertarianism, and the positive value of hierarchy and racial realism and sex/gender realism. “—-

    (a) I would love to see someone other than Yarin who has added content to NRx. I am not sure who has.

    (b) As I understand it, the criticisms are (i) that the enlightenment project seeking to extend the aristocratic franchise(political participation) and post-kinship-relations to all property holders, then to all men, then to all women, then to out-group members, has been a failure because the competing interests of each group cannot be satisfied by majority rule, and the result of majority rule was proletarian rule. (ii) And that the cathedral complex (state, academy, media, elites) have displaced the martial, judicial, and empirical complex, and have constructed a pseudoscientific and pseudo-rational mythology to replace the Aristocracy/Merchant/ChristianChurch+Academy and it’s division of responsibilities (jurisprudence, production, education) with a monopoly of state and academy supported by the media. Importantly: the west successfully resisted this centralization longer than all other cultures, and this is one of the many reasons for our technological, legal and military excellence.

    (c) Yarvin constructed his argument using critique. (Yarvin: Jewish criticism(gossip), Hoppe: German justificationary rationalism(philosophy), Doolittle: Anglo analytic-empiricism(science).)

    The criticism is largely correct. The solution (technology) is not. This is the problem with all philosophical Critique and Justifiationism. In failing to answer the why, the criticism alone provides no insight into the prior era’s success: extension of kinship trust and truth-telling to non-kin, and the extension of property rights(enfranchisement) by merit.

    —“Neoreaction wants a more stable, sustainable, anti-fragile society, one that is integrated and organic, with very little political activity, since politics is disruptive to the social fabric. Reaction has those same goals. The problem is that everything else in Neoreaction attenuates that one point of strength.”—

    Yes. The western tradition advocates Heroism/Truth/Honor while warning against Hubris/Vanity. And western hubris and vanity are demonstrated by our belief that our enlightenment visions have solved ancient problems rather than that we have been able to act hubristically because of the temporary wealth effect of our legal, financial, technological, and petrochemical innovations. As the world catches up to us, our advantage is no longer legal, financial, technological and petrochemical, but merely cultural: we still are the only high trust culture, and we are destroying it through that same legalistic hubris and immigration.

    5) Tech Culture
    —“A software system is fragile; a statesman has to be flexible. A software system is designed around a particular model of reality, and cannot “see” beyond that model.”—

    This is an excellent point but fails to get to the underlying problem:discretion. Rule of law requires decidability. The debate in economics for example is between the saltwater economists who seek to find opportunities to apply discretion; the freshwater economists who seek rules so that economic governance is articulated under rule of law (without discretion), and the Austrian economists who seek to reduce the frictions of cooperation by improving institutions of cooperation.

    Software requires decidable propositions. I am unclear as to whether Yarvin understands that he was trying to solve the ancient problem of rule of law. What I am clear about is that software teaches you the (low) limits of your knowledge, the requirement that you demonstrate your knowledge by creating algorithms, and that each step of which is decidable. And if you succeed then you have constructed the equivalent of well articulated law. In other words, rule of law should look very much like programming: lacking need for discretion (or in math what we call “choice” in a cases of arbitrary precision (lack of context)).

    So Yarvin intuits the approximately correct problem I think, and simply fails to come up with a solution. THe solution is that when we enfrancise new groups with different interests we can no longer rely upon majority rule, but require houses for each new group, within which majority rule may be practiced, but where trades can be conducted between houses and trades invalidated if illegal, rather than requiring assent. In other words, government should consist of a market for the production of commons between classes with dissimilar interests. (Genders, Social Classes).
    It is possible to develop this solution only because one does not rely on critique of failure, but reconstruction of success of the west. Criticism provides no insight. The success of the west requires we understand it.

    6) Social Darwinism

    I’m not going to criticize this paragraph (even though I should) but it’s not constructive or insightful. No ‘harmony’ no ‘positive assertion’ is knowable in cooperative matters, any more than it is in physical science. Western civilization has been practicing eugenics through at least three phases: (a) harsh winters (b) manorial allocation of property to capable married couples and (c) through hanging or killing .5-1% of malcontents annually. (So has China). As far as I can tell, the primary difference between the different tribal and racial groups is only in the degree of suppression of reproduction of the underclasses (how successful they were at eugenic culling), or in the case of india and south america, how successful the aristocracy was at creating a caste system. The problem is that reproductive suppression of the underclasses is least harmful, and produces superior distributions so that the pareto rule (80% of the property in the top 20% of hands) can place the means of organizing production in the hands of those most able to do it for profit rather than exploitation. (this is the problem facing india and south america.)

    So whether it is appealing or not, it’s true. The question is then, given the truth, how to best go about transferring reproduction from dysgenic to eugenic ends. And as far as I know, that’s only possible by paying the underclasses not to reproduce, and paying the upper classes (or at least the middle class) to reproduce.

    Right now we do precisely the opposite. Which since 1850 appears to have taken us from parity with ashkenazim to 1/2 standard deviation downward.

    6) Culture of Critique
    I think I’ve covered this already, but I agree wholeheartedly. This is because NRx, structured as Critique, attracts gossipers to easy criticism for the purpose of argumentative signaling, rather than serious intellectuals to the furtherance of challenging political solutions. It also explains the near absence of intellectuals in the NRx (and libertarian) movements. (Something I want to fix, by emphasis on solutions rather than criticisms.)

    7) No Constituency
    Correct. Gossip is used to rally, shame, and ostracize, not to organize solutions. Critique is merely advanced gossip used to rally, shame and morally outrage. Intellectuals and activists of above average ability, and those who are capable will pursue positive rather than critical ends. Leaving those who are less capable in the field. This is what has happened to libertarianism. Intellectuals have abandoned the field since the 70’s leaving only over-invested has-beens. (most of whom I know personally who I hope forgive the truth.)

    8) No Sacrifice
    —“There is no great spirit of sacrifice.”—

    I think this criticism should be restated as that there is no heroic call to action. But again, there is no call to action there is only call to moral indignation over being *lied to* for a century at so much expense.

    But your statement that individuals are seeking attention is probably not meaningful. This should be restated as the content of NRx is insufficient to advance a theory, so that individuals advance the criticism through rallying. Rallying requires leaders to rally.

     This is a natural consequence of the failure of Critique. At least the marxists proposed solutions, even if they were pseudoscientific. We lack the numbers (and women) for gossip (critique) to be distributed as is progressivism and political correctness, and we lack the incentives of the government (votes) academy (female student customers) and media (female and some male consumers) necessary to conduct rallying and shaming (although the alt-right is making some impressive progress in meme-generation that is certainly working).

    9) No Dialectic
    Well, I would argue that a ‘dialectic’ is an admission of failure, and a research program is evidence of success. Dialectic is an exceptional means of carrying upon deceit. Research programs are not. If you mean that an ineffective minority is trying to contain the discourse because they have no theoretical definitions to constrain it, then that is correct. But this is another example of consequence of the failure of the method, not that the criticism NRx puts forward is false.

    Unfortunately, moral rallying is more emotionally rewarding and easier to grasp than rational, legal, or scientific argument that by very nature eschew the subjective value of moral outrage.

    And this again presents an interesting problem since political power requires moral outrage, but in the scientific era it must be proposed as an actionable theory – we are no longer in the era of the french revolution or even the marxist and postmodern. The very reason we have the science to justify Reaction is the end of those eras and the current scientific era. Our arguments must depend upon the ratio scientific – which is why I am working to unite science, philosophy, morality and law. And I think (I am not yet certain) that I have done so.

    I do not matter however. I am irrelevant. What matters is whether the theory survives. And I think it will survive for many generations: truth (in the scientific sense I put forward) is enough to prevent and reverse the second levantine lie: the combination of cosmopolitan pseudoscience and anglo puritan and neo-puritan utopianism.

    10) Apocalyptic Mentality
    This is an ideologically necessary technique for implementing political change. See Andrew Heywood’d Political Ideologies : An Introduction. And they’re not wrong. This problem is indeed culturally and genetically apocalyptic. There is no reason to prevent yet another dark age. There have been multiple in our history. And in both the sea peoples, the classical period, and the contemporary period, they were caused by population migration by inferiors into established cultures.

    11) Metaphysical Foundations
    Well, that’s certainly true but I have almost as certainly corrected that, leaving the NRx criticism as ‘true’ and Testimonialism and Propertarianism as explanations and solutions. So this merely strengthens the NRX critique. I see NRx as the ideological incentive for revolution, while my work as the solution that we must demand to either reform or replace the enlightenment.

    12) Amorality
    I am not sure I should try to correct this paragraph. You mean to say something but I am not quite sure what it is. I think I would restate it as people need to feel moral justification if they are to forcibly implement change, but the NRx community is not giving people that justification in actionable terms.

    FROM MY PERSPECTIVE

    (a) People are already associating my work with the radical right even though my solution is certainly progressive by any measure. I see this as threatening the viability of my work just as Nietzche’s works were threatened. So I am reluctantly pleased that traditionalists see the value in my work as explaining why their civilization outpaced all others everywhere at all points in time, but equally nervous about casting me as anything other than a social scientists seeking economic prosperity and non-conflict. (I hate conflict)

    (b) I tend to disassociate myself with NRx because it is as you suggest, a fairly immature movement and aside from Land (who is himself an elegant practitioner of rational meaning in the continental tradition not an analytic philosopher in the scientific and critical rational traditions) it is a very lonely place to be. I don’t want to be labeled on the down side.

    So: Classical Liberal->Libertarian->Ancap->NRx->Testimonialism/Propertarianism seems to be the trajectory I follow.

    We have taken the classical liberal program, criticized it for its incremental failures in each generation, and now have produced a sufficient criticism that we can REFORM the classical liberal program such that we restore the ability for houses of government to represent various classes and to conduct contractual exchanges between them (legislation) but that they cannot make law. This process of pacification first uses centralized government to suppress local parasitism and decrease transaction costs producing economic velocity, at the cost of an increasingly self-serving monopoly bureaucracy. But it is our generation’s function to now eliminate the cost of self serving monopoly bureaucracy, and to return western government to the function of producing commons within the limits of the civic society that we so uniquely developed in this world.

    (c) The rate of revolutionary incentive and consensus is accelerating, but a revolution without an objective that provides everyone who agrees with our moral incentives and not is much more difficult to bring into fruition. There were generations of thinkers prior to the last revolutionary era. The world moves faster now and our generation needs to complete a political solution that can be implemented in law without the need for ‘belief’ or ‘shared values’ which are code-words for monopoly of opinion, if we are to achieve the restoration of our civilization.

    CLOSING
    I hope this was helpful as a means of giving those who are sympathetic to the NRx movement some ideas about why they’re both right but insufficient, and where they might turn next, given that they’re insufficient. I find no reason to really attack the NRx movement as I have the cosmopolitan libertine (ancap) movement. However, my preferred objective is that if we recognize these movements as failures, that we can all unite behind some variation which gives each of us most of what we desire, and our opposition much of what they desire. The reason being that in game theory while no one achieves all his wants, the best wants that all can achieve are the best wants POSSIBLE to achieve.

    Truth is enough. It’s the source of western exceptionalism. We just need to put truth into law. Aristocracy is an empirical means of government. We assert no positives other than that if we prevent negatives then all of mankind is free to experiment by trial and error. And that is the very definition of ‘scientific’.

    Ancap was a step. NRx was a step. One foot in front of the other, we soldier onward.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)
    http://thespiritualsun.wordpress.com/…/a-catalog-of-unforc…/