MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY? (reposted from elsewhere) (I think this will blow your mind a little bit.) Mises Human Action as Cosmopolitan Stoicism. [H]e was almost right. If Rothbard and the Rothbardians had not damaged his legacy so severely, he would not be ostracized by the main stream intellectual community. At present any mention of his name associates a public intellectual, an economist, or philosopher, with the pseudoscientific lunatic fringe. Praxeology is a failed attempt at Operationalism, sure – but no one ELSE came close to developing economic operationalism but Mises. I only did it because I have the luxury of a century of additional development in computability (especially Turing), and because it’s clear now that the analytic program (attempt to convert philosophy into a science) has been a failure, and that the success in reforming both science and psychology has almost entirely been because of Operationalism. Had Mises joined with Brouwer and Bridgman, the three of them might have saved us from a century of pseudoscience. But without a philosopher of ethics to unify them, Popper in the philosophy of science, Mises in Economics, Brouwer in mathematics, and Bridgman in physics all failed to come to the correct conclusion: that they were not in fact articulating logical constraints – because there is no logical constraint to theory-development. The logical constraint is only in the statement of promise (that you are telling the truth) that such a theory can be expressed existentially, as a sequence of operations (actions) or operational measures of observations. And as such, one’s theory, in any discipline, is free of content that was added by error, imagination, or deception. Man can testify to observation in the execution of recipes – all else is imagination. As such the practice of the sciences (or rather, the practice of *disciplined testimony* which the sciences developed, but which consists of nothing unique to the physical sciences) is a moral one, with ethical constraints. As such, praxeology, mathematical intuitionism, operationalism, operationism, Popper’s critical preference, and the scientific method, as well as the discipline of science as currently practiced, are moral constraints, not logical ones. One can intuit a theory by whatever means possible. One can believe whatever he wishes to justify. But one’s promise of testimony to the actions that did or may produce consequences is a moral one, not a logical one. [A]s far as I know, the only meaningful reason to study economics for use in ethics and politics, is to justify the rule of law (Nomocracy), under the single rule of property rights, where property rights is as defined under Propertarianism, as property-en-toto (demonstrated property). And where that body of law suppresses sufficient involuntary transfer of property-en-toto, that the formation of a Nomocratic polity is possible. And where the formation and perpetuation of that polity is possible, because transaction costs are sufficiently suppressed that a rational choice for Nomocracy is possible, over a rational choice for statism. And that the normative preference of nomocratic rule over statist rule is maintained by the constant exercise of that body of law in daily life, rather than a phillosophical-rational, religio-moral, pedagogically-instructional, or normatively-habituated means of persistence. If we look at his human action as an attempt to develop an economic version of stoicism – a mental discipline – I think it is probably a better frame of reference for his work than as economics or analytic philosophy. As such I see him as creating a Cosmopolitan version of stoicism (economic/intellectual character) rather than western (Aryan if you will) stoicism (political/craftsmanship character). Both forms of stoicism are early attempts at operationalizing philosophy for disciplinary action as an individual member of a complex division of labor in which we possess fragmentary information. Since I quote him endlessly for his analysis of money and fiduciary media, which again, he (“a sequence of human actions” = “operational observations”) correctly uses operational analysis to isolate and articulate the causal rather than normative properties – I am clearly an advocate. But I am not an advocate of the misuse of Mises’ errors – his failed attempt to develop economic operationalism – to justify Rothbardian libertinism – an outright assault on the production of both high trust, and the commons – both of which are the primary competitive advantages constituent in the western indo-european (Aryan if you will) evolutionary strategy. [I] walk by Mises’ childhood home every day. It has tempered my criticism. I see him making natural errors of Cosmopolitanism – as Hayek said “a victim of his upbringing”. Just as the Germans have made endless errors in conflating religion and philosophy to preserve their hierarchy and duty as a group competitive strategy. Just as British (Anglo/Irish/Scots if not the Belgae) have fought to preserve their island universalism despite the necessary suicide that results from universalism outside of their island (or the american island, or the Australian island.) I will venture this post is one of the more important things that has been written about Mises in recent history, and my arguments, if not my criticisms will assist us in RESCUING Mises from the lunatic fringe, and RESCUING his work for use in intellectual discourse – as the first attempt at saving Economics through operationalism, the way that science and psychology (if not also mathematics and logic) have been saved by operationalism. **I see myself as rescuing ALL of the Misesian/Hoppeian program from the fruitcake fringe: by laundering German, Jewish and British enlightenment fallacies – the attempt to universalize local evolutionary strategy – rather than simply adopt scientific epistemology (operationalism) as the only neutral tool for the use of studying group evolutionary strategies.** Although it is, I am sure, somewhat difficult for those religiously devoted to immoral, libertine, Rothbardianism to either understand or accept. I am quite sure I do not err in this analysis. A statement which I am aware further taunts libertines. But which my fellow aristocrats (libertarians-proper) both understand and expect from me as a promise. Because the anglo-empirical model of truth telling, quite opposite from the cosmopolitan, is that truth is the name for testimony. And as such I testify that to the best of my knowledge my statement is true. And that I bear the reputational consequences of my promise that this statement is true. This is the polar opposite of the Popperian, Analytic, and Cosmopolitan version of true: that truth is the unknowable province of god alone, and as such we can only ‘do what we can’, and as such are unaccountable for our words. This ethic, this definition of truth, as performative – as operational, is what Kant was searching for, but could not find. And it is why both Jewish and German philosophy are dead ends. And it is why english philosophy became lost through its influence by the germans and the cosmopolitans. We lost a century of philosophy to cosmopolitan pseudoscience in economics, politics, ethics and logic. Germans lost centuries to pseudo-philosophical religio-moralism. Mises can be seen in context as the most successful – if still failed – attempt to rescue german and cosmopolitan thought from its religious constraints. – Cheers. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine
Form: Full Essay
-
THE MEANING OF “AUSTRIAN” (as I understand it today.) (draft) Note: I’ve wanted
THE MEANING OF “AUSTRIAN” (as I understand it today.)
(draft)
Note: I’ve wanted to put this together for some time, since I have some significant issues with the way that Boettke has written it – even if he has written the best to date. I believe this form of articulation is more analytical and less romantic. But this is still just a draft. And each bullet needs a paragraph of explanation. – Thanks.
VALUE
1) Value as incentive to act.
2) Subjectivity of Value.
3) Marginal Value.
4) Opportunity Cost.
5) Exchange as only test of value and therefore production or consumption
6) Morality as voluntary exchange. (Propertarianism’s addition: productive, fully informed warrantied, exchange that is free of externality.)
VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION OF PRODUCTION
1) Property. Without property one cannot choose between alternative actions available to him.
2) Commodity money allows for the evolution of prices.
3) Prices function as information about what others want and need.
4) Information provides incentives. Prices make actions and resources commensurable, so that complex choices and planning are possible.
5) With Property,Money,Prices,Information and Incentives, individuals can voluntarily choose to participate in production.
6) If many people possess this choice, a polity can evolve the Voluntary Organization of Production. Without these choices, people cannot voluntarily organize production, and must be involuntarily organized. (It is not clear that all people prefer the voluntary organization of production, even if they prefer the rewards of living under a voluntary organization of production.)
THE ORGANIZATION AND REORGANIZATION OF VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS
1) Increases in participation in voluntary organization of production increase the division of knowledge and labor and by consequence their participation produces variations in productivity and prices.
2) People Evolve complex organizations from Sustainable Patterns of Specialization and Trade.
3) Changes in preferences cause alteration of the existing sustainable patterns of specialization and trade (Reorganization).
4) Innovation (Discovery) provides incentives to alter the existing sets of preferences, and the existing organizations of production to satisfy those preferences.
5) Changes in the scarcity of resources (Shocks) alter prices and by consequence alter preferences, and the existing organizations of production change in order to satisfy those changes in preferences.
6) Changes in innovation, resources and preferences create opportunities for the satisfaction of preferences.
7) People, and organizations of people, demonstrate flocking and schooling in response to opportunities.
8) Business cycles evolve from the exploitation and exhaustion of opportunities available in the current organization of production, and the evolution of new opportunities in new organizations of production, and the need for the reorganization of the existing patterns of specialization into new organizations of production. (ie: equilibration is a fallacy of numeracy.)
INTERFERENCE IN THE INFORMATION SYSTEM, ORGANIZATION, AND CAPITAL
1) The state distorts information under Keynesian employment policy by flooding the market with cheap money and misinforming individuals as to what actions they should take.
2) Unnecessary shortages of money also misinform individuals as to what actions that they should take.
3) Economists and philosophers have not solved the problem of supplying money independent of shortages, (although it appears possible by increasing taxes along with interest rates).
4) The cost of distortion is an opportunity cost between one possible set of affairs and another possible set of affairs. We just can never recover a lost set of affairs.
5) Monetary prices may be neutral in the long run, but distortion of those prices produces externalities that are non-neutral.
6) Distortions impact all capital Human capital (skills), Reproductive capital (family structure and gene pool), Normative Capital (inter-generational habits, values, traditions, myths), and Institutional Capital (Formal institutions, including the law). While economic activity may be easily quantifiable, accounting for gains or losses in the remaining forms of capital are not.
PROPERTARIAN EXTENSIONS TO AUSTRIAN THEORY
1) The first means of production is reproduction, and is the purpose for all other production.
2) The organization of reproduction and the organization of economic production are interdependent, and for one to change so must the other.
3) Moral rules are those that prevent parasitism: free riding, involuntary transfer (fraud), and imposed cost (theft and violence), and family structure heavily influences moral rules, which only property rights and law can change.
4) Voluntary exchange requires the exchange is productive, fully informed, warrantied, and free of externality.
5) Trust is the word we use for the feeling we have, when transaction costs (risks) of free riding, rent seeking, fraud, theft and violence are eliminated – leaving only error in forecasting of demand as the possible risk.
6) Trust is developed by increasing the scope of property rights to exclude all actions that make free riding possible, and therefore eliminate transaction costs.
7) The common (organic) law of property rights, being specific positive assertions of the general negative prohibition on parasitism in order to make cooperation rational, is the only means of scientifically (experimentally) evolving law that corresponds with morality.
8) It is not clear that savers have a moral claim to appreciation of the value of currency from saving, albeit they do have a claim to against inflation of the currency. It is quite hard to argue otherwise.
OPPOSITIES: AUSTRIAN (aristocratic) VS PSEUDO-AUSTRIAN (cosmopolitan).
Austrian theory is broken into two branches: (a)The Cosmopolitan (Jewish) Branch (Mises/Rothbard/Hoppe) and (b) the Aristocratic (Hayekian) Branch (Hayek/Popper and as far as I know, myself).
It may be novel idea or not, but the difference is largely in the Aristocratic use of the commons and high trust as a competitive strategy, and the cosmopolitan attempt to privatize all commons, and eschew high trust in favor of low trust, as a means of evolutionary strategy that COMPETES with the high trust producers of commons. In other words, the Misesian/Rothbardian if not Hoppeian Austrian branch produces behavior that eschews all commons. For these reasons, the Misesian/Rothbardian/Hoppeian branch is not an Austrian branch but a cosmopolitan competitor specifically articulated as an attack on the high trust aristocratic commons.
In the early 2000’s I had assumed that I could reunite Mises and Hayek, because I understood that Hayek was speaking politically and Mises individually. But I did not at the time understand that these are competing and mutually exclusive social strategies. That the purpose of the Cosmopolitan strategy was to preserve levantine low trust, and to privatize all possible commons. That the aristocratic strategy is to produce commons because no other group has been able to.
Hayek may have challenged the view among academics that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism. He argued that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual. But just as we must mobilize one another for war, fascism was an effort to mobilize us against communism. So while it may be true that fascism and socialism possess common roots, but it is also true that war is not a process of exploration as is capitalism – it is a deliberate concentration of all production into fighting. And the fascist war against communism most likely saved the west.
So, these two branches are not tastes. They are polar opposite propositions. They ask us to choose between levantine low trust morality and aristocratic high trust morality. And that is an easy choice.
Only warriors can produce aristocracy.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine.
Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 14:15:00 UTC
-
Is Self Deception Possible?
IS SELF – DECEPTION POSSIBLE? YES. IT TURNS OUT IT IS. AND MOREOVER WE ARE SURROUNDED BY MASTERS OF IT.
( Lesterians ) ( Austrians )[O]ver the past better part of a year, Lee Waaks, a Lesterian who has taught me quite a bit about Jan Lester’s ideas, and to whom I am forever grateful, has been dutifully ‘correcting’ me, every time I use the term ‘self-deception’, because at least rationally, self deception should not be possible.
But my intuition has been relentlessly hounding me – because I can’t imagine that self deception isn’t possible. And I have a good reason: otherwise people are far more dishonest than I can imagine them being. Especially when we consider that there is a very high computational cost to dishonesty (lying consistently is expensive and hard work) and that under self deception that cost goes away – especially if the deception is clouded by verbalisms (‘fuzzy’ words that are analogical and whose properties are not necessarily ascertainable.) When you lie you must be conscious of it. When you practice persuasion under the influence of self deception, then at least, in theory, you are not lying – which requires at least intuitive intent.
THE CONSCIOUS, SUBCONSCIOUS, AND INSTINCTUAL MIND
Thanks to Kahneman’s framing of the mind as composed of System 2 (reason), System 1 (intuition – our ‘search engine’); And in addition to Systems 1 and 2, what I have coined as ‘System 0’ – the human reproductive bias that determines what property we must acquire, inventory, and defend, and therefore the cause that determines our different moral biases.We possess intuitions At both the System 0 (reproductive instinct) and System 1( memory ) levels. And system 0 intuitions appear to operate as cognitive biases that we rarely can imagine as other than ‘the right and moral order of things’.
We work very hard at using language to JUSTIFY our moral intuitions. So each group that uses a different reproductive strategy, and each gender and class within each group, contains members who hold both marginally different and marginally indifferent values – each using signals to justify his or her needs (biases).
However, because of all this justification, when we cooperate we appear, at least within the group to share largely similar interests. And we do. We cooperate on means even if we do not always cooperate on ends. The opposing male and female reproductive strategies, and the compromise of serial monogamy are ever present properties of human existence yet we manage to cooperate and flourish within group and without.
As groups we further justify our group reproductive interests. Westerners justify universalism
SO HOW DO WE DECEIVE OURSELVES?
Because we want to. WE overload our reason and our intuitions (System 1) by searching for verbal means of justifying (System 2) our reproductive strategy (System 0) such that we can cooperate in-group with group members, and compete against out-group members with different strategies..The problem for us is coming up with a narrative that is both easy to advance, easy to justify, and easy to apply. The more detailed the story, the more cases that are covered by the narrative, the more that others can use the narrative, and the more pervasive is the narrative in our environment, then the more our intuition can be trained to ‘believe it’. This is why religions propagate despite the fact that they are obviously nonsense – they are really useful. And if enough people that you interact with ACT as if something is true, the more it appears to be. And the more you are deceived.
SO HOW DOES A PEOPLE DECEIVE ALL ITS MEMBERS
By ‘reality by chanting’. The more verbal, more literate, more sources of distribution and media that a people has, the easier it is to create self deceptive narratives.WHY IS SELF DECEPTION POSSIBLE?
Because it allows a group to create a mythos – a strategic form of warfare against out-group members, while retaining in-group cohesion.HOW DO WE CONQUER SELF DECEPTION
While self deception for psychological purposes is probably something we want to preserve. Deception and self deception as political theft, and intercultural warfare, if not genocide are things we want to protect against. Aristocratic Egalitarianism, Propertarianism, Testimonial Truth, Operationalism, and the Scientific method, codified in law, with universal standing as means of enforcement, under loser-pays. We conquer it with truth-telling.WHAT EXAMPLES DO WE HAVE TO WORK FROM?
Every group creates deceptions, but some groups are better than others. Our own mythos is what we call the Enlightenment. While discrediting the church and giving promise to science, what we also did was create the mythos of the “aristocracy of everyone” : that it is both desirable and advantageous to join the aristocracy (it isn’t) and that an homogenous aristocratic (meritocratic) policy is in everyone’s interest (it isn’t). This self deception has been harmful for much of the world, and remains so. We promote democracy, when it’s bad for everyone, ourselves included. We promote majority rule, which is likewise bad for everyone. We promote consumerism, which also is bad for everyone. What we should promote is property rights, rule of law, truth telling and science, and the use of poly-systemic governments so that the underclasses may operate socialistic-ally and the upper aristocratically – just like we always have.THE OLD WORLD CULTURE EXAMPLES
We currently have three old-world-peoples practicing different alternatives to truth living with us to study: Gypsies, Jews and Muslims. Although we do now encounter Asians as well. But the best research has been done on one group, the jews, and that work was done by Kevin Macdonald in his exhaustive study of the Jewish use of deception and self deception in intellectual movements.But while Jewish authors are responsible for a disproportionate number of the pseudosciences, as well as monotheism, it is important to keep in mind that they are merely “HERE” with us, and that their work, while more prolific, and since the Jewish enlightenment, more pseudoscience rather than mythical, is no different from the Muslim narrative, the Russian, or the Chinese.
What follows are pointers to Macdonald’s notes on the self- deception, and deception of Jewish authors.
Just why Jewish authors are the worlds best a manufacturers of pseudoscience is probably (a) evolution verbalism by the requirement for memorizing literature, (b) the Talmudic teachings which which force dualism, and therefore dishonesty (c) the strategy of economic parasitism which rewards deception, (d) their genetic dislike of outsiders, and (e) justification for their in0group evolutionary strategy.
I will address in another article, why western truth is so important as an evolutionary strategy for a small, poor, illiterate people on the edge of the bronze age, who constantly had to defend themselves against superior numbers from wealthier civilizations.
Truth is an advantage for us. But deception is a greater value to others than truth. The Chinese, Jews, and Gypsies among them. Just as the totalitarian law of Islam is an advantage for the lower IQ peoples in low trust in-breeding societies.
This topic is endlessly fascinating.
—-
MACDONALD ON DECEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION—Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified
as Jews AND thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing
specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find
evidence for these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as
in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did
identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues despite surface
appearances to the contrary.——…deception may not be as important here as self-deception, ”a
common enough feature of Jewish intelle ctual history (see SAID, Chs. 7, 8).—Macdonald. (1998a). Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger.—If life is truly without any evolutionary meaning, why have advocates propagated these ideologies so intensely and with such self-consciously political methods? Why have many of these same people strongly identified with their own ethnic group and its interests, and why have many of them insisted on cultural pluralism and its validation of minority group ethnocentrism as moral absolutes? By their own
assumptions, it is just a meaningless game. Nobody should care who wins or
loses. Of course, deception and self-deception may be involved. I have noted (p.
195) that a fundamental agenda has been to make the European-derived peoples
of the United States view concern about their own demographic and cultural
eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology.—MacDonald. CofC
—Evolved mechanisms that facilitate the acceptance of maladaptive ideologies
among gentiles are not the whole story, however. In SAID (Ch. 8) I noted a
general tendency for self-deception among Jews as a robust pattern apparent in
several historical eras and touching on a wide range of issues, including personal
identity, the causes and extent of anti-Semitism, the characteristics of Jews (e.g.,
economic success), and the role of Jews in the political and cultural process in
traditional and contemporary societies.—Macdonald. (1998a). Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger.—Self-deception may well be important in facilitating Jewish involvement in the movements discussed here. I have noted evidence for this in the case of Jewish political radicals, and Greenwald and Schuh (1994) persuasively argue that the ingroup ethnic bias exhibited by their sample of researchers on prejudice is not conscious. Many of the Jews involved in the movements reviewed here may sincerely believe that these movements are really divorced from specifically Jewish interests or are in the best interests of other groups as well as Jews.—
Greenwald, A. G., & Schuh, E. S. (1994). An ethnic bias in scientific citations.
European Journal of Social Psychology 24:623-639.—They may sincerely believe that they are not biased in their associational patterns or in their patterns of citation in scientific articles, but, as Trivers notes (1985), the best deceivers are those who are self-deceived. Finally, theories of social influence deriving from social psychology are also relevant and may yield to an evolutionary analysis. I have suggested that the memes generated by these Jewish intellectual movements achieve their influence, at least at first, because of the processes of minority group influence. The issue of whether this aspect of social psychology may be viewed as part of the evolved design features of the human mind remains to be researched.—
Trivers, R. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings.
———. (1991). Deceit and self-deception: The relationship between
communication and consciousness. In Man and Beast Revisited, ed. M.
Robinson & L. Tiger. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press.—It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at
achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their nameâ€; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that
Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were involved, and they could not
develop a specific rationale for Judaism acceptable within a post-Enlightenment
intellectual context. In SAID (Ch. 2) I noted that the Jewish contribution to the
wider gentile culture in nineteenth-century Germany was accomplished from a
highly particularistic perspective in which Jewish group identity continued to be
of paramount subjective importance despite its “invisibility.†Similarly, because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism.——In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer
is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities†(Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that gentiles would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91-93). The technique of having gentiles as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the following chapter.—Jay, M. (1973). The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School
and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Boston: Little, Brown.
———. (1980). The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical theory’s analysis of
anti-Semitism. New German Critique (#19):137-149.
———. (1984). Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press.—As an additional example, Irving
Louis Horowitz (1993, 91) contrasts the “high-profile,†special-interest pleading of the new ethnic and sexual minorities within sociology with the Jewish
tendency toward a low-profile strategy. Although Jews dominated American
sociology beginning in the 1930s, specifically Jewish interests and political
agendas were never made salient.—Horowitz, I. L. (1987). Between the Charybdis of capitalism and the Scylla of
communism: The emigration of German social scientists, 1933-1945. Social
Science History 11:113-138.
———. (1993). The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University
Press. -
Is Self Deception Possible?
IS SELF – DECEPTION POSSIBLE? YES. IT TURNS OUT IT IS. AND MOREOVER WE ARE SURROUNDED BY MASTERS OF IT.
( Lesterians ) ( Austrians )[O]ver the past better part of a year, Lee Waaks, a Lesterian who has taught me quite a bit about Jan Lester’s ideas, and to whom I am forever grateful, has been dutifully ‘correcting’ me, every time I use the term ‘self-deception’, because at least rationally, self deception should not be possible.
But my intuition has been relentlessly hounding me – because I can’t imagine that self deception isn’t possible. And I have a good reason: otherwise people are far more dishonest than I can imagine them being. Especially when we consider that there is a very high computational cost to dishonesty (lying consistently is expensive and hard work) and that under self deception that cost goes away – especially if the deception is clouded by verbalisms (‘fuzzy’ words that are analogical and whose properties are not necessarily ascertainable.) When you lie you must be conscious of it. When you practice persuasion under the influence of self deception, then at least, in theory, you are not lying – which requires at least intuitive intent.
THE CONSCIOUS, SUBCONSCIOUS, AND INSTINCTUAL MIND
Thanks to Kahneman’s framing of the mind as composed of System 2 (reason), System 1 (intuition – our ‘search engine’); And in addition to Systems 1 and 2, what I have coined as ‘System 0’ – the human reproductive bias that determines what property we must acquire, inventory, and defend, and therefore the cause that determines our different moral biases.We possess intuitions At both the System 0 (reproductive instinct) and System 1( memory ) levels. And system 0 intuitions appear to operate as cognitive biases that we rarely can imagine as other than ‘the right and moral order of things’.
We work very hard at using language to JUSTIFY our moral intuitions. So each group that uses a different reproductive strategy, and each gender and class within each group, contains members who hold both marginally different and marginally indifferent values – each using signals to justify his or her needs (biases).
However, because of all this justification, when we cooperate we appear, at least within the group to share largely similar interests. And we do. We cooperate on means even if we do not always cooperate on ends. The opposing male and female reproductive strategies, and the compromise of serial monogamy are ever present properties of human existence yet we manage to cooperate and flourish within group and without.
As groups we further justify our group reproductive interests. Westerners justify universalism
SO HOW DO WE DECEIVE OURSELVES?
Because we want to. WE overload our reason and our intuitions (System 1) by searching for verbal means of justifying (System 2) our reproductive strategy (System 0) such that we can cooperate in-group with group members, and compete against out-group members with different strategies..The problem for us is coming up with a narrative that is both easy to advance, easy to justify, and easy to apply. The more detailed the story, the more cases that are covered by the narrative, the more that others can use the narrative, and the more pervasive is the narrative in our environment, then the more our intuition can be trained to ‘believe it’. This is why religions propagate despite the fact that they are obviously nonsense – they are really useful. And if enough people that you interact with ACT as if something is true, the more it appears to be. And the more you are deceived.
SO HOW DOES A PEOPLE DECEIVE ALL ITS MEMBERS
By ‘reality by chanting’. The more verbal, more literate, more sources of distribution and media that a people has, the easier it is to create self deceptive narratives.WHY IS SELF DECEPTION POSSIBLE?
Because it allows a group to create a mythos – a strategic form of warfare against out-group members, while retaining in-group cohesion.HOW DO WE CONQUER SELF DECEPTION
While self deception for psychological purposes is probably something we want to preserve. Deception and self deception as political theft, and intercultural warfare, if not genocide are things we want to protect against. Aristocratic Egalitarianism, Propertarianism, Testimonial Truth, Operationalism, and the Scientific method, codified in law, with universal standing as means of enforcement, under loser-pays. We conquer it with truth-telling.WHAT EXAMPLES DO WE HAVE TO WORK FROM?
Every group creates deceptions, but some groups are better than others. Our own mythos is what we call the Enlightenment. While discrediting the church and giving promise to science, what we also did was create the mythos of the “aristocracy of everyone” : that it is both desirable and advantageous to join the aristocracy (it isn’t) and that an homogenous aristocratic (meritocratic) policy is in everyone’s interest (it isn’t). This self deception has been harmful for much of the world, and remains so. We promote democracy, when it’s bad for everyone, ourselves included. We promote majority rule, which is likewise bad for everyone. We promote consumerism, which also is bad for everyone. What we should promote is property rights, rule of law, truth telling and science, and the use of poly-systemic governments so that the underclasses may operate socialistic-ally and the upper aristocratically – just like we always have.THE OLD WORLD CULTURE EXAMPLES
We currently have three old-world-peoples practicing different alternatives to truth living with us to study: Gypsies, Jews and Muslims. Although we do now encounter Asians as well. But the best research has been done on one group, the jews, and that work was done by Kevin Macdonald in his exhaustive study of the Jewish use of deception and self deception in intellectual movements.But while Jewish authors are responsible for a disproportionate number of the pseudosciences, as well as monotheism, it is important to keep in mind that they are merely “HERE” with us, and that their work, while more prolific, and since the Jewish enlightenment, more pseudoscience rather than mythical, is no different from the Muslim narrative, the Russian, or the Chinese.
What follows are pointers to Macdonald’s notes on the self- deception, and deception of Jewish authors.
Just why Jewish authors are the worlds best a manufacturers of pseudoscience is probably (a) evolution verbalism by the requirement for memorizing literature, (b) the Talmudic teachings which which force dualism, and therefore dishonesty (c) the strategy of economic parasitism which rewards deception, (d) their genetic dislike of outsiders, and (e) justification for their in0group evolutionary strategy.
I will address in another article, why western truth is so important as an evolutionary strategy for a small, poor, illiterate people on the edge of the bronze age, who constantly had to defend themselves against superior numbers from wealthier civilizations.
Truth is an advantage for us. But deception is a greater value to others than truth. The Chinese, Jews, and Gypsies among them. Just as the totalitarian law of Islam is an advantage for the lower IQ peoples in low trust in-breeding societies.
This topic is endlessly fascinating.
—-
MACDONALD ON DECEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION—Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified
as Jews AND thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing
specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find
evidence for these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as
in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did
identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues despite surface
appearances to the contrary.——…deception may not be as important here as self-deception, ”a
common enough feature of Jewish intelle ctual history (see SAID, Chs. 7, 8).—Macdonald. (1998a). Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger.—If life is truly without any evolutionary meaning, why have advocates propagated these ideologies so intensely and with such self-consciously political methods? Why have many of these same people strongly identified with their own ethnic group and its interests, and why have many of them insisted on cultural pluralism and its validation of minority group ethnocentrism as moral absolutes? By their own
assumptions, it is just a meaningless game. Nobody should care who wins or
loses. Of course, deception and self-deception may be involved. I have noted (p.
195) that a fundamental agenda has been to make the European-derived peoples
of the United States view concern about their own demographic and cultural
eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology.—MacDonald. CofC
—Evolved mechanisms that facilitate the acceptance of maladaptive ideologies
among gentiles are not the whole story, however. In SAID (Ch. 8) I noted a
general tendency for self-deception among Jews as a robust pattern apparent in
several historical eras and touching on a wide range of issues, including personal
identity, the causes and extent of anti-Semitism, the characteristics of Jews (e.g.,
economic success), and the role of Jews in the political and cultural process in
traditional and contemporary societies.—Macdonald. (1998a). Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger.—Self-deception may well be important in facilitating Jewish involvement in the movements discussed here. I have noted evidence for this in the case of Jewish political radicals, and Greenwald and Schuh (1994) persuasively argue that the ingroup ethnic bias exhibited by their sample of researchers on prejudice is not conscious. Many of the Jews involved in the movements reviewed here may sincerely believe that these movements are really divorced from specifically Jewish interests or are in the best interests of other groups as well as Jews.—
Greenwald, A. G., & Schuh, E. S. (1994). An ethnic bias in scientific citations.
European Journal of Social Psychology 24:623-639.—They may sincerely believe that they are not biased in their associational patterns or in their patterns of citation in scientific articles, but, as Trivers notes (1985), the best deceivers are those who are self-deceived. Finally, theories of social influence deriving from social psychology are also relevant and may yield to an evolutionary analysis. I have suggested that the memes generated by these Jewish intellectual movements achieve their influence, at least at first, because of the processes of minority group influence. The issue of whether this aspect of social psychology may be viewed as part of the evolved design features of the human mind remains to be researched.—
Trivers, R. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings.
———. (1991). Deceit and self-deception: The relationship between
communication and consciousness. In Man and Beast Revisited, ed. M.
Robinson & L. Tiger. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press.—It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at
achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their nameâ€; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that
Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were involved, and they could not
develop a specific rationale for Judaism acceptable within a post-Enlightenment
intellectual context. In SAID (Ch. 2) I noted that the Jewish contribution to the
wider gentile culture in nineteenth-century Germany was accomplished from a
highly particularistic perspective in which Jewish group identity continued to be
of paramount subjective importance despite its “invisibility.†Similarly, because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism.——In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer
is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities†(Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that gentiles would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91-93). The technique of having gentiles as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the following chapter.—Jay, M. (1973). The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School
and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Boston: Little, Brown.
———. (1980). The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical theory’s analysis of
anti-Semitism. New German Critique (#19):137-149.
———. (1984). Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press.—As an additional example, Irving
Louis Horowitz (1993, 91) contrasts the “high-profile,†special-interest pleading of the new ethnic and sexual minorities within sociology with the Jewish
tendency toward a low-profile strategy. Although Jews dominated American
sociology beginning in the 1930s, specifically Jewish interests and political
agendas were never made salient.—Horowitz, I. L. (1987). Between the Charybdis of capitalism and the Scylla of
communism: The emigration of German social scientists, 1933-1945. Social
Science History 11:113-138.
———. (1993). The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University
Press. -
An Interesting Path To A New Secular 'Religion'
(insight)[I] want to take you through an interesting line of thought, starting with creativity, and ending with something profound.
Unfortunately for all of us, creativity is terribly time consuming. You cant sit down and say “I’m going to be creative now”, and cram through it like you can with calculations, or organizing or planning which rely on reason and concentration. Creativity requires free association, trial and error.
We don’t think of creativity it as research and development, but it is. We merely artificially separate aesthetic, philosophic, scientific, technological and procedural forms of creativity by the concreteness of the information we have two work with. While we can see actions in procedures, technological and many scientific objects, philosophic and aesthetic are almost entirely imaginary. We have to ‘observe’ them introspectively. And worse, we cannot ‘see’ into our intuitions to analyze and observe our creativity at work, but we can examine what it is that we do and hypothesize about it – something which Daniel Kahneman has than thankfully given us a language to describe.
Now, I have made a habit of creative thinking, by keeping my mind in that kind of space nearly full time. Although as an autistic it’s a lot easier to stay in that mode than people more in the middle of the curve: neurotypicals. But it is a luxury to afford the ability to conduct research and development (“Creativity”) full time. And while scientists avoid the acknowledgement of their work as a luxury good, artists and philosophers never do, and technologists and proceduralists never have to: they get paid for what they do.
Myself, I don’t see any difference, and never have, between creative approaches to humor, the arts, literature, philosophy, the sciences, technology and processes. I have done work in all but humor which I am tone deaf to, and science: something which requires too often getting your hands dirty- which I have an objection to. But I had to work very hard for many years to obtain the freedom to specialize in creativity. Most creatives endure economic hardship to practice creativity: it is only for a few that creativity is other than a luxury good.
But creativity is an expertise that at least most of us can improve upon. It is not unlike meditation in that it focuses your mind, but unlike meditation it attempts to solve a problem through what I consider guided dreaming. Free association with direction.
I think part of the hard work of becoming a non-procedural writer is in learning how to conduct guided dreaming, while at the same time, quickly jotting down a narrative of the dream. You don’t start out that way of course. You start out by planning your work, and gradually develop increasingly meditative states of mind, while at the same time writing down your observations of the internal visualizations.
–the three degrees of meditation–
So in this respect, I view this form of meditative creativity as the highest achievement of the disciplined mind, stoicism as action-oriented the middle ground, and buddhism as the lowest level of achievement in which we seek to do nothing whatsoever.I am not fond of buddhism but I think that especially for women it may be more important to quiet the impulsive chaos of the female mind that it is for them to focus on action or creativity. I think for most people but more often males, it is perhaps better to focus on actions, since we are not troubled by the chaos of the female mind. For a few of us, who are most often if not entirely male, theoretical creativity is the only use our minds are really fit for.
For these reasons I think any new ‘religion’ or form of spiritualism, will not need to come from the buddhist, stoic, or creative schools of thought, but from all of them. We could easily cleanse buddhism of it’s mysticism, and represent all three as three different skills, dependent upon our individual human needs.
If this form of discipline was mirrored with ancestor rituals, and a return to the pagan celebration of nature, then I think that is the highest form of religion possible that we currently could construct for mankind.
–Rider and Elephant–
Until recently, I didn’t understand what form of skill that I had taught myself. It wasn’t until I tried to resolve the differences between buddhism and stoicism that it became clear to me that it isn’t so much that either is right, but that they each try to apply the same technique to the problem of mental discipline: gaining control of our “system 1”: the search engine we call ‘intuition’, and putting that miraculous machine to use: helping the rider of our consciousness control the elephant of our intuition.–Adding Nature and Ancestors—
Really, mythology in the Greek and Roman models, absent family hierarchy, is all any people needs. We could celebrate, read and study the great people throughout history in each of the four disciplines of organization: Morality(words), Justice(force), Commerce(trade), and Craft(art, science, tech, manufacture, and construction). All of us would be better off with a libertarian theology (patron saints), than authoritarian (monotheistic god). Authoritarianism is a means of generating hostility and conflict. I think most of us would rather celebrate (remember and learn from thinking about) Alexander, Aurelius, Jefferson, Michelangelo, and those like them, than any mythical god. And we would be better of for it.Nature is already set to restore to celebration, but we must restore our civic responsibility for the commons, and incorporate the problem of excessive reproduction in that sentiments.
–Should vs Can–
There are very few opportunities to establish a new civic cult, and formal institutions and the rapid change of formal institutions is the most secure means other than organic expansion. Given the right opportunity and incentives we can. And I think I know what that opportunity is, what incentives we use, and what institutions we rely upon. But I’m going to talk about that some time in the future.For now, I’d like to get across the very interesting idea that Creativity, Stoicism, and Buddhism can be combined into a secular cult that can provide an answer to post-mystical civic religion.
Followup Comments:
I have to go down this path. I will not end up as one of the racists. Arguments against something are futile. Arguments for something are actionable.
I know it’s frustrating for people to watch, but I have to be able to address comparative evolutionary strategy in order to make the weakness of our model, visible to us. I can almost do it.
Religion is something that I am working in the background since I want an answer to the complaints of religious conservatives. And in order to demonstrate that I’ve captured all of the unstated properties of western aristocracy I simply have to address religion. Not in terms of ‘how do we return’ but in terms of ‘why did it work’.
I had a hell of a time with both operationalism and performative truth. And I burned a few friends and relationships solving that problem. But from my perspective I’ve completed operationalism by tying it to testimonial truth. That was what prior generations failed to grasp. They were looking for a totalitarian answer, to the problem of truth, but no such thing exists. Mises failed because he lacked the ethic of testimonial truth, and relied upon pragmatic truth. Hayek got lost in psychology and universalism, rather than evolutionary biology. Brouwer and Bridgman and their followers are still looking for platonic and totalitarian truth. Macdonald is too interested, as is the HBD movement in genes. The mainstream is interested in institutions. Myself I am interested in the metaphysical assumptions that reflect our evolutionary strategies. And I think that I have found a better means of exposition than the others have. In the sense that it is possible to capture necessary and universal morality in law articulated as property rights, while voluntarily constructing contracts on top of those laws to perform voluntary exchanges – rather than to construct new laws.
I still cannot quite reduce the problem of pathological altruism to simple statements that people can empathize with as well as understand. How our universalism won’t work for the rest of the world, and how it won’t even work for us. I have to reverse the value of altruism from something we treat as sacred, to something that we treat as profane: suicidal. I know I can do it. I just need to work at it a bit longer. We cannot extend the family universally unless everyone also extends it in return. And demonstrably, others will not do so. And it is wise from them not to.
Anyway. Once I have that line of thinking done, I should have the entire picture. Right now my outline is I think, the broadest ever attempted. We will see if I succeed.
But while aristocracy is clearly my preference, propertarianism doesn’t recommend anything. It’s just the logic of cooperation. The institutional means of producing the level of trust that is tolerable for any polity.
Thanks for the kick in the pants tho.
Just please keep in mind that I’m conducting my experiments (testing my arguments) in public. It’s just R&D. Its how we fail that we learn from. What remains is that which is most likely true.Cheers.
Curt DoolittleWell, Christianity wasn’t appealing, but we know who it appealed to and why. As far as I know, Christianity was practiced by less than 10% of the population and most of the persecution myths are just that. Had justinian not wanted to adopt byzantine (middle world) totalitarianism, and enforced christianity and closed the other schools, we might have never had the intellectual dark age, even if we had the economic one caused by the arab conquests.
When a population is mobilized, whether in contemporary america, or industrializing england, or in imperial rome, the disconnected peoples look for artificial tribes. This is why the english advocated tolerance for multiple churches – so labor would find company.
The USA did it with civic organizations. Now we do it, I don’t know how – because we are alienated as hell and simply mollify our anxiety with consumption and participation in artificial families and tribes created by television.
Women, slaves, and the disaffected found the promise of familial love from fellow church members attractive.
Not complicated really.
-
An Interesting Path To A New Secular ‘Religion’
(insight)[I] want to take you through an interesting line of thought, starting with creativity, and ending with something profound.
Unfortunately for all of us, creativity is terribly time consuming. You cant sit down and say “I’m going to be creative now”, and cram through it like you can with calculations, or organizing or planning which rely on reason and concentration. Creativity requires free association, trial and error.
We don’t think of creativity it as research and development, but it is. We merely artificially separate aesthetic, philosophic, scientific, technological and procedural forms of creativity by the concreteness of the information we have two work with. While we can see actions in procedures, technological and many scientific objects, philosophic and aesthetic are almost entirely imaginary. We have to ‘observe’ them introspectively. And worse, we cannot ‘see’ into our intuitions to analyze and observe our creativity at work, but we can examine what it is that we do and hypothesize about it – something which Daniel Kahneman has than thankfully given us a language to describe.
Now, I have made a habit of creative thinking, by keeping my mind in that kind of space nearly full time. Although as an autistic it’s a lot easier to stay in that mode than people more in the middle of the curve: neurotypicals. But it is a luxury to afford the ability to conduct research and development (“Creativity”) full time. And while scientists avoid the acknowledgement of their work as a luxury good, artists and philosophers never do, and technologists and proceduralists never have to: they get paid for what they do.
Myself, I don’t see any difference, and never have, between creative approaches to humor, the arts, literature, philosophy, the sciences, technology and processes. I have done work in all but humor which I am tone deaf to, and science: something which requires too often getting your hands dirty- which I have an objection to. But I had to work very hard for many years to obtain the freedom to specialize in creativity. Most creatives endure economic hardship to practice creativity: it is only for a few that creativity is other than a luxury good.
But creativity is an expertise that at least most of us can improve upon. It is not unlike meditation in that it focuses your mind, but unlike meditation it attempts to solve a problem through what I consider guided dreaming. Free association with direction.
I think part of the hard work of becoming a non-procedural writer is in learning how to conduct guided dreaming, while at the same time, quickly jotting down a narrative of the dream. You don’t start out that way of course. You start out by planning your work, and gradually develop increasingly meditative states of mind, while at the same time writing down your observations of the internal visualizations.
–the three degrees of meditation–
So in this respect, I view this form of meditative creativity as the highest achievement of the disciplined mind, stoicism as action-oriented the middle ground, and buddhism as the lowest level of achievement in which we seek to do nothing whatsoever.I am not fond of buddhism but I think that especially for women it may be more important to quiet the impulsive chaos of the female mind that it is for them to focus on action or creativity. I think for most people but more often males, it is perhaps better to focus on actions, since we are not troubled by the chaos of the female mind. For a few of us, who are most often if not entirely male, theoretical creativity is the only use our minds are really fit for.
For these reasons I think any new ‘religion’ or form of spiritualism, will not need to come from the buddhist, stoic, or creative schools of thought, but from all of them. We could easily cleanse buddhism of it’s mysticism, and represent all three as three different skills, dependent upon our individual human needs.
If this form of discipline was mirrored with ancestor rituals, and a return to the pagan celebration of nature, then I think that is the highest form of religion possible that we currently could construct for mankind.
–Rider and Elephant–
Until recently, I didn’t understand what form of skill that I had taught myself. It wasn’t until I tried to resolve the differences between buddhism and stoicism that it became clear to me that it isn’t so much that either is right, but that they each try to apply the same technique to the problem of mental discipline: gaining control of our “system 1”: the search engine we call ‘intuition’, and putting that miraculous machine to use: helping the rider of our consciousness control the elephant of our intuition.–Adding Nature and Ancestors—
Really, mythology in the Greek and Roman models, absent family hierarchy, is all any people needs. We could celebrate, read and study the great people throughout history in each of the four disciplines of organization: Morality(words), Justice(force), Commerce(trade), and Craft(art, science, tech, manufacture, and construction). All of us would be better off with a libertarian theology (patron saints), than authoritarian (monotheistic god). Authoritarianism is a means of generating hostility and conflict. I think most of us would rather celebrate (remember and learn from thinking about) Alexander, Aurelius, Jefferson, Michelangelo, and those like them, than any mythical god. And we would be better of for it.Nature is already set to restore to celebration, but we must restore our civic responsibility for the commons, and incorporate the problem of excessive reproduction in that sentiments.
–Should vs Can–
There are very few opportunities to establish a new civic cult, and formal institutions and the rapid change of formal institutions is the most secure means other than organic expansion. Given the right opportunity and incentives we can. And I think I know what that opportunity is, what incentives we use, and what institutions we rely upon. But I’m going to talk about that some time in the future.For now, I’d like to get across the very interesting idea that Creativity, Stoicism, and Buddhism can be combined into a secular cult that can provide an answer to post-mystical civic religion.
Followup Comments:
I have to go down this path. I will not end up as one of the racists. Arguments against something are futile. Arguments for something are actionable.
I know it’s frustrating for people to watch, but I have to be able to address comparative evolutionary strategy in order to make the weakness of our model, visible to us. I can almost do it.
Religion is something that I am working in the background since I want an answer to the complaints of religious conservatives. And in order to demonstrate that I’ve captured all of the unstated properties of western aristocracy I simply have to address religion. Not in terms of ‘how do we return’ but in terms of ‘why did it work’.
I had a hell of a time with both operationalism and performative truth. And I burned a few friends and relationships solving that problem. But from my perspective I’ve completed operationalism by tying it to testimonial truth. That was what prior generations failed to grasp. They were looking for a totalitarian answer, to the problem of truth, but no such thing exists. Mises failed because he lacked the ethic of testimonial truth, and relied upon pragmatic truth. Hayek got lost in psychology and universalism, rather than evolutionary biology. Brouwer and Bridgman and their followers are still looking for platonic and totalitarian truth. Macdonald is too interested, as is the HBD movement in genes. The mainstream is interested in institutions. Myself I am interested in the metaphysical assumptions that reflect our evolutionary strategies. And I think that I have found a better means of exposition than the others have. In the sense that it is possible to capture necessary and universal morality in law articulated as property rights, while voluntarily constructing contracts on top of those laws to perform voluntary exchanges – rather than to construct new laws.
I still cannot quite reduce the problem of pathological altruism to simple statements that people can empathize with as well as understand. How our universalism won’t work for the rest of the world, and how it won’t even work for us. I have to reverse the value of altruism from something we treat as sacred, to something that we treat as profane: suicidal. I know I can do it. I just need to work at it a bit longer. We cannot extend the family universally unless everyone also extends it in return. And demonstrably, others will not do so. And it is wise from them not to.
Anyway. Once I have that line of thinking done, I should have the entire picture. Right now my outline is I think, the broadest ever attempted. We will see if I succeed.
But while aristocracy is clearly my preference, propertarianism doesn’t recommend anything. It’s just the logic of cooperation. The institutional means of producing the level of trust that is tolerable for any polity.
Thanks for the kick in the pants tho.
Just please keep in mind that I’m conducting my experiments (testing my arguments) in public. It’s just R&D. Its how we fail that we learn from. What remains is that which is most likely true.Cheers.
Curt DoolittleWell, Christianity wasn’t appealing, but we know who it appealed to and why. As far as I know, Christianity was practiced by less than 10% of the population and most of the persecution myths are just that. Had justinian not wanted to adopt byzantine (middle world) totalitarianism, and enforced christianity and closed the other schools, we might have never had the intellectual dark age, even if we had the economic one caused by the arab conquests.
When a population is mobilized, whether in contemporary america, or industrializing england, or in imperial rome, the disconnected peoples look for artificial tribes. This is why the english advocated tolerance for multiple churches – so labor would find company.
The USA did it with civic organizations. Now we do it, I don’t know how – because we are alienated as hell and simply mollify our anxiety with consumption and participation in artificial families and tribes created by television.
Women, slaves, and the disaffected found the promise of familial love from fellow church members attractive.
Not complicated really.
-
An Interesting Path To A New Secular 'Religion'
(insight)[I] want to take you through an interesting line of thought, starting with creativity, and ending with something profound.
Unfortunately for all of us, creativity is terribly time consuming. You cant sit down and say “I’m going to be creative now”, and cram through it like you can with calculations, or organizing or planning which rely on reason and concentration. Creativity requires free association, trial and error.
We don’t think of creativity it as research and development, but it is. We merely artificially separate aesthetic, philosophic, scientific, technological and procedural forms of creativity by the concreteness of the information we have two work with. While we can see actions in procedures, technological and many scientific objects, philosophic and aesthetic are almost entirely imaginary. We have to ‘observe’ them introspectively. And worse, we cannot ‘see’ into our intuitions to analyze and observe our creativity at work, but we can examine what it is that we do and hypothesize about it – something which Daniel Kahneman has than thankfully given us a language to describe.
Now, I have made a habit of creative thinking, by keeping my mind in that kind of space nearly full time. Although as an autistic it’s a lot easier to stay in that mode than people more in the middle of the curve: neurotypicals. But it is a luxury to afford the ability to conduct research and development (“Creativity”) full time. And while scientists avoid the acknowledgement of their work as a luxury good, artists and philosophers never do, and technologists and proceduralists never have to: they get paid for what they do.
Myself, I don’t see any difference, and never have, between creative approaches to humor, the arts, literature, philosophy, the sciences, technology and processes. I have done work in all but humor which I am tone deaf to, and science: something which requires too often getting your hands dirty- which I have an objection to. But I had to work very hard for many years to obtain the freedom to specialize in creativity. Most creatives endure economic hardship to practice creativity: it is only for a few that creativity is other than a luxury good.
But creativity is an expertise that at least most of us can improve upon. It is not unlike meditation in that it focuses your mind, but unlike meditation it attempts to solve a problem through what I consider guided dreaming. Free association with direction.
I think part of the hard work of becoming a non-procedural writer is in learning how to conduct guided dreaming, while at the same time, quickly jotting down a narrative of the dream. You don’t start out that way of course. You start out by planning your work, and gradually develop increasingly meditative states of mind, while at the same time writing down your observations of the internal visualizations.
–the three degrees of meditation–
So in this respect, I view this form of meditative creativity as the highest achievement of the disciplined mind, stoicism as action-oriented the middle ground, and buddhism as the lowest level of achievement in which we seek to do nothing whatsoever.I am not fond of buddhism but I think that especially for women it may be more important to quiet the impulsive chaos of the female mind that it is for them to focus on action or creativity. I think for most people but more often males, it is perhaps better to focus on actions, since we are not troubled by the chaos of the female mind. For a few of us, who are most often if not entirely male, theoretical creativity is the only use our minds are really fit for.
For these reasons I think any new ‘religion’ or form of spiritualism, will not need to come from the buddhist, stoic, or creative schools of thought, but from all of them. We could easily cleanse buddhism of it’s mysticism, and represent all three as three different skills, dependent upon our individual human needs.
If this form of discipline was mirrored with ancestor rituals, and a return to the pagan celebration of nature, then I think that is the highest form of religion possible that we currently could construct for mankind.
–Rider and Elephant–
Until recently, I didn’t understand what form of skill that I had taught myself. It wasn’t until I tried to resolve the differences between buddhism and stoicism that it became clear to me that it isn’t so much that either is right, but that they each try to apply the same technique to the problem of mental discipline: gaining control of our “system 1”: the search engine we call ‘intuition’, and putting that miraculous machine to use: helping the rider of our consciousness control the elephant of our intuition.–Adding Nature and Ancestors—
Really, mythology in the Greek and Roman models, absent family hierarchy, is all any people needs. We could celebrate, read and study the great people throughout history in each of the four disciplines of organization: Morality(words), Justice(force), Commerce(trade), and Craft(art, science, tech, manufacture, and construction). All of us would be better off with a libertarian theology (patron saints), than authoritarian (monotheistic god). Authoritarianism is a means of generating hostility and conflict. I think most of us would rather celebrate (remember and learn from thinking about) Alexander, Aurelius, Jefferson, Michelangelo, and those like them, than any mythical god. And we would be better of for it.Nature is already set to restore to celebration, but we must restore our civic responsibility for the commons, and incorporate the problem of excessive reproduction in that sentiments.
–Should vs Can–
There are very few opportunities to establish a new civic cult, and formal institutions and the rapid change of formal institutions is the most secure means other than organic expansion. Given the right opportunity and incentives we can. And I think I know what that opportunity is, what incentives we use, and what institutions we rely upon. But I’m going to talk about that some time in the future.For now, I’d like to get across the very interesting idea that Creativity, Stoicism, and Buddhism can be combined into a secular cult that can provide an answer to post-mystical civic religion.
Followup Comments:
I have to go down this path. I will not end up as one of the racists. Arguments against something are futile. Arguments for something are actionable.
I know it’s frustrating for people to watch, but I have to be able to address comparative evolutionary strategy in order to make the weakness of our model, visible to us. I can almost do it.
Religion is something that I am working in the background since I want an answer to the complaints of religious conservatives. And in order to demonstrate that I’ve captured all of the unstated properties of western aristocracy I simply have to address religion. Not in terms of ‘how do we return’ but in terms of ‘why did it work’.
I had a hell of a time with both operationalism and performative truth. And I burned a few friends and relationships solving that problem. But from my perspective I’ve completed operationalism by tying it to testimonial truth. That was what prior generations failed to grasp. They were looking for a totalitarian answer, to the problem of truth, but no such thing exists. Mises failed because he lacked the ethic of testimonial truth, and relied upon pragmatic truth. Hayek got lost in psychology and universalism, rather than evolutionary biology. Brouwer and Bridgman and their followers are still looking for platonic and totalitarian truth. Macdonald is too interested, as is the HBD movement in genes. The mainstream is interested in institutions. Myself I am interested in the metaphysical assumptions that reflect our evolutionary strategies. And I think that I have found a better means of exposition than the others have. In the sense that it is possible to capture necessary and universal morality in law articulated as property rights, while voluntarily constructing contracts on top of those laws to perform voluntary exchanges – rather than to construct new laws.
I still cannot quite reduce the problem of pathological altruism to simple statements that people can empathize with as well as understand. How our universalism won’t work for the rest of the world, and how it won’t even work for us. I have to reverse the value of altruism from something we treat as sacred, to something that we treat as profane: suicidal. I know I can do it. I just need to work at it a bit longer. We cannot extend the family universally unless everyone also extends it in return. And demonstrably, others will not do so. And it is wise from them not to.
Anyway. Once I have that line of thinking done, I should have the entire picture. Right now my outline is I think, the broadest ever attempted. We will see if I succeed.
But while aristocracy is clearly my preference, propertarianism doesn’t recommend anything. It’s just the logic of cooperation. The institutional means of producing the level of trust that is tolerable for any polity.
Thanks for the kick in the pants tho.
Just please keep in mind that I’m conducting my experiments (testing my arguments) in public. It’s just R&D. Its how we fail that we learn from. What remains is that which is most likely true.Cheers.
Curt DoolittleWell, Christianity wasn’t appealing, but we know who it appealed to and why. As far as I know, Christianity was practiced by less than 10% of the population and most of the persecution myths are just that. Had justinian not wanted to adopt byzantine (middle world) totalitarianism, and enforced christianity and closed the other schools, we might have never had the intellectual dark age, even if we had the economic one caused by the arab conquests.
When a population is mobilized, whether in contemporary america, or industrializing england, or in imperial rome, the disconnected peoples look for artificial tribes. This is why the english advocated tolerance for multiple churches – so labor would find company.
The USA did it with civic organizations. Now we do it, I don’t know how – because we are alienated as hell and simply mollify our anxiety with consumption and participation in artificial families and tribes created by television.
Women, slaves, and the disaffected found the promise of familial love from fellow church members attractive.
Not complicated really.
-
An Interesting Path To A New Secular ‘Religion’
(insight)[I] want to take you through an interesting line of thought, starting with creativity, and ending with something profound.
Unfortunately for all of us, creativity is terribly time consuming. You cant sit down and say “I’m going to be creative now”, and cram through it like you can with calculations, or organizing or planning which rely on reason and concentration. Creativity requires free association, trial and error.
We don’t think of creativity it as research and development, but it is. We merely artificially separate aesthetic, philosophic, scientific, technological and procedural forms of creativity by the concreteness of the information we have two work with. While we can see actions in procedures, technological and many scientific objects, philosophic and aesthetic are almost entirely imaginary. We have to ‘observe’ them introspectively. And worse, we cannot ‘see’ into our intuitions to analyze and observe our creativity at work, but we can examine what it is that we do and hypothesize about it – something which Daniel Kahneman has than thankfully given us a language to describe.
Now, I have made a habit of creative thinking, by keeping my mind in that kind of space nearly full time. Although as an autistic it’s a lot easier to stay in that mode than people more in the middle of the curve: neurotypicals. But it is a luxury to afford the ability to conduct research and development (“Creativity”) full time. And while scientists avoid the acknowledgement of their work as a luxury good, artists and philosophers never do, and technologists and proceduralists never have to: they get paid for what they do.
Myself, I don’t see any difference, and never have, between creative approaches to humor, the arts, literature, philosophy, the sciences, technology and processes. I have done work in all but humor which I am tone deaf to, and science: something which requires too often getting your hands dirty- which I have an objection to. But I had to work very hard for many years to obtain the freedom to specialize in creativity. Most creatives endure economic hardship to practice creativity: it is only for a few that creativity is other than a luxury good.
But creativity is an expertise that at least most of us can improve upon. It is not unlike meditation in that it focuses your mind, but unlike meditation it attempts to solve a problem through what I consider guided dreaming. Free association with direction.
I think part of the hard work of becoming a non-procedural writer is in learning how to conduct guided dreaming, while at the same time, quickly jotting down a narrative of the dream. You don’t start out that way of course. You start out by planning your work, and gradually develop increasingly meditative states of mind, while at the same time writing down your observations of the internal visualizations.
–the three degrees of meditation–
So in this respect, I view this form of meditative creativity as the highest achievement of the disciplined mind, stoicism as action-oriented the middle ground, and buddhism as the lowest level of achievement in which we seek to do nothing whatsoever.I am not fond of buddhism but I think that especially for women it may be more important to quiet the impulsive chaos of the female mind that it is for them to focus on action or creativity. I think for most people but more often males, it is perhaps better to focus on actions, since we are not troubled by the chaos of the female mind. For a few of us, who are most often if not entirely male, theoretical creativity is the only use our minds are really fit for.
For these reasons I think any new ‘religion’ or form of spiritualism, will not need to come from the buddhist, stoic, or creative schools of thought, but from all of them. We could easily cleanse buddhism of it’s mysticism, and represent all three as three different skills, dependent upon our individual human needs.
If this form of discipline was mirrored with ancestor rituals, and a return to the pagan celebration of nature, then I think that is the highest form of religion possible that we currently could construct for mankind.
–Rider and Elephant–
Until recently, I didn’t understand what form of skill that I had taught myself. It wasn’t until I tried to resolve the differences between buddhism and stoicism that it became clear to me that it isn’t so much that either is right, but that they each try to apply the same technique to the problem of mental discipline: gaining control of our “system 1”: the search engine we call ‘intuition’, and putting that miraculous machine to use: helping the rider of our consciousness control the elephant of our intuition.–Adding Nature and Ancestors—
Really, mythology in the Greek and Roman models, absent family hierarchy, is all any people needs. We could celebrate, read and study the great people throughout history in each of the four disciplines of organization: Morality(words), Justice(force), Commerce(trade), and Craft(art, science, tech, manufacture, and construction). All of us would be better off with a libertarian theology (patron saints), than authoritarian (monotheistic god). Authoritarianism is a means of generating hostility and conflict. I think most of us would rather celebrate (remember and learn from thinking about) Alexander, Aurelius, Jefferson, Michelangelo, and those like them, than any mythical god. And we would be better of for it.Nature is already set to restore to celebration, but we must restore our civic responsibility for the commons, and incorporate the problem of excessive reproduction in that sentiments.
–Should vs Can–
There are very few opportunities to establish a new civic cult, and formal institutions and the rapid change of formal institutions is the most secure means other than organic expansion. Given the right opportunity and incentives we can. And I think I know what that opportunity is, what incentives we use, and what institutions we rely upon. But I’m going to talk about that some time in the future.For now, I’d like to get across the very interesting idea that Creativity, Stoicism, and Buddhism can be combined into a secular cult that can provide an answer to post-mystical civic religion.
Followup Comments:
I have to go down this path. I will not end up as one of the racists. Arguments against something are futile. Arguments for something are actionable.
I know it’s frustrating for people to watch, but I have to be able to address comparative evolutionary strategy in order to make the weakness of our model, visible to us. I can almost do it.
Religion is something that I am working in the background since I want an answer to the complaints of religious conservatives. And in order to demonstrate that I’ve captured all of the unstated properties of western aristocracy I simply have to address religion. Not in terms of ‘how do we return’ but in terms of ‘why did it work’.
I had a hell of a time with both operationalism and performative truth. And I burned a few friends and relationships solving that problem. But from my perspective I’ve completed operationalism by tying it to testimonial truth. That was what prior generations failed to grasp. They were looking for a totalitarian answer, to the problem of truth, but no such thing exists. Mises failed because he lacked the ethic of testimonial truth, and relied upon pragmatic truth. Hayek got lost in psychology and universalism, rather than evolutionary biology. Brouwer and Bridgman and their followers are still looking for platonic and totalitarian truth. Macdonald is too interested, as is the HBD movement in genes. The mainstream is interested in institutions. Myself I am interested in the metaphysical assumptions that reflect our evolutionary strategies. And I think that I have found a better means of exposition than the others have. In the sense that it is possible to capture necessary and universal morality in law articulated as property rights, while voluntarily constructing contracts on top of those laws to perform voluntary exchanges – rather than to construct new laws.
I still cannot quite reduce the problem of pathological altruism to simple statements that people can empathize with as well as understand. How our universalism won’t work for the rest of the world, and how it won’t even work for us. I have to reverse the value of altruism from something we treat as sacred, to something that we treat as profane: suicidal. I know I can do it. I just need to work at it a bit longer. We cannot extend the family universally unless everyone also extends it in return. And demonstrably, others will not do so. And it is wise from them not to.
Anyway. Once I have that line of thinking done, I should have the entire picture. Right now my outline is I think, the broadest ever attempted. We will see if I succeed.
But while aristocracy is clearly my preference, propertarianism doesn’t recommend anything. It’s just the logic of cooperation. The institutional means of producing the level of trust that is tolerable for any polity.
Thanks for the kick in the pants tho.
Just please keep in mind that I’m conducting my experiments (testing my arguments) in public. It’s just R&D. Its how we fail that we learn from. What remains is that which is most likely true.Cheers.
Curt DoolittleWell, Christianity wasn’t appealing, but we know who it appealed to and why. As far as I know, Christianity was practiced by less than 10% of the population and most of the persecution myths are just that. Had justinian not wanted to adopt byzantine (middle world) totalitarianism, and enforced christianity and closed the other schools, we might have never had the intellectual dark age, even if we had the economic one caused by the arab conquests.
When a population is mobilized, whether in contemporary america, or industrializing england, or in imperial rome, the disconnected peoples look for artificial tribes. This is why the english advocated tolerance for multiple churches – so labor would find company.
The USA did it with civic organizations. Now we do it, I don’t know how – because we are alienated as hell and simply mollify our anxiety with consumption and participation in artificial families and tribes created by television.
Women, slaves, and the disaffected found the promise of familial love from fellow church members attractive.
Not complicated really.
-
IS SELF – DECEPTION POSSIBLE? YES. IT TURNS OUT IT IS. AND MOREOVER WE ARE SURRO
IS SELF – DECEPTION POSSIBLE? YES. IT TURNS OUT IT IS. AND MOREOVER WE ARE SURROUNDED BY MASTERS OF IT.
( Lesterians ) ( Austrians ) @Lee Waaks.
Over the past better part of a year, Lee Waaks, a Lesterian who has taught me quite a bit about Jan Lester’s ideas, and to whom I am forever grateful, has been dutifully ‘correcting’ me, every time I use the term ‘self-deception’, because at least rationally, self deception should not be possible.
But my intuition has been relentlessly hounding me – because I can’t imagine that self deception isn’t possible. And I have a good reason: otherwise people are far more dishonest than I can imagine them being. Especially when we consider that there is a very high computational cost to dishonesty (lying consistently is expensive and hard work) and that under self deception that cost goes away – especially if the deception is clouded by verbalisms (‘fuzzy’ words that are analogical and whose properties are not necessarily ascertainable.) When you lie you must be conscious of it. When you practice persuasion under the influence of self deception, then at least, in theory, you are not lying – which requires at least intuitive intent.
THE CONSCIOUS, SUBCONSCIOUS, AND INSTINCTUAL MIND
Thanks to Kahneman’s framing of the mind as composed of System 2 (reason), System 1 (intuition – our ‘search engine’); And in addition to Systems 1 and 2, what I have coined as ‘System 0’ – the human reproductive bias that determines what property we must acquire, inventory, and defend, and therefore the cause that determines our different moral biases.
We possess intuitions At both the System 0 (reproductive instinct) and System 1( memory ) levels. And system 0 intuitions appear to operate as cognitive biases that we rarely can imagine as other than ‘the right and moral order of things’.
We work very hard at using language to JUSTIFY our moral intuitions. So each group that uses a different reproductive strategy, and each gender and class within each group, contains members who hold both marginally different and marginally indifferent values – each using signals to justify his or her needs (biases).
However, because of all this justification, when we cooperate we appear, at least within the group to share largely similar interests. And we do. We cooperate on means even if we do not always cooperate on ends. The opposing male and female reproductive strategies, and the compromise of serial monogamy are ever present properties of human existence yet we manage to cooperate and flourish within group and without.
As groups we further justify our group reproductive interests. Westerners justify universalism
SO HOW DO WE DECEIVE OURSELVES?
Because we want to. WE overload our reason and our intuitions (System 1) by searching for verbal means of justifying (System 2) our reproductive strategy (System 0) such that we can cooperate in-group with group members, and compete against out-group members with different strategies..
The problem for us is coming up with a narrative that is both easy to advance, easy to justify, and easy to apply. The more detailed the story, the more cases that are covered by the narrative, the more that others can use the narrative, and the more pervasive is the narrative in our environment, then the more our intuition can be trained to ‘believe it’. This is why religions propagate despite the fact that they are obviously nonsense – they are really useful. And if enough people that you interact with ACT as if something is true, the more it appears to be. And the more you are deceived.
SO HOW DOES A PEOPLE DECEIVE ALL ITS MEMBERS
By ‘reality by chanting’. The more verbal, more literate, more sources of distribution and media that a people has, the easier it is to create self deceptive narratives.
WHY IS SELF DECEPTION POSSIBLE?
Because it allows a group to create a mythos – a strategic form of warfare against out-group members, while retaining in-group cohesion.
HOW DO WE CONQUER SELF DECEPTION
While self deception for psychological purposes is probably something we want to preserve. Deception and self deception as political theft, and intercultural warfare, if not genocide are things we want to protect against. Aristocratic Egalitarianism, Propertarianism, Testimonial Truth, Operationalism, and the Scientific method, codified in law, with universal standing as means of enforcement, under loser-pays. We conquer it with truth-telling.
WHAT EXAMPLES DO WE HAVE TO WORK FROM?
Every group creates deceptions, but some groups are better than others. Our own mythos is what we call the Enlightenment. While discrediting the church and giving promise to science, what we also did was create the mythos of the “aristocracy of everyone” : that it is both desirable and advantageous to join the aristocracy (it isn’t) and that an homogenous aristocratic (meritocratic) policy is in everyone’s interest (it isn’t). This self deception has been harmful for much of the world, and remains so. We promote democracy, when it’s bad for everyone, ourselves included. We promote majority rule, which is likewise bad for everyone. We promote consumerism, which also is bad for everyone. What we should promote is property rights, rule of law, truth telling and science, and the use of poly-systemic governments so that the underclasses may operate socialistic-ally and the upper aristocratically – just like we always have.
THE OLD WORLD CULTURE EXAMPLES
We currently have three old-world-peoples practicing different alternatives to truth living with us to study: Gypsies, Jews and Muslims. Although we do now encounter Asians as well. But the best research has been done on one group, the jews, and that work was done by Kevin Macdonald in his exhaustive study of the Jewish use of deception and self deception in intellectual movements.
But while Jewish authors are responsible for a disproportionate number of the pseudosciences, as well as monotheism, it is important to keep in mind that they are merely “HERE” with us, and that their work, while more prolific, and since the Jewish enlightenment, more pseudoscience rather than mythical, is no different from the Muslim narrative, the Russian, or the Chinese.
What follows are pointers to Macdonald’s notes on the self- deception, and deception of Jewish authors.
Just why Jewish authors are the worlds best a manufacturers of pseudoscience is probably (a) evolution verbalism by the requirement for memorizing literature, (b) the Talmudic teachings which which force dualism, and therefore dishonesty (c) the strategy of economic parasitism which rewards deception, (d) their genetic dislike of outsiders, and (e) justification for their in0group evolutionary strategy.
I will address in another article, why western truth is so important as an evolutionary strategy for a small, poor, illiterate people on the edge of the bronze age, who constantly had to defend themselves against superior numbers from wealthier civilizations.
Truth is an advantage for us. But deception is a greater value to others than truth. The Chinese, Jews, and Gypsies among them. Just as the totalitarian law of Islam is an advantage for the lower IQ peoples in low trust in-breeding societies.
This topic is endlessly fascinating.
—-
MACDONALD ON DECEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION
—Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified
as Jews AND thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing
specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find
evidence for these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as
in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did
identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues despite surface
appearances to the contrary.—
—…deception may not be as important here as self-deception, ”a
common enough feature of Jewish intellectual history (see SAID, Chs. 7, 8).—
Macdonald. (1998a). Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger.
—If life is truly without any evolutionary meaning, why have advocates propagated these ideologies so intensely and with such self-consciously political methods? Why have many of these same people strongly identified with their own ethnic group and its interests, and why have many of them insisted on cultural pluralism and its validation of minority group ethnocentrism as moral absolutes? By their own
assumptions, it is just a meaningless game. Nobody should care who wins or
loses. Of course, deception and self-deception may be involved. I have noted (p.
195) that a fundamental agenda has been to make the European-derived peoples
of the United States view concern about their own demographic and cultural
eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology.—
MacDonald. CofC
—Evolved mechanisms that facilitate the acceptance of maladaptive ideologies
among gentiles are not the whole story, however. In SAID (Ch. 8) I noted a
general tendency for self-deception among Jews as a robust pattern apparent in
several historical eras and touching on a wide range of issues, including personal
identity, the causes and extent of anti-Semitism, the characteristics of Jews (e.g.,
economic success), and the role of Jews in the political and cultural process in
traditional and contemporary societies.—
Macdonald. (1998a). Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger.
—Self-deception may well be important in facilitating Jewish involvement in the movements discussed here. I have noted evidence for this in the case of Jewish political radicals, and Greenwald and Schuh (1994) persuasively argue that the ingroup ethnic bias exhibited by their sample of researchers on prejudice is not conscious. Many of the Jews involved in the movements reviewed here may sincerely believe that these movements are really divorced from specifically Jewish interests or are in the best interests of other groups as well as Jews.—
Greenwald, A. G., & Schuh, E. S. (1994). An ethnic bias in scientific citations.
European Journal of Social Psychology 24:623-639.
—They may sincerely believe that they are not biased in their associational patterns or in their patterns of citation in scientific articles, but, as Trivers notes (1985), the best deceivers are those who are self-deceived. Finally, theories of social influence deriving from social psychology are also relevant and may yield to an evolutionary analysis. I have suggested that the memes generated by these Jewish intellectual movements achieve their influence, at least at first, because of the processes of minority group influence. The issue of whether this aspect of social psychology may be viewed as part of the evolved design features of the human mind remains to be researched.—
Trivers, R. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings.
———. (1991). Deceit and self-deception: The relationship between
communication and consciousness. In Man and Beast Revisited, ed. M.
Robinson & L. Tiger. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press.
—It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at
achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their nameâ€; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that
Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were involved, and they could not
develop a specific rationale for Judaism acceptable within a post-Enlightenment
intellectual context. In SAID (Ch. 2) I noted that the Jewish contribution to the
wider gentile culture in nineteenth-century Germany was accomplished from a
highly particularistic perspective in which Jewish group identity continued to be
of paramount subjective importance despite its “invisibility.†Similarly, because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism.—
—In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer
is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities†(Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that gentiles would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91-93). The technique of having gentiles as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the following chapter.—
Jay, M. (1973). The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School
and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Boston: Little, Brown.
———. (1980). The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical theory’s analysis of
anti-Semitism. New German Critique (#19):137-149.
———. (1984). Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
—As an additional example, Irving
Louis Horowitz (1993, 91) contrasts the “high-profile,†special-interest pleading of the new ethnic and sexual minorities within sociology with the Jewish
tendency toward a low-profile strategy. Although Jews dominated American
sociology beginning in the 1930s, specifically Jewish interests and political
agendas were never made salient.—
Horowitz, I. L. (1987). Between the Charybdis of capitalism and the Scylla of
communism: The emigration of German social scientists, 1933-1945. Social
Science History 11:113-138.
———. (1993). The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Source date (UTC): 2014-08-08 08:30:00 UTC
-
The Central Argument: Western Testimonial Truth vs Platonic Truth
(the central argument)( profound)
[T]he central argument regarding truth:
1) … is that giving witness to one’s observations, is testable by reproduction of a set of operational definitions. That operational definitions produce the equivalent of names, just as positional numbering provides quantities with names. Such names are insulated from deception, distraction, loading, framing and overloading. Theories are not. While we cannot demonstrate the absolute parsimony of a theory (that we know of), we can demonstrate that we truthfully conveyed our observations. In other words, we can testify truthfully to an ordered set of facts, even if we cannot testify truthfully to parsimony of a theory.
2) … that physical science is a narrow and special case of human activity, and popper was defining truth for that special case – a definition which is not applicable outside of the special case, and even inside the special case, he made questionable use of the term in order to retain its moral loading for purely social reasons. Justifiable social reasons, but social reasons none the less.
3) ….that it is possible to state instead that all outputs of scientific investigation are true, if they are truthfully represented – where ‘scientific investigation” refers to the use of the scientific method, regardless of field of inquiry. But that we seek the most parsimonious statement of a theory, and we can never know that we have obtained it, we can only develop consensus that we cannot cause it to fail. This is, as far as I know, the best non-platonic description of truth available. Everything else is a linguistic contrivance for one purpose or another – possibly to obscure ignorance, and possibly to load ideas with moral motivation. Scientists load their contrivance of truth, and mathematicians load their contrivance of numbers, limits, and a dozen other things – most of which obscure linguistic ‘cheats’ to give authority to that which is necessary for the construction of general rules. (ie: the problem of arbitrary precision).
4) … that popper did no investigation into science or the history of science prior to making his argument, and that as yet, we do not have a systematic account of the history of science. However, what history we do have, both distant and recent, is that science operates as I have suggested: by criticism upon failure via overextension. The reason being that it is economically inefficient (expensive) to pursue criticism rather than to extend a theory to its point of failure then criticize it. And as far as we know, this is how science works, and must work, because it is how all human endeavors must work. Because while a small number of scientists may seek the ‘truth’ whatever a platonist means, what scientists try to do is solve problems – ie: to manufacture recipes for useful cognition.
5) … that popper’s advice was merely moral given that the scale of inquiry in all human fields had surpassed that of human scale, where tests are subjectively verifiable. (I think this is an important insight because it occurred in all fields.) Einstein for example, operationalized observations (relative simultaneity for example) over very great distances approaching the speed of light using Lorenz transformations. And as Bridgman demonstrated, the reason Einstein’s work was novel was because prior generations had NOT been operationalizing statements ,and as such, more than a generation and perhaps two were lost to failure of what should have been an obvious solution. (See the problem of length, which I tend to refer to often as the best example.) I addressed this in a previous post, and what popper did was give us good advice, and while he made an argument that appears logical, like most rational arguments, unsupported by data, it is not clear he was correct, and in fact, it appears that he was not. The question is not a rational but empirical one.
6) … and I am not terribly interested in criticizing popper, any more than criticizing any other philosopher I admire, since popper unlike Misesian Pseudoscience, or Rothbardian Immoral Verbalisms, was engaged in a moral attempt both in politics and in science, and perhaps in science as a vehicle for politics, to prevent the pseudoscientific use of science – particularly by fascist and communists, to use the findings of science as a replacement for divine authority by which to command man. What popper did, particularly with his platonism, was to remove the ability for the findings of science to be used as justification for the removal of human choice. Popper, Mises, and Hayek were responsible for undermining pseudoscientific authoritarianism. Of the three popper is perhaps less articulate (possibly to obscure his objective), but certainly not wrong, so to speak. While mises’ appeal to authoritarianism (which is part and parcel of jewish culture) was entirely pseudoscientific, by claiming that economics was deductive rather than empirical, and justifying it under apriorism, instead of as I’ve stated, understanding that he was merely trying to apply operationalism to economic activity, which would merely demonstrate that Keynesian economics was immoral, not unscientific.
But Popper, Mises, Hayek, Bridgman and Brouwer, did not find a solution to restoring the western aristocratic conditions for public speech.
They too were a lost in platonism a bit. Bridgman and Brouwer did understand that something was wrong, and were very close,b ut they could not make the moral argument. We have had a century now of attacks by verbal contrivance and we can demonstrate the destruction of our civilization by way of it. So the moral argument is no longer one of undemonstrated results. WE have the results. And we have a generation of men, myself included, trying to repair it.One must speak truthfully, because no other truth is knowable. Intellectual products that are brought to market must be warrantied just as are all other products that are brought to market, and the warranty that you can provide is operational definitions (recipes, experience), not theories (psychologism, projections). And if you are not willing to stand behind your product then you should not bring it to market. Because you have no right to subject others to harm.
Intellectuals produce ideas (myself included), that is our product. We are paid in measly terms most of the time, for our product, but that is what we do. But it is no different from hot coffee or dangerous ladders, or defective gas tanks.
And given that one particularly prolific group of people has created marxism, socialism, postmodernism, libertine-libertarianism, and neoconservatism, it is about time we stopped allowing them to ship lousy products into society.
And rather than regulate them by government, the common law and universal standing will allow punishment of those who bring bad products to market.
OBSCURITY
I am entirely capable (as above) of writing clearly, but it is tedious when most logical connections appear to be obvious to the informed person. I will cop out to being lazy, particularly when I have no idea whether the others involved in the debate will be worthwhile. But it’s not that I can’t drill down to necessary arguments. OK? It’s just a lot more work than incrementally testing an idea and making sure that others follow the breadcrumbs….CLOSING
I am pretty sure the above analysis is correct. It’s going to be very hard to demonstrate otherwise: that popper used a pragmatic theory of truth, just like all of us do. But there is only one possible extant truth, and that is testimony. All else is but moral rule, not logical necessity. OK? That’s just how it is. Period, end of story.Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine