Over On “League of Ordinary Gentlemen” there is a very long thread fitfully attempting to be critical of Libertarianism.
It’s interesting how almost no one on the thread understands anything other than what they’ve read in the popular press about libertarianism.
Which is common, because like any doctrine, people adopt it because of the appeal of it’s general sentiments, not because they actually understand it. And they propagate the sentiments very simplistically. Then, those who have adopted other doctrines because those doctrines appeal to their own sentiments, react to these simplistic statements of sentimentality, rather than to the libertarian doctrine itself –and all potential opportunity for rational discourse is lost in the chaos.
A TECHNICAL, EMPIRICAL PHILOSOPHY
But Libertarianism is a technical philosophy that can be rationally articulated. It is often, for historical reasons, articulated as a moral philosophy as is most western ideology. THis is because the French enlightenment philosophers ‘Catholicized’ what was an empirical Anglo philosophical system and converted it to sentimental, moral, and rational system of thought. It was this moral, rational, and sentimental French framework, not the empirical Anglo framework that was popularized by continental philosophers and through their writings, distributed to the world in printed literature — thereby removing precisely what made the Classical Liberal economic political program innovative: that it was procedural and empirical rather than rational.
HISTORY
The term “Libertarian” was coined by Classical Liberals because the left appropriated the term “liberal” for their Moral political program.
PRINCIPLESFirst Principle: Economics
Libertarianism relies on economics.
So, in any political discourse, given a multitude of possible choices, libertarians ‘err on the side of liberty’ because they believe liberty will have the most positive and the least negative side effects.
Second Principle: Anti-Bureaucracy
Libertarians use the term government as a synonym for bureaucracy. They use anti-authoritarian arguments. Anti authoritarian arguments are Moral and rational arguments. Anti-bureaucratic arguments are rational and empirical arguments: meaning that the evidence is that bureaucracies universally consolidate power and abuse it because of the processes and incentives necessary for humans to operate in a bureaucratic organization. (See Michels and Mises).
Libertarianism then, is an anti-bureaucratic rather than anti-government philosophical framework. It suggests that people can and do organize into groups we call governments. It suggests that in almost all cases, privately owned, market-driven service providers will provide better services at lower cost with less danger of bureaucratic abuse of group members than the alternatives.
Third Principle: Voluntary Transfer
Libertarians use moral arguments to criticize involuntary transfer of property. However, the rational and empirical argument is that only voluntary transfer allows people to ‘calculate’ positive social ends together by making use of their collective knowledge, rather than the supposed knowledge of one or more bureaucrats – and that ‘externalities’ (the secondary effects) are beneficial when transfers are voluntary.
The single moral property that defines all libertarian philosophy is that individuals have a monopoly on the use of their minds, bodies and property.
LIBERTARIANISM
Libertarian is a middle class (commercial) philosophy.
It consists (largely) of two wings:
Classical Liberal
(This is the important part that is lost on everyone – libertarians included. It is an empirical system of government.)
Anarchist
THE VALUE OF LIBERTARIANISM
The libertarian research program has contributed significantly to political discourse because it has:
CONCLUSIONS
In the end, the combination of poor data collection, fiat monetary policy, use of the DSGEM in economics and it’s ‘static’ limitations, undermining the constituion’s implied but unstated empirical nature, and the democratic rather than class-based process of debate, have put us in a position where it is not possible to make rational economic and political judgements.
Thanks to Libertarians, we know that whether or not we have moral ambitions, we cannot currently make rational decisions in our form of government with the information at our disposal. And that is profound.
Tyler Cowen, while at a Conference in Israel, posts : “The influence of the Tea Party seems on the decline.”
But that doesn’t mean what most people will take away from it.
I’m sure Tyler knows this, but other people may not: Movements need ideologies. All ideologies are progressive. Tea partiers are conservatives, and conservatives don’t use an ideology.
Conservatives NEED an ideology. They need a means of competing against creeping totalitarianism and socialism. They need a fully rational framework that proposes a fully rational system of government. WIthout that framework, they rely upon tradition, history and moral arguments. They rely upon the constitution, the founders, and law. And they have failed because of those forms of reliance. And they have lost by relying upon something that they appreciate, and value, but largely do not understand how to advocate through science, logic and reason.
Today, Conservatism is not an ideology. Conservatism is a sentiment at the very least, and a philosophy at the very most. But it is not an ideology. It prescribes no program. It simply sets hurdles by which changes should be implemented due to the limits of human reason.
PHILOSOPHY
Conservative philosophy consists of a very simple set of propositions:
1) Human reason is something to be skeptical of at all times. History and tradition are the tools by which we test our ideas and protect ourselves from hubris.
2) Because reason limited, change should be accomplished through merit in the market by people who conform to established moral codes, and are humble about their accomplishments.
3) People who attempt change by political means are charlatans who want to take from hard working people in order to glorify themselves.
SENTIMENTS
And Conservatism consists of a limited number of sentiments:
1) Long term group persistence: This is a primitive human sentiment that encourages some portion of the population to give very high regard to saving – concentrating all forms of capital. It is universal to all societies. Some authors express Group Persistence as “loyalty”, which attributes only arbitrary emotional meaning to what is an important evolutionary strategy.
2) Hierarchy as a form of natural order. Hierarchy is mistranslated as obeying someone, rather than what it really means to conservatives is that “People are very different in knowledge and ability. Even if they have similar abilities they have differences in knowledge, and upbringing that mean some people are better at some things than others.” Conservatives do not see ‘following a leader’ as anything other than a practical necessity driven by the differences in human beings.
There are three other universal human political sentiments:
3) Fairness ( Reciprocity and it’s corollary Fidelity / Sincerity)
4) Nurture / Training : Taking care of others and protecting them from harm, and the objective corollary “training” and “educating”.
5) Purity. Avoidance of unclean foods, habits, places and thoughts.
Conservatives place equal value on all five of the sentiments (See Jonathan Haidt.) Progressives give their entire moral and emotional weight to just two sentiments: Nurture and Fairness. Conservatives have a more complex problem, becuase they place equal weight on all five values.
SENTIMENTS VERSUS PHILOSOPHIES
Thomas Sowell, in his two works on political differences “A Conflict Of Visions ” and “The Vision of The Anointed”, states that the only substantial difference between conservative and progressive philosophies is in their assessment of the potential of human reason.
Progressives: The Unconstrained Vision
Or the “Utopian Vision”.
In Sowell’s opinion, the unconstrained vision relies heavily on sweepingly optimistic assumptions about human nature, distrust of decentralized processes like the free market, impatience with systemic processes that constrain human action. Sowell often refers to them as, “the self anointed” people with a progressive political view.
Conservatives: The Constrained Vision
Or, the “Tragic Vision”.
Sowell argues that the constrained vision relies heavily on a reduced view of the goodness of human nature, and prefers the systematic processes of the free market, and the systematic processes of the rule of law and constitutional government. It distrusts sweeping theories and grand assumptions in favor of heavy reliance on solid empirical evidence and on time-tested structures and processes.
My view is that progressives get a discount on intellectual labor by artificially simplifying the problem of social orders, and that they justify their simplification by taking emotional pleasure from the fact that involuntary transfers are forced between producers and non-producers.
Conservatives simply account for more variables, and therefore are more pessimistic in the face of complexity. Furthermore, conservatives see involuntary transfers as failing to train people, not taking care of people.
HERITAGE
Because english heritage is european, and european heritage is Aristocratic, conservatism favors the aristocratic system of politics. Aristocratic politics is fundamentally military and hierarchical in it’s view of the world. Aristocracy can be loosely translated as “a system of order for controlling and holding a body of land.”
The first principle of aristocracy is the Fraternalism. That is, the idea that each of us has his home or farm or Manor (plantation), and that we gather together to create a market, and a city around that market, and defend it together. But that we do not, under any circumstances, surrender our sovereignty over ourselves or our land. This is what makes the west unique: cities are the result of fraternal cooperation by land owning warriors who are required to supply their own arms, equipment and soldiers. In other words, cities were joint stock companies.
Aristocracy is not limited to a social or economic class. There are plenty of people, males in particular, in the middle and and upper proletariat classes, that are intuitively practitioners of aristocratic sentiments. Freedom, as it is used in libertarian circles is the remnant of aristocratic philosophy.
As such, the sentiment of conservatism has been confused with the philosophy of aristocracy, and the political system of classical liberalism. Sentiments, Philosophies and Political Systems are three different things.
RIGHT AND WRONG CONSERVATISM
There are good conservative ideas and bad conservative ideas. Southern conservatism over the elimination of slavery was obviously a self-interested bias masquerading as conservatism. Anti-communism and anti-socialism was clearly the correct proposition given the hundred million people it murdered, and the prosperity that the world has achieved by adopting consumer capitalism. Even McCarthy turned out to be right about quite a few things, after all. Conservative concerns over immigration will very likely play out as correct – the nation will divide either gracefully or violently at some point in the next century. Conservative preferences in health care are only that if it’s to be done at all, it should be done without expanding the government bureaucracy. And conservatives are right on that issue as well.
SUMMARY
Conservatism is not an ideology. It is a skeptical philosophy that has biological, historical, and rational philosophical origins. The Tea Party, as a conservative movement, does not seek power. It seeks to prevent radical changes to the social order that are conducted in hubris, and where the consequences are dire.
In my Time Magazine reply to “Why do westerner’s fear the rise of China”, someone challenged me with:
You make the westerner seem as if he actually walks around Afghanistan and iraq folding hands and asking people to be quiet and china being the only country forcing power on others.
I don’t make that assertion at all. I (correctly) list the reasons why westerners fear a rise in China.
You make the error of treating geopolitical strategy as if we’re dividing up a loaf of bread for dinner. One can criticize individual actions of nations, or one can create an full accounting of the accomplishments and failures, and then to discern the motivations for those actions. Americans have had very simplistic objectives for the past century. 1) take over the collapsed british empires’ navy and trade routes. 2) take over the collapsed british pound 3) defeat communism and spread market democracy, 4) protect the oil fields in the old ottoman empire from being used as economic warfare against developing nations until those nations are ready to mature into market societies.
Sinic civilization, or rather the Chinese empire of north china, south china, the interior, Mongolia and Tibet, has a strong central state and a long standing bureaucratic tradition. After it’s devastating failure with communism, and the most expansive destruction of human life in history, Chinese intellectuals decided to give up on Communism and instead adopt authoritarian capitalism. Their efforts at doing so, despite being dependent entirely upon imported technology, has resulted in a vast movement of people from abject poverty to the consumer lifestyle. It is a difficult climb. But they are making progress.
Islamic civilization, which is more correctly viewed as the collapsed remnants of the Ottoman Empire, is still institutionally and culturally primitive, remains incapable of resolving the entho-tribal geographic conflicts, or even educating it’s people above sub-saharan african levels. Islamic civilization lacks a core state – a core state which holds other states in their civilization accountable in the international community – and therefore makes external intervention unnecessary.
I am quite sure it is humiliating for members of Islamic nations to hold to a personal religion and political doctrine of superiority, while faced with the daily evidence of the inferiority of the civilization and it’s people in the world arena. I am sure that it is frustrating that the west has maintained a policy of containment on the post-ottoman islamic nations, in the hope that they will skip the communist phase of evolution and directly join the modern market economy. I am sure that it is exasperating that the west has propped up dictators as a means of preventing yet another series of marxist states that will even further repress and regress their citizens. I am sure it is frustrating to have the west, yet again, for the fifth or sixth time in human history, hold the middle eastern people’s at bay in order to prevent the spread of ‘magical’ society, and it’s endemic pervasive ignorance. I am sure that it is frustrating that the west is split between those people who think islamic nations are insufficiently mature for democracy, and those who evangelically spread the idea of democracy without understanding that democracy is a government for a mercantile and commercial society – which is alien to islamic nations. I am sure all of these things are frustrating.
Do muslims actually think the average American wants to pay for maintaining the pattern of world commerce and trade? Do they think that American citizens like losing money and the lives of soldiers to contain Marxism, now Islam – Radical Islam is just another iteration of Marxism. Don’t they think we wouldn’t rather spend our lives and money on other things?
Most of us just wish muslims would just grow up and take care of their own house, so that we don’t have to act like their parents any longer. The question is then, what can they do so that it is unnecessary for others to interfere in their affairs.
Westerners fear the rise of China for the same reason they fear the Islamist movement: because they are both regressive social orders that are only rising out of ignorance and poverty due to western technology, western medicine, western ideas, western education, western institutions, and the emphasis on universal trade that the west exports.
And most of us look at China as either one of our great successes in transformation of a primitive society, despite their corrupt and kleptocratic political system and the fact that we Americans are paying for the transformation with our jobs, or we look at china as a systematically corrupt society that will simply disturb and destroy the system of world trade that we have developed over the past five hundred years, and return us to a world of physical rather than economic conflict.
The question is, which will it be?
The US would like to withdraw it’s military efforts around the world in order to account for our relative decrease in world economic dominance. It is simply too expensive to let other countries save military expenditures and force us to pay them. particularly the western europeans that treat us with distain on a daily basis all while they live entirely under our support and protection. The problem is that the average american is dependent upon the world system of trade, and in particular the market for oil. Americans do not want the rest of the Israelis to end up inside the USA, so they want a stable settlement of an israeli state, and for muslims to understand that israel does not breed enough people to hold that small nation for more than another century. Lastly, that rapid changes in military power create power vacuums that create expansive wars. And we cannot in good conscience allow that to happen when the world can no longer let people return to farm life. There are too many of us, and billions would starve if there were another series of world wars.
There is nothing more to American geopolitical strategy than that one paragraph.
So I’ll stick with my explanation of why Americans fear the rise of China. And radical islam. Primitive societies are a threat to the modern commercial order.
In my Time Magazine reply to “Why do westerner’s fear the rise of China”, someone challenged me with:
You make the westerner seem as if he actually walks around Afghanistan and iraq folding hands and asking people to be quiet and china being the only country forcing power on others.
I don’t make that assertion at all. I (correctly) list the reasons why westerners fear a rise in China.
You make the error of treating geopolitical strategy as if we’re dividing up a loaf of bread for dinner. One can criticize individual actions of nations, or one can create an full accounting of the accomplishments and failures, and then to discern the motivations for those actions. Americans have had very simplistic objectives for the past century. 1) take over the collapsed british empires’ navy and trade routes. 2) take over the collapsed british pound 3) defeat communism and spread market democracy, 4) protect the oil fields in the old ottoman empire from being used as economic warfare against developing nations until those nations are ready to mature into market societies.
Sinic civilization, or rather the Chinese empire of north china, south china, the interior, Mongolia and Tibet, has a strong central state and a long standing bureaucratic tradition. After it’s devastating failure with communism, and the most expansive destruction of human life in history, Chinese intellectuals decided to give up on Communism and instead adopt authoritarian capitalism. Their efforts at doing so, despite being dependent entirely upon imported technology, has resulted in a vast movement of people from abject poverty to the consumer lifestyle. It is a difficult climb. But they are making progress.
Islamic civilization, which is more correctly viewed as the collapsed remnants of the Ottoman Empire, is still institutionally and culturally primitive, remains incapable of resolving the entho-tribal geographic conflicts, or even educating it’s people above sub-saharan african levels. Islamic civilization lacks a core state – a core state which holds other states in their civilization accountable in the international community – and therefore makes external intervention unnecessary.
I am quite sure it is humiliating for members of Islamic nations to hold to a personal religion and political doctrine of superiority, while faced with the daily evidence of the inferiority of the civilization and it’s people in the world arena. I am sure that it is frustrating that the west has maintained a policy of containment on the post-ottoman islamic nations, in the hope that they will skip the communist phase of evolution and directly join the modern market economy. I am sure that it is exasperating that the west has propped up dictators as a means of preventing yet another series of marxist states that will even further repress and regress their citizens. I am sure it is frustrating to have the west, yet again, for the fifth or sixth time in human history, hold the middle eastern people’s at bay in order to prevent the spread of ‘magical’ society, and it’s endemic pervasive ignorance. I am sure that it is frustrating that the west is split between those people who think islamic nations are insufficiently mature for democracy, and those who evangelically spread the idea of democracy without understanding that democracy is a government for a mercantile and commercial society – which is alien to islamic nations. I am sure all of these things are frustrating.
Do muslims actually think the average American wants to pay for maintaining the pattern of world commerce and trade? Do they think that American citizens like losing money and the lives of soldiers to contain Marxism, now Islam – Radical Islam is just another iteration of Marxism. Don’t they think we wouldn’t rather spend our lives and money on other things?
Most of us just wish muslims would just grow up and take care of their own house, so that we don’t have to act like their parents any longer. The question is then, what can they do so that it is unnecessary for others to interfere in their affairs.
Westerners fear the rise of China for the same reason they fear the Islamist movement: because they are both regressive social orders that are only rising out of ignorance and poverty due to western technology, western medicine, western ideas, western education, western institutions, and the emphasis on universal trade that the west exports.
And most of us look at China as either one of our great successes in transformation of a primitive society, despite their corrupt and kleptocratic political system and the fact that we Americans are paying for the transformation with our jobs, or we look at china as a systematically corrupt society that will simply disturb and destroy the system of world trade that we have developed over the past five hundred years, and return us to a world of physical rather than economic conflict.
The question is, which will it be?
The US would like to withdraw it’s military efforts around the world in order to account for our relative decrease in world economic dominance. It is simply too expensive to let other countries save military expenditures and force us to pay them. particularly the western europeans that treat us with distain on a daily basis all while they live entirely under our support and protection. The problem is that the average american is dependent upon the world system of trade, and in particular the market for oil. Americans do not want the rest of the Israelis to end up inside the USA, so they want a stable settlement of an israeli state, and for muslims to understand that israel does not breed enough people to hold that small nation for more than another century. Lastly, that rapid changes in military power create power vacuums that create expansive wars. And we cannot in good conscience allow that to happen when the world can no longer let people return to farm life. There are too many of us, and billions would starve if there were another series of world wars.
There is nothing more to American geopolitical strategy than that one paragraph.
So I’ll stick with my explanation of why Americans fear the rise of China. And radical islam. Primitive societies are a threat to the modern commercial order.
As Camus said, the first problem of philosophy is why we do not commit suicide. But that is followed by the first problem of political philosophy, which is not “how do we best get along?” It is “Why don’t I kill you and take your stuff?” I opt for freedom by advocating the organized application of violence against those who would take my stuff. Violence is a virtue, and the source of the institution of property. Without that violence, there is no property, only slavery to those who have either violence or property. So, property does not insure freedom. Violence insures freedom. Violence is a virtue not a vice. Property is simply a more productive use of freedom, because it allows us to develop fixed capital at lower risk, which then increases production and profits, decreases prices.
Yet, once we consider that there are differences in ability between individuals, and therefore their differences in ability to create and obtain property in real time, the question remains: if we ask people to forgo the opportunity for theft, murder and plunder, how do we compensate them for their costs? All costs are opportunity costs. A man who is very powerful, or a group of weak people who by their numbers are powerful, is most free from constraints if they can rape, murder and plunder at will. Since they sacrifice this freedom in order to respect property, then what is their compensation for it?
If people form a group, organization or corporation for the purpose of plunder, why should others not form a group for the purpose of preventing plunder and creating property and a market for exchange? Is that not exactly the course of development of these organizations?
But once these defensive organizations are founded, and power is concentrated in them the bureaucracy forms, and corruption and predation upon the property of others replaces violence against their ‘person’, people, and things. We then attempt to regulate corruption, rather than replacing bureaucracy with market accountability. We replace violence against the barbarians with bribes so that they will respect our property: redistribution is payment for conformity to the standards property definitions of the organization which defends property.
Since all costs are opportunity costs, and there is a cost born by those who respect property, each person who respects property is therefore a shareholder in the market. One could say instead, that access to the market is paid for by the cost of forgoing opportunity to rape, murder, pillage, and plunder, thieve and fraud, deceive and lie. And that might be true. But the question is, whether access to the market is SUFFICIENT compensation for the ongoing cost of opportunity paid by respecting property. And whether this is quantifiable or not, people ACT as though it is insufficient, and they rebel against the constraints.
Radical individualism is a rational construct for epistemic purposes. But fundamentally, people ORGANIZE to achieve cooperative ends. Individualism is not enough of a solution to the problem of politics.
In effect, propertarianism is an upward redistribution of opportunity costs from the lower to the upper classes. Anarchism is an effort to avoid paying costs of creating organizations that create property and create the market. Anarcho capitalism is a research program that has demonstrated the failure of bureaucracy, and suggested private and competitive rather than public and monopolistic means of achieving group ends. But the question then, is who are the shareholders of this organization that is so costly to implement? The answer is all that forgo opportunities for coercion. And what is their return on their forgone opportunities?
I am a libertarian by epistemic method and a classical liberal by institutional method, and a conservative by social class and time preference. And I do not want to privatize the costs of others, and participate in corruption, by failing to compensate others for their forgone opportunities, from which I benefit. I simply want to stop corruption in the bureaucracy, and to privatize everything. I do not want to steal from others. Therefore redistribution of some sort is mandatory, because without redistribution, we cannot say that we respect property.
[callout] Run the government like a business network. Make it an EMPIRICALLY CALCULABLE DECISION process rather than a RATIONAL AND RHETORICAL POLITICAL DEBATE process: [/callout]
The problem then becomes how to make this process calculable. The answer is simple. Run the government like a business network. Make it an EMPIRICALLY CALCULABLE DECISION process rather than a RATIONAL AND RHETORICAL POLITICAL DEBATE process: “Loans Not Laws.” Laws are loosely calculable. Loans are narrowly calculable. Laws are rational. Loans are empirical. There is only one law, and that is property. Citizens are shareholders. And as shareholders they are due returns on their investment in opportunity costs.
This is the grownup version of libertarianism. Most of which has degenerated into a Rothbardian religion supported by Friedman’s monetary analysis.
Karl Popper (who wrote the Logic of Scientific Discovery) and Thomas Kuhn (who wrote the structure of scientific revolutions) approached the problem of knowledge in the domain of DISCOVERY, which we call the physical sciences. At the same time, the CLOSE FRIEND of Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, worked on the problem of hubris in the social sciences. Hayek ended up combating Keynes over the frailty of models and reason. Keynes wrote ‘A Treatise On Probability” and then the “General Theory” which led to the governmental use of economic calculation that all of us live under, by trying to solve for unemployment – something Hayek (correctly) stated was not possible in the long run and would lead (as it has) to our bankruptcy. Hayek stated that traditional knowledge that was handed down, and perpetuated by trial and error, was ‘true’ even if we did not understand it rationally as yet. And that our record of rational judgment was exceedingly frail, and that history was filled with examples (past and present) of ridiculous scientific error. Keynes won in the short term however, because his theory solved the problem of socialism by replacing a false pretense of REASON (a managed economy), with the false pretense of PROBABILITY ( a monetarist economy) in the field of national economics. In other words, Keynes gave politicians power over our economies. The power that has led us to our financial crisis.
BOTH Popper and Hayek were countering two problems. A) the use of the fairly new field of statistical analysis and it’s limitations at prediction due to what Nassim Taleb calls the LUDIC FALLACY. And B) the rise of Socialism, and the socialist hubris of central planning . These men, plus Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises, effectively undermined and predicted the impossibility of a socialist economy. Both men stated that human minds are frail and capable of very limited reason and prediction. More importantly, that the Anglo RECORD OF WHAT WORKS, or EMPIRICISM, is a superior form of KNOWLEDGE to the French (and then Marxian) fantasy of RATIONALISM. The fact that the average american does not understand this by doctrinare education difference is probably equal to the use of today’s mysticism in Islam or medieval christianity. It is a means of keeping people ignorant. We have attempted to replace mysticism with science without also teaching history (mythology) which teaches us the error of hubris. We do not teach history because in a pluralistic society, history includes value judgments and value judgements are class, race, and culture judgements. However, aside from class, race and culture, we are taught only the error of the churches, without the errors of silly scientists who were little better than shaman. We did not teach our children HUBRIS. Greek mythology teaches one lesson above all others: Hubris.
[callout]We have attempted to replace mysticism with science without also teaching history (mythology) which teaches us the error of hubris. We do not teach history because in a pluralistic society, history includes value judgments and value judgements are class, race, and culture judgements.[/callout]
To the physical sciences, which is the process of DISCOVERY of what EXISTS already, is the objective of study. The holy grail is to discover the first-causal properties of the physical universe. To economists, the problem is one of INVENTION. This is called Hume’s problem, or the problem of induction. That is, what can humans INVENT given their current state of knowledge. THe problem of economic science, which is the ONLY social science we yet possess, is similar to climate science in complexity, yet additionally more complicated because there is no process of EQUILIBRATION in the intellectual world. (there is no human equivalent to the law of thermodynamics – there is in fact, energy added to the system. We call it ‘increases in production’.) Nor is time constant. In fact, that’s what productivity does: it creates more ‘time’ by using less of it to produce more calories. Instead, of an equilibrium as in nature, the mind of man invents new ideas all the time from permutations of existing patterns and disrupts all attempts at equilibria.
Both forms of our theories, whether physical science or economic science, can only be tested by FALSIFICATION. Unless you can stipulate ACTIONS by which we can prove climate hypothesis false, they are not in fact, scientific. For example, Einstein said that the absence of red shift would falsify one of his theories.
The first principle of Greek Rationalism is SKEPTICISM as a warning against HUBRIS. Hubris is a danger because of the cognitive biases humans of necessity possess because we attribute higher value to that which we study most.
TRUTH IN SCIENCE IS PREDICTION AND FALSIFICATION. Models are not truth. They are tools for rationalizing data. The carpenter may not understand the metallurgy of his chisel. He may not understand the distribution channel for his wood. The scientist is often using chisels and wood that he or she does not understand. If he or she understood, then he or she would understand that the peer review process CANNOT WORK. DOES NOT WORK, and QUANTIFIABLY, given the record, DOES NOT WORK. Furthermore, he or she would understand that only FALSIFICATION, not correspondence with a model, is the means of proving a theory.
Since these two problems DISCOVERY (Physical Science) and INVENTION (induction) are the two fundamental problems of the universe, it is not surprising that we are still incompetent at both.
What is surprising is that in both PHYSICAL SCIENCE and in ECONOMIC SCIENCE, the cognitive bias we bring to our studies, in which we confuse the practical utility of the limited tools and methods of our craft, consistently overwhelms and suppresses the knowledge that in fact, out tools are rough approximations with very poor records of prediction. And that only a combination of prediction and falsification demonstrate the veracity of any theory in either domain.
[callout]A financier who violates one of these principles, or a lawyer, or a craftsman, is held accountable for violating the ethics of his craft. With free speech, comes the same ethical constraint on Physical and Economic scientists. That is because there is HARM put upon populations whenever our work products are put into the public domain such that they may be used for the purpose of policy. The reason is, that all public policy is the application of VIOLENCE[/callout]
A financier who violates one of these principles, or a lawyer, or a craftsman, is held accountable for violating the ethics of his craft. With free speech, comes the same ethical constraint on Physical and Economic scientists. That is because there is HARM put upon populations whenever our work products are put into the public domain such that they may be used for the purpose of policy. The reason is, that all public policy is the application of VIOLENCE: the forcible taking of resources and the coercion of individual behavior under the treat of violence. The scientist or the economists is appealing for the application of violence to his purposes.
Therefore, a scientist is operating ethically by publishing FACTS. He or she is NOT operating ethically when he publishes theories or predictions unless the theory is accompanied by falsification. Failure to include how to falsify one’s theories is by definition a form of deception.
If we made it possible to sue scientists the way we can sue doctors and CEO’s then no doubt the quality of work would increase dramatically. And the fact that we cannot sue scientists for the harm that they cause, puts them in the realm with fortune tellers and astrologists.
An Ideology: Any reasonably coherent set of social, cultural, moral and political ideas that can be used to obtain and hold political power on the behalf of a part of a population that perceives it has similar interests.
THE POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
There are three basic western philosophical traditions:
1) Aristocratic and Conservative with the longest time preference. 2) Middle Class and Classical Liberal with medium time preference 3) Proletarian and Socialist with short time preference.
These three philosophies loosely correspond to social class sentiments and perceptions of social order. They also loosely correspond to the Monarchy, the Senate, and House of Commons. The insight of the british model was to give each social class it’s house, and to force the houses to collaborate in order to enact laws.
BREAKING THE CLASS BASED MODEL OF GOVERNMENT
This class-based model was successful in adapting to changing currents until the thought leaders of the American and French revolutions attempted to break the class model and transfer full power to either the middle (american) or lower (french) classes. And was further exacerbated by the Russian and Chinese revolutions which (regrettably) succeeded in transferring political power to the proletariat – in the greatest destruction of human life in history after the Black Plague. After the world wars, Europe was broken economically and socially and the citizenry rejected the aristocratic model entirely. (( And did so wrongly. Germany’s intellectuals were right: the anglo social order was socially destructive without the empire to support it – as the experience of both Spain and Portugal had demonstrated. German social order is the most economically productive yet discovered because it mobilizes the working class to produce quality exports. Exactly as it’s 300 princes had done during the medieval era prior to unification. )) Instead of the fraternal aristocratic model, which was the unique feature of western culture, governments sought solace in socialist doctrine and universal enfranchisement. Meanwhile western authoritarian and military leadership was absorbed by the Americans along with the British navy and port system. The parliamentary method of government has been moderately successful given the …….
Americans used this period of postwar economic prosperity to assert their inherited global military power to undermine global communism – successfully. But the cost was high, and the US is now largely bankrupt and unable to fund it’s existing military structure as well as it’s redistributionist benefit system. And the west must now combat the primitivism of Islam, which has taken on the proletarian strategy communists at a time when european postwar economies have recovered, but the developing economies are competing with western lower classes for jobs.
To fund this military empire to protect the west against proletariat primitivism, Americans export debt, and effectively charge the world an indirect tax, instead of taxing other countries directly and creating a political problem for them. Then americans use that debt to finance the cost of running the world trade and monetary system.
Unfortunately, in the process of running the empire, Americans have now become a fractured society, with race, culture and class divisions, as well as somewhere between four and ten different geographic ‘nations’ within the USA, each with different cultures, but operating under the administration of an international imperial government. Many of which, within these sub-countries feel the government is as oppressive to their cultures as do foreign nations. Under this trade empire, the US economy is now so dependent upon the value of the dollar, and the use of military force to determine the means by which trade is administered, that the citizenry will suffer if these obligations are reduced.
This series of events shows the danger of empire building to national cohesion — whether it is done on purpose as in the case of Britain defending herself from Spain and France, or by accident, in the case of the USA, trying to maintain stability, and defense from communism during and after the war period.
GOVERNMENT’S STRUCTURE MUST REFLECT SOCIETY OR SOCIETY WILL FRACTURE BECAUSE IT DOES NOT
The government must reflect the class structure of society in one way or another, so that the classes that do exist can use the government to cooperate rather than regress into class warfare. And if government does not reflect society, then society will either change to reflect the government’s class structure, by the massess aspiring or attempting to become upper middle class, which has some value, or in the opposite case, the aristocracy will abandon the nation as it has in the USA and in Ireland, which is entirely destructive to culture and economy alike. Or the upper and upper middle classes will become a predatory diasporic class like it has with the Jews in the west, and the Chinese in Oceania.
While both the aristocratic (natural law) and proletariat (socialist) political philosophies specifically state that society consists of classes, our classical liberal and democratic socialist philosophies promote the false philosophy of egalitarianism: the factual equality of ability, and the couter factual equality of outcomes – rather than the equality of opportunity despite our differences in ability to produce beneficial outcomes. The socialists, in their effort to undermine the aristocratic political system so that their elites may sieze power, supposedly on behalf of the proletariat classes, have taken control of our educational system to reinforce the justification for their seizure of power in the popular consensus, and created enough of a popular mythos to affect voting patterns, reinforcing their political power, while at the same time, reducing the competitiveness of our lower classes against foreign groups, by a process of intentional “Harrison Bergeron-ing” – dumbing down.
This is not to say that giving people property rights is necessary a bad thing. In fact, it’s an exceptional thing for everyone in the society. THe question is not whether people should have individual property rights. Its whether people need poliitcal rights if they have property rights. And logic would dicate that no. NOt only do they not need political rights, but that by giving people the opportunity for political power, we distract them from developing more useful activities in the market.
We are argue over the absurdity of choosing the best single form of government, when what we mean is ‘which class should rule?’, and “if any class should rule it should be the lower, which is the majority.” When the question itself posits a false dichotomy: the question is, since society consists of different social classes, what institutions should we create to help them cooperate such than none harms the other, and only by mutual benefit can they reach their desired ends. And so we have chosen ‘winner takes all’ government, and because of that choice, we have also, of necessity, chosen perpetual class warfare, and the destruction of the cultural cohesion necessary for the perpetuation of our nations.
So, we should reframe the question, from “which class should rule, using their class’ philosophy”, to “which form of government best facilitates the cooperation of the social classes for achieving shared ends?”
That answer, logically, is that we can, with some effort, accomodate all three class philosophies into one form of government. In fact, we had that form of government. We foolishly have abandoned it, because of the rapid shift in economic power during the industrial revolution.
THE OTHER MISTAKES WE HAVE MADE – AND NEED TO CORRECT
The first mistake we made was the transfer of political power from the landed aristocracy to the middle class, rather than replacing landed and inherited aristocracy with a new layer of aristocracy whose position was earned by merit. This allowed a new aristocracy to form, that is excluded from, and invisible to the politcal economy of society. American upper classes have abandoned participation in politics. The second mistake we made was egalitarianism, and structuring our government for rule by a single class. But we have made a series of other mistakes, partly because we lacked the knowledge of other options, lacked technologies, ideas, philosophical frameworks and processes to provide an alternative to the Hellenic and British models.
-The Errors Of The Political Process:
Scalability of the Debate form of government.
Rational Debate rather than Empirical Pragmatism: The problem of Calculation.
Taxes rather than loans.
Devolution of the defense provided by the senate / House of lords / Upper house
Descent From Utilitarianism Into Moralism
Failure to Keep Pace WIth Technology – debit cards and direct democracy.
-The Errors Of Abstract Ideas:
The Corporeal State, and the Corporeal Business
The Error Of Free Trade
The Error Of Intellectual Property
Probabilism From The Physical Sciences Applied To The Social Sciences
-The Errors Of Human Nature:
The Blank Slate vs Natural Law
The Prohibition of Political Wealth
Ignoring the Status Economy
Devaluing Aristocracy
Devaluing Voluntary Charity
The Universal Utility of Freedom, Democracy and Capitalism
The Impossibility of Agreement upon means, even if possible to agree upon ends.
-The Errors Of Credit and Money
The Relationship Between Time And Money
Breaking The Relationship Between Knowledge And Valuation Among Bankers and Lenders
Erroneous Priorities: The Financialization Of The Economy vs The Productivity Of The Economy
The Creation of Ponzi Benefits Packages Rather Than Saving and Insured Investments.
The Errors Of Incentives
The Transformation of Incentives from Negative Punishments, to Positive Rewards.
The Inability of governments to ostracize individuals and groups.
The Inability of popular government to punish real crime
The criminalization of political speech and action.
GOVERNMENT IS A SET OF INSTITUTIONS
Governments consist of organizations of human beings who follow processes, rituals and rules. These processes and rules may be historical and habitual, or formal and written. The purpose of these rules is to allow people to PLAN: to make plans and to cooperate with one another. So that they may take the risks needed to increase productivity and trade. Even dictators need a bureaucracy: an organization that will execute their will. Democracies more so, because without the hierarchy they must rely upon the established rules to give them authority by which to persuade others to cooperate with them to achieve their goals. And people who wish to cooperate, and combine their capital to produce ends, need some assurance that their risk will allow them to take the profits from that risk.
We call these organizations, rituals, processes and rules ‘institutions’. Institutions are the means by which we cooperate and compete politically.
REPAIRING THE INSTITUTIONSInstitutions:
Managed Corporate Institutions
Managed Private Institutions:
Each institution operates as do the medical, legal and accounting industries, which are largely self regulating, and self-educating. They report to senate committees.
ALSO:THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
THE REGIONAL GOVERNMENTS
Money, Insurance, War are global but all trade and culture is local.
NATIONALISM
Monarchs have been superior to elected leaders because they have a longer time preference. And with a longer time preference they can more wisely veto those fashionable changes which will, in the long term, harm the society, or transfer power between social classes.
CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY IS A CLASS BASED SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
(undone)
MONARCHY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A CLASS BASED SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
(undone)
ALL SYSTEMS OF GOVERNMENT NEED IDEOLOGIES
Monarchy needs a sufficient ideological base. The people have abandoned the church. The church has abandoned christendom. Economics has replaced cultural nationalism, and empirical tools have replaced the moral sentiments. For monarchy to prevail in the post-mystical age, we must remake it’s foundations so that they rely upon economic and cultural superiorities, not desire to return to the past.
Monarchs have been superior to elected leaders because they have a longer time preference. And with a longer time preference they can more wisely veto those fashionable changes which will, in the long term, harm the society, or transfer power between social classes.
Monarchy has a high correlation with Nationalism.
Under monarchy multiculturalism is not a problem, because cultures can form communities of interest in as many monarchies as they wish. And there is no threat from them, because they are denied access to political power, and must compete in the market, rather than politics. IN fact, this is the primary virtue of aristocratic society: people compete in the market to serve one another, rather than in politics to enslave one another. And the monarch profits from the fact that this competition, which he or she presides over, serves better to serve the people, than politics ever shall. Politics cannot create wealth. It an only create an an environment where wealth can be created.
So, under monarchies, and nationalism, people form nations, or states, which must compete against other states. These competitions then inform their value judgements – benefitting or punishing them for their decisions.
MONARCHY AND NATIONALISM
Now, why is that circumstance of nationalism a “good”? Because cultures consist of a series of hypothesis and value judgements. Each value judgement in the cultural catalogue asks each member of the community to suffer the cost to himself of forgoing opportunities to fulfill his self interest in order to ‘fund’ the social order. Social orders consist of these rules, and the associated costs in forgone opportunities. In nearly all societies these rules consist of forgoing opportunity to lie, cheat, steal, hurt, and murder. And in most advanced societies, we convert these social words into market language, and call them Fraud, Theft and Violence. But they are effectively synonyms. People can then use this market for behavior to form the society that they wish to. In other words, nationalism, or monarchies, allow people to form and join communities where they have shared values. And to enjoy the benefits of those values, and to bear the costs of those values. People are happiest when they know the rules, when they agree with them, when they can choose which community to belong to, and when it is possible to judge a set of values by their visible outcomes. Furthermore, diversity of communities does not require that we oppress one another. Diversity today is a mask for one group, largely the proletarian, for empowering the state to equally oppress everyone, and to transfer power from the meritocratic-ally endowed classes to those who are not using a false language of morality, that is framed in religious tribal language, but under analytical scrutiny simply is nothing more than exploitation. It is anything other than diversity. It is using the mask of diversity to institute their version of homogeneity.
My rights are protected by my willingess to kill in order to defend them. Legal documents either require that many people are willing to kill to defend them, or that many people are willing to kill to enforce them, or that many people are wiling to kill to change them.
Moral arguments by contrast are a form of deceptlon by which the weak attempt to gain advantages without paying the costs for obtaining those advantages. That is the sole purpose of moral argument. By contrast, any right that is possessed by virtue of social contracts, formal or not, is possessed only because of the willingness of people to use violence in order to protect it. The government does not protect my rights. I do. Instead, government is a shareholder system whereby we each obtain the productive efficiency of scale in enforcing our defense of established rights, and therefore obtain them at a discount. But the government has that power only because we relinquish it to them. And we do not pay those costs equally. Some of us have a greater virtue of violence at our disposal than others. We are initially wealthier in violence than other people, so the cost of our privileges is higher. While those who are weaker, obtain a higher benefit than do the stronger. This is looking at the mythology from the opposite perspective. Since in all of history, the minority who has the greatest capacity for violence has established all political orders.
[callout]Moral arguments by contrast are a form of deception by which the weak attempt to gain advantages without paying the costs for obtaining those advantages. That is the sole purpose of moral argument. By contrast, any right that is possessed by virtue of social contracts, formal or not, is possessed only because of the willingness of people to use violence in order to protect it. The government does not protect my rights. I do.[/callout]
The west was built diffrently from the east or middle east, because it was built by a fraternity of warriors. Even with our vast specialization of careers, it is still protected by vi olence. Violence is a virtue. The fact that women are poorer in violence, and that the poor and ignorant are less able to pay the sacrifice nand discipline eeded to use it, is why they rely on moral arguments.
THE PROXY FOR VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL CLASS
There is no argument among philosophers, and certainly among political economists, that the system of property rights and exchange, regardless of culture, is a proxy for violence. By monopolizing violence, ‘governments’ force people to compete by production rather than violence. This provides people wiht incentives to produce. Production vastly favors discipline. Wealth vastly favors IQ. Productivity has the negative emotional consequence of amplifying the differences between individuals, and rewarding individuals more diversely than under tribal society, and therefore subjects the proletariat to more negative status signals, and making a social class out of the proletariat because of it, that our tribal sentiments and cognitive biases support.
THE ECONOMICS OF MORAL ARGUMENTS
Moral statements depend on economic circumstances.
In pre-agrarian society, murder, plunder and rape are heroic, not prohibited activities.
In post-industrial society, some sort of redistribution is at least suggested by human sentiments.
“rights” are a MORAL not NECESSARY argument.
Rights are POSSIBLE only when there is very limited SCARCITY.
Legal RIGHTS are only POSSIBLE when a minority is willing to exercise violence to protect them.
We ACKNOWLEDGE the POSSIBILITY of certain rights only because we can AFFORD them at some period in time.
There are vast differences between social classes on what ‘rights’ we can afford at one period in time or another.
The lower social classes argue for rights. The upper social classes argue for utilities. The lower classes breed. The upper classes don’t.
The lower classes envy the productive classes, the upper classes protect their assets.
Property, civilization, society, in ALL CASES WITHOUT EXCEPTION were created by the application of violence by a minority
Ideas held in ignorance are just evidence of ignorance, and nothing more. Moral arguments are irrational arguments because they do not enumerate their properties. Economic arguments are NECESSARY arguments, not the display of PREFERENCES nor MORAL arguments.
The lower classes use resistance movements rather than actions to work against stronger forces.
Resistance movements are ‘costs’. They are opportunity costs. They create economic friction. They create cooperative friction.
Resistance increases the costs for the middle class, and can overwhelm the ability to export violence by the upper classes.
Moral statements on rights made under the threat of the application of either resistance, political violence, or street violence.
“MIGHT MAKES RIGHTS”
“Might may not make right. But might certainly makes all Rights.”
[callout]”Might may not make right. But might certainly makes all Rights.[/callout]
Hence, my correct statement that my rights consist of my willingness (along with others) to use violence to protect my rights.
THE FRAUD OF MORAL ARGUMENTS
Violence is a virtue. It is the first virtue. And those who argue otherwise do so out of either ignorance or fraud.
Because it is fraud to make a moral argument rather than a necessary and economically necessary argument.
Moral arguments are, without exception, arguments made from either ignorance or deception.
In most cases they are made from deception, in order to obtain transfer payments in order to accumulate resources at a discount.
IN effect most if not all proletariat arguments for transfer payments are threats of organized violence against others.
You are welcome to debate this topic with me but I am fairly sure I will prevail. Because unlike you I am not arguing from a network of silly moral deceptions.
In moral arguments “follow the money” is a more valuable technique than it is in forensic investigation.
Because the world is very clearly separated into people who produce and those who form resistance movements in order to obtain the productive results of others by the reliance on moral arguments the implication of which is violence if their wants for transfer payments are not met.
The only good and bad is whether the transfer payments requested by the proletariat threat of violence is Pareto Efficient or not. ie: whether more harm to the economy is done by the transfers (redistribution) than by failing to do so, and over what period of time that harm is created. There is no harm in creating roads because roads increase productivity which is for the good of all. But all redistribution to individuals that is for personal consumption has significant negative consequences. While there is some benefit to Poor Farm’s and Social security, as long as it is a very minimal cost. Creating a dependent class of people by failing to force them to save, is creating an economic hazard. No matter what transfer we talk about the society is exposed to risk by the creation of supposedly risk abating transfer payments.
It is very simple really.
[P]areto, in his study of society, and Haight in his study of emotions, and perhaps Axelrod as well in his study of human cooperation, do not attribute to Status Signaling the importance which it deserves. Haight is far too interested in the egalitarian assumption. Pareto, in his analysis of Sentiments, misses status signals almost entirely.
Humans attempt to acquire and maintain status at all costs. We are acquisitive — in stimulation, experience and knowledge, in security and relationships, in opportunity, in mates and in Status. Because status increases the opportunity for mates, opportunities, security and relationships, stimulation, experience and knowledge.
SOCIAL STATUS
As acquisitive creatures, humans, like most animals with memories, sense ‘more’. More calories, more opportunities, more information: more anything. The human concept of Beauty is almost synonymous with “plenty bounded by symmetry”. Beauty is “more”. Symmetrical perhaps. But more none the less.
Status is the human accounting system. We many need a vast number of conceptual and physical tools to delve into the sciences, and we need to evolve complex institutions in order to cooperate in large numbers. But every human being regardless of his intelligence is master accountant of the currency of status signals and their measurement. Without that talent we could not survive in society. People may differ in their ability to act on abstract knowledge in real time. however, they differ very little in their ability to detect and measure status signals.
Status signals help us select mates. But, almost as importantly, without status signals we would not know whose behaviors to imitate. For learning creatures, status symbols are an necessary property of knowledge transfer within and across generations.
If the human animal has any innate mastery whatsoever, it is in sensitivity to status signals.
RULES
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
– Cormac McCarthy, “No Country For Old Men”.
Of course, the answer is, that the rule has one or more uses, and one or more unintended consequences. In the west, the unintended consequences have been rapid change, an unhappy proletariat and class warfare that has led to the abandonment of our society by it’s upper classes, who, if unrewarded with status for their success, can find no reason to engage or acknowledge anyone in society. Therefore they have adopted the strategy that the purpose of attaining wealth is to exit participation in society and it’s market. Having elites abandon society is extremely detrimental for the propagation of knowledge and values. Elites, especially families that persist wealth over generations, are the most important people for the population to learn from in any society.
DIFFERENT INNOVATION INCENTIVES
Each culture uses slightly different techniques of social management. The novelty of the west is that the fraternal model, and jealousy of one’s status and influence, led to the solution to the problem of politics: competition between opposing forces. Politics was not solved in other societies. I suspect that the Asian and Mystical model of hierarchy is the self-limiting barrier that those societies erected when they became large and centralized. And conversely, that the advantage of the western political system which at different times consists of debates, competing manors, feudal alliances, and the competition with the church, and the need to keep the east at bay, allowed the civilization that was actually youngest, to compete more effectively at producing and USING technical innovation to compete with other civilizations.
The West: “Draw Them Up” (Minority, Fraternal, Technical) Organizing Principle: As a minority we need advanced technology to compete. Advanced technology is expensive. We need to enfranchise the best men and their money in order to compete. Minority: Westerners are a minority. They combat both eastern decadence and local barbarism. Fraternal: Men join together to form a fraternity who elects a general, president, king, or leader. Technical: It is an action-oriented, real world, and technocratic system of utilitarian thought. Value: It’s predicate is to ‘leave the world better for having altered it for the purpose of man’
The East: “Keep Society Stable” (Majority, Paternal, Equilibrial) Organizing Principle: Majority: Paternal: Equilibrial: Value: It’s predicate is ‘stability and conflict avoidance’
The Middle : “Keep Them Down” (Majority, Maternal, Magical) Majority: Maternal: Magical: It’s predicate is ‘
In the middle east, Magian (mystical) society, what we currently call Islam, one of the precepts is that all men must be treated with dignity. They do not need to learn dignity. THey do not need to demonstrate achievement. They are simply due it. This is a social strategy for downward distribution of, and dtermination of the TERMS by which status is determined and transferred.
CORRUPTION
For any society to create prosperity, the human tendency toward corruption (privatization) must be suppressed and re-channeled into some other behavior. THe division of labor, division of knowledge, and the flucity of knowlege and capital that allow nations to compete on the world stage against other natinos, cannot function without supresssion of corruption.
Property rights train societies in the habits and skills of anti-corruption. Property rights allow the brightest to make best use of resources for the purpose of increasing prodution, and decreasing prices. Property rights allow for the greatest fludity and adaptation. But the abuses of property rights which we call corrption, the abuse of oportunity costs which we also call corruption, and the abuse of foregone opportunity costs, which we faili to call corruption, and even certain social and moral principles which reallocate status without action, are a form of corruption.
KEEPING THE DEMONS IN THE PIT A Romanian friend of mine tells a parable. In hell, there are demons guarding the pits. In each pit is a nation of people. They demons are standing around the jewish pit. A new demon walks over and says “why aren’t any of you guarding the Romanian pit?” To which the elder demon replies “If one jew gets out, he’ll help another, until very quickly they all escape the pit. If one Romanian tries to get out of the pit, all the others will drag him back down.”
Urban Black culture, and to some degree Hispanic culture, has an aspect of “keeping others in the pit”.
The purpose of islam is to keep everyone on earth in the pit.
That is the unintended consequence of Islam’s concept of dignity.
Last weekend a friend of mine surprised me by confessing to have an interest in philosophy (which surprised me, I thought all he was interested in was traveling and fly-fishing) and recommended a book, Philosophy of Language , by Scott Soames. I am wondering, what do folks here think of Soames and of his book, Philosophy of Language?
Epistemology and the philosophy of science are my main philosophical interests, but I have read Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (at Ali’s urging) several years ago (LOVED it!) and am ready for another book on the general subject of philosophy of language and (because another friend of mine recommended it) I was about to purchase Soames’ book, but thought to pass it by y’all first just to make sure (if I can) that it is a good choice.
If anyone has a better “one book read” suggestion on the philosophy of language, please let me know.
I’d ask what he means by ‘philosophy’.
Soams seems a little advanced for the common reader. I’d recommend Durant’s Story Of Philosophy.
Furthermore, I think it’s also assumptive, since the entire anglo-analytical framework is a branch of logic, and is currently under significant attack, as either simply tautologically descriptive, or a as a deductive toolset. And as non-advisory and non-predictive, it’s questionable whether it has ethical content – meaning it’s questionable wither it can be used to determine action on it’s own, or whether it is a branch of logic to assist one in criticizing ethical action oriented statements in the face of a future about which one has insufficient knowledge. The counter proposition is best covered by Brand Blanchard (Yale) in Reason and Analysis, which is one of the best criticisms of the movement.
Axis A) The historical Position is covered by Aristotle, Toynbee, Durant, Quigley, Gibbon, Braudel, Spengler, McNeil and, to add some depth Pomeranz, Mokyr, and Armstrong. The historians represent each of their cultural biases (french, english, american and german) but as a set are useful. To some degree weber belongs here to as he compared religions worldwide.
Axis B) The ethical position is covered best by Marx and his disciples on the one end of the triangle (the peasantry), or Popper, Hayek, mises, rothbard, and perhaps Sowell and Parsons on the second (the middle class), and aristotle, machiavelli, sorel, michels, burnham, pareto, and weber on the third (nobility). The problem of the social sciences is stated by hume, but originates in the christian scholastics. He calls it induction. But that is an insufficient explanation of the problem which has distracted minds for centuries now. The technical solution to the social sciences was recommended by weber, and unfortunately the tool being used is largely quantitative economics – ie:trade, despite the fact that the status economy, the differences in IQ distribution among the classes, the power struggle between class elites, and the knowledge economy are as important as the monetary and trade economies.
Axis C) In understanding ethics and politics it may be useful to understand that equality and the attempt to obtain power by claims for equality are the primary source of distraction in ethics. There are only three coercive technologies available to man, and that they are best exploited by different classes: inclusion/ostracization and access to opportunity and insurance or what we call moral coercion (talking), as practiced by the poorest classes. Remunerative coercion (money) as practiced by the moneyed and merchant classes. And violent coercion (law, violence, contract, and military action) as practiced by the managerial classes. The elites in each class use their own form of coercion and the three hierarchies constantly compete with one another to get their elites into power. This is perhaps the most easily applied means of analyzing human collective behavior.
Contemporary philosophy as a discipline, is a tool for making one fit, but not for accomplishing anything alone. However, utility and wisdom in life’s actions are derived from a comparative study of history, wherein we discover what men actually do with the scribblings of philosophers. As Will Durant said after writing his history of philosophy: “I was interested in philosophy, but after my research, realized that there were no answers there. The answers are in history: the record of what men do.”
I came to a similar conclusion and found that human sensation, perception, and reason is so limited that we have had to construct a number of terribly complex technologies that allow us to categorize, remember and compare those complexities that our hunter-gatherer biology was insufficient to sense, perceive, compare and calculate on it’s own. These tools include various complex contents of language, the narrative causal explanation, counting numbers, arithmetic, mathematics, accounting, and the iterative research program tools that we call the scientific method. POlitically we have invented various devices: ethics, morals, property, religious scripture, rhetorical debate, logic and it’s branches. Beyond the limits of perception and comparison of rhetoric, debate and politics, where we have exceeded the limits of those tools of consent, we have invented tools of cooperation in the extended order of others that we cannot sense or perceive, but must cooperate with none the less: the means of cooperating with entirely abstract perceptions: money, banking, prices, interest, contract, and abstract rule of law, and abstract property rights and options. We have invented all these technologies, mostly by accident, in order to solve the problems of coordinating our activities in a vast and complex division of knowledge and labor – because we must coordinate in that vast complex division of labor, because w are not wealthier than our cave men ancestors in the only human asset ‘time’ – we are simply vastly more productive, and have made everything vastly less expensive. The extent of that division is so vast that it is incomprehensible to the human mind. We have invented forms of ‘calculation’ (in the wider sense) in all fields of knowledge, and ‘the scientific method’ is little more than an accounting system and accounting principles for different branches of human inquiry such as Law, religious doctrine, physical science, history, and even music and the arts: any venture where the past must be categorized and compared to the current circumstance, so that it may be used to either make choices in, or to forecast the future. Linguistic philosophy is but one tool in that arsenal, and to view it as more than an epistemic device for the analysis and criticism of our accounting method is an act of intellectual egoism or myopia that borders on immoral and unethical.
The fundamental problem of human existence is ethics – actions. Ethics is the underlying problem of the social sciences. So far, we have succeeded in our efforts to understand the physical sciences – the act of discovery, more than we have succeeded in our social sciences – the act of invention. To some degree the physical sciences are no longer a ‘problem’ but simply work. The social sciences, or the act of invention, is on the other hand, fraught with difficulty. Largely because we knew only the tools of the much more simplistic physical sciences, and it’s perception extending technology of calculus, and for a century or more have been erroneously attempting to apply the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences, without the understanding that those tools are far too limited to assist us in the process of cooperation and invention. And the stress created upon our societies by this divergent progress, has left our social orders in conflict as our breeding rates and opportunities expand faster than our wisdom and our tools of sensation, perception, calculation and ethical decision making, as well as our tools of politics and political systems, commerce, contract, property and trade.
As such, the question of philosophy has been lost in academic philosophy’s attempt to apply the principles of discovery to the process of invention, largely so that the field may find academic (ie:social status) legitimacy among the new harder physical sciences, rather than be relegated to the ‘arts’. And for that reason, philosophy has been lost for almost a century – in a futile attempt to legitimize itself as a methodology rather than as a practical tool for solving meaningful human problems. And as such it has become either a puzzle (as is much of higher mathematics) a form of self-referential entertainment, or a religion which to hide oneself like brahmins and buddhists, from material reality. All religions often need a reformation. And contemporary philosophy is one of them. (as can be easily discerned by reading a random sampling of papers.)
One reason that ethical and political philosophers seek to find absolute statements in philosophical content is best seen in the contrast between western natural law (political), eastern natural law (familial), and everyone else’s ‘law’ which is more doctrinal (tribal). Most philosophical doctrines simply attempt to rationalize cultural preferences. For example, despite all our academic emphasis, it turns out that the german model of social order is better than the anglo-american model of social order, despite losing two wars, the german emphasis on mastery in the working class is the most effective social model – the upper classes take care of themselves. Anglo emphasis on the middle class, and everyone else’s emphasis on the peasantry, turn out to be less effective in maintaining competitive advantage and are driven by social status sentiments rather than reason. Therefore, as an ethical statement, the only measure of a philosophy is the economic status of its adherents.
The number of ideas I’ve posited here are too large, perhaps, but it’s only by such positioning that it’s possible to justify the recommendation that no book on philosophy is terribly helpful. While the problem of human social cooperation and individual fulfillment is ancient, and while we have made great progress int eh social sciences, we have been distracted by a significant number of philosophical errors: ie: we have incorrectly either defined the problem, or applied the wrong tools or both. The fundamental problem of philosophy is action, and action requires categorization, calculation, forecast, and cooperation in vast numbers. And most philosophical doctrines attempt to simplify the number of axis in order to fit the limits available to the craft. Because the craft has not made use of tools that will allow it to extend its perception. Language in particular is somewhat interesting because all language constructs are analogies to perception, and as such are limited by perception.
Hopefully there is something interesting for you to work with in this posting.
Curt
PS: again,thanks to all here who have helped me.
