Prep for Debate with Walter Block
June 14, 2020 · Curt Doolittle
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhBp_k3rXY4
Note: this is my script for debate with Walter Block of the Mises Institute on Sunday June 14 2020. whenever I’m going to talk about something I gather my thoughts by writing down the argument. In this case we had 15 minutes to present an argument. then there were rebuttals. While I timed myself a head of time, I ran out of time during the actual presentation. This prevented my summation and threw off the debate. And unfortunately Walter hadn’t prepped at all and it went south. … Like I tell people, I do Adversarial Science and Law. Justificationary Philosophy is for wimps. This debate is an example of why.
Topic: is a just society possible without a state?
Thank you for having me, thank you for arranging this discussion, and thank you Walter for willingness to debate one of the most important subjects of our age, in a time of crisis and question.
While I have the fortunate position of being at the end of a long line of thinkers, I also have the unfortunate position – of quite by accident – stumbling into the job of consolidating their work into what is the eqivalent of a darwinian revolution of our age – and paying the price for bearing a similar truth as bad news.
For this audience, let’s just say, that between mises and Hayek, rothbard and Hoppe, and those of us in the next generation that includes me and countless others outside of the field, that we have used the classical liberal, libertarian, Anarcho capitalist program to discover and solve the hard problem of social science, and produce it’s formal logic. But to borrow from Nietzsche and others of similar wisdom: when you cast the light of understanding into the dark forces of time and ignorance, you may not like what you find was hidden amongst the shadows.
But since the secret of western civlization is our heroism in speaking truth before face regardless of cost to self, competence, and dominance hierarchies, I’ll continue in the western heroic Tradition, and I beg your forgiveness in advance for the painful truths you may hear.
And I hope you will recognize the painful rigor in the arguments – especially the difference between my use of adversarial law, operational logic and science, versus Mises failed attempt converting jewish law to european justificationary logic, Rothbard’s use of conventional moral reasoning and Hoppe’s Kantian Rationalism. this difference in method reflects the profound cultural differences between Jewish Diasporic, continental martial, and Scandinavian naval civilizations, group strategies, thought, and means of argument.
Our question is, whether a just society possible without a state?
There are no paradoxes – only problems of definition and grammar. Philosophy as a discipline survives the onslaught of the sciences by little more than sophistry under the absence of that definition and grammar.
So let’s disambiguate this sentence: and define the terms Just, Society, and State
Disambiguating these terms requires a set of definitions that we call ‘types‘. A type is a series of examples, like points on a line, illustrating a constant relation between terms under a spectrum of conditions that together prevent the use of philosophical sophistry by suggestion, conflation, and inflation, and subsequent deception by deduction, induction, and abduction.
As for the defintion of Justice we’ll use a process beginning with conditions to actions to results.
1 – CONDITIONS: Avoidance < negotiation < Cooperation > undermining > Conflict2 – ACTIONS: Display > Word > and Deed. Or their opposites of inaction, silence, and going unnoticed.3 – CONSEQUENCES: Evil < Criminal < Unethical < Immoral < Amoral > Moral > Ethical > Good > Virtuous4 – DECIDABILITY in Morality as Losses < Irreciprocal < unaffected > Reciprocal > Returns5 – RESUT: Defection < unJust < unaffected > Just > Cooperation
That is the cycle of cooperation.
So Justice refers to actions, experiences, and conditions produced by norms, laws, traditions and institutions, that construct and preserve acts of reciprocity within the limits of defection, and we call that limit of defection “Proportionality”.
As for the defintion of Society and State:
CUT: 1 – Imagine a circle of terms Individual > family > clan(of kinship) > a society (of families and norms) > a polity (institutions that produce commons) > state (of laws, assets and arms) < industry < business < craft < individual (Loop) with law in the center. (Note that I’m leaving out the two series of force,:sheriffs, police, militia, military, and indoctrination: religion, education, and academy for simplicity’s sake.)
A kinship group cooperates by kin selection.A society cooperates by normsA polity cooperates by rules (legislation, regulation) in the production of commonsA state protects cooperation by providing dispute resolution intra-state by law , inter-state by preventing defection – largely by trade, and intra-stat and extra-state by war.
The distinction being that a state may contain one or more governments, polities, societies, but a state provides the system of weights and measures, including that measure of dispute resolution we call the law. And governments and bureaucracies and everyone else abuse the hell out of it at every opportunity.
So while you won’t remember all that, we can and have defined Justice, society, and state. And we have drawn attention to the fact that rule, state, and government are three different services.
So, now that we have defined our terms lets discuss the question:
POINT ONE – MAN COMPETES – OR HE FAILS TO REPRODUCE AND DIES
Nature is adversarial.Evolution as the result of nature is adversarial.Unlike us, the universe cannot predict, and seizes the first opportunity to defeat entropy.So, Man competes against time, nature, and others of his kind.He competes less against kin, more so against kith, more so against allies, and more so against potential and existential threats.But he is never free of natural selection nor the threats of it.But he always seeks to be. And that is his both the the problem.
POINT TWO: MAN COOPERATES – OR IS ERADICATED BY THOSE WHO DO..
That Man Acts is a common libertarian trope but it tells us precisely nothing unless we disambiguate acting into the process:
observing > predicting > permuting options, >and expending effort > in pursuit of advancing our interests.
Even then it tells us that we simply have more permuting ability than other beasts.
that Man cooperates on the other hand tells us a great deal. It means we can imitate in the physical, empathize in the emotional, and sympathize in the intellectual, and in doing so cooperate, where cooperation produces disproportionate returns unavailable to other creatures, at the cost of relative brain volume, that is eleven times as costly as muscle tissue.
Without cooperation man dies. That’s why ostracization was such a threat, and why the female instinct to being left behind because of the burden of her young is so panic inducing: ostracization is a death sentence. Cooperation is not an option. Its an evolutionary necessity. The least cooperation we can engage in is by retreating to the borderlands, and free riding on the production of private and common by others,
CUT: The libertarian trope of crusoe’s island is a false promise baiting well meaning fools into the hazard and subsequent error in deduction, induction, and abduction. Cooperation developed in population density and spread through population density. Crusoe’s island, surrounded by the fortress of the sea, is a metaphor for the empty desert, the empire’s borderlands, the state’s walled ghetto, and the specific protection and privilege of the state’s ruler.
But What is the Limit of Cooperation?
Just as a common theological trope is that some higher power demands our compliance, a Common philosophical trope is to presume the infinite utility of cooperation.
So to avoid that, Let’s answer the first three questions of philosophy, ethics, and politics:
PHILOSOPHY: The first question of philosophy is Why should I not suicide? (becaus I prefer to live)ETHICS: The first question of ethics is Why should I in not kill you and yours, take your women, and your property? (because cooperation is more valuable as long as it’s more valuable.)POLITICS: The first question of politics is: Why should me and mine not war, genocide, pillage, loot, rape, enslave, enserf or tax farm you and yours? (because cooperation is more valuable as long as it’s more valuable.)
So cooperation is not a binary but ternary choice. We can avoid, we can cooperate or we can conflict. The first premise is not the presumption of cooperation – that’s a fraud by which the deceitful frame any debate.
Avoidance < negotiation < Cooperation > undermining > Conflict
This ends the presumption of the infinite value of cooperation.
It also prohibits the fallacy of argumentation ethics which Hoppe borrowed from the Marxists and many folks rely upon.
What’s the truth the limits cooperation?
1- The Weak Beg (Socialism – the female strategy )2 – The Able Ask Permission (libertarianism – the ascendent male strategy)3 – The Strong Decide (Conservatism – the dominant male strategy)
POINT THREE: MAN ORGANIZES – OR IS ORGANIZED BY OTHERS
Man cooperatesMan Competes to cooperateGroups of men cooperate to competeGroups of men that cooperate to compete best survive best.Groups of men that cooperate to compete by producing superior commons survive best.So Man organizes or is organized by others.
POINT FOUR: STATES FORM, OR ARE FORMED BY OTHERS
We know why states emerge, because they emerge for the same reasons everywhere throughout history – and they fail to emerge everywhere throughout history for rather obvious reason by the same means, that are tediously well documented.
States form when an organized group of warriors succeed in suppressing local parasitism by murder, harm, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by suggestion, baiting into hazard, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, free riding, conspiracy, corruption, trade warfare, information warfare, conversion warfare, immigration warfare, military warfare, lowering transaction costs, by the institution of ‘weights and measures’, lowering opportunity costs, and lowering risk that collectively increases cooperative, economic, and monetary velocity, producing longer more valuable production cycles, and greater wealth for all. This does not lower the costs per se, in that the state merely centralizes local material costs, but that the gains result from the eradication of local material costs, are exchanged for higher cooperative trust and velocity and the wealth that results.
WHY DO STATES SUCCEED?
States succeed because they make possible cooperation at increasing scale.
The results of cooperation at scale provides a competitive advantage.
This competitive advantage prevents their being displaced and replaced by others.
In the never ending competition by cooperation vs competition by predation.
WHY DO STATES FAIL?
States fail by insufficiencies due to excess extractions in relation to competition, nature, population.
insufficient production of suppression of parasitism to maintain control.
causing defection through excess extraction less valuable than the alternatives
Insufficient production of commons to ecommically, demographically, compete.
Kinship overexpansion and fragility (rome)
Military overexpansion and fragility (everyone but china – martial class)
Economic overexpansion and fragility (middle class)
burecratic overexpanasion and fragility (
privilege overexpansion and fragility
failure to preserve sufficint resources to organize in response to shocks
My favorite, currently illustratd, failing to have general staff and war games for every category of threat – we just failed both political, military, economic, and biological – all at once.
failure to adapt to technology or means of warfare (japanese)
WHY GROUPS WITHOUT STATES FAIL
They fail because they are unable to organize innovation, production, distribution, trade, institutions , sufficient to produce commons sufficient to hold territory, population, and trade from competitors who will make better use of the territory, resources, and opportunity.
They Cannot Produce reciprocity and trust and productivity
SUCCESS
The Chinese survive by very slow very deliberate signification in genetics, culture, and institutions. It is the most successful method except their face before truth in preservation of harmony caused them to stagnate.
The Hindus are still a little opaque to me, but there appears to have been an age at which the elites were producing work equal to europeans and Chinese but that age was lost. They were unable ( I don’t know why) to resist repeated invasions, and despite the hindu expansion and intellectual works around the year zero this flowering failed to take root. Most arguments are demographic. I’m persuaded by the combination of demographics and conquests.
Indo Europeans survived by profiting from the domestication of man as they had cattle, horses – and each other. Unfortunately wherever outbreeding is possible they were exterminated.
FAILURES
Africans – “there is nothing wrong with Africa that time will not fix if it resists false promise of islam.” Africa’s only problem is demographics, islam, the interruption of west africa’s imperial flowerling, and the failur of the european colonial project to modernize the continent due to the european civil world war.
Gypsies – survive by finding host polities that will tolerate them and engaging in petty begging, prostitution, petty crime, and sometimes organized crime under the moral defense of the pretense of victimhood. Studying gypsy culture is fascinating since it demonstrates how hard it is to indoctrinate humans into a cult, sect, or separatist group, by paying a high cost, agianst their initial preferences.
Jews – survive on hosts by avoiding production and warranty and instead specializing in industries free of production and warranty and instead those that bait into hazard, then using the proceeds to invest in rent seeking until the pretense of plausible deniability, causes the population to deport them – or worse. For those that engage in the provision of ethical and moral services, they do not suppress the hazard production of their peers, and they pay the cost for not having done so.
Muslims(Arabs) – Survive on hosts by destroying everything rational and material replacing it with pedant ritual and memorization, maximizing reproduction, and resulting dysgenia. Islam has murdered 1B people, and destroyed every civilization it’s population can reach, including is culture, arts, letters, knowledge, institutions, and elites, and is only china has chosen to be the last man standing, with india recently making that decision and europe very likely to make that decision shortly.
The Reason Is Demographics and Trust
POINT FIVE: JUDGMENT
So, given physical laws of the universe, natural laws of cooperation, the laws of evolution, how may proposed ethical and moral systems are not ethical or moral at all, but merely frauds by which to bait high trust people into the hazard, of ignoring physical laws of scarcity, natural laws of reciprocity within the limits of proportionality, and the natural law of evolution we call selection?
All of Them.
EXPLANATION
This is the reason for the evolution of separatist judaism, and universalist Christianity, and islam in the ancient world, and universalist marxism, socialism, neo-marxism, postmodernism, anti-male feminism, human-difference-denialism, political correctness, and truth suppression in the present world.
Together these constitute a two and a half thousand year The rebellion against natural selection by those who organize superior innovation in, and production of private and commons by those who cannot.
And the entire pre-and-postwar rebellion against western civlization is precisely because western civlization has, since the IE expansion, most disocoverd and adapted to the physical, natural, and evolutionary laws, producing the most innovative, adaptive, eugenic, civilization in history. We have been not the first, but the fastest in the ancient and modern world, with the judeo-christian-muslim dark ages of ignorance the only obstacle in our five thousand year effort – mostly successful, in dragging mankind kicking and screaming out of superstition, ignorance, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, child mortality, early death, the chaos of a nature all but hostile to advanced life, in a brief window of geological peace, in a brief period of solar peace, in a brief period of galactic peace, in our only chance to defeat the red queen.
And our current effort is to drag them out of that denial – or fail to pass through the great filter that for all we know, leaves this universe empty but for us – because everyone else who has tried has failed.
SO TELL ME NOW? What is a Just Society? A just society is One that is competitive enough to survive market competition for territory, resources, population, and time, while limiting the population to acts of reciprocity within the limits of proportionality, given the innovation and productivity of the demographic within the territory.
This undermines the entire rothbardian libertarian premise. There is no point in discussing the impossible, other than to suggest a false promise that prevents people from pursuing the only possible means of sovereignty, liberty, and freedom: Rule of law by the natural law of reciprocity, insured by a militia of sovereign men.
There is only one surviving form of libertarianism, and that is Propertarianism: rule of law by the natural law of reciprocity in display word and deed, defended by a universal militia of equally sovereign men.
NOTES FOR AFTER PRESENTATION
Can a just society survive without a state? No. Every possible example is an exchange of borderland territory for a social or kin group under limited defense of a state or empire.
And even in those places, (particularly Ukraine where I usually live) it results in pervasive criminality that results in violent unpleasantries in opportunistic times. I mean, Ukraine’s government is really a proxy for a bunch of what we call gangsters, what they call oligarchs, what used to be called boyars, and today we see in its next evolutionary leap in the finance and tech sectors.
NOW FOR THE BACKGROUND TO PROVIDE UNDERSTANDING
1 – All civilizations produce a group strategy, a mythology, a method of argument to advance them, and institutions of intergenerational transfer to persist them. Classes and sexes produce variations on them. All civilizations appear to have produced them in the Axial Age (recovering from the bronze age collapse), and anchored at that point, and cannot evolve without crisis, or change without conquest.
2 – Europeans for accidental geographic reasons developed truthful testimony (military reporting) as a norm, sovereignty reciprocity, heroism and duty, excellence and beauty, as a group strategy – and metalworking as and martial conquest as the high ranking positions. The Smith and the Demon, The Faust Myth, these are our founding mythos.
This is the male group strategy. I call this strategy Aristotelianism (elitism)
… this strategy produces the optimum adaptation of man because of the highest correspondence to physical natural and evolutionary laws.
… With this strategy, in a few centuries in the bronze age (indo european expansion) a few centuries in the iron age (mediterranean expansion) and a few centuries in the modern steel age ( north sea expansion), europeans dragged mankind kicking and screaming out of ignorance, hard labor, poverty. starvation, disease, suffering, early mortality and the victimization of nature.
… We do not need to be first but fastest.
… The first question is, why all other civilizations failed to discover continuous adaptation, and instead, stagnated, or collapsed. The answer is rather obvious: the human want of stability and his hatred of adversarial markets, and the inability to shrink the underclass so that a majority genetic middle can form, or as in the case of the hindus and chinese, and less so the europeans, an elite caste can form.
…. The second question is, why some civilizations failed at cooperation, organization, trust, commons, and specialized instead on reverting to parasitism or predation.
… As in many things we learn more from the study of failure than from the study of success.
3 – The people of the middle east never defeated the problem of the Hermes and the cart of lies. They were weak poor slaves or peasants who were the victims of various warrior aristocracies, and endless tribalism. They developed the strategy of undermining by social construction.This is the female group strategy. I call this strategy Abrahamism (undermining).
4 – Judaism, Christianity, Islam used the false promise of freedom from physical, natural, evolutionary law, in exchange for resistance to undermingin of, and sedition against, the masculine strategy, resulting in judaism to undermine, christianity to weaken, and islam to destroy – and by that method they reversed evolution of the great civilizations and destroyed those great civilizations of the ancient world, their arts, letters, cultures, governments, religions, reducing them to ignorance, poverty, dysgenia, and collapse.
5 – They repeated this technique in the modern world, instead of using supernatural and sophomoric false promise, used psuedoscientific and sophomoric false promise with marxism to undermine european tripartism, socialism to undermine rule of law, postmodernism to underming testimonial truth, feminism to undermine the family as the central object of both policy and intergenerational transfer, hbd-denailism to undermine our long tradition of market(meritocratic) eugenics, and political correctness to undermine our use of signal and social pressure to conform to our group strategy of natural law.
6 – However, just as marxism was an underclass monopoly strategy that prohibits private goods, libertarianism is a middle class monopoly strategy that prohibits commons, and neoconservatism is a political class monopoly strategy that prohibits political goods. So what all six strategies in both ancient and modern world share is monopoly (Feminine) vs market (male) tripartism and trifunctionalism.
7 – So whether supernatural judaism, Christianity, or islam, or pseudoscientific Neoconservatism-globalism, Libertarianism-Anarchism, or marxism-Communism with neo-marxism, postmodernism, feminism, hbd-denial, political correctness., the technique of undermining the european group strategy of europeans which consists in:
1 – A Universal Militia Regardless of Cost2 – Excellence and Heroism Regardless of Cost3 – Duty and Commons Regardless of Cost4 – Truth and Oath Regardless of Cost5 – Promise and Contract Regardless of Cost6 – Sovereignty and Reciprocity Regardless of Cost7 – The Natural Law and Jury Regardless of Cost8 – Wherein every man a soldier, sheriff, judge, and his own legislator, of his own demonstrated interests.9 – And as a result – the only possibility for social organization is Voluntary Markets in:.. – association.. .. – cooperation.. .. .. – production.. .. .. .. – reproduction.. .. .. .. .. – commons.. .. .. .. .. .. – polities.. .. .. .. .. .. .. – war.10 – Together producing the fastest possible means of human adaptation to circumstances;11 – Including the continuous evolutionary production of Human Agency (human capital);12 – By the domestication of man by market eugenics,13 – And as a result, the direction of surpluses to the production of commons, and the multiples of returns produced therefrom;14 – Including the unique high trust society;15 – And the informational, scientific, technological, medical, economic, social, political, and military benefits therefrom.16 – Yielding a genetic distribution free of the burden of underclass consumption, and the costs of their organization, administration, and care.
8 – Libertariaism and anarchism rely on baiting people into hazard (defeat), by use of a false promise (freedom from costs of commons), sold by the method of deception called suggestion using the half truth of the NAP, is criminal unethical and immoral, impossible to bring into being, and unsustainable in competition for people and trade, unsurvivable in competition with other polities, because it would as always attract parasites upon those polities (pirates, scammers), and hostilitiy from them As such the only vaguely anarchic polities have been borderlands claimed by states and empires, who trade settlement by otherwise undesirable peoples, in exchange for plausible claims to territorial possession, while escaping the costs of administration.
WHY DOES LIBERTARIANISM FAIL?
Attempt to avoid the costs of natural selection pressureProhibition on organizing.Prohibition on commons.Prohibition on standards of weights and measuresGhetto Ethics: A License for irreciprocity under demand for non-retaliation.All examples have been borderlands under powerful states or empires, using population to hold plausible claim to possession without providing any institution other than limited defense.
10 – So the question is do you or do you not want the benefits of producing those commons? Then if you want them you must fight to produce sovereigny so that those weaker may have liberty so that those even weaker have freedom, so that those even weaker may have subsidy. If you don’t want to pay those costs of commons you can retreat to the point where you pay no cost of commons but still obtain limited benefits of trade as long as you dont annoy a state enough to make them punish you.
9 – It is the prevention and reversal of this defeat that i seek to correct so that I can unify libertarians, conservatives, and centrists to restore western civilization and it’s normative institutions before the enemy succeeds in creating another fall of Rome and another dark age of ignorance, superstition and dysgenia.
10 – My mission is to deprive moral men of childish folly so that we can together bear arms and restore our people to the only freedom that is possible: sovereignty under a universal militia, and the natural law, in the distributed dictatorship of sovereign men, who produce sufficient violence to deny the alternatives. …. or leave behind with the primitives, those unfit to transcend into the gods we imagine.
Welcome to Childhood’s End.