Form: Quote Commentary

WHY SOME SMART PEOPLE THINK PROPERTARIANISM IS ‘STUPID SHIT’.

—“I seem to understand what Curt says and proposes, but many smart people I hold in high esteem seem to think it’s all stupid shit. I don’t know if I’m dumb for not seeing what they see or if there’s a breakdown of communication between the two groups or WTF.”—Elcid Campeador

It’s a language problem. How do you talk about comparative experience, psychology, ethics, sociology, politics, economics, and group competitive strategy – all of which are heavily loaded, with normative, moral, and metaphysical value judgments, and even pseudoscientific and scientific judgments.

Property rights theory provided a language for small-scale interpersonal cooperation. Money, finance, economics for larger scale cooperation. Haidt provided a connection between evolutionary biology and moral instincts. I translated that connection into property and financial language. Then I translated cognitive science and psychology into that language. Then I translated political argument into the same language. Then I translated group evolutionary strategy into the same language.

So it sounds like word salad if you don’t know what I’m doing. If you have some experience with both the philosophy of science, AND finance AND economics, it’s a bit easier.

And that’s the reason aspies like it: because it’s very precise language, and it doesn’t require that you intuit emotional priors. So the people who are very good at it quickly have an autistic bent.

And the people who find it confusing have an intuitionistic bias, and I (we) are asking them to climb a steeper learning curve – to re-learn at personal cost, rather than just learn in order to solve a personal problem of desiring a language to express what they already speak.

You can’t imagine how hard it was to learn to write and speak this way. It’s a lot like writing software – syntactically unforgiving. It took me years and years of work to incrementally evolve from completely incomprehensible to kicking off a few insights, to appealing to aspies, to slowly and painfully learn to express these ideas to normal people.

So most critics don’t know all of that. They want ‘meaning’ from communication. But my work is designed to solve the problem of the Cosmopolitans and the Jews before them: how to make it extremely difficult to engage in deceit of the human mind by error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, loading and framing, overloading, propaganda, pseudoscience, and deceit.

So while most people want DISCOUNTED METHOD of obtaining meaning, my work is designed to impose costs on meaningful speech so that lying and fraud is almost impossible.

But once you start thinking in human operations, voluntary transfers, costs and premiums and discounts, then you eventually think very differently, and you see (correctly) that all human speech is either honest negotiation for mutual gain, or practical attempt at deceit for the purpose of obtaining a discount at someone else’s expense.

And that’s when the light bulbs start going on and the world appears as a very different place.

So I completely understand why people think it’s nonsense.

That’s because for a class of people it solves a problem (very analytical people) a cost of learning – and for another class of people it imposes a problem: a cost of re-learning.

Note that I used propertarian reasoning to explain this difference in behaviors. It is a very powerful language for commensurable argument of diverse portfolios of cognitive, moral, cultural, and metaphysical bias and priors.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine