Curt Doolittle shared a post.
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 21:29:00 UTC
Source: Facebook
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Mr. Doolittle, From my (very limited) knowledge of your work, you seem very conc
http://propertarianism.com/reading-list—“Hi Mr. Doolittle, From my (very limited) knowledge of your work, you seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.
Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights? From what I’ve seen, most of us favor an overall capitalistic economic structure with the caveat that economic activity should support the nation, both financially and morally (spiritually?), such as through the limiting of pornography and the banning of usury (actual usury, such as predatory lending terms, not merely interest on capital), and limiting the activity of foreign interests in domestic issues. I ask whether you think it’s a weakness that we don’t discuss this because even though there is a general consensus, I dislike having blind spots in my worldview.
Lastly, have you read James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution and/or Sam Francis’ follow-up Leviathan and its enemies? If so, what were your thoughts on the theory presented re: the transformation of capitalist society to a managerial society?”—
Great questions. I”m going to reframe the first one:
–“ou seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.”–
I’ll restate this as I try to unify science, morality, law, and philosophy into a single discipline that merely requires we speak truthfully in matters of the commons, and I advocate the forcible restructuring of our institutions using the language of institutions: law.
What you see in the alt right, despite the alt right’s embrace of science, is the perpetuation of moral language. The question is, if we evolved from supernatural to reason, to rationalism, to science, and in my work “complete scientific realism”, then why would people continue to argue in reasonable and rational terms, and partly scientific terms, when scientific and completely scientific are available?
Well, there are four reasons: (a) moral language helps us rally and shame. (b) moral language helps us with catharsis, (c) moral language is intuitionistic even if unscientific, and (d) scientific l language is none of the above.
So to simplify that, I’ll say that I use the language of natural law to construct institutions of natural law: exchange, rather than trying to argue that one position is superior to another in order to enforce a monopoly decision that I prefer over the monopoly decisions that others prefer.
—“Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights?”—
All rights are contractually exchanged, that’s the only way they can exist. Natural rights are those we generally require if we are to avoid conflict with one another, and foster cooperation and competition with one another. Otherwise they’re not contract rights or natural rights, but legislative rights enforced by an insurer of last resort. We do not contract for our rights. In our case the government is an insurer. And the government works to construct LEGISLATIVE rights, not NATURAL RIGHTS.
SO in answer to your question, it’s not useful to discuss rights other than those we require.
Instead, I’ve stated it differently: that our position can, and must be, that the only reason we do not use our wealth of personal violence, group violence, and organized violence, to construct legal rights in our interests alone at the expense of other’s desired natural rights, is if we all possess natural rights and natural rights alone.
So I’ve tried to restore the reality of political philosophy to the state prior to the set of lies we created in order to justify adding women to the franchise, in an equivalent house, rather than in their own separate house of government: that the only reason to forgo our desire to rule in our own self interest, is if we rule by rule of law in one another’s equal interest. And if that is not the case, then we simply license parasitism and our own destruction.
The first question of ethics and politics is ‘why don’t I just kill you and take your stuff’. It’s only after we’ve decided that we will cooperate that we enter the question of ethics (how not to disincentivize cooperation), or politics (how not to disincentivize the production of commons.)
We value a MERITOCRATIC commons (political), economy (ethics), reproductive (family), structure that is against the interests of those who lack competitive reproductive desirability, competitive productive ability, and productive ability to contribute to the commons. That you phrase the question as moral, and I phrase it as economic is the problem with the alt-right that I am trying to solve by providing a rational and scientific language for the discussion, comparison, and contrast of all epistemic, ethical, political, and group evolutionary strategies.
The weakness is that we will not come to terms with the fact that meritocracy and eugenics and our ability to produce wealth and commons are antithetical to democracy, and that without the restoration of the market for commons and a judicial monarchy (inherited), we cannot possess the liberty and meritocracy we desire.
Eugenics is incompatible with democracy. The original settlers (my ancestors included) used different language but the American colonies were an experiment in eugenics. The disaster was the Louisiana purchase that requires vast immigration to populate the new territory so that it would not be seized (yet again) by the European powers. The new territory would have extended slavery, and this would have firmly put both taxation (on export goods) and the power of the federal government, in the hands of the agrarians and their international market, at the expense of the new industrialists and the domestic market. Had we retained the original colonies it is possible that we could have retained the eugenic experiment – even with the handicap of the Scotts-Irish in the south.
Of course, I have read Burnham and I consider him one of my greater influences – he gave me the moral courage so to speak to abandon my cultural allegiances as a member of the puritan families, the anti-monarchy forces in the English civil wars, and the anti-monarchy movement in the American revolution. I consider all of these to be failures. You can see my entire reading list on Propertarianism.com/reading-list, and you can contact Ramsey because he maintains our library, and we have most of the work in digital format available for readers.
Burnham’s observation is not unique, but he was trying to warn us about it. There are a couple of human tendencies that we should be aware of:
1) the models we use like analogies to animals, hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, and now computational (information) change with every era, and we misapply properties of those models to man.
Man is an organism that grows and is changed by his growth from conception to old age. We tend to try to hang on to a model and extend the use of that model in our minds to ever greater scope. But they’re just analogies, with information in both physics and social science the current state of our ability to represent the world.
2) tendency to thing obvious trends are special and novel. But if we look at all human organizations they go through the same cycles and Burnham was trying to tell us that. Like Hayek and popper, or perhaps even Simmel, he was trying to describe the problem of political order as an information and decidability problem. So just as monarchies fell because their families lacked sufficient population to produce sufficient technocrats to run things, and just as private companies had to give way to corporations with professional managers, the size and scale of the modern state requires institutions. Whether those institutions could have been provided by market services is a question of maturity. At first, no, but over time yes.
He was critical because he did not have a solution. We have all be correct in criticizing socialism. What we haven’t been correct about is in criticizing capitalism and democracy. Yes, we can have a star trek society with an average IQ of 125 or higher. But the Arabs cannot with an average IQ of 85-90 at the best. Neither can the Brazilians with such an enormous underclass in relation to the productivity and quality of their institutions.
I hope this gave you some ideas to work with.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 16:55:00 UTC
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“You’ve said that you see information as a commodity and therefore lies should b
—“You’ve said that you see information as a commodity and therefore lies should be punishable fraud. Could you expand on what you mean as a commodity and how you would determine what forms of “lies” (you usually say leftist pseudo-science) should be punished?”—
I said I see information as a kind of production that is dumped into the commons, just as pollutants are dumped into the air, land, and water. We don’t care much if you dump clean water into the commons, or clean air into the commons, or even oxygen, and to some degree heat or cold. But why should you be able to pollute the informational commons any more than you can pollute air, land, water, or damage parks, infrastructure, buildings, and monuments?
It was one when we all have equal voices in the Thang, Square, Church, or Parliament. But it becomes quite different when you can make use of Altar, Pulpit, Throne, Press, media, and entertainment. It’s very different to tell a white lie, a gray lie, a black lie, and a white, gray, or black propaganda lie. And it’s far worse if you force a legislative lie.
Our civilization has been nearly conquered by the Jewish pseudoscientific, pseudo-rational, and outright falsehood movements, by the academy, media, and state, just as the ancients were conquered as much by the lies of Jewish monotheism and it’s distribution by pulpit and state. Likely with equally dark ages to follow.
So how do we prevent correct it now, and prevent it in the future?
Well, we make it as illegal to lie in politics as it is to commit any other kind of fraud, by removing the right to free speech and replacing it with the right to truthful speech.
But why is the problem of truth and falsehood so challenging? The answer is that until approximately now, we didn’t know what ‘truth’ was any more than we knew what ‘justice’ was.
What I’ve tried to do is provide a set of warranties of due diligence (which is what scientists do) that if performed means that a proposition may not be true, but it is very difficult for it knowingly to be false.
IF we then simply create universal standing for matters of the commons and remove the ability of the state to intervene in matters of the commons, then people will regulate speech in the commons as rigorously as they regulate fraud in the commons.
Advertisers are highly regulated, but most of us would suggest we regulate them far further. Some speech is regulated, but we could regulate it further.
We used to teach grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and adding warranties of truthfulness is certainly not harder than teaching logic or geometry. And if you cannot state logic or geometry or truthfulness we have a question whether you can say anything other than what you desire, versus what is true. In my grandmother’s generation, it wasn’t uncommon for people to say “I don’t know about such things” because that was a truthful statement. Yet in pursuit of socialism, we have told generations to express opinions as if they were a truth that they understood. This attack on truth in favor of self-expression, in order to empower the incompetent classes, has been central to the anti-aristocratic strategy we incorrectly call ‘socialism’.
So in brief there is absolutely no reason we cannot state in comprehensible and observable legal language the requirements for due diligence in truthfulness when speaking of matters in the commons. We do it with creating a hazard (‘fire in a theater’), and we do it with inciting a riot (‘taking advantage of mob instinct’), and we do it with libel and slander, and prior to the outlawing of judicial duels we did it even for insults. It is not clear at all that the world is a better place for our tolerance of insult, libel, slander, advertising representation, political representation, teaching of pseudosciences, and other conflationary public speech.
It’s just the opposite.
We’ve just endured a century of pseudoscience.
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 16:21:00 UTC
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Q&A: —“CURT: WHAT’S WRONG WITH CAPITALISM?”— —“What is wrong with capitali
Q&A: —“CURT: WHAT’S WRONG WITH CAPITALISM?”—
—“What is wrong with capitalism? Can it be solved by economic theories alone, or is it a leadership problem as well?”—
Well, let’s take a ‘meaningful’ name: “capitalism”, and restated it operationally, using a ‘true’ name: What problems arise from the voluntary organization of production distribution and trade(capitalism) with individual distribution of property rights providing individual discretion using information provided by the pricing system, compared to the involuntary organization of production, distribution, and trade (socialism) with the discretionary distribution of property rights, in the absence of a pricing system, and compared to a mixed economy, where we use the voluntary organization of production, distribution, and trade, with the individual allocation of property rights, and with individual discretion provided by the pricing system, yet representative decision over the amount and use of the proceeds from the voluntary organization of production? And why has no one really succeded at producing a mixed property economy (other than the fascists), whereby the majority of consumption goods are produced by the voluntary market, and the commons are produced by the involuntary organization of production? In other words, we use armies for building defense, why don’t we use the industrial equivalent of armies to build and maintain infrastructure, and maintain the beauty, and civility of the commons.
That’s a very long way of describing the problem, but it still obscures the next layer of complexity: discretion (decidability).
The market provides superior decidability for those things that will benefit from competition. In many cases, competition for ideas(architecture and engineering) is beneficial but competition for labor is not (construction and maintenance).
The answer is that we cannot choose pure capitalism because too many people are of too little value in many markets, because of immigration, asymmetric class reproduction, or simply overpopulation in relation to the trustworthiness of the people and their institutions.
Likewise we cannot choose pure socialism, because there are too few incentives for people to engage in value-creating production, and too many incentives for people to engage in corruption.
When we try a mixed appropriation economy (what we call a mixed economy today), we seem to produce rapidly decreasing birth rates in our productive people, and extraordinary rents in the public sector.
We considered trying a mixed production economy, but the problem is the statists and rent seekers in the productive sector compete using the government to deprive the private sector.
So the problem is not capitalism or socialism. The problem is demographic mix, the mixture of voluntary and involuntary organiztaion of production to suit the demographics and institutions available, and the elimination of discretion from the people in what we call government so that even if they exist they cannot (easily) engage in corruption.
The problem is:
1) That we lack rule of law rather rule of legislation. Majority rule, representative democracy, is perhaps the worst government everyone ever produced. If we could vote to oust the entire government every 90 days, and rescind all acts of that government upon successful ouster, then that might be helpful. If we could sue government participants if they tried to construct or did construct immoral contracts, then that would be an a solutoin. And if we were still required to pay a progressive income tax, but we chould choose how it was allocated, right down to the paperclip, I think that would solve the problem.
2) But then we get to the answer: That we lack a market for the production of commons (like we had under english houses of parliament). We rely on assent (majority rule) creating opportunity for corruption, instead of relying on dissent (violation of natural, judge discovered, common law) to prevent immoral and illegal contracts for the production of commons. We could allocate funds evenly and let areas negotiate exchanges. And that would produce a moral and naturally legal market for the production of commons.
3) We rely on fiat money (which is an advantage) but we distribute liquidity and dividends through the financial system rather than directly to consumers. In other words, we cause consumers and businesses to fight for credit, rather than businesses and finance to fight for consumer spending.
So as humans we tend to like to break ideas down into too simple a set of comparisons, becuase really, it’s hard to work with anything other than ideal types. Humans… well, we just aren’t that smart. (Try algebraic geometry, which in principle should’nt be too complicated, but our minds are just not often made for it.)
Instead we must often thing in supply demand curves, becuase whether the thing we are discussing is persona, social, international, or physical concept, we deal with equilibrial forces.
In this case we have a series of problems we must deal with:
1) demographic distributions: the differnce between races is largely one of sexual maturity and asymmetric sexual dimorphism producing differences in abilities. This is magnified by geography that cuases various selection pressures. As such poor places just were worse at killing off the lower classes and suppressing their reproduction, and the wealthier places better at upward redistribution of resources and constant culling of the underclasses through sanction (killing), war, starvation, and the difficulty of surviving in cold climates.
2) Information and incentives: the pricing system provides opportunity to FORM both information and incentives.
3) Discretion versus rule of law: Discretion and corruption versus rule of law and non-corruption.
4) The distribution of the organizaiton of production from authoritarian (originating in the fertile crescent and other flood plains) raider ethics (originating in steppe and desert), and libertarian (originating in the forest and sea peoples), and equalitarian, (preserved among hunter-gatherers).
The solution is to solve all these problems with (a) rule of law (non discretion) (b) market production of commons limited by legal dissent. (c) extension of involuntary production for the construction and maintenance of commons, and reduction of the voluntary organization of production to those capable of surviving within it. (d) the restoration of the family as the central object of policy (e) the restoration of the process of intergenrational lending to preserve knowldge and calculability. (f) the direct and equal distribution of liquidity under fiat money (shares in the commons) to consumers in the case of the necessity to reorder the sustainable patterns of specialization and trade (the market) when it incurrs shocks or exhaustions (of opportunities).
I could go on but I think you get the general idea. We got it wrong when we tried to steal the commons from the aristocracy by imposing majoritarianism, rather than constructing additional houses and continuing the tradition of using government as a market for the production of commons by negotiation between the classes.
The middle class was nowhere near as good at governing as the aristocracy.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 16:17:00 UTC
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Q&A: “IMPORTANCE OF ARISTOTLE?” —“Hi, Curt. Currently going through your readi
Q&A: “IMPORTANCE OF ARISTOTLE?”
—“Hi, Curt. Currently going through your reading list. Trying to make myself the best propertarian I can so I can help spread the message. There are plenty of libertarians and conservatives who would take to propertarianism if they got the message. My question is to you what do you think the significance of Aristotle’s work is from a propertarian perspective?”—
Well, Aristotle is as close as we come to the first ‘scientist’, Social: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bacon, Locke, Smith and Hume, Jefferson, Darwin, Spencer, Durkheim. -vs- physical: Archimedes, Galileo, Copernicus, Davinci, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein
Now, the way I use natural law was a product of the Stoics, not of Aristotle. And I tend to see the greek era as a combination of spartan aristocracy in law rationalized by the Romans, and Aristotelian intellectuals rationalized by the stoics.
I would say that Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bacon, Locke, Smith, Hume and Jefferson, Darwin, Spencer, Durkheim, and Hayek, represent the attempt (and near failure) to make the case that natural law, discovered by judges by trial end error, is what constitutes social science. And that economics is an empirical branch of that science, as are evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. But those are explanatory fields, whereas natural, judge discovered, common law is a purely empirical field.
And this is why I think of my work as uniting philosophy, morality(Ethics), science, sociology, psychology, and law, into a single universal language – as locke suggested – reducible to statements of the voluntary or involuntary transfer of property defined as that which humans demonstrate as property.
So to summarize, I would say Aristotle is the father of western thought in this sense, and that between Aristotle’s idealism, stoic reason, and roman pragmatism, and finally English empiricism, we developed a chain of reasoning that nearly came to fruition in the last century – but Hayek, Popper, Mises, Brouwer, and Bridgman simply failed. Just as the conservatives failed to produce a competitor to cosmopolitan pseudosciences.
And they failed because they subconsciously had to work around the truth: they were not benevolent Christians, but self-justifying Aryans (elites), and middle-class capitalism like middle-class voting, was a net negative for the simple reason that the success of the western model is reducible to truth, but that as a consequence our political system is reducible to benevolent domestication of animal man. And that was inconceivable to classical liberals so proud of their defeat of the aristocracy that had made their prosperity possible.
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 13:55:00 UTC
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Conservative: “What would happen if everyone did that?” -VS- Progressive “It’s n
Conservative: “What would happen if everyone did that?” -VS- Progressive “It’s not going to matter if just I do that!”
Conservative: “What do we need to prevent?” -vs- Progressive: “What can we get away with?”
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 13:15:00 UTC
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Unless you’re 12 and under, there pretty much isn’t a reason to go to the movie
Unless you’re 12 and under, there pretty much isn’t a reason to go to the movie theater until March of ’17. Not that there’s been a reason to go to the theatre in ’16.
What idiots are greenlighting this drivel?
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 13:09:00 UTC
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Untitled
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 12:52:00 UTC
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CURT SAYS ASK ME ANYTHING ON REDDIT (I’m giving this one a try. Two very good qu
CURT SAYS ASK ME ANYTHING ON REDDIT
(I’m giving this one a try. Two very good questions answered so far today.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/altright/comments/4xnhvy/curt_doolittle_propertarianism_ask_me_anything/
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 11:52:00 UTC
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Regardless of revenue, you are a small business until you must rely on policies
Regardless of revenue, you are a small business until you must rely on policies and procedures.
You are a family until you need norms.
Your are a tribe until you need law.
You are a collection of tribes until you combine resources to produce physical commons.
You are a village until you have a market with standard weights and measures.
Source date (UTC): 2016-08-14 09:15:00 UTC