Source: Facebook

YOU CAN’T CONVINCE PEOPLE, WE DON’T NEED TO, AND YOU’RE IMMORAL IF YOU TRY TO. (CONVINCE THEM OF ANYTHING THEY SHOULD PREFER, RATHER THAN STATE THAT WHICH WE PREFER, AND THEY MUST GRANT US OR PAY THE CONSEQUENCES.)

(from elsewhere)

Yeah… I agree that you can’t persuade people. but that’s mostly because of the investment cost: the fact that the intuitionistic searching we do (that which we cannot observe) determines the subjective probability (possibility) of answers. And I suspect some of our learning isn’t open to re-weighting (what we call metaphysical value judgements), because all consequential development is dependent upon those pre-rational, pre-cognitive, unobservable, weights.

I am never going to convince a person highly invested in ‘meaning’, highly invested in ‘rationalism’, or highly invested in ‘postmodern construction of social reality’ any more than I am going to convince their precursors: metaphorical and historical analogists, or mystics and magians, or even those few cultures who never developed any post-experiential thought such as mythic history (and yes they do exist.)

Furthermore, I’m not going to convince someone like Wilber (Nor do I feel the need to ) to adopt the level of scientific argument I’m working on, because his inquiry is into the personal and experiential, just as mine is in the political and INEXPERIENTIAL. I want to prevent people from doing harm (law). People like him want to help people find happiness(religion).

I cannot convince the feminine (submissive) bias in favor of buddhism, to switch to the male (dominance) bias in favor of stoicism, even though both are only concerned with mindfulness, and happiness achieved through mindfulness. The difference between them being buddhist discipline in escapism, and stoic action in reality. Any more than I can convince a hedonist to prefer either, or scientific ascetic like myself to do either.

We cannot convince others.

And the only reason we even think of it, is so that we can form alliances in order to obtain power by means of gossip and ostracism, or authority, law and violence, or to encourage consumption for the purpose of profiting from it.

We don’t need ideals and monopolies. We are not only unequal, but very different – different casts, that perform different functions in the inter-temporal division of reproductive labor.

There is only one ‘law’ that must be observed for all of us to have the possibility of happiness, and that law is the prohibition on parasitism, without which violence is our only rational recourse.

And propertarianism is the only logical means of providing decideablity between individuals in a heterogeneous polity of heterogeneous interests, working in our self interest, through nothing but signals and information, in a voluntary order of cooperation toward one end: the persistence of our genes, and the persistence of man.

A monopolist of preferences, whether socialist conservative, or libertarian, is a tyrant. It doesn’t matter which point in the spectrum you advocate. Monopoly in political systems requires the elimination of choice.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine.