***There is no authority but totality of consequence***
Forever ignorant, forever ill-informed, forever limited by reason, we have increasingly general rules to rely upon when we must make the dozens if not hundreds of decisions we make daily.
To make those decisions, we rely upon those methods of decision making we call manners, ethics, morals, traditions, history, natural laws, and formulae, consist entirely of theories that have survived over time, through a multitude of uses.
Infrequently in human history, these theories change along with the great shifts in our geography, economy, technology, and knowledge and cause changes to manners, ethics, morals, traditions, our interpretation of and value of historical examples, and the set of formulae that we use most frequently.
And we demonstrate those changes by altering our family structure, property allocations, and means of commons production: the structure of reproduction, the structure of production of goods and services, and the structure of production of commons.
We can, from this history, given enough ‘shifts’ to compare with each other, derive basic rules of human cooperation that remain unchanged regardless of the weights and values and decision criteria we use in each era.
These general rules are what we refer to as “natural law”.
And that Natural Law is reducible to this principle: In any given structure of reproduction, production, and production of commons, all normative manners, ethics, morals, traditions, histories, myths, and institutions will adapt such that we produce the least imposition of costs upon one another’s expended efforts -parasitism- necessary to preserve that structure of reproduction, production, and production of commons.
We seem, in each era, to produce some variation between Nash and Pareto optimums to until all possible rents at all possible levels are consumed. This maximization of rents (efficiency) creates both efficiency and fragility. And then when the necessary shocks arrive to trade routes, disease, climate, populations, war, immigration, conversion, the society cannot be reordered under the existing system of production and rents.
This is why small nations are superior to large: they experiment small, and they fail small, and are subject to constant competition that forces early failure. This is the secret to western civilization. Because we cooperate better than other peoples by the near total suppression of free riding, and the inescapability of contract, we can create networks instead of hierarchies, and remain flexible at the cost of constant competition which gainst us constant adaptation.
The USA will fail, just as Europe will fail – and we must make them fail. Because scale merely misleads us with visible efficiencies at the cost of invisible fragilities by maximizing rents along with maximizing redistribution.
This is the law of nature. This is the law of man.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine