Curt Doolittle

Theme: Cooperation

  • MULLER : IS THE MARKET MORAL? (Important Propertarian Concept: Market And Morali

    http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/is-the-market-moral-JERRY MULLER : IS THE MARKET MORAL?

    (Important Propertarian Concept: Market And Morality)

    Yes the market is moral in the universal. No it is not in the particular. BUT lets look at this a little more deeply.

    Muller is the author of THE DEFINING intellectual work on Conservatism. It was his work that convinced Jonathan Haidt that there was more than one moral code. Both is book _Conservatism_ and his Teaching Company Lectures, are the first and most important discussion of conservatism in rational and moral terms.

    Conservatism, like libertarianism, has produced a landscape littered with trite entry-level works that are little more than pop entertainment, or statements of personal enlightenment. And there are only a handful of authors who produce more than sentimental, allegorical, or historical works. And that is because conservatism, still, remains an habituated moral philosophy, not a rationally articulated one – Something some of us are trying to change. Muller changed that with _Conservatism_.

    **This particular essay shows however, that even Muller still does not grasp the market as the REPOSITORY into which we have transformed ALL immoral action. It is the ONLY place we allow immorality. And that is because the market produces virtuous consequences as an output of that instinctively immoral activity: competition. The negative feedback to the producer creates the incentive for the producer to improve his or her wares, or to price them more cheaply. It creates a squirrel cage wheel of increasing quality and decreasing prices.

    The market has made LIFE outside of the market, increasingly moral. The virtue of the immoral process of the market, produces virtuously moral longer term outcomes in terms of prices, quality and choices.

    But more importantly, it does not require we eliminate our attempts to outwit each other. It simply gives us a single virtuous venue in which to do it. And the consumer always wins, no matter what bet he places.**

    WHAT YOU SHOULD READ

    _Conservatism_

    http://www.amazon.com/Conservatism-Anthology-Political-Thought-Present/dp/0691037124/

    _The Other God That Failed_

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-that-Failed-Deradicalization/dp/069100823X

    “Us and Them : The enduring power of ethnic nationalism”

    http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63217/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them

    “Capitalism and Inequality : What the right and the left get wrong”

    http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality

    WHERE HE IS WRONG

    The Mind and Market

    The Jews and Capitalism

    His failure is perhaps our own failure to articulate property, property rights, reproductive strategy, the mind, moral intuitions and moral codes as the cause of both ‘the mind and market’ and the near universal condemnation of jewish morality despite their success in the market.

    No one is perfect. šŸ™‚

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-19 09:04:00 UTC

  • CAUSAL AXIS OF MORAL BIASES (update) This weekend I spent working on the connect

    CAUSAL AXIS OF MORAL BIASES

    (update)

    This weekend I spent working on the connection between COOPERATION and morality. Now I have to tie cooperation to REPRODUCTION and reproduction to morality. This really is pretty simple. It’s there between Boehm, Ridley and Haidt. Once I do that I have the full chain from memory, to thought, to reproduction, to cooperation, to extended cooperation, which yields the axial dimensions of ‘calculation’ and ‘reproduction’ and ‘cooperation’ and ‘population’. With those axis, I can demonstrate most (all) of human moral behavior.

    I actually get pretty bored with just copying down citations. I know that’s good academic practice and labor, but it’s justificationism to me. Either something has explanatory power or not. Whether it’s justified isn’t something that usually troubles me. šŸ™‚ A descriptive ethic does not need much justification. It’s purely explanatory. A prescriptive (normative) ethic, requires justification.

    Not sure if many people get what that means. But it doesn’t say much for the chance we’d ever come up with a prescriptive set of ethics that wasn’t nonsense. šŸ™‚

    Although only my fellow critical rationalists will really grasp that.

    My objective here, will be to articulate moral biases the way that we articulate cognitive biases. I think, if I can reduce all of the moral biases, via Haidt, to just that, it’ becomes pretty easy to articulate them. And if it’s easy to articulate them, and in turn, show that they are claims against property, then it will mean that I have converted all moral discourse into propertarian language.

    And I am pretty sure then, that I can prove, that most political language is an attempt to use obscurantism to steal.

    And that’s pretty interesting.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-14 11:46:00 UTC

  • “Boehm (1999) shows that human hunter-gatherer groups have been characterized by

    “Boehm (1999) shows that human hunter-gatherer groups have been characterized by an ā€œegalitarian ethicā€ for an evolutionarily significant periodā€”long enough to have influenced both genetic and cultural evolution. The egalitarian ethic implies that meat and other important resources are shared among the entire group, the power of leaders is circumscribed, free-riders are punished, and virtually all important decisions are made by a consensus process. The egalitarian ethic thus makes it difficult for individuals to increase their fitness at the expense of other individuals in the same group, resulting in relative behavioral uniformity and relatively weak selection pressures within groups. Mild forms of social control, such as gossip and withholding social benefits, are usually sufficient to control would-be dominators, but more extreme measures, such as ostracism and execution, are recorded in the ethnographic literature. By controlling behavioral differences within groups and increasing behavioral differences between groups, Boehm cogently argues that the egalitarian ethic shifted the balance between levels of selection and made selection between groups an important force in human evolution.”

    Kevin MacDonald (2002-06-06). A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples (Kindle Locations 81-89). iUniverse. Kindle Edition.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-13 07:06:00 UTC

  • (cultural observation) TAXI DRIVERS I take a taxi along the same street every da

    (cultural observation)

    TAXI DRIVERS

    I take a taxi along the same street every day. Its about a $5 fare to the office at most. The taxis collect both on the corner across from my house where Pavel waits for me most mornings unless he gets a fare to the airport. The majority sit around Kontractova (The Place Of Contracts – the old market).

    Now, you know, I have this aristocratic moral intuition that means speaking truth to power, being unforgivingly demanding of peers, forgiving of dependents, and charitable to the working man. And so I like to tip people at the bottom who do good work and deliver good customer service. I see it as a civic duty. A way of creating a feedback loop of good service, and the ‘commercial society’.

    So, because of this behavior, I have this reputation as a ‘mark’ among the taxi drivers. And I love it.

    Every morning I get to play this game. Everyone knows its a game. And it’s a pretty fun game. If Pavel is across the street he charges me $5, and he won’t take more. If I dont have a five, he gets it from me the next day. If He’s not there, then I walk to Kontractova and try to find someone else.

    And the drivers at Kontractova compete, good naturedly, for my fare. Why? Because they know that I love the game with them, and that I’ll always pay more. So we always have this dance. I tell them $4, they tell me $10, I tell them that it’s robbery and offer $5, they tell me “You are businessman!, I have good car!” and finally we settle on $6 or $7, and they know I’ll give them $8 or $10. So I get to play this sort of human pokemon game every morning for the price of a latte, and I absolutely love it. It’s a weird way of belonging to the community but every single person who works on this street pretty much knows me now.

    It’s a Karma thing. I just love it. Conservatism is, after all, a social philosophy tightly bound by the law of Karma. And while I’m a libertarian, I’m a conservative and therefore aristocratic, libertarian.

    We are only equal in our care for one another.

    And that’s the only equality we need.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-11 06:38:00 UTC

  • “I WILL COOPERATE WITH YOU BUT I WILL NOT SERVE YOU” We can take care of people

    “I WILL COOPERATE WITH YOU BUT I WILL NOT SERVE YOU”

    We can take care of people by cooperating with them, or by serving them. Cooperation is mutually beneficial. Service is purely extractive. Oppression and extraction are exactly the same thing.

    Redistribution against one’s will is simply oppression.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 12:52:00 UTC

  • Westerners are crazy. Russians and Ukrainians are wonderful people – both east a

    Westerners are crazy. Russians and Ukrainians are wonderful people – both east and west. Trust will develop more slowly. Commerce will spread slowly. But they will get it. If they didn’t use Cyrillic they’d be indistinguishable from the rest of us. But that they are distinguishable probably helps them resist us.

    Their the only sane Christians left. šŸ™‚

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 04:19:00 UTC

  • CULTURE OR GENES: IT’S A MUTUALLY DEPENDENT PROCESS (from elsewhere) I study coo

    CULTURE OR GENES: IT’S A MUTUALLY DEPENDENT PROCESS

    (from elsewhere)

    I study cooperative institutions they way hbd_chick studies familial institutions. And as such Iā€™m sure that my bias in determining causality is toward cultural rather than genetic factors.

    Iā€™ve always been suspicious of suggestions of genetic transmission of those biases that can be transmitted by habits, norms, traditions, myths, institutions, and those that are the product of organizations: family or extended family. Maternal or Paternal. Hunter-gatherer, agrarian, industrial, post-industrial as well as Ritual, temple, church, voluntary civic order.

    But the universalist bias in indo-europeans seems to transcend those external forces. We can tell now that we have an interesting combination of :

    1) Lower testosterone and therefore lower impulsivity.

    2) Lower Impulsivity and therefore longer (lower) time preference.

    3) Higher verbal intelligence and therefore hIgher median intelligence.

    4) Higher energy levels and higher rates of burning calories, so more action oriented.

    This means that our activity is more evenly distributed than more impulsive gene pools.

    And our vision of man, as represented in our art, is as beautiful. And our metaphysical objective is to transform nature to our will.

    The east asians have much lower testosterone and impulsivity than we do, but lower verbal intelligence intelligence. I canā€™t find data on their energy levels, but it appears that they are more even-tempered laborers than ā€˜whitesā€™. Although their vision of ā€˜manā€™, as represented in their art is as evil in contrast to nature, which we must submit to.

    These factors are not cultural transmissions. They are genetic transmissions. Just how much of that genetic transmission is caused by cultural necessity, and how much it produced that cultural necessity is very hard to determine.

    But regardless of FIRST cause, there is certainly a relationship between the two, such that genetic and cultural factors are self reinforcing over time.

    As far as I can tell, Gimbutas was right, and the structure of military tactics is the cause of western, northern european, (white) cultural differences. And those differences have been gradually encoded in our genes over the centuries as biases.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-05 05:14:00 UTC

  • THE CALCULUS OF MAN “Our Signals are to Status, as Property is to Cooperation, a

    THE CALCULUS OF MAN

    “Our Signals are to Status,

    as Property is to Cooperation,

    as Sets are to Language,

    as Money is to Exchange,

    as Measurement is to Science.”

    Closer. I don’t know how to get the fact that our emotions are reflections in our perception of changes in our inventory of property. If I get that in there, I can get the common law in there.

    ITS ALL ABOUT CALCULATION.

    Mises and Weber ALMOST had it. Hayek missed it. It’s what he missed.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 07:08:00 UTC

  • MICROECONOMIC FALLACY #1 No. Our interests do NOT equilibrate. All your assumpti

    MICROECONOMIC FALLACY #1

    No. Our interests do NOT equilibrate.

    All your assumptions blind you to the false notion that human society is a process if equality rather than an ongoing struggle to civilize each person in each generation.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 05:04:00 UTC

  • ON FREEDOM: THE ABSENCE OF EXTERNAL CONSTRAINT TYPES OF FREEDOM 1) INDIVIDUAL FR

    ON FREEDOM: THE ABSENCE OF EXTERNAL CONSTRAINT

    TYPES OF FREEDOM

    1) INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM: freedom of thought, action, property exchange. The freedom to cooperate for INDIVIDUAL ends.

    2) POLITICAL FREEDOM: speech, assembly, leadership, concentration of wealth. (The right to cooperate against others who have a similar right) The freedom to cooperate for GROUP ends.

    3) LEGISLATIVE FREEDOM: This includes the freedom to establish property definitions (real, several, built) as well as abstract (patents, options), as well as enforce normative opportunity cost payments, including manners, ethics and morals, and normative tax payments for a multitude of purposes.

    4) NATIONAL FREEDOM: freedom to control and compete for resources by establishing legal monopoly on violence over geographic territory. (In other words, adding territory to legal freedom.)

    5) CULTURAL FREEDOM: Freedom to employ, coerce, convert, and compete using different opportunity cost norms (opportunity cost payments required of members) as a means of competing against other groups who have different opportunity costs, and different capital structures.

    6) REDISTRIBUTIVE FREEDOM: Freedom to claim a share of proceeds of production, earned by virtue of adhering to norms (bearing costs of adhering to norms), despite lack of control over resources, participation in production, or influence over the productivity of those resources, except by voluntary restraint. (Restraint is a real opportunity cost to individuals.) This is the correct non-platonic definition of economic freedom that describes human actions in the productive process.

    THE ONLY NON-CONTRADICTORY FREEDOM

    The only form of ‘freedom’ you can have, that is non-contradictory (you can equally grant it to others and they to you) is personal, individual freedom.

    And even then, the only form of political freedom you can have is to DENY others the right to their political freedom.

    And at that point you are stuck with the problem of either getting to the point where you can convert the barbarians into paying the opportunity cost of becoming property holders in the first place, (establishing the system of property definitions) and without that need for coercion, you’re stuck in poverty even if you want to change the established order.

    The only freedom you can logically have is individual freedom – the freedom of constraint. We can grant it to others equally. The rest of the freedoms are not ‘freedom’. They’re rights to take from others. All political freedoms are rights to take from others. They are rights of coercion, oppression. But then one cannot have a division of labor, a complex society, economic calculation, and the incentive to participate in productive activities unless you apply the ‘coercion’ of private property – at least to some degree.

    Private property as we understand it is unnatural to man, just as debate as we understand it, using reason and objective truth is unnatural and uncommon to man. It was an INNOVATION. Private property was at best, limited to one’s body, and wearable possessions. In the case of many societies, and some societies today which marry off children. It was only in the west that we developed the nuclear family, Paternal property rights, evolved property rights for women, and therefore universal property rights.

    And the socialists have been trying to return us to primitivism for almost two centuries now.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-02 06:18:00 UTC