Curt Doolittle

Theme: Cooperation

  • BELONGING We want to belong to the group. Some of us less or more than others. B

    BELONGING

    We want to belong to the group. Some of us less or more than others. But few of us want to ostracized from it.

    We can that sense of belonging through empathy if we are similar, and duty if we are not. Empathy through shared interpretation. Duty through shared action in pursuit of mutually beneficial ends.

    Women vary less. They sense more. At least, on average, they tend to belong through empathy. Men vary more. They sense less. They are action rather than perception oriented.

    Dominance is the corollary of empathy. We must learn to use our dominance against the physical world, and in defense of life and property, and not as a means of self expression or control of others.

    Misused empathy is just as dangerous as misused dominance. The damage we have done to the world by our supposedly charitable activities is as great as the damage we have done by war.

    We have lost the ancient understanding of our dual natures.

    To cohabitate and to cooperate politically we must master both empathy and dominance in relation to how we possess them.

    And in doing so create belonging by both empathy and duty.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-06-30 07:04:00 UTC

  • Is Charity “a Capitalist And Conservative Project”?

    There are plenty of treatments of the subject that discuss the decline of the ‘civic society’ and decline of ‘civic participation’ in society, because the state has destroyed the motivation for, and the ability of people to engage in civic behavior.  The ‘corporatization and bureaucratization’ of charity. The reason is ostensibly that conservatism provides charity in exchagne for adherence to established norms, and progressives reject adherence to established norms, and requrie that charity require no action in exchange.

    So in that sense, yes, it is a conservative project to create a CIVIC, menaing, voluntary, society. And a progressive project to create a STATIST, meaning ‘managed’ society.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-charity-a-capitalist-and-conservative-project

  • Friends are a wonderful thing. Doing some unfinished housekeeping. Met with a bu

    Friends are a wonderful thing. Doing some unfinished housekeeping. Met with a bunch of friends this week. Enjoyed most. Thanked others. Apologized to two. One in person, one by email, both long overdue. Got an apology of sorts from another. Life being what it is. Change being what it is. But the world is full of wonderful people. And it’s amazing how gracious people are.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-07 23:59:00 UTC

  • Institutions That Allow Different Groups To Exchange, Not Pursue Shared Beliefs.

    The Golden Rule is quite simple. But what complexity emerges from it? Property rights are very simple. But what complexity emerges from them? The problem of cooperative politics does not seem simple until we reduce it to these first principles: 1) the dependence by humans on instinct in the face of complexity, and 2) the instinctual and irresolvable conflict in mating strategies between the genders — and the complexity that emerges in society because of that irresolvable conflict. 3) The instinctual, pervasive, and necessary differences in signals between the classes, tribes and races, because of the differences in distribution of ability, exacerbated by a market economy. Yet there is a solution provided by the libertarians: exchange is cooperative, encourages mutual understanding, and produces win-win rather than win-lose outcomes. The English class-based political model was superior to the democratic model for that reason: we now have a winner-take-all society in permanent conflict rather than a system of cooperation between classes with different strategies and no means of resolving that conflict except for class warfare, constant polarization and social disintegration. The solution is to create institutions where classes with different evolutionary strategies can cooperate despite those differences through a process of exchange. Since exchange must be calculable, which in this case means reducible to something so that it can be measured, then we can improve our existing institutions by requiring voluntary exchange between the classes that is reducible to calculative formulae. ie: contracts rather than laws. Data rather than moralistic rationalism. Interest and ownership rather than taxation. It is the process of democratic government as we have constructed it as a winner take all proposition that is the source of both our conflict and social disintegration. And if one is to argue against this strategy, one makes two mistakes. First, that you simply want to win regardless of the wants of others. And as such you expose yourself as impolitic and using the government as a proxy for theft fraud and violence. Second, that the miracle of the west has been its ability to produce of a balace of powers that requires competition and exchange in favor of the masses. And universalism, which the left seeks to embrace, is just the most recent version of the error of simplicity that all other civilizations have fallen into, and has resulted in their impoverishment and suffering. Besides being a vanity, it is a demonstration of a false consensus bias, and ignores the value that comes from competition, and the problems that arise with bureaucracy. The rest of my arguments, which expose and articulate our different strategies, are irrelevant once we create a set of institutions that makes that our differences in strategies something that is to our advantage. We do not need to engage in perpetuating and exacerbating the problem of politics by attempting to get a democratic majority to agree on universal goals. Something which is imposible because of those differences in biological strategies. We need only advocate institutions that allow each group to achieve its goals. Markets are useful in that they produce aggregate beneficial ends for all parties despite differences in preferences, knowledge and ability. And by creating a market for class cooperation we can produce beneficial ends for the aggregate by serving each other rather than destroying each other.

  • Institutions That Allow Different Groups To Exchange, Not Pursue Shared Beliefs.

    The Golden Rule is quite simple. But what complexity emerges from it? Property rights are very simple. But what complexity emerges from them? The problem of cooperative politics does not seem simple until we reduce it to these first principles: 1) the dependence by humans on instinct in the face of complexity, and 2) the instinctual and irresolvable conflict in mating strategies between the genders — and the complexity that emerges in society because of that irresolvable conflict. 3) The instinctual, pervasive, and necessary differences in signals between the classes, tribes and races, because of the differences in distribution of ability, exacerbated by a market economy. Yet there is a solution provided by the libertarians: exchange is cooperative, encourages mutual understanding, and produces win-win rather than win-lose outcomes. The English class-based political model was superior to the democratic model for that reason: we now have a winner-take-all society in permanent conflict rather than a system of cooperation between classes with different strategies and no means of resolving that conflict except for class warfare, constant polarization and social disintegration. The solution is to create institutions where classes with different evolutionary strategies can cooperate despite those differences through a process of exchange. Since exchange must be calculable, which in this case means reducible to something so that it can be measured, then we can improve our existing institutions by requiring voluntary exchange between the classes that is reducible to calculative formulae. ie: contracts rather than laws. Data rather than moralistic rationalism. Interest and ownership rather than taxation. It is the process of democratic government as we have constructed it as a winner take all proposition that is the source of both our conflict and social disintegration. And if one is to argue against this strategy, one makes two mistakes. First, that you simply want to win regardless of the wants of others. And as such you expose yourself as impolitic and using the government as a proxy for theft fraud and violence. Second, that the miracle of the west has been its ability to produce of a balace of powers that requires competition and exchange in favor of the masses. And universalism, which the left seeks to embrace, is just the most recent version of the error of simplicity that all other civilizations have fallen into, and has resulted in their impoverishment and suffering. Besides being a vanity, it is a demonstration of a false consensus bias, and ignores the value that comes from competition, and the problems that arise with bureaucracy. The rest of my arguments, which expose and articulate our different strategies, are irrelevant once we create a set of institutions that makes that our differences in strategies something that is to our advantage. We do not need to engage in perpetuating and exacerbating the problem of politics by attempting to get a democratic majority to agree on universal goals. Something which is imposible because of those differences in biological strategies. We need only advocate institutions that allow each group to achieve its goals. Markets are useful in that they produce aggregate beneficial ends for all parties despite differences in preferences, knowledge and ability. And by creating a market for class cooperation we can produce beneficial ends for the aggregate by serving each other rather than destroying each other.

  • Three Institutions And Why Libertarianism Is The Answer To Political Problems

    The nuclear family is an expensive artifice. It is economically accountable. It is the smallest economically accountable unit (tribe) humans can produce. It requires constant compromise. It requires suppression of our instincts and desires. It requires a long time preference. Because of that it encourages late marriage, and careful mate selection. The reward we get for economic accountability, constant compromise, suppression of our instincts and desires, the risk of planning, delaying marriage, and careful mate selection, is status cues and economic enfranchisement by others who pay these high costs. Conversely, if we do not ‘conform’ we pay the cost of lost economic and social opportunity. If one ‘cheats’ through non conformity, one is effectively obtaining the benefits of this highly conforming, high-trust, highly productive social order at a discount — at the expense of others, and they see it as ‘unfair’. It is not clear to westerners who live in a universe of nuclear families, that this social order is an artificial construct created by the church in order to undermine inbreeding and family and tribal ties. The church outlawed marrying as far out as six cousins. (if we did that to the muslim world they would be unable to breed.) The manorial system required that one demonstrate fitness in order to obtain land to rent, in order to obtain a wife and feed a family (and obtain access to sex.) These three systems: the manorial (corporate) system, and the nuclear family, and the common law, induced the conformity we see as ‘western conservatism’. (which is inaccurate. It’s western germanic christian manorialism with english classical liberal institutions that ‘conservatives’ feel ‘conservative’ about.) But it is impossible to create a high trust society (“getting to Denmark”) without these three systems. That is why the west is unique. It used the nuclear family, the ‘corporation’, and the common law (no centralized power) to create a highly accountable system where allegiance was to society as a whole rather than family or tribe. And by doing so, this process insured quality breeding: it suppressed the breeding of the underclasses. (Which has led to the assertion, that while western ‘whites’ and ashkenazi jews previously had the same IQ distribution, we have fallen by 5 points since 1850 because of overbreeding by the lower classes. As it stands, the USA will continue to decline in aggregate IQ over the next century. The impact of this is not something we understand. But given that both the greek pre-industrial revolution and the British industrial revolution occurred after a similar duration of manorialism makes it very curious as to whether our way of life, which is predicated on verbal reasoning that requires a substantial part of the population possess an IQ over 106, is worth considering.) That this economic and social system unarticulated is one of the great unfortunate features of history.It prevents conservatives from understanding that their social system can adapt given the proper institutions and ridiculous non-conforming objections like race and sexual preference are immaterial if the institutional safeguards are in place to protect the economy from aberrant norms. WIthout understanding our own society as a set of causal institutions we cannot create a government of exchanges where both win rather than dictates where one loses. And the central premise of libertarian philosophy is that we can EXCHANGE, rather than FORCE each other to do things.

  • Three Institutions And Why Libertarianism Is The Answer To Political Problems

    The nuclear family is an expensive artifice. It is economically accountable. It is the smallest economically accountable unit (tribe) humans can produce. It requires constant compromise. It requires suppression of our instincts and desires. It requires a long time preference. Because of that it encourages late marriage, and careful mate selection. The reward we get for economic accountability, constant compromise, suppression of our instincts and desires, the risk of planning, delaying marriage, and careful mate selection, is status cues and economic enfranchisement by others who pay these high costs. Conversely, if we do not ‘conform’ we pay the cost of lost economic and social opportunity. If one ‘cheats’ through non conformity, one is effectively obtaining the benefits of this highly conforming, high-trust, highly productive social order at a discount — at the expense of others, and they see it as ‘unfair’. It is not clear to westerners who live in a universe of nuclear families, that this social order is an artificial construct created by the church in order to undermine inbreeding and family and tribal ties. The church outlawed marrying as far out as six cousins. (if we did that to the muslim world they would be unable to breed.) The manorial system required that one demonstrate fitness in order to obtain land to rent, in order to obtain a wife and feed a family (and obtain access to sex.) These three systems: the manorial (corporate) system, and the nuclear family, and the common law, induced the conformity we see as ‘western conservatism’. (which is inaccurate. It’s western germanic christian manorialism with english classical liberal institutions that ‘conservatives’ feel ‘conservative’ about.) But it is impossible to create a high trust society (“getting to Denmark”) without these three systems. That is why the west is unique. It used the nuclear family, the ‘corporation’, and the common law (no centralized power) to create a highly accountable system where allegiance was to society as a whole rather than family or tribe. And by doing so, this process insured quality breeding: it suppressed the breeding of the underclasses. (Which has led to the assertion, that while western ‘whites’ and ashkenazi jews previously had the same IQ distribution, we have fallen by 5 points since 1850 because of overbreeding by the lower classes. As it stands, the USA will continue to decline in aggregate IQ over the next century. The impact of this is not something we understand. But given that both the greek pre-industrial revolution and the British industrial revolution occurred after a similar duration of manorialism makes it very curious as to whether our way of life, which is predicated on verbal reasoning that requires a substantial part of the population possess an IQ over 106, is worth considering.) That this economic and social system unarticulated is one of the great unfortunate features of history.It prevents conservatives from understanding that their social system can adapt given the proper institutions and ridiculous non-conforming objections like race and sexual preference are immaterial if the institutional safeguards are in place to protect the economy from aberrant norms. WIthout understanding our own society as a set of causal institutions we cannot create a government of exchanges where both win rather than dictates where one loses. And the central premise of libertarian philosophy is that we can EXCHANGE, rather than FORCE each other to do things.

  • A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance

    Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members of the society to avoid. We can bear these costs for both positive and negative reasons: Positive: as an investment in the future, in the hope that these people will learn the norms, increase the portfolio of opportunities, or increase the portfolio of assets. Negative: as a matter of convenience, resulting in our privatization of public assets ourselves, we can refrain from paying the cost of policing the portfolios by forgoing opportunities with the individual, or bearing the costs of protecting those assets from involuntary transfer. The only way to know the difference between the positive and negative use of Tolerance, is to know whether the actions of the individual or group in question will result in the accumulation of assets or not. But it should be clear that it is impossible to perform neutral tolerance. All tolerance is either good or bad. Claiming ignorance is just convenience: privatization. Theft of public assets for one’s personal consumption. The complexity arises when multiple portfolios are involve and outcomes are speculative. Unless ‘Tolerance’ is an economic strategy whose impact is fully understood by the population, it is not investment but convenience. The example in the western countries is that they pay for their social programs by a) letting the USA pay for their international trade and defense costs, and b) using immigrants to create consumption not possible for the people to create by productivity. In canada, we add c) which is that we export resources. So the cost to canada is one of a pair of risk propositions: that immigrants can be assimilated sufficiently that a ‘canada’ and its portfolio can be maintained, OR that the future is irrelevant, and there is no responsibility we hold toward the future. In the States, one population holds to its heritage – attempting to retain its portfolio in the belief that it is something unique in human history. Another seeks to consume that portfolio in an attempt to build a more utopian society. And that is the source of conflict.

  • A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance

    Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members of the society to avoid. We can bear these costs for both positive and negative reasons: Positive: as an investment in the future, in the hope that these people will learn the norms, increase the portfolio of opportunities, or increase the portfolio of assets. Negative: as a matter of convenience, resulting in our privatization of public assets ourselves, we can refrain from paying the cost of policing the portfolios by forgoing opportunities with the individual, or bearing the costs of protecting those assets from involuntary transfer. The only way to know the difference between the positive and negative use of Tolerance, is to know whether the actions of the individual or group in question will result in the accumulation of assets or not. But it should be clear that it is impossible to perform neutral tolerance. All tolerance is either good or bad. Claiming ignorance is just convenience: privatization. Theft of public assets for one’s personal consumption. The complexity arises when multiple portfolios are involve and outcomes are speculative. Unless ‘Tolerance’ is an economic strategy whose impact is fully understood by the population, it is not investment but convenience. The example in the western countries is that they pay for their social programs by a) letting the USA pay for their international trade and defense costs, and b) using immigrants to create consumption not possible for the people to create by productivity. In canada, we add c) which is that we export resources. So the cost to canada is one of a pair of risk propositions: that immigrants can be assimilated sufficiently that a ‘canada’ and its portfolio can be maintained, OR that the future is irrelevant, and there is no responsibility we hold toward the future. In the States, one population holds to its heritage – attempting to retain its portfolio in the belief that it is something unique in human history. Another seeks to consume that portfolio in an attempt to build a more utopian society. And that is the source of conflict.

  • It’s Not That I Value Free Markets In The Abstract.

    Last night, a wonderfully intelligent Canadian I’ve recently met referred to me as a ‘free marketer’. Which in Canadian lingo is a synonym for Libertarian. (We clearly need a Mises chapter up here in eastern Canada.) And, I’m fussing with writing a page the separates Propertarians from Anarcho Capitalists. If it was possible to regulate trade intelligently, I don’t have a problem with it per se. I have a problem with market regulation because its not possible to regulate it without causing harm. I don’t see regulation as an abstract ethical question, because I see markets as intentional not natural constructs. (Which I’ve addressed elsewhere.) I see it as a time-knowledge problem. That’s a long way of stating that it’s kind of interesting to be referred to by a property of one’s classification, where the property is tangental to the classification. 🙂 I’d prefer to be called a conservative or libertarian. I want freedom on principle. The economy is just a tool. Propertarian reasoning says that we cannot do certain things. It explains why we must do certain things. It allows us to do stupid things if we want to. It allows us to do beneficial things if we want to. We pay or gain the consequences either way. Just like any other corporation.