Theme: Grammar

THE LANGUGAGE OF SOVEREIGNTY

(must read) (synthesis) (good for informed newbies)

I suppose it doesn’t occur to people that reading philosophers and reading fantasy, science fiction, crime novels, and historical fiction are all identical activities separated only by the pretense of the philosopher. A pretense only exceeded by theologists, and pseudoscientists.

It’s amazing to me how – as we mature – we trip over some frame of reference and build upon it: scientific, historical, literary, or their evil twins: pseudoscientific, mythical, philosophical, and theological. And that the obvious difference between those choices is, like the solipsistic autistic spectrum, a bias between the real, actionable, and transformative – and the imaginary, inactionable, and escapist. The question is whether we merely stumble into that escapist vs action bias, or whether we gravitate because of a genetic bias – or both.

I don’t study philosophy – the literature of wishes and half deceits. I study institutions: existential and self perpetuating sequences of operations constructed from rational incentives. Institutions of personal transformation. Institutions of cooperation. Institutions of competition and conflict. Institutions of evolution and transcendence.

I want to end the false pretense that philosophy – in the platonic sense – has been a value or is a respectable pursuit – rather than the west’s version of supernaturalism. A half truth. A conflation of the supernatural and imaginary, and the rational and existential. The platonic equivalent of a supernaturalism that one can conduct in polite company without looking foolish or losing status by appeals to authority from the supernatural. A more respectable way of practicing superstition.

We possess sciences, history, and literature. With literature as our means of envisioning possibilities, history as our record of our limits, and science as our record of the limits of the universe. And neither science, nor history, nor literature claims rationalist, platonic, or supernatural authority. An authority that is desirable only as a means of escapism from the difficult task of providing others sufficient value that they will cooperate with you in mutually productive exchange. The search for truth constantly respects the preservation of sovereignty: there is no authority in truth, only the absence of it. Absent authority, absent error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit, we are left only with productive, fully informed, voluntary transfer limited to productive externality, and the choice to compromise and cooperate truthfully, or to withdraw to violence – the failure to cooperate, while preserving truth and sovereignty. (This also explains the origins of western trial by combat).

There are no answers in the words of men in the past, only evidence that they pursued solutions to the same problems with different levels of truth by deflation and falsehood by conflation. The truth has stood before us since our origins and we have not ourselves understood it. And by failing to understand it, by practicing it as genetic predisposition, cultural tradition, institutional tradition, literature and myth, we have perpetuated it over millennia. A metaphysical assumption about the fixed nature of man that is instead a choice: Sovereignty. From that one choice all the west descends – all our works, all our arts, all our sciences. Our whole civilization depends upon this one presumption. A presumption that is a gift from our ancestors – the source of our prosperity and achievement. We assume sovereignty as our most desirable status signal.

But Sovereignty is a status signal that is not available to those who lack agency because of biological impulsivity, cognitive limitations, or lack of training (socialization) in the limits of impulse. In the west, we have selected for agency for thousands of years both through our ancient culture, our nearly universal militia training, independent farmsteads, manorial control of land, agrarian hardship, and the intolerance of the seasons, and the ravages of disease. Other civilizations have not. While the lower classes lack agency we were able to minimize their number over the centuries. Unfortunately, for reasons of reproductive and pedagogical necessity, women retain their lack of agency until they have enough children that they learn it by their limits, or are overwhelmed by the irreconcilability of reality and impulsivity. Men of any capability at all possess agency for the simple reason of competitive and reproductive necessity. So sovereignty comes more easily to men – at least men in the middle and upper genetic (meritocratic) classes – not only because of their caloric independence, but because of evolutionary biology.

And had we understood that gift of sovereignty, the attempts to attack it might have been more successful – as they were in the ancient world when we were flooded by immigrants, migrants, and eventually by the plague that they brought with them from the east, the devastation of which left open the expansion of the greatest lie man had yet invented: islam. A lie perfectly constructed to satisfy the needs of the “evil 80’s”: those people cognitively unable to compete by truthful, inventive, productive, voluntary means, but able to compete by reproductive, consumptive, and as a consequence, the military strategy of raiders. As in the current era, the forces of those incapable of our Sovereignty achieve through immigration, migration, religious conversion of women and the underclasses, violent raids (terrorism today), parasitism (upon institutions and , what they could not achieve by military, intellectual, commercial, cultural means on their own. They flee to the good bringing with them the genetic, institutional, cultural, informational, disease in the current era no different in consequence from the biological disease they brought with them in the ancient. And with the same intent: to achieve through migration, conversion, devolution, and seizure of political power by fiat of numbers, in this era what their ancestors had achieved in the ancient era by the christianization of the west and the thousand year dark age, we half corrected with the enlightenment of the physical sciences, and the five hundred year enlightenment we still struggle to complete in the social and conceptual sciences.

We do not need to search for what is good. The world is full of good ideas. We can search to eliminate what is bad, and only good remains. We can search for what is false and only the true remains. The common law does not search for what is good. It has but one rule: Sovereignty. whatever is not bad is good. The markets do not search for what is good. They search for what is not bad under Sovereignty. Whatever is not bad is good.

But then, while anything that is not bad, is good, whether it is affordable is something else. And to make goods that are affordable requires many hands to make light work. So we rally others to our presumptuous goods and ignore or shame those who dismiss our marketing of presumptuous goods. And in doing so discover whether this presumptuous good is more or less important than others’ presumptuous goods.

The search for these goods is merely a means by which we market to others (rally) for the cooperation in the production of one end or another. All that remains is to prevent people from deception in marketing. In other words, all that remains is to prohibit fraud in the marketing of information for the purpose of rallying for the purpose of producing commons. And can prohibit fraud in the marketing of information, the same way we prohibit it in the marketing of goods and services: by involuntary warranty of due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, conflation, obscurantism, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and deceit.

When one rallies around a religion, a philosophy, an ideology, a party, a policy, the question is whether one is marketing fraudulently or truthfully. And there is only one language of truthfulness. A language we invented over centuries, over Millenia to speak truthfully, and therefore in defense of Sovereignty – fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality. That language is science.

True, we may speak in analogy, literature, and myth in order to assist in the transfer of MEANING, but then we have only told a half-truth. We must then warranty against falsehood, and insure that our meaning is free of error, bias, suggestion, and deceit. And our only guarantee of such is the involuntary warranty and susceptibility to torte (suit) by our peers if we do not. And the requirement that ‘loser pays’ to prevent the malincentives of economic overloading of the dispute rather than the adjudication of the dispute on purely meritorious grounds.

So, philosophy is just another fantasy literature. I practice social science: the institutions of cognition, cooperation, conflict, and transcendence. And I organize it similarly to Aristotle’s categories of philosophy. But I do this in no small part to end the conflationary deceptions common in pseudoscience, philosophy, ideology, and theology. There is but one social science, and that is law, and the measurement of its success or failure in that immature discipline by which we measure our relative velocity that we call economics.

There is but one psychology: the need to, desire to, acquire a host of inventories needed for our joy, reproduction, and survival, and the structure of the human brain which unfortunately denies us access to sufficient introspection to make judgements about the criteria that determines the values we attribute to our own thoughts. Thoughts whose value is attributable entirely to various forms of acquisition, preservation, consumption and loss. Aside from acquisition and the emotions that inform us as to our successes, conflicts, and failures, all human language consists of negotiation. And our primary difficulty in negotiating truthfully in order to cooperate in increasing numbers at increasingly abstract scales, is that we did not evolve to speak truthfully for the common good, but to negotiate selfishly for the private good, while not harming ourselves in the commons (family, pack, tribe, and nation).

And there is but one method of speaking truthfully: the laundering of our imaginary free-associations (ideas) – produced by a mind we cannot introspectively examine – of all error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading, pseudoscience, and deceit. And while we can never know if we speak the perfect truth, we can attempt to do so by a series of tests that complete the scientific method by extending it from physical sciences to social and cognitive (personal) sciences. Those tests look for consistency. Or what is called in science (not philosophy) ‘determinism’ – meaning ‘ patterns of regularity’. And while it might seem difficult to comprehend when we list them, those tests function as a grammar of language, and can be taught as such. So that if we respect the grammar of that language, by and large, it is hard to claim something is known, and therefore that we can make a truth claim about it, if we cannot construct sentences (propositions and descriptions), that …..

1 – Identitarian – identity. Categorical consistency – the test of non conflation. Am i mixing things so that I can create false comparisons?

2 – Logical – internal consistency – Is what I’m saying reasonable, rational, logical, and possible?

3 – Empirical – external consistency – does what I’m saying correspond to reality, and more importantly, where does it NOT correspond to reality?

4 – Reciprocal – morally consistent – does what I’m saying consist of productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers limited to productive (beneficial) externalities?

5 – Operational – existential consistency – can what I’m saying be reduced to a sequence of possible, repeatable, testable human cognitive, or physical operations?

6 – Complete – scope consistency – have ai fully accounted for all costs seen and unseen for intended and unintended consequences? Can I state the limits beyond which what I state will fail? Is this the most parsimonious means by which I can state this, such that there is no opportunity to be fooled by it?

These criteria, with very little more explanation, can be used in the common law as the initial criteria (guidelines) for the beginning of, and continuous evolution of, a common law, holding people in all walks of life, accountable to their peers – not to a regulatory government bureaucracy, but to civic suit by their peers- as a market good (product, service, or information) brought to market for the purpose of rallying (marketing) one or more others toward an end – and limited to market activity. In other words, private conversation without personal, commercial, political incentive, differs from speech in public, or amplified, or published by any form of media.

And by this one act: the constitutional adoption of this constraint, we will restore sovereignty to western civilization, overthrow a century of mysticism by which eastern thinkers have tried for the second time to destroy the west. overthrow the ability of the practitioners of that new religion in State, academy, public intellectuals, and marketers and advertisers, from further advancing of the conquest of The Sovereign Civilization by hordes of the ‘evil 80s’ and the falsehood (theology) that they depend upon to use in attacking it.

Sovereignty had many consequences. Not the least of which was allowing us, for profit, to domesticate (give agency to) man, and in doing so, rise him out of ignorance, superstition, starvation, poverty, and disease. Sovereignty requires truth be spoken between peers for it to exist, and a militia, judge, jury, and senate of sovereign men to enforce it. But likewise, possessing a militia, a judge, jury, and senate of sovereign men, by the juridical demand for truth, we can reproduce and retain that sovereignty. Not because of falsehoods. But because truth is a competitive advantage no other people, no other civilization has manage to construct as a commons. Sovereignty (the good), Truth(truthfulness) and Beauty(investment in the creation of excellent goods) are the values of western civilization.

This is not a statement of philosophy. But a statement of personal, social, and group evolutionary science, and the institutions necessary to advance group evolution, in competition with hostile other groups attempting to advance their evolution. The assumption is that having dragged mankind out of ignorance, superstition, starvation, poverty, and disease by sovereignty and by consequence truth, and by consequence the various institutions, and by consequence the various sciences, and having done so conquered and modernized the world in the colonial and capitalist periods, that our condition until at least the first world war, was not one of transcending man. And that, there is some superior means of decision making (preference choice) at the scale of ‘civilization’.

And while one might report (say) such a thing. Humans worldwide actively demonstrate something else: a desire to consume the products of sovereignty even if they are undesirous of incapable of sovereignty themselves.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute