Theme: Incentives

“Nietzche: Man is a tortured being trapped between god and beast”

Doolittle: Man is a purely rational actor having to constantly choose between the short personal gratification at the expense of others and long term gratification through cooperation with others. With the optimum solution for both short and long term is to achieve personal perfection without causing retaliation by others that would destroy those ambitions.

Most of us struggle in one way or another with the constant problem of achievement without causing retaliation (rejection, resistance, restitution, punishment).

And at the same time we struggle with internal impulse and the impatient desire to achieve our ends and the frustration of having to worry about others rather than only the self.

Nietzche uses romantic, poetic, narrative language to make this rather boring statement of cooperative economics. But by using that ancient primitive poetic language he fails to inform us as to the cause. And given that cause how to succeed.

Hence why I say that Nietzche and propertarianism are compatible. The question is WHICH IS MORE ACTIONABLE? Read him for inspiration and integration with your soul. Choose Propertarianism as the means of achieving it.

In retrospect I see my work as succeeding where spencer failed. We had Darwin and Nietzche, but because of competition from the ‘new age’ provided by marx economically pseudoscientifiic and immoral Marx and immoral and correlative pseudoscientific keynes, the generation that included Spencer, pareto, weber and durkheim, and the generation that included Mises, Popper, Hayek, Brouwer, and Bridgman all failed.

THey failed for the same reason the Greeks failed: they worked from the position of virtue and morality (contribution to commons) instead of simply grasping the reductio simplicity of man: we are all rational actors and choose cooperation when beneficial, and non-cooperation when it is beneficial, and we judge all our actions by the cost vs the likely return, given our experience. Man is not moral per se, he just evolved intuitions to assist him if he DOES wish to act morally because it is in his interest, and he must be cautioned that he will incur retaliation if he acts immorally by imposing costs upon others.

So we understand man’s behavior as purely rational, and moral intuitions as warnings that we are likely to incurr retaliation for our actions.