Theme: Institution

CIVILIZATION: ALL PROBLEMS OF INFORMATION

The solution to ALL HUMAN PROBLEMS OF COOPERATION is (a) information and (b) institutions that facilitate the production, distribution, and testing of information. We need institutions that allow the intergenerational transfer of information. Previously savings and interest combine with property and family provided those institutions. The 20th century can be seen as a pseudoscientific attack on those western traditions.

They attacked us because we habituated our scientific culture without being able to articulate what we had habituated in rational and scientific language.

We were vulnerable to that attack because we used democracy to overthrow the aristocracy, rather than to ask for additional houses with which to conduct trades between long term genetic responsibility (monarchy), long term territorial responsibility (nobility), medium term economic responsibility (burghers), medium term responsibility for production( man as provider of family consumption), and short term responsibility for consumption in reproduction (woman as producer of generations).

In every civilization, every nation, every sub culture, every class, and every person, at every age, in both genders makes use of some cognitive constant against which they calculate their judgements. Unfortunately, no such constants exist. We call this assumption of constants ‘taking something for granted’. Taking something for granted makes decisions easier when we have sparse information. But without knowing that we are taking something for granted in order to make decisions easier, we do not know the limits of the decisions we can make under the assumptions that we take for granted.

Hence the importance that all individuals of all ages, in both genders, in all classes in all subcultures in all nations and all civilizations know the limits of the decisions that they make because of the assumptions that they make. And it is not complicated to teach people this set of limits of knowledge, and why. It is certainly easier than reading, writing, and arithmetic – which are contrary to human cognitive habits,. There is nothing more natural to human cognitive habits than deciding among our wants and the possibility of obtaining them in the circumstances we exist in, with the resources at our disposal, with the abilities that we possess. Unfortunately, lying to ourselves and others about limits, circumstances, recourses, and abilities, is often easier that finding a solution without lying about them. So while we may have a desire to possess the value of the skills of reading and writing in obtaining our wants despite their cognitively unnatural demands, we may not desire to possess the skill of ascertaining the limits of our judgements in obtaining our wants despite their cognitively natural demands.

So just as we must work hard to teach people the value of reading and writing so that we make use of the written and calculative information systems, we must also teach people the value of limits of knowledge so that they can make use of the information system in obtaining their wants through cooperation with others.

There are differences in institutional requirements between:

Simple arithmetic knowledge – which requires the institution of teaching…

And literary knowledge which requires accumulated written material stored in institutions private and public so that we can access it, but requires little interpersonal cooperation other than argument to assist us in filtering information….

And the institutions of contract, law, and judiciary And the institutions of money, accounting, and banking, require formal institutions in addition to education….

And the limits of knowledge, requires education, and the institutions of arithemtic, literacy, finance, and at least natural law if not the law iteself. Each of these skills and the institutions that perpetuate them, make us aware of both opportunities if we learn them and limits imposed upon us by necessity when we have.

There are few people who do not desire to read, more that do not desire to perform mathematics, more that do not want knowledge of finance and economics, more that do not want knowledge of natural law, law, contract, and court.

But we defend ourselves against the ignorant, regardless of those numbers, in no small part by forcible education in those subjects – at least at the level to which they can find some useful (paying) labor.

And we now require that we expand the knowledge of people prior to their ability to enter the franchise, such that they cannot be easily lied to by those who would use their ignorance to in turn use the franchise to destroy those institutions of knowledge that we have evolved, incrementally, in the west, over millennia.

The aggression against the ignorant mind is a means of insuring ourselves that the bottom do not burden the top over-muchly, and in doing so stagnate or regress the society that depends upon individual ability to make use of the various institutions by which we manufacture, distribute, make use of information, in the pursuit of information about opportunities that we can consume, and transform into consumption for us, our families, our classes, our tribes, our nations, and our civilizations, and in the end… mankind.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine