Theme: Institution

INTRODUCTION

(draft)

I set out to provide a vehicle for conservatives to discuss their aristocratic egalitarian social model in rational rather than historical, metaphorical and moral terms.

That mission led me (over a decade) to develop Propertarianism: the logic and ethics of the high trust society. The logic and ethics of aristocratic egalitarians. The logic of the incorrectly attributed ‘protestant ethic’ – the highest trust ethic man has ‘yet’ developed.

The side effect of developing Propertarianism, was that it allowed the rational expression of *ALL* political preferences in commensurable terms. I had believed it was possible I just never intended to discover it by simply starting with Hoppe’s ethics of private property.

So, rather than treat propertarianism as a prescriptive philosophy, I left it as a universal language for the articulation of ethical and moral codes. And added the voluntary contract for property rights (mutual insurance of property rights) and high trust ethics as Aristocratic Egalitarianism. Leaving Propertarianism as the logical means of describing the ethics of all political philosophies by how much free riding was suppressed by the moral code. This system of measurement creates a single universal scale for describing criminal ethical and moral behavior in objective terms.

Once I made enough progress beyond Propertarianism and Aristocratic egalitarianism, I understood that I had a bigger challenge, if I wanted to arm conservatives and libertarians, and that was undermining progressive and postmodern fallacies.

And I struggled for most of last year with whether it was necessary or not. And I almost gave up – I think two or three times. But in the end I decided, or maybe only intuited, that I needed to include that capacity in order to demonstrate that all postmodernism is merely lying, and nothing more. Postmodernism – progressivism – is a new age mysticism meant to replace the old age mysticism – judeo-christianity. It’s just stated in verbally obscurant and highly loaded and framed form rather than mystically obscurant and framed form. But regardless of the form of obscurantism, whether mystical or linguistic, it’s still just deception.

That led me to performative truth (only humans can act, and therefore only extant truths are testimonies). And then to the understanding that the underlying problem plaguing philosophy in all fields: Philosophy proper, economics, ethics, politics, logic, math and science is the definition of truth, and moreover the purpose of truth.

You would think this was something people figured out, but if you research the topic truth is a highly contested thing. By researching truth in all fields, I was able to solve that problem and then explain why Mises, and the Austrians, as well as the progressives and Rawlsians, but more importantly the scientists, mathematicians and logicians all failed to both solve their internal conflict over the nature of truth, and why political economists and moral philosophers in particular, had failed.

I’d read a draft paper by Rafe Champion I think in the early 2000’s that described how the Austrians and Popperians had failed to solve the problem of the social sciences. And in that paper, Rafe framed the question for me pretty clearly. It stuck in the back of my mind as the underlying problem and a constant subconscious irritant. What is the logic of cooperation? Why have all these thinkers failed?

And, like all other scientifically biased folk, I had thought it was a problem of an inadequacy of mathematics or logic. But it wasn’t. It was an inadequacy of general understanding: what does it mean to claim something is true? Was the reason that none of these people solved the problem a history of philosophy saturated with platonism, an over-fascination with science, and an under-fascination with ethics, metaphysics and human action?

Joel Mokyr wrote a wonderful book called “The Gifts of Athena”. In that text he divides knowledge into “knowledge of how” and “knowledge of what”. Which I intuited was somehow not quite right or possibly unscientific. But somehow his work was taking us in the right direction. But I also intuited that it was somehow wrong for the same reason Mises was wrong. I just couldn’t figure out why I felt that intuition.

Once I realize that the fallacy of Cantorial sets as a substitution of frequency for quantity and perpetuated the fallacies of infinity and infinities had damaged the philosophy of math and that Turing’s solutions were superior, I started to understand that Marx, Freud, Cantor, Gödel, Mises, Einstein, Popper, the Socialists, Marxists, Postmodernists and Rothbard, shared a similar error originated by the Cosmopolitan Enlightenment, and that only Mises and Einstein had partly managed to escape. But an error that Poincare, Brouwer, Bridgman and Bishop seemed to intuit, but could not seem to solve.

The scientists rather than the verbalists understood something was wrong. They understood that sophisticated but empty verbalism is a means of obscuring ignorance of causality, while merely justifying correspondence, without substance. And that there is very great difference between knowledge of correlation (knowledge of use) and knowledge of causation (knowledge of construction).

But these more technical and less verbal authors had no answer to the utility and correspondence of classical mathematics despite its platonism, the internal consistency of formal logic despite it’s tautological constraint, the postwar utility of Keynesian economics, or the expansion of mathematical physics into what appear to be magical realms that could not be disproved. Physicists did manage to mature their discipline into one of information, and psychologists did managed to adopt Operationism thereby saving the discipline from its status as a psuedoscience. But by and large, philosophers proper failed to provide a unifying structure across all fields, and none solved the problem of the social sciences – economics in particular.

The counter intuitive and missing reason being simply that while it is ethical to state that some theory merely works, it is unethical to make a truth claim when one is ignorant of causality, and immoral to perpetuate platonism or obscurantism in any of its forms, in any discipline. To do so is a moral hazard, innocent deception, and white lie, that en masse, produce the same insidious effect on a population as the 12th century work of Islamic philosopher _____ had on muslim civilization by dooming it to the rejection of science and thereby permanently institutionalizing ignorance justified by mysticism.[Citation] Or Justinian’s forcible institution of Christianity and the closure of the schools of Greek Stoicism – the western equivalent of buddhism that taught disciplined individual character and action rather than disciplined disengagement from reality of buddhism or the mystical obedience to authority of Christianity. Worst of all, when Stoicism was in retrospect, the only religion whose widespread practice results in the creation of a productive and ethical civic society, and as such the most important religion ever developed by man.

The statement that truth is an ethical proposition that constrains politics, ethics, science, logic and mathematical claims may seem silly and unnecessarily burdensome to contemporary audiences – and it may forever seem silly and burdensome to audiences – because much of linguistic obscurantism concentrated in the verb “to-be”, is merely convenience – reduction of cognitive effort in an already precise and cognitively expensive english language. But on the other hand, it is fairly obvious once we realize that we are just simply lying unless we are at least trying hard to tell the truth. And telling the truth is the cure not only for ancient religious mysticism, but for new linguistic mysticism, and the constant subjugation of the populace to propaganda and deception from all disciplines both economic, political and scientific.

Hayek stated that while he himself could not solve the problem that like Bridgman he had intuited, he believed that the twentieth century would be remembered as an era of reemergent mysticism.[Citation] In this work, I hope to demonstrate that Hayek was correct in his accusation, explain why Mises came closest to the answer but failed, and to provide the reasoning with which to rescue moral, ethical, political and economic discourse from the mysticism of the late 19th through early 21st centuries.

And while I do not have terribly great hopes that I will be successful en large, since the value of obscurantism, empty verbalism, pseudoscience and outright deception, are so politically valuable, I do have some hope that like the discipline of science has managed to increase its ethical content considerably, if not entirely, that over time, what I have written here may assist those of us of more moral ambitions, in improving our institutions, and our discourse, so that morality, ethics, politics and law, are conducted scientifically: which logically equates to ‘ethically’. The reader and the passage of time will be the judge.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

Kiev Ukraine

June 2014