Natural Law Institute

The Problem:

Solving Your, Our, Everyone’s Political Conflict: The Crisis of our Age

EXPLANATION
There aren’t that many causes of our conflicts, but there are many conflicts that arise because of those few causes, and the culmination of these conflicts threatens to tear us apart – to the detriment of all of us past, present, and future.

All human populations, in the Age of Transformation, developed a group strategy, a set of metaphysical presumptions about the world, myths to explain the world and their strategy within that world as ‘good’, a set of parables and stories to reinforce it, usually a literature or religion to persist it, and a logic of sorts to defend it – whehter mythical, religious, philsophical, historical, empirical, or secientific – and in most cases more than one of those logics, each one, of greater precision than the last. Human populations then adapt to those institutions and thoe institutions slowly atdapt to the population as the size, complexity, economy, and politics of the people increases (or declines). This group strategy is extremely resistant to change because it’s interwoven in every aspect of a the life of every individual in every civilization as a presumption as certain as gravity.

Like all other people, Europeans do not understand the metaphsical presumptions they make of the world and of man that are at this point five to eight thousand years old -and formed on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia. But they begin with one pirinciple: the preservation of sovereignty and autonomy by the prohibition on authority, leaving us to voluntary agreement in markets for cooperation in all walks of life on one hand, and responsibility for preserving that sovereignty, autonomy. We have done so, more so than any other people, by maximizing individual responsibility for mind, self, kin, the private, and the common, in display, word, and deed – including the high cost of truth before face regardless of cost. (The very thing the marxist, feminist, and woke movments have sought to overturn.) We were the first people ever to put the polity before the family. The first to eliminate tribalism, and the first to eliminate clannishness. As such we are the only high trust people capable of producing commons as our competitive advantage – reducing the opportunity costs as well as material costs for all.

Throughout human history, every time humans develop technology whether conceptual, physical, behavioral, economic, or institutional, we grant opportunity for exercise of individual agency to a larger pool of people – what we think of as raising people from one class to the next. Every time this happens, the people who ascend – the whole body of people across the spectrum of classes – carry with them the presumptions, narratives, values, traditions of their previous class – a previous class with less agency and opportunity. Some of these instincts, intuitions, and beliefs are genetic, some class, some local, and some accidents of historical chaos, superstition, and ignorance. And like technology, means of deception, fraud, conspiracy, corruption, sedition, and treason increase with each change. And institutions often lag in prohibiting each emergence of new criminality, sedition, and treason.

Worse, all human organizations calcify by maximizing discounts (cheating, privileges), free riding, rent seeking, and corruption – and this calcification applies to governments, and to the policy, legislation and laws produced by governments. This expansion occurs until some change whether systemic gradual, or immediate shock, causes the incentive to reform – or causes collapse because it cannot reform. At present we have what Professor Turchin calls an ‘oversupply of elites’, largely in the form of ‘credentialists’ which are politically comforting terms for people who are costly, contribute no material value, and who have achieved positions through talking and credentails rather than through demonstrated competency in military, industry, or commerce with real people under adversarial circumstances. In our case that’s the government, the academy, the media, the financial sector, and those global corporations that circumvent the people’s will we desire to be expressed via the legislature.

So the crisis of our age is neither novel nor surprising. We ascended the middle class in the age of enlightenment, the working class in the industrial revolution, and women in the postwar era, and we have immigrated millions from outside our european tradition in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century as we united the world in free trade and the promise of the end of poverty. All the while increasing the free-riding, rent seeking, and corruption classes that are a burden on the shrinking number of productive people. The worst consequence is the destruction of the primary institution of civilization -the family, and as a consequence sufficient reprodution to maintain our high trust civilization.

But the value of the anglo model of government is that we can change the law and people adapt – where in nearly every other form of government, the people not the rules must be changed. As such in the anglo tradition the manner of implementing change, which has created the british and american governents – the oldest existing today – is the use of a Common Law Suit against the state for a redress of grievances. What the founding fathers did with England.

We’re Repeating the Founding Fathers’ Demand for Reform. And it will work.