(important concept in demarcation between science and non-science)
I want to try to put my objection – if we can call it an objection – into a more articulate form, and see if I can convince you, or at least see if I am capable of communicating this idea with any degree of clarity.
1 – CONFLATION TO COMMUNICATE VS DECONFLATION TO INNOVATE
I”m not necessarily objecting to the conflation of experience, action, observation, and existence, because otherwise we could not produce literature and art, the purpose of which is loading and framing in order to attribute value through shared experience, to ideas. But I want to point out the consequences of conflationary( monopoly ) and deconflationary (competing) models by which civilizations produce and use knowledge.
2 – DECONFLATION AND COMPETITION VS CONFLATION AND AUTHORITARIANISM
In the western tradition, we maintained separate disciplines for Law, Religion, and ….welll… “Theory”, or what we call ‘science”. Or Religion: what we should do, Theory, how we do it, and Law, what we must not do. In the west , our civic disciplines are divided into the common law; contractual politics that are limited by that common law;
Our celebrations and festivals and art function as our ‘church’ experience (bonding), and our mythology as our literature (aspirations).
Our science and technology and commerce function as their own discipline inspired by religion and limited by law.
Our succes at discovering truth proper (scientific truth) is due to our evolution of empirical contractual law, independent of the state, independent of religion,
We divided the related properties of existence, and thereby deconflated them just as all human thought consists of a process of deconflation (increasing information), free association (pattern recognition), and hypothesis (ideation).
3 – COMPARISONS
Other civilizations that did NOT start with sovereign contractualism did not do this, and they retained conflation, in order to retain authoritarianism. (fertile crescent, east Asia). Monotheism, uniting law, religion, and even a pretense of existence into a literature, created the most conflationary totalitarianism yet developed. Law, politics, religion, and science deconflated those same concepts and left them not only open to further investigation and evolution, but prevented the deception that arose from the conflation of manipulation of the physical world(cafts and science), dispute resolution(law), cooperative action(trade), common aspiration(religion), and education.
The result in every civilization and in every era is that conflation led to stagnation. and deconflation led to innovation. (We can go through every civilization. Fukuyama does it for us actually.)
4 – WE ALL SEEK TO ESCAPE THE COST OF DUE DILIGENCE
All of us seek opportunities and aspirational information provides us with opportunities. We all want something for nothing, and we feel intellectual opportunities are the most valuable ‘freebie’ we can obtain. Moreover, we can read books and decide ourselves, rather than enter into production of goods and services, production of commons, production of arts, or production of offspring – all of which require cooperation with those who differ in knowledge, opinion and desire from us. Which is why many of us seek to use philosophy, like religion, like science, as an authoritarian method of decidability rather than a voluntary exchange of promises, contracts, goods, services, commons, and liabilities.
All of us seek to avoid limits upon us, and so we seek to separate the limits of cost, and the limits of morality,the limits of cooperation, and the limits of law, and by doing so the limits of reality. Philosophy notoriously throughout history differs from Law and science, by ignoring costs (effort, resources, time, and money), which is why it’s failed to retain independence from religion in the modern academy.
5 – THE ENLIGHTENMENTS AND THEIR OPPOSITIONS
The anglo enlightenment, beginning with Bacon’s creation of empiricism by applying the methods of the common law, to the methods of scientific investigation, was terribly disruptive to the non-contractual peoples, even though it was natural to the anglo-saxons (north sea peoples) who had been operating a contractual government since at least the 700’s if not earlier. The English revolution was painful but was eventually settled by contract – as is traditional in anglo saxon civilization, and remains today in the USA.
The french enlightenment was written as a literature of moral persuasion, in order to protect itself from empiricism and contractualism. And its revolution destroyed french civilization, created state currency financed total war, and force the uniting of german princedoms in response. That this effort was merely an attack on the land holders in both private (noble) and church hands is obvious to us. That this ended french contribution to western civilization is less so. That it has been the sponsor for marxism and Islamism are less obvious. France fell from the stage and without interference from other nations would be german colony today.
The german enlightenment used not empiricism, and not moral literature, but rationalist literature (kant) in order to protect its social order from empiricism and contractualism that threatened the hierarchy that constitutes german ‘duty’. Kant replaced germanic Christianity not with science but with rationalist literature. He spawned the continental philosophical movement retaining conflation which has tried every bit of verbal trickery to retain conflation while proposing alternate methods of INTERPRETING and VALUING what we experience, but not better methods of ACTING upon the universe we exist within. in other words, the germans remain desperate to restore religion. Unfortunately, the germans were cut short in their maturity by the entrapment between the bolshevik/soviets who wanted to obtain eastern Europe, and conquer Europe, to defeat deconflationary empirical contractualism – and the anglos who wanted to maintain the balance of power. And the germans who had spread what remains of Hanseatic civilization across central and eastern Europe with members of her own nation, and wished to defend them.
The Jewish enlightenment expanded on the french and german by creating the great authoritarian pseudosciences: boazian anthropology (ant-Darwinian), fruedian psychology (anti-Nietzche restorationism), and Marxist socialist (anti contractualism), and even Cantorian mathematical platonism (anti-materialism), frankfurt-school criticism (anti aristocratic ethics), and combined it not just with press, but with new mass media, and new consumers with disposable income from the consumer capitalist industrial revolution. Out of the Jewish enlightenment, we get the horrors of the Bolsheviks, the soviets, the maoists, and world communism. 100M dead. And at present, we are about to lose Europe for the second time in two thousand years to another wave of ignorance.
Without bolshevism and communism we would very likely never had the world wars, and would still retain the best system of government ever evolved by man: Juridical monarchy, a market for commons by houses representing classes, a market for goods and services, and a market for reproduction, all under the rule of law.
6 – THE COST OF CONFLATION AND DECEPTION
What has been the cost of each of these failed enlightenments? What has been the cost of the Jewish alone? What of napoleon? The British was a trivial tribal dispute between the (failed) corporate-republicans and the (successful) national-monarchists.
What if the British enlightenment hadn’t been cut short by the conflicts (counter enlightenments) of the French, German, Jewish and Russians? What if the greeks had finished their invention of the industrial revolution? What if Justinian hadn’t closed the stoic and greek schools, and forcibly indoctrinated Europeans into mysticism instead of literacy and reason? What if the RESTORATION OF DECONFLATION imposed on the west by the first great deception of authoritarian monotheism had not been necessary?
Most of the great lies in history are created by conflation, and all our great achievements in dragging mankind out of ignorance and poverty have been achieved through information provided by deconfliction and competition.
SO while as a human I can empathize with the desire to assist in COMMUNICATION through conflation – thereby allowing us to impose values upon ideas, during education, and allowing us to experience life through the words of other minds. That is very different from the act of conflation in philosophy which appears in large part, whether literary philosophy, moral philosophy, or religious philosophy, to be nothing more than the use of subterfuge (the use of suggestion under the influence of suspension of disbelief), to cause either submission or agitation by artful deceit.
So just as we must have communication and education (conflation) we must have analysis and prosecution(deconflation). Without both tools, (literature for education, law for deconflation) we cannot protect ourselves from the greatest crimes in history.
Because outside of the great plagues, philosophers and prophets are responsible for more death and destruction, ignorance and poverty, susceptibility to starvation and disease than any general ever dreamed of being.
So contrary to giving philosophers a license to special pleading, my position is that the evidence is in, and that unless words are backed by warranty that they do no harm, the are no different from any other product of man. And that while no producer of goods, services, and ideas, wishes to be accountable and to warranty his materials, actions, and words, that we must constrain those people such that no intellectual products, like no services, and like no material goods can enter the market for knowledge any more so than goods and services can enter the market for consumption.
My assessment of history is that the jurists and scientist do all the work, and the prophets and the philosophers take all the credit, and us it like today’s marketers and advertisers for personal gain despite the drastic consequences of their deceptions.
So I tend to damn philosophy or literature that is objectively criminal, regardless of the intentions of the producers and distributors of it.
7 – WHY CAN WE NOT WARRANTY OUR SPEECH?
I have no idea why, in an era of mass manufacture and distribution of information that we do not require the same increase in due diligence against harm, that we have incrementally added to the production of goods and services.
If we can police polite speech (political correctness) against shame by the true, then why can we not police philosophical speech against damage by the false and immoral?
We cannot ever know what is good or true until we test them. We can, however, know that is bad and false.
If it is bad and false we can either regulate(prior constraint) in the continental model, or enforce involuntary warranty(post facto restitution) in the American model. My opinion is that regulation creates corruption and restitution creates quality.
So as to your preference for conflationary philosophy, I would say that as long as you would warranty that your conflation does not harm, then it seem you have nothing to worry about. But if your use of conflation does harm, then you do.
And if we had the same defense against deception that we have gainst every other kind of fraud, that there would be very few philosophers – and the few we had, would be of much higher calibre rather than simply those who write the rationalist equivalent of science fiction and fantasy, under the pretense of possibility, thus inspiring people to the social equivalent of yelling fire in the theatre.
8 – CLOSING
There is only one moral law of nature: do no harm. Everything that does not harm, is by definition good. One thing may be better good than another. But that is a matter of preference and taste, not of truth,
No free rides. No special pleading. Ideas produce more harm than material goods by orders of magnitudes.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
