—“Hi Mr. Doolittle, From my (very limited) knowledge of your work, you seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.
Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights? From what I’ve seen, most of us favor an overall capitalistic economic structure with the caveat that economic activity should support the nation, both financially and morally (spiritually?), such as through the limiting of pornography and the banning of usury (actual usury, such as predatory lending terms, not merely interest on capital), and limiting the activity of foreign interests in domestic issues. I ask whether you think it’s a weakness that we don’t discuss this because even though there is a general consensus, I dislike having blind spots in my worldview.
Lastly, have you read James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution and/or Sam Francis’ follow-up Leviathan and its enemies? If so, what were your thoughts on the theory presented re: the transformation of capitalist society to a managerial society?”—
Great questions. I”m going to reframe the first one:
–“You seem very concerned with legal rights and economic questions (based upon a moral framework), which is a definite departure from many on the Alt-Right who focus primarily on socio-political issues.”–
I’ll restate this as I try to unify science, morality, law, and philosophy into a single discipline that merely requires we speak truthfully in matters of the commons, and I advocate the forcible restructuring of our institutions using the language of institutions: law.
What you see in the alt right, despite the alt right’s embrace of science, is the perpetuation of moral language. The question is, if we evolved from supernatural to reason, to rationalism, to science, and in my work “complete scientific realism”, then why would people continue to argue in reasonable and rational terms, and partly scientific terms, when scientific and completely scientific are available?
Well, there are four reasons: (a) moral language helps us rally and shame. (b) moral language helps us with catharsis, (c) moral language is intuitionistic even if unscientific, and (d) scientific l language is none of the above.
So to simplify that, I’ll say that I use the language of natural law to construct institutions of natural law: exchange, rather than trying to argue that one position is superior to another in order to enforce a monopoly decision that I prefer over the monopoly decisions that others prefer.
—“Do you think it’s a weakness of our movement to avoid discussion of economic & legal rights?”—
All rights are contractually exchanged, that’s the only way they can exist. Natural rights are those we generally require if we are to avoid conflict with one another, and foster cooperation and competition with one another. Otherwise they’re not contract rights or natural rights, but legislative rights enforced by an insurer of last resort. We do not contract for our rights. In our case the government is an insurer. And the government works to construct LEGISLATIVE rights, not NATURAL RIGHTS.
SO in answer to your question, it’s not useful to discuss rights other than those we require.
Instead, I’ve stated it differently: that our position can, and must be, that the only reason we do not use our wealth of personal violence, group violence, and organized violence, to construct legal rights in our interests alone at the expense of other’s desired natural rights, is if we all possess natural rights and natural rights alone.
So I’ve tried to restore the reality of political philosophy to the state prior to the set of lies we created in order to justify adding women to the franchise, in an equivalent house, rather than in their own separate house of government: that the only reason to forgo our desire to rule in our own self interest, is if we rule by rule of law in one another’s equal interest. And if that is not the case, then we simply license parasitism and our own destruction.
The first question of ethics and politics is ‘why don’t I just kill you and take your stuff’. It’s only after we’ve decided that we will cooperate that we enter the question of ethics (how not to disincentivize cooperation), or politics (how not to disincentivize the production of commons.)
We value a MERITOCRATIC commons (political), economy (ethics), reproductive (family), structure that is against the interests of those who lack competitive reproductive desirability, competitive productive ability, and productive ability to contribute to the commons. That you phrase the question as moral, and I phrase it as economic is the problem with the alt-right that I am trying to solve by providing a rational and scientific language for the discussion, comparison, and contrast of all epistemic, ethical, political, and group evolutionary strategies.
The weakness is that we will not come to terms with the fact that meritocracy and eugenics and our ability to produce wealth and commons are antithetical to democracy, and that without the restoration of the market for commons and a judicial monarchy (inherited), we cannot possess the liberty and meritocracy we desire.
Eugenics is incompatible with democracy. The original settlers (my ancestors included) used different language but the American colonies were an experiment in eugenics. The disaster was the Louisiana purchase that requires vast immigration to populate the new territory so that it would not be seized (yet again) by the European powers. The new territory would have extended slavery, and this would have firmly put both taxation (on export goods) and the power of the federal government, in the hands of the agrarians and their international market, at the expense of the new industrialists and the domestic market. Had we retained the original colonies it is possible that we could have retained the eugenic experiment – even with the handicap of the Scotts-Irish in the south.
Of course, I have read Burnham and I consider him one of my greater influences – he gave me the moral courage so to speak to abandon my cultural allegiances as a member of the puritan families, the anti-monarchy forces in the English civil wars, and the anti-monarchy movement in the American revolution. I consider all of these to be failures. You can see my entire reading list onPropertarianism.com/reading-list, and you can contact Ramsey because he maintains our library, and we have most of the work in digital format available for readers.
Burnham’s observation is not unique, but he was trying to warn us about it. There are a couple of human tendencies that we should be aware of:
1) the models we use like analogies to animals, hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, and now computational (information) change with every era, and we misapply properties of those models to man.
Man is an organism that grows and is changed by his growth from conception to old age. We tend to try to hang on to a model and extend the use of that model in our minds to ever greater scope. But they’re just analogies, with information in both physics and social science the current state of our ability to represent the world.
2) tendency to thing obvious trends are special and novel. But if we look at all human organizations they go through the same cycles and Burnham was trying to tell us that. Like Hayek and popper, or perhaps even Simmel, he was trying to describe the problem of political order as an information and decidability problem. So just as monarchies fell because their families lacked sufficient population to produce sufficient technocrats to run things, and just as private companies had to give way to corporations with professional managers, the size and scale of the modern state requires institutions. Whether those institutions could have been provided by market services is a question of maturity. At first, no, but over time yes.
He was critical because he did not have a solution. We have all be correct in criticizing socialism. What we haven’t been correct about is in criticizing capitalism and democracy. Yes, we can have a star trek society with an average IQ of 125 or higher. But the Arabs cannot with an average IQ of 85-90 at the best. Neither can the Brazilians with such an enormous underclass in relation to the productivity and quality of their institutions.
I hope this gave you some ideas to work with.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
