Aug 22, 2016 9:36am
(important piece) (synthesizing) (readable)
—“Constructionism involves the creation of a product to show learning. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender, as well as tables, chairs and atoms are socially constructed. Kant, Garns, and Marx were among the first to suggest such an ambitious expansion of the power of ideas to inform the material realities of people’s lives.”—
1) To act successfully one must act correspondingly (truth).
2) We discover correspondence: Personally, Socially, Contractually, Legally, Scientifically, Aesthetically.
3) We can VALUE those discoveries more, or less, as they assist or impede our group evolutionary strategy.
4) We can construct norms (including myths, and falsehoods) to convey those values(truth or falsehood) we attach to our discoveries.
5) But we will pay the cost of any values that we attach to discoveries,
Race, sexuality, gender, chairs, tables, and atoms may or may not be socially discovered. They are absolutely socially valued.
But they correspond to reality.
Because reality does not care about our values.
And those that value falsely pay the cost, and those that value truthfully, reap the reward.
Truth determines velocity of everything in a culture. Not only the economy, and therefore our wealth, but the velocity of our evolution, and even our ability to survive in competition with other societies.
The best way to harm a people is to teach them to value a falsehood. You poison the mind, which poisons other minds. You leave the body alive, but kill the civilization.
The only reason social construction is available is because a new technology for information distribution has become available, and the discovery of a means of correcting the falsehood faster than it spreads is impossible.
Whether it be the oral tradition and travel in prehistory, writing and pulpit and roads in the ancient world, or printing and shipping in the modern, or media and propaganda in the present, the cost of deception is always higher than the cost of falsehood.
Ergo we must develop institutions that correct falsehoods over time, and bear the intertemporal cost of the damage done by those falsehoods.
Thankfully the west has the most responsive technology for defeating lies and deceits and propaganda: natural, judge-discovered, common law, with universal standing and universal application. The first successful suit creates the prohibition against falsehoods (frauds).
We merely must defend the informational commons by requiring a warranty of due diligence against informational harm, as we do with every other kind of harm.
What prevented us from institutionalizing the requirement for truthful speech in the commons was a failure to understand how to test for truthfulness.
Now that we have this test, we can enforce an involuntary warranty of due diligence against any speech placed into the commons.
And while it may take some skill to test, just as grammar and meaning take some skill to test, and while it may take some greater explanation to employ these tests, they are not altogether that difficult if we restore grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and merely add operational language (e-prime) to that list.
If we can teach mathematics which is not intuitive, we can teach grammar, logic, rhetoric, and operational language, which is. These are the two languages with which we describe the world: the mathematical for the inanimate non-sentient and physical, and the operational for the animate, sentient, and intellectual.
The tests of due diligence for the warranty of truthfulness are:
1 – categorical consistency (identity and non-conflation)
2 – internal consistency (logical and non-contradictory)
3 – external consistency (external correspondence)
4 – operational consistency ( existential possibility)
5 – moral consistency ( voluntary possibility )
6 – scope consistency (limits, full accounting, and parsimony)
If we test any utterance against these six criteria, then it is almost impossible to engage in error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading, pseudoscience, and deceit, without intentionally engaging in deceit.
And just as reason in the ancient world’s greek civilization raised man out of ignorance, and British science in the modern world rescued us from mysticism, poverty and disease, truthfulness in the present world will have as great an effect on mankind – both disruptively, and beneficially.
We are the men of the west. Truth is both our most powerful weapon in defeat of the dark forces of time, ignorance, and deceit, and our most powerful technology of Transcendence.
With truth we shall become the gods we seek.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
