RE: “Lafayette Lee & Michael Anton discuss the American Revolution & Counterrevolutions”
While the modern rule of law state was invented by England, it was the founders who, under Blackstone’s articulation of Natural Law as the science of cooperation, created a system of governance under it, by producing a formalization in a constitution (contract)- creating what was very close to a science of government.
And while the group strategy of the europeans is an outlier among civilizations, it is a tradition with origins that are approaching five thousand years old. The natural law is not so much an innovation as a discovery of the science of cooperation under the preservation of individual sovereignty in one’s demonstrated interests.
That said, science is rarely complete. There are a set of holes in the founder’s constitution – all which are understandable in hindsight – but they are sufficient for the camel’s nose of sedition to find its way into the tent of that law and it’s foundations as a science of cooperation and government, the european group evolutionary strategy (values, metaphysical presumptions), and the disproportionate returns under that strategy that have caused us to evolve faster than the rest, in greater prosperity, in the bronze, iron, and steel ages.
Those holes in the American Constitution are:
- Strategic Foundations: Failing to articulate the european strategy clearly, and natural law as its consequence. It’s unclear whether they could have at the time. But they could have done better than ‘the rights of Englishmen.’ And they could have explicitly stated more clearly than they did, that unlike England, the american people are sovereign individually, in their states, and collectively in their federation, and that the government is specifically not sovereign, is not extant to lead but to execute the demands of the peoples of the states.
- Logical Foundations: They assumed but failed to articulate the empiricism of the common law, and the common law’s dependence upon the natural law of sovereignty, demonstrated interest, trespass(tort), equity, and the natural rights that arise from their necessity, and they only specified the organization of government under those constraints, and as an afterthought, some number of those rights they thought governments would readily impose upon. The use of commonality in courts and concurrency in voting and legislation to specifically prevent majority democracy from usurping the rights of individuals, small states, and factions.
- Accountancy of Law: They assumed but did not articulate Transactional law as accounting of transactions against the constitution: The debate over originalism results from a failure of the constitution to state the obvious: (a) that words are weights and measures like any other weight and measure, of time and place. (b) Any question of jurisprudence that is sufficiently undecidable by the court under originalism requires legislative innovation – it does not convey the power of lawmaking upon the court. (c) without this limitation, legislation from the bench, judicial activism, and lawfare are (and have been) possible. (d) legislative ‘laziness and imprecision’ transfers responsibility for incompetency to the court. (e) thus circumventing the sovereignty of the people and the duty of the legislators as representatives of the sovereignty of the people.
- Limiting Conflict to The Empirical: Creating markets in everything by competition in all walks of live, and Limiting Conflict to markets of Duel, Church, Court, and Legislature: While the common (empirical) law did include prohibitions on the defamations of libel, slander, and fraud, they had no concept of the industrialization of the use of social construction by other than the government of the church, and with – they had no concept that the common law that limited us all to resolution of disputes by duel in matters of honor, church in matters of morality, or court in matters of life and property, could be used to create a circumvention of those institution – as such they left the door open to enslavement by the false promises of the marxist sequence just as the ancients left the door open for the false promises of enslavement by the abrahamic sequence (Categorically these are crimes of ‘baiting into hazard’.)
- Open Ascent of Legislation: They also failed to require judicial review prior to ascent of legislation, and failed to provide the return of legislative undecidability to the congress, thereby putting the court in the position of legislating from the bench — which is how the postwar left undermined the constitution, and brought about the crisis of today -by circumventing the sovereignty of the people, the market between regions and classes of the legislatures, and the foundations of the common, natural law. (Which, despite public disapproval, the current supreme court is reversing.)
- Market for the Classes: The founders failed to explain the British, Germanic, and Early European systems, as corporations, under which the monarchy(executive) was required to gain approval from the shareholders (investors, jury). And that the purpose of multi-house government (multiple juries), was to require agreement between, and to create a market for trades between the classes, preventing any class from usurping the others, and thereby preserving sovereignty by creating “markets in everything”. So when Americans expanded the franchise to non-property owners and women, without creating additional houses for them, they indirectly destroyed the entire purpose of participatory government: the power to deny power that had forced a market between the classes. The direct election of the senate only amplified this problem.
- Presidency over Monarchy: They failed perhaps most subtly, by not ‘persuading’ (even blackmailing) Washington (or one of the others) into taking the role of monarch — who, like recently deceased Elizabeth – is a judge of last resort, and limits the fashions of the government the way the senate was designed to limit the fashions of the population. This is the hardest ‘pill’ of truth to swallow: that of prime ministers, presidents and monarchies, the optimum is monarchy, cabinet and parliament – and the presidency is the worst of all possible models. Same for Nobility (status) vs Governor (material).
- Free Truthful and Reciprocal Speech: Additionally, while they understood the problem of free speech, they could not both perpetuate the christianity that served as the moral education of the masses, and outlaw false promises, baiting into hazard, or untruthful speech, and relied on the market for debate – costly to enter at the time, and practiced largely by the educated or literate – to control the population. An optimism that was very christian and english in origin.
- Freedom of Religion: They also used freedom of religion rather than freedom of Christian religion, because they could not envision a world in which Darwin and the physical sciences had eviscerated the church’s ability to use false promise to bait people into the religion. And even if they did they had no conception of mindfulness and how to use stoicism in stead to replace it. Worse, they held the still common but false view that religions are of equal merit and consequence, when religions consist of a group strategy, to advance the group at the expense of others and especially host governments.
- Separation of Caretaking vs Deciding: When the Darwinian revolution undermined the church and her traditional role of insurer of last resort, and the false promise of marxism and socialism was spread, the state failed to maintain separation of powers and separation of revenues between the coercion of the state, and the care of the church, exacerbating class conflict and effectively denying both sided minimum power distance in pursuit of their interests, setting up a conflict that had to take place in propaganda and deceit, rather than in political markets specifically designed to provide those with dissimilar interests to cooperate.
Even so, Americans have had five constitutions already:
- Articles of confederation,
- First constitution,
- Post civil war southern conquest,
- Depression experiment with socialism,
- 1960’s experimentation with cosmopolitanism,
And we are currently working toward the 6th, which will very likely consist of the devolution of federal powers back to the limits the founders imposed, so that the multiple nations of America can produce their own cultures according to their own strategy and values, and not use the federal government to impose their wants upon others.
The Cause of the Crisis of the Age
With that knowledge in mind, let’s examine the cause of the crisis of the age:
In any federation as vast and diverse as the U.S. or Europe, or even China or India, with diverse urban, suburban, and rural communities spread across a vast continent, the federal government’s primary external roles must be defense, international relations, trade policy, and credit, as they are the only benefits of scale.
Conversely, unlike an empire, a federal government’s internal function is not to lead, or command, but to provide a market for the production of commons through tests of commonality in dispute resolution and concurrency in voting and legislation – thereby protecting minority rights and preventing majority tyranny – and leaving leadership to the states in domestic affairs and the unity of states in foreign affairs, and most importantly leaving constituent states the freedom to build culture, community, commons, infrastructure, commerce, and industry as they will.
However, this system of responsibilities is an aristocratic (responsibility for capital) method of government. And over time, we’ve introduced new groups—first the middle class, then the working class, then women, and finally non-European populations—into this system. Each addition has required each group to undergo adaptive shifts enforced by native men using social, economic, and sometimes political influence, to force their gradual conformity into our high responsibility high trust polities.
Our current crisis stems from the challenges of incorporating the last three groups: the remains of the working class marxist religion, the introduction of women, whose instincts almost universally oppose Western civilization’s demand for individual responsibility, and then non-European immigrants, who have yet to develop the traditions and institutions of responsibility that underpin our legal and political systems, and perhaps worst, the introduction of a foreign minority elite not only hostile to those traditions but using the antisocial and seditious warfare of women to advance themselves, women and foreigners to prevent that integration into our high-trust maximum-responsibility civilization.
Class differences fundamentally reflect varying capacities for bearing responsibility for capital beyond oneself. The success of the West is rooted in institutionalizing individual responsibility in exchange for political participation. Integrating women into this model, for example, introduced challenges due to their instinctual tendencies toward irresponsibility, which I argue has been detrimental.
Our System’s Empirical – So It’s Reactive
Our system’s brilliance lies in its empiricism —ensuring that laws and policies are legitimate through the agreement (concurrency) of states, regions, and classes, and through commonality in court decisions that provide consistent dispute resolution across these groups. This structure protects minority rights and prevents the tyranny of the majority.
However, over time, we’ve deviated from this structure, mixing these functions, which creates friction. Historically, as Western institutions evolved, raising different groups from subsistence to political participation, we paid an adaptive price for each. These groups often carried over behaviors from their previous status until social and economic pressures coerced them into adopting the responsibilities of their new status.
Historically, our legal system’s empirical foundations—grounded in the principles of sovereignty, tort, equity, concurrency and commonality—managed the adaptive pressures on newly integrated groups by ensuring that laws and policies were legitimate and consistent across states, regions, and classes. Our religion, our education, and our arts and letters reinforced these behaviors. And the reward was the increase in standard of living, increase in self respect and status, and decrease in life’s stressors for paying those costs of impulse suppression, respect for others, their assets, and common assets.
And we have trouble learning the lessons of our past follies. We must recognize that this event has been brought about as it was in Sparta, as it was in Athens, as it was in Rome, and to some degree in France – by the very virtue of european innovation and adaptation made possible by sovereignty and agency – …. resulting in the Christian Destruction of the Ancient World.
Next, we must recognize that this combination of expansionism in the face of seditious cults prevents the ability for the host population males to maintain the institutions and norms necessary for maximizing individual responsibility and the resulting high trust and economic velocity – without the use of excessive political coercion that undermines the very institutions of responsibility we have evolved over 2500 years.
So the introduction of the marxist sequence in parallel with the introduction of women who ‘war’ by sedition, an elite specializing in the abrahamic and marxist methods of seditious warfare, and large numbers of non-europeans, has overwhelmed the political, academic, and cultural institutions. And to such a degree that only legislation or revolution may correct the decline. In other words, it’s just the mathematics of behavioral supply and demand. There are not enough remaining ‘soft’ pressures to restore our civilization and its profound benefits for all, and as such ‘firm’ institutional pressures may be needed to correct our course – or fall prey to the collapse of other civilizations who have universally faced this problem.
This means that our crisis isn’t just social—it’s a legal one. Our laws haven’t kept pace with the need to suppress instincts and traditions that run counter to the values of individual responsibility and political participation. Moreover, the rapid rate of immigration, combined with prohibitions on the social and economic pressures necessary for conformity, has exacerbated these challenges. Instead of allowing native European males to use these pressures to foster assimilation and responsibility, we’ve restricted these mechanisms, leading to the current disarray.
So while the legal system has historically managed social pressures through empirical governance, within the western group evolutionary strategy (that strategy weakly stated as ‘values’), it has failed to keep pace with the need to suppress instincts and traditions counter to Western values, leading to the current disarray, decline, dysgenia, and depopulation.
While I appreciate the dialogue’s focus on the Founders’ principles and federal overreach, it doesn’t fully address how these complex social dynamics have strained our legal and political systems. The solution lies in reaffirming our commitment to concurrency, commonality, and the principles of the Natural Law of Cooperation (individual sovereignty, tort, equity), ensuring that our governance remains empirical and capable of adapting to these ongoing challenges.
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute