(preface)
(UNDONE: A preface generally covers the story of how the book came into being, or how the idea for the book was developed; this is often followed by thanks and acknowledgments to people who were helpful to the author during the time of writing.)
Preface
“Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.”- Archimedes. The difficulty then, requires discovery of the lever, and the lever is knowledge of the lever the universe itself uses.
( CD: this whole intro isn’t right. )
(Childlike Dreams Rant from 8/22)
( … )
Inspiration
In 1990, around the time of the Gulf War, the American Democratic Party launched its campaign to get air time for no other purpose than to repeat talking points and avoid answering questions. At the same time, the conservatives and libertarians were still unable to argue their positions in other than moral, historical, or religious language – meaning, they presumed their moral intuitions were universals among man, that these moral intuitions would somehow prevail over time, and they had no counter-argument against the left, the promises of the left, or the will to prosecute the left.
Conflict of Visions (problem statement)
Reality by Chanting, Social Construction, and The Industrialization of Lying
There hadn’t been a scientific and rational counter-revolution in Conservative political speech to match the pseudoscientific Marxist and pseudo-rational Postmodern left’s counter-revolution against science, nor the level of sophistication in the production of ideology.
Worse, the postwar movement of the marxist project from Europe to where capitalism was in fact superior for the working class, to America where capitalism could not solve the black-white divide, combined with the entry of women into the franchise and voting pool, created an exceptional opportunity that the neo-marxists intentionally exploited. And europeans have had no counter-proposition to argue against the flood of pseudoscience, sophistry,f alse, promise, and deciet offered by those hostile to our civilization.
The left succeeded in the postwar construction of yet another foundational mythos in a repetition of the revolt against reason and law by the foundational myths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The combination of demand for, and financial incentive to, expand the education of the newly affluent working and lower-middle classes, and the new foundational myths that promised a more prosperous future as well as political power, and the quite deliberate purge of the western aristocratic, meritocratic, empirical, rule of law tradition, from the academy, actively suppressed the western aristocratic tradition.
The preservation of the eugenics of Darwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche had failed, the preservation of eugenic meritocracy had failed, and the preservation of the relationship between economics and rule of law had failed. All failed to survive the European civil wars. In the postwar period, the conservative moralism of Kirk had failed, the classical liberal appeal to rule of law by Hayek had failed. Even the classical economists who were incognizant of the difference between their classical retention of rule of law and the left’s Keynesian abandonment of rule of law in favor of rule by economic discretion – they either underestimated or were incognizant of the fact that rule of law and classical economics continued the western eugenic tradition.
Sometime in the late seventies, those of us in conservative and libertarian circles merely assumed that just as Johnson’s Great Society experiment had clearly failed, that the same collapse would occur in the rest of the world (it did), and that we merely must wait out the bankruptcy here in America, and then the left would ‘see the light’. For this reason, the use of debt to produce the military leap that would break the Russian economy’s ability to compete, was preferable and repairable, while the consequences of expanding the left’s increase in consumption would leave genetic, normative, traditional, and institutional scars on our civilization.
( … )
( … continue thru obama … )
AND …
( NEXT: The Author’s Journey To This Point )
Timeline
Initially, my only ambition was to provide conservatives and conservative libertarians with a rational and scientific means of arguing in favor of western civilization’s strategy against secular socialist humanists and the left’s overwhelming production of propaganda, pseudoscience, sophistry, and deceit. It was a duel in which they were painfully obviously unarmed. It was both frustrating and embarrassing.
While I had the idea in 1992, listening to the propaganda of the time, I started working hard on the problem in or around 2001.
I was confident by about 2006 that I knew the institutional solution to creating heterogeneous post-democratic polities. It didn’t take me long to solve the problem of institutions.
By 2009 I had used Haidt’s work to express all moral differences in terms of property rights. By 2014 I’d developed testimonial truth. But I got stuck when I figured out that I had to make it harder for progressives to just lie, load, frame, and overload through repetition and sheer numbers. And at that point, I had to understand ‘truth’ – and that took me quite a while (because it’s contentious) but I was able to solve it. And that led me to complete the scientific method, develop the science of testimony and decidability – And as an accidental consequence, the Wilsonian Synthesis.
The Wilsonian synthesis refers to E. O. Wilson’s prediction … ( … )
By 2015 I had developed the moral division of labor. And I spent most of 2016 on the very difficult tasks of simplification of the overall message, solving the problems of religion and literature, and refining the questions of institutions. But the past year or so has been largely an effort to simplify – to become better at speaking about these topics in a narrative voice that more people could more easily understand.
And it wasn’t until 2016 that I understood that what I’d done with Testimonialism (Truth) was to complete the Natural Law project set upon by Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, and the Romans.
( … Religion … )
( … POLICY AND CONSTITUTION … )
( … try to save the lost boys … )
Mirroring Hayek’s Journey
( … )
Challenges
I’ve drafted this book four times now. As an anti-libertarian (libertine) reformation restoring liberty, libertarianism, and classical liberalism to its origins in rule of law. Then as the reason for the success of the European people. Then as an indictment, prosecution, and remedy for the crimes of our age. And finally as a work of law.
Costs …
The Internet Experiment and King of The Hill Games.
( … )
The Many People Involved
( … )
Every Major Intellectual Reformation Requires Three Generations.
I consider my work the final result of the movement consisting of the Hilbert, Brouwer, Bridgman, Turing, Popperian, and Hayekian programs that inherited the model of information from physics, as the Mengerians had inherited the model of calculus from mathematics and physics. They thought they were conducting a counter-revolution against the re-mystification of mathematics, physics, and especially the social and behavioral sciences. It’s to these thinkers that I am intellectually indebted.
It was the conflict between Hans Hoppe’s reduction of all social science to testable measurements by reduction to demonstrated interest; Popper’s failure to solve the problem of demarcation of science; everyone’s failure to define the scientific method; and the libertarian’s attempt to create an immoral alternative to rule of law – that together inspired a quite accidental intuition that the answer we were looking for to unite the sciences was in their disconnect.
Had these thinkers the access to my generation’s computer science, genetic science, and cognitive science revolutions, the evidence of the failure of via-positiva economics, the failure of via-positiva law, and the many failures of the left’s pseudoscience and in everything else, and as well as the failure of the right to halt them, then they would have had the advantages I did, and solved the problems in their era. So, I’m not special. I’m just the first person to see the entire pattern across the many fields, because of my place in the timeline of history.
The Religion of the Future
The Greeks, then Augustine and the Church, then Aquinas and the Scholastics, then the British(Scottish) Enlightenment and the protestant reformation, each time synthesized european science with religion. But during the 1800’s, and the Darwinian revolution, no one emerged to reform European religion by synthesizing it with the advancement in the sciences as had Augustine and Aquinas or even Smith and Hume.
I have attempted to provide that synthesis and reformation in answer that question although no doubt, without satisfying the wants of the fundamentalists, libertarians, civic natinoalists, totalitarians, or leftists of any stripe.
Why? Because the truth is what is. What we do with the truth is politics. And it is only with the truth in politics that we can make reciprocal exchanges that benefit all.
Because the only other solution is civil war.
We Are All Products of Our Time
No sane person would intentionally set out to produce a work of this scope. Although Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Arnold Toynbee, Will Durant, Friedrich Hayek, and a dozen others have tried in one way or another – and so if they lack sanity then at least I am in good company. But, my journey was entirely accidental and circumstantial, and I am, like this work, more a product of our times than claiming to be possessed of any particular intention, wisdom, or genius.
Consequences
It’s a prophetic function…. deterministic. based on the science, of how this must play out. There are no other options. We are in a crisis and it must play out in this fashion.
— CD
