CRITICISM: PETERSON: FIGHTING THE LAST WAR, WITH A WEAPON THAT HARMS US AS MUCH AS IT HELPS.
(NET/NET (TL;DR): The narrative requires intention, authority, and indoctrination in an effort to create behavioral goods, but natural law, like the good of markets, requires only dispute resolution, caused by self interests, from which all ‘goods’ emerge – even the unimagined. Narratives explain values. Laws create them. )
THE ENLIGHTENMENT, THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, AND THE PROBLEMS OF CHOICE UNDER POST-HUMAN-SCALE
I’m still going to criticize Dr Peterson’s conflation of the true(decidable), the good(preferable), and the beautiful(best/excellent) the similarity between men’s judgements provides us with a ‘unit of measure’: man’s abilities. It is this unit of measure that assists us in determining candidate opportunity, objective judgement, and successful action. When we encountered the industrial age, we changed from group norms as the unit of measure (test), to the limits of man’s perception(test) as the unit of measure in methods of decidability. Everything grew in scale:, information, markets, awareness of differences, necessity of understanding that which was beyond personal limits to perception, individual limits to ability and action, and group limits to organization and understanding.
It was this intellectual transition from small, homogenous, and local to large, heterogeneous and remote, that both created great opportunity for mankind, and created all our personal, cultural, institutional, and international conflict. We changed from ‘markets’ where we interacted with and cooperated with, and disputed with people in familiar and consensus context, to markets of all kinds where we interacted with, cooperated with, and disputed with peoples and groups, and nations on unfamiliar and very different consensual contexts. And our normative means of decision failed to scale. So we required methods of decidability not born then of consensus within a context, but of decidability regardless of context (and preference).
This is the story of the anglo scientific enlightenment, the failed social scientific and political enlightenment that followed (French, German, Russian, Jewish, in europe), and the consequential and failed german scientific, social, and political enligthenment of the 19th and 20th centuries – cut short by the (Immoral and Destructive ) world wars.
And it was the failure of 20th century philosophy and 20th century social science, only recently rescued by late 20th and early 21st century physical sciences, that has allowed an opportunity for the second conquest of the west by a ‘Second Great Deceit” – this time by pseudoscience, pseudorationalism, and propaganda, mass media, and the academy selling utopia to women and the underclasses, just as the the first conquest of the West by the First Great Deceit was achieved by Supernaturalism, pseudo-reasonableness, writing, the pulpit and the state sponsorship of monotheistic religion as a cheap means by which the wealthy east, could rule the independent but poorer west.
The only central claim to ‘Darwinian’ thought is that it provides us with knowledge of long term consequence (outside of experience, outside of perception, outside of human scale), and that as such we possess decidability between what were previously either only preferential goods, or what were both preferential, normative, and institutionalized assumed goods that are in fact ‘bads’ (Islam’s (a) unearned respect, and (b) fixed scope of knowledge, or Judaism’s dual ethics and its parasitism upon the host’s commons, or Christianity’s superstition and submission to authoritarian falsehood as a means of creating docile agrarian labor forces and limiting the conflict of families, tribes, clans, chieftains, and states). With this long term tool we can understand the unintended consequences of comforting falsehoods. That is what ‘Darwinian’ thought provides us with: an understanding of consequences of scale.
THE WANT OF DISCOUNTS – TO PRESERVE HUMAN SCALE
I’m sympathetic. I’m human as well. Humans want an intuitionistic means of decidability to save them the labor of investigation and calculation. And the economics of time, energy, and ignorance prevent us from investigation and calculation. So our multitude of decisions must be reduced to simple general rules in the context of each era. We all want the Elephant to DRIVE, and for our minds to merely RIDE upon his labors, and enjoy the view. But that is to be animal – not human – to lack agency not possess it. Of course we would all love to ride easily on a river of normative conditions that suited our interests. But that is not the fate of our struggle against the dark forces of time and ignorance – only possible in the pursuit of the cooperation with others at sufficient scale to win the struggle.
So, while I agree with Jordan’s criticisms (as many of us do), his prescription is wrong. He’s wrong because he is playing to the reasons that religions fail modernity via conflation and deceit (his coherent truth) but literature, history, the common law of torts, and science achieve by non deceitful, non false, ends. He is against the current pseudoscientific religion of the state, but he’s regressing into fighting the last war, instead of continuing modernity by deflating the beautiful, the good, and the true, which is the source of western competitive success, and the reason the west dragged the rest out of poverty.
We have struggled for millennia to tame the Elephant of evolutionary intuition with the Rider of reason, and we have obtained extraordinary benefits from doing so.
THE SOLUTION TO THE PRESENT IS THE SAME AS THE SOLUTION TO THE PAST – RETURN TO TRUTH
The solution to the present second attempt to ‘christianize the west’ – this time through cosmopolitan pseudoscience of Boaz, Marx, Freud, Cantor, and Adorno – is not to regress to the past, in order to admit failure to defeat the pseudoscientific cosmopolitan religion of the present, but to defeat the pseudoscientific cosmopolitan religion of the present, with literature(ideation of and decision between possible contexts), history(judgement within each extant context), and decidability (truth – decidability REGARDLESS of context: judgement regardless of preference or opinion. ).
Literary analogy can assist us in the free association that is necessary to identify candidate opportunities (ideation), but once possessed of an idea, we cannot, without deceit, choose other than to rely upon the record of man’s actions in matters of conflict (including law, norm, culture, religion, immigration, invasion, war, conquest, and genocide), and deflationary truth (science). Where by ‘science’ we mean not the via-positiva of investigation, but the via-negativa discipline by which we perform due diligence against ignorance, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, supernaturalism, pseudo-rationalism, pseudoscience, propaganda, and deceit.
We may only be able to SHARE literary(and platonic) means of general rules in pursuit of remote common goods, but we must at least possess the knowledge of, and a caste of people who, specialize in Judgement in matters of conflict, tat relies upon deflationary truth(science) for the purpose of those judgements.
No more lies. The west defeated the rest and dragged man kicking and screaming out of ignorance, superstition, poverty, labor, starvation, disease, deceit and tyranny, by the the construction of one commons above all other: deflationary, testimonial, correspondent truth. Despite internal and external resistance at all times. We did it.
And no retreat into eastern mysticism, jewish superstition, greek platonism, continental rationalism, or retention any of the enlightenment fallacies of the nature of man, will resurrect our civilization.
THE TRUTH OF THE FOUNDING INDUSTRIES OF THE WEST: DOMESTICATION OF MAN FOR NECESSITY AND PROFIT
The unwritten, unstated, impolitic history of the west is quite simple: a small number of independent, voluntary, warriors using advanced technology and advanced tactics of maneuver, where tactics were highly dependent upon adherence to oath (contract), sought to preserve their sovereignty( their independence and spoils of war) through continuing a contract of peerage. This retention of sovereignty, and their demonstrated, existential, superiority in action (conflict), leaves only one method of dispute resolution available: markets in everything. War constitutes the most intolerant market we know of, and martial epistemology is the most scientific. And the martial ‘reporting’ that we incorporated into our society as ‘testimony’, has permeated our civilization so much so that we cannot (unfortunately) understand that it is our uniqueness. That the bond of warriors – the oath – is of higher import than the bond of blood in matters of the commons. And it is the multitude of consequences of this bond of testimony – oath- using the epistemology of war (minimalist, deflationary, correspondence), that the aristocracy by practice, the middle class by aspiration, the craftsman class by necessity, and the working class by utility have created The Truthful Civilization and the most expensive commons that man has produced. Meanwhile, the outcast underclasses, the practitioners of gossip: politicians, priests, academics, and public intellectuals have fought against at every opportunity.
The western aristocracy, having domesticated plants, animals, (and in large part, women), ever needing to increase the numbers of fellows possessing AGENCY IN FACT (both intellectual, physical, and existential), created a profitable industry: the domestication of the beast man from dysgenic, ignorant, superstitious, violent, parasitic, predatory, opponent, to eugenically produced human: rational, knowledgable, productive, competitive, through the process of slave, serf, freeman, citizen, and peerage. Humans were not oppressed. The beast man was domesticated through the organized use of violence to prevent his survival except through productivity in a market, and contribution to the informational, normative, institutional, and material commons.
Just as the West evolved by the use of advanced technology, contractualism, truth, and markets in everything to evolve not first, but FASTER than the rest (and earlier) civilizations, the Cosmopolitans have used the advanced technology of mass communication, and the specialization in mass communication by politicians priests, academics, and public intellectuals, and their ‘soldiers’ in the school system, the media, and the underclasses, to rally against, and fight the people who use TRUTH, by the INDUSTRIALIZATION OF LYING. The product they sell is the hope of salvation in the present from Socialism ( discretionary rule over discretionary production, and discretionary allocation of production to individuals, families, and commons) that is the organizing model of the totalitarian flood-plain civilizations of antiquity that profit from the retention and expansion of the underclasses using religion (lying). And the cosmopolitan strategy is nothing other than a reformation of the promise of salvation (utopia) after death that is the source of Egyptian, abrahamic, judaic, christian, and muslim religions of the underclasses and the tellers of comforting lies that organize them.
OUR CHOICES: THE POVERTY OF COMFORT OR THE PROSPERITY OF EFFORT
We can choose between the imperial, dysgenic caste system of large scale underclasses taught by supernatural literature, and conflationary argument, that doctor Peterson seems enamored of, OR we can choose the eugenic production of sovereignty, agency, and equality of norther european warriors and universal militia taught by adherence to the oath, the common law, the decidability of the science (due diligence in testimony), testimonial (deflationary) truth, and producing a smaller and objectively superior majority middle class society in which we are all possessed of agency in institutions, and agency in mind, and agency in the face of a universe yet waiting to be domesticated by our will.
The balanced argument (the market solution that is the product of western civilization) is that we need multiple forms of argument, education, economy, and a market (government) for exchanges of commons between the classes, to suit the needs of people who possess a range of abilities, from those who can but imitate to those who can most radically innovate.
But we can only achieve that diversity (market) of available models for our people, if the means of decidability between them is parsimonious, deflationary, correspondent, Truth that is produced by the due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, and deceit that we call ‘science’.
RETURNING TO HUMAN SCALE
Its quite simple. Let a thousand nations bloom. End the empires and let loose the creativity of mankind. Its between empires that we make our rapid evolutions from one condition to another. we can all live in a diverse set of Denmarks (small homogenous egalitarian kin groups with commonality of interest and redistribution) or we can live in large empires (Brazil, India, China, Islam, and the United States) where we evolve once again into castes with high concentrations of wealth, vast underclasses, and stagnation – and the myths, superstitions, and comforting lies we tell ourselves to justify our condition.
What has to change? Bring knowledge, capital, institutions, and norms to people – and expand ‘the good’, not people to knowledge, capital, institutions and norms – and degrade and consume ‘the good’.
There is nothing in western civilization that cannot be copied by moral peoples.. There is nothing in western civlization that cannot be destroyed by large numbers of immoral peoples.
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law of Sovereign Men
The Philosophy of Western Civilization
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
