Research & Foundations

Research & Foundations

Note: This section preserves the Institute’s original research mission and reform framework — the theoretical work that supports today’s lawfare services and Academy. For live dispute support, start with the homepage or contact Brandon Hayes.

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The Logic and Science of Universal Decidability

Applied to Law, Constitution, Government, Policy, Economy and Society

The Crisis of Our Age

"The Only Comprehensive Solution to The Crisis of Our Age, And The Ethical and Moral Alternative to The Great Reset – in The Greatest Return of Liberty, Quality of Life, Prosperity, and Power to the People Since the Roman Reforms."

The Problem: Solving Your, Our, Everyone’s Political Conflict

EXPLANATION

There aren’t that many causes of our conflicts — but there are many conflicts that arise from those few causes. The culmination of these conflicts now threatens to tear us apart, to the detriment of all — past, present, and future.

All human populations, in the Age of Transformation, developed a group strategy: a set of metaphysical presumptions about the world, myths to explain it, and a narrative justifying their strategy within it as ‘good’. They constructed parables and stories to reinforce it, typically a literature or religion to preserve it, and a logic to defend it — whether mythical, religious, philosophical, historical, empirical, or scientific — and often more than one, each with increasing precision. Human populations then adapt to those institutions, and those institutions slowly adapt to the population as its size, complexity, economy, and politics evolve. This group strategy is extremely resistant to change because it is interwoven into every aspect of every individual’s life within that civilization — taken for granted as naturally as gravity.

Like all other peoples, Europeans do not consciously understand the metaphysical presumptions they make about the world and man — presumptions that are now five to eight thousand years old, and formed on the steppes of what are today Ukraine and Russia. But those presumptions begin with one principle: the preservation of sovereignty and autonomy by the prohibition of authority, leaving us to voluntary agreement in markets for cooperation in all walks of life, and individual responsibility for preserving that sovereignty and autonomy. We have done so — more so than any other people — by maximizing individual responsibility for mind, self, kin, the private, and the common, in display, word, and deed, including the high cost of truth before face, regardless of consequence. (This is precisely what the Marxist, feminist, and woke movements have sought to overturn.) We were the first people to put the polity before the family, the first to eliminate tribalism, and the first to eliminate clannishness. As such, we are the only high-trust people capable of producing commons as a competitive advantage — reducing both the opportunity and material costs for all.

Throughout human history, every time humans develop new technology — whether conceptual, physical, behavioral, economic, or institutional — we create opportunity for the exercise of individual agency by a larger portion of the population. This is what we refer to when we speak of ‘raising people from one class to the next.’ But every time this happens, those who ascend — across the entire spectrum of classes — carry with them the presumptions, narratives, values, and traditions of their prior class, a class with less agency and opportunity. Some of these instincts, intuitions, and beliefs are genetic; others are class-based, local, or accidents of historical chaos, superstition, and ignorance. And just as technology advances, so too do the means of deception, fraud, conspiracy, corruption, sedition, and treason. Yet institutions often lag in prohibiting these emergent forms of criminality.

Worse, all human organizations eventually calcify by maximizing discounts (cheating and privileges), free riding, rent-seeking, and corruption. This calcification applies to governments as well as to the policies, legislation, and laws they produce. Expansion continues until some change — whether systemic and gradual or an immediate shock — creates sufficient incentive to reform, or collapse occurs due to the inability to reform. At present, we are in what Professor Peter Turchin describes as an ‘oversupply of elites’ — largely in the form of ‘credentialists.’ These are politically palatable labels for people who are costly, contribute no material value, and have achieved positions through speech and credentials rather than demonstrated competency in military, industry, or commerce with real people under adversarial conditions. In our case, these elites occupy the government, academy, media, financial sector, and global corporations — many of which circumvent the legislative expression of the people’s will.

So, the crisis of our age is neither novel nor surprising. We elevated the middle class during the Enlightenment, the working class during the Industrial Revolution, and women during the postwar era. We have also imported millions of people from outside the European tradition in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as we united the world through free trade and the promise of ending poverty. Meanwhile, the ranks of free-riders, rent-seekers, and corruption classes have swelled, burdening a shrinking population of productive people. The worst consequence has been the destruction of the primary institution of civilization: the family — and with it, sufficient reproduction to sustain our high-trust civilization.

But the value of the Anglo model of government is that we can change the law and the people will adapt. In nearly every other form of government, the people — not the rules — must change. In the Anglo tradition, the means of implementing such change, which created both the British and American governments (the oldest surviving governments in the world today), is the Common Law Suit against the state for redress of grievances. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers did against England.

The Solution

The Greatest Restoration of Liberty, Freedom, and Equality Since The Roman Reforms

THE PROCESS

• Produce a set of reforms that resolve the present conflict before it escalates into hostile war. These reforms take the moral high ground by offering a peaceful resolution — one that gives everyone most of what they want, at the expense of the elites.
• Present the demands: including the declaration, constitutional amendments, and policy changes.
• Restore America to the great path of Western Civilization — whether through negotiation and settlement or escalation and punishment.
• Then, restore European Civilization to the great path of our people.
• And in doing so, prevent a recurrence of the dark ages — an outcome our enemies seek by forcing the world into another age of managed decline (destruction from within).

The problems of our age are solvable. It is merely a matter of enough of us choosing to work together — to solve them together.

Proposed Reforms (Summary)

RESTORE SELF-DETERMINATION TO THE PEOPLE AND THEIR STATES

Restore the Constitution to its original intent: a large number of small European states, forming a market for different polities — each serving the distinct interests of its citizens.

De-politicize, professionalize, and shrink the continental government to its original limited purposes:

• National defense
• Guarantee of a republican form of government and rule of law by Natural Law
• Insurance and trade policy
• Arbitration of disputes between the states

Restore self-determination by:

• Enabling secession, consolidation, and state formation for everyone
• Returning economic, social, and cultural choice to the states
• Separating urban, low-opportunity-cost, low-investment, low-trust, individualistic, hyper-consumptive populations from suburban and rural, high-opportunity-cost, high-investment, high-trust, familial, capital-intensive populations

MODERNIZE AND DE-FINANCIALIZE THE ECONOMY FOR THE BENEFIT OF FAMILIES

Enact comprehensive economic, financial, and retirement reforms that restore the emphasis of policy and the economy to the interests of the laboring, working, middle, and upper-middle classes — ending predatory disparities in returns on citizenship.

RESTORE OUR HIGH-TRUST SOCIETY

• Restore voluntary association and disassociation, ending government interference in familial, social, economic, and political cooperation.
• Restore truth in public discourse by extending the prohibition against loading, framing, obscuring, "faith healing" (pandering), fictions, fictionalism, denial, deceit, false promise, and fraud — from commercial to political speech.
• Restore the commons, society, and socialization — reversing the alienation, isolation, dysfunction, depression, and loneliness that plague modernity.

RESTORE INVESTMENT IN PEOPLE

Reform education — primary, secondary, and tertiary — for the new century. Train the whole person in physical fitness, mindfulness, manners and ethics, and basic life skills (including finance, contracts, family, economics, and business) — so that we are all prepared for the world as it is, not as we once imagined it.

RESTORE THE INSTITUTION OF THE FAMILY

Restore the primacy of marriage, family, and intergenerational wealth and care as the foundational unit of the polity — because the family is the origin of what we have in common, and the purpose of that shared commonality we call society.

ADAPT TO THE RESTORATION OF HISTORICAL GEOSTRATEGIC NORMS

Reorganize the military, state, intelligence, research, industrial investment, economy, finance, and education for total war — ending our strategic vulnerability caused by dependence on world markets for survival and on the private sector for research and development.

We are repeating the Founders’ demand for reform. And it will work.

Who We Are and What We Do

The crisis of the age is solved by a system of measurement, laws that judge it, and institutions that enforce it.

We are a think tank — an independent academic organization conducting research in human cognition, human behavior, human cooperation, and the development of constitutions, legislation, and social and economic policy.

Think tanks originated as secure "safe spaces" for military research during the wars of the early 20th century. In the postwar period they evolved to include economic, policy, and legal research organizations — operating independently of the academy, which had become increasingly politicized due to institutional capture by Marxists, neo-Marxists, postmodernists, and their adoption of behavioral and social pseudosciences.

Political orientation

We work to end political conflict by lawfully limiting ourselves to truthful, reciprocal discourse, negotiation, and policy exchange.

We are not affiliated with any political party.

We seek to fulfill the ambitions of those who value moral and intellectual honesty — through the restoration of the sciences, the reformation of law through scientific application, and the return to cooperation across the spectrum of our differences.

We work in English and have focused much of our attention on the Anglo world and the broader Eurosphere. But our work is scientific, universal in application, and intended for the benefit of all humanity.

The simple version? We’ve made it impossible to lie to the people, even when they desire to hear those lies. The last century saw innovations in the industrialization of lying to the public, a public willing to believe them, and the capture of our institutions to indoctrinate our people into them. We can end lying to the public in public in matters public. It turns out, Truth is enough. Or, well, at least Truth … and a lot of policy changes.

Mission

1. Researching and developing the science and logic of legal decidability, and publishing our findings in historical, philosophical, scientific, and secular-religious prose — so that we may reach all people with the same moral counsel, regardless of their context for meaning.
2. Producing legal, legislative, and policy reform that eliminates the present conflict by restoring peaceful cooperation and prosperous conflict resolution — continuing the long trajectory of European transcendence.
3. Training a generation of scholars, judges, lawyers, legislators, teachers, activists, and laymen in the science and formal logic of the Natural, Common, and Concurrent Law of Human Cooperation.
4. Organizing individuals, groups, factions, and movements for activism — to bring about legal, legislative, and policy reform, and to rebuild our high-trust civil society.
5. Prosecuting a common law suit against the government for redress of grievances and the restoration of institutions, laws, rights, obligations, and inalienable principles necessary for the renewal of human flourishing.
6. And if necessary — should that suit against the government fail — justifying and encouraging a reform movement to bring these moral conditions into being for the betterment of all, and the generations to come.

What we offer

Humans differ by universal, collective, and individual moral sentiments. We offer a value-neutral means for people to communicate across their biases and to construct variations in polities that produce the commons each community desires.

We offer a solution for the good of all, regardless of political bias.

Return to applied work

Today’s Institute delivers that research through lawfare services and the Academy. For a live matter, start an inquiry ?. For courseware, visit naturallawinstitute.org ?.