A Current Synthesis of Thought

Influences and ideas have been merging in my mind, and will continue to. But here's where I am now on multiple different topics.

Since doing what I’ve described as “going beyond” libertarianism, many people have said that I’ve abandoned it. It’s nonsensical, but I expected it. For many, the term libertarian is a part of their sense of self rather than a political or legal theory, and any poke to the theory to test it’s strength is akin to stabbing their ego.

I must admit I’ve had fun scaring people and being a little provocative, seen in the title and subtitle of my first “real” article here. But those who actually bothered to read it, rather than fall into the deliberate midwit trap, would have read me saying I am still a Hoppean voluntarist, and that remains so. I have not abandoned libertarianism, I have learnt more about reality than the NAP and economics and have begun to talk about it. Those who wrap their political theory up in their self become frightened by this. They perceive themselves as experts on all of reality, but the truth is that their cone of vision is extraordinarily narrow. When you expand out of this cone they can be led by hysteria to believe you’re coming around their blind spot to attack them.

But again, I saw this coming. I will now take the time to clarify my thoughts and give arguments on a range of topics, to act as a kind of micro-encyclopaedia of my overall thoughts, if only to refer such hysteric people to when they start throwing their toys out of their pram on a site with a 240 character limit. If you’d like to use it as such to share any particular arguments that I’ve given here, Substack lets you link to particular chapters by using the headings.

Good & Evil

Yes, they exist. Well… It’s more complicated than that. Good exists, evil is a lack of good.

There are multiple meanings to the word ‘good’, but when contrasted against ‘evil’ we know straight away that we are discussing moral good. Only acting rational creatures can conceive of, and behave according to, morality. That’s us. What is good is “that which is as it ought to be”, so, morality is “the way rational things ought to behave”. Can we say there is a way humans ought to be?

A thing is a thing inasmuch as it conforms to it’s own nature. If an apple tree did not grow any fruit it would be a bad tree, but as it is not moral, we don’t mean it to be bad in a moral sense. But if a human (a moral creature) did not behave in the way a human ought to, they would be at least somewhat bad; given it’s moral component, it would be apt to say they would be at least somewhat evil.

That which is perfect is that which is completely good, the ultimate particular of a category. A perfect man would be the best man, one who is 100% conforming to the nature of being a man. We know certain features about the nature of a human, one way Aristotle famously put it is: “man is a rational animal”. We’ll come back to that soon, but suffice it to say, a man who behaves irrationally (which might sound contradictory to Austrians, but bare with me) would be an evil man, as the barren tree is a bad tree.

A tree does not conceive of or choose to violate perfection by it’s limited fruit-bearing capacity and is not culpable for it’s actions. A man is aware and does choose, and it is from this we can see that everything a person does which is less than perfect is evil, or call it bad if you insist on a less loaded term as it means the same thing in the application of humans.

When a man behaves unlike he should that is because he is not behaving as a man. How is that possible? He cannot be anything else, so how can he be acting as something else? Well, that’s exactly the point; in committing evil and being inhuman, a man participates in non-being, in non-existence. That which cannot be does not truly exist, hence, evil does not truly exist (or some say, it has no right to exist). What we call evil is simply a descriptive term for a lack of being.

Given that good is the way things ought to be, a lack of being and evil are the same thing. This means the same thing as the more classical definition that evil is a privation of the good. Evil does not have it’s own existence, it is only observed as a lack of being, a lack of good.

Rationality

The view of rationality used in praxeology and economics by Ludwig von Mises (1949) is correct, but is only a portion of what it means to be rational. To Mises, to be rational means to make choices based on subjective valuations of the options at hand. This is a feature of rationality, but not all of it. Hans Hermann Hoppe (2021) gets closer to the fullness by exploring the significance of language in the history of mankind; as, in the use of language, we inevitably refer to immaterial concepts.

We can speak of a particular dog such as the family pet, which is a physical entity that we observe empirically. Through this empirical observation we can come to know what makes something a dog and not a pig, or come to know ‘dog in general’, not just Fido particularly. When we do this we invoke the immaterial concept which shows that, alongside subjective decision making, rationality is also the ability to conceive of “higher things”.

These higher things are abstract concepts. Do you still doubt that they actually exist beyond our own minds? What if I told you that mathematics is an abstract concept (or technically a group of infinite abstract concepts)? Yes, we learn mathematics as small children through the empirical senses by counting our fingers, but at that moment we don’t invent counting, and the first person to ever count their fingers did not invent mathematics.

Our language to describe numbers as ‘one’ and ‘two’ and so on is indeed a ‘subjective social construct’, but it refers to these truly existent transcendental concepts, like a perfectly clear window from the subjective to the objective. If we were to switch over to German and count from ‘eins’ to ‘zwei’ we are using another ‘subjective social construct’ to refer to that exact same objective abstract reality. That is the truly amazing and literally interdimensional power of rationality, which we learn whilst we’re too young to even remember and then use every single day for the rest of our lives. That is what it means to be made in the image of God.

What most convinced me of moral realism was the realisation that morality, just like mathematics, is an abstract concept which we discovered through reason rather than invented. “Goodness” exists as an abstract concept just as numbers do. Every thing ought to be that thing which it is, or else it would not be, which is a contradiction. Therefore imperfection is a lack of perfection, or a lack of good. Therefore good exists prior to any contingent thing which could be described as good, or else how could you possibly refer to it as such?

Natural Theology

Now what if I told you that everything we’ve just discussed can prove God?

You may have heard of Plato’s “theory of forms” before. If you translate my use of the phrase ‘abstract concept’ to ‘form’ then you’re on the way to understanding it. We discussed perfection before and how it is the ultimate version of a category; the perfect or ‘ideal form of’ dog is one which would fully instantiate the features of ‘dogness’ and lack none of them. Infinity is the ultimate form of a number, as it is everything and lacks nothing.

Well, then, what about goodness? There must be an ideal form of goodness, which is wholly good and lacks nothing, as we found that badness is only a lack of good, which is also a lack of being. So the ideal form of goodness must be being itself. Would you like to know one of the terms that St. Thomas Aquinas used to describe the essence of God? In Latin it’s ipsum esse subsistens; in English, being itself subsisting.

Through identifying the ideal form of the Good, Plato stumbled across God. God, aka “the Good”, is perfection, which is pure being, which is infinite, which lacks nothing. God does not merely ‘exist’, He is existence. That’s why we capitalise the H when referring to Him as Him rather than a proper noun. Shall we get even more mindblowing? Remember that dogs are only dogs in as much as they insatiate themselves as particulars of dogness in general.

Well, every particular exists in physical reality, and every concept exists in abstract reality. Existence is what every thing of every kind shares in, as if it did not, it simply would not exist and would therefore not be a thing at all. So, every thing which exists also only exists in as much as it shares in the form of existence, which as you’ll remember, is God. Literally every thing outside of God only exists because God is existence, and He shares this feature with everything.

Logically, therefore, He must be the creator of everything outside of Himself. Aka, the God of classical theism, aka, the God from the Bible. If you still need more confirmation you can see it in His own words. When God sends Moses back down the mountain, Moses asks for His name:

God said to Moses, “ I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘ I AM has sent me to you.’”

Exodus 3:14 (ESV)

We have used deductive reasoning through metaphysics of dogs to arrive at the understanding that God IS existence; and there He is, telling you “I AM”. You and I exist; He IS. He literally couldn’t not exist, for that which IS can’t not be. It’s for this reason that much of what gets called “Christian apologetics” leaves an extremely poor taste in my mouth as I’ve come to know this, as apologetics is a perpetually-defensive way of arguing for the existence of God. He literally is pure existence itself!

Thomistic Natural Theology

So there you have the gist of Platonist (or Neo-Platonist) natural theology. But wait, there’s more! I converted from atheism to Christianity thanks to the arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas, who is for certain an Aristotelian though with many Neo-Platonist influences which he ‘Aristotelianised’. As I continue to learn more about Scholastic Metaphysics (Feser 2014) I see how Aristotle’s understanding of forms and causation ‘temper’ the rather ethereal and perhaps simply ‘too far-fetched’ nature of it. If you found the Neo-Platonist argument like that, then research Aquinas’ “Fourth Way” argument, the “argument from degree”, but from what I can tell there is little difference from the way I put it, except of course his is much more intelligent.

But what I have come to learn is that I completely misunderstood both the “First Way”, the argument from motion and the “Second Way”, the argument from causality, chiefly obvious because I constantly conflated the two. I tried to explain it in my old video “My Journey to Christianity” and I can’t help but cringe listening to it now. I completely butchered it and outright did not get it, which honestly makes it tragic how it was one of my main reasons for converting.

I can only be thankful that it set me on the road to further learning and greater understanding, as I am so truly blessed for continuing to do so. Reader beware: I likely still will butcher it here and look back on it in the future with my head in my hands, but for now I will try to undo my previous errors and hopefully not add too many more.

The critical flaw that 99% of people (of which I used to be) who hear the argument from causality make is to think that it examines a temporal chain of events. The argument normally looks backwards in time to the known beginning of the universe and ask “What caused the big bang? Only an infinite and omnipotent being could create the universe, so it must be God”. This is a butchered version of the Kalam argument, not anything from Aquinas.

And it is not a God of the gaps fallacy, but to be honest, when phrased this way it’s close. Yes, only an infinite and omnipotent being can explain the existence of anything outside of it, but not for this reason. It would not matter if the universe had a determinate beginning or had existed eternally for the First Way to be true. If you make this critical mistake of tracing back events in time, all a person has to do is propose the “big bounce” theory to make your argument seem epistemically lacking and essentially a leap of faith.

So let’s do it properly. First, two points on causation. We will deal with an “essentially ordered” series of causes and effects which pertain to the present, not an “accidentally ordered series” which would be a look at the history of causes. Don’t think of it as a horizontal chain of events back in time. Now, an efficient cause is the reason behind an effect. If I were to throw a brick at a window then I would be the efficient cause of the window breaking, but it would be the brick itself which was the material cause. The brick could not be the efficient cause as it did not travel through the air by itself of for no reason, but I am the efficient cause because I threw it. Keynes would be proud.

This is a useful analogy due to the final point: bricks do not move themselves. “A thing only moves inasmuch as it is put into motion by another thing” as Aquinas (2014) says. As Fradd (2019) uses in a brilliant YouTube video, I find introducing a new analogy of a vertical set of cogs to really do the trick to explain the argument from causation.

The smallest cog at the top of a line of gears could only turn if the cog before it is turning, which would be the cause of that final cog’s turning. That cog will only turn if the one before it is turning as it’s cause, and so on. If you remove any cog from the line, then all of the ones above it will stop turning, as no effects occur without causation. What is most important here though is that none of the cogs could start turning unless there is a cog at the other end providing motion to all of the others as the efficient cause. An infinite amount of cogs would not be able to move on their own. Positing an infinite regress of cogs could not explain why any one of them are turning. The only way that any of the cogs on the line could be turning is that there is a first cog which moves but is not moved by another. This is the uncaused cause, which everyone knows to be God.

This analogy allows us to look at a visible piece of reality and ask what the cause for it is in a ‘horizontal’ and immediate manner, not tracing back events to the big bang. I am only currently able to exist because I am on earth. Earth is only able to currently exist because of gravity. Gravity is only able to currently exist because of mass. I don’t know the scientific answer for the cause of mass to currently exist, there probably is one, but if you know it then you just continue down that line. The line will not go on forever and you will reach the limit of physical reality which does not explain itself, beyond which you will see that it is the second cog in the line. The one before it must exist without a cause for it’s existence, and that is God.

Power

Onto the politics. Power exists, it always will, and like everything pertaining to human society it will always be distributed hierarchically no matter how hard anybody tries to make it distributed in an egalitarian manner. Power is the ability to inform attitudes and behaviours in society. Taking all of this together, it can only mean one thing: good people should be put in power and bad people should be kept out.

The most visible way to see who has power is not to see who makes the rules, but who makes the exception to them (Parvini, 2022). The template for what rules a well-ordered society should include are given by Hoppe in DTGTF (2011) and in other recent writings such as Getting Libertarianism Right (2018) as generally right-wing values, focused on natural order, peace, and private property. But, he also gives us some unavoidable exceptions: democrats and communists.

I’ve previously written on elites, the name for those people who hold power at the top of the distribution pyramid. For this, I’ve been called a “collectivist”. If acknowledging that groups exist such as the poor, the rich, black, white, Christian, Muslim, or elites, counter-elites, and non-elites, if that’s how low the bar is to be a collectivist then so be it. I don’t care, they exist and have features which can be observed. Call me what you like, it’s not my problem.

Hoppe’s defense of, and understanding of the importance of, natural elites, power, and it’s purpose, make him stand head and shoulders above, quite frankly, any other relevant libertarian to put pen to paper. Hoppe frequently cites De Jouvenel, a forefront thinker in the current Dissident Right, for his views on power and how it works. Again, people can call me and the Dissident Right whatever they like, but they are likely to turn around and passively accept Hoppe, clearly not knowing what the man actually thinks. There is a reason why Hoppe remains a key figure alongside De Jouvenel in the DR, it’s because both of them are correct. The people who actually take the time to read them know that.

Natural Order

My thoughts on the natural order and ideal structure of human society are, again, not unfamiliar to libertarians who actually read the works of their leaders, although I have detailed that I don’t agree that the term ‘anarchy’ applies. It’s complicated, read about it here. The ideal order is chiefly comprised of three components:

• natural hierarchy,

• private property,

• consensual participation.

Actualising such an ideal society into the physical world will take a lot of work, and will have to be a process. Critics of libertarians say that they “let the perfect get in the way of the good”, and they’re not always wrong for saying so. This society will have to be built, we can’t just tweet as hard as possible until it just appears.

Those three components are the building blocks of such a society - one must be the foundation, another placed on top that, and another placed on top of that block. I want to formalise the arguments more effectively in the future, but I believe the order in which I listed them is the order in which they need to be placed, given that we have had an enormous amount of societies with natural hierarchy, fewer with both that and private property, and a very small amount with all three. The only one I’m fully comfortable in saying had all three is Cospaia.

Cospaia came about by accident, so has nothing to tell us of strategy. It’s natural hierarchy in the town leaders, and the institution of private property, pre-existed the institution of consensual participation. I make that bold because it is an extremely crucial point, and validates the order in which I’ve laid the blocks. You cannot have private property without natural hierarchy, and you can’t have consensual participation without private property. The order in which these blocks must come about is clear, and tells us what our objectives must be depending on the circumstances of our given societies.

In the GAE (the homogenised Western world), we don’t even have natural hierarchy anymore. Becoming and sustaining a member of the ‘managerial’ elite is now an exercise in beauracracy, ‘bullshit email jobs’, and walking a tightrope of red tape; rather than political leadership, effective delegation, warfare, moral guidance, or basically just having a backbone. How can a society where power is in the hands of pencil-pushers expect to have a well-regarded institution of private property? In the USA all the elite need to do to completely invalidate your right to property is wave their hand, and they will face no resistance, because they have completely centralised their power. There are no other rungs on the hierarchy to challenge them, as feudal Dukes, Barons, Lords and Elders could in the past. And without this private property, how can you have 1) the defensive means, and 2) the high levels of peace and trust necessary for a society to have consensual participation?

Strategy

The answer for how we could ever hope to bring about the full extent of a natural order society is this: ally with the people who can help you get to the next block. Right now those people are the Dissident Right, unorganised but rapidly getting smart on how power works and positioning themselves to take it when the moment shows itself. If libertarians don’t get their act together and ally with these people, they will be left behind. If the DR succeeds in taking power, and there are no libertarians in their ranks to urge them to secure private property as a priority, then they have nobody to blame but themselves. All because they sat smugly at home saying “You want to take over the institutions which undermine private property? You’re literally Stalin and just as bad as them”. It’s completely tone-deaf, myopic, and self-defeating.

As I’ve said before, the DR is already friendly to Hoppe and many of his influences. It is an alliance opportunity just sitting there waiting to happen. Those who let the perfect get in the way of the good will be the ones culpable if it doesn’t, and we know that’s what they’re doing, as I’ve shown how this alliance could restore the first two out of three blocks of the natural order. You’d get two for the price of one, and ingratiate yourselves amongst the new elite who you could then work in persuading to bringing about consensual participation initiatives.

Many DR thinkers are clued in on Schmitt’s “friend/enemy” distinction, which is rapidly growing in fame. I have heard and read plenty of them say “Hoppeans (and people like Dave Smith) are our friends”, “When I complain about libertarians, just know that I don’t include Hoppeans” et cetera. They know this alliance is ready and waiting, it’s the libertarian side that doesn’t. That fact fills me with embarrassment. And you don’t need me to tell you this, Hoppe has been writing for years that our natural allies are the fringes of the right, and we should be proactive in steering them towards perfection, not calling them Nazis for being 90% of the way there. But I’m not even telling you anything new, it’s just tragically comedic that the iron is hot and now is our time to strike, and the thought police have come out now more than ever to prevent any actual work being done. They have put the cart before the horse.

Conclusion

I think I can wrap things up there. As there was no intended structure from the get-go beyond just giving my thoughts on my mental developments, this article couldn’t be summed up nicely. We’ll go through section by section summaries.

Good & Evil

A particular thing gets it’s features from the universal concept which it embodies. Every concept has an ideal form, the perfect particular. No particulars are perfect in physical reality, as they lack the perfect embodiment of one or more features of the ideal form. As this thing cannot be another thing than what it is, the lacking of that feature is a participation in non-being, meaning, that good exists and evil has no existence outside of being our description of a lack of good.

Rationality

We know that these universal concepts exist separately from our minds, although that is where we retain knowledge of them which is obtained through our senses. To be rational is to be able to conceive of these immaterial things which we discover, rather than invent. The Misesian and economic sense of rationality, which is the ability to make subjective value decisions, is included in rationality but is not the exhaustive definition of it.

Natural Theology

If there is an ideal form of particular things - which is the most good by lacking nothing pertaining to that thing’s nature - then what is the ideal form of good itself? Plato called it “the Good”, and it is essentially God. By being all-good this means He lacks nothing, is the fullness of being itself, and is what gives being to every thing.

Thomistic Natural Theology

The Five Ways are extremely misunderstood. I do not understand them fully and I don’t imagine I will for a long time, possibly even a few years. But, through these ways we can see that things do not cause themselves, contain being within themselves, or can have their existence explained by an infinite regress of causes in the present moment. This is NOT the Kalam argument, which starts by saying “the universe had a beginning”. This is irrelevant to whether or not Aquinas’ arguments are valid, and St. Thomas himself says that an eternal universe is not logically impossible.

Power

Power is not going anywhere, whether you like it or not. If you want to make the world better, especially through non-violent means, you need to grow a spine and work towards seeing you or your allies taking power from the despicable people who currently hold it. Hoppe is the GOAT because he gets this.

Natural Order

Natural hierarchy, private property, consensual participation. These are the three key features of the ideal society, the fullest embodiment of the natural order. We must first understand how monumental of a task it would be to bring all three of these about, as evidenced by it’s extreme rarity throughout history. They must also come about in that order.

Strategy

Sitting on your hands because the final block is not in place, while none of the blocks is in place, is shooting yourself in the foot. The time is now, and the door is wide open, for Hoppeans to ally with the budding Dissident Right who are poised to take power and begin the restoration of a natural hierarchy. This must come before the restoration of private property, and that without those two first there is no possibility of achieving consensual participation. If you refuse to work towards a better world because it’s not already perfect, you’re an idiot, and if things get worse you could be culpable.

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References

Aquinas, S.T. (2014) The Summa Theologica: Volume 1 (in 9 volumes). Translated by The Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Catholic Way Publishing.

Feser, E. (2010). The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. United States: St. Augustine's Press.

Feser, E. (2014). Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Germany: Editiones Scholasticae.

Fradd, A. (2019) Aquinas v Dawkins on God's Existence. [Video] YouTube: Pints With Aquinas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N9IPxWb_gA

Hoppe, H. (2021). Economy, Society, and History. Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Hoppe, H. (2011). Democracy - The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. United States: Transaction Publishers.

Mises, L.v. (1949). Human Action. Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Parvini, N. (2022). The Populist Delusion. Austria: Imperium Press.