One of many parallel trajectories - from simple axioms to full accounting

Stefan Molyneux once said "empirical evidence always trumps reason". That stuck with me.

During the 7 or 8 years I was a Rothbardian/Randian, my main focus was ethics, and what that boiled down to was "property rights". For me this was unconnected to the matter of Austrian economics, be it Hayekian or Misesian.

The Rothbardian NAP is similar enough to Rand's, and IIRC Rand came up with it first, and as far as I could tell, she had better reasoning for it. But regardless, the NAP sits upon the idea of private property, and the idea of private property is Lockean. So I spent some time reading about Locke. And Locke was an anglo empiricist. And we can talk about transforming the land and occupier-ownership etc, but to me a property right boiled down to will and ability to defend, and firearms were the great equaliser (rather than decision maker). Although up to that point, that was reserved in my mind to physical and scarce goods only.

But when I got to this point, I discovered a new found interest in exploring different perspectives on metaphysics and epistemology. With the contemporary politics of 2015-2016, there were a few options around, and I had zero inhibitions in exploring what was available.

I'd read just about enough Mises, which is hard going, going over synthetic a priori et al (but it explains Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics). And there is still something about Misesian Praxeology that fascinates me, even though I no longer identify with it. But at the time, I was relatively Misesian. And of course the Mises Institute had been my goto source since the beginning of my interest in libertarian ideas.

Further, a stronger Austrian influence on me was the Mengerian subjective, marginal utility theory of value. And subjectivism has always been a strong point for me regarding knowledge. Yet, I was a massive fan of Piekoff's rhetoric on metaphysics and objective reality.

And most of the stuff I was into preached the value of the scientific method.

But then Dr Jordan B Peterson and Curt Doolittle showed up on radar.

After the libertarian Thick/Thin/Brutalist war, I'd become relatively knowledgeable of Cultural Marxism (the Jewish Frankfurt School and the French Post-Modernists), Peterson was packing heavy punches, and uniquely among the right, getting a lot of mainstream attention and tolerance.

To boot, in his eyes at least, he's a British "classic" (As he puts it) liberal. Meaning classical liberalism, and individualism, which was right up my street. I thought myself an ancap but realistic and non-ideological enough to tolerate and even enjoy classical liberal "statists". Who are the last vestige of anything resembling a right wing platform on the public stage.

But there were some good arguments about in reference to weaknesses of individualism. Particularly how radical, “autistic” individualism was failing to protect the ideas of private property and common law upon which my remaining liberties rest, in the face of Cultural Marxism’s march through the institutions. This gave me pause and lead to quite a significant change in my values and relationship to my social environment.

Now to most Austrians Methodological Individualism is a post in the ground. And to be fair, as far as I can tell, MI is valid and useful and scientific. But when libertarians talk of individualism, there is often a conflation of MI with ethics, an attempt to say the 2 are intrinsic to each other (self ownership et al). And this conflation has perverse and parasitic consequences. An unscientific individualist egalitarianism founded on the myth of objective universal morality - which essentially is an ally not a foe of Cultural Marxism. And this conflation comes from Mises, Rand and Rothbard.

You can't philosophically derive an ought from an is. And this is a quote attributable to another British empiricist, Hume. I'd followed many of the well documented debates around this dichotomy in Objectivist and Libertarian circles. Nozick I think made Hume's case conclusively for me. And funnily enough I suspect arch-minarchist Jan Helfield also espouses something of Hume's perspective.

But Peterson was even more interesting. He observes different kinds of truth, of knowledge. And seemingly doesn't hold any one to be better than the other, though maybe what most people would think of as scientific objective truth, ascertained via the Aristotelian scientific method is "as good as we can get", or "useful enough", to satisfy our needs.

Ultimately, philosophically, ethics, and then knowledge and reality became a lot more subjective to me. But the idea of how we cooperate and how society is organised, and live a good life, was still very much important to me. I did not become a nihilist. Evermore the opposite.

Peterson had got me on the fundamentals of epistemology, but it left the question, if epistemology is subjective, then how do we gain knowledge with any certainty beyond our own individual experience? Well scientists do it all the time. They rely on reporting of measurements taken from operations in experiments, they use the scientific method (reason) to construct, and science to deconstruct. And the only reason we have working computers and are exploring space right now is because the truth was reported and lies were dismantled to those ends.

This is the essence of Doolittle’s heavy emphasis on science to deconstruct - to get to a more accurate and useful epistemology.

Once you have that, you can begin to hold view points that can be expressed in terms of ethics (preferences). I am a libertarian. And so my preferences lean that way anyway. But having undergone a radical epistemological shift, this meant I was no longer an ancap for starters, at least not a Rothbardian. This has been a bit troubling for me as I have met some wonderful and very intelligent and well meaning Misesians, and I know how this bothers them, especially considering the investments made in the cause over the past decade.