54:37 / 191 words
To listen in a player, click here.
To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
To subscribe to our podcasts, click here.
On June 23, 2015, Greg Johnson interviewed entrepreneur and author Curt Doolittle, whose writings on the philosophy, economics, and politics of a high trust society are found at propertarianism.com. Topics include:
- Curt’s background and education
- Why truth-telling is the secret to the success of European society
- How Europeans have lowered the costs of truth-telling and raised the costs of lying
- The emergence of rhetoric, philosophy, and science
- The importance of imagination in science and the necessity of criticism to winnow out pure fancies
- The subversion of truth-telling in science and politics
- Why the 20th century became the era of weaponized pseudoscience
- Political correctness vs. truth
- How we might restore truth-telling in politics and science
Note: regrettably, I lost some audio around the 31 minute mark, but fortunately Curt’s narrative remains intelligible. We will have to fill in the gaps in future conversations.
Curt’s interviews at The Right Stuff:
- The Daily Shoah, Episode 22, “A Propertarian Brunch”
- The Daily Shoah, Episode 35, “Doolittle Does it Again!”
4 Comments
This was a remarkable interview. Positively riveting. For me, it was especially interesting to listen to something that was slightly “over my head” in terms of language, but more so in terms of background knowledge it presupposed. But it was so much fun that I listened to it twice!
In terms of *why* we tend to be truth-tellers, his explanation is interesting and sounds plausible. Richard Lynn did a study of Jews’ IQ and values. A huge random sample of Americans was asked which traits they would value most in their children (obedience, cleanliness, hard work, honesty, etc), and here are the percentages for who placed honesty first: Protestants 38%, Catholics 34%, Jews 26%. I can’t say exactly how this relates to that! But I think it’s consistent.
One point that I want to make is that every trait ever measured has shown *some* degree of heritability. You have a distal cause, evolution, and a proximate cause, genes. Criminality is about 50% heritable, and it usually involves dishonesty, so that alone would contribute to the overall heritability of honesty. Obviously if people value a trait highly, they’d be more likely to possess it themselves, and if they don’t, they won’t.
Hello Dr. Johnson,
Any chance you’ll be uploading this on the apple podcasts app? Haven’t listen yet, but am looking forward to it. Thank you.
Very good, indeed.
I think Mr. Doolittle has a common very-smart-man’s problem, namely struggling to keep his message understandable to those with somewhat lower intellectual capabilities, which would seem to me, from hearing him, to likely be 99%+ of us. (I think he says explicitly in the interview that his greatest fear is losing his audience while making a point, i.e. not being understood, something that likely has been very common in his life.) Despite Counter Currents’ reputation for being quite highbrow (as Jonathan Bowden said, it can be called “a right-wing university”), Doolittle did well here in keeping it simple enough for those not steeped in philosophical jargoning to follow along, at least 80 or 90% of the time.
“We invented truth telling”. I like it.
I loved listening to this. Two interesting men talking about important things. Thank you for posting it.
I think Mr. Doolittle ought to relax about being unintelligible to the laity. Surely, this is complex thinking that requires a general familiarity with history, philosophy, and evolution. But both on The Daily Shoah and on Counter Currents Radio, he has seemed actually surprised that people understood him.
I’m sure the work that went into developing these ideas was far above my capabilities, but merely talking about tough ideas on a podcast is not difficult for relatively smart people to follow. We do actually have the capacity to fill in the blanks mentally, to infer meanings from contexts, and to follow lengthy or complex arguments.
He may be smarter than the average among us, but not that much smarter.
After all, we are North Sea people, too!