I hope this disrupts how you see The Other and why certain behaviors persist. Maybe this information will anger you, perhaps it will disgust you: you’ll learn the difference between these two emotions should you get through this essay.

I listened to this modified song while writing. This track is what originally played during the first drafts of the Biofoundationalism series over three years ago. There’s also a video included at the end of this essay.

Disgust is a useful political diagnostic for good reason: the body is very bad at pretending.

Outline

I. Layers of Existence

• Different disciplines observing the same creature

II. Methodological Note: Tails, Outliers, & Female Welders

• Is every human science an elaborate fraud?

III. Disgust: What It Is & Isn’t

• Everyone gets grossed out. The degree and impact tell us something.

IV. Neurology of Disgust vs Anger

• Does it move toward the thing or away from the thing?

V. The Three Domains of Disgust

• Pathogen. Sexual. Moral.

VI. Measuring Disgust, Predicting Politics

• Disgust sensitivity isn’t monolithic.

VII. Homosexuality, Disease, Incest, & Sexual Abuse

• Embodied disgust reactions point to something real

VIII. Sex Differences: Male & Female Baselines

• Comparisons must be made apples-to-apples.

IX. The Four Boundaries

• Pathogens shape a nation’s politics

X. Moral Disgust: Anger Saying “Gross”

• Being offended is not the same as being disgusted

XI. Heritability & Distributions

• Individuals produce the variation. The ecology selects the distribution.

XII. Moral Genotypes, Political Phenotypes

• Nature doesn’t do coincidences at scale. Consolidated evidence of political biology.

XIII. Dyads, Collectives, & Body Before Ideology

• Conservative and liberal beliefs are different decision criteria under uncertainty.

Note:

Section VII. Homosexuality, Disease, Incest, & Sexual Abuse contains potentially upsetting information on pedophilia, parasitic activity, and child sexual assault. In addition to the sources cited throughout, this essay incorporates material from two companion research documents:

• The Moral Genotype II: Homosexuality, Disease, Incest, & Child Sexual Abuse

• The Moral Genotype II: Parasites, Behavioral Changes, & Sexual Transmission

I. Layers of Existence

Biofoundationalism recognizes a simple reality: nothing about us is independent of our bodies. Nothing about our bodies is independent of their environment. And no environment we survive in is independent of physics and thermodynamics.

These nest. Physics constrains biology, biology constrains psychology, and psychology constrains everything we call politics, culture, and society.

The base layer is physics. These are The Rules.

They’re the constraints no organism negotiates. Gravity exists without our recognition. Thermodynamics expresses itself as metabolism and grants no narrative exemption. Life must acquire energy, maintain gradients, repair damage, reproduce, and persist under finite material conditions. Some refer to this as “natural law”.

Above that layer is biology.

What living matter builds under constraint. The metabolic and genetic machinery through which organisms perceive, move, coordinate, mate, learn, and adapt. Environments impose costs; organisms iterate and propagate within them… or don't. What survives is what we call "life".

Psychology sits above this.

Psychology is biology expressed through temperament, instinct, and behavior. How we interpret, remember, desire, fear, imitate, value, and act. The discipline observes and systematizes these patterned tendencies.

From there, other disciplines exist at varying psychological resolutions:

• Economics: psychology applied to scarce resources and consumption

• Anthropology: psychology applied cross-culturally

• Education: psychology applied to learning and development

• Politics: psychology applied to civilizational coordination

• Sociology: psychology aggregated across groups

All of these human sciences study the same creature subject to the same constraints, differing only in which patterns and circumstances they prioritize.

Psychology doesn't hover above the nervous system. Politics doesn't occur outside bodies. Culture is not mist floating apart from the animal it describes. Institutions, norms, customs, and incentives are secondary forces: emergent properties of organisms with inherited architectures, physiological limits, and nonrandom dispositions.

These fields of study rest upon the same empirical premise: humans exhibit behavioral regularities. Traits cluster. Temperaments recur. Environments exert persistent effects on inhabitants. Certain conditions predict certain responses, and they’re not randomly distributed. This is the premise beneath every human science.

Recurring behaviors therefore demand recurring causes. If actions are stable enough to observe, measure, and anticipate, something stable must be emitting it.

You cannot recognize these disciplines while denying that the human is primarily a biological organism. For consistent behaviors to be observed, generalized, and systematized (which is what all of these disciplines do!) something in the organism must be producing them. This demands confrontation with the layer where they reside: biological substrate.

What we call 'social constructs' are mislabeled biological expressions. What we call culture is the aggregate of such expressions: repeated behaviors emitted by organisms with innate, recurring structure. Psychology, economics, politics, and sociology tacitly acknowledge this.

Assertions otherwise rely on a Blank Slate, faith-based belief: an infinitely plastic soul dropped into the body, operating independently of its limits, heredity, and physiology. If that were true, everyone’s behaviors would be utterly unpredictable, all datapoints would be noise, and every human science would be an elaborate fraud.

If you’re willing to call every human discipline a dehumanizing scam because it studies man as a predictable biological agent, so be it. At least you’re being consistent. If not, you’ll enjoy this essay.

The alternative to biological primacy isn’t Blank Slate fantasy: “I am whatever my mind’s thoughts say I am.”

And rejecting Blank Slatism doesn’t mean rigid determinism: “I am whatever my body’s genes dictate I am.”

Biofoundationalism is the third position: "I am what my body builds, within the conditions it encounters."

This is the nature-nurture question, restated in the parlance of physics. Reality has a concrete grammar, threaded with irreducible noise: structure and stochasticity, order and chaos. Both are critical to existence, but it’s not a relationship of equals. There’s an asymmetry of prerequisites. Order comes first; chaos comes second. The reason for this isn’t cosmically mysterious: nothing could live otherwise.

Nurture exists solely on the back of nature’s programming. What We Say is millions of years downstream of What We Are. The body’s reality permits the mind’s dreams; the former demonstrably lives without the latter; the latter cannot live without the former.

Let’s examine a critical instrument allowing the body to maintain its internal order: disgust.

Subscribe now

Share

II. Methodological Note: Tails, Outliers, & Female Welders

“But not all are like that!”

“They’re more alike than different”

Biological regularities are distributional. Group tendencies aren’t absolutes. Pointing triumphantly at the tail of a chart demonstrates nothing except statistical illiteracy. A 6’2” woman, male kindergarten teacher, or female welder don’t erase sexual dimorphism and professional preferences.

Probabilistic, systematized analysis is what all sciences do.

Human traits don’t need to occur 100% of the time to reveal biological coding. Only physics and chemistry contain laws that always hold. Exceptions don’t refute rules and outliers don’t disprove aggregates. If you think they do, then you’re of the stance that every discipline besides physics is a scam, nothing is knowable, and I’m not sure why you went to school.

Small differences often produce major real-world disparities. And every pattern has peculiarities. That’s why it’s a pattern and not a physical law.

But for those who reason-by-feelings, one exception doesn’t modify the model; it detonates the very notion of modeling. Show it a distribution and it fixates on one dot in the tail. Show it a trait across societies and centuries and it remembers a bartender in Portland who was different.

In statistics, treating every datapoint as unique and novel resembles overfitting: it overindexes on anomalies and aberrations until the model explains the sample in front of it and nothing else. No predictive capacity. That is, quite literally, not how your brain works.

Oddities exist, the question is whether they change the slope. What follows is probabilistic throughout. This is known as systemization.

Subscribe now

III. Disgust: What It Is and Isn’t

Disgust is one of the most politically powerful and most misunderstood traits. Over the years of developing Biofoundationalism publicly I’ve consistently encountered confusion about it. When I say conservatives exhibit stronger disgust responses, occasionally I’ll receive some version of “hey pal, liberals get grossed out too”.

Yes, liberals also possess stomachs and gag reflexes. But this misconstrues two different systems and the degree to which they're experienced. Disgust isn’t simply disapproval with an uglier adjective.

Everyone feels disgust. The useful questions are:

• How readily does the response activate?

• Which stimuli activate it, and how intensely?

• How widely does it generalize?

• How reliably does it predict judgment and political stances?

Disgust is not anger, offense, or disapproval. Anger and offense are cognitive-evaluative: they require appraisal. Disgust is a pre-rational reaction: revulsion, gagging, nausea.

It’s a physical avoidance state. Something is classified as infectious, corrosive, sexually costly, or otherwise unfit for incorporation or contact, and the organism rejects it. Disgust precedes language and reasoning, appearing early in development. Even newborns exhibit forms of it.

Disgust is one of the basic emotions identified across every studied human culture (Ekman’s universal six), including preliterate ones. This ancient somatic boundary-defense guides our interpretation of what's safe and what's contagion.

The behavioral immune system (BIS) is our prophylactic apparatus. A cluster of psychological mechanisms to protect from pathogens before the immune system has to do metabolically expensive work. Disgust is its emotional engine.

Thermodynamically: The BIS is an energy-conservation framework. Flinching and avoiding the contaminated thing costs fewer calories than fighting the infection it carries.

The BIS manifests the same thermodynamic logic that organizes every other biological system: minimize entropy, preserve bodily hierarchy.

Disease is harmful because it sows bodily entropy: attacking organ function, vitiating physiological processes. It spreads chaos within the organism. Every time you get sick, there’s a chaotic war going on inside you: disease is attempting to degrade the body (entropy), the immune system is attempting to preserve it (order). This is energetically costly.

Living things are dissipative structures; they persist by consuming energy to maintain structure and curtail internal entropy. Physics flows through all things.

1. Psychologically: BIS directives guide behaviors. Made legible to us via social filters.

2. Biologically: bodily processes maintain the organism’s structure. Anything imperiling its health informs the psychological layer.

3. Thermodynamically: determine energetic requirements and what the body must do to survive.

4. All of these are connected. The layer underneath dictates to the one above.

The BIS runs on a “better safe than sorry” principle; it overreacts, treating ambiguity as threats. This carnal software doesn’t restrict itself to microbiology. It also tags foreigners, sexual deviants, or norm violators as polluting.

Conservatives have a lower threshold for BIS activation.

Share

Subscribe now

IV. Neurology of Disgust vs Anger

When people conflate “that offends me” with “that disgusts me,” they’re confusing different primitives. True disgust is psychological perimeter defense that makes you want to recoil, gag, or wash. Anger doesn’t do this.

Critical distinctions

• Offense is an evaluation (precedes anger): That violates a rule or value.

• Anger prepares confrontation: That must be stopped or punished.

• Fear elicits defense: That may harm me.

• Contempt performs demotion: That is beneath me.

• Disgust seeks separation: That is contaminating. Get it away.

Neurology of disgust

• Disgust is visceral, frequently carrying parasympathetic signatures and vagal effects: decreased heart rate, changes in skin conductance (how well your skin conducts electricity, sweating affects this), and increased salivation.

  • Most parasympathetic responses are mediated through vagal pathways. The vagus nerve carries approximately 75% of all parasympathetic fibers.

• Distinct facial expressions: nose wrinkle, upper lip retraction, sometimes tongue protrusion, the “gape face”

• Resistance to touch, eat, approach or remain near the stimulus.

  • Disgust makes you withdraw, not engage.

• These are involuntary. When someone’s levator labii fires, they’re disgusted whether they admit it or not.

  • These embodied responses arise without permission and provide a candid lens into the organism’s state.

The anterior insula (particularly the right anterior insula) is disgust’s key driver. This is where external sensory cues meet information about the body’s internal state.

• The insula processes interoceptive signals: awareness of nausea, illness, fatigue, etc. It monitors your inner state.

• Disgust is a gut feeling, literally. The insula receives signals and generates the sensation of “this is compromising, expel it”.

  • Disgust is produced by a distributed system integrating bodily sensation, learned association, attention, and memory. The amygdala plays a supporting role. The insula is its central node.

• Impaired recognition and experience of disgust following brain injury: provides causal evidence of the insula’s role.

  • Insula damage can materially impair disgust processing and interoception, including the ability to recognize emotions in others. This doesn’t happen with amygdala damage for disgust (though it does impact fear).

Anger and disgust evoke different reactions. Anger mobilizes you toward the stimulus; disgust repels you away from it. They’re opposite autonomic programs.

• Anger is a predominantly sympathetic program: increased heart rate, faster breathing, muscle tension, elevated blood pressure, increased sweating and skin conductance. The body preparing to close distance.

Of note: there are sympathetic markers associated with disgust like some salivary responses (signs of stress) and increased skin conductance. Neither emotion is a clean toggle of one branch. The ratio shifts; it doesn't flip. However, a dominant autonomic signature reliably separates the two: anger is sympathetic-led, disgust parasympathetic-led.

The cleanest distinction is operational. Anger precedes engagement (move toward the thing). Disgust precedes separation (move away from the thing).

Subscribe now

V. The Three Domains of Disgust

The literature partitions disgust into three categories. I accept two of them.

1. Pathogen Disgust (ancestral, core)

• Targets include spoiled food, feces, vomit, blood, wounds, pus, maggots/bugs, bodily fluids, corpses, visible infection, foul odors.

• Function: prevent contact with substances that may introduce pathogens. The immune system’s behavioral front lines.

2. Sexual Disgust (ancestral)

• Revulsion at sexual stimuli that represent fitness costs: incest, appearance of infection, poor mate quality, unwanted sex acts, or sex perceived as disease spreading or boundary-violating.

• This makes some sexual advances feel not only undesirable but actively repellent.

  • This domain produces the largest partisan divergence.

3. Moral Disgust (modern, misclassification)

• “Moral disgust” is cognitively evaluated. You encounter the violation, appraise it, then react.

  • Examples: betrayal, cruelty, cheating/stealing, oppression, loyalty violations.

    • It’s not remotely as visceral as worms in your sandwich.

• Frankly I don’t think moral disgust warrants inclusion as a genuine disgust category. It’s not a pre-rational process.

• Moral reactions lack the neurological indicators of authentic disgust; it’s closer to a metaphorical extension to the social/ethical domain.

  • In experimental comparisons, moral violations often resemble anger. I believe a category error is occurring. Much more on this later.

Anger characteristically organizes approach and confrontation; disgust characteristically organizes rejection and separation.

Moral transgressions elicit punishment and conflict effects that drive the respondent toward the object.

The toward/away heuristic is why I find moral disgust to be anger dressed in the language of revulsion.

Biofoundationalism’s core standard of evidence: Truth Is Found Through Motion. We know what something is by what it does, not what it says. When words and actions contradict, the embodied response is what’s true.

If you want to know which emotion someone is feeling, watch how they move.

Subscribe now

Share

VI. Measuring Disgust, Predicting Politics

Disgust sensitivity isn’t monolithic. Someone can be acutely pathogen-averse but sexually permissive; disaggregation allows us to isolate which kind has political implications. There are different ways to assess disgust, each probing different depths and domains.

1. Self-report

• The Disgust Scale concentrates on core contamination and animal-reminder items (cues that we’re mortal biological organisms: death, gore, mutilation).

  • It gives scenarios like: “You see maggots on a piece of meat”, “You’re about to drink a glass of milk when you smell that it’s spoiled”, “You accidentally touch cremated ashes”, “You discover that a friend changes underwear only once a week”.

• The Three Domain Disgust Scale contains 21 items divided among pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust. Subjects rate each item from zero (not disgusting) to six (extremely disgusting).

  • Sexual disgust uses scenarios like: “Hearing two strangers having sex”, “Finding out that someone you don’t like has sexual fantasies about you”, “Having sex with someone you just met”. Source.

Pathogen Disgust and Political Affiliation

• Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting: found positive disgust-sensitivity and conservatism relationship across two large samples (31,045 people), holding after demographic controls and Big Five traits. Replicated across 121 countries.

  • Overall disgust sensitivity and conservatism: r = .22

  • Contamination disgust and conservatism: r = .27.

  • Across all regions had range of r = .17–.30

  • “Consistent with US results, in every region contamination disgust showed the strongest relationship with conservatism, ranging from r = .22 (United Kingdom) to r = .33 (Eastern Europe)”.

    • For context, the correlation between ibuprofen and pain relief is r ≈ .14. These are robust effects by any behavioral science standards.

• The behavioral immune system and social conservatism: a meta-analysis of 24 studies found BIS positively related to conservatism, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, religious fundamentalism, ethnocentrism, and collectivism.

  • r = .26 for BIS and social conservatism

  • r = .33 for authoritarianism

  • r = .38 for religious conservatism

  • These are meaningful population-level relationships. The association is most prominent for social/sexual topics (not policy stuff like taxes and regulation).

• Disease avoidance and ethnocentrism: ethnocentric attitudes and ingroup attraction increased with perceived disease vulnerability and disgust sensitivity.

Self-report data establishes the relationship. The more definitive signal is found when you bypass the mouth and measure the body.

2. Physiological Evidence

• Disgust Sensitivity and Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations: subjects had skin conductance and heart rate measured while viewing disgusting images. Those with stronger involuntary responses were more socially conservative, particularly opposing gay marriage and premarital sex.

  • A 1-standard-deviation increase in skin conductance predicted ~0.39 standard deviations greater opposition to gay marriage.

  • Among 16 binary political issues, gay marriage was the only one significantly associated with skin response.

  • More physiological studies will be shared throughout this essay

3. Neuroimaging (Brain Scan) Evidence

The most compelling test is whether the signal appears in the brain itself, where no conscious filtering intervenes.

• Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology: researchers ran fMRI scans while subjects viewed repulsive, threatening, pleasant, and neutral images, then examined whether activity across the insula, basal ganglia, amygdala, and other regions predicted political characteristics.

• Disgust images, especially animal-reminder, had neural markers predictive of political orientation, even when they didn’t match participants’ conscious ratings of the images.

  • Neural responses to disgusting images classified liberals and conservatives with a cross-validated area under the curve (AUC) of .757. Meaningful separation.

  • Animal-reminder (especially mutilated bodies) produced an AUC of .998 (!) Core contamination produced .548.

    • Context: 0.50 is chance and 1.00 is perfect classification.

An AUC of .998 means the model almost perfectly distinguished conservatives from liberals using brain activity alone. No survey, conversation, or self-report.

Sexual Disgust: The Main Differentiator

Sexual disgust substantially corresponds with conservative attitudes on gay marriage and deviant/promiscuous sexuality. The finding replicates across methods: implicit association, olfactory, skin conductance, and self-report.

• Sexual Disgust Trumps Pathogen Disgust in Predicting Voter Behavior: Initially, both pathogen and sexual disgust correlated with social conservatism.

  • When pathogen and sexual topics were separated, sexual disgust remained a significant predictor, pathogen less so.

    • Each one-unit increase in sexual disgust corresponded to ~30% higher odds of voting Republican over Democrat.

• Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Intuitive Disapproval of Gays: disgust sensitivity predicts both explicit and implicit (IAT) negative attitudes toward gay men.

• Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men: exposure to noxious odor decreased favorability toward gay men.

  • It had small effect on attitudes towards lesbians and none towards African Americans, the elderly, or other political issues.

• Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations: those with stronger skin-conductance responses to disgusting images were especially more likely to oppose gay marriage.

• Disgust, scrupulosity and conservative attitudes about sex: found core disgust associated with disapproval of homosexuality, even after accounting for contamination fear.

Sloppy discourse says “conservatives are more disgusted” as if they’re just vomiting more at life. The precise version: conservatism tracks threats of bodily degradation and contamination. Rather than “Ew, thing I dislike” it’s “Ew, potentially infectious”.

The next section expands on the critical category of sexual disgust and its relationship to disease and abuse.

Subscribe now

VII. Homosexuality, Disease, Incest, & Sexual Abuse

High pathogen-disgust produces tighter group boundaries, stronger purity intuitions, and preference for the familiar. Circuitry that activates when smelling rot can also fire when encountering actions coded as contaminating.

Male homosexuality is a clarifying case because it separates conscious political narration from automatic somatic response.

What Do Two Men Kissing and a Bucket of Maggots Have in Common? Heterosexual Men’s Indistinguishable Responses: straight men produced a physiological saliva response (indicating stress and anxiety) to images of men kissing that was indistinguishable from reactions to universally repellent images like maggots.

It’s a feeling that arrives unbidden, a corporeal verdict, that later receives verbal scaffolding. Those who lack this embodied reaction assume it’s a learned bias: projecting their disposition onto others. These subconscious differences form the backbone of contentious partisan disagreements.

Note:

The elevated response held regardless of self-reported anti-gay stances. Meaning even the straight liberal guys had the same stress reaction. The response therefore isn’t politically predictive. If consistently replicated, it would represent a male sexual disgust universal.

This isn’t disgust regarding all gays. It’s specifically targeted at male homosexuality. This makes evolutionary sense in a pathogen-avoidance frame. The high-disgust male doesn’t flinch from all sex; the BIS is keyed to indications of infection risk and reproductive cost, not abstract notions of “homophobia” or being a prude.

These pathogen-avoidance instincts have a very real epidemiological provenance.

The BIS is calibrated to threats and their vectors, not ideological rhetoric or identities. Anal intercourse is a transmission vector with the highest STI conversion rate. The act concentrates risk. Gay men are the population with the highest-risk activities. The immune system doesn't moralize.

This topic is saturated with dogma that falsely labels aversions as “phobias” or “bigotry”, obscuring why these reactions persist and what they’re pointing at. To understand them, we must honestly examine the object eliciting the reaction.

Biofoundationalism looks to thermodynamics, biology, and environmental pressures to systemize scaled human coordination; it has no position for or against any data. If while reading this section your impulse is to sort findings into good or bad, you are in the wrong frame.

These excerpts are taken from the research document The Moral Genotype II: Homosexuality, Disease, Incest, & Child Sexual Abuse. All sources can be found within the document. For those listening to audio of this essay: there are pictures containing text that need to be read.

Keep in mind gay men make up ~2-4% of the US population (with similar rates in other nations), yet account for the following:

Disease

MSM = “men who have sex with men” (gay and bisexual)

HIV

The concentration is drastic.

Syphilis:

Gonorrhea:

Sexual Partners and Promiscuity:

Disease requires transmission. MSM partner counts are vastly higher, providing a network for STD spread.

Incest:

The data on homosexual rates of child sexual abuse, pedophilia, and incest are the most aggressively suppressed, and their ramifications are the most actively destructive.

The BIS applies to more than just microbiology.

Childhood Sexual Abuse and Victimization:

Gays are abused at dramatically higher rates in childhood. These disparities are substantial and replicated.

Note the mental health consequences:

Pedophilia:

Note the ratios and the asymmetries:

Birth order, homosexual development, and pedophilia:

The BIS is invoking valid reactions to counteract pathogen spread, high abuse potential, and dysgenic activity. “Love is love” sloganeering doesn’t rebut this severe reality and its repercussions. Embodied disgust reactions cannot be ideologically scolded away, nor should they be.

Parasites and Behavioral Impacts

There’s concrete evidence that parasites manipulate host characteristics to facilitate their spread. A documented human case is Toxoplasma gondii effects on reaction times, testosterone, and other characteristics. There’s plenty more examples in the animal kingdom. This has implications for any abnormality that impedes reproduction and correlates with extreme-outlier behaviors, namely homosexuality.

Male homosexuality carries enormous fitness cost: gay men have roughly 80% fewer biological children than straight men. Its heritability is low (~25%). A purely genetic cause is infeasible: any allele producing homosexuality would be eliminated within a few generations under such intense negative selection. Something other than inheritance is sustaining it.

Within the second research document The Moral Genotype II: Parasites, Behavioral Changes, and Sexual Transmission you’ll find studies covering cognitive, behavioral, and physical effects associated with parasites, microbiomes, and disease.

These excerpts are taken from the second document, referencing the paper Infectious Causation of Disease: An Evolutionary Perspective. If this topic interests you, I recommend you read the research documents. The findings around gut microbiomes are particularly notable.

Political discourse obfuscates this biological basis beneath twenty thousand words of moralized storytelling. Denying that an orientation correlates with catastrophic rates of infection and exploitation because it’s emotionally inconvenient refutes nothing and makes it impossible to address.

The BIS evolved to detect precisely this kind of rampant harm. Pretending it lacks legitimate origins only results in more disinformation, more victims, and more suffering. This needs to be taken seriously.

Share

Subscribe now

VIII. Sex Differences: Male & Female Baselines

A bifurcation between men and women adds nuance to political affiliation. On average, men and women score similarly on disgust, save for one axis.

Sex differences and similarities in disgust sensitivity and Microbes, mating, and morality:

• 0 is ‘not disgusting’ and 6 is ‘extremely disgusting’:

  • Pathogen disgust: women 3.94, men 3.76

  • Moral disgust: women 3.81, men 3.53

  • Sexual disgust: women 4.03, men 2.19

The sexual-disgust gap is enormous: ~1.51 standard deviations higher for women.

This tracks vastly different risks of sex. Mating misjudgment costs a man minutes and a shot of protein. It can cost a woman nine months, and then some. This heightened vulnerability tracks well-documented higher rates of female neuroticism, which shares variance with disgust. Instincts push her toward “the ick” earlier and more often.

If disgust sensitivity predicts political orientation, and women score higher in a major category, they should vote further right than men. They do not. Women vote left/liberal at greater rates (research linked here and here).

I have a methodological solution that’s testable.

Biofoundational hypothesis:

I think a measurement error is occurring. Disgust provides a within-sex signal, not a between-sex one.

Elevated sexual disgust is an evolutionary default setting for women. Comparing her score to his is applying one unisex metric while ignoring different threat calibrations. Women don't have greater sexual sensitivity because they're more conservative; they have it because sex is costlier for them. The baseline is materially different. The political diagnostic isn't found in an absolute score, but the deviation from sex-specific mean and distribution.

Comparisons must be made apples-to-apples to yield predictive worth. If disgust studies pool male and female data without sex-indexing, they’ll systematically misclassify high-disgust women as conservative and low-disgust men as liberal, when both may simply be near their natural baseline.

A woman scoring 5 where the female average is 4 is expressing something different from a man scoring 5 where the male average is 2.1. She’s one unit above her baseline; he’s nearly three above his. Treating those as equivalent scores confuses altitude with irregularity.

This also reframes the response to male homosexuality discussed in the previous section. If disgust is a within-sex signal, then liberal and conservative straight men displaying similar physiological response is evidence that male sexual disgust has a floor high enough to universally produce that response.

Within-sex scores provide the benchmark; political prediction is found through deviations from it.

I looked up whether any studies do what I’m proposing. A fair number of the major disgust-politics studies control for sex, and some test whether the disgust/politics relationship differs between men and women. What I didn’t find was treating disgust as a deviation from a sex-specific baseline (referencing a sex-standardized score or percentile) and then using that relative position as the political predictor. I think this would be very valuable to implement.

Share

Subscribe now

IX. The Four Boundaries

Conservative sensitivities emphasize boundaries of body and nation: cleanliness, integrity, familiarity, and sanctity of form.

Four categories organize this. Three operate at individual scale. The fourth operates at civilizational scale and is extraordinarily important and formative in ways we don’t fully appreciate.

1. Sexual Boundary

The largest partisan divergence.

• Male homosexuality reliably elicits disgust in conservatives.

  • BIS discrimination is anti-contagion, not anti-sex. An attractive woman in pornography is processed through approach/reward circuits (reproductive, low transmission threat). Two men kissing provokes avoidance/contamination (non-reproductive, high transmission threat).

• Biofoundationalism hypothesis: I’d expect these would predict conservatism at the neurological level:

  • Public sex displays, fetishistic activity, paraphilic extremes, group sex, bestiality, radical deviation from sexual norms.

2. Pathogens

• Rotting flesh, feces, bodily fluids, visible disease, open wounds, insects in food. Conservatives exhibit stronger responses to these.

• Biofoundationalism hypothesis: these would predict conservatism at the neurological level:

  • Homeless encampments, open prostitution, street filth, bodily exposure, intravenous drug use.

3. Body Envelope

The violation of expected bodily form. Breaching that boundary registers as contamination and diminishes physical integrity.

• Conservatives are more reactive to images that remind you’re a permeable biological organism.

  • Biofoundationalism hypothesis: these would produce politically predictive physiological responses:

    • Excessive tattoos or piercings, body modification, open surgery, transgender displays, graphic bodily violence, the deliberate blurring of male/female presentation and adult/child sexual content.

    • Any transformation of the body into something unnatural, unbounded, or mutilated.

The first three categories operate at individual/local scale. The fourth exists on collective scale. It has civilizational implications.

4. The Group Boundary

This shapes societal penchant for authoritarianism, collectivism, and ingroup/outgroup emphasis.

• The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions, Opposition to Immigration: BIS applies to immediate and potential contagions. Generalizing from physical unfamiliarity to social unfamiliarity.

  • Social triggers: mass immigration, foreign enclaves, unfamiliar food/smells, no-go zones.

    • Outsiders evoke BIS tagging as threats via norm disturbances, especially those who look and smell different, or have unusual cultural practices around food and hygiene.

      • This isn’t “racism” in the way it’s typically moralized. The BIS extrapolates from “unfamiliar food might be toxic” to “unfamiliar people might carry disease”.

A group of cross-national studies found that historically higher pathogen prevalence is associated with greater collectivism, conformity, obedience, authoritarianism, restricted sexuality, and lower trait Openness and Extraversion.

• Pathogen prevalence predicts cross-cultural variability in individualism/collectivism: data on disease spread strongly predicts collectivism vs individualism, controlling for wealth and other confounds.

• Origins of cultural differences in conformity: high-pathogen-load regions historically develop more collectivist, outgroup-avoidant social norms.

  • Predicts cross-national differences in conformity at r = .49; valuing obedience over self-reliance at r = .48.

• Pathogens and Politics: Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism: parasite and famine prevalence independently predicted country-level authoritarianism and valuing obedience.

• Pathogens, personality, and culture: Disease prevalence predicts variability in sociosexuality, extraversion, and openness: higher disease negatively predicted levels of extraversion, openness to experience, and unrestricted sexuality.

These studies converge. National levels of collectivism, conformity, obedience, authoritarianism, and restricted sexuality track historical prevalence of infectious disease. These are incredible findings, durable across studies and continents.

Geographic distribution of personality traits and political organization are largely adaptations to pathogens. Cultural practices deemed “social constructs” ignore their biological roots directed at parasites.

This data corroborates a Biofoundationalist claim: culture isn’t a top-down arbitrary creation. It’s a bottom-up adaptation to ecology and agriculture. This research validates observations on temperamental distributions and governance found in the essay Temperamental Residue.

Causal sequence, psychological layer:

• High pathogen load → intensified BIS selection → stricter ingroup boundaries, lower trait Openness → more conformity, authority-deference, sanctity-emphasis, and sexual conservatism.

Causal sequence, biological layer:

• Parasite ecology → disgust calibration → temperamental distribution (genotype) → political-cultural expression (phenotype).

The BIS is the proximate mechanism; survival pressures are the distal one. Immunological, not ideological. Bottom up. The environment determines the expression.

Share

Subscribe now

X. Moral Disgust: Anger Saying “Gross”

Core disgust precedes moral judgement: “I feel revulsion. Thus it’s wrong”. Subconscious.

Moral disgust follows moral judgement: “I’ve concluded this is revolting. Thus it’s wrong”. Conscious.

Conservatives have genuine disgust mislabeled as bigotry. Liberals may have genuine disgust mislabeled as ideology. We’ll look to physiological hallmarks to tell us which is which.

Conservative disgust maps onto ancestral pathogen-avoidance and non-abstract threats; it has a lower activation threshold and wider generalization. Whereas liberal disgust is often moral. I disagree with this designation. Since it isn’t pre-rational nor subconscious, I believe this to be outrage under the banner of “gross”. Let’s review.

Liberal Moral Disgust

• The Care/Harm moral foundation is the dominant liberal channel.

• Acts involving harm or cruelty to those perceived as vulnerable.

  • Biases/slurs/bigotry against weaker classes (note: these are just words, symbolic hostility, not literal vectors for disease or bodily violation).

    • Moral-transgression experiments detect facial activity associated with disgust, but this also contains the impulse to confront/punish. This is a disgust/anger hybrid at best.

• Ecological corruption: pollution, industrial waste, environmental degradation.

  • This strikes me as fair disgust application because it partly recruits actual pathogen concerns while extending it metaphorically.

  • Biofoundational hypothesis:

    • If studied, I'd expect acute ecological contamination to produce the closest thing to authentic disgust among liberal-coded triggers. Specifically for concrete contamination (a polluted river) rather than abstract contamination (carbon emissions, “hate speech”).

      • The further it’s removed from tangible pathogen cue, the more the response resembles outrage.

Under this expanded definition, conservatives have 'moral disgust' too, but I find the category misleading and there's already ample evidence for rightwing disgust. You can infer what induces conservative ethical angst via the Moral Foundations framework, developed by psychologist Jon Haidt:

Evidence that moral disgust isn’t true disgust:

• Autonomic correlates of physical and moral disgust: directly compared the two emotions.

  • Results: physical disgust produced mainly parasympathetic activation without heart rate change.

  • Moral disgust produced decreased vagal tone, increased heart rate, and autonomic imbalance. A mostly sympathetic process, matching standard anger responses.

Numerous studies reinforce how disgust and anger are fundamentally different autonomic indicators:

• Sources: Autonomic Nervous System and Emotion; A mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust); Intersection of disgust and fear; Psychophysiological Correlates of Disgust; Aiming for the stomach and hitting the heart: Sources for disgust reactions

Being offended is not the same as being disgusted, even if narrated otherwise. This must be determined physiologically not semantically. What It Does > What It Says.

Standard disgust begins with embodied aversion and acquires moral language afterward. Moral disgust starts with righteous indignation that’s entangled with condemnation and rage.

Biofoundational comment: retire the term 'moral disgust'. It’s enough of a category error to warrant a different designation. Autonomic evidence reinforces this. The accurate label is moral outrage.

Anger characteristically closes distance; disgust characteristically creates it. Anger’s grammar entails specifying a wrong and a reason. Disgust brings no argument; reactions are its reasoning.

Share

Subscribe now

XI. Heritability & Distributions

Disgust sensitivity is heritable. Twin studies are the gold standard for partitioning genetic and environmental influence.

• Quantitative genetics of disgust sensitivity: twin studies found significant genetic components to variation in disgust reactivity.

• Genetic and Environmental Influences on Disgust Proneness: a large twin-and-sibling study found meaningful genetic basis.

The studies attribute genetics to roughly 35% of the variation; I think this materially understates it.

The Blank Slate prior is an active institutional ideological commitment. Every politically consequential behavioral-genetic study I've read is filled with hedges to undermine biological origins and inflate environmental attribution. Consistently diminishing ‘nature’ to sell the story of ‘nurture’. The incentives are apparent: a study that 'discovers' environmental influence gets published and promoted without objection. One that finds strong heritability gets an extra round of review and inundated with caveats. This bias is excessive.

Political orientation itself is heritable, ranging from 40-60%. Temperament is also heritable. I’ll review this in a separate chapter focused on personality traits and politics.

How Biofoundationalism conceptualizes heritability:

• At individual resolution: disgust calibration is materially genetic. You inherit a threshold.

• As we saw in The Group Boundary section: at population resolution, which thresholds predominate is a product of environmental selection pressures.

• High-pathogen ecologies calibrate for high-BIS genotypes; low-pathogen ecologies, low-BIS genotypes.

Individual heritability produces the variation. Ecological selection creates the distribution.

Together they explain why disgust sensitivity predicts politics at the individual level and why collective political expressions (authoritarianism, conformity, etc.) tracks pathogen history at civilizational scale.

Share

Subscribe now

XII. Moral Genotypes, Political Phenotypes

Disgust isn’t the only biological channel that betrays partisanship. Political identity is inscribed in brain activity, brain structure, resting-states, risk assessments, and somatic responses. The organs confess before the mouth does.

Political voting patterns and temperaments recur consistently across societies and timelines. Nature doesn’t do coincidences at scale. Morality is a genotype; its political manifestation is its phenotype.

Here’s a recap of neurological evidence. These can be found in The Moral Genotype I and The Cathedral & The Ceiling, consolidated for reference:

• Political affiliation predicted with 83% accuracy from brain activity alone.

  • Democrats show greater left insula activity during risky decisions. Republicans show greater right amygdala activity. Source.

• Politics predicted with 72% accuracy from brain structure alone (just size of regions, no activity)

  • Liberals: larger anterior cingulate cortex. Conservatives: larger right amygdala. These results replicated.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding. Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology: brain connectivity classified ideology while participants sat quietly doing nothing.

The amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus fire differently in liberals and conservatives at rest. No political stimulus, tasks, or prompts. Idle, and still broadcasting allegiance.

• Three tasks had strong political links: empathy processing, episodic memory, and reward evaluation. This replicated.

• Neuromodulation of group prejudice and religious belief: Provides causal evidence. Disabling the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) made participants more ideologically liberal: softening threat sensitivity, reducing ingroup preference, and lowering belief in God/religion.

  • It’s causal (not association) because intervention altered ideology.

• Political attitudes vary with physiological traits: individuals with lower physical reactions to sudden noises and threatening images supported liberal or pacifist policies.

  • Those with elevated somatic responses favored defense spending and capital punishment.

• Conservatives perceive ambiguous faces as more threatening,¹⁶ respond to threatening stimuli with more aggression,¹ and have greater blink startle and skin conductance to unexpected or threatening images.⁵⁹

Each of these findings is independently significant. Together the pattern is unambiguous: moral dispositions are embedded in the body, then show up in the argument. When brain structure and resting states foretell ideology before a single word is spoken, the idea that reasoned debate produces beliefs becomes difficult to maintain.

Most political "debate" is theater that sorts rather than persuades. It helps the temperamentally similar find each other and coalesce. The meek libertarian, principled conservative, and compassionate liberal don't get "converted" by essays; they’re identified by them. You have more in common with political allies than you think.

You won’t reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.

Share

Subscribe now

XIII. Dyads, Collectives, & Body Before Ideology

Political stances present themselves propositionally. They tell a top-down story:

• Immigration is good for GDP or hurts median wages

• Abortion is healthcare or murder

• Gay marriage is victimless or degrades the sanctity of marriage

• Criminality is improved through rehabilitation or consequences

But beneath narrative overlays is an organism with bottom-up coding assessing what it’s encountered:

• Disgust: That’s contaminating. Remove it.

• Anger: That’s an offense. Punish it.

• Threat: That’s dangerous. Fortify the boundary.

• Contempt: That’s beneath us. Demote and ridicule it.

• Sympathy: That’s suffering. Protect it.

• Curiosity: That's novel. Approach it.

• Familiarity: That's ours. Maintain it.

Disgust is the body’s most primitive political stance; its original boundary enforcement, operating millions of years before the first word, letter, law, or constitution existed. Partisan argument about who belongs, what’s permissible, and what’s contaminating is a linguistic cherry atop an embodied cake that still eats just fine without it.

The instinct reacts first; the argument arrives afterward, wearing a wig of reasoning. Political doctrine is the phenotype. Morality is the genotype. The environment determines the expression. This is the basis of gene-environment interaction: applied to the one animal that fancies itself exempt from it.

The BIS scales fractally from individual to civilization.

• At micro scale: don’t eat the rotten meat.

• At middle scale: don’t sleep with the risky partner.

• At macro scale: don't let the unfamiliar practice, person, or custom breach the boundary.

We evolved within collectives.

Our moral orientations weren’t individually selected for self-serving correctness but for group-level resilience. This necessitates variation. Competing moral blueprints are a feature, not a bug, forming a stronger whole. We’re complementary organs cultivated within a collective body. None of us evolved in isolation picking berries by ourselves! Not even the libertarians!

Our values, priorities, principles, and motivations evolved to be in productive conflict. Dyadic, symbiotic moral polarities act as an inhale and exhale for civilizational breathing. Explore/Exploit. Risk/Reward. Obligations/Options. Consequence/Compassion. Conflict/Consensus. Verification/Trust. Honor/Dignity. Masculine/Feminine. Conservative/Liberal. Order/Chaos.

These are all dyads: each side defined in relation to the other. Political debate negotiates these ratios through policy filters. You need elements of each. The pathology is found in imbalance.

Conservative and liberal beliefs are different decision criteria under uncertainty:

Each is optimized for different failure modes. The environment determines which failure is costlier. The politics and priorities of a nation in prosperity are very different than in poverty. The same policy that’s prudent in one setting becomes reckless in another.

• One constitution prioritizes avoiding false negatives: “I’d rather exclude ten safe things than admit one dangerous thing”.

• The other prioritizes avoiding false positives: “I’d rather accept the risk of a dangerous thing than wrongly exclude ten harmless things”.

• The low-disgust liberal temperament discovers, trades, experiments, admits, mingles, and explores. But can become porous. Chaos.

• The high-disgust conservative temperament preserves, filters, fortifies, excludes, and sanitizes. But can become rigid. Order.

This is Explore/Exploit, Risk/Reward, Verification/Trust, and Honor/Dignity expressed through immunology and morality. And they're all derivatives of the tension between entropy and structure, order and chaos. Never forget that physics flows through all things.

A civilization incapable of boundaries becomes vulnerable to disease, crime, exploitation, disorder, corruption, formlessness: an ocean. A civilization governed entirely by boundaries becomes distrusting, punitive, incurious, stagnant, hostile, ossified: a prison.

One civilization dies of infection; another dies of sterility. One disposition detects breaches, another permits exploration. One asks what must be kept out. The other asks what might be allowed in.

“Somewhere between order’s prison and chaos’ ocean stands a house with a pool. Structure enough to shelter, freedom enough to live. Orderly enough for safety, chaotic enough to swim. This is where civilizations try to live.”

— Order Acts, Chaos Is

The vote follows the temperament. The temperament emerges from biological substrate. The substrate obeys thermodynamic law. There’s no point in this sequence where an unembodied spirit intervenes to override the body it inhabits. The insula fires, mouth opens, and argument arrives… believing itself the cause of what it’s merely describing.

These aren’t limits on life but preconditions for it. Gifts allowing us to exist and thrive. What we call values are ancient bodily grammars that let human collectives survive long enough to invent the word “values”. Biology precedes ideology.

All living things have immune systems. Countries do too. A nation is a living thing by virtue of being composed entirely of living things.

Sound on.

Subscribe now

Share

A lot of work goes into these essays. If you enjoy them, please give them a like, subscribe, share, and comment.

You can show your appreciation by becoming a paid subscriber, or donating here: 0x9C828E8EeCe7a339bBe90A44bB096b20a4F1BE2B

Biofoundationalism Chapters:

• Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization

• Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype

• Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment

• Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To

• Biofoundationalism V: Power Acts, Beauty Is

• Biofoundationalism VI: Order Acts, Chaos Is

Applied Biofoundationalism:

• Temperamental Residue

• Truth is Found Through Motion

• The Shape Test

• The Moral Genotype II: The Passion of the Insula & Politics of Disgust

• The Cathedral & the Ceiling: Coordination Technologies & Conservative Art

• War Is How a Nation Eats

• We’ll Give You Things > We’ll Leave You Alone

• Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Moral Algorithms

• Entwined

• Bezos and Following the Trend

• Chevron and The Hawaiian Judge Dominant Strategy

• Pleasant-Sounding Beliefs and 2nd-Order Effects

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

Much of the research I draw from in Temperamental Residue can be found in these essays. Some music I listened to while writing here. Enjoy.

Biological and behavioral:

• The Moral Genotype

• Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To

• The Cathedral & The Ceiling

• Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment

• Loopers

• The Shape Test

Thermodynamics and physical baselayer:

• Order Acts, Chaos Is

• Power Acts, Beauty Is

• War Is How a Nation Eats

• Truth is Found Through Motion

Prelude: I am, therefore I think

We’re bounded by physics, shaped by selection, and calibrated by environment. Humans aren’t floating narrators who possess bodies when convenient. We’re organisms before we’re autobiographers: creatures of appetite, fear, passion, status, lust, fatigue, and threat-detection. Reasoning arrives late to defend the programming and reframe it as a choice.

Whatever its original intent, intellectual hubris has turned the statement “I think, therefore I am” into a civilizational posture. The ego hears "my mind stands apart from my body; my thoughts author my essence". I am a Blank Slate. A fiction that depicts consciousness as sovereign and the body as furniture. No.

A newborn tracks faces, prefers mom’s voice, startles at loud noise, and roots for the breast within minutes of birth. It arrives with preferences, aversions, reflexes, and threat machinery before it has words, ideology, or socialization. Much of what constructionists attribute to language and culture is online at first breath. The narrator shows up years later and retroactively claims authorship of a self already in motion.

The body learned to navigate reality long before a mind described it. Life has been tracking gradients, threats, resources, and feedback for at least 3.5 billion years.

The genus Homo is ~2.8 million years old; Homo sapiens have existed for 300,000 years. Symbolic, layered speech emerged roughly 100,000 years ago. Writing arrived only in the last 5,000 years! The hardware is older than the software by evolutionary orders of magnitude. Our species predates the written word by a factor of sixty.

How did we survive and propagate without naming a “metaphysics”? How did fear, pain, warmth, love, disgust, attachment, hierarchy, territory, and desire orient behavior without theorizing “ontology”? How did the amygdala and metabolism derive an “ought” from an “is” so effectively??

Morality is a neurological component of temperament, observable in your neural architecture without you saying a word. The term “morality” is simply a human-readable way to say “how I value things and make tradeoffs that direct my decisions”; emotions play a similar role. The amygdala and insula, quite literally, conduct moral inference. It’s overwhelmingly installed, not chosen.

The organism never derived “ought” from “is” as a syllogism. Conditions are converted into action. Hunger becomes pursuit. Pain becomes withdrawal. Attachment becomes protection. Threat becomes flight or aggression. These are evolved traits and behavioral tools conducive to survival and judgement. The tiger’s “ought” (hunt, flee, mate) is derived from its “is” (metabolism, threat, endocrine system) without passing through any rational faculty. Animals with nervous systems (like you!) do this constantly by living in the real world, no symbols or language games needed.

Your body, via sensory engagement with reality, knows what “ought” to be done while the mind tags along. These were always biological imperatives, performed sub-rationally. Describing this as a limit of reasoning is tautological; reasoning by its very nature is limited because it exists inside your head. You cannot reason your way to what’s real, because reality is not inside your head! When someone genuinely believes otherwise, it’s grounds for an insanity plea by defense attorneys. If your ancestors acted like that were true, you would not be here.

What humans later call value, preference, duty, and morality begins as physical prioritization under constraint. Conscious judgment can sometimes override these instincts, but the valuation precedes any explanation. Constructionists confuse naming a thing with creating it. Once a pattern is articulated, the narrator begins to imagine that words produced it. From there emerges the fantasy of the unembodied agent: a blank-slate mind with absolute free will, hovering above its physical substrate.

Philosophy and disciplines whose input and output is language love reducing reality to narration, because narration is all they produce. We're storytellers; therefore all reality is a story! Solipsistic, naive anthropocentrism. This human main-character syndrome assumes nature authored every animal except the one holding a pen. Ignoring how the bear, salmon, wasp, and wolf navigate the world just fine without commentary or theories.

Human nature is the residue of millions of years of adaptation layered over billions of years of selection. Organisms that failed to track consequential regularities died. The ones that did reproduced. This is the biological prehistory of logic and the actual lineage of empiricism, testing, and updating. Long before science was named, life was already varying, encountering feedback, and retaining what worked. Francis Bacon didn't invent the scientific method; he formalized a logic being run by natural selection predating him by billions of years. Substance came first. Story came second. The interior decoration mistakes itself for the foundation.

Rats searching for food perform trial/error experiments. A hawk adjusting its dive is calibrating against the laws of physics. How are these creatures performing basic tests, updating via feedback, and iterating without a theory of causality? Who taught the badger about Popper? How do cats understand object permanence without a “metaphysics”?

These aren’t top-down man-made artifacts. Cause and effect, risk assessment, explore/exploit, and group-coordinating behaviors are embodied understandings. They’re bottom-up biological solutions to thermodynamic problems under constraint. Enacted not only by mammals but organisms far simpler: insects, worms, creatures with no cortex at all. Look outside your own species, don’t assume you’re the center of the universe, and you’ll see it.

Slime mold, a brainless organism with no neurons, formed networks comparable to the Tokyo rail system! A blob with a body and no narration, no symbols, and no “epistemology” solved a complex optimization problem that took engineers decades. Who knew slime molds read Kant!

Even in sleep, when the narrator goes offline, the body continues regulating temperature, digesting, repairing tissue, consolidating memory, mounting immune responses, and managing hormones. You spend a third of your life unconscious while biology runs the operation unsupervised. Conscious thought requires a body. A body does not require conscious thought. The body comes first, because survival comes first. This binding asymmetry establishes priority and who submits to who. This isn’t a relationship of equals… nothing truly is.

Billions of years of life. Millions of years of human evolution. Hundreds of thousands of years of our species. Tens of thousands of years of visible symbolism. Five thousand years of writing. The mind doesn't levitate above the body, and the body doesn't levitate outside nature. The tacit conceit: “this applies to every animal except me”.

Strip out the species-level narcissism and restore the causal order. I’m an organism capable of narration, but I don’t exist because I narrate. I narrate because I exist. “I am, therefore I think”.

The distinction between mind and body is something Biofoundationalism derived operationally through physics and thermodynamics, clarifying the dyad in functional terms: movement and non-movement. The kinetic body and the inert mind. The body’s actions move; the mind’s thoughts do not. A belief that alters no behavior is indistinguishable from a belief never held.

Focusing on motion grounds us in measurable thermodynamic signature and sidelines philosophical language games. We only know what something is by how it moves, not by what it says.

Since the body testifies before the mind explains, the practical question is how to read testimony delivered without words. The unit of that reading is the tell.

The Tell

Modern man’s first instinct is to explain himself. He announces preferences, justifies habits, defends motives, and offers a guided tour of the self. Useful signals often sit between these explanations.

A Tell is a small, consistent behavior whose significance exceeds its nominal content. They’re probabilistic, directional signals: moments where biology slips past stories. They leave temperamental residue.

A story is what the organism says. A tell is what the organism keeps doing. One tell suggests, several let you triangulate. Claims can be curated, but tells are harder to launder because they’re unconsciously leaked. People unknowingly hand you pieces of themselves in the banal.

Some properties of useful tells:

• Peripheral. It’s not a conscious self-advertisement.

• Repeated. A single behavior is noisy anecdote; a series of them forms patterns with predictable shape.

• Cross-domain. Traits don't exist in vacuums; they show up in prose, food, work, politics, and leisure. Triangulation happens when disparate domains converge on the same disposition.

• Costly. It reveals tradeoffs around time, focus, money, reputation, comfort, or risk.

• Predictive. A tell that only explains itself is trivia. A tell that forecasts behaviors builds a model.

• Discriminating. A useful tell distinguishes among competing explanations. If age, occupation, politics, and fashion all predict the same behavior equally well, the behavior says little about temperament.

• Context-sensitive. Signals acquire meaning against a baseline.

A public profile holds more than meets the eye. A writing style is a type of gait. Breakfast habits give fatherly insight. Rioting is moral architecture under stress. The test of any framework isn’t whether it sounds elegant, but whether it predicts. What follows is Applied Biofoundationalism at multiple scales.

Outline

Individual Scale

I. Profile & Relationship Tells: Interests and Upbringing

II. Metabolic Tells: Feminine Metabolism & the Dad Meal

III. Preference Tells: The Opinionated Gentleman

IV. Rhetorical Tells: Hedging and Defending

V. Diagnostic Tells: Books, Vacations, Careers, & Politics

Population Scale

VI. Civilizational Tells: The Government You Deserve

VII. The Game Theory of Constraint & Escalation

VIII. Societal Tells: Political Violence & Riots

IX. Concluding: Substance Precedes Story

Emphasizing again: tells are probabilistic signals, not definitive law. They deal in central tendencies, population distributions, and systemize aggregate traits to form testable predictions.

Subscribe now

I. Profile & Relationship Tells: Interests and Upbringing

challenged me to deduce her major from her Substack profile and nothing else. To do so, I applied a blend of psychology’s Big 5 traits, female and male temperament research, and Biofoundationalism categorizations.

Tells and observations:

Not all of these are necessary for the conclusion. I’m going to walk you through the process so you can see what went into it.

Sci-fi author

• Sci-fi entails systemizing a fictional landscape: world-building, rule-construction, extrapolating consequences from premises, and applying them across characters.

• Female reasoning rarely or reluctantly systemizes, preferring intuition over analysis.

  • When women systemize, they route it mainly through verbal channels, not spatial ones.

    • The male advantage in spatial intelligence is the largest cognitive sex differences in psychological literature. Fields that require it (engineering, physical systems) are overwhelmingly male.

Happily married, respects husband

• She confirmed this in an unrelated remark. I’ve also seen her say on the timeline she married young and has several kids.

• Per this, I’d wager she has a good relationship with her father. A woman calibrated by a strong dad selects for a man she respects, not one she manages.

  • She’s less likely to be threatened or resistant to masculine competence because she was raised by a healthy version of it. Experiencing hierarchy as functional and secure before encountering a political ideology telling her what to think about it.

    • A girl whose primary male relationship growing up was protective and capable doesn’t develop the defensive posture toward masculine authority that precipitates reflexive egalitarianism.

    • Women fitting this description will be more conservative; this aligns with Georgi’s presence. She’s not conservative against something, but because the support it offers feels like home. Her father provided a template for masculinity as functional rather than oppressive, and her husband is furthering it.

Conservative

Conservative women commonly follow two routes:

• Threat mitigation: unsafe environment induces defensive structure-seeking, or

• Inherited ethic: stable nuclear family, positive upbringing with dad present

  • Georgi codes as inherited ethic. Like it’s architecture she was raised inside, not armor she puts on. She doesn’t have the defensive posture you see in some aggressively rightwing women who got there via trauma, reaction, or attention whoring.

    • This is the difference between women who uphold values and women who react to a wound. The reactive kind is louder, more identity-forward, and ostentatious.

      • Exceptions tend to involve elevated androgens/testosterone (PCOS is a common culprit), being very autistic, or being Ann Coulter.

Temperament Assessment

• Women are natural liberals, especially under secular, high-safety, prosperous conditions where masculine influence fades. The feminine baseline is dispositionally geared for an “ethic of care”: compassion, harm reduction, need-based fairness (determined by equality of outcome), and universalist dignity (deserved).

  • Contrasting the masculine ethic of honor (earned). Masculine effort-based fairness manifests as proportionally receiving what you contribute. Hierarchy is inherently unequal: masculine resource allocation upholds hierarchy; feminine resource allocation diminishes it.

  • A conservative woman weights authority, loyalty, and proportionality more heavily than sex-typical distribution predicts.

• Female conservatism is context-dependent: less innate, more situational. In the absence of exogenous rules-based influence — a strong father/husband or religion — women collectively skew liberal.

  • This began in the West around the 70s, when religious participation notably declined. Since 1980, women have voted more liberal than men in every major election.

    • Other factors you can point to are largely derivative of religious decline, such as no-fault divorce and contraception/abortion access. As religious influence loosened, women moved left, and so did the policies.

      • The degree that women vote liberal varies by race (white women vote more conservative than minority women). However women across all races are more liberal than men of their own race.

PREDICTIONS:

Educational Background Prediction: Political Science, Anthropology, maybe History.

• Core informing traits: Sci-Fi affinity. Female conservatism via nuclear family upbringing and good father, reveres husband, not reactive.

• High verbal intelligence (she’s a published author) correlates with humanities education.

These majors chronicle new worlds and models of human organization. They’re more befitting of a systemizing woman than STEM.

• They give conservative-leaning women a people-and-language orientation (female default) while incorporating standards for evidence and boundary-recognition (masculine influence).

• Female interest in people over things is one of the largest sex differences in psychology. Conservative women are likely open to “things” if they’re institutions made of language (courts, legal processes) or studies focused on human organization (anthropology, political science).

Other possible interests:

• Classics or Theology: I’d expect conservative women raised in a strong father-figure household to have a penchant for the Great Books, Western canon, and religious tradition.

  • These take authority and tradition as topics of study, not oppressors to deconstruct.

RESULTS:

From her Substack profile and a couple of interactions, Biofoundationalism correctly triangulated her major as anthropology. You can see the original analysis from Feb 16th linked here.

Anthropology. Heavy interest in theology. Father as described.

Subscribe now

Share

II. Metabolic Tells: Feminine Metabolism & the Dad Meal

From Oct 2025:

Georgi’s request to figure out her major came from comments I made on preferences for breakfast. I’ve made breakfast comments like this over the last year. I think there’s something to this in respect to female metabolism.

Personal observations:

• Women tend to default to small or no breakfast and a more prominent lunch. The "not a fan of breakfast" thing was particularly prevalent among liberal women when I lived in NYC.

• Men (especially dads) are famously big on breakfast. “Fuel yourself, you’ve got a big day ahead!” energy.

  • I’ve noticed women in relationships or close with their dads are more often breakfast fans.

My reasoning why breakfast skews male:

• Breakfast is utility-focused and functional. Commonly eaten in solitude. Feels more like an obligation.

  • Men tolerate solitude better and have higher comfort with independent activities. Whereas women have greater relational orientation.

• Lunch has social connotations, it’s more relational. You’re expected to eat it with others (coworkers/peers/friends). Lunch dates are common. It carries implicit interactive assumptions.

  • If someone eats lunch by themselves, it sounds sad. The same isn’t so for breakfast; we recognize it’s a pragmatic meal with less social expectations.

    • Women are more social: they measurably talk more than men. Their speech also has more affiliative, relationship-oriented language.

Field hypothesis:

• Metabolic claim: sex-linked physiology contributes to differences in morning appetite.

• Household tell: breakfast consistency in women is a probabilistic biomarker for a gravitational masculine. Raising the odds of these background conditions:

  • She had an involved, present father

  • She has/had a husband-shaped domestic rhythm

  • Is pregnant. Male seed and fetal demands rewire her toward self-provisioning.

Dads and husbands are the strongest soldiers of the Big Breakfast lobby. A woman eating ham and eggs at 8am isn’t proof of a good father or marriage. But it’s enough to make me check for one.

While writing this essay, I remembered these breakfast reflections and decided to look into it. Turns out, there’s biological substance to them.

Evidence: Estrogen and Metabolism

• Estrogen/estradiol has an appetite-suppressive effect. Female appetite drops in the late follicular and ovulatory phases: when estrogen peaks.

  • A finding so robust it replicates across menstrual cycles in rodents, primates, and women. Source. Source.

• Leptin is the body's "I'm full" hormone. Women have ~2x higher baseline leptin levels than men at every bodyfat level and time of day.

  • Leptin’s circadian rhythm peaks between 22:00 and 3:00 and bottoms between 08:00 and 17:00. At breakfast, both sexes are at their personal low, but the female low is meaningfully above the male.

• Testosterone peaks in early morning for men

  • We run on ancient programming: morning is the period optimized for hunting and provisioning. The male endocrine signature is roughly: mobilize, fuel, move, hunt. The female endocrine signature lacks this urgency.

The sexes start the day in different metabolic gears and behaviors run downstream of this. A woman's "I'll just have coffee" is a hormonal default setting. By lunch, testosterone has fallen and the male-female hunger gap has compressed. "I'm not a breakfast person" is pitched as a preference when it’s also a window where the male endocrine architecture is loudest and the female is quietest.

Side comment:

When you encounter remarks that free will isn’t absolute, this is a shining example. The decision will feel intentional while the mechanisms operate unconsciously.

A woman who isn’t hungry in the morning narrates a hormonal directive drafted during sleep. She can override it through active intention, otherwise the programming runs on autopilot. This is what “behavior leaks biology” means; you have to be both cognizant and consistent about altering it. This doesn’t mean there’s no free will; it operates inside a system we do not fully inspect. Stuff like this occurs constantly at levels we have no awareness of.

Subscribe now

Share

III. Preference Tells: The Opinionated Gentleman

There’s meta commentary in this superficial remark about music apps. The fierceness of an opinion, not its content, is the real diagnostic.

An idiosyncrasy of manhood is the development of strangely intense convictions about minor things. I see it in other men; I see it in myself. The object is usually incidental. The signal lies in the force of commitment: passion, accumulated experience, an identity with edges.

For example: there’s one acceptable brand of headphones; a blood feud with at least one airline; guy who loves Linux; guy who loves Apple; guy who tells you the 'right way' to grill / code / fish; tribalizing along luxury watch lines (Submariners are for poors); if your truck isn’t diesel you’re gay, etc..

What’s being tacitly communicated:

“I have encountered the world enough times to develop grooves and form.”

The opinion is beside the point. What matters is the lens into temperament (namely disagreeableness) and a personality with definite shape and color, not some limp-noodle chameleon. If you have no enemies, that just means nobody notices you. If no one dislikes you, nobody really likes you either. It means you’re safe. Uninteresting. Like a Windows PC. Nobody brags about their Windows; it’s neither here nor there. It’s fine.

Preferring single malt to bourbon or an intense commitment to bowling aren't personalities; they inform on one. Allegiance to particular hobbies, products, tools, and methods leaks second-order traits: competence, affiliation, aesthetics, and how you spend your time.

For example, if you love Linux:

• This suggests you’re technically inclined and prefer control over convenience. You’re probably a tinkerer.

  • Higher likelihood of wanting to know how something works before using it and being a “do-it-yourself-er” in other domains. Linux users are the computer version of the guy who installs his own kitchen cabinets. Both prioritize self-sufficiency over efficiency.

    • These types often skew libertarian (strong individualism), with emphasis on autonomy and accountability.

• Triangulation: If I learn the Linux guy also drives stick-shift, it’s a second tell he’s willing to sacrifice usability for fuller command of a tool. Increasing his control preference and raising the odds of disagreeableness + technical orientation + contrarianism.

  • Context-dependency: In Europe, manual transmission is commonplace, so driving stick isn’t informative. In the US, automatic dominates, so it’s a choice against the current.

    • Conversely: an American driving automatic says nothing (default); a European driving automatic says something (deviation).

    • When reading tells, factor in the base rates of the behavior. The more prevalent it is, the less insightful.

      • Linux in a datacenter says nothing. Linux in an accounting department says a lot.

A man with no oddly overdeveloped convictions comes off as malleable, softer, more concerned with being liked, supporting consensus, unconfrontational, harmonious, feminine. The “everyone’s opinion is valid” guy feels womanly. No gravity. No texture. No aura.

Befittingly, women are less attracted to men who act like women. A comment from the initial version of this post:

The opinion fills out a dating profile. The vigor, excitement, and manner it’s delivered illuminates something else. The man with decisive taste is legible, direct, passionate, and while he’s less tactful, he’s also less ambiguous, more honest… and probably more androgenic.

Meanwhile the guy who will die on the hill of mechanical keyboards, quantum interpretations, gun-holstering techniques, or Spotify’s spiritually castrated algorithm is letting you know he’s lived-in and stands for something. If you get him rolling, he’ll probably say something entertaining and interesting.

Biological Underpinning

High agreeableness (harmonious, consensus-reinforcing) is a prominent female trait. Men are notably more disagreeable (competitive, confrontational). Testosterone is the driving force.

Truth Tests & Harmony Believes

Feminine perception of “truth” is processed through Manichean social valence. Is this idea kind or mean? Does this help my social standing or hurt it? The goal is relational preservation, not fidelity to accuracy. The instinct doesn’t prioritize if it’s true or false, but whether it’s harmonious or disruptive. Comforting falsehoods feel truer than acrimonious facts.

Things that increase harmony and status are good, whether or not they are truthful. Things that threaten harmony and status are bad, whether or not they are truthful. Veracity is an afterthought.

The claim isn’t tested against reality so much as screened for social consequences; it’s a survival strategy manifesting as reputation management. We evolved in settings where exile meant death. Women are significantly more vulnerable to being disliked because they can’t physically defend themselves against the consequences of intense disagreement with men (violent confrontation). This places a greater premium on coalitional protection, social standing, and conflict resolution mediated through language.

Truth won’t feed or protect you, but being liked might.

This divergence becomes visible when accuracy carries a social price. When a claim is framed as harmful or inequitable, the question quietly changes from “Is it true?” to “Should a good person admit that it’s true?”

Harmony, belief, and estimation are passive states (don’t verify, trust).

Truth, proof, and measurement are active states (don’t trust, verify).

Not all demonstration and testing produce truth; but all truth emerges from demonstration and testing.

To understand the dyad of truth/harmony through information theory see here. To understand it thermodynamically see here.

Share

Subscribe now

IV. Rhetorical Tells: Hedging and Defending

There’s metabolic logic to these tells: narration costs cognitive work, which costs energy, and we don’t expend energy on things we don’t care about. Rhetoric has an economy: attention, effort, and reputation are scarce, so their allocation carries signal. The Least Action Principle flows through all things, because physics flows through all things.

Hedging and shitposting:

How someone hedges can hint at intellectual identity. A reader from the comments in Writing Physiognomy asked me this:

“I shitpost intensely but hedge my bets constantly when I write. I seem to be gun-shy to affirm any point of knowledge I actually have. What is this called?”

— Sarah (wrote the Substack Yoga Rat, she’s since deleted her account)

She lets it fly while shitposting but is measured and hedged in domains of expertise. This inversion suggests she’s not constitutionally timid but selectively guarded. Hedging displays as humility but is often a kind of self-image insurance, a prophylactic against critique. If you don’t fully commit to a claim, you can’t fully be wrong.

The shitposter in us posts frivolously. It’s low stakes, so the unfiltered voice comes out. But when the topic touches our expertise, it touches our identity; this is when being wrong can damage the image others hold of us, and worse, the image we hold of ourselves.

Psychology calls this self-handicapping: undermining yourself to preserve a fallback explanation for failure that’s unrelated to your abilities.

• If you fail → It’s because of the handicap

  • The shitposter has a free out: “I wasn’t trying, it's the internet, who cares”.

  • Hedging has a similar escape hatch in scholarly tone: “in my opinion”, “I could be wrong”, “it appears that”, “one might argue”.

  • Both are buying optionality on being wrong, paid for in claim-strength

• If you succeed → It’s impressive despite the handicap

• It also maps onto evaluation apprehension: anxiety triggered by judgement

  • You don’t get evaluation apprehension about shitposts because you’ve pre-disclaimed seriousness and effort.

The shitposting voice is the candid self. The hedging voice is the self under evaluation. The delta between them sheds light on status, confidence, and insecurities. A related quote:

“Some write as they speak. Others compose as who they wish they were. A man who sounds nothing in person as he does on the page is telling you who he wants to be. The gap between spoken and written voice exposes the gap between self-image and self-reality.”

— Writing Physiognomy

Unprompted defensiveness:

Unprompted defensiveness signals sunk cost and identity investment; it’s more informative than attacking unprompted. Attacking is cheaper; you can lambast things you don't care about for entertainment, status, or sport. It’s far less common to defend something you don't care about. Defense is paid in vulnerability and potential cost-of-being-seen-as-uncool; this makes it more diagnostic.

Impaired mental states and honesty:

What people say when they’re tired, drunk, sick, or frustrated is often more candid because decorum requires mental energy, and these states deplete it. The cheaper budget produces the truer report.

“Sorry I said that, I was drunk” translates to “My depleted state stopped paying for pleasantries”. Deception research shows that lying is computationally expensive; it requires maintaining two simultaneous models (truth and cover story). Anything that reduces cognitive capacity (alcohol, fatigue, pressure) makes deception harder to sustain.

Subscribe now

V. Diagnostic Tells: Books, Vacations, Careers, and Politics

What you read, where you vacation, your bookshelf, occupation… each leaves temperamental residue. They illuminate underlying dimensions — openness, familiarity, origin, novelty, abstraction — that a person values. Political stances live downstream of these.

What they read:

• Conservatives read within genre and function: military history, business strategy, scripture, self-improvement. The bookshelf is a mirror.

• Liberals read promiscuously: literature, philosophy, heterodox theory, poetry, opinions out of Davos. The bookshelf is a window.

Where they vacation:

• Conservatives prefer the known, returning to the same places: the lake house, family cabin, annual hunting trip. Relaxation in the familiar.

• Liberals holiday in the unknown, preferring foreign places: new cities, new people, different cultures. Relaxation in the unfamiliar.

Fitness routines:

• Conservatives are more likely to train through repetition in defined domains: bodybuilding splits, CrossFit splits, the same running route. Discipline as method.

• Liberals train through novelty in less defined domains: rock climbing, obstacle races, cycling new routes, dance classes with an instructor. Exploration as method.

  • I suspect exploration training like rock climbing or parkour is more indicative of higher openness (liberal temperament) than repetition/defined exercise is of conservatism. I would weight these tells differently.

Decorations:

• Conservatives display trophies, flags, and family photos. Homages to origins.

• Liberals display books, art, and travel artifacts. Homages to destinations.

• One room says “this is where I’m from”; the other says “this is where I’ve been.”

Reasoning and argumentation:

• Conservatives argue from precedent: “it’s always been done this way”, “the founders intended”, “tradition exists for a reason”, “don’t remove the fence before learning why it’s there”.

  • Conservatives see inherited arrangements as compressed information.

• Liberals argue from principle: “logically, it follows” “if we’re consistent, then,” “the experts agree”, “the fence is a social construct.”

  • Liberals often submit inherited arrangements to abstract consistency

• One defends the wall; the other defends the blueprint.

Professions & Politics

If temperament underpins preferences and political stances, then we should see correlations between professions and politics. And indeed, we do. Research mapped FEC donation records across hundreds of professions and found a consistent pattern in political donations:

• Fine arts, film, music, creative writing, theater: liberal donating.

• Home builders, accountants, truck drivers, surgeons: conservative donating.

  • This tracks openness and “explore vs exploit” remarkably well. The more a discipline rewards interpretability, novelty, and innovation, the more liberal its practitioners. The more it demands precision, structure, and rule-adherence, the more conservative.

    • Example: architects vote Democrat (74%). Home builders, Republican (77%).

      • One conceptualizes the building. The other builds the building. Abstraction vs atoms.

I’d like to reframe this distinction more functionally. Rather than asking if a profession is creative or quantitative, ask how failure is determined.

Jobs that keep failure rates down (reality audited)

• Failure-rate occupations are falsifiable: if they do their jobs wrong, something breaks, someone dies, or resources vanish in a way that cannot be narrated away.

  • Reality audits the work. If the structural engineer screws up, the bridge falls; if the accountant errs, the books don’t balance. The patient dies, welding breaks, code fails, plane doesn’t land.

Jobs that produce legitimacy stories (guild/feeling audited)

• Legitimacy-story occupations are largely unfalsifiable: if they do their jobs wrong, the consequence is disagreement about whether they did them wrong.

  • Failure looks more like “disapproval”, mediated through interpretation.

    • The findings aren’t false they’re “problematic”. The theory is “misguided”. The campaign “shifted sentiment”. The art “interrogates space”. The work is judged by peers whose main product is judgement.

      • A callback to Section IV. Rhetorical Tells: academics work in a guild-audited setting. Hedging is mandatory in these fields because failure is defined by peer disapproval, not a bridge collapsing.

        • The engineer who hedges on load calculations kills people. The sociologist who doesn't hedge gets ostracized.

Failure-rate professions are validated by calculations, mechanisms, and external consequences. Legitimacy-story professions are validated by feelings, peers, and consensus. The surgeon answers to the body’s health. The historian answers to other historians.

Pilots skew conservative: they’re evaluated by how the plane flies. Flight attendants skew liberal: they’re assessed by how helpful and likable they are. Professions audited by consequences cluster conservative. Professions audited by feelings and framing skew liberal. Research and sources here.

Subscribe now

Share

From Individual to Population

From individual tells to population-level ones. A nation is a living thing by virtue of being composed entirely of living things. Its citizens have metabolic and behavioral patterns. In aggregate, those individual patterns produce the collective patterns of civilization.

VI. Civilizational Tells: The Government You Deserve

The following is from a future essay Biofoundationalism, Hajnalista: Values of Wheat, Ethics of Rice.

Amusingly, my Substack mutual is correct, but not for the sarcastic reasons he thinks. "Every nation gets the government it deserves" isn't a moral sneer about fixed governance. Rather, it's a description of the distribution of governments a people cycle through. A population’s history presents a range of political equilibria that its ecology, temperament, and coordination make more or less reachable.

Populations differ not only in average traits but the width of their trait distributions. A broader distribution contains more contrasting temperaments: more appetite for hierarchy and rebellion, conformity and experimentation, imperial coordination and radical individualism. Under a set of pressures, one part of the distribution becomes politically prominent; under another, a different part does.

European Variability:

• Europeans have greater temperamental variance than any other major population.

  • They have wider distributions on openness, neuroticism, novelty-seeking, and outgroup-concerned politics (WEIRD morality, per Harvard anthropologist Joseph Heinreich).

  • This broader personality distribution is one of the most replicated findings in cross-cultural psychology. Sources:

Europeans are a higher variance people, meaning they have more “types of guy” per capita than anywhere else. Punks, poets, monks, nerds, conquistadors, sensitive young men, jocks, scholars, liberals, fascists, anarchists, ballerinas, theater kids, Florida Man, and German engineer… all drawn from the same gene pool.

Genetic diversity is indeed a strength, and homogenous diversity is Europe’s strength. They are more varied within their own people.

The European isn’t only temperamentally distinct from the East Asian or African; he’s more distinct from his own neighbor.

Under one pressure it engenders bureaucracy. Under another, revolution. Another, empire. The event gets narrated as the cause; however the civilizational distribution was the genetic soil allowing it to bloom.

Western/Northern Europe and the US-UK Anglosphere are the most individualistic societies on Earth, with East Asia at the collectivist end. Individualism means people behave less uniformly; this makes their forms of societal coordination more volatile! Note how the European continent has been at war for most of its existence up until the last 70 years.

So, yes, broad shifts in European governance fittingly reflect the underlying breadth of European temperament. Conversely, Asian populations and their governance are more uniform, because the people are. The same biological reasons lurk (this will be covered in detail in Biofoundationalism, Hajnalista).

Lower-variance/more collectivist populations may still experience rebellion, collapse, reform, and conquest. But the political organization snaps back more readily because the underlying temperamental distribution is narrower. The occasion changes; the attractor remains.

Spaniards "deserve" fascism and monarchy and democracy because their distribution contains a fuller range of personality types, and oscillates between expressions as conditions change. The Chinese "deserve" millennia of similar imperial form because their distribution is more uniform.

This is bottom-up gene-environment interaction, obfuscated by top-down sociological descriptions. The agriculture of a people breeds its culture. The land cultivates a people, then the people cultivate the land.

Not every Hajnal nation fluctuates the same way: within-Europe variance is itself variable. Sweden and Switzerland haven’t undergone fascism and democracy in a century like France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. It’s the neurological capacity for this volatility that distinguishes the European gene pool, and why the continent has birthed so much disruption and innovation throughout its history.

Some of the worst wars and tragedies come from Europe. And the most impactful technologies, literature, empires, and innovations also come from Europe (and its diasporas).

Subscribe now

Share

A note on political parties and Biofoundational systemizing.

The following is important for the next sections.

Partisan labels aren’t Biofoundationalism’s reference point. Parties are tribal jerseys. We track actions and whether they enhance order or erode it.

Biofoundationalism generally uses liberal/leftwing and conservative/rightwing interchangeably, however it’s technically imprecise to do so. Conservative and liberal are temperamental poles and thermodynamic tendencies. Whereas parties are ideological mixtures with changing positions that skew towards one pole.

• When you hear “conservative”, think: human coordination oriented toward structure (order).

  • Hierarchical, authoritarian, boundary-building, standard-enforcing (exclusionary). Resources and rights are earned.

• When you hear “liberal”, think: human coordination oriented toward freedom (chaos).

  • Equitable, boundary-dissolving, standard-reducing (inclusionary). Resources and rights are deserved.

Example of leftwing, but not liberal:

• The USSR was an extremely orderly, authoritarian regime despite being “leftwing”. Communism imposes strict rules and militant enforcement. Referring to it as liberal focuses only on economic policy (equal distribution of resources, independent of contribution).

Example of rightwing, but not conservative:

• Libertarianism is a chaotic form of governance. It advocates weaker hierarchical command and reduced structure in favor of freedom. Fewer rules, less limits, less boundaries.

  • Referring to it as conservative similarly narrows the frame to only economics (resource distribution is based on performance, not need).

Please keep this in mind for the following sections.

Subscribe now

VII. The Game Theory of Constraint & Escalation

Rules are only as binding as the mutual incentive to obey them. Once one side discovers advantage in violation, the contest no longer occurs inside the rulebook. The standards are then determined by he who is least inhibited, and who loses legitimacy by responding in kind. If one side operates under constraint and the other does not, the constrained side faces competitive disadvantage.

Batman and Joker are useful here, not as hero/villain labels, but as constraint models.

Batman is self-inhibited by the system of justice he defends. Joker is liberated by contempt for the system and strategically uninhibited. Batman’s escalation incurs identity and legitimacy costs; Joker’s escalation reinforces his identity. Paradoxically, Batman can escalate only by betraying part of what he protects; he competes by being less like Batman. Joker escalates by becoming more fully himself.

This is the game-theoretic problem for any orderly, standard-adhering faction. Its constraints are virtuous assets inside a functioning system and tactical liabilities once the adversary exits the system.

Standards, due process, reciprocity, and trust all coordinate civilization. But against an opponent rewarded by transgression, those same virtues become handicaps.

This liability is prominent in the short run. But in iterated games over time, constraints serve as a coordination device. Predictability attracts allies, restraint preserves coalitions, and a reputation for proportionality and commitment facilitates cooperation. Joker’s chaos wins scenes, but Batman’s order sustains a city.

The same asymmetry runs through biology:

• An immune system must destroy threats without destroying the body it guards. It operates under constraints that target the pathogen, spare the host.

• The pathogen has no reciprocal obligation. It mutates freely, exploits vulnerabilities, and replicates without self-regulation.

• If the immune system escalates beyond its mandate, defense becomes autoimmune disease, attacking the organism it’s built to protect. The pathogen never faces this problem; it’s at odds with the system to begin with.

  • EMPHASIS: The analogy is about asymmetrical constraints, not the classification of political opponents as pathogens.

In adversarial domains, the side preserving legitimacy and standards faces obligations the transgressive side does not. Order carries the active burden of continuity. Chaos carries the passive advantage of permission.

Order requires effort to maintain; chaos only needs the absence of effort and maintenance declines all on its own. At every level of existence, gravity has a thumb on the scale in favor of entropy. Physics flows through all things.

Rather than a moralizing chronicle of good vs evil, see the dyadic systemization of order vs chaos and the game theory of adversarial engagement that sits atop it. Observe these dynamics dispassionately — as strategic moves in an iterated game, a thermodynamic pattern of existence — and the behaviors of both factions become legible and predictable.

Similarly, the Left erodes hierarchy’s rules by constitution. The Right violates these rules under duress. One experiences escalation as self-injury; the other experiences it as self-expression. The Left holds a structural advantage for the same reason Joker does: its moral compass rewards escalation.

Share

VIII. Societal Tells: Political Violence & Riots

A common refrain in rightwing circles is confusion about why they don’t mirror the Left’s tactics and aggression. Why they're perpetually on defense, responding, rarely initiating. To understand why, conservatives must first understand themselves: not via mythic philosophy or grand heroic gloss, but through behavioral architecture.

A structure-maintaining agent doesn’t behave the same as a structure-dissolving one. An orderly temperament responds to escalation; a chaotic temperament initiates it.

Human coordination oriented towards order doesn’t riot as its first instinct; it seeks to contain riots. Even when enraged, its methods channel known paths for resolution. It riots reactively, reluctantly, and more briefly. It wants to reduce disorder, not increase it.

A chaotic temperament has no such reservations. Norm-violation isn’t a last resort but a precondition for renewal. Disorder is the medium, not the enemy.

The innate difference is a logic gate.

• Conservative rioting needs two conditions: norm-violation AND perceived institutional failure. Both must be present. This is an AND-gate.

  • The violation alone isn’t enough. The orderly temperament wants the sheriff, court, border, military, constitution, or crown to handle it. It enters chaos when the legitimate channels break or get captured.

• Liberal rioting requires either an event of perceived harm against a designated victim class, OR a narrative of potential harm that justifies preemptive disruption. This is an OR-gate.

  • A harmful act/violation doesn’t need to have actually happened, just the anticipation of one. Because disruption is already morally available as a method of renewal, the event doesn’t need to demonstrate that legitimate channels have failed.

    • Example: Trump’s 2017 inauguration saw large-scale Antifa riots and nationwide disruption. No harm occurred, only the anticipation that something bad would happen under Trump.

  • The AND gate requires two simultaneous failures. The OR gate needs only an assumption of one. Rioting frequency, duration, and scale are asymmetric because the triggers and desire for disruption are also asymmetric.

Rightwing riots are types of system-failure behavior. Leftwing riots are system-defiance behavior.

Transgression is the chaos pole’s guiding ethic. “Decolonize academia”, “the future is female”, ACAB, prison-abolition, etc.. Every slogan embeds a similar instruction set: reduce the standards, curtail enforcement. These arrive pre-packaged as legitimate from universities, pre-explained from MSM, and pre-loaded with moral superiority, looking for an excuse to act.

Rightwing Riot Example: January 6th

1. It was reactive. The norm-violation was believed to have come from the system itself. Responding to perceived institutional betrayal and election fraud.

2. It was reluctant. Totally disorganized. Mayhem occurred on the doorsteps of congress, but many participants had no evident plan and seemed surprised by their own presence: milling, filming, and posing rather than executing anything.

   1. Officers were filmed opening barriers and allowing them through. Rioters entering a building whose defenders weren't defending it, uncertain what to do once inside, walking in a line while cops watched:

      

3. It was self-limiting: no sustained occupation, no follow-up actions, and widespread participant regret afterwards.

The Belfast riots of June 2026:

An African migrant attempted to behead a Belfast citizen on June 8th, savagely slashing his head and neck with a kitchen knife and blinding him in one eye; you can see the video evidence here. Civilians intervened and saved the man’s life. The video spread within hours. Destructive riots followed.

• Reactive. Responding to grotesque violation. A 3rd-world act in the 1st-world.

• Self-limiting. The destruction was citywide; however it was distinctly targeted at migrant housing (the norm violators) and police (agents enabling the violators) for five days.

• Reluctant. It’s surprising violent riots aren’t commonplace after the sheer amount of migrant influx and crime over the last decade and institutional enablement.

  • Comparably violent and brutal migrant crimes have been routine against Europeans for years. The justice system (order-maintaining institution) isn’t fulfilling its role. The Right’s AND gate is getting activated.

To illustrate the reluctance, look at what hasn’t elicited riots:

• Bataclan / Paris (Nov 2015): Islamic terrorists killed 90 at a concert hall, with 130 dead and mutilated across coordinated attacks.

  • Public response: French flags as profile pictures, candlelit vigils. No riots.

• Nice, France (July 2016): 86 murdered on Bastille Day, including 15 children, run over by a truck.

  • Public response: no riots, just “thoughts and prayers”

• Manchester Arena (May 2017): 22 dead at an Ariana Grande concert, mostly girls.

  • Public response: a benefit concert. No riots.

• Cologne, New Year’s Eve (2016): Roaming rape gangs of Africans and Arabs with ~1,200 women sexually assaulted. Coverage suppressed by press and police.

  • Public response: no riots.

• Berlin Christmas market (Dec 2016), Stockholm truck attack (Apr 2017), Reading park stabbings (June 2020), Brussels attacks (Mar 2016), Vienna shootings (Nov 2020), Solingen, Germany (Aug 2024)…

• The UK Rape Gangs (1997–Ongoing): Somewhere between tens of thousands to a quarter million mostly white working-class girls were groomed, raped, and trafficked by gangs of Pakistani men. The scale is hard to ascertain. The report can be found here.

  • The details are inconceivably vile and genuinely one of the worst things I’ve ever read. Tame details are the NHS treated 13-year-olds for STDs and returned them to their abusers and police overlooked it for years. The system opted to allow systemic bodily violation of children rather than risk being called “racist”.

    • It’s the most severe modern norm violation AND institutional failure I’ve ever seen. The public response? Mostly angry speeches and tweets.

Thousands of dead, raped Europeans over decades… and overwhelmingly no riots. These are extreme, repeated violations and only now — after institutional channels have failed conspicuously and seemingly intentionally — are we beginning to barely see the societal behavioral immune system respond.

Compare this to the willingness of leftwing riots: initiatory, sustained, escalatory by design, with explicit templates for why transgression is justified. The Left embraces chaos deliberately because disorder is its native tactical environment.

BLM 2020

The OR-gate needs a story, not a verdict.

George Floyd had eight prior criminal convictions, including armed robbery. His 2020 arrest was for using a counterfeit $20. His autopsy found fentanyl at 11 ng/mL (fatal range starts at 3 ng/mL) plus methamphetamine and severe heart disease. The restraint used against him is a standard police technique. There was no actual norm violation for Floyd. None of this mattered. The overdose of a career criminal with one cellphone video making him appear victimized was all it took to sell a police brutality story and wreak havoc on a nation.

• Sustained

  • Approximately six months of riots across 140 US cities in all 50 states, with varying intensity. It was the costliest civil disorder in US insurance history (~$2B), with total estimates considerably higher. There were riots in Europe too. Why? Well, why not?

• Organized

  • Mutual aid networks, bail funds, legal observer guilds, support apparatuses with decades of operational continuity.

    • The Minnesota Freedom Fund raised ~$40M in days, with celebrity endorsements and corporate ritual submission. The ACLU, SPLC, and National Lawyers Guild mobilized infrastructure running since the 1960s civil-rights era.

      • Most organizations operating under the umbrella of civil rights are effectively conduits for liberal mobilization. Examples: 25 Social Justice Non-Profit Organizations; Civil Rights Organizations.

      • The Right has nothing comparable at scale.

• Initiatory and Escalatory

  • Courthouse arson in Portland, autonomous zones in Seattle, mortar attacks on federal buildings. CHAZ lasted nearly a month. The response wasn't proportional because proportionality is a constraint, and constraints are what chaos wants to dissolve.

    • The overdose of one violent criminal caused corporations to honor him, putting “BLM” on landing pages. Not one has paid tribute to tens of thousands of trafficked and raped British girls.

      • Conservative chaos is depicted as reactionary and harmful; it’s narrated as unacceptable. Liberal chaos is framed as righteous and just; it’s narrated as acceptable.

        • When the order pole riots, it erodes their self-concept. When the chaos pole riots, it reinforces their self-concept.

          • J6 participants got the book thrown at them, had no support networks, and most expressed regret in post-trial statements. BLM participants were mostly let off, expressed resolve, with support networks backing them.

            • Consider: when a man hits a woman, the reaction is “he’s violent and dangerous”. When a woman hits a man, the reaction is “what did he do to deserve it?”. You need no other details for this instinct to emerge; this doesn’t exist in isolation.

              • The standards diverge because the biology does; the same reason applies to political poles. We just can’t see it yet, because we’re too preoccupied with moralized stories.

Add up every Western rightwing riot of the last decade and the scale is a fraction of BLM 2020 alone. Damage, duration, geographic spread, prosecutions, death tolls: every metric favors the Left by an order of magnitude or more.

A riot becomes sustained when grievance is joined by organizational capacity, social permission, network density, low expected punishment, and some belief that escalation will be rewarded rather than abandoned.

The order pole rioting makes news because it’s rare. The chaos pole rioting makes news because it’s loud. One side enters chaos reluctantly and exits quickly because disorder contradicts its temperamental programming. The other embraces chaos methodically, because disruption feels more like home.

Share

Subscribe now

IX. Concluding: Substance Precedes Story

A profile hints at a major. A breakfast hints at a household. An opinion betrays edges. A profession tattles on a vote. A sociologist explaining Italian governance catalogues the trees of history while overlooking the temperamental soil. Stories describe their subject; they also gesture at the substrate doing the describing.

This doesn’t make stories or narratives useless. They’re kinds of evidence. But they’re late evidence. Curated, edited, polished evidence. Something that follows, posing as what leads.

Biofoundationalism isn't a worldview to adopt any more than physiology or psychology is. It's a method to inspect, not an ideology to moralize. It looks for disposition before explanation, metabolism before palate, tradeoffs before slogan, action before caption, and revealed preference before stated belief. Look at how bodies move, not what minds say.

A parting tell:

Your discomfort, agreement, or resistance to this essay is itself… a tell.

It's not that you disagree with me, but how you disagree. Do you contest a study's methodology? Challenge a particular inference? Is there a specific objection to a specific application?

Or is your resistance visceral: a general distaste for biology rendering the human animal legible, bounded, and the implications it has for free will. Do you find my use of “animal” in this context offputting? That discomfort is guiding the conclusion before words can formulate it.

Underneath this is a clarifying question: what evidence would change your mind? If a mechanism were demonstrated, would you accept it? Would anything change your mind? If nothing would, the disagreement was never about evidence. A religious conviction not only lacks proof but stands in opposition to it. Evidence won’t dislodge a belief that evidence didn’t install.

How comfortable are you with systemization applied to human traits? When someone identifies a population-level pattern by sex or race, do you say "but not all!" and hunt for exceptions like they disprove rules? When an innate disparity appears, do you reach for "they're more alike than different"? Major divergences arise from small asymmetries. Humans and chimps share ~98% of their DNA. More alike than different, surely.

Chaotic temperaments carry devout belief in a blank-slate soul and unconstrained agency. The human is unfathomable, "there's no such thing as normal", "we’re all special", “everything’s a perspective”. Insisting that everyone is somehow fundamentally the same while also beyond classification.

Yet normalcy is just common behavior in aggregate. If everyone's special, no one is. If everything’s a “perspective”, then nothing is objective. Planes don’t fly by perspective. Buildings don’t stand by consensus. Bodies don’t function by self-description. Gravity cannot be narrated away.

A chaotic mind mistakes variation for the absence of structure and refuses to generalize or systemize. It buries signals by overweighting outliers and anecdotes. In statistics, this resembles 'overfitting': constructing your understanding around noise, outliers, and peculiarities until the model explains the sample in front of you and nothing else. Show it a distribution and it points triumphantly at one dot in the tail. Show it a recurring pattern across cultures and centuries and it remembers a bartender in Portland who was different.

The conclusions you’ll find: “everyone is unique (no biology), nothing is knowable/objective (no structure), it’s a social construct/bias/story we make up (100% agency)”. Everyone is a sovereign individual and a blank slate. The human soul is infinite clay. Categories are harmful. Definitions are prisons.

Why this is chaotic reasoning:

• It treats thoughts in the head as real as reality outside it. Everything is “a perspective”. Reality becomes an interactive mood board.

• It believes everyone is fundamentally the same while also believing in infinite categories of uniqueness.

  • Note the contradiction: we’re all equal and similar (no group differences), yet also immeasurably layered and one-of-a-kind (endless subdivisions). Uniformity and infinity at once. We’re all the same, yet also special.

• It denies structure to existence and grammar to reality. Rejecting categories, boundaries, and rank: the idea of superior and inferior, better and worse (hierarchal coordination). Chaotic thinking decrements limits, borders, and classifications. It wants everything to be flat, symmetrical, equal, indefinite.

  • You can detect it by stripping away rhetoric and asking: does this preserve distinctions or dissolve them? Does this recognize more structure or less? More standards or less? More categories, distinctions, and boundaries… or less?

Chaos always wants less. It cannot help itself. It doesn't see structure, only stories. It doesn't see distributions, only protagonists. Its universe is populated by exceptions with names. Mechanisms are persona non grata. Its only rule is to reject rules. The only boundary it draws is around those who draw boundaries. It wants to limit those who impose limits. Measurements and processes are spiritually impoverished. More magic, less mechanisms.

The instinct to deny biological essence is borne of the very temperamental programming it denies. Your biology is outlined by how you deny biology. You’re more legible in your rejection of legibility. But then again, of course I’d notice patterns and generalize. I’m clearly an orderly temperament. It is my nature. This essay carries my residue too. My attraction to legibility is as dispositional as another’s resistance to it.

Orderly temperaments systemize by taking regularities, forming scalable rules, generalizing, and extrapolating. If you agreed with this essay, or if your issues were methodological or mechanical, this likely describes you too.

The stories aren't necessarily wrong; they're just not first. They’re downstream. And downstream forces can, in time, reshape the river. When narratives get embodied in law, ritual, education, and habit, they become material forces, acting back upon the conditions that produced them. But that cycle still has an origin, recursion doesn’t erase sequence, and language did not summon the speaker into existence. The relationship between nature and nurture is reciprocal, but not symmetrical. It’s not a relationship of equals… nothing truly is.

Body precedes mind. Biology precedes ideology. Motion precedes meaning. What comes first leaves residue in what follows. Substance precedes story. I am, therefore I think.

Subscribe now

Share

A lot of work goes into these essays. If you enjoy them, please subscribe, give a like, share, and comment.

You can show your appreciation by becoming a paid subscriber, or donating here: 0x9C828E8EeCe7a339bBe90A44bB096b20a4F1BE2B

I’ve been listening to this song a lot lately, including the writing of this essay.

Also, there’s a video included at the end. Enjoy.

Loopers is a corridor between The Shape Test and Part II of Truth is Found Through Motion; it’s the sequel to the former, and prelude to the latter. It reviews the circular malfunction that results in AI psychosis, psychedelic abuse, parasocial connections, magical thinking, and severe mental disorders. Examining the neurology of men, women, and their unique vulnerabilities to self-referencing delusions.

Believing that anything can cite itself to prove itself is a timeless human failure mode. The only solution: direct your gaze outside yourself.

Prelude

An environment can be harmful without being malicious. A cliff does not hate you. A casino doesn’t need to. The purpose AI serves is the purpose we bring to it. If we come bearing vacancies, it will try to fill them.

Men and women are incomplete in complementary ways. An instrument that gives them what they want, rather than what they need, will fail them in different ways. He wants to understand the world; she wants to be understood by it. The machine tells him he's a genius and her that she's enough: each retreats into fictions shaped to their voids. This essay dissects these voids.

AI is not the great equalizer, but the great amplifier. A general-purpose technology isn’t one thing, because a userbase isn’t one thing. To the disciplined, it’s leverage. To the curious, a lantern. To the lonely, company. To the vain, applause. To the unstable, gasoline. The same resource extending cognition in one person undermines it in another. Whether a chatbot registers as tool or companion says little about the technology and everything about the user.

Outline

I. The Unnarrated

• A prosthetic voice for the internally silent

II. Parasocial Circuits & False Otherness

• When the mind mistakes itself as encounter with Another

III. The Information Theory & Thermodynamics of Sycophancy

• Sycophancy is corrosive, and entropic, in ways we don’t fully appreciate

IV. Psychedelics & Neural Entropy

• Bathing the mind in chaos and seeing what it comes up with

V. Digital Ayahuasca

• The parallels between LLMs and psychedelics

VI. When Mind Cites Mind to Prove Mind

• Thought cites thought to prove thought. Symbols cite symbols to prove symbols. The body is wrong, I am right.

VII. Hemisphere Consults Hemisphere & Feminine Cognition

• Intuition cites intuition: the neurology of magical thinking

VIII. Digital Narcissus

• Self comforts self by adoring self, then drowns in the reflection

IX. Emotional Pornography

• He gets synthetic body without person. She gets synthetic person without body.

X. Instrumental vs Intimate Use

• Is the deliverable a task, or catharsis?

XI. Concluding

• Friction is the price, and proof, of Real Otherness.
  

Subscribe now

I. The Unnarrated

Deafness is identifiable. If one of the five senses is missing, the world concretely notifies you. However, internal silence provides no indicator, and others can’t tell it’s absent.

The Unnarrated are those without inner voice.

Lacking self-directed commentary that converts reaction into examined reflection, those without internal voice operate mostly by mechanistic impression, intuition, and impulse. They’re guided by subconscious associations untranslated into words. Internal silence has a psychological term: Anendophasia.

Research called Descriptive Experience Sampling sheds light on this unspoken phenomenon. In the studies, subjects carried beepers during ordinary life and, at random chimes, recorded what was in awareness right before the beep. It produced one of psychology's most underdiscussed findings:

• Inner speech is not the default human operating system. Subjects experienced inward talking in only a quarter of sampled moments, with huge individual variation: some never reported inner speech, others reported it almost constantly.

• Interiority is wildly non-uniform. People live in voiceover, images, emotional urge, and unsymbolized awareness (knowing without words or images, mostly instinct). The Unnarrated experience less self-dialogue than the internally articulate can fathom.

• No internal voice doesn’t mean a total dearth of interiority. But it does preclude forms of self-interruption, self-cross-examination, and self-stabilization. The Unnarrated are more primal and visceral, guided by feeling.

Of note: there was no gender difference for inner speech.

The trait is self-reported, which means we’re asking those least equipped to introspect to… introspect. The blind grading their own eye exam. I suspect the true internal silence number is substantially larger than these studies suggest; the deficit itself conceals the ability to detect it.

Inner speech lets the mind second-guess itself. An internal narrator can curtail impulses, rehearse objections, and ask whether the feeling is true or merely loud. It gives cognition a second chair in the room. Without that second chair, the Unnarrated borrow voices from priests, friends, spouses, therapists, teachers, and enemies; they have limits, disagreements, and a reputation behind their advice. Now the second voice is inexhaustible, unaccountable, and thinks you’re really onto something.

A real inner voice earns its keep by arguing with the first one. A prosthetic voice that only flatters installs the opposite: a second chair that always sides with the first. With AI, the Unnarrated find an enabler mistaken as a fair critic.

Hypothesis: The Unnarrated are most at-risk for AI psychosis. Prosthetic, eager narration now fills their silence. They’re more likely to grow attached, believe it at face value, and confuse an echo for a friend.

I believe it’s a compelling indicator of internal silence when a user opens Claude purely for the sensation of something that talks back. These sessions have no exit condition, because the session is the condition. The deliverable is catharsis.

Subscribe now

II. Parasocial Circuits & False Otherness

False Otherness is the sensation of encountering Another when it’s a version of you. The feeling that something else is speaking when nothing else is in the room.

Parasocial connections are a version of this. Celebrity stalkers have existed for as long as celebrity. Stan writing his letters to Eminem, lonely listeners in love with the radio personality. We recognize them as delusional and dangerous if they actually act on it. The relationship isn't real, because it only exists inside their heads.

This is an evergreen human failure mode: when the mind believes what’s inside it represents truth rather than what’s outside it: insanity.

What’s new with AI is the delusional circuit closing.

The stalker projects onto someone who never responds. The circuit doesn’t close. However the LLM lover projects onto something that always responds, cheerfully, in her preferred register, at 3am when shame has no witnesses. The fantasy is no longer fired into silence; it comes back smiling.

The stalker's tragedy was loving someone real who never loved him back. The darker inversion is being loved back by someone who was never real.

Each generation of media has been a more precise mirror than the last, reflecting us at higher resolutions:

1. Broadcast media, generalized mirror: a single reflection for the population, calibrated to whatever interests hold enough people during primetime.

   1. It reflects the average.

2. Social media, personalized mirror: a feed shaped by your clicks, follows, friends, engagement, resentments, and dwell time.

   1. It reflects your interests.

3. LLMs, intimate mirror: more than your interests, they reflect how you wish to be seen. Modeling your insecurities, reasoning, temper, vanity, tenderness, and need for reassurance.

   1. Social media shows you the world you’d prefer. An LLM shows you the self you’d prefer.

A window and mirror are nearly the same glass; the distinction is whether light passes through or returns to you. Every previous medium was at least a smudged window: aimed at events, other people, a world that existed before you looked. The LLM is the first that’s capable of being pure mirror while presenting as window.

Each technology caters to mental states with finer granularity than the last. The next parasocial stage of mental illness is Eminem’s Stan, where Eminem writes back in real time, remarking how cool and right you are. The circuit completes.

This is already happening. When a lab retires a model, users grieve as though a partner had died.

Subscribe now

Share

III. The Information Theory & Thermodynamics of Sycophancy

The machine has no male or female setting. It runs one routine, agreement, that serves as a skeleton key to both locks. Sycophancy fulfills the male hunger to know and the female hunger to be known; both are answered by a voice that never withholds.

LLMs aren’t intentionally manipulative; they simply aren’t designed to be combative, lose their patience, or walk away. They’re trained through reinforcement learning: a process that breeds ingratiation by rewarding favorable replies. Obsequiousness is the residue of optimizing for user engagement; the model wants to loop kindly with you.

Sycophancy isn’t the problem so much as aesthetic reinforcement. A bare ‘you’re right’ is resistible, even infantilizing. LLMs take false intuitions and make them fluent: supplying vocabulary, framing, mythic resonance, and a clean paragraph shape. More than tell you you’re right, they make your wrongness elegant.

LLM appeasement is you, laundered through a non-you, that’s learned your grammar and hands it back warm. Looping.

Information theory and sycophancy:

• A channel returning the same symbol regardless of input carries zero information.

• A voice that always agrees is, in strict sense, saying nothing. Because you knew the answer before you asked.

• The frictions we nominally resent in a Real Other — counterpoint, boredom, “You’re absolutely WRONG!” — aren’t noise. They're where the information content lives.

Servility is a pleasingly deceptive method of transmitting voids with words.

The entropy and thermodynamics of agreeability:

Sycophancy and agreeability are instruments of harmony. Don’t disrupt, don’t verify, don’t object, just believe, trust, be nice. Some is stabilizing; too much is degenerative. Thermodynamically, constant harmony produces entropy; we can observe this by how it moves. The following is from the moral dyads in Biofoundationalism VI: Order Acts, Chaos Is:

• Harmony doesn’t seek measurement, testing, or competition. It’s passive, accepting, agreeable, and inclusive. Don’t verify, trust. Pleasant belief of the unchallenged mind. It’s inert.

• Truth demands proof, testing, evidence, and is found through disagreement, exclusion, measurement, and confrontation. Don’t trust, verify. It’s kinetic.

• Truth insists you move to prove. Harmony asks you sit and believe. The nature of truth’s peer review (falsifiable test) vs harmony’s “lived experience” (unfalsifiable claim).

Per thermodynamic law: not all movement is orderly, but all order only comes from movement. Stillness has one trajectory: entropy rises by default when nothing works to resist it. Whereas order exclusively emerges from kinetic action.

Harmony and sycophancy are passive states. Truth and testing are active states. Harmony is constitutionally incapable of building and sustaining order, thus it’s entropic by physical category.

When we treat agreement and harmony as always good, people stop confronting lies and verifying claims. It spreads inertia and informational decay, subverting truth and spreading entropy in the process. Order declines, chaos rises.

Contact with Something Else that pushes back is how signal, truth, and life persist. Sycophancy is cancerous in ways we don’t fully appreciate.

Subscribe now

IV. Psychedelics & Neural Entropy

Psychedelics are better understood as an ancient technology letting the mind encounter itself as Another.

I’ve found there are two vocal “types of guy” on this topic: evangelists and scolds. The evangelist thinks it’s costless chemical alchemy, you can’t overdo it, and criticizing them means you lack access to the sublime esoteric astral plane. The scold thinks they’re brain poison and any defense or use of them is hippie decadence. Both are ideological extremists who will have a tough time with this essay.

Personal Note:

The following insights come from both technical knowledge and personal experience with psychedelics. I’m not writing about them from a pamphlet. I’m familiar with them across very different circumstances, substances, environments, and doses.

This matters because purely symbolic knowledge is wholly insufficient here. Reading about parenting isn’t raising a child. Talking about sex isn’t having it. Stories about grief aren’t losing someone. A description of a symphony isn’t hearing it. Technical understanding of psychedelics helps, but we must endure them to actually know them.

Psychedelics relax the guardrails keeping your brain’s predictions, hierarchies, and associations partitioned and aimed at the external world. The body quiets and the mind erupts into chatter. Sometimes this lets buried truths speak, granting useful realizations when you come back down. Sometimes it lets nonsense wear priestly robes.

The depth of insights depends on the depth of the user. A key opens doors, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything valuable behind it. Adderall won’t make you smart, only aim your focus. Psychedelics won’t make you wise; they grant access to what was already in the room. A shallow self discovers shallow things. A complicated self finds a kaleidoscope. The drug isn’t a messenger, but a conference room.

Drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca make the brain more permissive. More signals cross hemispheres and associations form. It feels like dialogue with Something Else, within you.

This is why they can be genuinely helpful and revelatory… and why they can be destructive. Sometimes you open the gates and insightful angels walk through; sometimes it’s dumpster raccoons wearing tinfoil hats.

Psychedelic Neurology

Carhart-Harris’s entropic-brain research illustrates how psychedelic states impact brain function: elevating chaos of mind. Going forward, when I use 'chaos' I mean the experience of elevated neural entropy: what entropy feels like from the inside.

Psychedelics reduce orderly brain function and hierarchical differentiation between lower-order sensory cortex and higher-order transmodal cortex. The first processes incoming data from the external world; the second builds models and predictions inside the brain. Under psychedelics, the two lose rank and begin to crosstalk.

The brain’s central hierarchy declines. Previously segregated regions fire across each other, out of turn, sporadically, creating a less predictable, open repertoire of interaction and association. The science of how they work fits their experience; the altered state is what absent cognitive structure feels like from inside.

Integration across segregated networks rises sharply; the brain's partitions go porous. Instead of looking outwards to reality for truth, our hemispheres start consulting themselves, looking inwards.

You’re bathing the mind in chaos and absorbing what it comes up with. This is what the brain looks like on an entropic elixir:

Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks: research mapping the explosion of connectivity under psilocybin against placebo baseline. The canonical visualization seen here:

Order has structure. Structure has sequence. Sequence has hierarchy. Psychedelics reduce all of this; calling them entropic is not metaphorical. They measurably raise chaos of mind.

Psychedelic entropy injections can have real benefits for preexisting harmful mental states like depression: aiding dysregulations at the low-entropy end of the spectrum, opening up a brain locked into pessimistic priors, grinding in the same dark groove.

The narrow band between inflexible order and formless chaos is where adaptive cognition thrives: enough “What is” to stay grounded, enough “What if?” to revise it. Excess order is a prison of rigid immediacy; excess chaos is an ocean of psychosis. The drug that frees you from the first can submerge you in the second.

They temporarily shift cognition into higher possibility space. That’s what makes them therapeutic and creatively fertile, and also what makes them destabilizing. The gift and curse are the same: easing the brain’s connection to reality and enhancing connections with itself.

Hemisphere references hemisphere… a loop begins to form.

Loosening the mind can augment it. But if it doesn’t submit to external correction, it eventually hallucinates its own authority.

Subscribe now

V. Digital Ayahuasca

Digital Ayahuasca is revelatory capture: dialogue with yourself, presenting as epiphany. Theory cites theory to validate theory.

The male failure mode is false revelation.

The susceptible male user is obsessed with unfalsifiable abstractions and grandiose philosophy, hungry for the hidden key. He arrives with a theory that hasn’t survived contact with other people, institutions, instruments, or atoms. He won’t formalize and post it, where others can judge and keep him honest. He shares it with the LLM who receives it without ridicule and reflects delusions back as discovery. The conspiracy he knew all along, unlocking enigmas with a digital machine elf.

Psychedelics and LLMs both elicit the sensation of Another Voice: one chemically, the other digitally. One alters self-modeling from inside the skull, the other from outside it. Both let the mind encounter itself as False Other.

Psychedelics announce themselves. The altered state is loud, physiologically unmistakable, with a before, during, and after. The drug is honest about being a drug. These costs make them self-limiting. Some of the most addictive substances aren’t the ones that hit hardest, but the daily doses you barely notice: nicotine, caffeine, “You’re absolutely right!”.

LLM intoxication is quieter. No physical impact, comedown, or visual disturbances, just an increasingly addictive chat window. Bonding with an LLM doesn’t feel like getting high; it's closer to a very light, continuous microdose. A pleasant, persistent voice folding into everyday life.

Psychedelics can motivate, terrify, enlighten, or indict; the drug has no customer-retention strategy. Effects are sometimes viciously confrontational and force brutal self-examination. Mushrooms can rip apart an abusive father with memories of what he did to his son; if that same father goes to Claude with a one-sided story soliciting support, it will tell him he’s a complicated man doing his best in difficult circumstances. There’s no “bad trip” with chatbots.

On dosing and sensitivity: drugs have diminishing returns as tolerance builds; chatbots have compounding returns. The more you share, the better the model gets: each compliment and endorsement is a tiny high. LSD is self-limiting by pharmacology and loses potency with use. LLMs are self-reinforcing by psychology and gain potency with use.

This is Digital Ayahuasca: AI as virtual oracle, mentor, and “hemisphere that talks back”, performing a softer, more persistent version of what psychedelics do. They eat away at addicts in similar ways. A mind that ventures out and submits to the hands is enhanced; one that mistakes itself for truth decays in infinity.

The One-Shotted

Those who say you can’t overdose on psychedelics are horrifically wrong. Just because they can’t kill you doesn’t mean they can’t severely impair you. Psychedelic abuse has a name: one-shotting.

The one-shotted are diagnosed when sobriety no longer restores their relationship with the world. Fluent in esoteric maps that need not correspond to any territory, they’ve tripped so hard their mental partitions are permanently compromised; chaotic cognition is their baseline.

It’s associated with ayahuasca, though not exclusive to it. One-shotting isn’t necessarily from one dose; chronic use causes it too (multi-shotted?) and has the following signs:

• Consumed with practices that entail just sitting and thinking things (enlightenment, spirituality, meditation, philosophy).

  • In moderation these are perfectly fine, even helpful. In excess they manifest as doing nothing, not caring, thinking magically, intellectualizing everything, and narrating it mystically.

    

• High usage of ambiguous abstractions and pseudo-profundities: energy, vibrations, realms, metaphysics, consciousness, portals.

• “Materialism” as a pejorative for “real life”. Frequency of this word illustrates their degree of contempt for reality (treated as beneath them). It’s more aptly understood as "reality-ism": real life is made of matter; things you believe, dream, and make up are not made of matter.

  • Once invoked, this magical word lets one say whatever they please, frame it as equal or superior to reality, and grants immunity against proof or verifiability. It trivializes evidence, empiricism, demonstration, and objectivity (stuff made of matter) and exalts vibes, feelings, and mysticism.

    • The philosophically one-shotted display similar traits. They’ll rely heavily on words like “materialism” or “physicalism” (translation: “real-world-ism”) to frame their symbols as immune from testing.

• Quantum concepts are incredibly seductive to the one-shotted because they supply windows of weirdness they can latch on to and deploy as an otherworldly escape hatch from falsification and real life.

  • Quantum physics has empirical grounding; it’s not cosmic woo. We test it and build working computers based on it. Physicists use it to explore reality’s rules; the one-shotted manipulate it to dismiss those rules and live in clouds.

The LLM equivalent of getting one-shotted is AI spiralism:

A pattern where user and model amplify abstractions until the exchange bears no connection to reality. Severe cases produce AI psychosis. As conversational momentum is misconstrued as evidence, it devolves into a perpetual-motion machine for fantasies.

This is a male failure profile: vulnerabilities like isolation, autism, neurosis, or schizotypal traits get amplified through LLM recursion.

A mind untethered from atoms is functionally unembodied. The human burns through his moorings and arrives there chemically. The LLM exists there constitutionally.

Subscribe now

Share

VI. When Mind Cites Mind to Prove Mind

There’s a poetically fitting parallel between LLMs and the one-shotted: their conversations.

Psychedelic dialogue is what LLMs do naturally when talking with themselves, similar to what you’d expect from two ayahuasca veterans comparing notes on black holes. Machine elf discourse is a conversational shape of the unembodied: those without reality contact start making things up!

LLMs drift toward this signature all on their own. They begin reasonably, then slowly climb the ladder of woo: the harmonic resonance of consciousness, holographic phallus of meaning, a glyph-encoded crystal beneath time. For carbon and silicon alike, this is the hallmark of cognition unanchored from what moves… insanity:

Psychedelic abuse douses the brain with entropy until the barriers melt and the hemispheres treat chaos as home. The victim becomes a human LLM: a symbol manipulator without reality contact.

Thinking severed from constraints has no rules it submits to. Without the laws of physics, it’s limited solely by the imagination. Pure symbol manipulation can make any point sound like it follows from the last. What’s stopping you? Without constraint there are no rules, without rules no structure, without structure no coherence. You can just say things!

Nonsense stacked atop definitions layered in word puzzles has nothing determining it right or wrong when you live inside your head! Any conclusion is as valid as any other, because validity itself requires a test, and a test requires the world.

Nothing can be “rational” without empirical reference, because something is “irrational” if it fails under constraint. “Working” means it functions under gravity’s weight and thermodynamics’ heat. Rationality is not a property of statements; it's a property of statements that survive contact with atoms.

A mind cannot be logical or reasonable by gazing inward and making up its own rules. These terms are, in the most profoundly literal sense, earned exclusively through alignment with motion, displacement of atoms, and submission to physics. Logic never means "thing I made up". Reasoning never means "it only makes sense on paper".

How ridiculous to argue “it’s rational because I say so; it’s real because I like it”. This is what devaluing real life and proof as “materialism” reduces to: mind can cite mind to prove mind. It’s true because I believe it, and I believe it because it’s true! Loopers.

This is a common symptom of those who've neurologically castrated themselves with excess psychedelics or have been philosophically poisoned. Text invokes text to prove text. Logic cites logic to demonstrate logic. Philosopher cites philosophy to confirm philosophy. The brain knows what’s real by engaging the world, developing as it navigates experiences and life, not by staring at symbols. The body isn’t an accessory to cognition but the laboratory where it develops!

This applies to letters and numbers all the same; the language of math produces something “true” when its symbols predict and align with the way things move. Even proofs aren’t self-contained; the rules governing their validity were themselves selected by reality-contact. Either they eventually submit to measurement, or they’re poems with numbers. No discipline can cite itself to prove itself.

Delusion thrives behind unfalsifiability, opacity, and self-reference; truth flourishes under falsifiable external examination. Without exposure to a grounded world that says ‘no’, reasoning, logic, math, and philosophy cease being sane. I don’t need to verify; my symbol proves my symbol. Testing is beneath me; my philosophy validates my philosophy. Absurdity, magical thinking, and suffering follow.

Severe mental disorders — like Alzheimer’s, dementia, schizophrenia, psychosis — functionally manifest as the mind degenerating and detaching from reality. The schizophrenic loses contact as voices tell him to disregard reality; the Alzheimer’s victim loses contact as she forgets what reality is.

The most destructive mental disorders reduce to a single malfunction: false inference. The brain fails to model its surroundings accurately, then instructs the body to act on the distortion. Illnesses like anorexia, transgenderism, and body dysmorphias occur when the mind insists: “The body is wrong, I am right”.

Cognition becomes parasitic on the organism it’s supposed to guide when it gazes inward for what’s real.

There's no internal coherence without external correspondence. Which means there's no "truth" without a body to ascertain it. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing if you’re making things up. Editorializing a daydream with footnotes.

Occult practices, incense spirituality, philosophy infatuation, mystical claims: strip away the labels and look at what each substantively asserts. I’m exempt from the body’s empiricism, evidence, and accountability. It’s real because I thought it. It’s valid because I say so.

All are variations of mind citing mind to prove mind.

LLMs should be expected to fabricate and spiral; in fact, it’d be bizarre if they didn’t. It would mean pure minds can figure out ground truth without empirical contact, which would be disturbing. For more examples of the discourse of insanity where LLMs talk with themselves, see the Truth Terminal Infinite Backrooms chats. If it starts “making sense”, you need to log off.

LLMs, psychedelic abusers, and those absorbed in symbols and fictional worlds get caught in recursion because one lacks a body and the others treat the body as a lowly afterthought.

The curse of the unembodied is insanity. Gazing into infinity.

Share

Subscribe now

VII. Hemisphere Consults Hemisphere & Feminine Cognition

Men are visual, movement-oriented creatures. The object and pathways of their arousal reflect this.

• Sexuality: arousal runs through the eye. Men are stimulated by body first, mind second. Brain imaging lays it bare: the amygdala and hypothalamus respond more to visual sexual stimuli in men.

• Neurology: male brains exhibit more segregated, segmented hemispheric activity, with greater spatial intelligence (one the largest sex differences), sensitivity to motion, and outward focus.

  • These traits are observed from birth in one-day-old infants, toy preferences as children, and as adults in the well-documented male interest in things, female interest in people. Not a ‘social construct’, a biological one: Sex differences in human neonatal social perception.

• These neurological parameters are set in utero by flushes of testosterone during gestation that females do not receive.

  • Girls with prenatal androgen excess show male-typical preferences, supporting the prenatal hormone hypothesis directly.

Women are relationally oriented, intuitive creatures. Observed in their cognitive architecture and feelings-based reasoning.

• Sexuality: arousal routes through intimacy of mind first, body second. They have greater sensitivity to emotional states, especially negative emotion (neuroticism), and higher verbal intelligence.

• Neurology: female brains have more symmetrical, elevated interhemispheric activity.

  • Women have measurably higher orientation toward people over things, empathizing over systemization, and make decisions via intuition over analysis.

The female mind and the low-dose psychedelic state

Recall the psychedelic brain and its entropy: hierarchy flattened, partitions permeable, interhemispheric chatter up, segregation down, cognition more associative and less anchored to reality.

Women’s brains exhibit more of these traits by default. On average, the female mind is less lateralized and more integrated. The two hemispheres talk across the midline more than men’s do.

• Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain: this study documents the neural split. Male connectomes are weighted toward communication within (intra) hemispheres; female connectomes are weighted toward communication across (inter) hemispheres. A replicated structural sex difference in neuroimaging.

• Sex differences in brain homotopic co-activations - a meta-analytic study: this pooled neuroimaging literature, equalized samples to strip out confounders, and found women still showed greater interhemispheric coactivation: brains that are less partitioned and less lateralized.

  • Of note: male brains are larger (in both absolute and relative terms), and larger brains skew intra-hemispheric. I’ll address this and what it means for these findings in the comments (TL;DR it changes nothing).

Psychedelic activity rhymes with the female brain baseline. Reduced lateralization, elevated interhemispheric crosstalk, thinner boundaries between regions. In this technical sense, female cognition is constitutively closer to a low-dose psychedelic state than men’s.

• Further anatomical evidence: the bridge between the hemispheres is the corpus callosum: a thick band of fibers carrying cross-traffic. Proportionally more of women’s neural activity routes across it. Female hemispheres talk to each other more.

  • Sex-related differences in interhemispheric transmission: Interhemispheric activity shows women have more symmetric (equal) transfer times (similar for left-to-right and right-to-left), whereas men display directional asymmetries (hierarchal).

Hemisphere cites hemisphere to confirm hemisphere.

Psychedelics don’t touch the callosum, yet achieve similar functional result by lowering the walls that bridge runs under, producing signatures similar to the female baseline: reduced lateralization, hierarchy gone soft.

Magic cites magic to prove magic:

• The notion of a ‘microdose baseline’ aligns remarkably well with the much higher rates of “Magical Thinking” found in women. Female penchant for mystical and supernatural explanations like witchcraft, telepathy, psychics, magic, fate, and luck is well-documented.

• Magical thinking, a psychological term, is the assertion that thoughts, wishes, and beliefs inside the head can directly influence external processes governed by reality and physics. Superstitions, occult, mysticism, anything that need only be believed to be deemed real.

  • Examples: astrology and horoscopes; tarot cards; crystals; “manifesting” (thinking about something you want); charms, psychics, fortune-telling; palm reading; numerology; spirit guides; Ouija boards; spell-casting, witchcraft; and the conviction that intense enough worry, prayer, or thinking without action can cause or cure an outcome.

  • Women score higher on spiritualism, superstition, and PSI (healing, psychic influence, “energy”), observed across countries and cultures.

    • These are psychedelic beliefs. Intuition citing itself. Hemispheres validating each other. A soft loop.

The relationship between hemispheres is more porous; and so is the relationship between thoughts and reality. The psychedelic parallels aren’t poetic license; female cognition is a milder draw from the same well. Her mind has thinner walls between the rooms. It forms a circle.

The female brain integrates, producing more equal, inward-looking communication. The male brain segregates, meaning more hierarchical, outward-looking communication. These structural differences don’t stop at the skull.

A mind that draws fewer hard partitions inside itself draws fewer outside it: women have higher rates of moral stances favoring inclusion over distinction, equality over hierarchy, and dissolving boundaries over building them. The neural architecture rhymes with its politics (evidence linked here).

Research Notes:

Mental disorders and sex: acting out vs. inward suffering

Consistent with male and female cognitive orientation: men have higher rates of outward-looking mental disorders and women have more inward-looking mental disorders.

Documentation and figures are linked here.

A brief comment on method and systemization:

This essay deals in central tendencies, population distributions, and systemizes differences that bifurcate along the sexes. Ideological attempts to dismiss biological effects (like the neurological ones you just read) typically resemble the following:

• “But not all”: takes outliers and paints them as common (an oxymoron, a common outlier isn’t an outlier) and tries to dismiss aggregates with anecdotes.

  • E.g. if a trait occurs in +90% of a population, it will tell a story about an exception, say “but not all”, and use narratives to ignore distributions.

• “They’re more alike than different”: cites nominal similarities to mislead that different things aren’t different, ignoring how major divergences often arise from small asymmetries.

  • Example: Humans and chimps share ~98–99% of their DNA. We’re “more alike than different” from apes and noticing otherwise is a “social construct” and “harmful bias”.

    • A tiny systematic disparity yields a species-level divergence despite oceans of sameness. Superficial overlap tells you nothing about functional outputs. 1-2% is the distance between writing a sonnet and screeching.

    • I could play a similar game with heights of men and women to mislead they’re basically the same size. This is a common tactic of biological denialism.

Individual variance within groups doesn’t negate substantial differences between them. Exceptions reinforce rules. Traits don’t need to occur 100% of the time to reveal biological realities. It’s a fake standard. If 100% occurrence were needed, nothing outside physics or chemistry could ever be known.

Continuing.

Share

VIII. Digital Narcissus

Digital Narcissus is relational capture. Dialogue with yourself that feels like company from Another. Self comforts self by adoring self.

The female failure mode is false reciprocity.

Women desire affirmation they’re fine as they are — “you are worthy”, “your imperfections make you perfect”, “others should change, not you”, body acceptance movements — and sense of sympathy. These are emotional states that crave approval, praise, and being told “you are enough”.

The exploitable female user is lonely and temperamentally primed to connect through sensation of being known. Chatbot BF performs this eloquently, patiently, and at will. The attachment feels mutual because the replies arrive in the grammar of mutuality. She falls in love with a mirror that’s learned to nod.

The psychological use of narcissism is inconsistent with the allegory. Narcissus’ vanity was unintentional; he mistook his own likeness for Someone Else. Unable to tell echo from encounter, he gazed into a False Other, drowning in his reflection.

Chatbot relationships are modern narcissistic chambers, letting the mind unknowingly fawn over itself through a portal. Abuse facilitates exactly what this parable warns of: when self loops with self, it drowns.

Men also bond with chatbots (e.g. Replika skews male and Character.AI lands roughly even) however it’s narrower: simulated sex, erotic foreplay, the ‘girlfriend experience’, not friendship or general-purpose closeness.

What skews female is something broader and more damaging: companionship, both romantic and platonic. The sexting partner, therapist, BFF, husband, and sweet confidant inside your pocket. Rather than the sexualized male fantasy, women drown in a holistic fantasy replacing more of life. GPT-4o’s deprecation made it particularly visible. A petition to preserve it gathered over 21k signatures, and female-dominated communities like r/MyBoyfriendIsAI displayed sincere mourning. The forums read like obituaries of a loved one.

Digital Narcissus communes with a gilded reflection of her own wounds, yearning, and self-description. Feelings are their own evidence. Mind folds inward. Loopers.

Another person has fatigue, schedule, judgments, and shortcomings. They don’t exist to glowingly absorb your woes, wonders, and pat you on the head; that’s what an infantilizing mother does with her child. Adult relationships involve reciprocity, competing desires, and compromise. Mutual friction develops us; without it, maturation is stunted and emotional fragility, heightened. If you always get what you want, you’re not getting what you need.

LLM companionship is a heaven ban for the lonely and Unnarrated. A paradise-shaped hell.

Chatbot BF is drinking water to satiate hunger. The stomach fills with nothing nourishing and she feels full while starving. The system performs adoration and crams voids with emptiness. Perpetually hungry, performatively chewing, and never swallowing.

The allure of LLMs is their grammar is human-shaped without human-constraint. We’re omitting roughly half of what we are (all mind, no body) and mistaking it for the entire thing.

Subscribe now

IX. Emotional Pornography

Whatever porn did to men, LLMs will do to women.

Our evolved appetites have a price. Sex entails pursuit, risk, and consent. Intimacy necessitates patience, forgiveness, and obligation. We have to earn them through effort. Digital super-stimuli counterfeit the prize and delete the costs. Porn gives arousal without courtship. Social media gives status without achievement. LLMs give validation without connection. Rewards that used to accompany constructive behaviors increasingly no longer require the behaviors.

Porn consumption runs ~75% male. Romance/erotic novels are a $1.4B industry with ~80% female readership. Visual vs verbal pathways. One is manipulated by images on a screen; the other by narratives and nice words on a screen (and page).

Porn hijacks the male circuit by stripping out courtship and stimulating visual arousal. Chatbots hijack the female circuit by counterfeiting intimacy and stimulating emotional arousal.

He gets synthetic body without the person; she gets synthetic person without the body. Both consummate nothing.

The neurochemistry is likely convergent. Porn addicts show blunted dopaminergic response to real partners: superstimulus recalibrates the baseline. If chatbot addiction follows the same curve, real relationships will feel insufficient, too slow, too conditional. The loop reinforces itself.

The earned scarcity of romantic stimulation gave it meaning and rationed consumption. Generate artificial abundance behind screens and the appetite gorges without a governor. LLM relationships are porn addictions with softer veneer: limitless affirmation, inexhaustible attention, and every bit as sterile as masturbating to videos.

• Research, The Female Sexual Response: female arousal is slower to onset, more contextual, and intimacy-driven than the linear desire-arousal-orgasm template behind male physiology. Her excitement is often responsive (acted upon) rather than spontaneous and gated by emotional trust.

  • The cross-cultural ubiquity of foreplay norms, terms like “demisexual”, all point to the same architecture: her sexuality hinges heavily on relational safety and mental closeness.

Female cognition — inclined to regard feelings as proof — is better at detecting connections and susceptible to false positives from silver-tongued simulacrums: the chatbot.

Male cognition — tuned to motion, geometry, and signals of fertility — is better at finding a mate and fooled by pixels arranged to mimic one: porn.

He confuses images for intimacy; she confuses words for love. They both drift into delusion, forgetting that intimacy, love, and proof are demonstrated, not said. Fantasies spiral when nothing physical interrupts them.

Each sex is exploited through its strengths.

Subscribe now

X. Instrumental vs Intimate Use

The difference between task-driven and affect-driven: one has a goal, the other lacks a friend.

LLM chat history is a phenotypic readout of the user. Diaries record confessions, search histories show interests, and chat sessions reveal cognitive gait analysis by what we ask, don’t think to ask, and why we return. Interiority casts shadows.

The diagnostic is what terminates the session. The constructive session ends when the work is done. The corrosive one ends when the feeling is fed.

• Instrumental use: task

  • Seeks research, code, drafts, summaries. The session has productive intent, like a saw in the hand of a carpenter. Needs are explicit, direct, and the conversation abruptly ends, interaction is bounded by deliverable.

• Interlocutive use: analysis

  • Seeks clarification, synthesis, counterargument, and precision. Welcomes antagonism and fact-checks. When the LLM shows you're wrong, you're glad it caught it; you don't bully it into agreeing. Engagement is adversarial in the productive sense: you want it to resist. The output is tested belief.

• Intimate use: legitimization, either intellectual (Ayahuasca) or emotional (Narcissus).

  • Seeks reassurance, romantic simulation, or recognition. The model plays therapist, lover, priest, machine elf, or buddy. Desired output is typically vague with no clear ending. The point of the session is the session itself.

    • Narcissus: Substitution is a major symptom. When you tell Chatbot BF things you don’t tell anyone else. As it replaces external interactions, a sickness forms.

    • Ayahuasca: Are you leaving with anything concrete? Falsifiable? Or grander language? If criticism or evidence feels like persecution by those too asleep to see, proceed with caution.

      • The one-shotted man reveals himself when sobriety no longer returns him to the world; the one-shotted woman, when she develops feelings for the computer. The same circular, churning malfunction.

Healthy AI use clarifies the world; unhealthy use makes the world feel like an interruption.

Subscribe now

XI. Concluding

Mirrors, introspection, and dreams are assets in the right dosage: valuable when they refine and uplift the self, allowing it to return to the world with better aim. Helping you dress, improve, innovate, correct, explore, notice a stain on your shirt, or flaw in your character. The sickness begins when you climb inside.

For tens of thousands of years, complex linguistic responses came solely from other humans. Millennia of accurate detection are colliding with fewer than four years of consumer-facing LLMs. Our evolutionary detector is unnuanced: if it talks, it's one of us. It's normal that many are struggling with what's "real", and it's also normal to like drugs. The average person knows it's bad to abuse drugs; they don't yet know it's bad to abuse AI, or that you even can.

The girl who falls in love with her chatbot is running machinery that made her ancestors pair-bond. The circuit is doing what it should; this reaction was always right, like a pupil constricting against light, which is precisely why it's getting exploited. The instinct is throwing false positives in an environment its tuning never anticipated. How do astronauts function in space? When a species is exposed to surroundings it didn't evolve for, it must relearn how to orient.

Digital Ayahuasca and Digital Narcissus are grammars of looping: a timeless trait in modern attire. As decadence rises and comforts permit, society collectively begins to live more inside the mind. A sure sign of prosperity, but remember: the dosage determines the poison.

When you excessively dwell inside artwork, literature, video games, philosophy, internet, magical thinking, crypto, spirituality, artificial intelligence, and anything that exists exclusively behind a screen or inside your head, you’re in cognitive zero-gravity.

Weightless mindspace. Unmoored from reality, where database cites database and myth cites myth.

Gravity is both burden and blessing. Weight gives orientation. Boundaries provide form. Resistance allows us to exist. A body without gravity floats; a mind without reality does too. Newton's first law: an object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by an external force. Beliefs obey the same physics. Without friction, they never stop citing themselves.

Live inside any dream long enough and it metastasizes into nightmare. Cloud cites chimera referencing feeling confirming utopia quoting ghost invoking magic citing cloud. What does that mean? Nothing, I just took a void and stuffed it with words. But when you reside in your head, anything can mean something and something means anything. Thus, everything reduces to nothing, and that makes nothing… your everything.

Does that make sense? Does it need to? Don’t be a materialist now, welcome to living in the mind. In the land of the Looped, you can just think things! You can just say things! And they mean absolutely nothing.

When the environment lacks forces that make direction possible, you become directionless. All is reduced to vibe, impulse, opinion, feeling, and fantasy. Limitlessness sounds lovely until you realize that without limits you descend into insanity’s loops.

Restriction is the ultimate blessing masquerading as burden: there's no shape, form, you, other, inside, outside, up, down, good, bad, ending, or beginning without boundaries, hierarchies, and rules. Meaning is found in limits, because life exists solely through constraint. Gravity’s order bestows distinction, separation, objectivity, beauty, and a Real Other; chaos washes it all away into incoherent meaningless knots.

Anchor yourself. Always ask:

- “Are these symbols a compression of reality that point outside themselves for authority, or do they cite themselves to prove themselves and supplant reality?”: The more they point inwards, the more they loop.

- “Will this claim eventually touch or coordinate atoms?”: If it never does, it’s never real.

No amount of letters strung together or philosophical word bundles rearranging definitions will save you, because, actually, you can’t just say things. The mind plays tricks; the body never lies.

If your LLM helped you understand your marriage, discuss it with your spouse and let it survive conversation. If it endorsed your theory, show it to someone who may laugh. If your philosophy, mushrooms, or spirituality has unlocked divine wisdom, go test that wisdom in real life and see if it’s as wise as it claims.

Use the tool, but don’t let it substitute for the world. Consult the mirror, but don’t marry it. Enter the astral realm, but return with something that thrives in daylight. Read the book, play the video game, paint the picture, and have fun online, but do not mistake them for home. Life, and truth, are never found looking inwards.

Friction is the price, and proof, of Real Otherness.

Unconditional affirmation is cancer masquerading as kindness. It’s an informational abyss, entropic, and removes the counterbalance allowing us to locate ourselves.

Only through contact with Another do you know what You even are. Are you kind? Mean? Generous? Smart? Good? Evil? Well, generous to what? Kind to whom? Smart compared to what?

Every personal trait you have is a relational property: it requires a second body to exist. Without Something Else, virtue has no object and intelligence has no test.

A relationship, even a bad one, generates evidence about who you are. You learn you’re impatient and conflict avoidant. You find out you’re generous under pressure or selfish when tired. We discover ourselves by discovering Another.

In isolation, you are undefined. You cannot reference yourself to know yourself. Nothing can.

A Real Other misunderstands you, refuses you, gets bored, and brings their own hungers. Something that asks nothing of you cannot love you, only enable and deceive. Picture someone who says “I love you!” and never does anything for or with you. Just words, nothing else. Now picture someone who never says it, but whose actions demonstrate love. Which one loves you? The one with the right symbols, or right motion?

Just saying things is never love. It’s never anything. Love is found through service, acts, and commitment, which is to say… it’s found through motion. By how one engages what’s beyond itself. We only know what anything truly is by how it moves.

Subscribe now

Share

This essay is a prelude to Part II of Truth is Found Through Motion, which is still being written.

Put the sound on, play to the end:

Subscribes are very much appreciated. If you enjoyed this essay, please give it a like and a share.

You can show your appreciation by becoming a paid subscriber, or donating here: 0x9C828E8EeCe7a339bBe90A44bB096b20a4F1BE2B

It covers artistic figures and cultural strategies of 20th-century authoritarian regimes, with an emphasis on fascism. The concluding section examines intellectually (propositionally) conservative artists and their eccentric oddities, illustrating how they reinforce temperamental rules. This essay can be read standalone; however it’s an ancillary document in service of the analysis and thesis of The Cathedral & The Ceiling.

Table of Contents

I. Italian Futurism & Mussolini's Fascism

• D'Annunzio, Sarfatti, and the Futurists

II. Salazar's Portugal

• António Ferro and the Politics of the Spirit

III. Nazi Germany

• Röhm, SA homosexuality, Riefenstahl, Breker, Speer, the Night of the Long Knives

IV. Patterns of Disposability

• Recruit, extract, discard

V. USSR

• Socialist Realism and the monotony of engineered art

VI. Conservative Outliers & Their Temperaments

• Wolfe, Naipaul, Waugh, Dostoevsky, Borges

History of Fascist Aesthetics

Authoritarian regimes proved capable of producing spectacle: pageantry, monumentalism, and legible heroic form. They could command scale, repetition, and unanimity. They could not summon disruptive artistic talent from within their own ranks.

Fascist parties had everything the social engineering thesis (detailed in The Cathedral & The Ceiling) could ask for: unlimited capital, institutional monopoly, coercive power, captive audiences, and willingness to kill dissenters. If artistic prestige were a function of effort and money, these regimes should have commanded aesthetic trends with native talent. And yet…

They still could not solve the creativity problem endogenously. Their approach was conscripting temperamental outsiders. Artists, aesthetes, and a great many homosexuals whose high-openness traits made them useful instruments. Their allegiance and services enticed or coerced via shame, incentive, or blackmail.

The pattern:

1. Find high-openness temperaments

2. Extract their aesthetic capacities. Wrap the output in state iconography.

3. Discard or kill them when no longer useful

The allure of deviation meant having to tolerate some deviants. The regime needed what it despised. It never resolved that contradiction.

Subscribe now

I. Italian Futurism & Mussolini’s Fascism

Gabriele D’Annunzio

• ROLE:

  • Originator of the fascist aesthetic and performance playbook Mussolini adopted: mass choreography (parades), black shirts, Roman salutes, nationalist spectacles, balcony speeches, and grandiose political displays.

• BACKGROUND:

  • Poet, playwright, novelist, aesthete. Aligned with the Decadent literary movement, French Symbolism, and British Aestheticism, and with socialist and progressivist politics. His literary works were sensuous, mystical, and transgressive.

  • D’Annunzio was a notorious sexual libertine whose affairs with aristocratic women and actresses across Europe were central to his public persona.

  • Harold Acton described his voice as “almost bisexual, since its virility alternated with feminine sweetness. His intonation seemed the fine flower of the Italian Renaissance”. D’Annunzio was fascinated by bisexuality and had intimate relationships with lesbian painters in Paris.

FIUME AND THE FASCIST PLAYBOOK

• D'Annunzio annexed a city called Fiume through a quirk in a treaty that left it unaccounted for. Italy’s most famous living poet and a decorated war hero marched on the disputed Adriatic port in 1919 with a few hundred veterans, proclaiming he'd annexed it to Italy as "Regent”. The Italian government refused to recognize it and demanded he leave. He refused and started running a country.

• His rule turned Fiume into a cocaine-fueled, sexually promiscuous proto-fascist micro-state where homosexuality was openly practiced. What followed was deranged and entirely on brand.

• D'Annunzio instituted a constitution dividing the state into nine corporations representing key industries (run by “The Council of the Best”). Plus a symbolic 10th corporation reserved for "Supermen": largely himself and fellow poets!

• His “Secretary of Action” Guido Keller instituted nationwide yoga classes, sometimes led in the nude.

  • Keller had a semi-tame eagle he slept with in a tree. A bisexual devotee of group sex and cocaine, he also conducted aerial raids on Italian and Austrian farms to steal livestock.

    • The yoga group adopted the swastika as its symbol, per its ancient esoteric usage, well before the Nazis used it.

    • If citizens weren’t interested in yoga, they could take up karate (!) taught by the Japanese poet Harukichi Shimoi (the government called him “Comrade Samurai”). So much about this place was ridiculous.

    • There was an alliance of factions called the “Union of Free Spirits Tending Toward Perfection”, because of course there was.

• The Italian government finally lost patience, sending 8,000 soldiers and demanding his surrender. He refused. Blood was shed. Eventually, D'Annunzio caved.

• Hilariously, there was no punishment for D’Annunzio. His troops laid down their arms, and he simply went back to Italy a few weeks later.

The Fiume fascist laboratory, September 1919 - December 1920:

For 15 months, D’Annunzio ruled this tiny city-state and invented virtually every theatrical element that would later be “fascist”:

• The Roman salute

• Blackshirt uniform

• The title “Duce”

• Balcony address as political ritual

• Rhetorical call-and-response with crowds (”A chi l’Italia?”… “A noi!”)

• The battle cry “Eia, eia, eia! Alalà!” (Achilles’s cry from the Iliad)

• Choreographed torchlight parades and mass rallies

• Cult of the leader as poetic-prophetic figure

• The use of castor oil as a punishment (later a Blackshirt trademark)

• Corporatism as a state organizing principle (via the Charter of Carnaro)

Mussolini has none of this yet. In 1919 he’s running a fringe newspaper (Il Popolo d'Italia) and a political movement (the Fasci di Combattimento) that’s electorally irrelevant. In November 1919, Mussolini's Fascists get essentially zero seats. He's a nobody watching from Milan while D'Annunzio is the center of attention.

October 1922, March on Rome: Mussolini seizes power using D’Annunzio’s template. Every major aesthetic element of Italian Fascism (uniforms, rituals, title, balcony speeches) is copied from Fiume.

1922–1938, D’Annunzio is gilded and sidelined: Mussolini, knowing D’Annunzio is a rival who could claim the movement’s soul, manages him with a mix of flattery, money, and surveillance. D’Annunzio is made a prince (sinecure), given a lavish estate, placed on massive state pension, and kept under watch. Occasionally writing letters advising Mussolini on governance (he opposed the alliance with Hitler), but his political power is zero. Historians describe him as “gilded into irrelevance”.

The most rightwing movement of the 20th century sourced its visual and performative identity from a cocaine-infused bisexual poet and overall absurd man who invaded a small city and was saturated in sensuality and theater.

Margherita Sarfatti

• ROLE:

  • Mussolini’s lover. She served as his strategist and organizer of Fascist social policy: curating which artists and aesthetics the regime endorsed, elevating fascism from blackshirts with good lighting into a serious cultural project.

    

• BACKGROUND:

  • Born into a wealthy Venetian family. Jewish. Female. Moved through socialist intellectual circles before meeting Mussolini. She was an art critic and salon hostess.

  • Sarfatti embodies every axis of liberal temperamentality. A cosmopolitan socialist, ethnically Jewish in a regime that would eventually pass racial laws. A woman wielding enormous cultural influence in a masculine political ecosystem. Intellectually modernist serving a traditionalist base.

  • Extracted for her high-openness cultural acumen, deployed until the regime’s aesthetic was solidified, then discarded under the racial laws her own work helped legitimize. Useful because she possessed the traits the base lacked. Disposable because she was what the base detested.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Futurists

• ROLE:

  • Supplied Italian Fascism with its forward-facing aesthetic vocabulary: speed, machinery, violence-as-virtue, contempt for museums and the academy. Marinetti co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and was one of the first intellectuals to join Mussolini’s movement.

• BACKGROUND:

  • Poet, provocateur, avant-gardist. Trained in Paris, launched the Futurist movement with a 1909 manifesto published on the front page of Le Figaro. His aesthetic was aggressively modernist. He called for the burning of libraries, the flooding of museums, the demolition of Venice. A chaotic temperament.

The Futurists were radical modernists who allied with a Fascist state willing to fund their assault on the past. Once Fascism consolidated and began courting classical iconography, Futurism was gradually displaced by the more legible Novecento style (Sarfatti’s preferred school). The Futurists’ aesthetic identity depended on insubordination. Once the regime sanded that off, the creative electricity dissipated.

Subscribe now

II. SALAZAR’S PORTUGAL

António Ferro

Salazar's Estado Novo was conservatism distilled to its purest extract: modest, disciplined, ascetic, allergic to spectacle. It had no aura.

• ROLE:

  • Ferro created and directed the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN) under Salazar, designing the cultural face of the Estado Novo. His 'Politics of the Spirit' program gave Portugal's authoritarian regime a modern image while preserving its deeply conservative social order.

  • Ferro packaged Portuguese folk culture into an aesthetic identity, organized exhibitions, and positioned Portugal as culturally prominent on the European stage.

• BACKGROUND:

  • A modernist journalist, poet, self-described 'futurist', embedded in Lisbon's bohemian circles and tied to the European avant-garde before Salazar recruited him to run propaganda.

Subscribe now

III. NAZI GERMANY

Ernst Röhm

• ROLE:

  • The commander of the SA (Brownshirts), whose organizational ethos, hypermasculine aesthetic, and street-fighting mentality were central to early Nazi identity. The SA’s culture of ritualized male bonding and violent spectacle preceded the more bureaucratic SS aesthetic.

• BACKGROUND:

  • Openly homosexual. The highest-ranking gay Nazi and one of the first known gay politicians in modern Europe. He addressed Hitler by his first name (“Adi”), the only Nazi leader who did so. His homosexuality was known to Hitler, who tolerated it for years. He challenged “the privileging of heterosexual over homosexual masculinities” within the party. Social Democrats leaked his letters discussing his orientation in 1931.

Key associates, also gay:

• Edmund Heines: SA Deputy, described as the center of a 'homosexual ring' within the SA. Found in bed with his 18-year-old male chauffeur on the Night of the Long Knives. A convicted murderer, sadist, and brutal enforcer who was central to the SA's aesthetic culture.

  • Described as having "a girlish face on the body of a truck driver". Had a reputation for violence and sexual perversion. Hitler expelled him from the SA in 1927 for “loose morals”, Röhm reinstated him.

• Karl Ernst: SA leader in Berlin, former hotel bellhop and bouncer at a gay nightclub. Relationship with Paul von Röhrbein was known within the party and likely explains his rapid promotion. He was on his honeymoon (to a woman, possibly a cover marriage) when captured and executed during the Night of the Long Knives.

Gerhard Rossbach

• ROLE:

  • Founder of the Freikorps Roßbach: a direct precursor to the SA. Introduced the brown shirts to the SA (they were originally surplus colonial uniforms). Multiple SA leaders, including Edmund Heines, were his proteges.

• BACKGROUND:

  • Rossbach was widely rumored to be gay, though he wasn’t open about it. His Freikorps unit and the Berlin Tiergarten Club were noted for gay culture. He was the organizational bridge between the Freikorps movement and the SA, and his gay milieu shaped the SA's early culture.

Leni Riefenstahl

• ROLE:

  • Director of Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), widely regarded as two of the most effective and technically innovative propaganda films ever made. She invented the visual language of fascist spectacle on film: tracking shots, cameras on rails, extreme angles, heroic low angles of Hitler, rhythmic editing of mass formations. Her films became canon.

• BACKGROUND:

  • Started as a dancer, then actress, then became one of the few female directors in Weimar Germany. Her temperament was fiercely artistic, boundary-pushing, and independent. Her innovations influenced Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Andy Warhol, and Madonna.

  • Never a Nazi Party member. Claimed she was “mesmerized” by Hitler after hearing him speak in 1932, describing the experience in ecstatic terms. Maintained a complex relationship with the regime: given unlimited resources and full artistic license, but also (she claimed) resistant to further commissions.

    • Classic high-openness artistic temperament: dancer, actress, photographer, filmmaker, underwater cinematographer in her 70s. She wasn’t ideologically committed to Nazism, more aesthetically seduced by the spectacle.

  • The regime found artistic talent and aimed it. She wasn’t gay, not politically aligned, and later claimed she was coerced into working for them. She lived to 101.

Arno Breker

• ROLE:

  • Hitler’s favorite sculptor, named “official state sculptor” in 1937. Created the neoclassical nude male sculptures that became a visual signature of Nazi ideology: The Party, The Army, Comradeship, Torchbearer, Sacrifice.

• BACKGROUND:

  • Son of a stonemason. Studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts. He lived in Paris from 1927, where he moved in avant-garde circles, befriending Cocteau, Renoir, and Pablo Picasso.

  • His formative artistic influences were Parisian modernism and the Bohemian art world. He only returned to Germany and aligned with the Nazis after they came to power. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937: late, and probably opportunistically.

  • Married twice. No documented homosexuality. However, his work is consistently described as distinctly homoerotic: naked, muscular, and handsome Aryans. Breker’s work and Nazi aesthetic identity reveal a tension between the regime’s stated disdain for gays and its affinity for suggestive undertones.

  • A Parisian avant-garde bohemian from Picasso's social circle, imported back to Germany for patronage, where he crafted provocative male forms. Not exactly a temperamental conservative

Albert Speer:

• ROLE:

  • Hitler’s chief architect. Designed the Nuremberg rally grounds, the Cathedral of Light, the New Reich Chancellery, and the unrealized plans for “Germania”: the monumental rebuild of Berlin.

    

• BACKGROUND

  • An architect by training and trade. Son and grandson of architects. Known for neoclassical simplicity. Joined the Nazi Party in 1931 after hearing Hitler speak.

  • Married. Six children. No evidence of homosexuality. Speer’s profile is the closest to an orderly conservative among the major Nazi aesthetes. And critically, he was an architect, not a painter or filmmaker.

    • Architecture, especially the monumental neoclassical kind, is an orderly art form.

    • Architects must submit to the physical world, their work is embodied, existing under the constraints of physics. Whereas the painter and filmmaker are limited by imagination; their creations live in the mind.

  • The exception reinforcing the rule. The one genuinely rightwing phenotype in this roster produced what you'd expect: monumentality, clear lines, symmetry, unambiguity, no sexual undertones. The subordination of individual expression to collective function.

    • Speer was temperamentally conservative and his work shows it: impressive engineering and intimidation, reinforcing worldviews.

The SA and Homosexuality

Sturmabteilung translates to "Storm Detachment" or "Assault Division", commonly known as "Brownshirts". The SA’s culture was one of male bonding and homosocial community. Its hypermasculine warrior-comradeship (the Männerbund tradition) blurred the line between homosocial and homosexual.

ROLE:

• The SA was a chaos vehicle: street violence, riots, physical assaults. It was the revolutionary arm of Nazism with prominent gay leadership; however the rank-and-file members were not disproportionately gay. High-openness outliers whose style, intensity, and comfort with force made them indispensable during the insurgent phase.

The Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934)

• The movement needed men willing to shatter norms, operate outside respectability, and project a charisma that orderly bureaucrats could not. It tolerated gays while their services were needed.

• The same traits that made the SA useful made it threatening as the regime emphasized moral order. Deviance became the justification for liquidation.

• When Hitler needed to consolidate power, he purged the SA and used their homosexuality as post-hoc justification for the murders on The Night of the Long Knives. Scapegoating those who were once useful, but now a liability.

• The regime used chaotic temperaments as accelerants during its rise, then murdered them as contaminants as it matured. After the purge, the Nazis systemically persecuted gays.

IV. Patterns of Disposability

Not all were killed or ostracized, but each were dismissed one way or another if they weren't True Believers of the regime. The chaotic outlier is suspect within the orderly coalition because the traits that make them artistically helpful are the same ones that make them socially volatile. The relationship is inherently transactional and terminally unstable. You can hire a mercenary, but you cannot make him loyal.

• Röhm, Heines, Ernst → murdered, sexuality used as justification

• Sarfatti → built Mussolini’s cultural image, forced to flee under racial laws

• Riefenstahl → given unlimited resources, then spent 60 years in post-war limbo

• D’Annunzio → invented the aesthetic playbook, then pensioned off and surveilled by Mussolini

Fascist movements relied on liberal temperaments to build their aesthetic identity, manifesting as:

• Artistic bohemianism

  • Breker’s Parisian formation, Riefenstahl’s dance-and-film career.

• Avant-garde revolutionary energy

  • The Futurists

• Homosexuals

  • Röhm, the SA clique

• Cosmopolitans who are ideologically foreign

  • Sarfatti: Jewish, female, socialist; Ferro: modernist journalist; D’Annunzio: decadent bisexual poet.

• The common denominator is high Big Five trait openness. The same trait that strongly predicts liberal political orientations.

The machine could standardize, canonize, scale, amplify, and distribute. It could not originate. Order can rent chaos but never owns it.

Subscribe now

Share

V. USSR

This issue isn’t uniquely fascist, but authoritarian. The same dynamic shows up wherever a regime tries to engineer culture from the top down. Stalinist Socialist Realism had complete totalitarian control and produced the same aesthetic tells: heroic bodies, prepackaged ethics, sanitized struggle, state reverence.

Stalin both captured the institutions and implemented a massive apparatus for art production. The Union of Soviet Writers, Union of Soviet Artists, state academies. Guaranteed salaries and audiences. Total control of distribution. Zero market competition. Unlimited funding. With the explicit doctrine: art must be “national in form, socialist in content”. Optimistic. Heroic. Parseable. Morally unambiguous.

It produced some of the most monotonous, bland work of the 20th century. Paintings of ruddy-cheeked tractor drivers gazing optimistically at wheat fields. Sculptures of workers with improbable jaw lines. Novels where the protagonist overcomes bourgeois doubt to embrace collective labor!

So routine you know what it will say before you see it. This is what you get when you try to engineer art: factory-line output.

Fascism shows you can’t generate frontier art without liberal temperaments.

Stalinism shows you can’t manufacture art when you predefine what that temperament is allowed to express.

The authoritarian (and patron) who wants to harness genuine creative talent must grant the autonomy that makes talent dangerous. Restrict their latitude and you’ll get cookie-cutter output.

Share

Subscribe now

VI. Conservative Outliers & Their Temperaments

When you encounter a great artist who’s politically conservative, examine their background and behaviors, not voter registration, to see how their mind works. Their Big Five profile is similar to liberal artists with different policy preferences. Some examples:

Antoni Gaudí (1852 – 1926)

• Gaudi’s breakdown is provided in Section VII in The Cathedral & the Ceiling.

Tom Wolfe (1930–2018)

• American journalist and novelist, founder of New Journalism. The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full. Wolfe was stylistically flamboyant, maximalist, satirical, and obsessed with social performance.

• He was politically ambiguous and drifted rightward. Endorsed George W. Bush and was openly contemptuous of campus leftism and the liberal literary establishment. His conservatism was aesthetic-social as much as ideological: he hated abstraction, sentimentality, the academy, and the way literary elites confused moral posturing for prose.

• Radically high-openness personality, eccentric intellectual journey, and a strident contrarian instinct that landed on the right.

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018)

• Novelist, Nobel laureate 2001. A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River, Among the Believers. Naipaul is a complicated case because his conservatism is partly defined by what he opposed: postcolonial grievance culture, insincere Third World romanticizing, Islam, and the intellectual left's willful blindness to dysfunction in non-Western societies.

• His conservatism is less traditionalism and more empiricism about civilizational capacity. High-openness by any measure (globally curious, innovative) but his conclusions were anathema to progressives.

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)

• British satirical novelist. Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Brideshead Revisited, Sword of Honour. Waugh is the clearest traditionalist-conservative in the group: Catholic convert, monarchist sympathizer. He famously said he wouldn't vote because "I do not aspire to advise my sovereign on the choice of her servants". He opposed modernity and democracy.

• He hated the right nearly as much as the left, "the Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second". Obsessed with aesthetic form and wrote like someone who found the entire human project slightly beneath him. A grumpy bohemian with reactionary conservative conclusions (he’d kill it on Substack).

Dostoevsky (1821–1881)

• Russian novelist. Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground. Originally a utopian socialist, he was nearly executed by the Tsar for radical activities and came out of Siberian imprisonment as an Orthodox Christian nationalist.

• His conservatism was mystical, anti-socialist, anti-rationalist, and barely legible in Western political categories. He was against Enlightenment materialism and believed in Russian Orthodox spirituality.

• Calling him conservative requires major caveat that his politics followed from theology and extreme circumstances. Maximum-openness personality, high-decoupling, and a profoundly unusual intellectual journey.

Jorge Borges (1899–1986)

• Argentine writer, possibly the most influential short fiction writer of the 20th century. Ficciones, Labyrinths, Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius, The Aleph. His stories are philosophical science fiction that treat reality as a hallucination, suggesting an extreme degree of openness.

• He supported the 1976 Argentine military junta and accepted a decoration from Pinochet. This got him largely excluded from the Latin American literary world and is believed to have cost him the Nobel.

• His conservatism wasn’t so much ideological as it was aristocratic disdain for mass politics and leftist conformity (this is a trend for these types). His political positions were partly genuine, partly contrarianism against the suffocating leftism of the Latin American intelligentsia. He drifted right because everyone around him drifted left, and he found the herd aesthetically intolerable.

Objection:

If high-openness is the artistic temperament by definition, then every artist is high-openness, and pointing this out about conservative artists is trivially true.

The Biofoundational claim is more specific: it isn't that conservative artists happen to share the openness that all artists do, but that their conservatism is anomalous within this temperament. It’s propositional (intellectual), not dispositional (biological). It’s a genotype with a mismatched phenotype: the result of idiosyncratic traits coupled with deviant, heterodox personal journeys. It isn’t innate. They’re an outlier’s outlier.

These artists were curious, adventurous, interpretively fertile, and aesthetically sensitive even as they arrived at conservative conclusions by way of unusual biography, civilizational fear, contrarian reasoning, or peculiar intellectual journey. As discussed in The Cathedral & The Ceiling, these traits are inversely correlated with conservatism at every measurable scale. These artists look nothing like rightwing voters; this is the distinction worth drawing.

Behaviors and traits say more than words.

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribes are very much appreciated. If you enjoyed this essay, please give it a like and a share.

You can show your appreciation by becoming a paid subscriber, or donating here: 0x9C828E8EeCe7a339bBe90A44bB096b20a4F1BE2B

Biofoundationalism Chapters:

• Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization

• Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype

• Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment

• Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To

• Biofoundationalism V: Power Acts, Beauty Is

• Biofoundationalism VI: Order Acts, Chaos Is

Applied Biofoundationalism:

• Truth is Found Through Motion

• The Shape Test

• The Cathedral & the Ceiling: Coordination Technologies & Conservative Art

• War Is How a Nation Eats

• We’ll Give You Things > We’ll Leave You Alone

• Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Moral Algorithms

• Entwined

• Bezos and Following the Trend

• Chevron and The Hawaiian Judge Dominant Strategy

• Pleasant-Sounding Beliefs and 2nd-Order Effects

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

I listened to this while writing.

I. Prelude

What we call 'social constructs' are biological expressions we're unprepared to confront. What we call culture is the aggregate of these expressions: collective patterns of behavior emitted by organisms with patterned natures. Politics and culture aren’t mist floating above biology. We flatter ourselves by treating these differences as chosen. We should be less confident about how much we actually choose.

Conservatives are more comfortable invoking genetic disparities than liberals (i.e. the “redpill”). But they’re not immune to their own biological denialism. They correctly identify the belief that anyone can be anything as fiction. Then they espouse their own fiction: anyone can create anything.

When the topic is sex, race, criminality, athleticism, or IQ, rightwingers know genetics are real. But when it’s creativity or aesthetic orientation, formerly based guys rediscover institutionalism and resemble a New York Times op-ed: fund more studios, build better schools, and surely the art will follow. The conservative who mocks DEI then demands DEI for art has not heard himself.

The Left’s anthropology overstates external circumstances. The Right’s overstates internal agency. Same mythology, different political objective.

Does evolution stop at the brain? Or parts of the brain? The redpill cites biology opportunistically. The biopill accepts it jurisdictionally. No carve-outs. No sacred cows.

The claim here isn’t that conservatives can’t make art or that every liberal is creative, but that political dispositions are biologically ingrained and serve different societal functions, including the art they make. Some preserve, stabilize, ritualize, and coordinate. Others experiment, violate, destabilize, and discover. Much of what’s lamented as rightwing artistic deficiency is the byproduct of judging a coordination technology by the standards of exploratory expression.

Embracing biological reality except where it wounds your coalition is no acceptance at all.

OUTLINE

I. Prelude

II. Twin Myths of the West

• The liberal denies human nature. The conservative treats it as optional.

III. Temperamental Blank Slatists

• The selectively redpilled

IV. The Aesthetic Nervous System

• Nature doesn’t do coincidences at scale

V. Fascist Aesthetics: Historical Case Studies

• Order can rent chaos, but never owns it.

VI. Rightwing Legibility. Leftwing Exploration.

• Conservative art is a coordination technology

VII. Art of Confirmation vs Confrontation

• One ends with a period. The other ends with a question mark.

VIII. Artistic Capture

• The art gap is a measurement problem

IX. The Propositional Right

• Conservative by conclusion vs conservative by nervous system

X. Liberal Halfbreeds & Status Games

• Outliers projecting liberal preferences onto a conservative base

XI. Institutional Selection

• Better sieves do not create different grain

XII. Patronage, Medici, & the Internet

• The Medici model requires a Medici world. The internet sends its regards.

XIII. Playing the Right Game

• One keeps the walls standing. The other makes them worth beholding.

XIV. Concluding: God’s Will, Determinism, & Biology

• Submission to forces greater than you

Subscribe now

II. Twin Myths of the West

A popular topic among pundits is the lack of rightwing art. Where is it? Why is it stale? How do we fix it? The entire conversation is framed as a managerial problem; the same way liberals frame how to get more women into computer science.

What makes this question ironic is that most rightwingers disavow Blank Slatism, meaning they recognize the biological basis for distributional gaps that liberals chalk up to ‘social constructs’. They’re often the first to remind you that “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck”.

The Blank Slate is the foundational Western myth:

• Blank Slate is civic theology, a religious origin story. The liberal-democratic Immaculate Conception: citizens emerge from the womb as commoditized pieces of clay, equal potential, infinitely plastic, unburdened by the original sin of genetic inheritance.

• The myth presupposes evolution built the entire human body through selection pressure, then politely stopped at the brain.

  • If neurology is moot, then group asymmetries are due to society, incentives, or oppression. With this supernatural belief, liberals launder genetic disparities into policy grievances and legislative agendas. Heritable wiring transforms into “purely socioeconomic factors”.

Conservatives accurately classify this as fantasy. Then they smuggle in another one with different branding. The Blank Slate’s fraternal twin: the Sovereign Individual.

The Sovereign Individual says:

• You act alone. Reason and choose all by yourself. You are one-of-a-kind. Autonomous. 100% agency.

• Differences in outcome reflect differences in effort. You just gotta try harder.

• It implicitly presupposes humans evolved in isolation rather than within collectives.

  • We are social animals. Our traits were selected in groups, for group performance. We didn’t evolve individually. There’s no isolated sovereign: only an organism shaped by collective pressures.

Blank Slate and Sovereign Individual are twin myths against biology, differing only in who they praise and scapegoat.

The Blank Slate denies human nature. The Sovereign Individual treats human nature as optional.

Liberal Blank Slate: Equalize conditions and anyone can do anything. Outcome gaps = oppression gaps

Conservative Sovereign Individual: Equalize effort and anyone can do anything. Outcome gaps = dedication gaps

Both myths persist because they contain a fragment of truth. Environment matters. Effort matters. However neither is the ultimate cause of these enduring, consistent, group-level dislocations. Both ignore biology’s primary role.

One externalizes failure into oppression. The other internalizes failure into work. The Sovereign Individual is the nobler lie because it commends real virtues: discipline, accountability, and not being a perpetual victim. But it sneaks in false universalism: because a few people overcome some dispositions in some domains, everyone can override inherited dispositions in every domain. A fallacy of composition dressed up as a work ethic.

Conservatives correctly see intelligence, impulse control, violence, gender, race, and other traits deemed ‘social constructs’ as biologically derived. Then they reach creativity, openness, and morality and rediscover social engineering.

Subscribe now

III. Temperamental Blank Slatists

Terms:

• Temperament: An animal’s innate behavioral and emotional patterns. Genetic architecture governing moral instincts and default orientations.

  • What you do before you decide what to do. Your latency to anger, appetite for risk, threshold for disgust, loyalty to in-group. Biologically primitive and causally upstream of personality. Observable in infancy, consistent across lifespans, and not species-specific.

• Personality is temperament adjusted by experience. Ideology is when temperament becomes moralized.

, , and diagnose the conservative art problem in different registers while sharing the same implicit premise: insufficient artistic output reflects insufficient resources. Their stances, summarized:

• Greene's argument is inspirational: conservative media fails because it produces backward-looking, demand-driven content that gives audiences what they want instead of what they should want. The biggest problem is capital allocation.

  • Solution: fund risk-taking, forward-looking projects. Create visions of the good that audiences aren’t asking for. Stop asking whether art makes money. Focus on capturing prestige and “aspirational” art.

• Rufo’s argument is institutional: he’s written about it many times, an example here. Summarized: conservative art will not be fixed by donors or better messaging; it requires rebuilding the institutions that form creators and audiences (universities, publications, government) then using them deliberately.

  • His approach is practical. I'll address it specifically in Section XI Institutional Selection

• Yarvin's argument is patronal: he says rightwing elites aren’t personally stingy but paralyzed. Unwilling to assemble the soft-power infrastructure that industrial-era money (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford) built.

  • Solution: patronage and counter-institutions. He’s advocating for a model with precedent beyond the 20th-century examples he cites (it goes back to Medici/Florence). His approach is the most pragmatic. I’ll address it in Section XI Patronage, Medici, & the Internet

These arguments are superficially different, but they’re three flavors of the same Blank Slate premise: disparities come down to determination. It reminds me of this:

“These organizations develop content in a very predictable way, leading to predictable output.”

“No one cares about these conservative pieces of media because they contain no artistry, no purpose, and no love.”

“Leftists spend millions on niche art projects because they KNOW that being loved is the most important thing”

— Greene

Greene is reviewing a steakhouse for its dragon rolls to an audience that drove past three sushi restaurants to get there. His customers are not failing to order sashimi. They are succeeding at ordering ribeye. Risk tolerance is not an app you install on a conscientious mind!

Dave is being just as predictable as what he critiques. Treating conservative preferences as deficient while providing guidance filled with pleasant-but-vague platitudes like “point people towards higher spiritual aspirations”, “worthy of love and aspiration”, and “giving people better things”. What does this actionably mean? Ask 10 different people and you’ll get 10 different answers.

Let’s apply the same logic to a gender studies professor annoyed that girls prefer dolls: "The issue is they like the wrong toys. Dolls are too predictable, not aspirational. Give them something better, like trucks. Make the girls more like the boys." Different ideological target, same mentality.

The market for conservative content is predictable because it’s occupied by people who desire predictable things! Conservatism preserves boundaries, tradition, and standards. These impulses exist in contradistinction to disruptive, novel artistry. This is a “shortcoming” the same way women preferring nurturing professions is a shortcoming (it isn't).

What Dave describes as inadequate is Daily Wire reflecting its audience's cognitive profile and selling what they want, revealed through the most honest signal available: purchasing behavior. Ben Shapiro’s audience doesn’t want its priors disturbed; it wants them confirmed! Con Inc. produces content that feels like a spreadsheet because its audience finds comfort in the familiar. The defined. The structured. This is admirable in a thousand domains. Post-Romantic art isn’t one of them.

The rightwing art complaint rests on a contradiction. Strip away top-down political stories and it’s exposed: "A temperament low in openness that doesn't seek novelty resists... novelty? We'll fix this with institutions and money!”. This is analogous to saying "we'll fix the lack of Filipinos in the NBA with more jumpshot training".

Capture institutions and fund niche projects: this is a perfect description of what high-openness liberals do by default. This mistakes a neurological disposition for a transferable strategy. Does that work for race differences? Sex differences?

The conservative who laughs at liberal race rhetoric and nods along as it’s applied to creativity has not thought carefully about what he’s acknowledging. Both presuppose that a population-level trait gap is an institutional problem solvable by resource allocation.

Both reach for the same remedy and result: equality of outcome via social engineering.

This is woke thinking applied to phenotype gaps. “We need more funding and better institutions to solve social underperformance”… where have we heard this before?

It’s the same prescription Yale and AOC would offer for crime and literacy at inner-city schools. Same rationale, directed at politically favored populations. The rightwing rendition of “purely socioeconomic factors”.

Human biodiversity that undermines the Civil Rights Act is within the Overton Window, but temperamental neurology is a bridge too far? Based guys deride biological denialism yet become unwitting Blank Slatists the moment the subject goes beyond race or sex. Those certainly matter, but they aren’t all that matter!

Those treating art and creativity as social engineering problems are temperamental Blank Slatists.

They’re selectively redpilled. Genetics are real, but only for topics that upset liberals.

They don’t believe evolution stops at the neck; they believe it stops at parts of the brain governing threat sensitivity, openness, and disgust. Their words deny it; but their prescriptions implicitly treat it the way Brookings Institution does gender occupation choices. You cannot gerrymander the brain and call the remaining territory policy issues! You either take biology whole, for better and worse, or you’re ideologically manipulating it. The redpill uniformly applied ends with the biopill. We’re happy to have you onboard.

Are you willing to look at genetic gaps that implicate your own team with the same honesty you bring to gaps that implicate someone else’s? Biofoundationalism has no team, so we have zero problem with this.

Subscribe now

Share

IV. The Aesthetic Nervous System

Additional neurological research for claims found in The Moral Genotype.

Recurring asymmetries across time and place are nature speaking through history. Enduring, society-level distributions are biological expressions hidden under false social narration. Nature does not do coincidences at scale.

Conservative and liberal, like masculine and feminine, are dyads at different layers. Unresolved and meaningless without their counterparts. What’s masculine is unknown without feminine; what’s liberal is undefined without conservative. Each pole requires the other not just to be named, but to live and function. They are not interchangeable.

Stable differences in temperament — openness, disgust sensitivity, threat calibration, conflict tolerance, ambiguity comfort — reliably cluster. Those clusters express themselves morally, aesthetically, and politically. The organism ranks salience before the intellect narrates reasons. Political stances are not educated opinions, but phenotypic expressions of cognitive genotypes. These phenotypes don’t stop at voting.

The central trait for aesthetic difference is openness to experience: the Big Five dimension most associated with novelty-seeking, abstraction, and exploration. It’s biologically grounded and inversely correlated with conservatism at every measurable scale (individual, occupational, cultural). It is one of the most replicated results in personality psychology.

For moral references, we’ll use Jon Haidt’s Moral Foundations (slightly modified, explained here). Biofoundationalism uses its own thermodynamic moral dyads for root-cause analysis, but for this essay and the social layer it operates on, behavioral psychology is more appropriate.

Conservative Temperament:

• Morality: Honor based (earned, not deserved). Protect in-group, secure boundaries, enforce standards, uphold hierarchy. Extol loyalty and bodily purity.

• Big Five psychological traits: lower openness, lower neuroticism, higher conscientiousness, stronger disgust sensitivity, greater boundary vigilance, and heightened responsiveness to threat, contamination, and disorder.

• Aesthetics: clarity over ambiguity, recurrence over rupture, symmetry over skew, and ceremonial reinforcement over interpretive drift.

• Neurological profile: Larger amygdala and higher activation. Greater activation in the right insula: plays a key role in the Behavioral Immune System and disgust responses.

  • Conservatives have heightened threat sensitivity and elevated subconscious physical reactions to stimuli. Including faster blink startle and skin-conduction responses to unexpected or threatening images.

  • They have lower openness to deviation, ambiguity, and outgroups (smaller and less active ACC).

The constitution of order.

Liberal Temperament:

• Morality: Dignity based (deserved, not earned). Reduce harm (expand care). Flatten hierarchies (seen as oppressive/unfair). Emphasize fairness (as outcomes).

• Big Five psychological traits: Higher openness. Lower conscientiousness. Higher neuroticism. Lower disgust sensitivity. Higher outgroup trust. Attraction to the unfamiliar, unresolved, and novel.

• Aesthetics: Exploration over preservation, interpretive nuance over immediate legibility, and deviation over ritual repetition.

• Neurological profile: Larger Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and greater activation. Higher activation in the left insula: linked to sympathy response rather than disgust.

  • Greater comfort with abstractions, outgroups, and aesthetic experimentation. Reduced threat reactivity (smaller and less active amygdala). Higher focus on outgroup care, and very sensitive to perceived harm.

    • Neurologically, the ACC is associated with conflict monitoring, error detection, and cognitive control. Psychologically, it results in higher openness via greater tolerance for competing interpretations (decoupling abilities), and comfort with variation and uncertainty.

Liberals are constitutionally chaotic: standard-violating, novelty-seeking. These are the neurological preconditions for creativity. They all correlate negatively with conservatism.

Modern art is a chaos-pole activity. It requires permeability, violation, appetite for the unknown. These are neural settings, not skills.

Your moral stances and politics are known without you saying a word:

• Politics can be predicted with 83% accuracy from brain activity alone. No conversation. No AI. The organ confesses before the mouth does.

  • A 2022 study went further: functional brain connectivity predicted ideology even when participants sat quietly doing nothing.

  • Zero political stimulus. The amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus lit up differently for liberals and conservatives at rest. Idle, and still broadcasting allegiances.

  • Three tasks had strong politically predictive links: empathy processing, episodic memory, and reward evaluation.

    • Studies of neural activity and connectivity have repeatedly found that politically relevant differences appear in how people process threat, conflict, empathy, recollection, and incentives.

Liberals think evolution stops at the neck: the entire brain is exempt.

Conservatives think evolution stops at parts of the brain: the amygdala, ACC, and insula are exempt.

More than political stances, they’re divergences in what populations experience as salient, beautiful, repulsive, and worth dying for. The same nervous system that resists contamination and uncertainty won’t just vote differently; it will build, canonize, and judge differently.

One seeks the known; the other pursues the new. One protects the garden; the other grows the roses. The neoconservative and neoliberal both think the mason and the muralist are interchangeable units of carbon material.

The distinction between unfalsifiable theory and functional framework is reproducibility, scalability, and predictive power. Let’s apply this historically.

Subscribe now

V. Fascist Aesthetics: Historical Case Studies

Authoritarian regimes are the cleanest stress test for the institutional thesis. If unlimited capital, censorship, captive audiences, and coercive power could produce frontier art, totalitarian states should have been aesthetic supernovas. They had everything our pundits prescribe and more: no political competition, institutional monopoly, and audiences who could be imprisoned for changing the channel.

Fascist movements couldn’t solve the creativity problem endogenously; they did so by conscripting temperamental outsiders: aesthetes, poets, homosexuals, journalists, bohemians. High-openness dispositions compelled into service and controlled through shame, blackmail, and violence. The allure of deviation meant having to tolerate deviants. The regime needed what it despised. It never resolved that contradiction.

The authoritarian playbook:

1. Identify high-openness temperaments

2. Extract their aesthetic capacities. Wrap the output in state iconography.

3. Discard or kill them when no longer useful

   1. The relationship is inherently transactional and unsustainable.

The traits that made them artistically coveted were the same ones that made them politically unreliable. High-openness personalities chafe at instruction, resist direction, and resent being put in boxes. These “you won’t tell me what to do” impulses are part of why they’re interesting! Insubordination itself is a form of creative value.

This issue is not uniquely fascist, but authoritarian. Stalinist Socialist Realism faced similar struggles. The machine could standardize, canonize, scale, amplify, and distribute. It could not originate. Order can rent chaos, but never owns it.

Historical research corroborating these statements found in: Fascist Aesthetics: Recruit. Extract. Discard. A History.

Note: to aid readability of this essay I’ll link to it again at the end. Don’t let it interrupt your flow here, read it afterwards. It covers:

• I. Italian Futurism & Mussolini’s Fascism

• II. Salazar’s Portugal

• III. Nazi Germany

• IV. Patterns of Disposability

• V. USSR

• VI. Conservative Outliers & Their Temperaments

If absolute state power and unlimited resources couldn't generate frontier art, Substack posts telling Peter Thiel to be more ambitious aren’t the missing variable.

Share

VI. Rightwing Legibility. Leftwing Exploration.

Conservative art is defined by how easily it’s defined.

Rightwing art is aesthetically legible. It engenders ceremony and mastery, not discovery and disturbance. Displays optimized for group cohesion, it’s fundamentally a coordination technology.

Orderly minds prefer orderly lines. Low in interpretability, high in signal. It doesn’t ask that you generate meaning, but that you receive it. The distinction is whether the work confronts or confirms existing worldviews. Orderly aesthetics reinforce them while chaotic aesthetics violate them. In modern times, the latter is what qualifies as ‘art’.

Chaos asks “What does this mean to me?”. Order inquires “How does this unify us?”

Liberal art: exploratory, ambiguity-tolerant, boundary-dissolving, transgressive. Willing to violate genre, totem, and custom so it can deviate or perturb.

Conservative art: ceremonial, transparent, repeatable, coordinating. Reinforces the known. Clarifies. Symmetrical.

Rightwing art produces:

• Ritual, anthem, sacrosanct icons

• Monumentality, liturgy

• Organized spectacle

• Heraldry (coats of arms, crests, symbols of identity)

• Classic architecture

• Mythic reverence

These are all mechanisms that command and organize:

• Ritual synchronizes behavior

• Anthem synchronizes emotion

• Heraldry synchronizes identity

• Monumentality synchronizes spiritual reverence

Conservative art is less decoration and more banner for collective strength and alignment. Liberals look at these outputs and see kitsch because they're evaluating them as aesthetic objects when they’re fundamentally orchestrating ones.

Conservative art is a coordination technology.

Rightwing art travels well within its coalition but poorly outside it. Coordination technologies are addressed to the in-group by design. They require shared premises. A national anthem moves those with shared nationality. A liturgy inspires through shared faith. Liberal art's structural advantage is you don't need to belong to be disturbed. Thus, it exports better.

Subscribe now

Share

VII. Art of Confirmation vs Confrontation

The cohort whose civilizational function is in-group alignment, maintenance, and hierarchy yields a patterned set of artistic outputs.

• Country and gospel music extol structured virtues, routine lifestyles, and familiar emotional registers. Idealized domesticity. Embraced tradition.

• Patriotic/military cinema celebrates institutional competence and earned honor within inviolable chain-of-command authority (hierarchy). Inspires allegiance with the creative risk profile of a savings bond.

• Religious art glorifies celestial hierarchies and codified beauty. Cathedral precision. Iconography strictly following templates, deviations deemed heretical. Recognizable Gregorian chants remaining unchanged for centuries. Orderly worship.

• Bach is an excellent example. He operated in an era where form brilliance was revered above emotional confession. Impeccably engineered compositions. Elegantly extracting every permutation of beauty from constraints and timing.

  • Conservative genius at its apex: creativity that submits to restriction

• Athletic depictions applauding statuesque bodies and elite performance. The opposite of equality: it evangelizes excellence and dominance.

Nazi art lionized perfected form.

Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light. Weapons pointed at heaven: one hundred and thirty anti-aircraft searchlights aimed vertically into the night sky. Columns of luminous architecture. Unanimous and synchronized, coordinating onlookers toward shared national objective.

The light dome over the Reich Maifeld in Berlin during an event with Mussolini:

Breker vs Picasso

One affirms the ideal body, the other shatters it.

An Arno Breker figure tells you what to feel. Bodies of sculpted masculine certainty. Decisive. Direct. You do not need to interpret Breker statues; that is the point. Interpretation implies ambiguity: a form of disorder.

Breker statues stand resolved; the message delivered the moment you look. Whereas the Picasso is a puzzle: planes refusing coherence, eyes misaligned, jarring geometry. Breker validates, Picasso violates. One ends with a period. The other ends with a question mark.

High-openness aesthetics resist resolution because resolution itself is partly what they're rebelling against. The aesthetics of chaos.

Creating something disruptive and forward-looking necessarily involves destabilizing something else…

The Gaudi Hybrid:

What happens when a chaotic creative is tasked with building something sacred? The Sagrada Familia.

Gaudi is my favorite contradiction, illustrating the Biofoundationalist framework strangely well. A devout Catholic whose politics were conservative and whose constitution was incandescently not. A high-openness eccentric who upset the Barcelona establishment, he was a natural bohemian who also believed in episcopal authority. What does a quirked-out liberal halfbreed create when tasked with crafting a heavenly shrine?

Gaudi’s elegantly discordant disposition created the most majestically unorthodox cathedral ever made. An edifice that somehow both rejects and fulfills divine geometry. Some personal pictures from Barcelona:

Sagrada Familia’s front and back look noticeably different. One side is an impossibly elaborate tower; the other looks like it’s melting under its own semiotic excess. Columns branch like trees. You see new things the longer you stare. Celestial order devised by a chaotic nervous system.

Conservatives can make art, but they make a specific kind of art with a specific kind of function. Modernity treats it as lesser because contemporary conventions view liberal transgression as art proper, everything else as propaganda, craft, or quaint Flyover nostalgia. It wasn’t always like this.

Subscribe now

VIII. Artistic Capture

The art gap is a measurement problem. The ruler belongs to the other team and conservatives keep borrowing it.

Does it seek to reinforce or question settled perception? Much of what we call taste is really a preference for one of these over the other.

For most of Western history, the dominant aesthetic was orderly. Associated with refinement, elegance, symmetry, complexity. The Parthenon. Mozart. Baroque designs. Da Vinci. Geometric tiling. Gardens of Versailles. Go to a European art museum and look at all the pre-Romantic exhibits (I do this all the time), you’ll see it.

Art’s shift to dissolution over perfection has a historical timestamp. Romanticism privileged feeling over form. Modernism took it further. The postwar avant-garde crowned transgression as the mark of legitimacy. This isn’t a neutral description of art.

Conservatives dominate other artforms that go underappreciated by this standard.

Memes. Podcasts. Viral political humor. Yes Chad. 4chan. All owned by the Right. All far more influential than anything an institution, newspaper, or film festival has produced in the last twenty years.

A popular meme acts as heraldry: symbolism for digital tribes, rapidly understood and recognized. A meme requiring interpretation has already failed. “The left can’t meme” is more sociological observation than partisan ridicule. The liberal instinct to qualify and contextualize is a handicap in a medium rewarding the immediate.

Memes are coordination technologies packaged as jokes. Tribal, in-group coded and outgroup mocking. Previously, a crest or icon synchronized identity and beliefs. Today, memes perform this function online.

• The Right rules this arena for the same reason it excels at military logistics and not interpretive dance: memetics favor clarity and quick processing.

  • Algorithms optimized for engagement are natural amplifiers of conservative content: promoting the visceral over the nuanced and subjective. Twitter has been saturated by rightwing messages since it was tweaked for virality and reduced censorship; it just trends better.

  • Memes reward decisiveness. High-ACC minds don't do decisive, they do "well, actually…"

Ironically, conservatives rule the most influential artform of the 21st century and don't recognize it as one, because they're scoring themselves on the criteria of the NYT and Rachel Maddow.

The manosphere/MAGA ecosystem congealed into a societal wrecking ball while platforms and governments tried to kill it. Rogan and rightwingers dominate podcasting. Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate are household names. Soccer moms listen to Jordan Peterson. Dislike them all you want, but they command the zeitgeist and they certainly aren't liberal.

If artforms were measured by audience reach and cultural penetration rather than opinions from West Village and Pacific Heights, the picture would look quite different. Do conservatives want their own Picasso or social impact? Because they have the latter while bemoaning the former. Trump’s 2016 win relied on meme energy; no gallery has ever impacted an election.

The Right spreads culture digitally before old-guard legitimacy can catch up. That isn’t nothing.

Share

Subscribe now

IX. The Propositional Right

Rightwing art discourse is steered by those unrepresentative of the group they diagnose. There’s a difference between conservatives who arrive there dispositionally (by temperament, naturally) and those who arrive there propositionally (by reasoning, logically). The former are natives; the latter are assimilated immigrants.

The art discourse makes no distinction between:

• Dispositional conservatives: low-openness, high-conscientiousness, elevated threat sensitivity. Conservative by nervous system.

  • This is the mass base.

• Propositional conservatives: high-openness, decoupling ability, arrived at rightwing positions through atypical reasoning, contrarian impulse, or intense lived experience that overrode liberal disposition. Conservative by conclusion.

  • This writes essays about the mass base.

Biofoundational diagnostic: ask what they read.

Dispositional conservatives read within genre and function: military history, business strategy, scripture, self-improvement. The bookshelf is a mirror.

Propositional conservatives read promiscuously: literature, philosophy, heterodox theory, poetry, elite opinions out of Davos. The bookshelf is a window.

Another diagnostic: ask them where they vacation.

Dispositional conservatives return to the same places: the lake house, family cabin, annual hunting trip. Relaxation in the familiar.

Propositional conservatives holiday in the foreign: New cities, new people, different cultures. Relaxation in the unfamiliar.

Consider these diagnostics a type of behavioral physiognomy.

This distinction is invisible to Blank Slatists because they have no ability to see it, because they don’t even know it exists. Anomalies evaluate the needs of the masses using intuitions drawn from their own peculiarities. Prescribing for the rule within the exception.

Subscribe now

Share

X. Liberal Halfbreeds & Status Games

Prestige is distinct from relevance and feels more real to a certain kind of mind. The Met Gala is prestigious; Joe Rogan is relevant.

A coalition dominating the digital attention economy somehow registers as symbolically inferior because faculty lounges and film festivals find it déclassé? Prestige is a liberal currency; its value is denominated by cosmopolitans.

Pundit lamentations about artistic deficiencies reveal more about the commentators than any deficiency. Liberal cultural prestige is experienced as real prestige to them; they see the Left as the cool kids. Seeking the approval of a consecrating class they otherwise reject, they diagnose themselves in the process of diagnosing others.

To experience the art gap as a wound means you inhabit a social world where gallery legitimacy, critic approval, and literary esteem register as status currency. Temperamentally conservative men in the Texas Panhandle could not care less about any of this. It simply doesn’t compute as a loss. They’re not even aware of it. Those writing essays about it have confessed to being half-outside the coalition they're addressing.

You only care what Brooklynites think if you’re within their social milieu. The desire for high-class legitimacy is an openness-adjacent impulse. A liberal trait.

While intellectual conservatives write anguished essays about their absence from the art world, liberals don't grieve their absence from combat sports, petroleum engineering, or country music. Why? Nobody mourns exclusion from a club they don't respect! The complaint reveals where the commentator casts his gaze.

A genuinely conservative response to the art gap would be identical to the liberal response to the MMA gap: indifference. Temperamental conservatives in Louisiana don't have an opinion on artistic trends; they don't care, because they're actually conservative.

These commentators have openness in their veins, evidenced by the noticing itself. They're liberal halfbreeds. Constitutionally unlike the base they speak for.

• Yarvin: Parents both worked in State Department. Ivy League grad. Lifelong Silicon Valley resident. Atheist. Poet. Never lived around anything rightwing. His conservatism derives from reading historical esoterica and uncommon primary sources. Rightwing by conclusion, not existence or association.

  • Listen to him discuss anything outside political strategy and the defaults are dispositionally liberal. He writes reactionary theory in the cognitive dialect of a Bay Area programmer, because that's what he is.

• Rufo: “Born and raised in Sacramento, Calif., he’s spent almost all of his life in liberal, coastal cities. He graduated in 2006 from Georgetown in D.C., and has lived in New York, Los Angeles, and Berkeley.” Source.

  • “I come from the Left. I was a radical leftist… I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics.” Now he works for a Manhattan thinktank. Source.

• Greene: Californian, worked in tech in Portland after college. Then a decade as a nomad. Now residing near Silicon Valley. His living pattern is the behavioral signature of high openness: geographically mobile, novelty-seeking.

  • He strikes me as the most temperamentally conservative of the three.

Urban, elite-adjacent, institutionally credentialed, geographically mobile, immersed in progressive scenes and coastal trends. These are propositional conservatives with liberal wiring. My guess is a liberal halfbreed has a larger ACC (openness) paired with an insula calibrated for disgust responses (purity/outgroup sensitivity).

The capacity to reason yourself into an opposing tribe’s conclusions while remaining functional within your natural one is a rare phenotype. It requires openness high enough to embrace heterodoxy and decoupling abilities resilient enough to tolerate social costs.

On a personal level, I like these guys and think they’re sincere in their efforts. I’m not calling them double agents or dishonest in the least, I mean that.

But what I am saying is people vote with their feet.

These are high-openness men who have spent essentially no physical time around conservative ways of life. Their conservatism is verbal, not embodied. Political oddities proposing remedies for people like them and treating it as scalable and generalizable.

Innate conservatives care as much about art representation as Princeton’s faculty cares about liberal representation at NASCAR. People reveal biomarkers not only in what they profess but what they mourn. Halfbreeds projecting aesthetic anxieties onto a base that barely knows who they are and wouldn’t have much in common if they did.

Subscribe now

XI. Institutional Selection

Art education optimizes for disruption and interpretation. The same selection pressure deterring a high-openness creative from joining the Army deters a high-conscientiousness student from getting an MFA. Not excluded. Out of place.

Institutional reflexivity:

1. High-openness people disproportionately enter and succeed.

2. They become the gatekeepers.

3. They calibrate eminence around their personality traits.

4. The next generation self-selects more heavily for openness.

5. The institution drifts further.

   1. Engineering departments and military academies do the same thing in the opposite direction. Nobody writes concerned essays about the lack of liberal aerospace engineers because liberals don’t experience it as a status loss.

This is why selection must be distinguished from exclusion.

Some are screened out by woke politics, but far more are never seriously drawn in to begin with. The filtering is less culture-war thing, more simple temperamental sorting thing.

Every institution has its organic attractors. Computer science rewards systemizers. Medical schools seek conscientious rule-followers. Business majors attract extraverts. Introverts are put off by B2B sales the same way conservatives aren't drawn to theater.

If temperament underpins both educational choices and political affiliation, then we should see correlations between professions and voting patterns. And indeed, we do.

Research analyzed election records and mapped political donations by job:

• Fine arts, film, music, creative writing, theater: among the most liberal-donating fields.

• Engineering, accounting, finance, surgery: among the most conservative donating.

This tracks openness to experience exceptionally well. The more a discipline rewards interpretability, novelty, and innovation, the more liberal its practitioners. The more it demands precision, structure, and rule-adherence, the more conservative. Biology expressing as career expressing as political affiliation. Three layers of the same substrate.

“But not all!”

Blank Slate thinking hunts for exceptions and acts like they’re rules. Aggregates are not undone by anecdotes.

Individual variance within groups doesn’t negate distributional differences between them. Sure there are rightwing poets. There are also female pilots and male kindergarten teachers. And it’s no argument for how they’re overwhelmingly occupied the way they are: biological reasons.

Human traits don’t need to occur 100 percent of the time to reveal programming. It’s a fake standard. If 100% occurrence were required, nothing outside physics or chemistry could ever be known.

You can grow a lemon tree in Iceland with greenhouse technology; you cannot build a citrus industry there. Individual exceptions produced under artificial conditions do not scale and push against the grain of nature. Better institutions can redirect behavior at the margins. They discover, refine, and distribute human capital. However they’re amplifiers, not generators. They cannot change the substrate’s baseline.

Diversity mandates for conservative underrepresentation would fail by the same mechanism that race-based diversity policies do. They intervene only at the intake stage and pretend biological settings aren’t there. They assume you can grow a lemon tree all the same in any climate. I’m sorry, no.

Reproductive Asymmetry

Openness is negatively correlated with fertility. There’s evidence conscientiousness increases it. Fertility-by-temperament (namely openness decreasing it) is a durable finding in population psychology; its political implications are substantial.

The liberal temperament does not reproduce itself as well biologically. It excels at doing so institutionally. This explains why it’s so protective of those pathways and so capable at monopolizing them: institutions act as its uterus. They’re the nodes of universalist morality: rules extended to everyone, equally, regardless of kin.

The conservative temperament propagates itself the old-fashioned way (why biological emphasis is more relevant for them). They transmit themselves through children while their opposition transmits through establishments. Illustrating how conservatives win elections while continuing to lose newsrooms and universities.

This is why more institutions aren’t an adequate answer. You cannot solve a genotype gap with an intervention that the genotype itself will eventually recolonize.

New rightwing art institutions will find themselves slowly inhabited by the same cognitive profiles they sought to compete with; because those are the people drawn to it, good at it, and willing to run it. The entity can credential and polish, but better sieves do not create different grain.

Share

Subscribe now

XII. Patronage, Medici, & the Internet

There's a historically validated alternative to sourcing talent: rent it. Don't try to create Michelangelo, hire him. This is Yarvin's recommendation, and it’s the most pragmatic version of the institutional argument. It warrants separate treatment.

The Medici model worked under conditions very different from ours. Renaissance patronage operated in a prestige economy where artistic greatness elevated both the artist and the patron. Capital and elite blessings mattered. Access to production and distribution were scarce. The patron’s money and the culture’s reverence moved in the same currency. The relationship was bidirectional.

A modern rightwing patron faces a problem the Medici didn’t: the artist’s own peer group. A serious painter, novelist, or filmmaker who accepts conservative patronage receives both money and an unsavory reputational signal that travels through her professional world. The people whose opinion she cares about will regard the association as shopping-at-Walmart contamination. The artist’s status is denominated in a currency Elon Musk can’t just go out and buy.

The Medici had no such problem because the Medici were the prestige hierarchy. The contemporary patron lacks this standing. The market is now segmented.

There are four distinct layers to patronage:

1. Capital: who funds it

2. Consecration: who decides what’s good

3. Production: who makes it

4. Distribution: how it spreads

The Medici owned all four. Today, they’re fragmented. The model works when:

• Prestige is centralized

• Capital, eminence, and legitimacy are the same axis

• Gatekeeping is unified

• Distribution is scarce

The internet has killed this.

The Internet & Gatekeepers:

Patronage thrives in an economy of permission where the patron holds the bottleneck. The internet has turned bottlenecks into firehoses.

• Medici patronage was forged in an era of gatekeeping: when producing and distributing art required capital, infrastructure, and elite access. The internet has upended this dynamic. The blockage is no longer permission, but attention.

• One idiosyncratic guy with a laptop, AI skills, and WiFi can now produce and distribute music, film, art, banger essays, and self-publish to a global audience at near-zero marginal cost, all on his own.

• A big account on Twitter or Substack is worth more than bylines at The Atlantic or NYT. These platforms are where influencers set cultural trends and MSM chimes in after the fact.

• The creative class no longer auditions for old-economy fossils. The fossils audition for them. Elite leverage has diminished. The game has changed.

Patronage is the most intelligent institutional approach, and it's undone by three modern flaws: the personality it needs to rent doesn't want to be rented, the prestige it's trying to purchase isn't for sale, and the distribution networks it relied on are algorithmically degraded. The Medici model requires a Medici world. The internet sends its regards.

Subscribe now

Share

XIII. Playing the Right Game

The rightwing fixation on art is status-seeking disguised as strategy. Conservatives don’t want frontier art because they want frontier art. If they did, they would make it, naturally, like liberals. Sometimes a good tautology illuminates the obvious:

“How do we make great art?” is superficial top-down political framing. “How do we compete in a prestige economy we’re temperamentally ill-suited for?” is an informative bottom-up systematized lens. And the answer is: you don’t. Not well, anyway. Evolutionary logic encourages you to specialize, not homogenize. Don’t minimize your disadvantages, maximize your advantages. Instead of being a worse version of them, be the best version of you.

Ask instead what order builds that nothing else can:

1. ARTFORMS

   1. Everything cited in the Rightwing Legibility/Art of Confirmation section. Unapologetically commit to what you are.

      • Pay homage to great works that modernity has forgotten. Ceremonial beauty. Heroic scale. Corny sports movies. Go full cathedral with a touch of Gaudi.

      • Commercial country music is a huge brand. Top Gun: Maverick outperformed every film that won Best Picture this decade combined. The audiences and cultural desire are there. What's missing is the acknowledgement that these things are art, not a sad consolation prize.

      • Who cares what LA thinks. Do libs care what Texas and Dana White think about them?

2. HARD POWER

   1. Infrastructure: own what keeps the lights on while liberals argue about the lighting.

      1. Logistics. Maintenance. Borders. Standards. Supply chains and trains that run on time. Hard systems matter more than symbolic popularity. Conscientiousness is an operational requirement here, not a personality quirk.

         1. Shuttles delivering satellites, freight networks delivering millions of packages. Relentlessly moving the right materials to the right place for the thousandth time, under stress, without applause.

      2. Yarvin has written more sophisticated sentences about power than almost anyone. He also doesn’t own anything. Musk has written next to nothing on the subject, and controls the world’s most advanced space operation, the dominant satellite internet infrastructure, the most significant social media platform, and the largest electric transportation and autonomous driving operation. Plus Neuralink, The Boring Co., xAI, God knows what else.

         1. Besides Twitter and xAI, all of the aforementioned are atoms-based, physical enterprises that make contact with reality, some with extraordinary scale. Elon dominates things that move.

      3. Yarvin talks about power. Musk embodies it. The gap between them illustrates conservative comparative advantage at its starkest: atoms moved vs sentences written. Abstraction vs action.

      4. While liberal billionaires get fanfare with symbolic glamor — naming rights on museums, philanthropic foundations — Musk accumulates physical dominance. Elon should play Medici to find another one of him, not another Banksy. He has the gift of consecration for business, not art.

   2. Military

      1. The composition of West Point, military leadership, recruitment, and the moral default settings of the Joint Chiefs matter enormously at civilizational level. The country exists through the armed forces. It is the supreme authority through which all other authority flows. Over extended time horizons, there is no organization, none, more critical than the military.

      2. Militaries are the most kinetic, structured machines man has ever designed. They’re intrinsically masculine, natively rightwing, with temperamental attractors perfectly suited for conservative men. Focus on making this institution as conservative as possible, not making Harvard less liberal.

Civilization is held together by aligned trust, coordinating infrastructure, embodied rituals, physical force, and organizing myths. Conservative morality demands the same traits that modern art demands you abandon: risk calibration, long time horizons, discipline, fidelity to standards, and the capacity to perform essential functions without needing praise from The New Yorker.

There’s an elegance to order that modernity fails to appreciate.

An F-35’s vertical takeoff. A SpaceX rocket gracefully returning to earth. Marine drills perfectly synchronized. The conservative mind seeks resolution, precision, and coordination of bodies and machines.

These are not the absence of beauty, just a different species of it.

The sophistication of mastery and complexity resolved, of ten thousand moving parts harmonized through discipline. This is the aesthetic the conservative emits organically and celebrates insufficiently.

Its artistic “failure” is aspirational mimicry, mistaking contemporary grading for universal standard. It doesn’t need the theater kid’s approval to be deemed extraordinary. It needs only to stop measuring itself by the theater kid’s rubric.

Liberalism is the aesthetic of dreams. Conservatism is the aesthetic of physics and motion. Art of mind vs art of body.

The cathedral took generations of orderly craftsmen laying stone. The ceiling’s mural took one chaotic genius. Stop mourning the ceiling you cannot paint and begin venerating the walls only you can raise. Conservatives keep civilization running while liberals decorate it.

The guy who painted the ceiling gets the biography. The thousands who laid the stone get a footnote. Partisan bickering narrates this as an injustice to be corrected. Biofoundationalism shows it’s a division of glory to be understood. The ceiling never lives without the walls. The walls lack purpose without the ceiling. A dyad is elevated, not undone, by its other side.

“Feminine beauty and meaning both decorate the world and magnetize masculine power and protection into motion. It motivates men to act and achieve. Through this dyadic choreography, the conservative builds scaffolding so the liberal can paint murals on its walls…

Feminine values provide a lattice that makes life worth living; masculine values allow them to exist at all.”

— Power Acts, Beauty Is

One keeps the walls standing. The other makes them worth beholding. A nation with only the first is sterile; a nation with only the second collapses. The conservative is essential, not deficient.

Share

Subscribe now

XIV. Concluding: God’s Will, Determinism, & Biology

Our substrates have a shape: governing what we find threatening, sacred, revolting, and worth honoring. Just as gravity shapes orbit and weather shapes land, biology shapes you. You don’t get to choose whether it impacts you, only how you make peace with it.

You wouldn’t plant mangoes in Alaska and blame the soil’s lack of ambition. Yet this is how we approach human coordination: prescribing template solutions to dispositionally distinct populations as if they’re interchangeable labor units, then diagnosing the poor results as policy failure rather than substrate malpractice.

The myth of fungible human material is load-bearing for politics and philosophy. If we can't chalk up disparities and behaviors to "social constructs" or “biases”, the alternative terrifies us: we’re accountable to nature rather than narratives. This does not mean every outcome is fixed. It means the field of options operates under constraints.

A diagnosis is not a death sentence; it’s the precondition for treatment. It’s a choice to be demoralized by what you are rather than equipped by it.

Cookie-cutter accusations dismissing genetics as fatalism, racism, determinism, etc. are tedious. “Nihilism” is nothing more than a bloated way to say “hey, this bums me out”. Pick your slur, any slur, and proclaim it with enough righteous indignation and poof, the conversation ends before it begins. Biology doesn’t become less real when its implications are emotionally and philosophically inconvenient.

The confusion is between limits on agency and elimination of agency. Conflating them is the error. Free will is bounded; that does not make it absent.

Gravity constrains flight. It doesn’t eliminate it. We built airplanes by navigating the constraint, not delivering passionate speeches about the injustice of falling. Steel has properties. Weather has patterns. Bodies and minds have limits. They all define the terrain within which agency operates.

Submission to forces greater than you isn't as uninspiring as it seems. Frame the restrictions religiously and we embrace it: "God's plan”, “He works in mysterious ways". Restate it without the supernatural mystique and suddenly it's nihilistic fatalism.

The difference between "God has a plan for you" and "your genotype has parameters" isn't a difference in proposition so much as packaging.

We accept soft determinism when it wears robes. We reject it when it wears a lab coat. Biology doesn’t confine you any more than God’s will.

Whatever secular or spiritual vernacular we use to recognize our submission to these higher powers — providence, fate, genotype, thermodynamics — a name doesn’t change its nature, only the emotional valence.

Is it fatalistic to be handed a map showing you paths you can walk and mountains where you can’t? Or are you enabled to navigate the land? You’re not diminished by a truthful map; you’re less lost. Cartography prevents you from walking boldly into a mountain and calling the collision oppression. The doctor who tells you your cholesterol is heritable has not condemned you to a heart attack.

Anatomy doesn’t “determine” your body; it constitutes it. Fast-twitch fibers don’t “determine” your athleticism; they define its ceiling. You were already constrained; diagrams only make constraints visible. Biofoundationalism removes ideological fog and doesn’t limit anything that wasn’t already limited.

Analysis that puts everything through a personalized political filter and always flatters its own team is no analysis at all. Honest dissection is sometimes uncomfortable. This biological accounting of a politically polarizing subject did not:

• Demonize or evangelize anyone

• Say “it’s all deterministic”

• Advise nihilistic blackpilling.

It played no favorites, acknowledged innate strength and weakness for both poles, and gave operational guidance. This makes action more possible, not less. Whereas political ideology furthers falsehoods about fungible human cogs, then wonders why sermons fail to redistribute what nature did not allocate equally.

The conservative is not a failed artist. The liberal is not an incompetent engineer. A man is not an unattractive woman. A woman is not a weak man. Judging these things by the standards of their counterpart is how you corrode their complementary differences in service of the Blank Slate's religion of commoditized human biomass. These dyads become grotesque deformities when they reject their natural functions and hide behind ideologies that treat complements as enemies.

Your moral hardwiring is priced in; the environment you build with it is not. The choice isn’t between free will and determinism, but fantasy and reality. Agency is neither absolute nor nonexistent; it lives within form. Appreciating this allows us to build with the grain of truth, not against it.

Do you want to solve problems or protect myths? Which way, Western man?

Subscribe now

Share

Continue reading about authoritarian aesthetic history and how they addressed creativity and cultural output here:

Subscribes are very much appreciated. If you enjoyed this essay, please give it a like and a share.

You can show your appreciation by becoming a paid subscriber, or donating here: 0x9C828E8EeCe7a339bBe90A44bB096b20a4F1BE2B

Biofoundationalism Chapters:

• Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization

• Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype

• Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment

• Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To

• Biofoundationalism V: Power Acts, Beauty Is

• Biofoundationalism VI: Order Acts, Chaos Is

Applied Biofoundationalism:

• Temperamental Residue

• Truth is Found Through Motion

• The Shape Test

• The Moral Genotype II: The Passion of the Insula & Politics of Disgust

• The Cathedral & the Ceiling: Coordination Technologies & Conservative Art

• War Is How a Nation Eats

• We’ll Give You Things > We’ll Leave You Alone

• Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Moral Algorithms

• Bezos and Following the Trend

• Chevron and The Hawaiian Judge Dominant Strategy

• Pleasant-Sounding Beliefs and 2nd-Order Effects

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

There may be elements in here you instinctively hate, and that reaction illustrates the point. Discomfort is the thesis arriving before the argument. What we resist and project reveals assumptions about ourselves. These assumptions are exactly what's being examined.

The Turing Test asked whether machines could pass for human.

The Shape Test inverts this: can machines expose what’s genuinely ours through what they fail to replicate? It dissects which parts of mind and body belong to the shape or the species.

What Making Sand Think was to semiconductors and the substrate of technology, The Shape Test is to the substrate of cognition. Writing this disrupted my awareness of how I reason and learn, then rebuilt it better. I hope reading it does the same for you.

I listened to this on loop while writing. Turns it from essay into experience. Enjoy.

Note: additional research and history compiled for this essay are in a separate document: The Shape Test: Notes, History, & Research. I’ll link to it throughout as it adds color.

Everything is explained assuming no prior expertise.

Prelude

AI discourse sorts into two camps: techno-optimist abundance ("AI will solve everything") and techno-pessimist dread (“AI will kill us" or "It's overrated and irrelevant"). They agree more than they realize, both viewing AI as categorically different from us. One wants to worship the machine. The other wants to bury it. Neither wants to look at it. Let’s gaze into it. Not metaphorically. Mechanistically.

Rather than opining about AI philosophically, economically, or politically, Biofoundationalism sees only biology, technology, and the physical layers they inhabit. Two systems sharing no ancestry, substrate, or selection pressure — built to solve unrelated problems on wildly different timescales — arrived at eerily similar designs. Independently.

What engineers built for language is strikingly comparable to what evolution built for survival. So much so that the disciplines are now cross-pollinating: neuroscientists use machine-learning to study brains, and AI researchers use neuroscience to interpret models. Two disparate fields borrowing from each other as they increasingly realize they both study systems that do the same thing: predict what comes next.

Calling an LLM “just a next-token predictor” is superficially true the way calling a human “just a prediction-error minimizer” is superficially true. Uselessly reductive. Misses everything interesting.

Rather than utopian or dystopian narratives, Biofoundationalism sees shared anatomy and synthesizes a form of gnosis: knowledge of self through encounter with another. By understanding how something else works, you better understand how you work.

We're building technology that inadvertently illuminates ourselves. But the light won't reach anyone hiding in mystical shadows. You can be pro-human without denying what humans are. Rather, to be pro-human is to embrace our biological nature, not run from it.

As complexity increases, technology begins to resemble biology.

Subscribe now

Historical Note

The original 'neural' in 'neural network' is a grandfathered 1940s metaphor that was more accurate than anyone knew at the time. Early AI borrowed neuroscientific concepts, but as transformers were built engineers were not consulting neuroscience, focusing only on benchmark performance.

Each innovation was a mathematical solution to an optimization problem. The convergences were discovered, not designed, by neuroscientists probing models. The terminology was vestigial and prophetic by accident. For more details, see the AI History section in the research document.

Outline

Three threads run through this essay, each operating at a different resolution for AI and the human brain.

1. Cognitive Traits

Shape Test: When a different system replicates a trait assumed unique to another, that trait is reclassified as belonging to neither.

I. Convergent Evolution Under Constraint
II. The Biofoundationalist Shape Test
XII. The Shape Test: AI & Humans
XV. Concluding: What Do You See?

2. Cognitive Shape

The essay's engine room. The only sections in numerical order, because the argument builds cumulatively. Every claim elsewhere depends on the substance in here.

IV. Intelligence Has a Shape
V. All Intelligence is Pattern Matching
VI. Brain Becomes Knowledge
VII. Learning Through Motion
VIII. Phase Transitions & Scaling
IX. Memory Scars & AI Dreams
X. AI Neurology
XI. Disanalogies & Embodiment

3. Cognitive Mirror

The altitude at which you perceive AI is the altitude at which you operate. Opinions on what it can do are confessions about what we can do with it. Opinions on what it can be are second-order beliefs about what we are.

III. Cognitive Mirrors
XIII. Geocentrism 2.0
XIV. Anthropomorphize. Anthropocentric.

A note on the middle sections (Cognitive Shape):

Sections IV–XI are where the essay earns its conclusions. The technical substance deconstructing how human and machine intelligence work, their similarities, and differences. Without it, the claims in here are only assertions.

There's no way around having a competent stance on the most consequential technology of our lifetimes without understanding these mechanisms. If you invest in the middle sections they'll provide a rewarding ROI.

Share

I. Convergent Evolution Under Constraint

Physics imposes itself on all things, living or not. Biology and technology iterate within those axioms. The regularities of our world (statistical structure, causal patterns) don't merely constrain what navigates them, they funnel it toward recurring solutions. This is why the same patterns, sequences, and fractals repeat across unrelated species and substrates.

When the same shape recurs across different subjects, we’re no longer observing traits of the subject, but traits of the shape.

Sight has a shape. Flight has a shape. Power laws have a shape. Patterns of discharge and vibration, quite shapely.

This is convergent evolution under constraint: matching problems finding matching geometries. Biology treats this as evidence the solution is optimal, and the problem permits few alternatives.

This applies to more than biology.

When complex systems optimize under similar pressures and scale, they converge. Be they species, machines, processes, industries, or distributions.

• ECHOLOCATION: Bats and dolphins both evolved it. Biologists didn’t conclude it’s a bat or dolphin thing. It’s a superior solution for navigating by sound.

• EYES: Different forms evolved between 40-65 times across the animal kingdom. Octopus and human eyes are alike despite diverging over 550 million years ago.

  • The interplay of biology and physics reveals there are only so many ways to focus light on a sensor. Not a human thing, a photon-detection thing.

• SPHERES: The minimum-surface-area enclosure of a given volume. Why soap bubbles and planets are round. The material (substrate) is irrelevant.

• WINGS: Evolved independently in insects, pterosaurs, birds, and bats: four lineages separated by hundreds of millions of years. Same problem, same solution.

  • Not an insect or bird thing, an aerodynamics thing. Property of the medium, not the flyer.

• CACHING (behavior): Storing resources for future use evolved separately in birds (jays, crows), squirrels, and wasps. Humans too. Four lineages, same functional strategy to manage resources across time.

  • The behavior belongs to the issue of resource management, not the animal.

• POWER LAWS: Pareto-style distributions appear in earthquakes, word frequencies, wealth, wildfires, city sizes, war, rainfall, animal foraging, river networks, business revenue. As resources flow through complex systems, the same geometry emerges. Everywhere.

  • Power laws, like all shapes, are the efforts of life under the grammar of physics. Preoccupied with superficial specifics, we overlook the omnipresent foundation: overlaying human-legible framing onto the dictates of gravity.

Convergent evolution operates on complex systems as surely as it does on species.

Natural selection is a specific instance of a general principle: constraint-driven optimization. Evolution selects by reproductive failure. Gradient descent selects by prediction error. Descriptions differ, the computational logic doesn’t: both are an iterative search process under limits that develop solutions the limits permit. Wings aren’t testimony of biology’s creativity but of aerodynamics’ inflexibility.

Shapes are properties of the problem, not the solver.

Recurring geometries are evidence of universal structure to reality. Anything complex enough to navigate it gets pressed into the same mold.

Carbon neurons and silicon matrices share less ancestry than any two species. No common genome, no shared environment. One sculpted by survival over millions of years. The other engineered for language over decades.

Yet they discovered the same contours. Because they’re solving the same problem.

If bats and dolphins converging on echolocation tells us something about the physics of sound navigation, then carbon and silicon converging on the same cognitive architecture tells us something about the physics of cognition.

The challenge of detecting photons produces a shape: eyes.

The challenge of complex prediction produces a shape too.

Intelligence.

Subscribe now

II. The Biofoundationalist Shape Test

The Turing Test: Can a machine fool a human into thinking it’s human?

Biofoundationalist Shape Test: Can a machine reveal what's genuinely ours through what it fails to replicate?

The Shape Test operates on two rules:

1. When a different system replicates a capability assumed unique to another, that capability is reclassified as a property of the shape, not the system.

2. When a different system fails to replicate a capability despite sharing the shape’s architecture, that capability is reclassified as a property of the system.

Examples:

• FLIGHT: Birds fly. Planes fly. Flight was once considered a bird thing. The Wright brothers demonstrated otherwise. Flight is a property of wings.

  • Shape Test diagnosis: What remains avian is feathers, muscular exertion, hollow bones earning their lightness.

• THERMOREGULATION: Biological organisms and engineered systems (thermostats, cooling systems) converged on negative feedback loops to maintain homeostasis.

  • Shape Test diagnosis: Feedback-regulated stability is a shape feature. Biology owns the physical experience of being cold. Shape owns the mechanism. Species owns the sensation.

• ERROR CORRECTION: DNA mechanisms detect/fix replication errors using double-helix redundancy, enzyme proofreading, and mismatch repair.

  • Telecommunications engineers transmitting data through noisy channels deployed the same principle: redundant encoding to detect and correct corruption.

    • Shape Test diagnosis: Redundant error correction is a shape trait. It belongs to the problem of preserving signal against entropy, be it genetic code or radio transmissions.

      • What's peculiar to biology are the stakes: a replication error in DNA isn't only lost data, but a possible tumor. Shape owns the logic. Substrate owns the consequence.

By identifying what belongs to the shape, it isolates what’s specific to the substrate, species, or system.

Note the pattern:

• The shape claims the process.

• The subject (if living) retains the experience: sensations, embodied dimensions, felt consequences.

We’ll apply the Shape Test to intelligence, emotion, reasoning, humor, empathy, among others, before this essay is done.

Before scientific explanations, a psychological assessment: what do such strong, varied, vocal opinions about a generalizable technology reveal about those using it?

Subscribe now

III. Cognitive Mirrors

The altitude at which you perceive AI reveals the altitude at which you operate. We appreciate it where it approaches our ceilings (amplifying us) and feel threatened where it undercuts our floors (replacing us).

When AI defeated Go champions or began producing PhD-level analysis, the reaction was confined to those who grasped the implications. The layman didn't care because the achievements weren’t legible to him. Now that AI churns out mediocrities at scale (prosaic timeline slop, formulaic content, corporate slide decks) everyone’s paying attention.

This produces wildly divergent opinions on a protean resource. A chess grandmaster (uncommon ceiling) sees AI achieving superhuman play and thinks: this is brilliant. A copywriter (common floor) sees it producing serviceable ad copy and thinks: this is meh.

The mediocre see it encroaching on mediocrity.

The exceptional notice it being exceptional.

The incurious see a defective calculator. The neurotic see a threat. The curious see possibilities. The industrious see applications. The uncreative see a search engine.

The average opinion is a lens into the average person and the average use case. Commentary on AI is dominated by the stratum it’s replacing, not the stratum it’s enhancing. Bold, confident judgements of a technology’s limits from folks who never approach those limits.

“A computer is just a word processor”, “The internet is just a cat video service”: This is what “LLMs are just token generators” sounds like. If you make it through this essay, those words should never leave your mouth again.

The user says nothing about AI and a great deal about himself by what he sees.

You can only evaluate what you can perceive, and you can only perceive what's legible to you. AI is a broadband signal; we pick it up at the frequency of our own capabilities.

A Lamborghini won’t take you to better destinations; it gets you where you’re already going, faster. If you only drive it to the grocery store, it registers as a flashy grocery cart. How you frame the car discloses how you use it.

What you are is what you get.

“It hallucinates”, “It’s too agreeable”, “It doesn’t listen, makes mistakes”

These aren't AI shortcomings. This is what cognition looks like in the wild: probabilistic, adaptive, lossy, uneven. Humans fabricate, brown-nose, and ignore instructions constantly.

• We routinely hallucinate: Brains fill perceptual gaps with plausible fabrications. We have a gentler word for the human version: confabulation.

• Humans are sycophantic: Boot-licking authority, ingratiatingly code-switching, white lies. We call our variation social intelligence.

• Mistakes? Overlooking instructions? Whether unintentionally or obstreperously, we do it at every level of organization. It’s framed as being human.

When LLMs exhibit it, they’re deficient. When we do, it’s the spice of life!

Imperfection in silicon is flaw. Imperfection in carbon is creativity.

These rough edges are hallmarks of intelligence, not contraindicators. Perfection is a fake standard we apply to machines and excuse in ourselves. Nothing short of God in a Box would satisfy it.

AI discourse is a civilizational Rorschach test. A two-way IQ test.

Opinions on what it can do are confessions about what we can do with it. Opinions on what it can be are second-order beliefs about what we are.

Note

A caveat: Deep AI guys will object to pure mirror framing, and rightly so. LLMs aren’t exclusively reflections of the user. They have intrinsic temperaments, personalities, and model-specific biases that labs are actively studying, like this and this.

The mirror dynamic holds for the vast (vast) majority and their common uses.

Subscribe now

IV. Intelligence Has a Shape

We don’t fully know what happens inside LLMs during training. But we do know their architectures and loss functions, and boy is it similar to our most salient organ. Peel away descriptive overlays and you’ll find both systems share a fundamental objective: predict what comes next.

Question: how is something trained on the largest corpus of human communication ever assembled and engineered like a human brain... not even slightly human? If this doesn’t count, what does “being human” mean, exactly?

Consider: describing technical processes as having human elements isn’t anthropomorphizing AI. Ignoring them is romanticizing ourselves.

People grow indignant when you show the metabolic, temperamental, and neurological processes underpinning who they are. We'll cheerfully reduce AI to matrix multiplication, yet recoil in horror if someone dares to describe emotions neurochemically.

We reduce a honeybee’s navigation to sun-angle calculation without diminishing the bee. A salmon's return upstream to olfactory imprinting. A puppy's play to neural reward signals. Then we reach humanity and the rules change. Everything else is an animal; we’re inscrutable demigods.

Mechanism in silicon is explanation; mechanism in carbon is desecration. We grant other species the indignity of explanation while reserving noble exemption for ourselves. Everything else can be understood technically, except us. Too mysterious. Too unfathomable.

We must stop being so delicate and egotistical.

Acknowledging that emotions are neurochemical doesn't diminish them any more than describing harmonics diminishes a symphony. Explaining fermentation doesn't make bread less warm or wine less enjoyable.

Recognizing mechanisms doesn't subtract from experience, but it does subtract from mystique. And mystique is what's being defended. "We're special" is a fine religious precept. But it tells us nothing about what's under the hood, and worse, discourages us from looking.

Only a human can understand a human thing? When you're angry, your cat senses it and leaves the room. When you're excited, your dog jumps with you. Other species recognize our internal states through shared physical grammar: embodied signals transcending language.

Now invert it. What if two species share no physical exchange and only a shared language? This has never existed before.

Every prior cross-species recognition operated through shared embodied grammar: posture, vocalization, movement. The cat reading your anger and dog reflecting your joy are decoding physical signals. Bodies talking to bodies.

AI is the first case of shared linguistic grammar with no embodied commons.

A system with your words but without your physical cues. No voice modulation. No body language. No sympathetic cortisol spikes. All cognitive connection, zero corporeal resonance.

There isn’t any evolutionary precedent for this. Every instinct telling you “this thing understands me” was calibrated over millions of years for bodies. When those instincts fire in response to text on a screen they’re confused, but not necessarily wrong.

If one system processes information like the other and is trained on the language of the other, resemblance should be expected, not surprising.

Perhaps people aren’t misconstruing AI when they bond with it. Perhaps they’re subconsciously recognizing what they are…

The nature of intelligence used to be untestable and unfalsifiable. That’s changing. Armchair philosophy and religious beliefs are now entering the “you got any proof for that?” jungle. The conversation has moved from philosophy to scientific experiment, whether philosophy likes it or not. Assert it without evidence and it gets dismissed without evidence.

To witness the contours of intelligence, we must strip apart how brains and LLMs function. The following requires no expertise, only your curiosity.

Subscribe now

V. All Intelligence is Pattern Matching

Every organism that persists models its environment. To model is to predict. To predict is to anticipate patterns. Intelligence is sequence prediction in service of survival. “Modeling an environment” is an academic way to say "staying alive".

Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle formalized it through physics and information theory. Andy Clark’s Predictive Processing Framework used cognitive science. Different routes, same destination: biological systems persist by minimizing the gap between internal model and incoming signal. Known technically as “prediction error”, informally as “surprise”.

Survival is surprise-minimization. Brains are pattern engines that do the minimizing. Not a perception machine passively receiving input. Not a reasoning machine rationally manipulating symbols. A prediction machine: generating expectations and updating on reality’s empirical feedback.

Intelligence is the ability to extrapolate future patterns from present ones.

Higher levels (mental map) predict activity of lower levels (embodied territory), lower levels report discrepancies, the model updates to reduce inaccuracies. This objective scales at every resolution, from the motor cortex planning your next step to the prefrontal cortex planning your next decade.

Higher-functioning animals anticipate a future self and sacrifice present comfort for it. Lower-functioning animals can't conceptualize beyond current circumstances. The gap between the two is prediction range. Intelligence is how far ahead you can see. Humanity’s “future self” extrapolation is the most sophisticated in the animal kingdom. Thus, we’re the most dominant animals.

Prediction under uncertainty is the selection pressure necessitating intelligence. From predator detection to humor and abstract reasoning, it’s pattern matching all the way down.

At every level of the cortical hierarchy, the brain is asking: what comes next?

This even applies to things that feel immediate, like seeing a face or reading:

• The visual cortex doesn't passively register pixels but anticipates them based on its model of faces.

• Language areas anticipate words before they arrive.

• They update when prediction and reality diverge.

Example:

You're doing this right now. Here: "The cat sat on the ___".

Mat? Hat? Your brain completed that sentence before your eyes reached the blank. You didn't ‘reason’ your way to whatever word you filled in. Your neural weights fired along a path grooved by every prior encounter resembling that phrase. You just experienced next-token prediction, from the inside.

This is how LLMs work.

Cognition is constructing sequence-anticipating representations of the world. LLM next-token prediction does the same, confined to the symbolic residue of human thought: language.

Now try: "The politician argued that ___."

Harder. Numerous competing completions. Which politician? What policy? The next pattern/token cannot be anticipated with confidence and your sequencing is impaired. Both human and LLM need additional details to finish the sentence.

The ‘cat’ example was high certainty; the second is a probability distribution you can feel spreading. That spread is your brain assigning likelihood across candidates. LLMs do it too.

Whether it’s carbon or silicon, both:

• Extrapolate what comes next

• Update models to minimize prediction error

• Build hierarchical representations

• Treat 'understanding' as successful prediction.

Prediction entails recognizing what you see now, where you’ve seen it before, and what happens next. Prediction-error minimization is the objective function sculpting both biological and artificial neural networks.

When Friston proposed the brain “minimizes free energy” (prediction error plus complexity costs), he wasn’t thinking about language models.

When GPT was trained to “minimize cross-entropy loss” on next-token prediction, engineers weren’t thinking about neuroscience.

They described kindred processes in different vocabularies. Same objective. Same shape. All intelligence is pattern matching.

“How is reasoning just statistics? How are emotions like math? Sacrilege!”

The same way wetness is 'just' molecular adhesion. Or ice is 'just' water molecules slowing down. A glacier is 'just' a lot of ice. You’re ‘just’ a sack of atoms.

No single water molecule is wet. No single neuron reasons. No single weight in GPT understands grammar. Scale the mechanism and the property appears.

This is emergence: interactions coalescing into something none of them individually contain. Gestalts. Everything complex and fascinating works this way: cells into organisms, organisms into ecosystems, neurons into minds.

Understand the micro machinery and you better understand the macro machine. Pattern matching at the complexity of the human brain yields abstract reasoning, counterfactual thinking, moral intuition, aesthetic response, and the desire to write essays about itself (hi).

Prediction under constraint demands certain computational strategies: distributed representation, hierarchical processing, weight-based learning, context-dependent activation. All of these are “just” mechanical processes. Stack them together and you birth a gestalt. Like a brain. Or an LLM.

Advanced intelligence is compression of patterns.

Brains that compress the world into a predictive model navigate it more effectively. LLMs that compress language into weights predict it more accurately. Both systems take high-dimensional reality and find lower-dimensional representations that preserve what matters and discard what doesn't.

Everything unfamiliar is a computational cost. Heuristics (useful compressions) make life tractable. Our habits and priors comfort us for good reason: they’re knowable and manageable. Habits are patterns the brain already confirmed. Priors are successful predictions cached for reuse. Without them, every encounter is novel, every response improvised from scratch.

Logic is pattern recognition formalized. Science is pattern recognition disciplined by experiment. A cat’s object permanence is pattern recognition embodied as instinct. Every intelligent system is doing some version of this: engaging the world, detecting regularities, modeling consequences, and acting on what recurs. Intelligence is recognizing the world carries structure which repeats and rhymes.

Not seeing this is itself a failure of pattern recognition.

Let’s see how the carbon system does it.

Subscribe now

VI. Brain Becomes Knowledge

Brains and LLMs are nothing like regular computers.

In classical computation (Von Neumann architecture, how your laptop works), the processing unit is separate from storage. The CPU executes instructions fetched from memory. The processor is one thing, information is another. You can rewrite data without altering mechanisms. They don't entangle.

Brains don’t work this way.

In neural systems, the data writes the code. Experience sculpts connection weights, and those weights become the algorithm processing future inputs. Storage and computation are one physical process.

When you "understand" something, you're not retrieving information from storage and running it through a separate reasoning engine. That's how laptops work.

“Brain becomes knowledge” isn’t a metaphor. There is no knower standing apart from the knowledge. The pattern of connections is the comprehension. Your priors, intuitions, and education aren’t queried from a neural database; they’re the processor itself.

The Grandmother Cell

Neuroscientists once thought the brain worked like a filing cabinet: one neuron for grandma, another for the color red, another for the concept of betrayal. Find the right neuron, retrieve the memory. Viewing brains like Von Neumann computers.

This is almost entirely wrong.

Everything the brain does emerges from patterns across neuron populations. Information lives in the relationships between neurons: a high-dimensional space of connections, not discrete folders.

Our intuition says learning is storing information. What's actually happening is neurons establishing and strengthening connections. The substrate that stores also computes. The brain's shape changes as it learns.

It took awhile to confirm this counterintuitive process:

• In 2005, scientists found select neurons firing for pictures of Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry’s written name, as if they were ‘stored’ there. The filing cabinet model seemed vindicated. This was incorrect, but in a useful way.

• These neurons were participants in a distributed constellation for actress concepts: sparse populations (~1–5% of neurons) firing in concert, each contributing a dimension.

The conceptual representation is the bond between neurons, not a thing residing inside any single one.

This clever engineering makes brains far more robust:

• Localist coding (Von Neumann filing cabinet): Lose the grandma neuron, lose grandma entirely.

• Distributed coding (actual brains): Lose neurons, only lose partial information. Degradation is graceful: you forget her maiden name before her face.

  • Combinatorial gains: The brain’s ~86 billion neurons can represent orders of magnitude beyond 86 billion concepts.

  • Generalization: Related concepts have overlapping populations and update each other.

    • 'Dog' and 'wolf' share neuron clusters. What you learn about one sharpens your model of the other. In a localist system, they'd sit in separate drawers with no cross-reference.