I listened mostly 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

• Reject the redpill, take the biopill

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 reproduces itself institutionally. Explaining why it’s so protective of those pathways and so capable at monopolizing them. They are its uterus.

The conservative temperament propagates itself the old-fashioned way (likely why biological emphasis is more relevant for them). They transmit themselves through children while their opposition transmits through establishments. Explaining how conservatives win elections while losing newsrooms.

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.

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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.

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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 force, aligned trust, infrastructure, ritual, and shared faith. Conservative excellence 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 is 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.

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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?

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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

• Part I: Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class

• Part II: Touching Soul, Touching Senses: The Art You Deserve

• Part III: The Insect Method: Tariffs, Labor, & Surpluses

• Part IV: Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Market

A lot of artwork and two different songs are included. The early sections of this essay were written listening to this. Enjoy.

Prelude

A unifying phenomenon appears across sports, retail, beer, banks, app stores, Hollywood, music, academia, the middle class, the list goes on. Unrelated domains all undergoing the same process and outcome.

The difference between narrative and structure: one attributes retail’s collapse to Amazon, the other explains why competitive systems produce Amazon in the first place. Narratives are perishable; frameworks compound. Top-down stories obscure this; bottom-up bedrock reveals it.

If this only happened to newspapers, we could blame Craigslist. If it only happened to music, we could blame Spotify. But when it happens everywhere, we ought to look deeper.

Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Give a man a story, he sees one thing; teach him a framework, he sees for a lifetime. Stories are fish. Frameworks are fishing rods. Feed someone a narrative about Amazon destroying bookstores, and they understand one industry’s death. Teach them the game theory of optimization, and they see the skeleton beneath retail, banking, entertainment, and their own career.

Frameworks endure because they’re upstream of opinionated narratives that treat situations as unique, novel snowflakes: no two patterns alike! To systematize is to realize each snowflake is basically the same, and nominal differences distract from their structural parallels. Once you see mechanisms, anecdotes become unnecessary.

This isn’t an opinion piece bemoaning NBA shot selection or how streaming ate media; those are symptoms and descriptions. What you’re about to read consists of diagnostics and fractal competitive patterns: something you can use repeatedly in different contexts and scenarios. It decomposes underlying mechanisms that convert spectrums into dichotomies, bell curves into barbells, and stable middles into hollowed cores.

Do you have opinions on the working class, income inequality, globalism, or why your hometown is a shell of its former self? You’re in luck, this essay is for you! I believe Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Market encompasses the most useful, informationally-dense-yet-digestible ~14k words you may ever encounter. A great deal of work went into this, with each section earning its place and building into the next. I know attention is valuable and focus is fleeting; if you commit to this essay, it will disproportionately give back to you.

If you’d like to absorb the reasoning and writing you’re accustomed to in my other work, you can skip Section V’s industry breakdowns and the Research Appendix at the very end and reduce read time by about 60%. They’re case studies that empirically reinforce the thesis and logic, but the framework stands without them.

However, if you read the case studies (recommended!) you’ll holistically internalize — with timelines, data, and some pizzazz — how entire swathes of the US economy (and basketball courts) have been eviscerated and will continue to be unless dramatic action is taken. We conclude with atypical answers about what that action should entail: taking no half-measures and providing solutions that look at the root of the issue, not its leaves.

By the end, you’ll understand why optimization doesn’t smooth things out, but sharpens them into points. You’ll recognize the forces humming around you that quietly polarize, consolidate, and impose a choice between extremes. If you derive value from this, please give it a like and share it with someone else.

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Outline

I. Optimized Poles, Exposed Core

• When optimization runs long enough, it eats its own bell curve

II. Patterns of Extremes

• The forces that breed fat tails

III. The Smile Curve

• How supply chains grin and eat the center

IV. Is My Center Disappearing?

• Diagnostics that suggest your core is on its way out

V. Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Market

Each case study demonstrates the same transformative pattern across different domains and timescales. Six examples are provided mid-essay to illustrate mechanism, process, and outcome, with more provided in the Research Appendix.

1. NBA

2. Local News

3. Hollywood & Movies

4. App Stores

5. Department Stores & Retail

6. Banking

VI. The Natural State of Extremes

• Extremes are the steady state, parity a peculiarity

VII. Individual Application

• Technology feasts on centers until what’s left is either scale or soul. Which way, Western worker?

VIII. Organizational Application

• Businesses either weaponize scope or worship distinction

IX. Civilizational Application

• How to sustain a functioning society when human economic value varies by five orders of magnitude

X. Societal Implications: Tradeoffs All the Way Down

• Purchasing social stability with economic productivity: unique solutions to preserve the center

XI. Universal Basic Income

• Societal volatility and the rage of the structurally obsolete

XII. Concluding

• The middle is a garden requiring enduring effort to sustain

Research Appendix

1. Additional Business Case Studies

   1. Music, CDs, & Streaming

   2. Book Publishing

   3. Casual Dining

   4. Beer & Breweries

2. Condensed Case Studies: Cities, Politics, Fitness, & Academia

3. Counterexamples: Extremists in Middle Disguise

I. Optimized Poles, Exposed Core

Unassociated competitive domains converge on dominant strategies with a consistent theme: the middle dies.

When systems optimize, intermediate positions become unsustainable. This pattern devours industries and blue-collar life alike, transforming colorful variability into black-and-white division. What was once a spectrum splits into binary, transforming imperfect art into precise algorithm.

We assess these situations individually, relying on bespoke top-down analysis as if they’re peculiar aberrations: “People don’t like malls anymore”, “Hollywood makes superhero movies because culture is stagnant”. This is superficial and misleading; these are not isolated events. Culture doesn’t create circumstances; circumstances create culture.

These stories are symptoms of the same mechanical architecture. Bottom-up environments produce similar outcomes under similar conditions.

Almost without exception, our first impulse is to assume we acted upon the world; we never consider that the world is acting upon us. Laws of nature impose a physics of coordination and information flows. We are subject to this, not separate from it.

Nature breeds extremes across all walks of life. This isn’t capitalism’s pathology or democracy’s failure, but the constitution of resource dissemination and information propagation: applicable to all creative and adversarial domains. Power laws emerge anywhere performance compounds and selection intensifies. The longer domains adopt performance filtering under pressure, the more their outcomes resemble one another: skewed, polarized, efficient, brutal.

This happens regardless of political system, personal beliefs, or whether we think it’s fair.

Soviet institutions had exaggerated prestige hierarchies via the nomenklatura, with elite privileges rivaling Western contemporaries. Chinese state-owned enterprises exhibit Pareto-esque productivity ratios despite central planning. Academic citations have fat tails in every country studied. When selection operates on multiplicative (exponential) rather than additive (linear) returns, skewed curves are the organic end state. ‘Capitalism’ is simply a politicized label for people acting in their interests through markets; it neither causes nor fixes these outcomes.

When a system tunes for specificity and scale, the intermediate becomes inefficient and exposed. Optimization eats its own bell curve if it runs long enough.

Baseball and venture capital operate in different worlds, yet both discovered identical strategies. Baseball neglects .270 singles hitters for power/patience homeruns. VC funds eschew steady 2x returns for portfolio allocation embracing twenty failures to find one Airbnb. Convergent evolution operates on competitive systems as surely as it does on species.

The middle, by its essence, is unoptimized: a compromise between price points, use cases, and audiences. As adversarial pressures intensify, dominant strategies align on targeted tactics that manufacture extremes and feast on centers.

To survive and thrive, you must choose a side: expand or specialize. Engineer for efficiency or experience. Become the cheapest to produce or the hardest to replicate. What’s left is either scale or soul.

As the middle class goes, so goes the market: bifurcating into luxurious top and discount bottom. The middle market becomes a contradiction in terms without a working class to sell to: no market is there anymore.

Steve Jobs called technology a “bicycle for the mind”: you get somewhere faster pedaling than on foot, just as you get somewhere quicker with technology than without. Charming, but incomplete. Tech is also a centrifuge: separating what was once mixed and spinning outcomes to the peripheries.

Geographic barriers guarding regional business vanish with digital distribution and globalized supply chains. Information asymmetries fragmenting markets evaporate with price transparency. Technology is both a bike for the mind and rocket ship for power laws.

The middle pays full freight and gets no favors. Scale players with generalized objectives overpower it; niche players with specific audiences outflank it.

Poles amplify when you optimize for pure efficiency or pure differentiation; the middle optimizes for nothing.

The middle is neither fast nor strong, cheap nor premium, simple nor sophisticated. In basketball, these players get cut. In markets, these companies get crushed.

There’s a physics to human coordination and resource circulation. Whether app stores, breweries, movies, capital, or countries, selection effects in open arenas yield Pareto’s 80/20 curve. Nature says inequality is the rule, parity the exception.

The tragedy of the center: if you try to be everything to everyone, you’re nothing to no one.

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Terms

• Power law: A mathematical relationship where small inputs produce outsized effects (y = x^k). When one variable changes, another responds asymmetrically.

  • Heavy (fat) tail: Right-skewed distributions where extreme outcomes are far more probable than normal distributions would predict. Power laws commonly produce heavy tails.

  • I use ‘power law’ throughout as shorthand for “extreme concentration at endpoints”.

• Pareto distribution: The 80/20 rule. A heavy-tailed probability distribution where a small share of inputs (<20%) account for a large share of outputs (>80%). Outcomes cluster at one end with a long tail at the other.

• Equilibrium (stable state): The point where a system naturally settles once its internal elements stop changing.

  • You can identify non-stable states by their need for consistent intervention against equilibrium-seeking dynamics.

    • A rock halfway up a hill rolls down unless you hold it there. Remove your hand, and it returns to the base (equilibrium).

• Linear, Exponential, and Multiplicative:

  • Linear growth: Adds a fixed amount each time: e.g. 10 → 20 → 30 → 40 (constant +10, declining percentage gain of 100%, 50%, 33%).

  • Exponential growth: Multiplies by a constant rate each time: 10 → 20 → 40 → 80 (constant 2x and 100% increase).

  • Multiplicative growth: Each step multiplies the previous one, but the rate isn’t necessarily constant.

    • It might multiply by ×3, then ×1.4, then ×2.1: still compounding, but not strictly exponential.

• General note: Power laws, Pareto, and fat tails overlap but aren’t identical. I use them interchangeably because the practical implication is the same for this essay’s purposes. I do the same for ‘multiplicative’ and ‘exponential’. The technical distinctions matter to mathematicians; the shared conclusion matters to everyone else.

• When I say ‘optimization’: I mean systems converging on a measurable objective under competition: points per possession, cost per unit, engagement per user, return on capital. Add feedback loops and enough time, and anything that doesn’t help that metric either mutates or dies. The middle is mostly made of things that are good for people but bad for that objective.

II. Patterns of Extremes

Power laws are nature’s ancient directives, appearing wherever systems compete for attention, resources, or influence… which is to say, everywhere.

Markets are calculators, not caretakers. They don’t weigh dignity, cohesion, or ideology, only throughput and efficiency. Competition’s gravitational pull adheres to predictable patterns pointing the same direction: away from the center.

1. The Matthew Effect (Cumulative Advantage)

The strong disproportionately gain through multiplicative returns. Those with more get more; those with less lose what little they have. This principle embodies cumulative advantage: success breeds success, wealth attracts wealth, fame begets fame.

This appears biblically in the Parable of the Talents, where servants entrusted with resources were rewarded or punished based on how they multiplied what they were given. Compound interest as a metaphor for divine justice.

“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” — Matthew 25:29

In network science, this is known as Preferential Attachment:

• The probability that a node gains new connections is proportional to its existing connections.

  • This is a subset of cumulative advantage, and the principle generalizes beyond networks.

  • Wherever coveted resources are sought, those who already possess them (citations, downloads, wealth, attention) experience Matthew’s preferential attachment.

Rewards don’t add but multiply. The paper with 10 citations gets cited ~100x more than the single-citation one. An app with 100k downloads gets exponentially more visible through algorithmic amplification than its 50k counterpart.

Benefits don’t stack linearly like bricks; they compound like interest. The rich get richer at an accelerating rate. The signature shape of Matthew distributions isn’t a bell curve centered on average, but a long tail where the top 1% commandeers more than the bottom 50% combined.

Concentration at the poles is the standard; equality is the anomaly.

2. The Barbell Distribution

Barbells illustrate outcomes clustering at poles while the middle empties. Normal distributions concentrate around the mean; barbell distributions evacuate it.

When systems prioritize a single metric (minimize cost, maximize engagement, increase points per possession), intermediate positions functionally become dominated strategies. They aren’t specific enough to monopolize niches nor general enough to prevail at scale.

• In game theory, a ‘dominated strategy’ is inferior because it produces competitively worse outcomes to alternatives, regardless of what opponents do.

Single-objective optimization yields barbell distributions:

• The premium end optimizes for quality, experience, or status

• The discount end optimizes for peak efficiency and price

• The middle optimizes for nothing. You either specialize, scale, or starve.

The middle must prioritize a single approach to persist. Competing on price weakens premium positioning; competing on quality weakens pricing. You can’t defend both flanks simultaneously! No half measures. Either go massive or microscopic.

3. Inverted-U Cost Curves

An Inverted-U cost curve: when per-unit costs peak at intermediate scale.

Giants achieve economies of scale in marketing, operations, and procurement (AWS data centers, Walmart supply chains). The tiny either avoid fixed costs or compete on dimensions other than price. The middle bears high fixed costs without scale to offset them: the worst of both worlds.

Digitally native businesses often have inverted-U cost curves:

• Small: Minimal fixed costs (indie developers with laptops and cloud services)

• Medium: Fixed costs (office, staff) without major volume

• Large: High fixed costs, but massive scale drives per-unit costs to near-zero (Visa, Cloudflare serve billionth customer for pennies)

Traditional U-shaped curves (applicable to atoms-based businesses) show per-unit costs initially declining via economies of scale, then eventually rising with bloat and excess complexity (diseconomies of scale). The middle does well here. Technology is inverting the U, raising the ceiling where diseconomies occur and promoting scale.

Amazon, Google, and Apple attain gargantuan capacity without diminishing returns because bits coordinate better than atoms. Automation reduces marginal costs and digital distribution evades geographic boundaries. Technology streamlines scale and privileges size. The middle is squeezed between differentiated small players and tech-enabled giants.

4. Preference Bifurcation

Widening income gaps produce widening markets. When the middle class shrinks and wealth concentrates, markets bifurcate in kind. Income inequality (where people either have a lot of money or not much) drives consumer demand to the same extremes! The middle market goes the way of median incomes.

• The premium segment chases the affluent minority

• The value segment chases the cost-conscious majority

• The middle market serves who, exactly? A shrinking demographic with diminishing purchasing power.

Middle market contraction exacerbates trends: mid-size failures eliminate middle-class jobs, which further depletes demand for middle-market products. A doom loop for the blue-collar man.

5. Network Effects and Algorithmic Amplification

Call these Turbo Matthew: the biblical dynamic, boosted by technology. What took decades in the physical world takes months in the digital realm. Things move faster with the computer’s bits vs reality’s atoms.

• Network Effects: Each additional user makes the network more valuable. Digital platforms breed radical concentration through Matthew loops where early success informs future success.

• Algorithmic Amplification: The algo cares not for who deserves visibility, only who already has it. Blessing engagement with more engagement.

Network effects shower connected nodes with more connections. Visibility elevates visibility. Positions become self-reinforcing.

Technology manufactures heavy-tailed ecosystems with industrial efficiency.

6. Threshold Cliffs

These are step-function thresholds, where minor growth triggers major punishment. When compliance, ranking, or eligibility requirements jump discretely, the middle is strangled.

• Giants clear the cliff and then some, capturing disproportionate value.

• The small and focused evade the cliff, mitigating expenses and punitive red lines.

Examples:

• Regulations where slightly crossing a barrier carries burdens:

  • Dodd-Frank’s (banking) $10B asset threshold:

    • Middle institutions right below the threshold face competitive liability (less nimble to specialize, still lack scale); those just above are saddled with crushing compliance expenses.

    • You’re ideally way above $10B or comfortably beneath it to keep costs proportional to profits.

• Obamacare’s 50 full-time employee threshold for mandatory health coverage:

  • Companies with 45-55 employees face a binary: stay under 50 or expand enough to make the regulatory burden worthwhile. Modestly above 50 is max compliance with minimum revenue relief.

• Environmental regulations with size-based triggers push firms to stay deliberately little or get big.

Regulations sterilize the middle not through intention but incentive. Policymakers design for average while the average systematically fades.

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III. The Smile Curve

Supply chains have vastly different margins at each stage; smile curves map how value is captured.

• In multi-entity supply chains, value clusters at endpoints: IP/design/brand on one side; distribution/platform/customer access on the other.

• The middle, comprised of manufacturing/assembly/coordination, is left commoditized, undifferentiated, fungible. Vitiating margins and reaping the least value in the chain.

This pattern emerges because endpoints control irreplicable scarcities:

• Upstream: IP, R&D, brand, and design aren’t fungible

• Downstream: Customer access, platform control, delivery networks resist commoditization

• Middle: Manufacturing, assembly, and coordination all standardize, facing relentless price pressure and margin compression.

Smartphones are an archetypal case:

• Apple feasts on 45%+ margins through design and brand

• Qualcomm gets 35%+ margins on chip IP; 70%+ on licensing

• Foxconn, handling the difficult work of actually making the phone, operates on emaciated ~6% gross margins.

  • The firm that does the most labor earns the least, with less than one-tenth the profits of the endpoints. Assembly is hard but replaceable. Fungibility means whoever does it cheapest wins.

The pattern reproduces across mature-growth industries with multipart assembly:

• Sneakers: Nike takes ~45% gross margins with brand and design. Asian manufacturers making the shoes get 8-15%.

• Pharmaceuticals: Pfizer and Merck enjoy 70-90% margins on patented medications or blockbuster drugs through R&D and IP. Manufacturers managing complex chemical processes creating the drugs: 15-25%.

• Coffee: Starbucks sips on ~27% margins via brand and experience. Processors and bulk distributors/logistics: single digits.

The smile bares its teeth as industries mature. Manufacturing standardizes, competition piles into the middle, margins compress. Meanwhile, endpoints accumulate benefits that defy commoditization.

The middle is saddled with fixed costs and fungibility while the ends harvest rents. That gap widens until the curve grins back at you :)

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IV. Is My Center Disappearing?

Power laws leave fingerprints. Here are harbinger diagnostics that your industry’s center is on borrowed time. If you see three or more, you probably have 5-10 years.

1. Are returns superlinear with size?

   1. Do businesses have naturally high operating leverage?

2. Is the middle segment of a supply chain getting highly competitive or considered fungible?

3. Are search/discovery/information frictions abating (ranked feeds, price transparency, more algorithms)?

4. Were threshold cliffs (regulatory, ranking, eligibility) recently introduced?

5. Are there network effects?

   1. Senior leadership has begun using the phrase “platform economics”

   2. Does adding one more user make the product better for everyone?

6. Is the objective function converging on a single-metric (points per possession, COGS, etc.)?

7. Is your trade association discussing industry consolidation? A lot of M&A recently?

8. Does geography matter to customers? Is it starting to matter less?

These heuristics are corroborated by the subsequent case studies in Section V and the Research Appendix.

V. Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Market

The following reviews how competition’s telos and technology’s ethos consume the core across business case studies. If you’d like to take my word for it, you can cut read time and skip ahead to Part VI The Natural State of Extremes.

However if you’ve gotten this far, then this topic clearly interests you. You’ve absorbed the mechanics of middle death and can now witness how it manifests in real life. If you have time, stick around. You’ll find historical nuance and deconstructions of industries that have touched your existence in one way or another.

The middle class itself has already been addressed holistically in Part I Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class and expressively in Part II Touching Soul, Touching Senses: The Art You Deserve. Now we’ll observe the same dynamics playing out across media, retail, sports, finance, entertainment, restaurants, and manufacturing: disparate domains with the same patterned skeleton supporting them.

As tech proliferates (algorithms, borderless logistics, financial engineering) and geographic barriers are removed, the center’s disintegration accelerates. Most barbell transformations (from balanced beginnings to skewed endings) span 15-35 years; digitally native ones can manifest in ~8-15 years.

The more a domain lives in the atoms-based, physical world and opposes technological enhancement, the longer it takes to reach full barbell. But resistance buys time, not immunity. Rejecting technology is like playing clean in a sports league that allows steroids. Choose to stay doughy and slow on romantic principle, and you get blown out. Markets don’t factor in noble motivations.

Geographic constraints were a Chesterton’s Fence of sorts.

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” — G.K. Chesterton

When borders disappear, discovery automates and metrics dominate.

We thought land boundaries merely limited consumer choice. They also limited winner-take-all concentration. Computers removed the geofence, and we found out it was a load-bearing column for the American core.

Consider what Amazon did to retail: your local bookshop’s only moat was its down-the-street convenience. Physical proximity made it viable. Remove that land-based advantage, and thousands of shops and hundreds of quirky Main Streets collapse into one website. Now a single omnipresent Everything Store in Seattle serves 300 million Americans while your downtown is hollowed out.

Technology clusters strategies and concentrates power in whoever leverages its best. As it propagates, you curiously find yourself with no midrange jumpers, and no middle market.

Here are examples that illustrate:

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Note: There are many data points in here and the Research Appendix, and despite my diligence, errors happen. If you catch any, let me know and I’ll review and change as needed. I’ll probably continuously update this essay as an ongoing point of reference for this concept. If you can’t read it all now, bookmark it, share with a friend, smash the like button, and return to it later.

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1. ENTERTAINMENT & COMMUNICATION

Fastest: bimodal in 8-20 years

Additional case studies in Research Appendix:

• Music, CDs, & Streaming

NBA Moneyball

THEN (2000):

• What the middle looked like: Balanced shot chart across court geography. Post-ups, midrange jumpers, three-pointers all viable strategies. The midrange game (15-22 feet) was ~35% of shots; three-point attempts ~17%.

  • Shot selection reflected coaching philosophy and player strengths rather than expected-value data analysis. Defenses guarded all areas equally, creating strategic diversity.

• Why it seemed stable: The middle represented sound decision making and tactical variety. Eye test suggested 15-foot jumpers were good shots. Traditional basketball wisdom: attack basket first, take open midrange if defense collapses, shoot threes selectively.

NOW (2025):

• What happened to the middle: Three-pointers jumped from ~17% (2000) to >42% (2025): more than doubling. Midrange fell from 35% to ~12%.

  • Modern superstars (Giannis, Luka, Curry) avoid midrange unless defense forces it. The “midrange specialist” is an extinct species for role players.

    • Defensive schemes adapted: Defenses actively funnel opponents into midrange, treating 15-foot jumpers as a success. The middle went from guarded territory to intentionally conceded space.

• Current structure: Extreme barbell. The court is now bifurcated: either take restricted area (at-rim) or beyond the arc. The middle a suboptimal desert.

  • In 2000, the Lakers won a championship with ~16% of shots from three. In 2024, the Celtics won with ~45% three’s. No team has won a title with a three-point rate under 35% since 2014.

• The transformation: Points per possession became the only metric that mattered. Strategic diversity died when everyone discovered the same math.

  • Analytics revealed midrange as a dominated strategy in points per shot (PPS) terms.

    • A good 40% three-point shooter generates 1.20 PPS; equivalent to a superb 60% two-point shooter.

    • Even excellent midrange shooters (50% from 15-22 feet) produce only 1.00 PPS.

• Three-pointers are worth 50% more (3 vs 2 points), and when shooting percentages are comparable, this point premium makes them decisively superior:

  • Three-pointers by good shooters: ~1.05-1.20 PPS

  • Restricted area attempts (dunks, layups) have highest efficiency per possession at ~1.20-1.30 PPS

  • Midrange jumpers by good shooter: ~0.84 PPS (dominated strategy)

• Time to collapse: 15-20 years (2000-2020) from balanced shot charts to bimodal poles.

MECHANISM: Barbell Distribution + Single-Objective Optimization

When everyone calibrates for the same metric, strategies converge. The midrange isn’t slightly worse, but utterly inferior:

• A team shooting 45% from midrange (elite) yields 0.90 PPS

• That same team shooting 30% from three (below average) delivers 0.90 PPS

• But improving three-point shooting from 30% to 35% (achievable) yields 1.05 PPS: 17% more effective than elite midrange

Daryl Morey’s Houston Rockets pioneered NBA Moneyball. From 2013-2019 they took around 40 three’s per game while averaging ~3-6 midrange shots. In 2018 they went 65-17 attempting ~45 threes and ~3 midrange per game; a 15:1 ratio deemed insane by any conventional standard. The whole league noticed.

Once Moneyball-style data quantified shots with precision (widespread by 2013), every team adopted the same expected-value approach: maximize restricted area and three pointers, minimize midrange. Within eight years, the league average jumped from 20 to 34 three-pointers per game. Coaches who resisted (like Jeff Van Gundy) got replaced by analytics respecters.

The feedback loop was merciless. Analytics-driven teams won games. Winning teams got copied. The shift spread rapidly through coaching, front office, and player development. All franchises calibrating for the same mathematical goal and strategy.

Every NBA team is now attempting more 3’s per game than Steph Curry’s 2016 Warriors. By 2024, zero teams attempted fewer than 30 per game: a figure only three teams exceeded in 2013. In 2025, the team average is 37 per game.

The midrange is an abandoned wasteland on NBA heat maps:

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Local News

THEN (Pre-2005):

• What the middle looked like: Thousands of metro and small-city dailies formed a robust middle tier between national brands and hyperlocal weeklies. Metro coverage employed newsrooms of 50-200 journalists covering regional politics, business, crime, education, sports.

  • 2000 was the peak of classified ad revenue at $20B

• Market structure: Fairly balanced three-tier system with national papers (NYT, WSJ, USA Today), metro dailies serving cities/regions, and local weeklies covering neighborhoods. Geographic fragmentation prevented winner-take-all dynamics.

• Who thrived in the middle: Metropolitan newspapers. The Cleveland Plain Dealer peaked at 400 journalists in the 90s. San Jose Mercury News had 400. The Boston Globe: 550. Seattle Post ~200. More than jobs, they were careers with pensions.

  • Local retailers bought display advertising to reach regional audiences. Classified advertising (employment, real estate, automotive) drove 20-40% of revenue and was the profit engine. Print advertising funded majority of revenue (up to 80%) with high margins.

    • A quarter-page “Help Wanted” ad cost $2k and took 15 minutes to place. Real estate listings ran $400 each. Pure margin, minimal production cost. These boring rectangles of text funded investigative journalism.

• Why it seemed stable: Geographic monopolies formed news citadels with limited metro competition. Classifieds were highly profitable with minimal production costs. Dual-revenue model of subscriptions and advertising provided solid base.

NOW (2025):

• What happened to the middle: 3,300 newspapers closed since 2005, creating news deserts across America. Metro papers hemorrhaged revenue as advertising migrated to digital platforms.

  • Google, Meta, and Amazon estimated with 56% of the ad market; some estimates high as 75%.

  • Out of 3,143 US counties: 208 have no local news source (6.6%) and 1,563 (50%) have only one. That’s about 55M Americans with either very limited or no local news. Source.

  • Classifieds went to specialized tech players:

    • Craigslist (run by ~50 people) disintegrated $20B in newspaper classified revenue. Indeed took employment listings. Zillow occupied real estate. AutoTrader, automotive. Each is faster and either free or cheaper.

      • The $2k help-wanted ad became a $100 Indeed posting. The $400 real estate listing, free on Zillow. Craigslist posts cost nothing.

• Current structure: Extreme barbell. Platform leviathans (Google, Meta, Amazon) seized digital advertising through scale and targeting. Few national big-brand papers (NYT 11M+ subscribers, WSJ 4M+, WaPo ~2.5M) achieved digital subscription scale.

  • Local operations survive on volunteerism, philanthropy, or subsidy. The metropolitan middle (50-200 person newsrooms) was eviscerated.

• Middle casualties: Since 2008, newsroom employment plummeted 57% (from ~71k to ~31k) Pulitzer-winning papers leaked readers and resources to digitally adversaries.

  • Denver Post down from 250 to 60 journalists. Baltimore Sun and Philadelphia Inquirer comparably decimated. In 2004, the Plain Dealer sold 350k papers daily, by 2020: 80k.

  • Print circulation declined 60-80% from peaks.

• Time to collapse: ~20 years (2005-2025)

MECHANISM: Smile Curve Disaggregation + Matthew Effect + Preference Bifurcation

Local news was razed by smile curve dynamics within the attention economy.

• Pre-internet, metro newspapers controlled both content production AND distribution, capturing full-stack attention chain.

• Digital disaggregation severed this: Google/Facebook annexed distribution (downstream endpoint), national brands like NYT captured premium content positioning (upstream endpoint).

• Metro dailies got stuck in the commoditized middle: serving content without controlling discovery and no brand premium.

Preferential attachment in algorithmic discovery amplified this handicap. A NYT article on urban crime appears in the same Facebook feed as a Denver Post article on Denver crime, but the algo’s engagement optimization favors the brand with more prior engagement, more social proof, more accumulated authority.

Advertisers who previously bought Denver Post ads now access hyper-targeted Facebook audiences. The affluent (who pay for subscriptions) consolidated on a few national outlets. The price-conscious (who supported ad-revenue models) migrated to free social platforms. The Denver and Cleveland readers advertisers targeted? Both buyer and seller evaporated.

Geographic monopolies dissipated with digital access.

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Hollywood & Movies

THEN (1990s-2000s):

• What the middle looked like: Studios regularly greenlit mid-budget, star-driven films, anchoring the middle between indies and blockbusters.

  • $20-70M films were large share of releases, targeting theatrical audiences seeking stars without spectacle (i.e. not superhero slop).

• Market structure: Balanced distribution with indie films (<$10M), mid-budget ($20-70M), and blockbusters ($100M+) each serving distinct market.

  • Critical: DVD backend sales provided profit a safety net for theatrical risk.

• Who thrived in the middle: Star power plus DVD backend equaled profit even if theatrical disappointed.

  • Michael Clayton cost $21.5M, made $92M box office, then added ~$20M in DVD sales. Taken cost $25M, grossed $227M, then another $85M in DVD sales; that’s an additional 37% of an already excellent box office from discs. Wedding Crashers invested $40M, returned $283M in theaters, then $147M in DVDs sales! 52% of theatrical revenue.

    • I was shocked learning how much money DVDs made. I thought they’d be an afterthought revenue source. Not the case.

• Why it seemed stable: DVD backend materially de-risked mid-budget films. Star power alone provided enough marketing to recoup investment without requiring franchise IP.

NOW (2025):

• What happened to the middle: Box office and marketing economics shifted toward $150-300M IP with franchise potential, or platform-distributed indies. Either you go full Batman or full Theater Kid, and Vince Vaughn gets left behind.

  • Theatrical middle disfavored as DVD backend evaporated. Total DVD sales fell ~94% from ~$16B peak (not counting rentals) to <$1B in 2024.

• Current structure: Creeping barbell distribution. Studios blockbusters ($100-200M+ production plus $100M+ marketing) with global franchise potential are economically en vogue.

  • Streaming platforms distribute micro-budget indies and occasional mid-budget acquisitions. Theatrical middle viewed like a midrange jumpshot.

  • A mid-budget drama that underperformed theatrically used to recoup on DVD; now it just loses money. Marketing costs increased. Theatrical windows shrank. The Owen Wilson rom-com became much riskier.

• Fat-tail supremacy: Marvel films routinely gross $1B globally, Avatar sequels break records, franchise IP (Star Wars, DC, Fast & Furious) delivers predictable returns.

  • Micro-budget artsy indies succeed through streaming and festival prestige: films under $5M find audiences on platforms without theatrical costs.

    • Both prioritize single objectives: maximize global franchise potential OR minimize production risk.

• Who’s left: Studios dominate megahit tier (Disney/Marvel with $200M+ per film). Streaming platforms acquire micro-budget passion projects and select mid-budget content. Theaters mostly occupied by spectacle-slop franchises and micro-budget breakouts.

• Bifurcation economics: Marketing costs spend better on global franchises; $100M only justifiable for $1B turbo-hit potential.

  • Streaming gave indies cheap path to audiences:

    • Mid-budget films have theatrical risk sans scale economics or micro-budget nimbleness.

    • The middle bears theatrical and marketing costs without franchise potential, economically suboptimal.

• Time to collapse: ~15-20 years (2005-2025), with DVD death and streaming catalyzing transformation.

MECHANISM: Scale Economies + Preference Bifurcation

Here’s Mr. Matt Damon with the details:

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App Stores

THEN (July 2008):

• What the middle looked like: iOS App Store launched with 500 apps and revenue distribution where middle-tier developers could build sustainable businesses. Top-10 developers claimed $9M of $21M total revenue (43%), leaving viable middle.

  • Freemium model not yet prevalent, just regular purchases.

• Market structure: Early platform with manageable competition, multiple paths to visibility, flat discovery curve. Independent developers and small studios could thrive. Category diversity allowed niche apps to find audiences.

• Why it seemed stable: Low customer acquisition costs made organic growth feasible. Algorithm neutral, no sophisticated engagement optimization yet. Early audience willing to explore and pay for quality apps.

  • In 2008, you could launch an app, get featured by Apple’s editorial team, and hit top 100 through word-of-mouth. Customer acquisition cost: essentially $0.

    • Angry Birds didn’t even advertise and became a global franchise. Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought it for $1B. The platform was a discovery engine, not a slot machine. Users browsed categories, tried apps, paid $2.99 without thinking.

NOW (2024):

• What happened to the middle: Eight years later, the bottom fell out. By Q1 2016 top 1% of publishers got ~94% of App Store revenue ($1.34B of $1.43B). Out of millions of apps, ~3-4k earned above US median income.

  • Candy Crush alone earned ~$1.3B in 2016. The bottom 99% of developers split ~$100M.

  • Gaming follows an equally radical Pareto distribution.

• Current structure: Radical fat tail with mega-hits at top and long tail of struggling apps. Big apps with budgets dominate paid acquisition. Long tail survives on organic/niche discovery with near-zero costs.

• Middle casualties: Apple algorithm changes weighted engagement metrics, ensuring early success predicted future success (Matthew). Customer acquisition costs skyrocketed.

  • The middle couldn’t reach escape velocity: too small to fund scaled user acquisition, too large to survive on organic discovery alone. Professional development demands investment but has insufficient scale to justify it.

• Time to collapse: 8 years (2008-2016) from balanced to peak Matthew, the fastest transformation across all domains examined.

MECHANISM: Network Effects + Algorithmic Amplification (Turbo Matthew)

App network effects created moats (users joined where friends already were). Each download improved chart positioning, generating more discovery. Freemium monetization (introduced 2009) with in-app purchases favored those with retention, amplifying early strength into a stranglehold.

The rank-to-revenue curve is exponential, not linear. E.g. jump from rank 10 to rank 5: revenue triples. Jump from rank 5 to rank 1: revenue up tenfold. Drop from rank 5 to rank 11: revenue craters 70%. Position isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

The distribution has a heavy tail, and the top annexes disproportionate value. Turbo Matthew.

Mobile operating systems:

Similar dynamics:

• 2010: multiplayer field with Symbian ~30%, iOS ~24%, BlackBerry ~19%, Android rising, plus Windows

• By 2016: iOS + Android owned ~99.6% of smartphone share. Mid-share operating systems couldn’t attract enough developers once app ecosystems tipped. Two-sided network effects (users and developers) locked in two winners while mid-tier platforms (BlackBerry, Windows Phone) died despite technical merit.

2. PHYSICAL RETAIL

Medium Speed: bimodal in 15-35 years

• Additional case studies in Research Appendix:

  • Book Publishing

  • Casual Dining & Restaurants

Department Stores

THEN (1990):

• What the middle looked like: Department stores recorded 14.5% of US retail sales, serving as anchors of American shopping malls with ~20k locations nationally and sales peaking at $233B in 1998.

  • Regional chains had geographic edge alongside national players.

• Market structure: Balanced three-tier system with budget (discount stores), middle (department stores), and luxury.

• Who thrived in the middle: Sears captured 1% of the entire US economy at peak, with two-thirds of Americans shopping there quarterly. JCPenney and Dillard’s catered to middle-income families. Macy’s and Nordstrom had middle-to-upper positioning.

  • The Sears catalog was 1.4k pages and reached 30M households

  • Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade had cultural aura

• Why it seemed stable: Geographic monopolies in malls provided captive traffic. Breadth of merchandise (clothing, home goods, electronics, furniture) under one roof was convenience edge. Middle-class economic stability was a reliable base.

NOW (2025):

• What happened to the middle: In twenty years, department stores went from dominant to decorative: no longer anchors but artifacts. Department store share crumbled from 14.5% to below 2% by 2024: an ~87% decline from 1990 peak over 34 years.

  • Store count: 20k to ~4.6k (76% reduction). Retail employment down 40%+ over two decades.

  • Number of department store brands fell from around 20 to 8.

• Current structure: Significant barbell. Growth accrues to value giants (Walmart, Target, dollar stores, TJ Maxx, fast fashion) and premium/luxury (specialty stores, boutiques). Department store share of general merchandise plummeted from 59% (2000) to 18% (2020).

  • Ulta Beauty’s market cap exceeds Macy’s, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, and Dillard’s combined. One category-specific retailer is worth more than four major department stores with 150 years of history.

  • Meanwhile, Shein floods the bottom with $5 polyester while Hermes prints money selling $10k handbags to ladies who don’t check prices (women be shopping).

  • Walmart’s market cap: $470B; Amazon: $1.8T

• Middle casualties: Sears declined from 1% of US economy to under 30 stores from 4k peak. JCPenney filed 2020 bankruptcy. Gap, J.Crew, Banana Republic all floundering. The middle market needs a middle class to sell to.

• Time to collapse: 34 years (1990-2024)

MECHANISM: Preference Bifurcation + Scale Economies

E-commerce eliminated regional superiority for physical retail. Generic merchandise became available everywhere, and department stores lost differentiation. Amazon’s unlimited products plus 24/7 availability were unsurmountable. Fast fashion (Zara, H&M, Shein) claimed cost-conscious consumers. Luxury brands claimed the wealthy.

Income polarization drove customer bifurcation: affluent minority traded up for luxury goods, cost-conscious majority traded down for low-price giants. The department store isn’t cheap enough to compete on price nor special enough to justify premiums.

The middle paid full fixed costs (stores + employees) without brand power or discount leadership.

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3. REGULATED & HEAVY REGIONAL

Slowest: bimodal in 40-60+ years

“Heavy Regional”: businesses serving a specific geography by distributing physically hefty products with significant logistics considerations.

Additional case studies in Research Appendix:

• Beer & Breweries

Banking

THEN (1970):

• What the middle looked like: US banking featured ~13k independent banks in highly fragmented market. Insured depository institutions at ~20k.

  • Regulations prevented interstate banking: only 12 states allowed unrestricted statewide branching, and 38 (76%) did not. Thousands of regional banks thrived serving specific geographies.

• Market structure: Balanced distribution across institution sizes. Top-10 banks controlled ~16% of entire banking system. Deposit bases were sticky and loyal to local institutions.

• Who thrived in the middle: Regional banks with ~$10-100B assets maintained strong positions combining relationship banking with solid scale for basic technology and compliance. Large enough to offer business lending, wealth management, and treasury services, small enough to know the construction company owner who banked three generations with them.

  • A $50B regional could fund a $20M commercial real estate project that JPMorgan would ignore. They occupied the Goldilocks zone: big enough to help regions, small enough for relationships.

    • Note: All $ figures are inflation-adjusted for today

• Why it seemed stable: Regulatory fragmentation created protected local monopolies. Geographic regulations prevented concentration. Technology hadn’t yet enabled economies of scale in IT, risk management, and operations.

NOW (2020):

• What happened to the middle: Number of banks fell 86% from 13k to ~4.4k. Industry underwent four decades of relentless consolidation eliminating mid-tier players.

• Insured depository institutions from 20k to 5k (-75%).

  • Most states restricted branching into the 1970s; by 1992 all but four allowed some statewide branching.

  • From an all-time high of 30,456 in 1921, the vast majority of commercial banks are gone. Since 1934, there’s been a 71% decline.

• Current structure: Major barbell distribution. The five largest banks control 50% of commercial bank assets and the top 10 have 1.3x the assets of all others combined (versus 1/4 of the assets in 1970).

  • As of Dec. 2020, four mega-banks dominate: JPMorgan $3.4T, Bank of America $2.8T, Citigroup $2.26T, Wells Fargo $1.9T

    • Community banks survive on relationships and stay under regulatory thresholds. Dodd Frank’s $10B enhanced compliance was onerous.

      • Of note: since 2019 some requirements were raised to $250B.

• Middle casualties: Regional middle ($10-100B assets) faces structural disadvantage: too large for relationship banking, too small for scale economies.

  • Unable to compete on lending rates (funding costs higher than megabanks), service (technology), or distribution (branches/ATMs).

    • Strong midsize players either acquired or imploded during the GFC:

      • Washington Mutual had $328B in assets in 2007, crumbled in 2008, acquired by JPM. Wachovia: ~$750B in assets, forced into Wells Fargo merger. National City: ~$140B in assets, sold to PNC. These weren’t small banks.

• Time to collapse: 40+ years (1970-2020) from fragmented to concentrated, with acceleration post-1994 deregulation and post-2008 regulatory burden. Merger wave in 1990s-2000s eliminated thousands of mid-tier institutions.

MECHANISM: Scale Economies/Inverted U + Threshold Cliffs + Network Effects

1994 Riegle-Neal Act removed geographic restrictions, enabling interstate banking and national consolidation. Once branch networks went digital, IT, funding, and compliance favored giga scale.

Network effects in payments and ATMs fostered winner-take-all dynamics; largest banks secure disproportionate value as hubs. And ‘too big to fail’ implicit guarantees provide funding benefits to mega-banks.

Post-2008, Dodd-Frank imposed onerous compliance: stress testing, risk management, reporting mandates, brutal overhead for mid-tier institutions. These regulations were written by people concerned about Citibank, not First National Bank of Topeka.

Either be huge (spread costs over trillions) or be tiny (exempt from enhanced standards). The middle was in no man’s land.

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VI. The Natural State of Extremes

These aren’t market failures. This is what unimpeded optimization, measured purely by output, looks like. The barbell is destination, not distortion. The question isn’t whether a domain will bifurcate, but when and how.

Cost minimization and premium maximization cannot simultaneously preserve the core; the math doesn’t allow it. Moneyball logic and Matthew Principles colonizes domains sharing no superficial relation; any system that optimizes measurable performance under constraints will rediscover these strategies independently.

‘Capitalism’ is an ideologically manipulative term for what natural selection gestates in open markets. When resources circulate in a decentralized way, with no central authority dictating it, we call that a ‘capitalism’. Clearly a misnomer because it’s not a governance or personal belief system, but the absence of one. It’s what organically happens when human nodes consume and allocate as they see fit.

You don’t need to ‘believe’ or ‘support’ a forest for it to grow; it does so all on its own if you don’t stand in the way. Beavers accumulate and stack wood because that’s what they do; humans accumulate and stack capital (resources, land, property, money, energy, etc.) because that’s what they do.

There’s a physics to how information and resources disseminate. Capital flows like water down a hill when left unencumbered, taking the path of least resistance as it pools at the base. If we want to preserve the middle, tradeoffs must be made. Dams will have to be built that stop the water from pooling at the base in the same way.

Power laws exist independent of man, not due to him. Appearing in nature and social systems (earthquakes, wildfires, city size, rainfall, animal foraging, river networks, etc.) without human involvement, intent, or awareness.

An emergent force, they coalesce not through dysfunction or ideology, but as the steady state. The optimal solution to competition under constraint: the natural shape of extremes.

They manifest fractally across individual, business, and nation.

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VII. Individual Application

Imagine explaining to a time traveler from 1950 that one Google AI engineer earns multiples of an entire high school faculty. Then tell him that engineer’s code impacts a billion users while the faculty only touches 1,000 students. The leverage chasm is obscene, and the engineer’s scarce skillset facilitates it. The compensation tracks accordingly.

How do you sustain a functioning, cohesive society when this scenario ceases to be anomalous and society-wide human economic value stratifies by some five orders of magnitude between top and bottom?

Companies optimize for revenue per employee with the same ruthlessness NBA teams do points per possession. The peddler of modestly complex knowledge work will find AI accomplishes it faster, cheaper, and without vacation days.

His profession is technologically commoditizing. He exists in the middle of a nation’s labor Smile Curve. What can he do?

The scale path:

Calibrate for leverage, influence, or network effects:

• Tech careers where one engineer’s code serves millions

• Finance roles where one trader’s decisions move billions

• Entertainment where one creator’s content reaches tens of millions

The specialization path:

Become locally irreplaceable and trusted through deep expertise or personal relationships, resisting automation and circumventing algorithmic subjugation.

• The master plumber in a small town with 20 years of reputation

• The physical therapist whose patient relationships foster loyalty and family referrals

• The orthopedic surgeon specializing in hip replacements that only 200 others nationwide can perform

These positions harvest value through personalized relationships, loyalty, and human trust: impervious to algorithmic replication and fungibility.

The fatal middle:

Neither hyperscales nor carries unique distinction, too tiny for capacity and too generic to protect. It can’t outwork the algorithm or out-human the artisan.

• Professional services, trashbag-of-facts knowledge work, middle managers (automated by project management software and AI).

  • Common lawyers and accountants (LLMs send their regards)

• Regional salespeople without personal relationships

• All consultants (good riddance)

Positions like these face dual pressures: tech automation from above and commodification from below (outsourcing, freelancers, global competition).

Successful adaptations position at tails:

• The middle manager who evolves into:

  • Engineering leader embracing AI and tripling productivity

  • Executive coach with deep expertise in family business succession (i.e. highly personalized rich-people services)

• The regional accountant who transitions into:

  • CFO at high-growth tech startup leading venture funding

  • Specialized tax strategist for real estate syndications

• The journalist who becomes:

  • Star reporter at national publication with big social following

  • Indie newsletter writer with 2k paid subscribers in specific industry (Substackcore)

The middle manager is to the LLM what the switchboard operator was to automated routing: blissfully, ephemerally residing in an untouched center during a technological grace period with an expiration date.

Technology feasts on centers until what’s left is either scale or soul.

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I mostly listened to this song on loop while writing the remaining sections.

VIII. Organizational Application

The individual and institution are fractally subject to the same pressures. The middle is a transient mode born of either geographic barriers or technological virginity. Healthy centers are likely to be found in nascent industries that haven’t yet discovered their barbells.

To position for the long term: either weaponize scale or worship differentiation.

The scale path:

Pursue winner-take-most games with network effects, data supremacy, and compounding operational edge.

• Platform economics: Each user makes the platform more valuable (network effects), emits more data (improving product), and spreads fixed costs over a larger base.

  • Example: each Uber rider increases value to drivers (shorter wait times), generates more data (improves routing algorithms), and spreads fixed costs (AWS infrastructure, legal, insurance) over a larger base.

    • A platform is readily identified when more value is created on top of it than the value of the platform itself.

The strategy involves accepting years of losses to achieve escape velocity, then extracting disproportionate rewards after establishing a stronghold.

• Scale economics: If the marginal cost of serving an additional customer approaches zero while marginal value increases with each one, you’ve found high-leverage territory. Digital services like software, content, and finance share this property.

  • Netflix’s cost to stream to the 100 millionth subscriber is functionally nothing. Visa’s cost to process the billionth transaction is infinitesimal.

    • In accounting, this is known as “high operating leverage”

• Not everyone can win here; power laws anoint ~2-4 major players per market. You gotta try to be one of them.

The specialization path:

Deliberately stay diminutive. Defend through specialization, brand, or premium experience that cannot be copy/pasted at volume.

• Craft breweries succeed despite Big Beer controlling 80%+ of market; their revenue per barrel is 3-5x higher

• Boutique hotels at $400/night thriving while mid chains recede

• Premium fitness studios like SoulCycle charge +$40/class while $30/month common-man gyms decay (elaborated further in Research Appendix)

This strategy demands discipline and refusing expansion if it dilutes distinction. Developing moats through quality, community, or prestige that repel commodification.

• In-N-Out Burger has ~420 locations across West Coast states and could easily open 4,000. Yet they don’t. Regional scarcity preserves the brand’s cult status and quality control.

• Many can win here. Long tail of custom, esoteric niches supports thousands of smol specialists.

The fatal middle:

Either modestly scales or partially differentiates. It hedges rather than commits.

• Mid-market retailers competing on selection/convenience (vs Amazon), price (vs Walmart), and experience (vs boutiques): failing at all three

• Regional banks attempting consumer lending (vs megabanks’ low costs) and relationship banking (vs community banks where the president knows your business personally)

• Mid-budget game studios with worse graphics than AAA blockbusters and higher costs than indies

• Department stores offering meh selection at meh prices with meh service: a ho-hum business all around

• Mid journalism trying to be both authoritative (but not as credentialed as NYT) and accessible (but behind a paywall). Substack indies eat their lunch from below while MSM hoovers up prestige from above.

Successful pivots entail monomaniacal repositioning: weaponize scope or worship distinction.

• Walmart realized it couldn’t beat Amazon online and invested in omnichannel capabilities, leveraging its physical stores as a competitive strength.

• Luxury brands (LVMH, Kering) overtly avoid commoners. They acquire high-class names, raise prices, and limit distribution to preserve status.

• Publishers either become platforms (Penguin Random House consolidation) or micro-presses for distinct audiences.

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IX. Civilizational Application

In tech-saturated industries with sophisticated players — be it venture capital, music, or app stores — the top 1% eats 70-95% of the riches. A nation is not immune to these forces.

A society must act to prevent the same outcomes, otherwise they will accumulate naturally. Either actively commit to preserving the middle or prepare for civilizational extremes. A half measure is no measure.

Power laws manifest fractally:

• The employee’s career barbells (hyperscale or hyperspecialize)

• The company barbells (platform dominance or premium distinction)

• Then society barbells (oligarchs or peasants)

• Which way, Western man?

With AI permeating all facets of work, this will only accelerate. The more computation enters the system, the faster Matthew goes.

Societies either capitulate to bimodal class structure or intervene permanently against power law equilibrium. The middle will not be sustained with wishful thinking and campaign slogans.

This is not new. Technology doesn’t cause this, capitalism isn’t the catalyst; they’re only bicycles for the process, getting you there quicker.

Pre-industrial societies exhibited similar effects. In 1700s France, the top 1% owned 60% of wealth (top 10% held 90%). The Romans had their patricians and plebeians with scant affluence in between. Medieval guilds (labor union parallels) guarding artisan middles gradually dissolved as open trade and mass production (factory systems separating owners from workers) proliferated. Every technological revolution (printing press, steam engine, internet) champions democratization but delivers consolidation.

There are of course many positives to this. The standard of living in absolute terms has risen dramatically since then; the poor have smartphones, cars, AC, and aren’t only not hungry but more likely to be fat. Credit goes to technology for this rotund accomplishment.

However it’s the wealth percentages, the ratios, the relative differences, that are schismatic, destabilizing, and likely to get far worse. “Economics isn’t a zero-sum game!” Oh, well do you know how percentages work? Because that is zero sum, and it ain’t a game.

Absolute living standards can rise while relative gaps expand. Economics isn’t zero-sum, but power and influence are: a 5x or 10x spread between classes materially changes how societies organize. Contentiously factionalizing, regardless of how many people own iPhones.

In nature, it’s large temperature and pressure gradients that fuel the hurricane’s destructive, dissipative formation: even if the whole atmosphere is ‘richer’ in energy. Likewise, it’s the steepness of the wealth gradient, not just the size of the economy, that destabilizes societal structure.

Extreme capital gradients are buoyed by technology’s waves: like water down a steepening hill, it gets there quicker. Whether there’s more liquid or less of it, the ratios of where it pools persist.

The post-war industrial boom temporarily flattened tails as three serendipitous preconditions aligned:

1. Geography mattered (transportation costs defended local producers)

• In the 1960s, shipping containers carrying 10,000 tons cost ~$700k in today’s dollars (inflation-adjusted $70/ton). Local producers reaped default protection from afar. Distance carried an embedded tariff.

2. Technology created more jobs than it eliminated (e.g. factory work absorbed agricultural surplus)

• US manufacturing peaked at 19.6M in 1979. Factories hired agricultural workers displaced by machines. For every farm job lost, 1-1.5 factory jobs appeared. Creative destruction for the low-skilled didn’t on net eliminate their jobs, only shuffled them around.

  • Once AI saturation hits an inflection point, low-skill human capital will cease being shuffle-able; you flat out won’t need them anymore. Employing them will become a quaint, inefficient gesture done for nostalgia; like going antiquing, but for labor.

3. Policy deliberately asphyxiated winner-eat-everything environments (antitrust, labor/union laws, progressive taxation)

• The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act broke up Standard Oil. In the 1950s, top marginal tax rates hit 91%, and union membership reached 35%. Laws preventing interstate banking precluded megabank consolidation.

  • Make all the libertarian noises you want, but these were very ‘pro-middle’ developments.

All three are now reversing

• Today, that $700k 10,000-ton shipping container runs $20k (-97% decline in shipping costs). US manufacturing employment is down to 12M. The top marginal tax rate is 37%. Union membership: 10%. The four biggest banks form a nationwide financial cartel.

The affluent American middle was a 20th-century windfall, birthed by winning two world wars that eliminated global industrial capacity and allowed the US to exist indulgently unoptimized. It was an evanescent period touted as a new normal. From 1947-1973, median household income almost doubled in real terms. High school graduates could buy homes and raise families on single incomes. No more. No wonder boomers have such a decadent worldview; they were raised in perhaps the most luxurious timeline in human history.

This was circumstance, not structure. A fortunate window we mistook for the natural order’s architecture. We did not defend it and took it for granted. Power laws reassert themselves as these fleeting factors decline.

Globalization’s emergent extremes are to be expected when technology neuters geographic boundaries, facilitates colossal scale, and nothing is done to preserve the center of the societal barbell. The middle isn’t dismantled by intention, but inaction.

Ascribe nefarious motivations to politicians or corporations if it satisfies your need for villains, but power laws require no conspiracy. When supply chains, trade, and labor compete globally with minimal friction, the bottom-up’s scaling physics and Turbo Matthew dictate outcomes.

To demonstrate, consider how monopolies form. The policy prescription is simple:

Do nothing.

That’s it. Don’t regulate mergers. Don’t enforce antitrust. Don’t tax. Just let the natural system percolate and Matthew handles the rest. Only through persistent intervention to thwart this organic phenomenon can we cultivate an artificial non-equilibrium situation with a healthy center.

Power law distributions are stable equilibria under competitive optimization. Markets engineer for gross margins and efficiency; they care not for societal cohesion, political stability, and working-class quality of life. Those are human values that oblige human interference.

Monopolies at the business level emerge when you do nothing.

Monopolies at the societal level (oligarchies) emerge when you do nothing.

We are subject to the same laws of physical reality at every substrate of existence.

If power laws at civilizational scale are inevitable without intervention, what should that intervention look like?

X. Societal Implications: Tradeoffs All the Way Down

Societal polarization and volatility rise as power laws run wild and you’re left with a ruling class, lower class, and nobody else. Dichotomy is destiny. Without a middle, all that’s left are extremes.

Permitting this is no different from not having antitrust laws for business. You just have to zoom out to see it.

Without antitrust, monopolies appear naturally. Extremes accumulate organically. Business enhanced by technology, with open borders for capital and labor, incubates monopoly outcomes for nations: giga corporations and niche micro businesses alongside peasants and patricians.

We know this doesn’t help the consumer, so why would it help the country?

When the FTC reviews antitrust action, it asks: does this substantially lessen competition and harm consumers? Swap “consumers” for “citizens” and the parallel clarifies. This is market logic at national scale. Same process, different domain. Fractals.

Apply the antitrust assessment bottom-up systemically at the aggregate level of nation, not the top-down individual review of each business.

Does an economy of multi-trillion goliaths and bodega-style indies help or harm the nation’s consuming core? Amazon offers lower prices (consumer surplus rises over the short term) while hollowing out blue-collar jobs and wages (middle class shrinks, surplus declines over the long term). You are trading one form of harm for another.

Traditional policy tools are palliative, not curative; they address symptoms rather than causes:

• Progressive taxation/wealth redistribution ameliorate capital concentration but cannot stop the foundational agents that sustain it.

  • US top marginal rates dropped from 91% (1950s) to 37% today. The top 1% held ~23% of wealth in the 1980s and ~35% by 2020s. The tax code helps, but redistribution doesn’t confront root causes and serves mainly as a partisan distraction.

• Antitrust enforcement breaks up monopolies but doesn’t eliminate network effects (or political power) that enshrine king-maker paradigms. Break up Meta tomorrow, and within five years a new social platform congeals through parallel dynamics.

These interventions manage outcomes, not mechanisms.

They trim visible branches without touching the veiled oak tree beneath. Kings remain the same kings if all they do is tithe some jewelry each year.

To concretely address distal causes, not paper over proximate ones, we must target bottom-up substrates, not shift resources around with top-down political stories.

Possible approaches:

1. Change optimization functions

• The NBA modified rules before: shot clock in 1954 (to prevent stalling), three-point line in 1979 (to open spacing). It could change them again. Push 3’s back or alter point values so expected values equalize. Shot selection would rebalance within a season.

• Platforms could modify algorithms to stymie Turbo Matthew results (revise engagement metrics to value diversity over virality).

  • Meaningful reform requires regulation. Big Tech has no incentive to cap its own growth. Asking Meta to de-escalate its network effects is like asking Exxon to cap its oil drilling.

2. Change the tax code: target dominance, not income

Tax systems could penalize market dominance at the network level, not the profit level. Don’t target net income (specious, easily manipulated), focus on Matthew signifiers.

• Example: Above 25% market concentration, implement graduated levies

  • 25-40% market share: 2% tax per percentage point on revenue attributable to that share

  • Above 40% market share: 10% tax per percentage point

    • Example: Say Amazon has 45% of US e-commerce market (irl it’s about 40%)

      • First 25%: No network tax

      • Points 26-40% (15 points): 2% × 15 = 30% tax on that revenue segment

      • Points 41-45% (5 points): 10% × 5 = 50% tax on revenue segment

      • Result: Amazon faces 30-50% tax on market share over 25%

      • And yes, I mean revenue, not net income. The topline is the target. You have nowhere to hide. Your accountants cannot save you.

        • This targets the mechanism (Matthew principles that entrench dominance) rather than the outcome (profits that may reflect genuine innovation), creating notable network-effect frictions without confiscatory taking.

          • This curtails platform efficiency and possibly innovation velocity. That’s the point. You’re buying political stability with economic productivity.

          • Yes there are flaws (tradeoffs!) to this, but the thinking is what’s important: it targets structure, not symptoms.

You can still get big, but you can’t get infinite. Expansion becomes prohibitively expensive at the roots, not branches. Dominance has a price, because the middle has value.

3. Create deliberate scarcities in the middle:

A) Intellectual property protections only for products generating under $150M annually in sales. Beyond that threshold, patents expire and become public domain.

• This is a Threshold Cliff that doesn’t punish the middle, only the hyperscale. Disney’s Mickey Mouse copyright would expire. Generic drug manufacturers could produce majors immediately instead of waiting decades.

  • Small pharma could still patent new compounds and profit for years before hitting the threshold.

  • There would need to be exceptions for investment size:

    • Developing a new drug can cost billions and take 10-15 years; no company accepts that risk if the patent expires when the product succeeds without recouping costs + substantial returns. To address this, we could have both a minimum ROI hurdle and annual sales threshold.

B) Make geography great again. Limit procurement to producers within 500 miles. Ohio school districts buy Ohio-manufactured desks, not Chinese imports.

• This involves federal legislation that every economist in Washington would despise and every voter in Pittsburgh would adore. Trump’s 2016 coalition understood this instinctively. Spreadsheet People do not bear the consequences of their decisions, Detroit does.

  • I’m acutely aware of the ugly tradeoffs here. I’ll acknowledge them when Ivory Tower minds acknowledge the strengths. Pick your poison, spreadsheet boy.

Geography is irrelevant, information is immediate and free; this has never existed before. Unique circumstances demand unique thinking.

C) Provide government subsidies or tax breaks for intermediate-scale operations: manufacturers with 50-500 employees, media companies with 10-100 staff, etc.

• A variation of Threshold Cliff, redesigned so it’s not a discrete boundary but a gradual gradient. I shall call this the Gradient Slope.

  • A Gradient Slope: benefits decline smoothly as you scale, not via cliff-like step that’s punitive to intermediate players.

    • E.g. companies with 100 employees get 20% tax credits. At 200 employees: 15%. At 400 employees: 5%. At 500+: 0%.

• Germany’s Mittelstand policies follow this model, sustaining millions of mid-sized positions. It works, at the cost of some efficiency.

  • Germany actively subsidizes mid-sized firms through tax policy, apprenticeship systems, and patient capital from regional banks. Protecting the middle requires intent.

  • The Mittelstand is not a natural exception, but a consciously crafted one.

The challenge: these solutions impede competitive dynamics. They stipulate ongoing intervention against natural market forces. Stop intervening for a decade, and the middle gets eaten. This is less a policy you implement than a commitment you maintain.

You’re buying social stability with economic efficiency. Whether that trade makes sense depends on how much you fear pitchforks relative to GDP evangelism.

There is no scientific answer here; it’s not a matter of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. You cannot optimize for both the middle’s stability and the tail’s efficiency. You must pick your poison; you don’t get to say your path has no toxins.

4. Pros and cons of middle preservation:

Every nation faces the same power laws. You’re choosing how to respond, not whether to respond.

• Con: Lower productivity. Near/mid-term efficiency weakness vs those who let power laws run unchecked.

• Pro: Stronger domestic demand over time (middle supports domestic consumption), political moderation, and cultural stability.

  • The productivity cons at the beginning are quantitatively apparent, but the benefits over longer timelines must be qualitatively factored in. Political stability and societal cohesion don’t initially show up in Excel sheets, but eventually they impact them.

Radical inequality should be understood as a structural issue, not ideological moralizing talking point. I do not care about things being equal as any moral stance or personal belief that everyone deserves the same. We are not equal. We are not all the same. I cannot stand fictions that pretend otherwise.

My concern with inequality is one of violent volatility, not fairness; extreme wealth gradients destabilize societies the way extreme heat gradients birth hurricanes. It’s gradients that matter for system dynamics. The same cosmic forces that govern stars and snowflakes also govern societies. We must stop telling stories and start seeing structure.

Bottom up.

XI. Universal Basic Income

When power-law economies strand large populations with no economic role, you either pay/subsidize them directly or you get revolt. There’s no third option that preserves both market dynamics and civil order. Which dystopia, Western man?

Every intervention I can imagine — network taxes, regional procurement mandates, IP restrictions — will either be kinda toothless or kinda totalitarian. There really isn’t an in-between.

Tax network effects above 25% market share? Platforms will jurisdictionally arbitrage or restructure to stay below cutoffs. Mandate regional procurement? You’ve just imposed Soviet-style limits, sacrificing comparative advantage for parochial protectionism. Deny IP rights for titan corporations? Congratulations, you’ve decimated incentives for the kind of R&D that relies on massive investment.

Implementing Matthew Regulations means relying on government to outmaneuver physics-style forces and trillion-dollar optimization engines, and, well, we all know how brilliant and capable bureaucrats can be.

Yet another unpalatable option that may be unavoidable: allow power law dichotomization and provide society-wide safety nets, otherwise known as universal basic income (UBI). Either subsidize existence or drown in instability. There is no situation where ~30% of the population has no role, no recourse, and we have a safe place to live. The market offers no solution to this.

I viscerally hate UBI on an ideological level. However the analysis here is concerned with stability and sustainability, not ‘does this suit my political priors?’. If we let Turbo Matthew run rampant with no economic floor, what exactly is the plan when ~1/3 of society occupies unemployable poverty? Learn to code! Oh wait, the LLM does that now.

A tragic symmetry: the same networks that generate exponential upside also generate exponential human redundancy. UBI is the price of letting The Machine run hot.

I dislike UBI for the same reason it seems inexorable: it medicates the symptom (mass unemployment) without curing the cumulative-advantage disease. But any root-cause solution involves intervention so aggressive it threatens the dynamism producing wealth in the first place.

UBI represents pragmatic intellectual surrender. It concedes we can’t sustainably solve these multilayered middle-eating problems, so we’ll pay people to exist. Because the alternative — obstructing tech platforms, banning algorithmic amplification, restricting AI — requires state power that would make the New Deal look libertarian.

There is no panacea. These solutions have flaws. Yours will too. Political decisions are collective-action problems expressing moral judgements, and they all involve tradeoffs.

Prioritizing some values necessarily means deprioritizing others. All moral frameworks have shortcomings, because no set of values is comprehensive. Every political belief we espouse does this implicitly. No exceptions.

If you only understand the world in net-income terms, fine. Economic efficiency is a value, not the value. Markets excel at optimization but cannot adjudicate between competing social priorities. Whether you genuflect to GDP over political stability, innovation over community, consumer surplus over producer dignity: these are moral decisions masquerading as technical or political ones.

Every efficiency claim embeds a tacit value statement. Your personal priorities are revealed by what you promote.

If your political stance distills to “no barriers, no borders, free trade”, you’re confessing that gross margins exhaust your moral faculties. You see one metric, cost, as the remedy for human flourishing. Don’t get me wrong, it helps, but does so in a unidimensional way.

The economist who perceives productivity as the sole metric has mistaken his personal values for objective truth. Claiming ‘efficiency is neutral’ while ignoring distributional consequences is a moral stance dressed in technocratic drag. His entire personality is one big optimization function.

These are people so uncomfortable with subjective judgement they’ve outsourced their ethics to Excel. A myopic quarterly earnings mentality for a game measured in generations. A one-track mind that only knows what the calculator tells him is ill-suited to lecture on collective-action decisions for civilization. Your opinions are cool for Nike, less so for a nation.

The McKinsey answer isn’t irrelevant, just woefully incomplete. The consultant with a 47-slide deck and the New Jersey construction worker who senses something’s broken are both communicating parts of reality. One has data and theories, the other has skin in the game and ramifications. Neither has the full picture, but only one gets paid $600/hour to be wrong.

The economist’s spreadsheet measures productivity gains but not political polarization, GDP growth but not the latent rage of the structurally obsolete. Maximizing one variable while ignoring all others is how you optimize your way into revolution. Neat expected-value thinking man, shame a country isn’t a shopping mall.

Efficiency and productivity are some values, not the values. There is no ‘right’ answer, only tradeoffs that expose priorities.

XII. Concluding

What happens to the individual impacts the business; what happens to the business shapes the country. All of these elements are entwined, inseparable, and subject to the same laws and fractal contagions. The barbell cascades.

A powerhouse middle was a confluence of serendipitous historical circumstance: industrial dominance, geographic fortresses, information asymmetries, and regulatory protections. Technology has melted the first three, and only the last one remains.

You can either accept polarization in favor of optimization and growth, or implement systemic, perpetual interventions to counteract Matthew’s will. You cannot solve this once and forget it. Skewed distributions are where systems settle; maintaining healthy middles entails enduring effort. Sie müssen sich der Mittelstand verschreiben.

Don’t forget:

How do you get monopolies? Do nothing.

How do you get oligarchy? Do nothing.

Does the cost of intervention (diminished efficiency, slower growth, competitive disadvantage) exceed the social cost of severe inequality (political disruption, civil unrest, loss of middle-class opportunity)? Your answer elucidates your priorities. Not what’s right, just what you value.

Middles are a garden in the desert: stop watering them and the sand wins. The social, political, and economic center are not self-sustaining against the sand’s equilibrium.

The middle serves as more than economic category; it’s a social shock absorber, political counterweight, cultural moderator, and civilizational bedrock. It gives people stakes worth defending without forcing them to choose between predator and prey. When you treat a country not as a home but a shopping mall, running it for margins and returns, you make its social fabric brittle, fragile, and vulnerable to revolution’s deterioration. Brittle systems don’t bend under pressure, they break.

If the center dies, don’t be surprised when the population divides into zealots and nihilists. Eliminate conditions that make moderation adaptive, and moderation becomes a losing strategy. Extreme environments beget extreme beliefs, and extreme behaviors follow suit.

By definition and essence, the middle is what keeps society from splitting in two.

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Research Appendix

Content:

1. Additional Business Case Studies

   1. Music, CDs, & Streaming (15 years)

   2. Book Publishing (12 years)

   3. Casual Dining (14 years)

   4. Beer (70+ years)

2. Condensed Case Studies: Politics, Fitness, & Academia

3. Counterexamples: Extremists in Middle Disguise

1. Additional Business Case Studies

Music, CDs, & Streaming

THEN (CD Era, 1990s-2007):

• What the middle looked like: Healthy middle class of working artists between bar bands and superstars. Music generated ~$23B at the Carson Daly 1999 peak (inflation-adjusted), with ~$21B of it from CD sales.

  • Disc sales had natural price points ($12-17 per album) where artists with 50k-100k annual album sales cleared $150k-300k income: a viable middle-class career.

• Market structure: Balanced distribution with megastars, mid-tier artists, and up-and-comers forming recognizable tiers. Physical retail (Tower Records, Virgin, Borders) and radio offered multiple revenue streams alongside regional touring.

• Who thrived in the middle: Mid-tier artists sustained careers through album sales, radio rotation, and touring. Physical album economics ($12-17 × 50K-100K sales = $600K-1.7M revenue) supported professional musicians. Music industry facilitated artist development through multi-album deals, allowing careers to build gradually.

• Why it seemed stable: Album price floors supported mid-tier viability. Multiple revenue streams (sales, touring, radio) diversified income. Retail and radio provided discovery paths. Geographic diversity in touring created stable income base.

  • If you read the movie industry case study, you may be sensing some parallels between CDs and DVDs…

NOW (2025):

• What happened to the middle: Revenue and attention dramatically concentrated at the top as streaming replaced physical albums. By 2022, streaming was 84% of industry revenue ($13.3B of $15.9B).

  • Top 1% of artists garner 77% of all revenue; top 1% drove ~90% of streams. Of 2M artists on Spotify, only ~22k (~1%) earn over $50k.

• Current structure: Matthew heavy tails. Megastars command overwhelming majority through algorithmic amplification. Long tail of hobbyist artists get negligible income. Blue-collar working musician crushed.

• Middle casualties: Artists who sustained careers with 50k-100k album sales now need millions of monthly streams.

  • Musicians previously earning $150K-300K annually with albums now log $3k-5k monthly if they hit ~800K-1M monthly streams.

    • Artists earn ~$0.003-0.005 gross per stream, requiring ~400k monthly plays just to earn about minimum wage (.004 x 400k = $1,600 x 12 = $19.2k).

• Time to collapse: Healthy normal curve to concentrated skew in 15 years (2008-2023).

MECHANISM: Preferential Attachment + Algorithmic Amplification + Smile Curve

Spotify pools all subscription revenue into a single pot, then allocates based on each artist’s share of total platform streams, not what individual subscribers actually listen to.

Example: if you exclusively stream jazz artists but 90% of Spotify streams are pop, then 90% of your subscription dollars flow to pop artists. The system socializes revenue toward the already popular, creating a subsidy from niche listeners to mainstream artists.

Physical retail allowed serendipitous shelf-based discovery and geographic diversity; whereas algorithmic discovery is mediated not by happenstance or store shelves, but black-box calculations calibrated for engagement. Winner-take-all dynamics surfaced when playlist placement led to massive amplification for top artists.

Mid-tier artists lack breakthrough hits for algo momentum and face comparable production costs as megastars. The smile curve smirks: platforms extract chunky distribution margin, stars snatch attention premium through existing fame, and the middle gets crumbs producing quality content few see. The endpoints get fat while the center starves.

Book Publishing

THEN (Pre-2007):

• What the middle looked like: Publishing sustained a midlist, with authors who weren’t stars earning steady advances and royalties off bookstore shelf space (Borders/Barnes & Noble + local shops), library/coursepack licenses, and backlist sales.

  • Midlist authors could sustain careers through moderate sales of 5k-50k and reliable advances ($10k-75k).

• Market structure: Balanced distribution with bestsellers, solid midlist, and debut authors. Physical bookstores provided shelf space for discovery and regional markets.

• Who thrived in the middle: Midlist authors earning $30k-80k through advances, royalties, and licensing. Writers of literary fiction, genre novels, narrative nonfiction sustained careers without bestseller status. Publishers invested in author development through multi-book deals.

  • A midlist author in 2000 might earn a $25k advance, sell 15k copies, generating $36k in royalties. Add $5k from coursepacks and subsidiary rights, total: $66k

• Why it seemed stable: Retail shelves created discovery that protected the midlist from algorithmic curse. Bookstore geo-diversity prevented winner-take-all concentration. Libraries purchased broadly across titles. Multiple revenue streams (retail, libraries, licensing) diversified income base.

NOW (2019-2025):

• What happened to the middle: Multiple simultaneous optimization shocks (2007-2019) murdered the midlist.

  • By 2019, Amazon had ~77% of online book sales (print + ebook). One store = one algorithm = winner-take-most discovery.

    • Median author income fell 42% from 2009 to $6k by 2017. ~25% of published authors earned $0.

    • The Kindle launched at $399 in 2007; by 2011 it was $79. Ebook prices dropped from $12-15 to $3-10. Readers paid less, publishers earned less, authors earned least.

• Current structure: Fat barbell. Publishers optimize their launch budgets for star authors and celebrity IP (Stephen King, celebrity memoirs, airport bookstore slop) that can pierce algorithmic gravity.

  • High-velocity indie authors exploit subscription model through rapid-release (6-12 books/year) in popular genres building direct reader communities.

  • Midlist authors trapped between traditional publishers who won’t market them and indie economics requiring velocity incompatible with quality literary work.

• Middle casualties: In 2007, traditional publishers released 276k books; in 2018, self-publishing flooded the market with 1.68M books. Scarcity shifted from distribution to attention.

  • Borders filed bankruptcy in 2011, eliminating ~1,200 stores. Barnes & Noble shrunk from ~730 locations to 600. Shelf space, the physical element thwarting king-makers, vanished.

    • Fair-use rulings gutted the licensing revenue midlisters relied on.

      • Google Books and university coursepack cases meant professors could legally share excerpts they previously paid for. These were small payments individually, but collectively kept writers afloat.

      • Tech companies celebrated this as “democratizing knowledge”; a platitude that means “writers now get less and the delta accrues to me”.

• Time to collapse: ~12 years (2007-2019) from Kindle launch through multiple optimization shocks to Authors Guild survey documenting 42% income decline.

MECHANISM: Smile Curve Disaggregation + Algorithmic Amplification

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Casual Dining & Restaurants

THEN (1990s-2013):

• What the middle looked like: Casual dining chains had ~$100B in sales at 2013 peak

  • Applebee’s, Chili’s, TGI Friday’s, Red Lobster, Olive Garden thrived serving affordable experience between fast food ($5-8/meal) and fine dining ($50+/meal).

• Market structure: Balanced three-tier system with fast food (efficiency), casual dining (moderate experience), and fine dining (premium) serving distinct segments. Sector maintained growth trajectory with casual dining positioned as treat for middle-class families.

• Who thrived in the middle: National chains expanded through early 2000s with ~$20-30 entrees, consistent quality, and experience unavailable in fast food.

  • Applebee’s peaked at 2k locations in 2007. TGI Fridays hit 600 in 2008. 700 for Red Lobster. These were community stalwarts: Friday night at Chili’s, birthday dinners at Olive Garden, Little League celebrations at Applebee’s.

    • A family of four spent ~$70-80 including tip. Affordable enough for regular visits, nice enough to feel like an occasion.

• Why it seemed stable: The middle class visited reliably. Alcohol subsidized food margins. The model worked as long as people had disposable income and nowhere better to go.

NOW (2025):

• What happened to the middle: The middle became too expensive for everyday dining and not nice enough for special occasions. Sector bled traffic for 13-14 consecutive years as of 2021. Sales crashed to $56.6B by 2023: a 43% decline from 2013 peak in just a decade. Nearly 350 chain restaurants closed in 2024 alone.

• Current structure: Barbell distribution. Growth accrues to fast-casual (Chipotle, Panera) offering comparable quality at 30-40% lower prices with speed.

  • Fine dining and Instagram-worthy independent restaurants attract experience-seeking segment.

  • Value-oriented survivors reposition down market: e.g. Chili’s had three straight quarters of double-digit growth after $400M investment in discount positioning with $10.99 “3 for Me” deal.

• Middle casualties: Red Lobster filed Chapter 11 in 2024, depriving the world of the Cheddar Bay Biscuit. TGI Fridays went from 600 restaurants to under 300 in six months before bankruptcy. Hooters closed ~70 locations. Applebee’s went from ~2k to ~1.6k. Each closure eliminates 40-80 blue-collar jobs.

• Time to collapse: About 14 years of consecutive traffic losses (2008-2021)

MECHANISM: Preference Bifurcation + Inverted-U Cost Curve + Optimization Pressures

Increasing income inequality drove consumer behavior that followed suit: budget-conscious diners optimized for value (fast-casual), while affluent consumers traded up to experiential fine dining.

Fast-casual uses supply chain efficiency and simplified menus to deliver Denny’s quality at fast-food prices. The middle bore full operating costs (staff, facilities, table service) without pricing power of fine dining or operational efficiency of fast-casual.

Moderate prices, moderate selection, and moderate experience only sells to a moderate consumer base.

Beer & Breweries

THEN (Pre-1980):

• What the middle looked like: In 1947, America had 421 macrobreweries. Most were regional: Rainier in Seattle, Lone Star in Texas, Narragansett in Rhode Island. Beer was historically local; transport costs and distribution constraints favored regional brewers.

  • Regional operations (15k-6M barrels/year) served specific geographic markets.

• Market structure: Reasonably balanced with national brands, regionals, and hyperlocal operations.

• Why it seemed stable: Transportation costs were a moat, mid-sized breweries were operationally efficient. Beer as local product and regional identity seemed inherent to category.

  • Beer is heavy, perishable, and expensive to ship. A barrel from Milwaukee costs more delivered to San Francisco than a local pub charged at the tap. Regional breweries owned their geography by default.

NOW (2025):

• What happened to the middle: Consolidation crushed regional breweries as market bifurcated. By 2006, only 20 US macrobreweries remained, a 95% decline from 421 peak.

  • Craft beer revival beginning ~1980-1985 drove chasm between big and small. By 2024, 9.6k crafts operated producing 23M barrels.

  • Top 2 macrobrewers control ~55% of the market, top 4 control 74%, top 10 control 88%, materially exceeding typical manufacturing concentration where top 4 average 36% share (2012 data).

    • In Europe, the top 4, depending on industry/product, average 41-61%. Global research found average of ~45% share for the top 4.

• Current structure: At one tail, multinational consolidation birthed brewing behemoths (AB InBev, SABMiller, Heineken) who approach beer as commodity logistics. At the other, craft breweries lean on nimble uniqueness: direct sales, premium pricing, and local authenticity.

  • Regional breweries that once dominated realized they were the wrong size: too large to credibly claim craft authenticity, too small to match industrial efficiency.

• Middle casualties: Regionals died slowly then all at once. Facing horrible economics and unable to compete with macro scale or craft authenticity and $12 six-packs.

  • Olympia Beer (Washington’s third-largest brewery in 1980) was absorbed by Pabst. Schaefer (New York’s largest brewery in 1950) went to Pabst. Texas’ Lone Star… you guessed it, Pabst.

• Time to collapse: ~70 years. 1947-1980 consolidation to 80 breweries, then 40+ years toward barbell market (1980-2025).

MECHANISM: Scale Economies + Preference Bifurcation + Distribution Network Effects

Technology in brewing and distribution (automation, refrigeration, packaging) made scaling possible, then unbeatable. High fixed costs in production, logistics, and marketing drove consolidation.

Regional brewers were too big to be charming, too small to be cheap.

2. Condensed Case Studies: Cities, Politics, Fitness, & Academia

• Mid-sized cities lose population to megacities (optimizing for career, cultural amenities, network effects) and small towns (optimizing for cost of living, community, quality of life).

  • The middle offers neither the opportunities of big cities nor the affordability and charm of small towns. Mostly traffic, sprawl, and strip malls.

• Moderate political parties/candidates get crushed in politically polarizing settings.

  • Coalition governments in Europe show center parties losing share to extremes. Primary systems and partisan media fan these flames.

    • The “sensible center” assumed to represent the largest constituency has no passionate advocates, losing to intense minorities on both sides.

• Fitness Industry: Mid-market full-service gyms are being squeezed between budget chains and boutique studios. The middle bears full facility costs but lacks both price leadership and experience/status differentiation.

  • Budget chains design for price:

    • Planet Fitness scaled to 2,762 locations at $10-20/month through brute simplification: no pools, no courts, minimal staff.

  • Boutiques monetize community and social status:

    • SoulCycle’s $42/class snags the premium demographic. The Hermes of fitness.

  • Mid-market clubs ($40-70/month) offer neither discount nor prestige:

    • Gold’s Gym and Town Sports International filed bankruptcy in 2020.

• Academia: Elite R1 institutions and small teaching colleges survive while mid-tier research universities struggle. The middle bears research expectations without elite resources or teaching-focused mission clarity.

  • Elite R1s dominate hiring and funding:

    • Top 5 universities (Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Wisconsin-Madison, Stanford) produce one in eight tenure-track faculty nationwide (13.8%).

    • Top 100 institutions receive nearly 80% of federal funding for science and engineering research.

      • Johns Hopkins alone gets 2.4% of the entire National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant pool.

    • Faculty trained at mid-tier institutions leave academia at nearly 2x the rate of elite-trained PhDs.

  • Small teaching colleges avoid the squeeze:

    • Liberal arts colleges and regional state schools optimize for undergraduate education, avoiding research cost structures while maintaining stable enrollment.

The same dynamics that killed department stores are now eating universities (Ivy League or community college, but not state schools), healthcare (concierge medicine or Medicaid, but not employer PPOs), and media (Netflix or TikTok, but not cable).

Each industry thinks it’s special. None are.

3. Counterexamples: Extremists in Middle Disguise

What about Costco thriving between Walmart and Whole Foods? Or Southwest Airlines surviving between Spirit and Delta?

These aren’t counterexamples so much as confirmation: each carved out a distinct specialty focus and pursued it obsessively.

• Costco optimized for a single objective: maximize inventory turnover with low-margin bulk purchases, backed by membership-funded fixed costs.

  • Costco charges $60-130/year for membership to shop there. It has 76.2M paying members, earning $4.8B/year from just the right to walk into the store.

    • This subsidizes operating expenses, allowing razor-thin product margins (low prices!)

      • Members prepay for access, inverting the retail model.

• Southwest looks middle-market only if you squint at prices. Structurally, it’s an extremist: one aircraft type, relentless turnaround times (very high asset utilization), point-to-point unique flight routes. Fanatical optimizers.

Successful ‘middle’ players are extremists who found unoccupied territory. They appear moderate only through superficial price comparison. Structurally, they’re often as focused as any tail player, calibrated for variables others ignored.

There are many more examples than what I’ve provided; even things like the stock market and liquidity are subject to it. An omnipresent gravitational force, impacting all of existence.

Thank you for reading.

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Related Essays:

• Part I: We’ll Give You Things > We’ll Leave You Alone

• Part II: Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Part III: Sovereign Investors & Geopolitical Traders

Introduction

Political summits like these are predominantly acts of pageantry, diplomatic theater and photoshoot opportunities. WWE for the credentialed. The goal is to signal friendliness and stroke egos. Participants tacitly know nothing will be agreed upon that can't be reversed with a bad mood and a tweet, yet we perform the decorous ritual as a kind of minimal viable politeness. One of the more uniquely hollow exhibitions is when Russia or China hold flamboyant “deal-making” events with the US.

The only two credible counterweights to US unipolarity need to exhibit just enough diplomatic genuflection to avoid insulting American sensibilities, then return to whatever multi-decade strategy that was already in motion. Every handshake is rehearsed, every 'breakthrough' pre-scripted, every joint statement a masterpiece of saying little with great solemnity. The US doesn’t demand you listen, just that you be tasteful while ignoring it.

When Putin sits across from a US president, he's playing nice with that particular administration's temporary interpretation of American interests. He knows US agreements have a shelf life measured in electoral cycles, whereas Chinese ones are measured in dynastic potential.

Russia, China, and the US are all genuine sovereigns that exist on vastly different timelines, on account of how they’re governed. China and Russia are capable of making commitments to each other, the US mostly is not.

Putin has outlasted Bush's 'soul-gazing', Obama's 'reset button', Trump's Helsinki overture, and Biden's deeply confused 1,000-yard stare. He understands whatever promises a president makes can evaporate with news cycles.

This is how geopolitical game theory looks when one side can invest and the other can only trade.

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Investors & Day Traders

In markets, investors rarely disagree on core facts - rather there’s differing beliefs on which facts are relevant. Competing emphasis on disparate facts are what happen when you have two different moral languages speaking past each other in the political domain, and two different temporal languages speaking past each other in the strategic. There are no right or wrong fact bundles, just unrelated values and/or timelines that implicitly disclose how far into the future someone’s looking. This communicates strategic priorities and incentives.

A decent finance heuristic: any portfolio position with a holding period under a year reveals a trader’s outlook. They’re likely allocating around a particular event or anticipating what others will do and trying to do it first. They’re hunting for a specific catalyst that will move charts, at which point they’ll sell and move on. They're not investing for value, rather trading around price.

If the intended holding period is beyond a year, you begin to enter the mindset of the investor. The nature of the thinking recalibrates towards financials and growth of the business - examining cash flow statements, industry-level developments, etc.. They're not trading around a price, they’re investing for value creation. As value is made, the score takes care of itself.

One of these dispositions demonstrates high time preference and is reacting to herd behavior; the other exhibits low time preference and is independently homed in on business success. To one, the stock represents a company they want to see fundamentally improve. To the other, the stock represents a series of letters and a price they expect to change X% by Y date due to Z catalyst.

In markets, the information these two mentalities metabolize and how they allocate capital won’t necessarily conflict, they’re just speaking past each other. What the trader touts will be noise to the investor, and vice versa. This concept is not exclusive to finance. You observe it in people’s impulse control, priorities, politics, how they plan for the future, and also how Russia and China engage the US.

The investor/trader dichotomy is apparent between the family office managing a multi-generational trust and a Reddit forum chasing meme stocks. To see it at national scale, we only need to recalibrate the duration of what a trading vs an investing mindset resembles.

An investing country plans in decades, a trading country thinks in election cycles. One is building a legacy, the other is hunting for a catalyst. Their priorities, motivations, and conceptions of value are incommensurable. The investor doesn’t concern himself with the metrics of the trader.

These “discussions” are like watching a chess player engage a poker pro; one calculates territorial endgame, the other for “next hand” headlines. The timelines are different because the incentives are. Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcomes. A democracy and its political selection effects do not incentivize for grand objectives.

As such, there's not much reason to bargain beyond a couple years with Washington if you're an authentically self-directed nation.

Not every country can act as a purely agentic investor. To do so, they must be a true sovereign.

Sovereignty Calculus

The traits of a genuine sovereign:

• Unilateral capacity to wage and sustain offensive war without anyone’s approval

• Unilateral ability to defend its territory by itself, needing no external authorization

• Issues its own currency backed by a substantive economy. A currency functionally derives its value from being a claim on the resources of the issuing country; the greater the economy, the more valuable and in demand those claims are.

Why are these the criteria? Because this is what’s required to make undoubtedly autonomous national and geopolitical decisions. If a country possesses these traits, it’s as sovereign as we know.

Consider the alternatives:

• How self-determining is a nation that requires aid to defend itself?

• How independent is a country whose currency is pegged to another's whims?

• How powerful is a state that needs permission to act?

To ask the question is to answer it.

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Projection and Porcupines

Nuclear weapons are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for unqualified sovereignty.

Nukes provide a partial sovereignty floor — a nation that possesses them can't be totally conquered — but offers no power-projection sovereignty ceiling. For example: Pakistan is less of a sovereign than non-nuclear nations with massive conventional forces that can actually be used. A nuke without noteworthy standard forces is like owning a sword you can’t unsheathe - intimidating to hold but with no offensive capacity. They are endgame options, not tactical national-interest tools.

Nukes are nation-sized suicide vests. You can't capture territory with them, can't enforce a blockade, can't even credibly threaten a neighbor without risking global intervention. All they do is make sure someone cannot eliminate you, because then they’d eliminate themselves. They alter the calculus of how conflict manifests; this is further deconstructed in War Is How a Nation Eats.

North Korea resides in this purgatory: nuclear-armed but economically prostrate, lethal enough to resist but not to impose. Nations like these are not truly sovereign, they’re preventively feral. Not leashable, not offensively dangerous, just inconvenient to swat. North Korea is a spam folder with missiles. Iran, should it ever get a nuke, will still be a bounded siege economy fueled by grievance, barter, and oil. Their capacity to shape history is derivative, not generative. They’re the geopolitical equivalent of a porcupine: unpleasant to swallow but incapable of hunting.

Saudi Arabia presents the inverse case: swimming in wealth, buying cutting-edge weaponry, yet requiring Pakistani troops to guard its holy sites and American contractors to maintain its F-15s. Independence isn’t for lease, it’s either owned or absent.

The sovereignty gradient reveals itself most starkly in proxy conflicts, aka when you can get others to fight your wars for you. Ukraine discovered that being democracy's darling means receiving enough weapons to not die, but not enough to win; a Goldilocks zone of suffering calibrated to avoid nuclear escalation while maintaining sufficient prime-time headlines so the Lindsey Grahams of the world can get their talking points. I’m sure Taiwan sees this, though unlike other proxy playgrounds like Afghanistan and Syria, what resides in Taiwan is categorically worth waging a major war.

NATO members are quasi vassals - outsourcing their defense, and thus independence, to the US military. A Faustian bargain that trades agency for the luxury of funding welfare states. They're self-directed like a trust fund kid is self-funded. Israel is completely reliant on Washington’s charity and weaponry to go on the aggression. Japan and South Korea can wage war… so long as the US gives its blessing and firepower. These nations are sovereign in the way a teenager with his parent’s credit card is financially independent.

India is an interesting one. It’s working towards military sovereignty while maintaining economic autonomy and a GDP that’s currently 4th in the world, likely to be 3rd place within the decade. It may eventually become a fourth bona fide sovereign, maybe.

Only three genuine sovereigns exist: China, Russia, and the US.

Why?

• None of them have to consult anyone over geopolitical business that is not a direct incursion against each other

• The only country that has a chance of defeating any of these nations in serious combat is one of these three.

• They can, and do, invade other countries while asking for no one’s permission.

• They have complete control over their domestic defense, relying on nobody to back them up to do so.

• They all have credible aspirations of expanding their territories, should they want to - Taiwan, Ukraine, and Greenland know this too well.

• They are certified financial sovereigns and issue their own unpegged currencies, backed by substantial economies.

This is what authoritative geopolitical power looks like. Right now, no other nations can make these claims.

Commitment

Negotiation requires commitment. Commitment demands promises. Promises only meaningfully manifest over extended timelines.

The United States is structurally incapable of commitment, on account of its governance.

US Executive, Senate, and Congress control shifts every 4-8 years, and strategic orientations along with it. The Iran deal lasted one administration; a diplomatic one-night stand that masqueraded as a marriage. The Paris Accord: in, out, in… super serious stuff! Even NATO guarantees are now within the Overton range of "obsolete" and "sacred", depending on which elderly gentleman occupies the Oval Office. What dissolved these “long-term commitments”? Leadership changes. The last guy liked them, the next guy wasn’t a fan.

Treaties officially need 67 senate votes to pass; a quaint threshold that made sense when senators could agree the sun rises in the east. Executive orders die with each administration. US international agreements have the binding force of a geopolitical drunk text.

Fun fact: In 1986, 98 senators confirmed Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. The other two? Absent that day! This is what nonpartisan cohesion and competent, functioning governance looks like. It used to exist in the US, it has not always been this obnoxiously toxic. Today, a nominee’s high school yearbook is grounds for national trauma and if the president’s party doesn’t have a Senate majority that nominee isn’t getting through. The arc of democratic governance bends toward spectacle, not strategy. Our adversaries see this.

China, pragmatic players of the ultimate long game, observed this pattern and adapted accordingly. When they "agreed" to intellectual property protections during WTO accession, they knew enforcement would oscillate with American political seasons. Steal during administrations focused on tax cuts and/or domestic gender studies, then back off during ones focused on multilateralism and trade deficits. They treated agreements like suggestions, knowing America's response would get a reset every four years.

In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum the US, UK, and Russia all provided security assurances for Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for nuclear disarmament. Ukraine kept its end, giving up the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. Then Russia took Crimea, and now it’s in the process of subsuming the whole thing. America sent strongly worded letters and sanctions that Russia had already priced in.

The US is certainly helping Ukraine with weapons and defense, however that support is waning; the public grows weary of “another $50B to Ukraine” headlines. Do you think voters are factoring in the 30-year-old Budapest Memorandum? Did anyone vote for that? Will citing that help your polling numbers? Ha. American security guarantees can fluctuate with the winds of willingness and trends. The common man cares not for the Budapest Memorandum, and he’s responsible for the politician put in place who decides whether to adhere to it or abandon it.

Russia sees a Ukraine with no more sovereignty floor, and American resolve as a temporary obstacle it can outlast. So, it acts. As sovereigns are known to do.

This inability to persistently commit creates a perverted structure where America's adversaries are rewarded for patience while its allies can be punished for trust. Every Ukrainian soldier who dies defending territory they denuclearized on US promises is a walking advertisement for why you should never, ever give up your minimum-viable-sovereignty on account of anyone’s good intentions. North Korea and Iran understand this.

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Sovereign Investment, Geopolitical Trading

Russian and Chinese regimes manage their interests and strategies as investors, concentrated on country fundamentals with 20-year timelines. America is a lines-on-a-chart democratic day trader who only sees about 18 months into the future, whenever the next WWE Royal Rumble big election is.

One exhibits impulse control, the other is encouraged to let its impulses take control. Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes.

Examples:

• China's Belt and Road Initiative is a one big mortgage on the developing world's infrastructure. When Sri Lanka couldn't pay its loans, China took their port on a 99-year lease (the same duration of Britain's New Territories lease on Hong Kong, how poetic).

• In Montenegro, Chinese loans nearly created economic collapse; with payments exceeding over a third of the government’s entire budget.

• They enticed Laos into a similar crushing debt cycle.

This is how a multi-decade geopolitical investor practices his craft.

China’s not building infrastructure in other countries for next quarter's political earnings call; they're thinking of their grandchildren's strategic positioning. Meanwhile, America can't agree on an infrastructure bill for its own bridges without government shutdowns.

Russia plays the energy card with Europe knowing that democratic volatility means eventually someone will cave when their constituency shows disinterest. They watched Germany shut down nuclear plants as the “green things and kindness” party (I assume that’s their name) forced them to become dependent on Russian gas, because apparently that’s a “green” thing to do. Russia’s multi-decade investment in European energy dependence paid off handsomely. Investor grindset.

By their nature, democratic elections necessarily produce leaders who promote short-term comforts and soundbites over long-term strategic goals; the common man is concerned with what you can do for him right now, not the delayed gratification of your ten-year plan. Schröder, Merkel, Scholz: each one inched deeper into the bear hug knowing voters cared more about heating bills than Ukrainian independence. You gotta give the people what they want, that’s how you keep your job as a democratic politician.

In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague ruled overwhelmingly against China's claims in the South China Sea. China rejected the ruling, calling it "null and void” and kept building - a foreign court does not dictate to a sovereign. The term “international law” essentially means “the law of the military hegemon and their willingness to physically enforce it”. No enforcement? That’s a suggestion my friends. Your suggestion is duly noted.

China went on to build artificial islands knowing America would object, protest, sail some ships through, then get distracted. By the time the US circled back, the islands had airports. Today those islands are military bases, and America is debating West Point diversity metrics: investing vs trading.

The investor’s mentality is witnessed in Africa. China builds infrastructure with colonial patience and colonial outcomes, but sweeter optics. They don't care who's in power; they care about access to copper mines in 2074. These are essentially forward contracts on geopolitical leverage, collateralized by concrete.

China is building a network of strategic dependencies that compound over decades; the difference between owning a toll booth or controlling the highway. Ports that control chokepoints, railways that redirect commerce. You either repay China with interest, or it foreclosures on your critical infrastructure: sounds like a win-win if you’re Beijing. Not all annexations use tanks.

America shows up every four years with a new multicultural-themed Africa strategy that lasts until the next administration decides Ghana isn’t polling well. Only one of these approaches earns you lithium deposits without launching a land invasion.

Punishing Kingdoms

The US deploys a sanctions model that’s more like a timeout, or scolding, when applied to sovereign peers.

Russia has been under some form of Washington sanction since 2014. Their economy has adapted, pivoted eastward, and learned to survive in the shadows of the global financial system. Each new package announced with fanfare in Washington is absorbed with a shrug in Moscow. Russia knows sanctions fatigue is real, enforcement is inconsistent, and a future American administration will eventually need their cooperation on something — Iran, North Korea, space station maintenance, nuclear terrorism — and the timeout will quietly erode.

The miscalculation is assuming economic discomfort translates to political capitulation. For a sovereign, it can have the opposite effect: fostering a 'fortress economy' mentality, consolidating power around the state, and worn as a badge of honor against ‘foreign aggression’. The pain can be real, but the intended outcomes often aren’t. Sanctions represent irritants to authentic sovereigns; they can cripple Iran, not China or Russia.

When the West ejected Russia from SWIFT in 2022, rather than financial collapse it accelerated de-dollarization and parallel payment networks. By 2024, Russia and China's trade in yuan increased some 2,000% and over one-third of Russian trade was conducted in yuan. India buys Russian oil in rupees, and recently allowed special Russian investment in Indian debt from their oil sales. A bunch of small tweaks and shifts end up creating a whole new way for capital to flow without US supervision.

On aside, it’s suspected that Russia might be the only country on earth that could be completely resource, energy, and agriculturally self-sufficient if it had to. Technologically it would suffer, but for the basics it could likely manage. It’s difficult to definitively know that, but this is the kind of scale of resolute autonomy we’re talking about here. It’s extremely hard to punish a country like this. Also Russians are historically capable at handling suffering.

The financial 'nuclear option' galvanized adversaries to build around US rails. When you sanction a legitimate sovereign, it can act as a vaccine that makes the target more resistant to the next dose.

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American Investing

American geopolitical investing is not impossible, merely improbable. Things like Roosevelt’s wartime management and the global architecture that followed World War II show the US can be a very talented long-term thinker when it chooses to be. However, these were not democratic decisions, but a result of quasi-autocratic leverage: winning wars and deeply insulated institutions.

FDR ruled like a wartime CEO with a four-term mandate. The war gave him discretionary powers peacetime wouldn’t have permitted. The New Deal was a central economic plan imposed by executive fiat under the pretext of emergency. Roosevelt got things done by treating the electorate like shareholders who needed steady quarterly confidence while he managed the hard stuff internally.

Bretton Woods, the UN, IMF, and the postwar global order weren’t hashed out in democratic debate, but drafted by hand-picked elites like John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, operating behind velvet curtains.

Postwar containment — perhaps the most-impactful commitment in US history — was sustained not through democratic consensus but bureaucratic inertia. The national security state created in the 1940s was engineered explicitly to survive political rotation (some unsavory brutes refer to this as the “Deep State”). The CIA, NSA, Alphabet Soup, and State Department were all fortified against the volatility of electoral turnover, because that’s how you get things done.

Fun fact: the petrodollar, the agreement the US made with Saudia Arabia where they’d provide military defense in exchange for denominating and selling their oil in USD, was made in a handshake side deal during the Nixon administration. Nothing formal was passed through democratic means and Congress never sanctioned it.

The petrodollar is kind of its own insulated military institution, generating material demand for USD and helping sustain American trade deficits. This oligarchical decision has sustained resolute commitment over decades, because it’s so gosh darn helpful for us! We’re pretty good at committing to things if they’re really, really in our self-interest.

How these institutions operate isn’t debated in town halls, but crafted by elite policy mandarins existing outside the approval of the unwashed masses; who are mostly completely unaware of what these institutions even do. That’s why containment and commitment lasted, because it didn’t require your neighbor’s opinion every four years.

These exceptions prove the rule. America can invest like a sovereign when it routes around its own internal trading noise, ceasing to be a true democracy and kinda sorta behaving like an oligarchy in the process.

When existential stakes are high enough to override voter sentiment, or when institutions are deliberately cordoned off from popular-vote meddling, commitment becomes possible. But absent these exceptions, the structure reverts and the Yankee day trader takes the reigns.

Concluding

US governance has many positives. We all ultimately vote with our feet, and I vote to live here over most other countries. But keep in mind tradeoffs are embedded in all frameworks. Transience is a foundational feature of “every vote counts the same” democracy, for better and worse. Also keep in mind… America is a young country.

There isn’t some massive, robust history to point to regarding how this empire and its methods have persisted beyond history’s well-known cycles. Spend some time in Europe, you’ll feel the multi-multi-century age differences. 250 years is a whopping three human lifecycles. Just, you know, keep that in mind if you think it’s worked so far, so it’ll work forever.

The core of American democracy — designed primarily to thwart authoritarianism and political violence through regular rotation of power — also prevents strategic consistency and durable decisions. The Founders built a system to stop kings, and in doing so inadvertently built one that can't play chess against kingdoms.

America rotates presidents at roughly the same rate as a call center manager. Putin has served under five US presidents. Xi has dealt with eight throughout his political career. I bet their internal memos list the US president they’ll be speaking to as *INSERT NAME*.

Democratic societies optimize for different values: mostly greater degrees of expression and political representation. However the frequency of these electoral expressions devolves into liability when facing adversaries who don’t need to check Gallup polls to see what their opinions and priorities should be that week.

Embedded in every decision of consequence is a tradeoff of some kind. You cannot make the same trade forever and expect to have an advantage; this applies to any domain in life. Markets simply paint the clearest numerical picture of it, and give the swiftest feedback, when the trade stops working.

Democracies swap calculated consistency for inclusiveness, long-term planning for public accountability, and competence for whoever’s most popular. Monarchy tends to present the inverse of these strengths and weaknesses. A democratic framework is a populist one, the only real difference is whether you support the outcome of the vote. They are synonymous when you strip away ideological veneers. Democracy = I like the outcome; Populism = I do not like the outcome.

The other true sovereigns function as patient monarchies, and have learned the rhythm of American populist volatility. They know you don’t make telescopic deals with the US and expect them to stick to it. You perform with it, dance with it, flatter, and never mistake a temporary position for permanent policy. Let it exhaust itself with internal arguments while quietly building the world you want your descendants to inherit.

American democracy, designed to prevent the concentration of power domestically, must now compete against nations wielding that concentrated power internationally. Our methods to stop tyrants at home struggles to engage them abroad.

The nature of equilibrium accounting means any pronounced strength in one domain results in a corresponding weakness in another. The Founders' greatest success for the homeland has a commensurate vulnerability outside of it. They weren’t wrong about tyranny, they simply had to decide which form of tyranny to defend against, and which tradeoff they preferred. Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcomes.

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Related Essays:

If you chronically use the word "indigenous" in political contexts to frame people as victims, we can roughly approximate how active your left insula and ACC is.

We can triangulate how conservative you are by your use of the word "the" and your reaction to a puff of air in your ear. Political stances are exposed in subconscious linguistic patterns and visceral reactions you have no control over.

That being said, what conversation is actually being had in this post? He’s responding to a guy trying to present “indigenousness” claims as some kind of concrete discussion about “who got there first”. BAP’s response is on the right track, however I don’t think he takes it far enough.

"Native" and "indigenous" should not be analyzed like you’re having a technical discussion; there isn’t any genuine concern for objective history embedded within them in contemporary politics. These words are effectively moral neologisms. They are not deployed to describe a group of people in any academic sense, these terms are facilitators of political narratives.

For liberal temperaments, these words are proxies for "the vulnerable and/or weak". If someone is depicted as vulnerable, they are more easily subject to harm; if someone is portrayed as weak, their situation is more readily described as unfair. The ethic of care and fairness is the substrate of liberal morality; all political information is filtered through this lens.

It doesn't matter who already was/wasn't in a country based on some arbitrary factoids curated to form a tidy tale. It is trivially easy to cherrypick data tidbits to promote a story that suits your moral priors; the higher your verbal intelligence, the better you’ll be at this.

Facts do not influence ethical axioms, because facts have nothing to do with values.

Accepting migrants to atone for colonization? Ireland never colonized anyone. Doesn’t matter. The Irish are wealthy and European, they fit an “oppressor” moral framework for an extremist liberal interpretation that no longer perceives harm and fairness domestically, but globally. Justification simply takes on a new shape for why they need to open their borders and aid the weak. The story is modified and the end goal is the same.

Narratives are not instruments of policy persuasion, but ethical justification.

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Moral Algorithms

We approach most political topics knowing the outcomes we want and construct post-hoc rationalizations to defend positions we've already embraced. Everyone does this, to do this is to be human.

This is the conservative and liberal algorithmic baselayer:

Liberal moral foundations and framing:

• provide care/reduce harm

  • harm reduction often accompanied by oppression claims

• promote fairness (synonymous with equality)

The superficial heuristic liberals in decadent environments typically employ to assess care/harm and fairness/cheating is equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunity.

Liberals broadly refuse to accept genetic realities for disparate performance, so any non-equitable outcome is de facto evidence of an absence of equality of opportunity. They are all nurture, no nature. This is predicated on what’s possibly the most prevalent tenet of Western faith: the Blank Slate.

“This theory informs basically everything you’ve been trained to think about human capabilities and biodiversity. Whether you’re rightwing or leftwing, both adhere to Blank Slate gospel in their own way.

Blank Slate Theory is a religious origin story. It’s the liberal democracy version of Immaculate Conception.

Just as Jesus was immaculately conceived without sex as the son of God, citizens in a liberal democracy are immaculately conceived without genetic differences as blank slates.

In the liberal democracy genesis tale, everyone emerges from the womb as gray goo, with nothing biologically ingrained. Able to be molded into whatever policy makers deem best. The Immaculate Conception Blank Slate precept is a fiction used to advance all kinds of misleading fabrications about the human condition and our organic variation. We lie about our innate differences, rather than embrace them. We pretend, rather than confront.

Genetic configuration is neoliberal Original Sin, and the Blank Slate doctrine serves as our secular baptism, washing away the stain of biological determinism.

We can’t stand being told we have predetermined programming, as it’s definitionally limiting to our sense of self. We like hearing we can become an astronaut, physicist, or elite musician if we just put in the work.”

From Biofoundationalism Part II: The Moral Genotype

If you assume we’re all Blank Slate gray goo, it makes sense if the opportunities were the same then the outcomes would also be the same! A lack of equal outcome is thus sufficient proof of lack of fairness, producing harm. Blank Slatism is the holy scripture through which harm-reducing, fairness-promoting narratives flow.

In modern times, this noble-seeming lie is used to weaponize the application of care/harm and fairness/cheating moral foundations. Radical manifestations of this morality results in unrealistic expectations of equality, denialism of natural power laws, lies regarding why disparities exist, and leads to communist-type policy decisions at the social and economic level.

Blank Slatism is a non-negotiable religious precondition in Western societies, similar to not embracing Allah as your God if you lived in Iran. There is no amount of FACTS and LOGIC that will change the faith. It is not a conclusion you arrived at logically, and logic will not be what brings you out of it.

Understanding these liberal moral motivations and the grand “axiom” that underpins their narratives, here is the leftist moral algorithm and political output for economic migrants and societal underperformers:

• Identify weak group (the moderate liberal identifies this nationally, the radical liberal applies this globally) —>

• Attribute inequality of outcomes to lack of opportunity (unfair), or oppressor misdeeds (harm). This externalizes blame on the oppressor group —>

• Disparate outcomes are thus due to lack of fairness, creating harm for weak. Harm will be reduced via policies that advance fairness —>

• Assert moral authority and create post-hoc narrative for the disparity that blames the strong groups —>

• Advance fairness-coded political solutions

Conservatives have moral algorithms too. I’ll deconstruct examples of these in other essays, you can see a quasi-variation of one here in Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment.

If you want an exercise in futility, go spend time researching if the IncaBinka tribe originally sprung forth from Andorra or whatever. Your FACTS are powerless here, because this is not a fact-based discussion, it's a moral one. Moral discussions benefit from factual grounding, however facts do not determine values. Facts inform the implementation of values, they do not alter them.

Facts don't care about your feelings, but more importantly feelings don't care about your facts. Understand the conversation you’re really having, it’s one of competing moral languages, not scholarly fact checks.

It is morally motivated feelings, not facts, that inform values, which craft narratives, which produce political orientations and stances. The moral is expressed through the political. This is all downstream of your temperament, and your temperament is a derivative of your cognitive architecture.

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Presuming Deities

We are not genetically configured to all have the same morality and consider them equally. Nor could we even if we were all Blank Slates, as it implicitly presumes we can become God: perfectly ethical, balancing all values at all times, evenly incorporating contesting morality that often conflicts in practice. This is the presupposition of a deity, not a man.

You cannot balance all six moral foundations, they cannot exist in harmony within one human mind. To value all equitably is to effectively value none; you must have biases towards certain ones to advocate and defend them. You are a man, not an angel.

It’s to our benefit that we have opposing moral filters:

“Competing moral blueprints are not coincidences of culture, but critical components of a naturally occurring, equilibrium-sustaining dyad. The masculine and feminine, the conservative and liberal: these are dyads. Not merely oppositions but symbiotic polarities, like inhale and exhale for civilizational breathing. This cultivates a moral ecosystem where contrasting beliefs lead to a more-resilient whole. Our orientations, priorities, principles, and motivations are designed to be varied and supposed to be in productive conflict.

Consider if the opposite were true, we’re all architected to absorb information identically: this would necessarily mean all values and moral doctrines can be encapsulated in one person. You can be morally everything everywhere all at once if you read the right books and grow up in the right place.

We are animals built for group cooperation; we are genetically fashioned to supplement each other’s strengths and compensate for weaknesses. A species that has evolved not as isolated individuals but as a collective, which necessarily means our traits have been engineered for diversity, not uniformity. A mosaic rather than a monolith. Developed to exist within societies, we are genetically tailored… to be different.”

- From Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment

We are a species evolved for group strategy and collaboration. Hierarchies are how we organize, and dyads are how we balance. Your ancestors did not evolve alone; they were cultivated amongst each other, filling different civilizational roles. This means our traits gestated over thousands of years to not be the same, but complementary within a collective. Different by design.

It would not be evolutionarily advantageous if we all valued the same things in the same ways at the same times in the same environments. Moral variability is useful for human adaptability. All moral foundations have varying utility, contingent on environment; it’s conducive to collective survival we have ingrained ethical variation between individuals within a society.

No human is impeccably moral, because no human can neutrally incorporate and embody the six moral foundations simultaneously. We all have moral algorithms that are a product of temperamentally encoded sets of values, and these hardwired neural preferences are expressed through our political beliefs. Political biology. Biofoundationalism.

A balanced presence of liberal morality is a good thing; it’s indicative of a prosperous, domesticated environment. Whether it’s a positive is a matter of degree and the parochiality of its focus. Helpful when it augments, corrosive when it consumes. The dosage makes it so.

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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

Applied Biofoundationalism:

• Truth is Found Through Motion

• 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

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

All chapters, including derivative essays called Applied Biofoundationalism, are linked at the end.

I listened to this while writing. Enjoy.

A dyad is a pair of oppositional and interdependent elements, each identified in reference to the other. E.g. day is undefined without night; left is unknown without right.

Prelude

Facts don’t care about your feelings, but more importantly feelings don’t care about your facts. This asymmetry defines modern political discourse.

The causal arrow runs in one direction: instinctive feelings generate beliefs, which we use to craft narratives, curating facts to reinforce what we viscerally perceive to be true. Which is to say what we consider moral. That similar sets of facts produce different conclusions is a feature of our political biology, not a bug. What looks like dysfunction is actually group-level design.

We evolved within collectives, not as individuals.

Competing moral blueprints are not coincidences of culture, but critical components of a naturally occurring, equilibrium-sustaining dyad. Masculine and feminine, conservative and liberal: these are dyads. They are complements that augment society’s moral ecosystem; one where contrasting beliefs lead to a more-resilient whole. We evolved in GROUPS, not as INDIVIDUALS.

Our orientations, priorities, principles, and motivations are designed to be varied and supposed to be in productive conflict. This is not a shortcoming; it’s evolutionarily beneficial. Oppositional, symbiotic moral polarities act as an inhale and exhale for civilizational breathing.

The reality behind these statements is apparent when you invert their claims: imagine if we were all architected to absorb information identically. This would necessarily mean all ethical values could be encapsulated in one person. You can be morally everything everywhere all at once if you read the right books and grow up in the right place!

Imagine assuming this about sexual or morphological characteristics: they can all be embodied within one person. Ascribing this premise to temperament, cognition, or politics is equally ridiculous.

The rightwing worships ‘Sovereign Individual’, the leftwing sanctifies ‘Blank Slate’: these are the same fictions with different political scaffolding. Twin myths against biology, wearing different civic religion vestments.

We are encoded to emphasize diametric moral claims: just as a symphony requires distinct notes in counterpoint to achieve harmony, so too does a society require disparate moral dispositions to stay balanced. All things are poison, and nothing is without poison.

Not recognizing these inborn neural disparities as temperamental is tantamount to believing anyone can be an athlete, intellectual, masculine, or feminine, if they just… put their minds to it. A Blank Slate/Sovereign Individual presupposition: a religious stance rooted in pure mythological hope.

Morality and temperament differences are genetic, like any other traits we accept as innate. This is a good, useful thing that goes unappreciated at micro scale, but its utility is easily seen at the macro, societal one. Structurally countervailing forces within a populace facilitate superior scaled human coordination. Nature’s way of fostering moral homeostasis: one that evolves as our environment requires.

The error is not that we disagree. The error is believing disagreement is error.

The natural dyads of masculine/feminine and conservative/liberal yield complementary moral frameworks, gestated by Darwinian pressures to advance human survival and prosperity. One is not ‘bad’ and the other ‘good’; they are mutualistic elements that further human coordination.

We are animals built for scalable group cooperation, genetically fashioned to supplement each other’s strengths and compensate for weaknesses. A species evolved not as isolated individuals but as a collective, which means our cognitive traits are engineered for diversity, not uniformity. A mosaic rather than a monolith. Developed to exist within societies, we are inherently tailored to be different.

Internalizing these hardcoded disparities — as well as how and why they manifest — is Biofoundationalism’s intention. You are going up against neurally programmed instruction sets when you engage with the moral principles of The Other.

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It’s Not “Fake News”, It’s “Fake Narrative”

Depending on your takeaways from a set of facts, one narrative will seem true and the other false; identical facts frequently produce opposing narratives and conclusions. This indicates you're not engaging in objective debate when discussing conflicting political philosophies, but witnessing a promotional war over which virtues deserve primacy. Two moral languages talking past each other.

There is nothing to ‘fix’ here; this is simply part of the human condition.

The narratives we form are expressions of our values. Values are predicated on your morality, your morality derives from your temperament, and your temperament is biologically imposed. As discussed in Part II, there are moral genotypes and political phenotypes; political biology is real. Your temperament informs how you interpret and respond to facts and reflexively sort them into stories.

This is why the overwhelming majority are indifferent to facts that contradict their narrative, because facts don’t refute values.

Facts cannot change someone’s morality, because you can’t reprogram biological temperament with words.

A person’s ‘educated stance’ is saturated with post-hoc justifications for innate programming. The adage “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people” is true, but incomplete. It’s better understood as: you don’t have morals, your morals have you. The possession runs much deeper than just ‘ideas’.

Neurological predispositions exert a gravitational pull on ethical intuitions no one can escape.

The moral foundations ascendant in society (resulting in which narratives become widely accepted and which policies follow suit) shift with the utility of those values within the environment. Morality useful in hardship isn’t equally useful in prosperity. Ideals that help you win a war don’t carry the same utility when determining social safety nets. Biofoundationalism IV elaborates on how the environment dictates the expression of societal values.

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Fact Check < Narrative Check

We see the facts we want. An illustration:

Here is a list of twenty facts in random order. I bet some stick out to you as more correct than others. Notice which ones feel true and which feel like propaganda; that’s your temperament talking.

• Neural pathways allow pain sensation as early as 12 weeks

• 61% of Americans support legal abortion (Pew)

• WHO estimates 23,000 annual deaths globally from unsafe abortions

• There are long adoption waiting lists with many couples waiting years

• 90% of abortions occur before 13 weeks

• Fetal cardiac activity detectable at ~6 weeks

• Estimated 5,000 annual US deaths from unsafe abortions pre-Roe

• 96% of biologists surveyed say life begins at fertilization

• Bans don't work: Latin America (abortion largely illegal) has higher abortion rate (44 per 1,000) than Europe (29 per 1,000) and US (17 per 1,000)

• Critical exceptions needed for rape/incest/health

• All major organs present by week 10 of development

• 75% of abortion patients are low-income

• Premature infant survival possible at 21 weeks

• Fetus shows brain activity in week 6, touch response at week 8

• Legal abortion access linked to reduced maternal mortality

• 60% of abortion patients are already mothers

• Only 1.3% of abortions occur after 21 weeks

• 38 states have fetal homicide laws (double homicide for killing pregnant woman)

• 95% of women don't regret their abortion after 5 years

• 63 million U.S. abortions performed since 1973

Lots of facts here, how do we sort them? With moral instincts.

Is your response to some of these sympathetic? Perhaps a twinge of disgust? Your ACC and insula are constructing a narrative taking shape in your head right now. If you made an “ick face” or scoffed while reading any, your insula sends its regards; it’s responsible for sympathy responses in liberals and disgust reactions in conservatives. The story writes itself; you just hold the pen.

Here’s how you’d organize these facts into partisan narratives, depending on what you instinctively feel is morally ‘true’. Just the facts, man.

Both form compelling narratives and are replete with factual fact-y-ness. You could even swap some around, depending on how you frame the fact! For example: the 1.3% fact (#10 in pro-life column) could augment a pro-choice stance if you present it such that there’s no need to limit abortion access at 21 weeks since women naturally self-regulate around that time. Thus, if it happens beyond then, it must be an edge case requiring special consideration, and the woman knows best.

Here are the moral foundations we draw from when assessing information:

Pro-choice fact curation is led by the Care/Harm moral foundation as it relates to the mother, and the Liberty/Oppression foundation regarding female choice by depicting restrictions as oppressive to women.

Pro-life facts are compiled almost exclusively by the Sanctity/Degradation moral foundation applied to the fetus and sanctity of life. You could also interpret it as Care/Harm in relation to the fetus, however conservative temperaments tend to be primarily concerned with violations of what’s considered sacrosanct (life in this case) rather than protection of the weak.

You cannot uphold all values equally. The very essence of moral conviction is unavoidably hierarchical in that you must prioritize certain virtues over others in order to have them at all. To value all equally is to effectively value none.

All moral decisions require tradeoffs, which means you elevate one value over another. If no tradeoff is made, you make no decision of consequence. If you sacrifice nothing, you decide nothing.

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Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment

It's morally governed feelings, not facts, that drive narratives; these narratives then shape political policy. Facts matter for implementing policies, not for persuading those who hold them. Wherever ethical certainty runs deep, facts are artillery support for positions already occupied.

Do you support the new congestion tax? Public transportation investment? For tepid topics like this, facts can sometimes work. Not every political disagreement is a forceful moral output, only most of them (though I’m sure some temperamental libertarians are seething at the notion of public investment and taxes of any kind).

As a simple heuristic: the more morally polarizing the topic, the more impervious it is to facts. High-conviction assertions aren’t a product of logical deliberation, but outputs of your amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, and insula architecture.

We know with a brain scan what you believe without you saying a word. The mind's silent confession precedes the tongue's testimony.

Facts are relevant to the execution of ideas; they do not alter advocacy of the ideas themselves nor convince people their narratives are wrong.

“Wow, you actually were unaware of this FACT? Also you failed to mention this FACT and another FACT that undermines your whole world view. Read a book!”

“Aha foolish you are for completely ignoring these little-known FACTS over here. Which when viewed in conjunction with this FACT, shows you to be nothing more than a chimp in shoes!” - 98% of political debates

Intelligent people with high verbal IQs are more adept at obfuscating their moral imperatives with carefully arranged info that concocts convincing narratives. This creates illusions that their stance is more correct or ‘informed’. The uninitiated mistake eloquence for objectivity. They don’t have better conclusions; they have better camouflage.

Politically “educated” means a masterful recall of factoids that elevates an interpretation and advocacy of a narrative. The verbally skilled dominate political domains because they’re the most compelling proponents of their moral foundations and rally those with similar ethical constitutions.

The verbally gifted tout their moral programming at the political-policy level, layering on veneers of objectivity (arguments look like: “You’re uneducated”). The lower-IQ moral lobbyist arrives at the same destination via cruder routes (arguments look like: “You’re evil and dumb”). Both espouse their temperaments all the same. One has miles of factual sediment to traverse; the other just points at the mountain and says 'that one’.

Simple folk cut to the chase and unabashedly make virtuous declarations, unburdened by informational pageantry. The academic, pundit, and politician wade through layers of data gravel to reach the same biologically rooted instruction set. Facts don’t take us to different moral destinations, they help us tout the ones we already wanted.

As you’re aware, there are many facts. Which do you adhere to? Only the good and true ones? Ah, don’t we all.

Facts endorsing our beliefs are evidence. Facts undermining our views require nuance! A coherent narrative is born in the gap between these two standards. We elide over what’s inconvenient and are staunch advocates of what supports our priors.

We all do this; it’s not specific to any party or ideology. Assuming good faith, it’s not intentionally deceptive or manipulative; in fact it’s almost entirely unconscious. Simply part of the nuts and bolts of human nature. Our amygdala and insula are the conductors, we are the vessel. Moral genotypes presenting as political phenotypes, guided by temperamental directives we do not control.

Rather than hate The Other, remember he defends values you’re blind to, and vice versa. His strengths are your weaknesses. As individually frustrated as you may be by this, we’re collectively improved by it. Nature doesn’t do coincidences at scale.

What’s ‘liberal’ is only known by what’s conservative. What’s ‘conservative’ is defined by what’s liberal. Dyads are interdependent and defined by their opposite, and healthiest when its components are seen as complements, not enemies.

A 'fact check' would be better understood as a narrative check. Or more accurately still, a morality check.

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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

• 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

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

Biofoundationalism is a multi-chapter series deconstructing the political cycles of nations, their societal shifts, and the thermodynamics that facilitate it. It approaches the processes bottom up, through a moral, biological, and physics-based lens. Part I introduces this frame from the social layer.

All Biofoundationalism chapters, including derivative essays called Applied Biofoundationalism, are linked at the end. Enjoy.

ABSTRACT

Biofoundationalism:

There are moral genotypes and political phenotypes. Your moral foundations are rooted in your temperament, and your temperament is biologically imposed. The biological informs the temperamental, the temperamental instructs the moral, and the moral expresses as the political. Moral beliefs are not a choice, and political stances are not informed decisions.

Biological traits (differing brain structures) that shape temperaments are evenly distributed across human collectives (societies), but rarely evenly expressed. Whether a moral genotype/political phenotype is fully expressed depends on the economic prosperity and safety of the environment it inhabits.

The environment dictates the expression, as it does with many genotypes and their phenotypes. This is known as gene-environment interaction. Humans are not an exception to nature’s rules. To change habits, you must change the habitat.

Our instruction set comes from biology, and biology takes its directives from physics. We are creatures that adhere to bottom-up laws while telling ourselves top-down stories to rationalize our beliefs. There are rules, and we do not operate outside them. We are of them.

Moral Foundations Utility Theory:

Conservative moral foundations take hold when you’re in the desert, canteen half-empty, scanning the horizon for threats. Liberal moral foundations bloom when you’re in a walled garden of plenty, allowing you to prioritize poetry and take survival as a given. Where a society exists within this spectrum informs its political expression.

Societies begin at conservative moral foundations out of necessity, then drift inexorably to liberal ones as resources and luxuries accrue. This drift is rooted in utility and a sign of success.

Conservative moral foundations are inherently order-based, hierarchical, loyalty-driven, and prioritize accumulating resources. You abide by these because you have to.

Liberal moral foundations are inherently fairness-motivated, resource-distributing, and harm-avoiding. You abide by these because you get to.

You cannot redistribute resources if you don’t have any. You cannot concern yourself with protecting the weak when the strong are fighting for survival.

A nation oriented by rightwing/conservative/masculine moral foundations is either at war or poor. A nation oriented by leftwing/liberal/feminine moral foundations is lavish and comfortable. There is no hedonism in poverty, and no discipline in decadence. The environment dictates the expression of a society’s moral emphasis.

This produces the well-known leftward shift in a nation’s values over time. Liberalism advances as prosperity does, because the utility of liberal morality increases as economic success does. Decadence feminizes, hardship masculinizes. Masculine because you have to, feminine because you get to. Hard times, strong men, good times, weak men…

Thus Cthulhu swims left… because he has nowhere else to go.

However, an ongoing leftward shift eventually degrades into widespread chaotic behavior and results in a forceful reset rightwards. Returning to order-based morality, correcting the entropy that liberal excess allowed.

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Moral Foundations: Conservative & Liberal Dyad

There is objective truth in STEM and competing moral foundations talking past each other for most else. The moral foundation taxonomy and their conservative vs liberal emphasis comes from social psychologist Jon Haidt.

All of these moral foundations are important. There’s embedded evolutionary wisdom why human collectives advocate and incorporate them. They’re evenly distributed for a reason; nature does not do coincidences at scale. Moral foundations are best understood as constituent elements of scaled human coordination.

When there’s such a clear behavioral bifurcation and persistently even split amongst animals within a system, it’s self-evidently a natural dyad. Masculine and feminine. Conservative and liberal. These are dyads. Synergistically antagonistic. Adversarially complementary. Symbiotically combative. Undefined without the other side.

The conservative/liberal split in societies is not a product of people finding the ‘right’ books (the other side clearly having read the ‘wrong’ books) and coming to the correct, high-minded, duly educated opinions driven by “the facts” (the other side just needs some better facts and they’ll come around, of course).

Differing morality (genotypes) results in different political expressions (phenotypes). These genetic value sets are structurally at odds and must be understood at the collective level, not individual. We are a species developed for group strategy and coordination. We evolved within collectives, not as isolated individuals. The ‘sovereign individual’ and ‘blank slate’ myths are two sides of the same coin denying this reality.

If we can figure out your political beliefs with just a brain scan and amygdala activity, we are having a biological discussion wearing political drag. The neurology behind this is deconstructed in Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype.

Hypermoralization

A healthy civilization has an equal expression of each moral foundation. When some are militantly emphasized over others, a corrosive, unsustainable situation is taking shape.

Hypermoralization: Toxic fixation on one or two moral foundations above all else. The Hypermoralized saturate apolitical topics with militant ethical stances. During Hypermoralized periods you’ll find institutions, corporations, and media adopting narrow, rigid moralizing purity, disregarding (and often demonizing) conflicting values.

Hypermoralization is a fever that inflames one set of virtues and dogmatically asserts moral authority. It manifests through one of two poles:

• Liberal Hypermoralization: Values of equality and fairness are sacrosanct to pathological degree. Monomaniacally fixated on harm reduction.

  • Every Disney princess becomes a diversity consultant. Corporate ads sanctimoniously promote inclusion both in message and model choices: ugliness is touted as beautiful. Standards are by definition exclusionary and thus unfair. Rules are oppressive. Anything extoling hierarchies is verboten.

  • ‘Victim’ and ‘oppressor’ classes are culturally established. The legal system begins to go easy on criminals in the interest of “fairness”, and takes an acute interest in fake, procedural offenses. An obnoxious, omnipresent message politicizes aspects of life previously nonpartisan.

  • This exists within wealthy, domesticated settings.

• Conservative Hypermoralization: A consecrated view towards purity, loyalty, and order saturates moral branding. An all-consuming pursuit of rigid order.

  • You get intense nationalism and in-group focused, patriotic displays in domains that should be neutral. Wartime-style propaganda pervades, with an “I want YOU to enlist in the US army” energy permeating a nation’s ethos.

  • Draconian law enforcement and excessive penalties for crimes are common. An acute sense of disgust is aggressively shown towards notions of impurity as it relates to body and religion.

  • This exists within strife or poverty.

Hypermoralization occurs in economic or environmental extremes. Hard times elicit Conservative Hypermoralization. Excess comfort enables Liberal Hypermoralization. Moral stances have different utility in different environments and are adopted accordingly. Biofoundationalism refers to this as Moral Foundations Utility Theory, covered further in Part IV and Part V.

The spectrum of wealth between indigence and opulence guides the evenness of civilization’s ethical priorities. As with all things, balance is healthy. A persistent moral asymmetry is a sign of deteriorating circumstances.

A Hypermoralized culture marks the onset of a political atmosphere where you won’t convince anyone of anything if they don’t fundamentally value the same things as you. People become politically doctrinaire, inflexible, and socially intransigent. There are decreasing political solutions to this irreconcilable polarization.

Hypermoralization means people don’t see political differences as competing values with something to offer, but as a Manichean war of good vs evil.

Opposing partisan factions start functionally speaking different languages. Two moral codes yelling past each other. The Other is deemed heartless, imbecilic, etc.. When you view the world through only one moral filter, political communication breaks down. I can’t convince you of anything, you can’t convince me of anything.

Extreme environments beget extreme behaviors. Luxury conditions beget luxury beliefs. They sow the seeds of their own reversal.

This goes on until it can’t.

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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

• 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

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

• Part I: Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class

• Part II: Touching Soul, Touching Senses: The Art You Deserve

• Part III: The Insect Method: Tariffs, Labor, & Surpluses

• Part IV: Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Market

It was written while listening to this song (a favorite of mine).

Prelude

Many nominally independent, unrelated things — such as art, political candidates, and culture — flow from dislocations you wouldn’t expect. We believe these are top-down choices: meaning outputs of unique, agentic human decisions.

In doing so, we overlook the bottom-up nature of existence: a vast majority of the actions, beliefs, and stances we adopt are inputs from our environment, imposed on us by circumstance.

For example: it’s unintuitive to think sustained trade imbalances influence our artistic preferences. Or that a nation’s manufacturing base substantially informs its culture. These are not as unconnected as they appear.

Art does not inform society, but emerges from it; it’s a symptom, an output, not an input. It all starts with the eudaimonia (well-being, purpose, fulfillment) felt by its people.

Environments Dictate Expressions

Art does not breed culture; a culture breeds art. Culture does not inform an environment; an environment informs a culture. The fish at the bottom of the ocean didn’t create that pressure, that pressure created them. What's true for abyssal creatures echoes for humans in that we don't choose our adaptations, our circumstances shape them for us. The environment dictates the expression.

The disposition of a people is downstream of the comfort, prosperity, and purpose they collectively possess. A society has agency in respect to shaping its environment, but it does not have agency in respect to what the environment imposes upon it while inside it. You can work to find light bulbs in a dark room so you can see; but when you’re in a dark room, you cannot see. This illustration is not unique to the room.

Sad times beget sad art, uplifting times, uplifting art. What was Picasso going through during his Blue Period? Was the art responsible for his depression, or was his depression responsible for his art? The answer to this question is not unique to him, and it scales.

It’s inverting causality to believe expressive output from Nirvana, David Foster Wallace, and the like were responsible for the nihilistic malaise that crept in around the 90s. I’ve seen frequent bemoaning of the grunge movement as responsible for the anomie and ennui-infused listlessness that the period is known for. This is misguided.

Symptoms do not produce illnesses; illnesses produce symptoms.

This distinct 90s vibe shift was rooted in a national orientation that went from emphasizing eudaimonism, to hedonism. From lionizing production, to extolling consumption. A mindset that prioritized pleasure, in lieu of purpose. This is when it started to be cool, to be sad.

A melancholic society seeks melancholic art. A once-upbeat people become forlorn as they elevate hedonic sensations over eudaimonic soul. What changed? The environment.

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Product-Market Fit (PMF): For Business and Art

Picture Elvis-style music being produced in the 2020s. Now imagine Nirvana-esque grunge performances in the 1950s.

Now envision if you’d still know the names Cobain or Presley if this were the case.

I assert you would not. I believe they would have failed miserably had they tried to sell these products in different surroundings. The essence and spirit of those decades feel like they’re in such complete contradistinction to each other we might as well be talking about different countries. The messages that Elvis and Nirvana offered had no PMF in each other’s eras. Why?

In 1957, the average American was 27 years old, married with children, and likely working in manufacturing. By 1991, that same American was 33, increasingly likely to be divorced (half of marriages end in divorce around this point), and watching the factory job that could support a family on one salary evaporate into the Pacific.

How is this related to art? You incrementally lose the ability to sell Hound Dog-style tunes to a generation with economic anxiety, just like Smells Like Teen Spirit doesn’t go viral for a population achieving the American Dream. Elvis exudes a vibrant wholesome optimism that feels corny and contrived now. Nirvana’s depressive jams are saturated with apathy and indifference. Zoomers are the zenith of this: the less you care, the cooler you are.

We don’t have feelings because we have art; we have art because we have feelings. Emotions precede the art. And our situations precede the emotions.

The predominant creative and artistic output of a time reflects the sentiments of its people, because otherwise they wouldn’t consume it. If you think art informs culture and not vice versa, pick artists/performers from the 1950s and consider honestly if they’d be successful if they came out today with the same message and songs.

These environments, despite being on the same physical soil, are basically different planets. Apparent in the dramatic change in dress, speech, and even physical shape of the people then and now (we’re now orb shaped and obese). Different environments produce and consume different art.

You cannot sell nihilism to a society on the rise. A culture ascending doesn’t stomach despairing stories. And a civilization in decline will not absorb a hopeful, uplifting message. Art mirrors the soul of its creator and spirit of the times.

Art is an extension of culture. Culture is a property of its people. People are products of their environment.

The environment dictates the expression of what we feel, how we coordinate, and communicate. Art channels collective sentiments and wouldn’t be consumed if it didn’t resonate; the demand comes first, the art comes second. Demand is an extension of need and circumstances.

Sure consent can be manufactured and consensus manipulated (a top-down argument), but some things simply cannot be sold to a healthy person. You can massage, encourage, and influence… but you fundamentally cannot market melancholy to a healthy, viral young man who exercises and has his way with his girlfriend 5x a week.

Why does a society collectively become less healthy, depressed, and stop having kids? Just a bunch of independent, self-directed decisions made by sovereign individuals? We evolved within collectives, exist within collectives, and are not immune from the health of that collective. Western myth insists everyone’s an individual, nature sees it a bit differently.

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Touching Soul, Touching Senses

When art speaks to you, it articulates something deep down you already sensed and were unable to convey. Art reveals beliefs and aesthetics inhabiting you

This isn’t confined to creative expressions. Jordan Peterson and Nassim Taleb are famous for similar reasons: they’re tellers of ancient truths, repackaged for modernity. They aren’t saying anything new, but reminding you of wisdom that humanity reliably forgets in 80-year cycles. Peterson's “clean your room” is Marcus Aurelius with a Canadian accent. Taleb's “skin in the game” is Hammurabi's Code dressed in probability theory.

In a culture deracinated from the roots that allowed it to prosper, the oldest ideas can feel the most revolutionary. So unaware of bedrock axioms that Bronze Age wisdom sounds like disruptive innovation! These are old, new ideas that register when you’re in need of their message. They are Lindy in the deepest meaning of the word.

That’s what it means when something speaks to you: it takes a subconscious awareness and makes it conscious. It turns an embodied understanding into a verbal one.

Human fulfillment can be broadly placed into two categories: the kind that stimulates your soul and your senses. You need a blend of both for a balanced life.

Artistic stimulation is when you encounter a message that resonates with your beliefs, morals, or aesthetics. It echoes in you. It touches your soul.

Hedonistic stimulation is when you encounter a sensation that ignites your flesh. It arouses or excites you. It touches your senses.

When a society is sanguine, it prioritizes artistic stimulation; when it’s decaying, it holds hedonistic pleasures above all else. The prevailing art of a period and what it values is a derivative of a civilization’s disposition. A concurrent or lagging indicator, not a leading one.

Social media doesn't cause narcissism any more than Nirvana is responsible for nihilism. They provide a lens into whatever spiritual poverty already exists. A sort of ironic, post-modern discontent began to take hold in 1980-90s America and carries on today. The grunge movement was only a proxy for it.

Symptom, not cause:

-------------- PAUSE --------------

During the 80s and 90s the fiscal deficit began to expand, the petrodollar, eurodollar, and their network effects essentially gave the US dollar a bottomless pit of demand, causing the deficit to functionally not matter from an insolvency lens (mechanically explained here). US manufacturing and the middle class began to be gutted and outsourced. These are all related.

Why did manufacturing start to vacate the US? What made other countries preferrable when America was so overwhelmingly dominant?

China, Germany, and other chronic surplus nations depress domestic wages below their productivity levels through industrial policies. This creates a substantial competitive advantage for their manufacturing sectors because it reduces labor’s earning power and makes manufacturing cheaper in those countries; this makes their exports comparatively cheaper, and thus more competitive. Companies cluster their factories and supply chains accordingly, based on wherever the labor inputs are lowest.

We call these gross-margin herding effects “globalism”, as the more accurately named “business clustering effects based on surplus-nation wage manipulation that seeks the cheapest labor inputs possible” is bad branding.

The average Chinese worker is about 20% as economically productive as the American one, and if he was paid 20% of the wage, that’d be perfectly fine and would yield no competitive advantage. However, he is paid only about 10-15% of the US wage: this is a substantial edge. Similar dislocations are found in other surplus nations, like Germany. It leads to a race to the bottom for labor’s share of income, all in the name of ‘efficiency’. Globalism means you compete by paying people less.

Structurally underpaying workers is a huge manufacturing advantage, and why entire industries uproot, move abroad, and in the process eviscerate the way of life for the middle class. The long-term side effects of McKinsey-minded medicine:

BUT, this means the trinkets became cheaper, and that means everything became way better! We know everything became better, because the spreadsheet-calculated GDP went up, and the trinkets are now cheaper. That is all there is to know.

But wait, is my purchasing power increasing such that I can consume more of those trinkets while still affording a house? Can I support a family on one income like in the 1950s? Is ther an actual quality-of-life increase to go along with that sweet, sweet Bain and Co. spreadsheet growth? I know it helps in theory, dear economist, but does it help in practice?

Is my well-being enhanced alongside those iPhone unit economics? Because if not, what are these low-price widgets doing for me exactly? If life isn’t improving alongside margins, who cares what the GDP says?

HUSH. The middle class are really happy about this, actually, they just don’t know it yet. Someone should tell them everything is only getting better.

This began in the 1970s, and the ramifications of it are slow to manifest; their second and third-order effects accumulating as this disconnect endures. Sometimes when you knock over Chesterton’s Fence, it takes a while to see what you’ve done.

-------------- RESUME --------------

Populists don’t produce political demand; political demand produces populists. Just as music, art, and culture are not responsible for societal ailments, but symptoms of it, so are the politicians we get.

Populist politicians would have no meaningful constituency if the polity was not in need of their political goods and services. Trump is not the cause of any strife or division, rather he is a symptom of it. There would be no PMF for his nationalist, protectionist platform if it weren't communicating something many felt at a spinal level was critical to address problems that spreadsheet thinking can’t identify.

The market for a political platform emerges from its environment. A shift in environment facilitates a shift in the utility of certain political beliefs over others and how well they sell. Promoting socialism in poverty is like trying to grow sunflowers without any soil; promoting conservatism in prosperity is like trying to grow sunflowers in the winter.

Political platforms are a response to demand; where is that demand coming from? Look to the habitat, not the politician.

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Eudaimonia. Hedonism. Purpose. Consumption.

A market for bleak art followed as eudaimonic, self-actualizing purpose became an afterthought, and hedonistic myopic consumption became the national priority. Time preferences shortened, whimsical pleasures prized. Middle-class wages slowly decimated. Divorce rates rising. A single income now incapable of raising a family on its own. Yet we’re assured all is well, because the GDP says so.

According to McKinsey, Yale, and The Economist, men don’t derive a significant part of their identity and sense of worth from their jobs, because we can’t measure holistic well-being in our expected-value models. Ugh! BUT, we can measure how many Taco Bell Doritos Locos and PlayStations you buy, so stop your complaining, the globalism will continue until morale improves. We are GROWING, don't you want to GROW; this is the ideology of the cancer cell, as well as Harvard Business Review.

Consumption is the north star of globalism, because that’s the only lens through which a supply chain understands the world. Nice for your bottom line, corrosive to the human condition. Optimization erodes the middle.

When nations are solely understood as expected-value calculations, then becoming the best GDP input you can be is your telos. Lead by ‘experts’ who don’t recognize a nation as a civilizational container, only as a production zone with border walls made of Excel columns. What do you mean you don't see it that way? Have you even read an economics book? If you fill your head with a fake science, then you too can understand why residing in a country-sized, low-trust factory floor is good, actually.

A society’s galvanizing force is hedonism when it sees a bigger GDP as its moral apotheosis, and cheaper trinkets as the most noble thing it can achieve. Structuring its industries, labor, society, purpose, and existence around the efficient production and consumption of trinkets. You are not happy when you ACHIEVE you are happy when you CONSUME.

If the material is your sole measurement of success, then the material is what’s sold to you under a false promise of happiness. The economic models say you’re gleeful now, so shut the fuck up and be grateful nothing is built here anymore.

Wait, why are the men getting sadder? Why is the art so blue?? A mystery, truly.

Global trade policy touches art.

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A Cost for Imbalances

To understand the impetus for these issues look at the conditions, view the situation bottom-up. A prolonged, glaring trade deficit and vacating industrial sector produce Nth-order effects that are difficult to discern, but undeniably felt.

The downstream effects of globalism and trade asymmetries eventually shape the well-being of men, women, and how a country comports itself. We are witnessing this in America, as protracted imbalances have frayed the fabric of the US industrial base and middle-class mode of existence. This carries externalities that go beyond income.

When it comes to men and women, the masculine and feminine, who derives their sense of eudaimonism from providing, and who derives it from nurturing? The men suffer first, the women suffer second; if you affect one, you affect the other. The stats on female happiness are degrading too. To harm one is to harm the other. To help one is to help both. To advantage one is to advantage none.

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Closing

A society is deprived of dignity when its citizens are reduced to cog people in a margin-maximizing supply chain. Globalism perceives nations and humans as fungible units of gray goo; it has no concept of country as a human vessel with desire for well-being and meaning. All it sees is one big factory floor. When this false god is your idol, the only stimulation you’ll find is of the senses.

A trait that makes us more conscious than animals is the ability to enjoy and produce artistic meaning. To be able to achieve eudaimonic joys, and not only hedonic pleasures. All creatures do hedonism, but only one has been given the gift of eudaimonism. Globalism’s efficiency obsession defiles this gift and deteriorates swathes of society in its sole pursuit of the cheapest labor humanly possible.

When you deny that a nation serves as a home first, GDP calculation second, what you worship becomes corrosive. “What’s the expected value?” becomes the only pertinent question. To only value the spreadsheet is to worship the spreadsheet. You always worship something, even if it has a number sign, so be careful where you direct your reverence.

When a society's eudaimonia withers, it births the hollow-eyed despondency and populist uprisings we see today. Did you know Detroit used to be the fifth-largest city in America? Once a legitimate global manufacturing powerhouse. Why is it called the Motor City again? That place is an absolute pit now. You’ll find this all across the American middle, while Brookings Institute assures you it’s fine. The byproducts of declining purpose coupled with the pursuit of nearsighted sensations.

Globalist economic thought is equivalent to a nutritionist telling you: “Here you go, have some Pepsi to help you hydrate, here are some processed Cheetos to fuel you. What do you mean these preservatives and pre-packaged foods aren’t nourishing? Look at the nutrition facts, you're nourished! How satiated you are can be found in this number I made, you see.” Fuck you.

A spreadsheet civilization trades Cathedrals for department stores and next-day delivery. A fitting monument to their highest values. Guess which one produces transcendent art? A society gets the art it deserves, because it reaps the fruits of what it decides to worship.

"The root of 'addict' in Latin is the word 'addicere', which means religious devotion.

We all worship and have a religious impulse; we can choose to an extent what we worship. But the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing, simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different.”

— David Foster Wallace

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Related essays:

• Part I: We’ll Give You Things > We’ll Leave You Alone

• Part II: Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Part III: Sovereign Investors & Geopolitical Traders

This essay is part of Applied Biofoundationalism. All chapters are linked at the end. Enjoy.

Prelude

When you're dependent on someone, they wield power over you. The more dependents you have, the more power and influence you have. Dependents do what you say and are more loyal, because they have no other choice. When a child depends on its mother, the dynamic is healthy; when an adult depends on the state, it’s corrosive and ripe for exploitation. It turns an adult into a child, and the state into a parent.

Understood this way, the dominant strategy in wealthy democracies isn’t gaining support for your cool ideas based on The Issue Of The Day; it’s gaining dependents who cannot defect. Loyal soldiers at the ballot box who won’t vote against the hand that feeds them. Viewing democracy through game theory rather than political analysis reveals how and why policies and Overton Windows drift as they do.

If every vote counts the same and you’re campaigning in a prosperous country, what’s a winning political product? Should it trend towards “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or inch towards “you see all this wealth, if you vote for me, I’ll send some your way”? What’s the best way to foster allegiance and loyalty?

The answer to this isn’t a mystery, it’s been playing out empirically over decades. The game theory of democracies creates a structural political lurk leftwards in electoral iterated games. The best way to win a kinetic war is coordination; the best way to win a political war is coordination. An excellent way to instill coordination among millions of people is incentives. The kind of incentives that once you get them, you can’t do without.

“Conservative” or “liberal” governments become a distinction without a difference when you zoom out over 10-year+ timelines in wealthy democracies. It doesn’t matter who’s elected, the machine keeps steadily engorging itself and lurching in one direction. Because state dependents keep growing, because it’s demonstrably a winning formula to cultivate children dependents in wealthy democracies.

You simply buy votes, because you can, because it works. Swims left.

A Political Product Must Be Sold; Who’s Buying It?

In any population, agency follows a power law distribution: observable across every domain where human capability is measured.

You’re not thinking ten or twenty years from now about the long-term health of your nation, that adult stuff doesn’t win elections. You’re thinking: what gets me into office today? We’re in the realm of high-time-preference sales pitches.

The high-agency constitute, at most, 20% of your electorate. The low-agency: 80%. The Pareto Distribution is an iron law, not a suggestion. You need 51% to win. The mathematics alone dictate your strategy. If your nation is rich — with the ability to issue debt and extract from the productive to sell your political product — what’s the dominant strategy?

Government transfer payments have quadrupled since 1990. Swims left.

Handouts. Inexorable government growth. A leftward saunter of the Overton Window of entitlements. This is what it looks like. This is how a Machine generates dependents. This is, sadly, what a series of successful (and myopic) political platforms manifests as.

You know why libertarian ideas don’t sell? People aren’t buying them. Libertarian ideas fail not because they’re poorly marketed, but because there’s not nearly a big enough market for them. They speak to the 20%, and elections are won among the 80%. The underclass doesn’t want your bootstraps.

Everything gradually trends toward policies of low-agency appeasement, because as you expand your base of dependents voters, you gain power. The Overton Window creeps accordingly.

Redirected wealth is not done to generate economic returns, but political ones.

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Pitch Me

The high-agency seek a singular promise: absence. Lower taxes, reduced regulation, governmental restraint. Please go away. To them, less is more. Only once you accrue capital, do you have the luxury of redistributing it.

These are the policies of ascending nations, those working toward achieving wealth.

Pitch: “We’ll leave you alone”

The low-agency ask a simpler question: what’s in it for me? Their vote flows to whomever promises the most: expanded welfare, multiplied subsidies, cascading transfer payments. More is more. The transaction is naked, and nakedness is no impediment to victory. Their vote goes to the highest bidder, there’s far more of them, and every vote counts the same.

These are the policies of descending nations, those trying to redistribute wealth they already have.

Pitch: “We’ll give you things”

This is not a flaw in the system, it is the system, operating as designed. One person, one vote, regardless of contribution, regardless of foresight, regardless of skin in the game.

Who do you structure your product for? How do the real-life trends stack up against this theory?

Per-capita transfer income has expanded 3x faster than other income over the last 50 years. Swims Left.

• The Left advances by creating dependents, buying voter allegiance. “We’ll give you things”.

• The Right must compete by selling a variation of the same product, but a little less so (they’re conservative, after all). The conservative product of “We’ll leave you alone” does not sell against a backdrop of prosperity, so the message becomes “We’ll give you things too, but not as much”.

We'll give you things > We'll leave you alone

Your political choice, then, is not between competing visions but between velocities: either fast liberalism, or liberalism going the speed limit. Conservatism is liberalism driving in a small town; liberalism is liberalism on the Autobahn.

The transfer payments tell the tale. The bloated fiscal budget will never be brought to heel out of ‘principled political beliefs’, but when it ceases to be a viable strategy to keep doing so. You don’t win on reducing handouts until you physically can’t anymore; the 80% do not vote for “I’d like some less, please”.

For the same reason a star cannot grow forever, those transfer payments do have a ceiling

The inexorable nature of this problem is clear, and it’s simple when you strip it down to its constituent parts. We deceive ourselves that these are complex McKinsey-consultant Excel-sheet-style problems, when they’re simply terminally corrupted incentives for both politician and populace. The flaws are structural; the distal cause is democracy and its selection effects.

Selling Magic

Price controls and rent ceilings are not economic illiteracy, they are unfortunate strategic byproducts. They make perfect sense when you understand democracy’s perverse incentive structures, which weigh the ballot of the indigent identically to the industrious.

Political products are sold not on factual merit but on moral resonance. Fact-checking is the province of the already-unconvinced, which is to say, the electorally irrelevant.

People want to know if the stance feels right. Does it cloak acquisition in the language of righteousness? If both answers are yes, you’ve got a great low-agency political product!

Price controls sell fairness: they subsidize the 80% by confiscating potential earnings from the 20%. This is not economic policy; it is wealth transfer dressed in the vestments of justice. And it wins. Empirically. Strategically. Economically? Ha, don’t be naive.

Those who approach this as an economic question find themselves befuddled by the persistence of such policies. They protest — “This never works, look at my studies!” — and fail to recognize that economic efficiency is not the operative standard. You don’t convince anyone to change moral stances with nuanced charts.

Also, what do you mean by “works”? Works… for who?

That’s how you get stuff like this, and you keep getting it, even when it “makes things worse”. Makes things worse, for who…?

This isn’t wild at all. It’s completely rational when you understand the game being played on its real terms, not how it’s nominally presented.

How to determine if a policy “works”

The question of whether a policy ‘works’ is meaningless without first establishing: works for who? On one plane of analysis, price controls are catastrophic failures; on another, they are instruments of electoral permanence.

Say you’re a politician who pitched price controls: you appealed to a moral stance. You invoked fairness. You purchase loyalty with others’ capital. You win. Uh oh, you created a problem, because price controls don’t actually work (no shit).

Your solution to the problem you created? Sell the same product, again! “Those fat cats got greedy and thwarted it, so we need more of the morally just thing I did”. The failure becomes evidence not of flawed theory but of insufficient commitment. You are re-elected to solve the crisis you authored. Real price controls have never been tried!

A formula for state expansion and winning elections in affluent democracies:

Provide morally appealing magic solution to real problem → create bigger problem → claim the solution to the bigger problem is more magic → get re-elected promising more magic → repeat.

School House Rock depictions of democracy obfuscate the game-theoretic reality of its competitive algorithm. Each iteration expands the state, deepens dependency, and entrenches the political actor who promises the next fix.

Manifestly silly economic solutions are routinely promoted during elections. Keep in mind you’re not selling your ideas because they're any good, you’re trying to win iterated games by cultivating dependents.

To do this effectively, you appeal to moral beliefs in service of political platforms that functionally say: “You deserve more than you have, and I will give it to you”. That’s a compelling message for your political product! “Yes please, I’d like some more, and this guy says he’ll give it to me!”. This sells quite well to voters.

What’s the conservative product? “You’ll get less, but that’s actually good for you. Also don’t you care about a balanced fiscal budget?” Ew! Do not want!

Below, JD has brought facts to a political fight, which is kinda like bringing a water balloon to a gunfight. You think the lowest-common-denominator voter will fact-check this and change their mind because of its factuality, JD? They vote on vibes and what you can provide them.

That’s how politicians understand if a policy “works”: does it keep getting me elected? If it gets me elected, it works great.

Don’t analyze if the policy ‘works’ as in “will it produce a good outcome?”. Analyze it from the lens of “will it recruit new voters and please my constituency?”; through this lens, yes, price controls ‘work’. This isn’t an economics discussion; it’s a moral-framing and “what can you do for me” one.

These stances aren’t confusing when you understand the game being played.

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Conservatism That Conserves Nothing

There’s no hedonism in poverty, and no discipline in decadence.

Selling conservatism in prosperity is like trying to grow sunflowers in winter; the environment just isn’t designed for it.

The US spends ~$6.2 trillion per year, and takes in ~$4.4 trillion; this is the low-agency dominant strategy, in chart form. You know what passing a tax cut does? It just makes the deficit larger, because politicians don’t win by campaigning to take away those sweet, sweet transfer payments.

That’s the “conservative” solution: issue more debt so we can “conservatively” cut taxes and do nothing about spending. Because it’s electoral suicide otherwise. Pure high-time-preference corn syrup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

It’s a running joke that conservatives conserve nothing, and it’s true, because they can’t, because they’d lose if they did!

That conservatives conserve nothing is not hypocrisy but inevitability. To actually conserve — to shrink the state, to withdraw benefits — is to commit electoral suicide. They cannot win by doing what they claim to believe. Conservatism is, at its essence, an appeal to duty, responsibility, and delayed gratification: precisely the virtues that prosperity renders dramatically less appealing. This moral messaging is increasingly abandoned as comforts accrue. Luxury conditions beget luxury beliefs, and luxury solutions follow suit.

This is why when conservatives are “in power”, the state does not shrink. Ask yourself seriously why. Not in a superficial way where the conclusion is “they’re all corrupt I tell ya!”, seriously reflect why it’s nearly impossible for anyone to implement conservative rollbacks over substantive timelines in the decadent West. We’re talking 10-year periods and longer, not short-term culture war skirmishes that oscillate on shorter timelines.

People don’t do responsible things because they want to, but because they have to. When life is comfortable, responsibility doesn’t sell. When life loses that comfort, discipline has its day.

Reagan won 49 states in 1984, Brexit was cool, and look how that’s worked out for the UK. Conservatism has waves of blowback-style energy over shorter timelines, but things revert to the leftward trend so long as comfort remains. It is very much a matter of what you must do, and what you may do.

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Democracy’s Endgame

When the vote of the indolent carries identical weight to the industrious, when simple majority suffices regardless of contribution, you have not merely a flawed system but a self-terminating one. You have corrosive incentives to engage in a voter bidding war. Moral hazard, but it’s the people’s moral hazard!

Ascending nations empower their agentic minorities: “We’ll leave you alone”.

Descending nations auction their accumulated wealth to their dependent majorities: “We’ll give you things”.

The former builds; the latter liquidates. The transition from one to the other is democracy’s inevitable arc.

The industrious, the entrepreneurial, the high-agency: they are numerically insufficient. You cannot win elections among the 20%. The less-productive, eagerly dependent 80% don’t desire your low-time-preference solutions. What do you do as a politician?

The democratic dominant strategy is abundantly clear: gain dependents, gain power. Spend lavishly. Purchase loyalty. Democracies don’t collapse from external pressure, they liquidate themselves, vote by vote, transfer payment by transfer payment. The Machine expands until the well runs dry, and then the real politics begins.

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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

Applied Biofoundationalism:

• Truth is Found Through Motion

• 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

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

This may seem based, but it isn’t:

These are the kind of middle-school-tier political stances that contribute to societal degradation. This superficially agreeable view is the libertarian equivalent of "I believe in equality and social justice". Gosh that sounds nice, who could disagree with such a statement? Unfortunately, your rainbows-and-puppies policy produces DEI neocommunist outcomes. The words are pleasant; the byproduct is not.

This kind of platitudinous, pollyannish context-rigging isn’t specific to any party or platform; all are equally susceptible to this. In fact, democracies encourage it.

Political platforms in democracies are oriented around how they make constituents feel; because feelings, not facts, attract voters. Nice-sounding intentions, not outcomes, inform how well it sells to your base. In democracy, the majority rules. The majority is, by definition, mostly composed of the lowest-common-denominator (LCD). You win by appealing to the fleeting impulses of whimsical, easily influenced, emotionally swayed masses. Policy and discourse flows accordingly.

When victory is determined by the LCD, messaging caters to them. Nuance and sophistication have no home here. Complex issues distilled down to three-word chants. The selection effects this produces for candidates and platforms are apparent; whoever best manipulates consensus and emotions is successful. The political domain is optimized for those who are most convincingly frame‑capturing and Machiavellian; it’s the nature of the game.

To craft policy positions based on pragmatic outcomes is to commit electoral suicide. Few care about your results, because that would require actual analysis! If the vibes poll well and align with en vogue moral preferences, you’ve got yourself voter.

If your policy doesn’t work, it’s because not enough of it was tried.

“The investor who overtrades eventually realizes it's a fallacy that more activity means more profitability. Take what the market gives you, more is not necessarily more. The zealous bureaucrat or academic never realizes his actions are counterproductive; the feedback mechanism is too long, and failure attribution too vague. If your policy didn't work, it's because you didn't do enough of it. Real *insert my policy* has never been tried.

So now you get more of the bad idea as a solution to the bad idea. However despite it being a technical failure, the idea was actually a strategic success. Your “more is always more” approach to political policy ended up being quite effective at what it was really aiming to accomplish: generating loyalty.”

No Victim, No Crime? What Do You Consider a Victim?

This "no victim, no crime" deception is destabilizing and produces numerous 2nd-order victims at the societal level. Luxury conditions insulate many from the outcomes of their luxury beliefs. A venture capitalist in Pacific Heights doesn't experience the consequences of drug and homeless policies in the Tenderloin district; he keeps voting for them because he keeps not having to pay that price.

Massie’s superficial political stance can’t see beyond 1st-order effects, creating 2nd-order repercussions everyone pays for. Here are some "victimless" crimes:

• Drunk driving

• Drug use

• Insider trading

• Public homelessness

There are no immediate victims from any of these. Here's what happens when you allow them unchecked:

• Drunk driving: The penalties are onerous because they act as a society-wide deterrent for actions obviously leading to higher rates of death and injury. Many a stupid drunk-driving decision has been stopped because people know what awaits them if they get caught.

  • Allowing it would create 2nd-order victims by making the act more prevalent: if you only get in trouble when you hurt someone, and not just for doing it, you’d do it more often and assure yourself you’ll just pay closer while driving. Of course it won't be you who hurts someone driving drunk, it'll be the other guy. You're always super safe…

• Hard drug use: For example, the 'safe injection' sites in SF. Normalized use of hard drugs invariably leads to degraded public spaces, increased property crime, and decay of social cohesion across entire neighborhoods. Everyone who has to be surrounded by the degeneracy that mass drug use causes is a victim.

• Insider trading: You undermine trust in markets by letting big players access inside information and disproportionately profit off it. This potentially reduces investment (growth) as well as market participation, which decreases liquidity, which impedes price discovery. But hey, there are no direct victims here!

  • The 2nd and 3rd-order effects of this harm economic activity, hurting jobs and other financial components nations need to prosper. Markets without integrity become playgrounds for the connected few while the many lose faith in the system altogether. Victims everywhere, just not ones you can easily point to in a headline.

• No one is victimized by a homeless guy sleeping on the sidewalk, but what about a homeless encampment along the street near your kids? You get to the latter by allowing the former.

  • We're seeing real time in big cities what this mentality breeds. Property values erode, businesses close, tax revenue diminishes, filth spreads, and entire neighborhoods slowly become uninhabitable for families.

The 2nd-order effects are spikes in crime and declining living standards. 2nd-order victims everywhere, but no 1st-order victim you can immediately see. The tyranny of "how nice does it sound and how good does it make me feel" political thinking eventually results in societies where no one wants to live.

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1st-Order Freedoms and 2nd-Order Freedoms

Sometimes maximum freedom reduces everyone's freedom. Sometimes restricting freedoms produces more of it. This is the paradox at the heart of functional societies that myopic pleasant-sounding platitudes fail to understand.

I met some Singaporeans recently, and it was interesting hearing how they appreciated the militant laws of their country. They understood the tradeoff they were making by losing some 1st-order freedoms, but gaining 2nd-order freedoms in the process. On one axis they had less autonomy, and on another they had far more of it. They can't chew gum and don’t dare risk trying any drugs, but their children can play in parks at midnight. They leave laptops on cafe tables unattended. They can't openly criticize the government, but they don't need to worry about stepping over human waste on their morning commute. All of life’s a tradeoff.

You’re maximally free in an environment that facilitates your ideal mode of being. An exaggerated example: Tom Brady is optimized for a highly restrictive setting. A football game has rigid rules for what you’re allowed to do, and there are swift punishments for violations. However in this freedom-limited domain, Tom performs at peak capacity. And he’s not oppressed by it; it’s how he prefers to exist. He welcomes this constraining situation, because it brings the best out of him.

This concept is abstractable on a societal level. If you have no desire to operate outside the circle drawn for you, then you're maximally free within that circle.

If you're content living inside a circle with unyielding boundaries, you're actually freer than if you lived in a space with no boundaries. The constraints almost exclusively only limit others' abilities to act upon you.

How comparatively liberated are the people of Singapore who can walk wherever they want at night vs those in LA and NYC who can’t do the same? The SF resident has the ‘freedom’ to do cocaine, but not the ‘freedom’ to park his car without rolling the windows down, so a car-robber doesn’t smash the glass.

People in SF have more 1st-order freedoms, but far less 2nd-order ones because of the unstable environment their feel-good myopic fixation has produced. Whereas the Singaporean has less 1st-order freedom, but far more 2nd-order ones.

The same people who champion "victimless crimes" policies wouldn't let their children wander freely in the neighborhoods those policies create. "No victim, no crime" is decadent thinking: advocating pretend freedoms while insidiously robbing people of freedoms actually worth having.

By only focusing on 1st-order victims, Massie would have you believe all that exists are 1st-order freedoms. A naive, politically expedient fiction that ignores societies tradeoffs. The liberty to shoot heroin in public devours the liberty of families to use that same public space. Whose freedom do you prioritize?

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

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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

• 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

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

The Chevron doctrine has been overturned by the Supreme Court. It’s a blow to regulators, as Chevron allowed them to interpret vague laws how they saw fit. In a country mostly ruled by unelected bureaucrats, it’s positive to have it gone.

Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that set forth the legal test used when U.S. federal courts must defer to a government agency's interpretation of a law or statute.^[1] The decision articulated a doctrine known as "Chevron deference".^[2] Chevron deference consisted of a two-part test that was deferential to government agencies: first, whether Congress has spoken directly to the precise issue at question, and second, "whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute".

Overturning Chevron is good in that it detracts from regulatory overreach and makes adjudicating disputes less of a kangaroo court. But power is a zero-sum game, where did it redirect? It rerouted to another set of bureaucrats: the judiciary.

Even more authority has now been handed to judges. Judges are mini despots who can do nearly whatever they want in that small room where they're kings. The interpretation of the law is what they say it is when you’re in their courtroom. The same conflict can have two completely different rulings depending on who's wearing the robes that day.

The judge's politics guide the interpretation of laws; this is part of the human condition. You can suppress it, but you cannot eliminate it. It doesn't matter where you went to school or what legal doctrines you espouse; those legal philosophies are merely moral beliefs, manifesting as through legal rulings.

Your moral foundations are expressed in interpretive political analysis; because your political beliefs are simply your moral ones. If it's legally subjective, it's inherently political. No matter what the judge says or how many oaths she signs, her moral convictions are seeping through into her decisions. We cannot disentangle this, but there are certain methods that delineate boundaries better than others.

Here are the moral foundations that inform your political ideologies:

The following are the legal doctrines of a “conservative” judge vs a “liberal” one, stripped down to their core principles and motivations:

• Originalism (conservative jurists): is the legal philosophy of the authority/subversion moral foundation. You defer and adhere to the authority of those who made the law based on their intentions, not yours, when applying it.

  • This should occasionally produce rulings you personally find to be unjust, even abhorrent. But that’s how it is sometimes, because your duty is to apply the law as written and originally intended, not give your political opinions on what it ought to be. You don’t like the law? Persuade your fellow man to change the rules: legislators legislate, judges apply legislation.

• "The Living Constitution", aka Progressivism (liberal jurists): is the legal doctrine of fairness/cheating and care/harm. Applied law is whatever you find fair, wrapped in comforting phrasing such as legislation being “dynamic” and “serving modern society”. What’s “dynamic” and “modern” has little if any consideration for the law as originally written, because you’re expressing moral tenets with post-hoc legal rationale. This is what “legislating from the bench” means.

  • Strong likelihood you personally agree with your rulings when this is your north star. It's a deeply enticing legal philosophy for this reason: it’s quite empowering and satisfying to always morally align your verdicts.

A sign of a good jurist is hating some of your decisions on a personal level. Scalia taught me this. You should have antipathy for some of your rulings, because following the law should not always be morally righteous and comport with your worldview.

“Do justice your honor!”

“I don’t do justice, I apply the law.”

— I can’t recall who originally said this, but Scalia shared it in a lecture and it stuck with me

Law is the language of order, and imposing order is sometimes unpleasant. A ‘living constitutionalist’ experiences no such discomforts; the doctrine that guides their judicial conclusions almost always produces an outcome that they personally support. That is not what the practice of law looks like, and it’s becoming increasingly common, as apparent by the hyper-politicization of the court-appointee process.

A reminder of how far the SCOTUS process has fallen: Scalia was appointed by a vote of 98-0. There’s zero chance he’d get confirmed today with anything less than 51 Republican seats in the Senate. That’s what electing a good jurist looks like; not your friend who has the same opinions as you.

Spoken from the man himself:

Originalism (guided by Textualism) is the only genuine attempt at legal analysis, because it best endeavors to separate the judge’s feelings from what the law dictates. It’s imperfect, but it’s the cleanest shirt we have in the dirty hamper. All else is legislating from the bench: a derivative of the judge’s political opinions and moral foundations.

Why The Judge Matters

Judiciary power is substantial and its application is deeply interpretative. In politicized environment, this subjectivity is exploited. It's why you see judge shopping, and why you’ll see more of it as the legal system comes under further political pressure. Chaos rises as the organ of societal order, the judiciary, is corrupted.

Remember when that obscure judge in Hawaii blocked Trump's immigration orders, and then kept doing it. A policy the president campaigned on, democratically elected to implement, and one tyrant said "no, I don't see it that way".

Why'd they take the case to Hawaii? Is it because the law is better understood by the beach? Or because they knew a liberal judge would give them the ruling they wanted if they said aloha?

With Chevron gone, state overreach will recalibrate towards a new path. Even greater power has been handed to an increasingly politicized legal system.

Judges matter, a lot. The judiciary exerts actual power over the people that lasts well beyond a president’s four years. The president is otherwise mostly a totem in respect to actionable power. The unelected bureaucracy of government workers that run much of our lives through unelected institutions cannot be fired or controlled by him. When people say “Deep State”, this is what they’re referring to.

In future essays, I’ll break down how these moral foundations are biologically ingrained manifestations of your temperament, what I call Biofoundationalism.

And to be clear: I think overturning Chevron is positive and I’m glad it’s gone. This is a reflection on how regulatory strategy recalibrates; if not guided by originalism, the moral beliefs of the judge call the shots.

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Subscribes and shares are very much appreciated. If you enjoyed the essay, give it a like.

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

I’m building something interesting, visit Salutary.io

Biofoundationalism chapters:

• Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization

• Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype

• Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment

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

• Biofoundationalism V: Power Acts, Beauty Is

Applied Biofoundationalism essays:

• Moral Algorithms

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

• War Is How a Nation Eats

• Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Bezos and Following the Trend

• Chevron and The Hawaiian Judge Dominant Strategy

• Pleasant-Sounding Beliefs and 2nd-Order Effects

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Entwined

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

• Part I: We’ll Give You Things > We’ll Leave You Alone

• Part II: Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Part III: Sovereign Investors & Geopolitical Traders

This is essay is also part of Applied Biofoundationalism. All chapters are linked at the end. Enjoy.

The investor who overtrades eventually realizes it's a fallacy that more activity means more profitability. Take what the market gives you, more is not necessarily more.

The zealous bureaucrat or academic inhabits a parallel delusion, never realizing his actions are counterproductive; the feedback mechanism is too long, and failure attribution too vague. Unlike the trader who receives swift market feedback, the policy architect luxuriates in ambiguity. If your policy didn't work, it's because you didn't do enough of it. Real *insert my policy* has never been tried.

So now you get more of the bad idea as a solution to the bad idea. However despite it being a technical failure, the idea was actually a strategic success. Your “more is always more” approach to political policy ended up being quite effective at what it was really aiming to accomplish: generating loyalty.

Dominant Political Strategies Optimize for Recruitment

Framing is critical here: when you read “democracy”, I want you to view it as interchangeable with “adversarial domain”. That means you understand it on game theoretic grounds, not punditry or academic ones. You’re not trying to sell your ideas because they're any good, you’re trying to win iterated games with them.

Don’t analyze if the policy “works” as in “did it produce a good outcome?”; analyze it from the lens of “did it recruit new voters and please my constituency?”. There’s hopefully overlap between the two, but not always. And in a dysfunctional society, they’re increasingly mutually exclusive. Creating problems is a great way to justify political action for solving the problems you caused, which creates new problems, justifying even more political action, rinse and repeat.

The dregs of society don't fact check anything, they vote on impulse and how pleasant the idea sounds. Remember this in your sales pitch. No one is guided by efficacy, they care about the moral stance. Democracy, stripped of its sanctifying rhetoric, operates like any other competitive system where incentives shape outcomes. The politician who grasps this thrives; the one who clings to civics textbook idealism withers.

Political parties are in the businesses of amassing influence and power, and the way they achieve that is through enlarging political constituencies. The winning strategy is to optimize for recruitment, not marry yourself to a warm-and-fuzzy ideology. Does this get me more votes, or does it give me a sense of moral superiority while I lose?

In a democracy, voter recruitment is how you advance your objectives, which means the game theory dictates that he who maintains the most loyalty wins. If you create a governance system where large amounts of people only have power under the purview of your political party, you have created loyal soldiers at the ballot box. Don’t vote against the hand that feeds you.

The structural advantage for the candidate that advocates for the expansion of state power under the pretense he will share this power with its voting base, is loyalty generation.

The Left is vastly superior at it, because nearly every platform they run on promises to provide restitution to the “victims” of power laws… “we’ll give you things”; a product for the low agency.

Every tenet the Right espouses fundamentally advocates more autonomy for the agentic… “we’ll leave you alone”; a product for the high agency.

What are you selling? Who are you selling to? And most importantly, is the target market for your product growing, or shrinking? Why?

The answer writes itself in demographic ink: producers dwindle, dependents multiply. The political customer base for 'leave me alone' contracts each year, while the market for 'give me things' inflates as resources do, and power laws amplify their uneven distribution. This isn't a bug, but a feature in democracy's code: the inevitable output when you run universal suffrage on a prosperous society's hardware.

Selling power is guided by manufacturing constituencies, and it goes beyond simple monetary handouts. The DEI regime is a prime example of how the party recruits its soldiers, by providing them standing they otherwise would never have on their own merits. These aren't jobs that emerged from market demand or institutional necessity, but political patronage positions dressed in corporate drag. Every act of race communism producing a dedicated voter whose livelihood depends entirely on the continuation of the regime that birthed their role.

Without the legal imposition of this hierarchy-degrading apparatchik generator, none of those DEI hires would have power, economically or politically. They have now been recruited, and will vote as such.

Low-agency recruits cannot defect, because the party is responsible for the power they otherwise would not have. Dependency through patronage. Their loyalty is bought.

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When The State’s Power is Sold as Yours

By decree of nature and math, there are more beneficiaries of power redistribution than there are of those who simply want to retain it. The Pareto distribution that governs everything from crater sizes to city populations also governs human competence and agency. All creative and economic endeavors follow this power law, and in a democracy the 80% have-nots carry more raw voting weight than the 20% who have. How do you recruit the 80%? Their vote counts all the same.

In any democracy, this creates an insurmountable arithmetic: the vital few who generate value will always be outnumbered by the many who consume it. One person, one vote transforms this natural hierarchy into an inverted pyramid; the productively impotent commanding the productively vital through sheer numbers.

The Left says power laws are to be flattened, any unequal distribution that nature produces isn’t your fault. Elect us, and we’ll make the power laws we dislike effectively illegal. The Left fundamentally sells low-agency solutions to an increasingly low-agency population, and their market is multiplying. As prosperity grows, the Right’s market deflates.

If your wellbeing comes from the state, you shockingly consistently vote for the expansion of the state! The Left is superior at buying these votes, because its platform is one of selling power to those who would have none without its bureaucracy.

The Low-Agency Dominant Strategy

The game theory of winning democratic elections in wealthy nations devolves over time into a bidding war. Low-agency voters can be persuaded to defect if the other party promises them more. You are buying their vote by sharing state power and resources, not with your good ideas.

Wealth and power tends to cluster, and it becomes quite noticeable that there’s a lot of it in rich nations. You no longer can compete as effectively by selling high-agency solutions that promise “we’ll leave you alone”; you slowly adopt a low-agency sales pitch of “we’ll give you things”.

This democratic strategy only works in prosperous countries; how much you can redistribute correlates with how wealthy you are. Because only when there’s money and power present can you credibly campaign on reallocating it. If the country is poor, you simply don’t have much to give away.

Enabling the high-agency to create wealth is the dominant political strategy in ascending nations.

Enabling the low-agency to feed off that wealth is the dominant political strategy in descending nations.

A complex adaptive system always has homeostasis embedded in it somewhere. A star cannot grow forever.

In the presence of abundance, bidding for voter allegiance becomes the superior approach. Political platforms, for all parties, slowly creep left in rich nations, because strategies gravitate towards what wins over time. If everyone’s vote counts the same, and you can buy them, you do.

If the state’s power is sold as your power…. new voters for the Party of Largesse are born. Recruitment is earned through buying it; loyalty is maintained through dependence.

The party that sells independence to high-agency people in a low-agency society will get predictable results over time in a wealthy democracy. This is what conservatives used to advertise, and what libertarians still do… who’s buying this product? The 20%? Is this market getting bigger or smaller? Lol.

This is why conservatism is simply liberalism going the speed limit in wealthy societies. It’s the scenic route leftwards. The polity maintains its nominal 50:50 voting split, but the sales pitch of both parties creeps stage left. Yesterday’s liberal policy is today’s based conservative one.

The Left sells political power: "Elect us and you get standing and handouts you otherwise won't have. We’ll give you things."

The Right sells political independence: "Elect us and we'll leave you alone."

Which strategy does a better job recruiting and maintaining loyalty among a low-agency, dependent population? The answer is empirically clear.

You will not get a wealthy society to adopt a fundamentally conservative mindset for the same reason you will not be able to grow a garden in the winter. You can try really hard, maybe get a flower or two if you constantly cover it with blankets and heating lamps, but the environment is simply not calibrated for it. The environment dictates the expression.

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High-Agency Defection and Herding Cats

Consider how allegiance is maintained: the answer is essentially “what are the repercussions if you leave?”

If the agentic and competent defect, they’ll be mostly fine. All their power does not come from the state. They’re industrious and conscientious and not natural dependents. However dependents know if they defect, they will return to the bottom rungs.

Maintaining loyalty among the capable — self-sufficient and independent, who aren’t acted upon, but act upon the world — is like herding cats. Maintaining loyalty among the impotent, obedient, and reliant, those who don’t act upon the world but are instead acted upon, is like herding sheep.

One scatters freely, the other flocks naturally.

It is much easier to form and maintain coalitions of the dependent. If the independent leave, they’ll still be pretty okay, they’re capable and they know it! The dependent know they exist at the pleasure of the state, and they are loyal because of it. It is much easier to coordinate allegiance among those who are beholden to you.

This is what you get when you indiscriminately grant the franchise to both the family-having business owner and the welfare-consuming criminal in the exact same way. One of these people you can buy, the other you must convince; which one makes for the better dependent?

Closing

History offers variations on this theme. Athens voted itself bread and circuses. Rome's citizens traded republican virtue for imperial grain doles. The pattern persists because it emerges from democracy's very structure, not from any particular culture's failings. When you democratize power while centralizing resources, you create a machine that can only run in one direction.

You’ll occasionally get surges of rightward pushback when this process overextends: Reagan 1984, Trump 2016, Brexit 2020, and yet... Cthulhu keeps swimming one way. These are just ripples in a left-bound tide. Imagine seeing the electoral map in 1984, the hippies are on the run, Republicans just won 49 states, tax cuts are coming! And 40 years later, look at you…

In the presence of decadence in a democracy, the dominant political strategy becomes recruiting and maintaining political loyalty by creating new dependents. This inexorably leads to a bloating of state power and the bureaucratic class. It’s why the government never, ever gets smaller, no matter who’s in charge. Because it’s just how the stages of a dying star works. It’s part of the natural lifecycle of nations.

This is poetically a sign of success, because a poor nation couldn’t adopt this strategy. And it’s also a harbinger of decline, because nothing about it is sustainable.

Luxury conditions beget luxury beliefs, and luxury solutions follow suit. The destination is embedded in the logic of the system itself: a democracy wealthy enough to buy its own votes will do so until it can't. The auctioneer's gavel does not fall when wisdom prevails, but when the treasury runs dry. Perhaps that's the only feedback mechanism that truly functions in democratic time: not the ballot box, but the balance sheet. Until then, we’re going to keep giving you things.

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

I’m building something interesting, visit Salutary.io.

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

Applied Biofoundationalism:

• Truth is Found Through Motion

• 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

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

There was a debate between and recently. It was entertaining and fun, they threw lots of stories at each other, both sounded well-reasoned and compelling. This is to say, it was not particularly useful.

A lack of utility in that I think good exchanges should be productive. That isn’t to say it was uniquely unproductive, just garden-variety political-dialogue wheel spinning. You may infer from these statements that I find political discourse to be less than useful; this inference would be accurate.

This exchange, while seemingly erudite and intellectually inclined, perfectly exemplifies the futility of political discourse. Both men are verbally adroit, so we got a lot of clever dunks and witticisms. And they both masterfully curated sets of facts that concocted narratives for conclusions they long ago decided were true. Political debates can almost entirely be summarized as competing moral frameworks talking past each other.

The TL;DR of the debate, from the lens of a Biofoundationalist:

"Wow, you actually were unaware of this FACT? Also you failed to mention this FACT and another FACT that undermines your whole world view. Read a book!"

"Aha foolish you are for completely ignoring these little-known FACTS over here. Which when viewed in conjunction with this FACT, shows you to be nothing more than a chimp in shoes!"

Intelligent people with high verbal IQs are more adept at obfuscating their moral imperatives with carefully arranged facts that craft their narratives. This makes their conclusions seem more correct or informed to the uninitiated. Politically “educated” simply means an expert recall of factoids that make a narrative appear superior.

There are many facts. Endless facts even. Which ones do you emphasize and highlight? Only the good and true ones? Ah, don’t we all…

The articulate often dominate political domains because they’re the most compelling advocates of their moral foundations, and attract support from those with similar temperaments as a result.

This debate is what happens when you put two different temperaments with sharp tongues in a room: a lot of spectacle and little true systematizing that’s focused on problems and their eradication. Just endless FACT dunking about whose selective, hand-crafted version of history is right/wrong (to his credit, Yarvin does systematize some things, but he relies heavily on bombarding you with stories and esoteric factoids).

Facts are tools, they are not prescriptive. Narratives are prescriptive. Facts are used to form narratives, and narratives are in service of moral foundations.

Moral foundations are a product of temperament, and temperaments are biologically imposed. That biological remark is defended and explained here.

Here are the moral foundations that act as the substrate of all political thought. The ones you prioritize are a result of your temperament. Your temperament is a result of biochemistry and brain activity; which is to say, you’re born with it.

Intelligent people have a lot of factual sediment to wade through to get to what they're actually advocating for: their moral foundations, manifesting as political policy.

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An Analysis of Yarvin’s and Rufo’s Moral Foundations:

Curtis Yarvin scores very high on Authority/Subversion

Yarvin is a monarchist. He views rigid, absolute authority as the path to rectifying structural issues. Almost all of his work is centered around placing utmost emphasis on the moral foundation of respecting authority, and he's well-read in his promotion and history of it. How do you think he came to be so singularly focused on this moral foundation? Must have been all the books...

—

Chris Rufo emphasizes Sanctity/Degradation, with secondary focus on Fairness/Cheating

Rufo's hyperfocus is on DEI: which directly undermines values he holds sacred regarding merit and notions of fair treatment. Leftist race communism compromises these ethics, so he believes eradicating it is paramount to achieving fairness (DEI is cheating by advantaging some races over others). He sees the continued degradation of these sacred ideals as a core culprit for US decline.

Side note: what’s interesting is fairness/cheating is typically a liberal moral foundation.

Why Deconstruct Political Dialogue This Way

This way you can understand:

1. Why does one guy keep focusing on certain FACTS and not others? What narrative is he creating?

2. What moral values is this narrative in service of?

   1. Remember, political beliefs and morality are synonymous; they cannot be disentangled. Morals inform political stances.

3. Once you ascertain which moral framework is dominant for each party, try to figure out which has greater utility in the current environment.

   1. To see what I mean by “utility”, read this.

All of the moral foundations are useful, but the degree to which they are depends on economic circumstances. Where there are growing political extremes, there are almost always underlying economic extremes: this is not a coincidence.

I have Yarvin sympathies due to a mindset that’s more structural in its diagnosis of issues. I think Rufo is excellent, but that his actions will ultimately produce pyrrhic, symbolic victories: as they focus more on superficial symptoms, rather than distal solutions.

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Biofoundationalism chapters:

• Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization

• Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype

• Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment

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

• Biofoundationalism V: Power Acts, Beauty Is

Applied Biofoundationalism essays:

• Moral Algorithms

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

• War Is How a Nation Eats

• Gain Dependents, Gain Power

• Bezos and Following the Trend

• Chevron and The Hawaiian Judge Dominant Strategy

• Pleasant-Sounding Beliefs and 2nd-Order Effects

• Patterns of Comfort

• Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment

• Entwined

• Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

• Astrology, Darwinian Truths, and Biochemistry in the Womb

• Part I: Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class

• Part II: Touching Soul, Touching Senses: The Art You Deserve

• Part III: The Insect Method: Tariffs, Labor, & Surpluses

• Part IV: Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Market

This chart made me sad. It’s the inexorable result of moneyball: when every decision is maximally maximized, when every choice is an expected-value calculation… you eradicate the middle. This is what power laws look like, and their application goes beyond jump shots.

It’s also the inevitable result of globalism.

Both moneyball and globalism are dominant-strategy-maximizing approaches to competitive domains. They solely understand players and citizens as productivity inputs, with all behaviors taken based upon their expected values. This mentality implicitly sees humans as variables placed into a machine that scores points and generates trinkets, nothing more. The guiding light is just one more point on the scoreboard, and one more point of gross margin. There is no higher-order value.

When a nation is seen only through the lens of utility calculations, and a society as a series of GDP factors: clustering occurs, power laws amplify, variance declines...

You curiously find yourself with no midrange jumpers, and no middle class.

Spreadsheet Brain

Excessive optimization eventually turns sports, supply chains, and the human spirit… gray. Unrelenting pursuit of 1% better margins or 1% greater chance of success in *insert competitive domain* is how the McKinsey consultant sees a country. It’s how the pedigree-touting economist understands every decision.

These are people trained to think unnaturally, inculcated to believe what the Excel sheet spits out is absolute truth. On questions of human existence, competition, and flourishing, there is a “right” answer, and that answer is what the data analyst says is right. The most noble pursuit to attain is that which increases the final score.

The Spreadsheet Brain vision of the world is cultivated in schools that exalt undermining the parochial, viewing their neighbors with disdain if they’re encumbering peak operating cashflows. Because, hear me out, if it helps gross margins, it MUST be what's best for everyone. If it makes the tchotchkes cheaper, it is pure and true and good: this is the holy crucifix of the trinket maximalist. Harvard Business Review is scripture, Keynes is canon.

Why build domestically when China has an underclass that exists on 1,400 calories a day and will do it for a fraction of the cost? The answer to this is obvious, if you assume society sees life through the same lens as your textbook. If the model says your middle class is best served by delegating their industries and jobs to a political adversary, then that’s just what the Bain and Co. gentleman does. Read a book!

As the shot chart empties its middle, so does the income distribution. To maximize efficiency is to maximize power laws, which is to necessarily vitiate the middle. But hey, your iPhone is 20% cheaper, so let's call it progress.

The consultant concludes the middle class has no desire for eudaimonism: fulfillment from a life that imbues purpose. This must be so, because my MBA says more is more and the Excel sheet doesn’t know how to quantify that, and if I can’t calculate it then it doesn’t matter (eudai-what? dude stop making up words and get in on this sale).

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Lose Variance, Lose Color

When globocorp’s bottom line is the unwavering guiding light, when the expected value of each basketball possession is the only consideration, actions eventually converge on the same scoreboard-logic strategies. Tedium ensues. Stagnation creeps in. But the numbers… the numbers have never been better!

Mankind needs variance like lungs need air. Strip away the novel, the inefficient, the beautifully pointless, and watch him suffocate under his own finely tuned calibration. He breaks relationships, institutions, his own psyche, until the chaos he needs little sprinkles of comes back. We're not machines built for steady states; we're improvisational creatures who find meaning in struggle.

If you go too long without a life of purpose, without eudaimonism, something inside you begins to chafe. Grayness seeps in. Hedonism leads to a shadow-puppet existence, yielding a shell of your former self that only understands pleasure of the senses, not purpose of the soul.

Life needs color, which is to say that which you can’t always predict. You know what elevates predictability? Expected-value thinking. Moneyball. Globalism. You can push that colorful beachball underwater and transmute it for a while, but eventually the volatility tax must be paid.

A risk-adjusted payoff existence is empirically corrosive to the middle. The spreadsheet mind cannot comprehend this, but the NBA shot chart and the factory worker can.

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Religion, Pretending to be Economics

Just as the priest only knows “Christ is King”, the Trinket Maximalist only knows “open trade open borders good”. It's religious thinking, masquerading as post-hoc, economic-presenting rationale. Because you cannot possibly conceive that the pinnacle priority of a society isn’t the cheapest gadgets possible. Unfathomable.

When the entirety of your beliefs and motivations can be distilled down to “what gives the best margins?”, you implicitly worship the material. Because the material is all you value when you think this way. You project this value onto others when you treat global trade as Christ 2.0.

This is the religion of consumption (hedonism), not salutary purpose (eudaimonism). If it doesn’t facilitate profligate intake, I’m going to have to kindly ask that you go to college.

What’s more, this fetishization of trade being “open” and “free” only manifests if it’s reciprocated. If BOTH sides do not abide by “free trade” then it is not free. Comparative advantage exists in the exchange of goods, not their production. The purpose of exports is more imports, and yet a massive asymmetry in the Balance of Payments persists… Pray tell what you think a sustained (as in decades long) massive trade deficit represents? By definition, an equal exchange is not occurring. Balance would eventually be found organically if the terms were equitable. What we have is a dislocation.

If trade is persistently incongruous, someone is exporting more than just trinkets, they’re exporting their industrial policies onto you. Other nations, namely China, do not reciprocate US openness; you ought to reevaluate your priors if your counterparty is strong, competent, and keeps running the same play against you… maybe it’s you who’s missing something, not them.

You are in the domain of religion, not economic thought, if you think a strategic action is always good, and the other always bad. The real answer is always… it depends.

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Midrange Variance

If a couple more basis points of gross margin is the North Star, and one more point on the scoreboard is all the strategy knows, you're left with no midrange jumpers, and no middle class. Everything converges on the same dominant strategies, because “dominance” is conceptualized in solely one domain: the realm of the numerically measurable. Producing a current account deficit, and spiritual bankruptcy.

Remember Rip Hamilton? Kobe? They lived in the midrange. Jordan did everything, everywhere, all at once. Now you know what you do in the modern NBA? You either get a sniper to shoot a foot behind the 3-point line, or you throw it to the post.

Listen, we ran the numbers, and the Monte Carlo analysis says what it says: no more 15-footers or you’re benched. No more domestic manufacturing, or you’re out of business. Diversity? Lol, yeah not that kind. Have you seen the NBA’s ratings lately? You get what you fucking deserve. Globalism is about to get the same.

I really hope they eventually try something like this to illustrate the idiocy of it all…

Who cares about all the action in between the 1st quarter and the final buzzer. The sport whose very reason for existence is to entertain and excite. The event we gather in big stadiums for and have our identities tied to. Meh, you see, all that matters is just one. more. point. than the other guys.

Who cares about a population’s sense of identity and esteem. A blue-collar existence of dignity and self-sufficiency. The men who derive their sense of worth and autonomy from their ability to provide. It’s fine if we rob them of their agency, because the doodads are that much cheaper for it. You don’t need a sense of independence, you need a smartphone that folds!

Boy you’re really laying it on thick for those flyover-state peons! All we want is just one. more. point. of gross margin bro. Chill. You clearly don’t read Harvard Business Review.

The spreadsheet cannot capture what the human condition requires. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This vacuous worldview produces grayness. Variance degrades. Fragility seeps into your supply chains and your soul when everything is reduced to sterile measurement. The satisfaction of a well-executed 15-footer, a holistic domestic sense of eudaimonia incrementally eradicated… the inefficient beauty of a life lived between extremes continually eroded.

The NBA shot chart is a proxy for much of modernity: X-rays of civilizations that optimized away their own meaning. No midrange jumpers. No middle class. Disemboweling the center, where margins decrease, but life actually happens.

The question isn’t whether optimization creates material abundance, but whether human beings can thrive on material abundance alone. We are running that experiment right now.

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I’d like to do a short follow-up on my piece regarding embodied vs verbal understandings that I applied to Elon previously.

A quick rehash of this concept:

A verbal understanding is providing an answer that would let you pass a test. You demonstrate with words you correctly understand something.

An embodied understanding is when your actions demonstrate you understand it. The way you navigate the world shows a physical, action-oriented, internalized recognition of information.

Several weeks ago, the guy who came up with the e/acc movement (accelerationism for AI development) who goes by @BasedBeffJezos on Twitter was doxxed by the people of exceptional merit and integrity who do journalism.

I want you to notice the following:

• I’m claiming to dislike this

• I am not sharing the link to it

• I did not ever click the link to it

This is a consistent verbal AND embodied understanding. I am not supporting the thing I dislike because I’m not promoting its consumption or propagation. Every time you click or share a link to any publication, you are helping them get paid. That is how online journalism works, with clicks and shares.

The outcry on Twitter against this was rightfully vicious, and the actions were uniformly this:

> "Doxxing is bad and journalists are wrong/immoral for it" (correct verbal understanding)

> *clicks article and shares it with everyone you know* (zero embodied understanding)

1 click = 1 fan of the journalism, 1 share = 1 gigafan of the journalism

This is the action of someone who thinks the behavior is good, while saying they think it's bad. The action being taken is directly reinforcing and rewarding the behavior. Harumph!

What a wildly successful night of clicks, shares, and ad dollars for that publication. You know what their editorial meeting discussed after that? “Well shit that was crazy popular, it got more views than anything we’ve done in months. Who else should we doxx next?” This behavior will happen again. It will happen again because the actions of the collective are saying "please do it again, we liked it".

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"

I'm basically screaming into the void against the human condition, because people actually love scandalous events while decrying them loudly. The journos are motivated to produce soap-opera-tier drama because it will be voraciously consumed, even by those who lambast it. It’s just the way it be.

Almost everyone is passive about this. I know they’re not actively thinking the way I am here when they click/share. But I can assure you even if my lecture was read by all those detractors, 85% or so would still click. People always vote with their feet….

I HAVE A SOLUTION!

I know you’re still going to click even if you hate it, but how about this: create an archived version of the piece, THEN read it and share if you must!

Go to the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) and archive the article first. The steps to do so are here. Do not click the link, all you need to do is copy the URL and paste it in. It takes about 4 seconds, just input the URL and click save. Now you can read the article and share it with your based friends and not actually be condoning the thing you do not condone!

Seriously imagine if this caught on, you could imperil the business model of those who weaponize and monetize outrage and scandal….

Follow @BackTheBunny

• A verbal understanding is providing an answer that would let you pass a test. You demonstrate with words you correctly understand something.

• An embodied understanding is when your actions demonstrate you understand it. The way you navigate the world shows a physical, action-oriented, internalized recognition of information.

If I say “I know Brock Lesner can destroy me” and then walk up to him, smack him in the face, and tell him his mom is ugly: I have a correct verbal understanding, but zero embodied understanding.

They aren’t mutually exclusive, nor does one suggest you have the other. You can have an incorrect verbal and correct embodied, and vice versa, or both wrong, both right. It’s the embodied understanding that counts most, because the Man In The Arena is the one who moves the needle; if you don’t act out a truth, you haven’t actually internalized it. Actions trump words, but ideally you have both.

Let’s review how Elon represents an embodied understanding of power, Curtis Yarvin the verbal understanding.

When Elon acquired twitter, Yarvin released a post on how he should leverage Twitter's narrative control to set the tone of what truth is to amass power. This is smart, Yarvin has an excellent verbal/philosophical understanding of power. More control over discourse is influence over what’s emphasized, discussed, and thus acted upon. Narrative control is soft power in that it directs and guides hard power.

Musk's stated stance of Twitter being an impartial platform is naive, infeasible, and shows poor verbal understanding of power dynamics. His enemies offer him no such “impartial” consideration in domains they control, of which they control most of them.

If you abdicate the power of Twitter by having it be apolitical (an impossible task, but we’ll pretend) that vacuum will be filled elsewhere by your adversaries. You must use the tools you have, lest they be used against you, to advance your positions and beliefs... if you’re serious about them.

However, Musk's embodied understanding of power is vastly superior to almost anyone alive. Elon understands power dynamics extraordinarily well, even if he fails to articulate it (or just hides his power levels). We know about love languages, but what about power languages? The actions one takes to assert dominance, establish supremacy, etc.; when it comes to language, Elon is immeasurably more fluent than Yarvin.

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Elon’s Empire

One (1) man controls:

• the most efficient way to get to space

• the most valuable transportation company (with energy and AI applications)

• the most high-impact social media company

• the most sophisticated satellite/communications companies

• the most advanced mind/machine company

• god knows what in AI

Elon is already more powerful than many heads of state. It’s not hyperbole. The constellation of assets Elon's amassed represent real societal and resource power.

This man has systematically gained command over numerous critical industries in human transportation, communication, space travel, and technology. He accomplished this degree of influence and authority entirely via asset allocation and his own decision making. Leveraging capital markets, government programs, and managerial excellence to advance his interests and empire. If you don’t respect what this degree of power represents and how difficult it was to attain it, you are blinded by some kind of ideology. You don’t have to like Elon, but you must respect him.

No violence was used, and he’s created hundreds of billions in value (likely trillions someday) and control over serious infrastructure. This man understands power, and is blindingly competent; it’d be impossible to accomplish this otherwise, you don’t just luck your way into this degree of repeated dominance. Yarvin should be able to see this, even while Elon sometimes verbally bumbles along saying otherwise.

Elon’s accomplishments are not generalizable to any rich guy. He's methodically dominated industries in incredibly difficult ways. The last car IPO before Tesla... was Ford. The ULA (Boeing and Lockheed rocket program) was basically a monopoly on rockets and he broke it. The same guy did both of these things. Why Elon??? You know there are easier ways to make money right? Perhaps he has different motivations…

Oh also militaries reach out to him for help on satellites and communications, just like they do with Mark Cuban! These really rich guys, they're all the same you know.

Let me disabuse you of “capitalist” misgivings: he’s not just trying to make money. A man who thinks this way wants more than money. I believe Elon believes in humanity, but that’s not all that I think he seeks to advance.

Elon’s embodied understanding of what power and resource control is is almost unprecedented, and there is information to be gleaned from the patterns in his actions.

Pretend I was writing a Marvel comic and creating a fictional businessman: and I made him the richest guy in the world, owns a diverse network of critical/impactful infrastructure, is self-made, and also hugely culturally significant. You’d tell me “come on man be more realistic!” But because it’s Elon we forget these accomplishments and gossip about how he’s not that smart because his tweets are silly. Perhaps he does this on purpose… “hey look over here, isn’t this meme outrageous!” and everyone fixates accordingly.

Stop analyzing him like a celebrity gossip commentator and view his actions and accomplishments in the historical context they deserve. When you see him do something you find to be dumb, consider… maybe he’s thought about this more than you. He deserves the benefit of the doubt. Just a little.

Yarvin need not worry, Elon knows what he’s doing, even if he’s not as eloquent or his verbal understanding says otherwise. I wouldn’t lecture him about power, I promise you he grasps it just a tad, because no man's embodied understanding of it is better.

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