Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization
No hedonism in poverty, no discipline in decadence
One year ago to the month, I published the first essay of my Biofoundationalism series on Twitter. It has since gotten traction (currently eleven essays), and I get messages on it often. I’ve discussed these concepts a lot in recent podcasts, and it’s time for them to come to Substack. I’m not going to link to the original essays, because I don’t want you to read ahead. I’ll be rewriting each original piece and adding new ones.
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.
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 III: Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment
Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To
Applied Biofoundationalism:
Incredible article, your best yet. Hypermoralization explains a lot about our current era.
Memorable line: “If we can figure out your political beliefs with a brain scan, we are having a biological discussion, not a political one.”
Also sent you $50 BASE bux, Merry Christmas
When you are writing on the rightward / leftward divisions in biology, thinking, & culture it feels like you're doing to work laid bare by Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary" (2009) & "The Matter with Things" (2021).
(McGilchrist demonstrated how both brain hemispheres offer two incompatible but complementary ways of attending to reality. Of course, the two brain hemispheres don't directly map onto the "left/right" political idea.)