a clarifying point, because some have remarked in the comments on how political designations are inconsistent over time:
you'll note I use the terms 'conservative/liberal' and not 'republican/democrat' or other political branding.
when I say conservative, I mean the morality that experiences disgust responses in the insula and has a larger amygdala. I consider this a masculine moral genotype, producing a conservative political phenotype.
when I say liberal, I mean the morality that experiences a sympathy response in the insula and has a larger ACC. I consider this a feminine moral genotype, producing a liberal political phenotype.
-
On definitions:
I consider 'conservative' appropriate terminology because it protects the ingroup, is hierarchical, emphasizes the behavioral immune system, and appeals to stability and the known past. this is inherently conservative (it seeks to "conserve"). whether or not tories, republicans, or other "rightwing" parties actually do this is not the point. the parties often shift over time. this is why I don't use political party nomenclature.
liberal is an appropriate term because it's open to new experiences, more intellectually flexible, more concerned with care/harm and less so hierarchies (thus more feminine). its outgroup emphasis is at the expense of "conservation" of ideals/standards and not as focused on threat detection. whether or not democrats or other "leftwing" parties embody this, again, is not the point. the nominal parties are prone to shifting over time.
-
Additional thoughts:
the ability of these moral genotypes to fully express themselves as political phenotypes is always contingent on the environment; this is why I often say in my essays "the environment dictates the expression". for animal species, the environment dictates how genotypes express their phenotypes. I find it to be no different for humans.
the environment is very decadent in the west, this facilitates more pronounced feminine moral genotype expression, creating a more dominant liberal political phenotype. this can only happen in a backdrop of comfort and prosperity.
conversely, in environments trending towards hardship, poverty, or war, that environment allows masculine moral genotypes, resulting in dominant conservative political phenotypes, to take hold. the concept of hypermoralization, which is covered in Part 1, touches on this too.
no hedonism in poverty, no discipline in decadence.
I'll defend and elaborate on this in Biofoundationalism Part IV. it's not as byzantine as it seems, promise.
One of the most unsettling things AI will reveal is how physical traits, outward appearance, characteristics of one's body, are neurological signatures. How the hardware whispers the software.
The body and mind cannot be decoupled. Two realms that create one system. They are entwined. Hardware and software work if the other does. For similar reasons why you can't get melody from a broken instrument, we will be shown how the carnal is a window into the cognitive.
Neuroscience and embodied cognition research show thought isn’t isolated in the skull. Posture, gut microbiome, hormonal state, even muscle tone, all feed back into temperament, mood, and decision-making. It does not stop there.
People will either be disturbed, or elated, by what's revealed by traits we were duly informed were entirely distinct from our minds. Faces have temperamental fingerprints. Psychology embedded in morphology. The machine is already able to spot these patterns....
I read this series out of order but when I'm done I'll have to read it once more from the start. This was really quite the journey.
For me, the uncomfortable fact to confront is that it seems our sense of morality is *also* biologically driven. Meaning that it's not obvious to everyone, and that plainly evident moral truths aren't; and perhaps, that arguing with people is not likely to convince them why what they feel is wrong, because they can't stop feeling what they feel.
As an aside, I find it incredibly funny that physiognomy can go so deep. It's almost unfair to me that you can predict all these traits about someone from listening to their voice, looking at their face, or examining a grainy featureless X-ray. There are no more surprises or secrets.
Interestingly, I think, it is not so much that one's morality is wrong. It is that choices require decision. Decide, from latin, is to cut off. So we decide not because there is zero validity in the other choice, but because we prioritize one choice over the other. I try to see the point of view of the other, but I am still decisive in my choice. I do not have to claim the other choice is wholly invalid; only that my choice is the better.
"How does this explain when people experience political shifts? Usually around midlife from whatever they were raised as to more the other side. I’ve seen both happen, people raised liberal become more conservative as they age and people more conservative become less rigid and a bit more tolerant."
reply:
the political shifts with age are vastly overstated and do not manifest like they’re made out to. there is actually pretty extensive research on this to corroborate it. it’s one of those folksy sayings that really isn’t true in the aggregate.
(typically it is the political platforms that shift, the temperamental preferences do not)
the temperamental traits do not change with age, however the noteworthy experiences of each generation do collectively mold the direction of things.
I will break this all down in a future part of the Biofoundationalism
I wonder how much of these innate temperamental qualities can change based on external factors even when they're already ingrained. For example, regular meditation seems to increase the activity in the left and right insula and ACC. Similar to how people's views on certain topics skew more liberal after brain damage.
Similarly, how would something like CBT affect disgust responses in this way? I also think about in 2012 when same-sex marriage was being voted on in various states and it came out (heh) that people were much more likely to support it if they knew a gay person. I wonder what significance regular exposure has when it comes to the conservative instinct for disgust for certain behaviors?
yeah good points. if there's one thing that can massage the temperamental/moral/political (massage, not change), it's personal experiences. upbringing or familial environment make very little difference; there is some fascinating research on this that speaks to this, I will break it down in another essay in this series.
What I find unfortunate is, exactly, that personal experience affects people emotionally. It seems to override their capacity for abstract evaluation of issues. I have some unique notions of LGBT..... despite knowing, and being fond of many. My ideas would be criticized as phobic, but I think they're uniquely rational, despite my fondness for the gays and lesbians I know.
Of note: technically the correct metaphor for blank slate should be 'virgin birth' - immaculate conception is a similar but different religious concept. however the metaphor falls totally flat that way and doesn't change the substance of what I'm illustrating.
One thing I have difficulty understanding, though, is that if "conservative" neurobiology has a stronger inclination towards disgust directed towards impurity, why is it that it was the "liberals" who embraced masking, quarantines, vaccines, closing schools and businesses, and the like, during the Covid panic?
liberals were not exhibiting a disgust response in 2020. you'll note they didn't care at all about covid at the start; in feb 2020 we're telling people to go to chinese new year parades and the like. however when trump started to downplay it, they pivoted in full force.
a disgust response is instinctive. looking at mutilated bodies. decaying flesh. maggots. repulsed at something sexually unpure. it's not a strategy, it's an intrinsic reaction; not the obverse stance of your perceived political enemies.
democrats exhibited a form of social control and signaling with the mask theatrics and orwellian covid games. it was doubly apparent when you saw the double standards surrounding the Summer of Love protests that year; they were ok with braving the virus for "social justice" gatherings, but if you gathered outside to have a BBQ or go to the beach, that was forbidden.
you also saw this with all the politicians who got caught violating their own rules. a genuine disgust response is not selective. a disgust response is something like the reaction you have to watching maggots eat; you know it's an authentic disgust response when it's not selectively applied based on political agenda.
these are not examples of disgust. that is displaying a form of dominance and advancing political goals in a hypermoralized society.
On one side, neural activity is revealed by an MRI machine, scanning a brain and decoding millions of radio waves emitted from hydrogen atoms in a fluctuating magnetic field. When processed, they show a precise 3D map of the brain and a real time picture of the specific regions as they are activated.
On the other side, there is a line with five points which measures whether the subject’s political views tend to be more conservative or liberal as those terms are understood in 21st century America.
Neural activity involving fear and disgust is correlated with modern conservative politics. Whereas neural activity reflecting curiosity, openness, and nuance tends to correlate with modern liberal politics.
Based on how liberal and conservative positions are presently marketed, this makes sense. However, I would be surprised if the same neural correlations would be found at different points in the evolution of liberalism and conservatism. For example, would the same liberal /conservative distinctions also appear in the brain activity of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton? Lincoln and Douglas? McKinley and William Jennings Bryan? Hoover and FDR?
We cannot go back in time and run these tests, but I would not be surprised if we found the same fear & disgust vs. openness & nuance dichotomy. But I strongly suspect that during some periods the fear/disgust activity would correlate with the liberal views of that era and the openness/nuance activity would correlate with the conservatives of that era. My hypothesis would be that as the political landscape shifts over time, the conservative side may at some points appeal to brains that favor openness/nuance and at other points to the brains that favor fear/disgust, and vice versa with liberalism. In other words, human brains are hardwired to favor either the fear/disgust impulse or the openness/nuance impulse, but over time those two impulses are not fixed to one side of the conservative vs. liberal dichotomy.
very thoughtful reply. broadly speaking, this linked comment speaks to it. namely in respect to the branding, which I fully agree oscillates over time.
It is, unfortunately, also a product of biologically caused morality (or more generally - cognition).
Blank Slatism disguises itself as a theory (i.e. descriptive framework), however, that's just a rationalization for it's morallistic core - egalitarianism, environmentalist/agentic bias. There are very smart people who will never accept HBD and hereditarianism - not because they are unable to see the truth of what you wrote, but because their moral/cognitive algorithms simply function differently. Blanks slatism on a population level is thus inescapable to the degree it is biological - which is a LOT.
Thanks for being the conduit between the science and the public. We need this. I'll have to read more of your articles about this. It had occurred to me that this data still doesn't tell us the best public policies, but you're arguing that is probably the extant policies- the product of our collective differences. I'll also be pondering how these differences differ around the world, and how they influence the relative success of different national populations. Clearly, methinks, there are better public policies that "should" predominate, e.g. free speech. Thank you.
Kind of a random thought but when I read your essays I think of the human future as either God-Emperors ruling entire galaxies, or packs of half-mad, feral humans going extinct in the ruins of 21st century architecture.
I had heard of the differences in disgust reflex but your research findings bring all of this home. Incredible work. As to the issue of disgust, it’s why liberal cities can turn into Warhammer 40K Hive Colony conditions of filth and homeless encampments everywhere. They just don’t have that physical revulsion that conservative temperaments have to these images. Like water off a duck’s back is an image of heaps of trash on the sidewalk to the committed liberal.
Very interesting to think about. What I can’t quite square in my head is: Was the amygdala in the republican brain bigger from birth? Or has it grown to be larger as a reaction function of its environment growing up?
For definitive proof you’d need to scan a bunch of children’s brains, predict how they’d turn out politically 20 years later, and then wait to see if your prediction was right or not.
Otherwise the “nature or nurture” question isn’t really answered to me.
And the other thing that I was thinking of was the tendency to grow more conservative as you get older (that old saying that “if you’re 20 and not a communist, you have no heart. If you’re 40 and still a communist, you have no brain”)
thank you for reading and for the comment. I'd guide you to the latter part of the essay to answer that question…. “nature doesn't do coincidences at scale”. the conclusion is clearer when you consider how unrealistic the obverse would be.
the amygdala (or ACC in libs for that matter) being a product of environment would still entail that half the population has a genetic penchant for... growing their amygdala more? rather than just coming out that way? what’s the real difference here? remember, liberals occupy the same national environment too, and their amygdalas aren't changing the same in this scenario…. why?
the genome supplies the blueprint; the environment can tune which parts of that blueprint are read. and when everyone is approximately in the same environment and morally/politically split roughly 50:50, something operating at a very deep substrate is at play.
even if environmentally elicited, that is still a genetic trait; an environment facilitates a genotype expressing as phenotype, it does not create the genotype. when subject to the same environment/nation, half the country displays a consistent distribution of neurological traits: to believe this isn’t genetic is to implicitly believe this is either a result of century-over-century coincidence, or a product of unique experiences for half a population.
50% of a population having their brains wired a certain way is not 50% of a population having a 'unique' experience, as it is definitionally not unique anymore at that scale - the liberal phenotype is experiencing it too, they inhabit the same macro surroundings (again, national-level assessment here). it is a biological expression that half a population is designed, evolved, to have.
(extreme environments can absolutely influence genetics/genotypes over time, but that is a different point and still must be assessed at scale: looking at macro distributions of characteristics to determine genetic origin of said characteristics)
and regarding the 'politics change with age' comment:
political shifts with age are vastly overstated and do not manifest en masse like they’re made out to; there's actually pretty solid research on this to corroborate. it’s one of those folksy sayings that really isn’t true in the aggregate.
I think there is only one dyad (male/female) rather than two (which would also include conservative/liberal) - given the significant overlap in their respective philosophies and modes of operation.
The complication arises because the conflict (the gender war eternal) is mediated across different ethnics groups, with alliances across and within genders often formed. Clearly men of all ethnicities have sounded off - not quite overwhelmingly, but more than ever in history. Will be interesting to see how the world rotates around this dyad now - and what new alliances will be formed. Hopefully we will not rotate back to the operating structure of the recent past.
I believe the unity of this dyad also explains why the two most common and popular discussion topics on Substack are politics and sexual relations.
And the discontent among the resurgent male political bloc had its first foundations online, via Substack and some of the earlier iterations including 4Chan. Memes have in fact changed the world.
a clarifying point, because some have remarked in the comments on how political designations are inconsistent over time:
you'll note I use the terms 'conservative/liberal' and not 'republican/democrat' or other political branding.
when I say conservative, I mean the morality that experiences disgust responses in the insula and has a larger amygdala. I consider this a masculine moral genotype, producing a conservative political phenotype.
when I say liberal, I mean the morality that experiences a sympathy response in the insula and has a larger ACC. I consider this a feminine moral genotype, producing a liberal political phenotype.
-
On definitions:
I consider 'conservative' appropriate terminology because it protects the ingroup, is hierarchical, emphasizes the behavioral immune system, and appeals to stability and the known past. this is inherently conservative (it seeks to "conserve"). whether or not tories, republicans, or other "rightwing" parties actually do this is not the point. the parties often shift over time. this is why I don't use political party nomenclature.
liberal is an appropriate term because it's open to new experiences, more intellectually flexible, more concerned with care/harm and less so hierarchies (thus more feminine). its outgroup emphasis is at the expense of "conservation" of ideals/standards and not as focused on threat detection. whether or not democrats or other "leftwing" parties embody this, again, is not the point. the nominal parties are prone to shifting over time.
-
Additional thoughts:
the ability of these moral genotypes to fully express themselves as political phenotypes is always contingent on the environment; this is why I often say in my essays "the environment dictates the expression". for animal species, the environment dictates how genotypes express their phenotypes. I find it to be no different for humans.
the environment is very decadent in the west, this facilitates more pronounced feminine moral genotype expression, creating a more dominant liberal political phenotype. this can only happen in a backdrop of comfort and prosperity.
conversely, in environments trending towards hardship, poverty, or war, that environment allows masculine moral genotypes, resulting in dominant conservative political phenotypes, to take hold. the concept of hypermoralization, which is covered in Part 1, touches on this too.
no hedonism in poverty, no discipline in decadence.
I'll defend and elaborate on this in Biofoundationalism Part IV. it's not as byzantine as it seems, promise.
a standalone comment:
One of the most unsettling things AI will reveal is how physical traits, outward appearance, characteristics of one's body, are neurological signatures. How the hardware whispers the software.
The body and mind cannot be decoupled. Two realms that create one system. They are entwined. Hardware and software work if the other does. For similar reasons why you can't get melody from a broken instrument, we will be shown how the carnal is a window into the cognitive.
Neuroscience and embodied cognition research show thought isn’t isolated in the skull. Posture, gut microbiome, hormonal state, even muscle tone, all feed back into temperament, mood, and decision-making. It does not stop there.
People will either be disturbed, or elated, by what's revealed by traits we were duly informed were entirely distinct from our minds. Faces have temperamental fingerprints. Psychology embedded in morphology. The machine is already able to spot these patterns....
I read this series out of order but when I'm done I'll have to read it once more from the start. This was really quite the journey.
For me, the uncomfortable fact to confront is that it seems our sense of morality is *also* biologically driven. Meaning that it's not obvious to everyone, and that plainly evident moral truths aren't; and perhaps, that arguing with people is not likely to convince them why what they feel is wrong, because they can't stop feeling what they feel.
As an aside, I find it incredibly funny that physiognomy can go so deep. It's almost unfair to me that you can predict all these traits about someone from listening to their voice, looking at their face, or examining a grainy featureless X-ray. There are no more surprises or secrets.
Interestingly, I think, it is not so much that one's morality is wrong. It is that choices require decision. Decide, from latin, is to cut off. So we decide not because there is zero validity in the other choice, but because we prioritize one choice over the other. I try to see the point of view of the other, but I am still decisive in my choice. I do not have to claim the other choice is wholly invalid; only that my choice is the better.
question:
"How does this explain when people experience political shifts? Usually around midlife from whatever they were raised as to more the other side. I’ve seen both happen, people raised liberal become more conservative as they age and people more conservative become less rigid and a bit more tolerant."
reply:
the political shifts with age are vastly overstated and do not manifest like they’re made out to. there is actually pretty extensive research on this to corroborate it. it’s one of those folksy sayings that really isn’t true in the aggregate.
(typically it is the political platforms that shift, the temperamental preferences do not)
the temperamental traits do not change with age, however the noteworthy experiences of each generation do collectively mold the direction of things.
I will break this all down in a future part of the Biofoundationalism
I wonder how much of these innate temperamental qualities can change based on external factors even when they're already ingrained. For example, regular meditation seems to increase the activity in the left and right insula and ACC. Similar to how people's views on certain topics skew more liberal after brain damage.
Similarly, how would something like CBT affect disgust responses in this way? I also think about in 2012 when same-sex marriage was being voted on in various states and it came out (heh) that people were much more likely to support it if they knew a gay person. I wonder what significance regular exposure has when it comes to the conservative instinct for disgust for certain behaviors?
yeah good points. if there's one thing that can massage the temperamental/moral/political (massage, not change), it's personal experiences. upbringing or familial environment make very little difference; there is some fascinating research on this that speaks to this, I will break it down in another essay in this series.
What I find unfortunate is, exactly, that personal experience affects people emotionally. It seems to override their capacity for abstract evaluation of issues. I have some unique notions of LGBT..... despite knowing, and being fond of many. My ideas would be criticized as phobic, but I think they're uniquely rational, despite my fondness for the gays and lesbians I know.
Of note: technically the correct metaphor for blank slate should be 'virgin birth' - immaculate conception is a similar but different religious concept. however the metaphor falls totally flat that way and doesn't change the substance of what I'm illustrating.
Excellent essay.
One thing I have difficulty understanding, though, is that if "conservative" neurobiology has a stronger inclination towards disgust directed towards impurity, why is it that it was the "liberals" who embraced masking, quarantines, vaccines, closing schools and businesses, and the like, during the Covid panic?
thank you very much.
liberals were not exhibiting a disgust response in 2020. you'll note they didn't care at all about covid at the start; in feb 2020 we're telling people to go to chinese new year parades and the like. however when trump started to downplay it, they pivoted in full force.
a disgust response is instinctive. looking at mutilated bodies. decaying flesh. maggots. repulsed at something sexually unpure. it's not a strategy, it's an intrinsic reaction; not the obverse stance of your perceived political enemies.
democrats exhibited a form of social control and signaling with the mask theatrics and orwellian covid games. it was doubly apparent when you saw the double standards surrounding the Summer of Love protests that year; they were ok with braving the virus for "social justice" gatherings, but if you gathered outside to have a BBQ or go to the beach, that was forbidden.
you also saw this with all the politicians who got caught violating their own rules. a genuine disgust response is not selective. a disgust response is something like the reaction you have to watching maggots eat; you know it's an authentic disgust response when it's not selectively applied based on political agenda.
these are not examples of disgust. that is displaying a form of dominance and advancing political goals in a hypermoralized society.
On one side, neural activity is revealed by an MRI machine, scanning a brain and decoding millions of radio waves emitted from hydrogen atoms in a fluctuating magnetic field. When processed, they show a precise 3D map of the brain and a real time picture of the specific regions as they are activated.
On the other side, there is a line with five points which measures whether the subject’s political views tend to be more conservative or liberal as those terms are understood in 21st century America.
Neural activity involving fear and disgust is correlated with modern conservative politics. Whereas neural activity reflecting curiosity, openness, and nuance tends to correlate with modern liberal politics.
Based on how liberal and conservative positions are presently marketed, this makes sense. However, I would be surprised if the same neural correlations would be found at different points in the evolution of liberalism and conservatism. For example, would the same liberal /conservative distinctions also appear in the brain activity of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton? Lincoln and Douglas? McKinley and William Jennings Bryan? Hoover and FDR?
We cannot go back in time and run these tests, but I would not be surprised if we found the same fear & disgust vs. openness & nuance dichotomy. But I strongly suspect that during some periods the fear/disgust activity would correlate with the liberal views of that era and the openness/nuance activity would correlate with the conservatives of that era. My hypothesis would be that as the political landscape shifts over time, the conservative side may at some points appeal to brains that favor openness/nuance and at other points to the brains that favor fear/disgust, and vice versa with liberalism. In other words, human brains are hardwired to favor either the fear/disgust impulse or the openness/nuance impulse, but over time those two impulses are not fixed to one side of the conservative vs. liberal dichotomy.
very thoughtful reply. broadly speaking, this linked comment speaks to it. namely in respect to the branding, which I fully agree oscillates over time.
https://thedosagemakesitso.substack.com/p/biofoundationalism-ii-the-moral-genotype/comment/88504449
babe wake up
ACC gf, amygdala bf
Nice work.
A point about Blank Slatism though.
It is, unfortunately, also a product of biologically caused morality (or more generally - cognition).
Blank Slatism disguises itself as a theory (i.e. descriptive framework), however, that's just a rationalization for it's morallistic core - egalitarianism, environmentalist/agentic bias. There are very smart people who will never accept HBD and hereditarianism - not because they are unable to see the truth of what you wrote, but because their moral/cognitive algorithms simply function differently. Blanks slatism on a population level is thus inescapable to the degree it is biological - which is a LOT.
Thanks for being the conduit between the science and the public. We need this. I'll have to read more of your articles about this. It had occurred to me that this data still doesn't tell us the best public policies, but you're arguing that is probably the extant policies- the product of our collective differences. I'll also be pondering how these differences differ around the world, and how they influence the relative success of different national populations. Clearly, methinks, there are better public policies that "should" predominate, e.g. free speech. Thank you.
@Methnostatist we should mix our dna
No
Why not tho
I just don't wanna
I do tho
Kind of a random thought but when I read your essays I think of the human future as either God-Emperors ruling entire galaxies, or packs of half-mad, feral humans going extinct in the ruins of 21st century architecture.
I had heard of the differences in disgust reflex but your research findings bring all of this home. Incredible work. As to the issue of disgust, it’s why liberal cities can turn into Warhammer 40K Hive Colony conditions of filth and homeless encampments everywhere. They just don’t have that physical revulsion that conservative temperaments have to these images. Like water off a duck’s back is an image of heaps of trash on the sidewalk to the committed liberal.
Brilliant.
Very interesting to think about. What I can’t quite square in my head is: Was the amygdala in the republican brain bigger from birth? Or has it grown to be larger as a reaction function of its environment growing up?
For definitive proof you’d need to scan a bunch of children’s brains, predict how they’d turn out politically 20 years later, and then wait to see if your prediction was right or not.
Otherwise the “nature or nurture” question isn’t really answered to me.
And the other thing that I was thinking of was the tendency to grow more conservative as you get older (that old saying that “if you’re 20 and not a communist, you have no heart. If you’re 40 and still a communist, you have no brain”)
thank you for reading and for the comment. I'd guide you to the latter part of the essay to answer that question…. “nature doesn't do coincidences at scale”. the conclusion is clearer when you consider how unrealistic the obverse would be.
the amygdala (or ACC in libs for that matter) being a product of environment would still entail that half the population has a genetic penchant for... growing their amygdala more? rather than just coming out that way? what’s the real difference here? remember, liberals occupy the same national environment too, and their amygdalas aren't changing the same in this scenario…. why?
the genome supplies the blueprint; the environment can tune which parts of that blueprint are read. and when everyone is approximately in the same environment and morally/politically split roughly 50:50, something operating at a very deep substrate is at play.
even if environmentally elicited, that is still a genetic trait; an environment facilitates a genotype expressing as phenotype, it does not create the genotype. when subject to the same environment/nation, half the country displays a consistent distribution of neurological traits: to believe this isn’t genetic is to implicitly believe this is either a result of century-over-century coincidence, or a product of unique experiences for half a population.
50% of a population having their brains wired a certain way is not 50% of a population having a 'unique' experience, as it is definitionally not unique anymore at that scale - the liberal phenotype is experiencing it too, they inhabit the same macro surroundings (again, national-level assessment here). it is a biological expression that half a population is designed, evolved, to have.
(extreme environments can absolutely influence genetics/genotypes over time, but that is a different point and still must be assessed at scale: looking at macro distributions of characteristics to determine genetic origin of said characteristics)
and regarding the 'politics change with age' comment:
political shifts with age are vastly overstated and do not manifest en masse like they’re made out to; there's actually pretty solid research on this to corroborate. it’s one of those folksy sayings that really isn’t true in the aggregate.
referenced in the comment linked here, and I will address it much more thoroughly in a later Biofoundationalism essay. ---> https://thedosagemakesitso.substack.com/p/biofoundationalism-ii-the-moral-genotype/comment/142529031
I think there is only one dyad (male/female) rather than two (which would also include conservative/liberal) - given the significant overlap in their respective philosophies and modes of operation.
The complication arises because the conflict (the gender war eternal) is mediated across different ethnics groups, with alliances across and within genders often formed. Clearly men of all ethnicities have sounded off - not quite overwhelmingly, but more than ever in history. Will be interesting to see how the world rotates around this dyad now - and what new alliances will be formed. Hopefully we will not rotate back to the operating structure of the recent past.
I believe the unity of this dyad also explains why the two most common and popular discussion topics on Substack are politics and sexual relations.
And the discontent among the resurgent male political bloc had its first foundations online, via Substack and some of the earlier iterations including 4Chan. Memes have in fact changed the world.