Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment

It's not fake news, it's fake narrative

This is Part III of the Biofoundationalism series and can be read on a standalone basis. The biological assertions in this essay will need more substantiating than what I’m providing here if you’re unfamiliar with them, and you can find that defense in Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype. Both Part I and II are linked at the end.

I listened to this while writing this essay.

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Preamble

Facts don’t care about your feelings, but more importantly feelings don’t care about your facts.

The causal arrow runs primarily in one direction: our instinctive feelings generate beliefs, which we then use to craft narratives, selectively curating facts to reinforce what we viscerally perceive to be true, which is to say what we consider moral. That the same sets of facts produce different conclusions is a feature of our political biology, not a bug.

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.

Imagine if we assumed this about sexual/morphological characteristics, that they can all be embodied within one person; ascribing this premise to the temperamental/cognitive/political is comparably fanciful.

You cannot uphold all values equally, because that is to functionally value nothing. The very essence of moral conviction is unavoidably hierarchal in that you must extol certain virtues over others in order to have them at all.

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 genetically disparate moral dispositions to stay balanced. All things are poison, and nothing is without poison.

Not recognizing these inborn neural disparities are intrinsic is tantamount to believing everyone can be an athlete or intellectual, masculine or feminine, if they just… put their minds to it. A blank-slate presupposition, an unsubstantiated religious pretext based on myth and wish.

Morality and temperament are genetic just as any other traits we accept as innate. This is a good thing, as it imposes structurally countervailing forces within a populace. Productive antagonism. Nature’s way of fostering moral homeostasis: one that evolves as our environment requires.

The natural dyads of masculine/feminine and conservative/liberal yield complementary moral frameworks, gestated over centuries by Darwinian pressure cooker 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 group cooperation; we are genetically fashioned to supplement each other’s strengths and 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.

Internalizing the reality of these hardcoded disparities and how/why they manifest is the intention of Biofoundationalism. You are going up against a neurally programmed instruction set, not “politics and facts”, 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 be true and the other false. Identical facts frequently result in completely opposing narratives, depending on the audience. This indicates you are not engaging in a facts-based debate when discussing conflicting political philosophies; it’s more appropriate to understand it as a promotion of one set of virtues over another. Two moral languages clashing.

The narratives we form are expressions of our values, values are predicated on your morality, your morality is derived from your temperament, and your temperament is biologically imposed. There are moral genotypes and political phenotypes; political biology is a real thing. 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 position” is almost always post-hoc justifications for natural programming. The adage “People don't have ideas, ideas have people” is right, however I think it’s better understood as: you don't have morals, your morals have you, because your temperament has you. Neurological predispositions exert a gravitational pull on ethical intuitions that few, if any, can truly escape.

The moral foundations that are ascendent in a society (resulting in which narratives become widely accepted and which policies follow suit) shift with the utility of those values within the environment. Moral foundations that are useful in poverty are not equally useful in prosperity. Ideals that help you win a war don’t carry the same utility when determining social safety nets. Biofoundationalism Part IV will focus 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.

• 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 our moral instincts.

Is your response to several of these to feel sympathy/empathy? Perhaps a twinge of disgust? Your insula is probably doing most of the heavy lifting creating the narrative that’s taking shape in your head right now. If you made an “ick face” or scoffed while reading any of them, your insula sends its regards; it’s responsible for sympathy responses in liberals, and disgust reactions in conservatives.

Here’s how you would organize the above facts into narratives, depending on what you already instinctively (genetically) felt was morally true. Just the facts, man.

Both form compelling narratives and are replete with facts. 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 and requires special consideration, and the woman knows best.

Here are the moral foundations we draw from when assessing which facts we like and dislike:

Pro-Choice fact curation is led by the Care/Harm moral foundation as it relates to the mother, as well as the Liberty/Oppression foundation regarding female choice by depicting it 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 to be 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 motivated by protection of the weak.

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Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment

It’s morally governed feelings, not facts, that drive narratives; these narratives then shape political policy. Facts matter insofar as the implementation of policies; they are not persuasive instruments in respect to viewpoints that carry strong ethical certainty. Facts are tools in service of moral stances.

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

As a simple heuristic, the more morally polarizing it is, the more impervious it is to facts. High-conviction assertions are not 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 the advocacy of the ideas themselves, nor do they convince people their narratives are wrong.

“What do you mean my narrative is bad? Have you considered these other facts over here??” - 98% of political debates

Intelligent people with high verbal IQs are more adept at obfuscating their moral imperatives with carefully arranged facts that concoct their narratives. This creates an illusion their conclusion is more correct or “informed” to the uninitiated.

Politically “educated” typically 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 begins at the political-policy level to promote his morality and give it a veneer of objectivity (Looks like: “You’re uneducated”). The lower-IQ moral lobbyist bluntly espouses his values on cruder terms (Looks like: “You’re evil and dumb”). Both are making arguments in favor of their moral foundations all the same. One has factual sediment to get there, one does not.

A simple person cuts to the chase and unabashedly makes the virtuous declarations he’s hardwired to champion, accompanied with less informational pageantry to rationalize it. The academic, pundit, politician, etc. has layers of data gravel to wade through to get to his biologically rooted instruction set: collating a collage of objective-seeming factual tidbits to advance his morality.

As you’re aware, there are many facts… which ones do you adhere to? Only the right and true ones? Ah, don’t we all. When we find facts that endorse our views, we are fact adherents. When we encounter facts that undermine our views, we pivot to nuance and elide over the bad facts and only uphold the good ones. This is how a coherent narrative is born.

We all do this. Assuming good faith, it’s not intentionally deceptive or deceitful (most of the time), as it’s largely unconscious. Simply part of the human condition. Our amygdala and insula are the conductors, we are the vessel. We are moral genotypes presenting as political phenotypes, guided by temperamental directives we do not control. Nature intended it this way. A dyad is healthiest when its components act as complements, not enemies.

A “fact check” would be more appropriately understood as a narrative check, and even more accurately framed as a morality check.

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