All chapters, including derivative essays called Applied Biofoundationalism, are linked at the end.
I listened to this song while writing. Enjoy.
A recap of the previous four chapters:
Part I, Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization: provides an overview of the series and deconstructs hypermoralization.
Part II, The Moral Genotype: the genetic nature of morality. Illustrated with brain-scan research and natural temperamental distributions
Part III, Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment: political narratives are post-hoc conceived to promote values based on the proponent’s temperamental morality. Facts curated as convenient, and ignored as expedient, to support instinctive conclusions.
Part IV, Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To: societal values shift due to different utility in different environments. Includes research on male/female moral and political divergences.
Outline:
I. Father Physics
II. Scaled Human Coordination
III. Ideologues and History’s Patterns
IV. Power Acts, Beauty Is
V. Moral Foundations: A Biofoundational Revision
VI. Prison. Ocean. Home. Forest.
VII. Concluding
Note: some light physics concepts are referenced that are granularly deconstructed in War Is How a Nation Eats; I will use them assuming baseline knowledge. If anything I cite is unclear, please reference this essay.
Father Physics
Politics is the visible behavior of biology constrained by physics. Successful societies persist by balancing the order that forms containers with the freedom that fills them.
Terms:
A dyad is a pair of oppositional but interdependent forces, each defined in reference to the other. E.g. day is undefined without night; left has no orientation without right; feminine has no point of reference without masculine.
‘Chaos’ and ‘entropy’ have close but not identical meanings: entropy is the formal thermodynamic measure; chaos is a lived correlate. I use them interchangeably.
Physics authors laws, biology issues templates within them, and their human-readable submission appears in how we organize at scale. Everything obeys the dictates of physics: not metaphorically, but materially. An immutable constitution all earthly inhabitants abide by. Some domains have optics that make this difficult to see. We gaze into them.
The same competition between entropy and emergent order that sculpts stars also births civilizations. The thermodynamic edict compelling atoms to form molecules guides man to form countries
Under gravity, diffuse matter coalesces into stars even as the universe’s overall entropy climbs.
Electromagnetic interactions drive atoms into molecules by lowering energy and releasing heat, trading exported entropy for localized structure.
Human societies mirror these fractals. By organizing into complex institutions and coordinating into increasingly intricate patterns, we establish localized structures that resist the winds of chaos.
Star, molecule, and nation: different scales of self-organizing systems that trade energy flows for stability and order. All are dissipative structures differing only by degree.
Why would this apply to us? A better question: why would it not?
We are not metaphorically guided by physics: we embody and enact its axioms in all we do. Thermodynamics molds biology; biology’s instruction set defines the cognitive and temperamental; the temperamental informs the cultural, social, moral, and political. These layers cannot be disentangled, they are entwined. We are not outside this process. We are of it.
Rather, the solipsistic exceptionalism presuming we could exist outside them is what warrants humbling examination. No deities walk this earth: that includes all of us. You can conceptualize this submission as one to nature, physics, or God: whatever allows you to be at peace with He Who Makes The Rules.
The rational and analytical must be grounded in the empirical to have merit; Biofoundationalism respects this requirement. Theory means nothing without praxis; we’ll take these concepts and apply them concretely in upcoming chapters.
Universal dyadic relationships permeate all facets of existence. Once you see them, it’s hard to look away.
Scaled Human Coordination
Retire the word ‘politics’ when navigating of social coordination: it’s a tarnished, tribalistic priming device that distracts and prompts seeing The Other as only enemy rather than evolved complement. It’s a pornographic term that titillates without inseminating: stimulating to stare at but leaves you sweaty and sterile. It generates emotional heat while synthesizing nothing.
A recalibration: rather than the theatrical shadowplay of political parties and sectarian ideologies, focus on the bedrock all beliefs conform to. The real subject is scaled human coordination, and there are two elemental forces:
Human coordination that seeks order: produced by the masculine/authoritarian/conservative/structure/tyrannical
Masculine order exists as a spectrum between competent and tyrannical:
The tyrannical masculine confuses control for strength, crushing liberty and life’s color. He turns the container into a prison.
The competent masculine understands strength as duty and safeguards liberty. He turns the container into a sanctuary alongside the feminine.
Human coordination that seeks freedom: produced by the feminine/libertarian/liberal/chaos/entropic
Feminine freedom exists as a spectrum between meaningful and chaotic:
The meaningful feminine gestates liberty through concert and compromise with the competent masculine transforming space into home. She fills the container with beauty, purpose, and dignity.
The chaotic feminine with no masculine counterweight overdoses on freedom and invites entropy. Rootless and vulnerable, she mistakes formlessness for liberation and dissolves the container, leaving her swimming in an ocean.
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that entropy increases in isolated systems; yet all of life is an open system and localized reversal of entropy, creating islands of order within a surrounding sea of chaos constantly threatening to wash them away. This applies to the wolf and its pack, bird and its flock, fish and its school, ant and its colony, and human and its society. There are no exceptions. Why would there be?
Understanding the political as Scaled Human Coordination — existing between order and chaos — diffuses manipulative political storytelling and provides a useful, clear frame. The top-down lens overlays narratives onto everything, making them appear unique and agentic. The bottom-up perceives them categorically through two poles and dyadic interplay.
A political stance invariably falls within this spectrum, because everything ultimately exists within it. Strip apart all the layers of post-hoc rationalization to find that one is always communicating, “I think society should have greater order”, or “I want it to have more freedoms”.
The primordial dyad isn’t conservative/liberal or masculine/feminine, but the cosmic tension between order and chaos. Structure and flow. There are rules. Human coordination abides by them.
Human civilization propagates by these principles: through action, the masculine converts chaos into order at great energetic cost, while the feminine, through essence, enacts the entropic flow making change and growth possible. Neither can survive without the other; pure order is death by crystallization, pure chaos is death by dissolution.
These systemic forces closely cluster along sex but are not exclusive to it. We witness the archetypal masculine and feminine within many of us, contingent on setting: the fierce mother protecting her children channels masculine protection; the male artist absorbed in creation or devoid of direction embodies the feminine’s creative chaos.
The omnipresent relationship between order and chaos is both oppositional and symphonic: the supreme dyad through which all other dyads flow. It manifests in every dimension of existence with different veneers.
Jazz requires both musical arrangements (scales, time signatures, harmonic progressions) and improvisational latitude. Order provides the chords; chaos sings the melodies. Too mechanical and you have a dry metronome; too much freestyle and you have noise. Beauty and boundaries live in the conversation between constraint and creativity.
A symphony depends on scores, orchestration, and a conductor’s authority for its backbone. But within that structure, musicians bring interpretive nuance: phrasing, dynamics, timing. Order writes the score, chaos breathes life into it: elevating it beyond robotic reproduction. Too much adherence is clinical and cold; too much freedom is distortion. Artistry thrives in the tension between discipline and deviation.
Ideologues and History’s Patterns
The ideologue evangelizes their preferred version of scaled human coordination as always the sweet spot, independent of context or circumstance. They’re inflexible and integrate little nuance. They believe the answer is fixed, not fluid, and that they’ve found it.
A reliable heuristic: someone whose message constantly consists of “more order!” or “more freedom!” — as if either is an unalloyed good no matter the setting — is a dogmatic doctrinaire chanting religiously. They’ve mistaken a context-dependent optimum for a universal rule. All they’re doing is showing you their temperament. People unwittingly reveal neurological information about themselves while doing so: “my anterior cingulate cortex is very active!”, “my amygdala is quite large!”, “my insula evokes strong disgust or sympathy responses!”. These are common tacit tattletales made by partisan junkies. Political speeches facilitate temperamental (neurological) profiling.
Don’t get distracted by academic subterfuge and descriptions littered with pseudo-specificity and neatly curated facts crafting narratives. Ideologies are shrouded in intricate-sounding, scholarly-seeming novellas that at best indoctrinate and at worst deceive. They tell top-down tales rather than work toward bottom-up comprehension. Reject this: worse than useless, it makes you see half your nation as adversaries.
Any chronicle that attempts to explain scaled forms of human coordination, incubated over centuries via Darwinian crucible, as “one half dumb evil, other half smart good” should be self-evidently mocked as juvenile and dumped in the trash. We are done with that. It is painfully uninteresting. We are being adults. An adult understands symbols that survive cycles communicate something we should heed, and tides that recur across timelines exist beyond our control.
Patterns echoing throughout history plainly operate outside man’s agency. Apparent in that the actors change, yet the script persists. His name may be different, but his nature endures.
The tidal forces that lifted Caesar beckon Trump. The entropic decay that dissolved the Dutch Golden Age does so to Detroit. History doesn't repeat, but most certainly rhymes as if it were in a rap battle; nature only has so many bars under physics’ beatboxing dominion.
Biofoundationalism is a framework recognizing natural law and seeking to advance an understanding. It reads society like a biologist reads an ecosystem: not through the eyes of good/evil or right/wrong, but of symbiosis and competition, growth and decay, adaptation and extinction. It maps environments and trade-offs; it doesn’t decree virtues.
This contrasts with the partisan ideologue’s model, which selectively curates factoids to craft top-down narratives advancing a moral belief wearing political drag. A framework is neither prescriptive nor asserts moral superiority, whereas a political belief implicitly does by its nature.
The cosmic couple of order and chaos is the physics-based dyad that biology obeys.
Physics is the generative root of all directives earthly beings adhere to. Biology’s submission to it is encoded in the genetic moral-genotypes responsible for the neurology underpinning our preferred poles of human coordination: one side seeks structure (order), the other pushes for freedom (chaos), and the political flows from these origins. People don’t possess beliefs, beliefs possess people; that’s because you don’t have your amygdala, your amygdala has you.
You have more in common with political allies than you think. And you have more to be grateful for regarding your political adversaries than you’ve been led to believe. We are counterweights in a shared mechanism. Opposing notes in the same chord.
A dyad is not whole without its opposite. The political friction you resent is the tension that defines you. The adversary you hate is the complement that completes you. A human collective evolved countervailing parts that engineer a more resilient unit. A symphony cannot be all one note. Right has no orientation without Left.
None of us are self-contained moral savants. We are outputs of biology’s wiring, and so is the person you think is destroying the country. He is wrong in the way you need him to be, giving you something to push against. A dyad is undefined, unoriented, without its counterpart. It kills itself when it consumes its antithesis. Extremes are insidious; balance is a blessing.
There are rules. Nature’s philosophy emerges from the ancestral grandfather of physics. The marrow of how a species propagates and survives is born bottom-up, predicated on dictates that answer to no man. There are no exemptions, only temporary delusions… then corrections.
Power Acts, Beauty Is
Beauty and purpose (the feminine) both decorate the world and magnetizes power and protection (the masculine) 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.
The human coordination of order toils to gain footing allowing the human coordination of freedom to take root. The conservative strives to create conditions where the liberal may prosper.
What is order if not infrastructure for comfort? What is structure if not the sinew of safety? What is discipline if not the precondition of delight? What is duty if not in service of freedom? What is the masculine if not protecting the feminine?
The former traits are things you must do; the latter are things you get to enjoy if the former is done competently. Masculine because you have to, feminine because you get to.
The masculine embodies obligations because he must; the feminine embodies options because she may.
What is a soldier if not the guardian of the artist? Protection and duty necessitate purpose.
Masculine motivation organizes itself around feminine beauty — not just the physical sort, but the beauty of ideals: poetry, harmony, transcendence. The soldier both protects the artist and what she represents: the possibility that life might mean something beyond mere survival. Order's highest achievement is creating chambers where its presence is invisible, yet palpable.
The adept masculine forges systems of control precisely to create zones where control becomes unnecessary. Building a fortress so secure that those within can forget walls exist: the ultimate act of love disguised as dominance. Masculinity's order works toward femininity’s liberty. Strength assembles rooms; beauty gives them reasons.
While one’s value derives from action, the other is a coveted prize in and of itself. The entire point of competent masculine gardening is to grow meaningful feminine roses: desirable just because they're beautiful.
Male accomplishment informs male value, whereas women are valuable simply by being. Women are born, men are made. One force proves itself through motion, the other generates gravity by existing. In cosmically comparable fashion, order is exclusively established through maintenance and effort, whereas chaos is what happens when you do nothing.
Order acts, chaos is
This dynamic is found from bedroom to body politic. Conservatism's utility lies in what it defends and protects, while liberalism's appeal requires no marketing campaign; its rewards are self-evident in their attractiveness.
Shockingly, you don't have to convince people to desire the increasing rights and privileges that accompany safety and wealth! When people need not bear heavy burdens, they overwhelmingly opt not to. This scales to the national level.
A societal predilection for liberalism naturally develops as abundance and stability permit. This pattern goes back centuries across civilizations and cultures. It is neither good nor bad, it simply is.
Whereas power operates through threat of impact, beauty is inert... topping from the bottom as a compass for power’s purpose. Beauty’s utility is illuminated by its sheer essence, organizing the world through inspiration rather than instruction. Feminine values provide a lattice that makes life worth living; masculine values allow it to exist at all.
The morality of honor (actions, earned) complements and eventually allows an ethic of care (dignity, deserved) to emerge. Noble masculine action (kinetic, extrinsic, empirical) earns the right to demand feminine dignity (inert, intrinsic, rational).
Honor acts, dignity is
This interaction is slowly taken for granted as prosperity makes the masculine contribution less visible, less obviously critical. Inhabitants on the 80th floor of a skyscraper who begin to treat pillars they never see as optional.
The capable do not wish for equality, the powerful do not desire fairness; however, they cultivate environments that lionize these ideals via their triumphs.
As prosperity rises so do freedoms; as you increase freedom you necessarily weaken rules; as rules are undermined, structure diminishes in parallel. Each constraint removed in freedom's name is another beam extracted from order's framework. As order declines, entropy must rise...
To swim left is inevitable as one succeeds. To swim too far left is to erode under the weight of your own victories. To never swim left is to stagnate. As with all things, the dosage determines the poison.
When freedom is viewed as a drug you can never overdose on, when we forget it requires a container to give it shape, it ceases to be liberty and metastasizes into chaos.
It eventually destroys the circumstances that allowed it to live.
Moral Foundations: A Biofoundational Revision
This brings us to a small-but-substantial correction of a core component of moral categorization.
Jon Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory is a masterful diagnostic tool and I’ve cited it in every part of this series thus far. However, I’d like to offer a notable tweak: I find one of them half wrong, containing a category error.
Jon Haidt has insightfully dissected the basis of liberal and conservative morality but operates from a top-down, dated angle with his designation of liberty. Here are his original moral foundations:
Haidt's miscategorization of liberty as conservative morality stems from conflating two distinct phenomena: the defense of freedoms (conservative) versus the expansion of freedoms (liberal). Conservatives protect current boundaries; liberals seek to extend them. Both serve liberty, but through opposing mechanisms. The conservative says “this far and no further”; the liberal asks “why not further if you can?”. Both push in distinctly different directions.
I believe Haidt subconsciously recognizes the two poles of human coordination while using more-legible political nomenclature. However, in doing so he succumbs to a top-down, textbook-style perspective of conservatism, overlooking the dyadic function it performs in conjunction with its liberal counterpart. You cannot assess either side of a dyad in isolation; they are critically mutualistic and defined by their obverse.
The Lib, whether liberal or libertarian, promotes a world guided by a moral filter that is technically and fundamentally (though not intentionally) chaos-increasing in its emphasis on freedom: these values are necessarily feminine, as they are categorically not agents of order. This morality advances coordination stage left on the spectrum between masculine order and feminine chaos, making it a component of liberal morality.
Here are the moral foundations updated to reflect this Biofoundationalist axis. In doing so, we also restore balance between the two poles. Haidt thought conservatives incorporated more moral foundations than liberals (3.5 vs 2.5), when both naturally reside in parity if properly understood.
Prison. Ocean. Home. Forest.
These moral foundations produce concrete outcomes when instantiated in societies. The masculine/conservative pull toward order and the feminine/liberal drift toward freedom create distinct societal conditions depending on their proportions and competence.
Scaled Human Coordination has four archetypal spaces:
Prison: Order without beauty. Walls without windows. Arrangement without purpose. Stultifying and draconian. Incompetent masculine tyranny occupies a landscape cloaked in conflict, poverty, and misery.
Home: Liberty’s dwelling. A balance between order’s skeleton and freedom’s fat. Limitations that enable flourishing. The competent masculine and meaningful feminine turn a country’s Pizza Hut into a Pizza Home.
Forest: The masculine gradually abandons his duties as society enters the woodlands. The feminine’s demands for more encounter few barriers. Load-bearing borders degrade. You can survive, but the gardens overflow with weeds.
Ocean: Freedom without form. Disarray and no direction. An absent masculine. A chaotic feminine indulgently disconnected from the empirical. She perceives hierarchies as oppressive, with no theory of mind regarding the savages that lurk beyond walls. The only boundary she draws is around those who dare to draw boundaries. She swims in an ocean, ‘free’ to drown in hedonism. Anomie.
Most political arguments are disagreements about which space we occupy, because basically everyone will say they seek the Home. However, at national scale no one’s temperament is calibrated to produce the Home on its own. Remember: we evolved as a collective and by evolutionary design have contrasting moral priorities.
Meaningful liberty doesn’t blossom in the wild but within walled gardens. The defense of that garden requires a perimeter and rules to sustain its roses. Structure yields the kind of freedom that’s valuable. Conversely, you are not ‘liberated’ when swimming in an ocean, you are lost.
You are not ‘free’ when wandering a horizonless plane, you are wayward. A lack of routine produces mental chaos, and an absence of fences leaves you strolling in fields of entropy. Liberty knows its limits; anarchy knows none.
Order grants freedom substantive autonomy, the type that anyone cares to have: do you aspire to roam “sovereignly” in a forest, or a home in society? The latter demands boundaries, the former demands nothing.
To domesticate one’s surroundings is to optimize the tradeoff between masculine and feminine morality and their forms of scaled human coordination: enough order to exist safely, enough freedom to exist meaningfully.
A gardener who pretends not to distinguish between weed and rose soon learns that one is a result of careful intention and preservation, and the other grows rampantly in their absence. One exists only through vigilance; the other thrives on neglect.
When these two moral poles sit in rough equilibrium, order and freedom breed liberty… and a life worth living. The beating heart where constraint enables rather than strangles. One of the crowning feats of civilization is building spaces where boundaries feel like horizons.
Somewhere between prison and ocean, order and chaos, sits a home with a pool.
Concluding
The protests in the streets, legislation being championed, the art on display: all communicate vital signs of where we sit on the coordination spectrum and which direction we're headed. They are not causes, but symptoms. The environment dictates the expression.
The pathology isn’t that some loudly fancy free everything plus a cozy nap while others yearn for a bootcamp that can touch the heavens; contrasting archetypes are perpetually present via nature’s temperamental templates The degeneration occurs through the loss of dynamic tension between them: when one side overwhelms, you enter unpleasant or unsustainable conditions.
As with all ideologies, they are wrong in isolation and right in the aggregate.
As countervailing elements within a collective, they are healthy. Destructive in purity, salutary in proportion. When a critical threshold of the poles of human coordination mutates into militant factions of tyrannic prisons and entropic oceans — each viewing the other as existentially evil rather than systemically essential — a polity loses the ability to self-regulate.
The cancer lies in imbalance. The cure is remembering that opposites don’t destroy, they define. Your opposite isn’t your enemy, but an anchoring counterpressure. Dyadic tension serves as competitive fuel for the civilizational engine. When that balance breaks, societies snap toward prison or drown in ocean. When it holds, they build homes.
Thank you for reading.
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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
I want the forest, literally and figuratively. I love and always have loved the outdoors and the forest is deeply indifferent and doesn’t care about us. It’s hard for the state or civilization to reach it.
What a profound and necessary message, especially given the contemporary Zeitgeist of the USA, the West in general. In terms of personal application, I don't particularly need any encouragement to shun ideology and doctrine, walked away from those traps before my 16th winter...but I came away with a win otherwise. I can now reframe my writing, lol, usually born in the ocean of the chaotic feminine, ideally disciplined by editorial constraints into an appropriate container for the call to freedom to flourish within. Eventually, I mean. Editing seems to be the never-ending story for me sometimes. I puzzled over your dyad of honor/dignity at first glance--the dependence of personal dignity upon one's upholding of personal honor seemed obvious, but I couldn't understand the oppositional nature of the relationship until you elaborated on it in terms of Acting and Being. Looking forward very much to the next two sections. I hope you publish these essays as a book someday, Dmitry.