This is essay is part of Applied Biofoundationalism. All chapters are linked at the end. Enjoy.
Human Natural State
“Capitalism” is a rhetorical sleight of hand. A socialist's scarecrow dressed up to frighten us away from recognizing our own nature. What we call capitalism isn't a deliberately engineered system, but an emergent pattern of human coordination. A spontaneous set of behaviors reflecting our motivations when unimpeded by external restrictions. Our default mode. The term implicitly assumes it’s an academic construct that organizes human behavior based off theory, directive, or model.
Laws and governments can be lubricants for natural motivations and innate desires, but they do not create them.
Imagine if an academic told you that you only wanted a wife and kids, to have sex and be intimate, because of a country's 'Sexualist Breeder' system. That your desire for intercourse isn't biology but bureaucracy. That girl with the prettier face? You don't actually want her, the Department of Reproductive Affairs has simply programmed you to think you do. A fat ass, wide hips, we only want them because of intellectual theory. It’s not millions of years of evolution speaking, but a policy paper from 1963.
Inane. Though when we ascribe academic and government credit to our inborn motivations to accumulate resources, capital, and wealth, we accept it as unthinkingly true.
Calling an emergent phenomenon where you pursue your self-interests, what man is pre-programmed to act out “capitalism” has always struck me as bizarre. Humans do this all on their own, why did you give it this strangely deceptive name? Academics don’t get to take credit for natural imperatives. Man seeks sex, capital, and trade, without any theorizing from the tweed-jacket-wearing demographic.
Academics love this term, because it’s not good marketing to describe man’s capital-seeking ways as a subset of natural law. That designation doesn’t help scholarly counter-branding; you can’t call the natural thing you dislike “natural”, because that makes the academic’s solution “unnatural” (many such cases).
Lest you think I’m being unfair to our ivory-tower friends, here’s the lore of the term “capitalism”: borne from a socialist French intellectual and popularized by Marx. So the guys who didn’t like the natural system, named the natural system something pejorative, weird!
This is a weaponized term. It allows central planners to subconsciously manipulate your view and acceptance of organic human actions, both collectively and individually. This is not trivial. Language is a powerful tool. More on this towards the end.
So we got the term “capitalism” to describe the natural, emergent behaviors and productive activities that occur when humans are left to their own devices. Power laws, but with money….. that’s a “capitalism”. Conniving rhetoric has been embedded into our understanding of capitalism from the very start, originating from a literal socialist and communist.
It’s every bit as subconsciously subversive as having your asexual, abstinence-promoting professor describe your heterosexual relationship with your wife as being part of the corrupt “sexualist breeder” system. How do you expect sex, children, and their pursuit to be framed based off just this name alone? You’re primed to dislike it before you even understand it.
Every time you debate "capitalism" on leftist framing (you implicitly do this when accept their premise and tacitly endorse this by using the word) you are being rhetorically molested.
A reset is needed. You don’t let your enemies define you, name you, and tell you what you are.
I’d like to offer a new name: Human Natural State (HNS)
To illustrate:
Emergence: The Natural Order
Complex systems — such as beehives, ecosystems, and human economies — regularly produce patterns no individual member deliberately intends, is responsible for, or can predict. These are known as emergent properties. What is known as “capitalism” is simply an emergent consequence of countless individuals pursuing their own motivations and ends. When people are allowed to act as their own self-interest, they “capitalism”. This does not come from a bureaucrat’s pen, but nature’s will. Other animals exhibit these traits too. It is a bottom-up phenomenon, not top down.
Consider the Beaver
What happens when you drop a bunch of beavers into a forest near a river? What do they do when uninhibited and can act out their innate programming? What motivates those beavers to accumulate logs and construct their dams with no Beaver Theory of Wood? No beaver parliament convenes to debate dam policy. No beaver economist publishes 'The Wealth of Lodges.' They simply build: because that is what beavers do.
Their programming says collect wood and construct dams; it's the default state of the wood-seeking rodent. How odd would it be to label this a “capitalist” beaver economy for log procurement and dam creation? As if these rodents adhered to some externally imposed market philosophy rather than merely acting upon their innate impulses to create these habitats. Those fat cat beaver robber barons are at it again!
Only when an external force acts upon the beaver does it alter their dam-building actions. Similarly, only when a central body determines the way man is gathering his wood should be changed, does it alter how he does it.
Now drop humans into a territory, what do they do?
They trade. They specialize. They accumulate. They create hierarchies. Not because some intellectual designed a 'system' but because this behavioral program runs deeper than thought itself. The frontier towns of the American West didn't wait for permission to create markets, they didn’t dig up their Adam Smith references to determine if they should trade with each other. The moment humans gather, commerce emerges like heat from friction.
In new environments where there’s no outside force telling settlers what to do, people start building their dams. They grow things, create supply chains, farm, barter, they “capitalism”. What a silly thing to call this emergent activity that happens all on its own.
Every civilization, from Mesopotamian merchants to Aztec markets to Aboriginal trade routes, developed commerce without a blueprint. No central committee wrote the 'How to Capitalism' manual and distributed it across continents. These patterns sprung forth just as birdsong or territorial marking do, spontaneous expressions of our species' behavioral repertoire.
The Phoenicians didn't need Ricardian textbooks to tell them to trade purple dye. Medieval guilds formed without consulting Milton Friedman! The Silk Road surfaced not from policy but from the simple recognition that someone over there has what I want, and I have what they want, so lets swap. This is as natural as wolves hunting in packs or bees churning out honey.
We are the only species arrogant enough to claim we invented our own instincts.
“Capitalism” is the term the aggrieved intellectual came up with to describe mankind’s innate desire to create networks and interactions that allow him to flourish. It is an intentionally manipulative, derogatory name for a beautiful, natural thing. HNS is our hardwired coordination mechanism, just as sex is our encoded reproductive mechanism.
Intellectual objection: “But property didn’t exist before man put pen to paper and concocted property rights. Without property, man cannot capitalism. Ergo, property comes from the state, so capitalism does too.”
This objection reveals the depth of modern, domesticated confusion. Property comes from governments? Go observe any dog with a bone, any bird defending its nest, any child clutching their toy, now go try and take it from them. How about a Somalian with no “property laws”… does property not exist in Somalia? How is its ownership determined? If you sit long enough with this question, you’ll realize it’s decided the same way in upstate New York or London. The savage and the civilized, all their property is enshrined and defended in exactly the same way.
Property predates law similar to how hunger predates restaurants. Governments didn’t create property rights, they recognized a natural phenomenon and built their societies around it.
“Noble governments create man-made laws that align with natural laws, facilitating orderly execution of the positive behaviors that man takes instinctively. Ignoble governments create laws that contravene our innate mannerisms, and impose a view of how man ought to be, rather than how he is.”
From Property Rights, Toilets, and the Way of the Dog:
“Capitalism” is a deceitful designation, propagated by intellectuals claiming false credit for innate human programming in some of its purest form. The best governments, and places to live, have created laws that recognize and encourage man’s productive, capital-seeking programming. The worst societies fight it. The results speak for themselves, people vote with their feet.
How do countries become more prosperous? The answer is obvious: governments start to fuck off and “capitalism” magically begins to happen.
Natural Law Branding
When intellectuals take credit for that which emergently occurs, it nurtures the human ego and leaves the action ripe for politicization. The capitalist designation is useful for the socialist-friendly politician, because it connotes greed, as if this is some contrived ideology forced on you by Scrooge McDuck.
Understood as Human Natural State, policies that undermine it are definitionally at odds with nature. People instinctively have an aversion to “anti-nature” designations, however “anti-capitalist”…. sounds like you’re just anti-greed; the moral branding hits differently.
While unfettered market dynamics produce wealth and efficiency, it also leads to power laws and monopolist abuses - this essay is not saying select centralized limits isn’t productive and helpful. From Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to today’s tech giants, reasonable institutional restraints are necessary to maintain healthy competition. However, the impetus behind the pursuit of capital remains innate, not engineered. A central body limits these activities, it is not responsible for them.
To the socialist economist, identifying capitalism as a natural system is to lose a key psychological touchstone and cede ground in a rhetorical war. Associations and branding are important when promoting an idea, and smearing self-interest as “greed” is often quite effective. The disparagement embedded in “capitalist” political attacks is subterfuge and the premise should be flatly rejected.
Strip out the deceptive presuppositions and show HNS for what it is: not a top-down institutional decree, but a bottom-up emergent phenomenon. Don’t accept the socialist’s attempt to fit it into an ideological box: for the same reason it’d be ridiculous to attack the beaver on these grounds. If you’re using a chart to proselytize for your beliefs, you’ve already lost; change the angle from discussing graphs, to reviewing survival imperatives in mammals.
HNS is pro-human and does not fight man’s inherent productive tendencies, it recognizes and amplifies them. HNS is how the nodes within the economic complex adaptive system organically structure their behaviors. It is not a man-made system, but rather a natural system that man exists within.
You’re Always Voting Your Temperament
Where do economic beliefs come from? The books you read? There are many books on political and economic systems that disagree wildly. Did you find all the right books? You know everyone thinks their books are the right books, right? So let’s go a layer deeper here: bottom-up, not top-down.
You sought out those specific books for a reason. The elephant and the rider, we gravitate towards information that confirms our priors. The better question is, where did those priors come from?
Economic stances are political derivatives with dollar signs; political stances are moral derivatives; moral stances are temperamental derivatives; and your temperament is biologically imposed. There are substantial implications in these statements if truly internalized.
Lions, Giraffes, and Their Optimum Environments
Smaller government resonates with the high-agency. Larger government with the low-agency. You are always voting your temperament... "what environment is best suited to my thriving" is embedded into your decision making, and political thinking, at a neurological level.
“A man’s interpretation of truth is downstream of his morality, and his morality is downstream of his temperament, and his temperament is a direct, explicit, observable, measurable output of his amygdala size, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity, and insula activation patterns. These are not the same for everyone. Your moral language originates from here.
We can predict your political beliefs with 83% accuracy with only a brain scan. We don’t need to know anything else about you. Don’t need to know your opinions, favorite books, where you went to school, none of it. And this is without AI. This hard reality cannot be ignored.
The raw physical architecture of your neural tissue illuminates your beliefs without you saying a word.”
From Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype:
Who thrives most in pure HNS? Consider why some promote laissez-faire societies, and others a dominant central point of control and resource reallocation. Your motivation for one over the other does not come from textbooks or where you went to school. The strong do not seek equality.
The barista advocating for socialism isn't stupid or lazy, just as the entrepreneur lobbying for deregulation isn’t evil or greedy: they're expressing the same form of temperamental self-interest. This is healthy and normal.
Both are trying to cultivate the ideal environments for them to flourish. Since we all have different abilities, different risk tolerance, different morality, there is a lot of variance in those preferences! Welcome to the genetic substrate of firmly held political convictions. You are always voting your temperament.
The tragedy isn't that people vote their nature: it's that we pretend otherwise, wrapping base instincts in elaborate academic costumes. You don’t have political beliefs, your political beliefs have you - because your temperament has you.
HNS environments are hypercompetitive, because nature is cutthroat by design. Those who don’t fare well in them tend to lobby for resource redistribution, touting things like fairness and providing restitution to the “victims” of power laws. The strong do not seek fairness, for their strength presents what could be called an unfair advantage to the weak. Your temperament is revealed in what environment you seek to create.
The same as the political, your economic beliefs are the subconscious promotion of an environment best suited for your abilities; this is what I mean when I say you are always voting, advocating for, your temperament.
A lion would support free trade and no income taxes; a giraffe votes for some protectionism and progressive tax rates. Understand this and you understand economic and political stances. Inside mankind there are many wolves, and they are not all hunters. But they all need food.
The small-business owner often has sympathies for the libertarian ethos. What are they actually expressing with their preferences? Notice how the guys touting “less government everything” policies are usually high agency, industrious, disagreeable types? Risk takers, entrepreneurs, preppers. They’re capable in a very “I installed my own kitchen cabinets” kinda way.
They're not lobbying for an economic system, but rather for conditions where they’re most likely to excel. Our social beliefs are that which create political and economic dynamics ideal for our capabilities. We evangelize environments most conducive to our prospering. Promoting our optimum situations, with post-hoc intellectualized justifications. Lions, explaining why the lion’s way is preferred.
It’s convenient for the giraffe to describe failing at this as “greed” rather than concede he’s just not optimized for it. You can’t ignore them, societies have a lot of giraffes.
As national wealth accrues, you begin to see more redistribution favored by a polity that is, per power law mandate, 80% giraffes and 20% lions: the lions are simply outvoted when every vote counts the same. Unsurprisingly, it’s those who stand to benefit from that redistribution that tend to promote it fiercest. Those who have little status or resources and can’t quite cut it in the free domain of the lion, adopt giraffian socialist beliefs. This is the giraffe telling you it wants rules more conducive to it flourishing.
Understanding that economic and political beliefs stem from temperament carries implications for moderating societal extremes. Without recognizing temperamental differences as innate and offering valuable countervailing forces for enhanced societal coordination and prosperity, societies risk undermining their own success by demonizing necessary opposition.
We all evolved as part of a human collective, we are designed to be different, complementary, to the group.
Concluding: Optimal State
What’s preferred for a nation? Is it always HNS and unleashing the lions (high agency, act upon the world), or do we prioritize a giraffe-friendly (low agency, world acts upon them) society, replete with safety nets? The answer lies in your circumstances.
If you’re poor, you must unleash your lions. As you become wealthier, the needs of giraffes become dangerous to ignore. Anyone who advocates unequivocally for one kind of environment always, no matter the condition, is what we call a political radical. An ideologue who’s just screaming “I vote my temperament as aggressively as I possibly can at all times”.
Larger government tends to hamper the most productive, the high agency, who are the value creators of civilization. You need them. Badly. You have nothing without them. Your country is poor if they're poor, but it’s not necessarily rich if they’re rich.
Giraffe considerations are necessary, because the majority are giraffes. While they are not what create wealth, they are what allow a nation to truly enjoy its wealth.
You need your high-agency to excel, without them you’re poor: thus a center-right style of HNS sits somewhere close to ideal. Pure HNS for too long begets radical power laws and capital concentration, and you must mitigate this by going center-right at some point and redistributing some of Pareto’s excesses. However, only when you’ve achieved a sufficient amount of wealth do you have the luxury of concerning yourself with its distribution and equality - having people complain about inequality is a good problem to have seen in the right context.
When we call it capitalism, we begin the dialogue wearing intellectual ankle weights that obfuscate the fabric of what we’re really observing. We're debating on the terms of the idealogue, and his premise should not be accepted. Human Natural State isn't an ideology to be defended, but a reality to be recognized. Like gravity, it exists whether we acknowledge it or not. Work with your nature, not against it.
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Part II:
Biofoundationalism chapters:
Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization
Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment
Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To
Something that I don't think you've addressed adequately here:
– Lions who are highly neurotic and therefore feel guilty and tend to self-flagellate over their natural Darwinian advantages, so engineer their own downfall
– Giraffes who have a sense of perverse honor and identify with and/or aspire to lionhood, so engineer their own destruction
I have adorned, and still do often, both of those temperaments, sometimes simultaneously!, and it causes a lot of inner confusion, and, frankly, insanity.
In general, I do tend to vibe with a type of center-right individualism, but it hardly seems ideal. The least bad of all the systems, as was said once.
The author Seems not to understand the functional nature of “capital” in which the more you have the more accrues to yourself within the boundaries of a “capitalist” system, as set by the ruler (which is the governing state in most cases). At an individual level the “capitalist “ eventually gains income by earnings arising from capital and not by “working”.
In this context “communism” is just a highly regulated form of “capitalism “ or vice versa - that “capitalism” follows from removing social restrictions on commercial activities. In summary, all human activity is “natural” so we don’t need another three-letter-acronym to play with. The usefulness of the concept of “capitalism”, etc. is not addressed in this article above.