This is essay is part of Applied Biofoundationalism. All chapters are linked at the end. Enjoy.
Human Natural State
The term “capitalism” is a rhetorical manipulation. A misnomer deceiving us about our own nature. What we call capitalism isn't a deliberately engineered system, but an emergent pattern of human production and consumption. It’s an emergent set of behaviors occurring naturally when our behaviors and motivations are left unimpeded. The term implicitly assumes it’s an academic construct that organizes human behavior based off theory, directive, or model, when in actually it’s just human default mode. The same default that causes beavers to amass wood.
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”.
The origin of the term “capitalism” is borne from a socialist French intellectual and popularized by Marx. The guys who didn’t like the natural system gave it a pejorative name, and for some reason that stuck.
This is a weaponized term. It allows central planners to subconsciously weaponize the perception of an organic system when it’s the actually the baseline of animal survival behavior: acquire capital. We say “capitalism” to describe entirely normal productive motivations and actions that occur all on their own when no one interferes. Power laws as applied to resources accrual and distribution. The term is conniving rhetoric originating from a socialist and communist.
It’s just as subversive as an asexual, abstinence-promoting professor describing heterosexual husband/wife relationships as a “sexualist breeder” system. How would you expect sex, children, and their pursuit to be framed based off this designation? You’re primed to dislike it before you even understand it.
Debating "capitalism" as a man-made system is profoundly misleading. We implicitly endorse Marxist framing when doing so.
Accurate terminology is needed to diffuse this sleight of hand. I’d like to offer a new name: Human Natural State (HNS). Recognizing capitalism as a natural system alters a key psychological touchstone, showing it’s not an ideology but the absence of one. It’s the default survival imperative for mammals.
The pursuit of resources is innate, not engineered. Governments constrain these activities; they’re not responsible for them. The capitalist designation is useful for the socialist-friendly politician because it connotes greed; as if this is some ideology forced on you by Scrooge McDuck. “Anti-capitalist” sounds like anti-greed when it’s actually opposition to a natural state.
HNS is how human nodes within a complex adaptive system coordinate. It’s not a man-made system, but rather a natural system that man exists within. Other animals exhibit it too.
The Natural Order
Complex systems regularly produce patterns no individual member deliberately intends, is responsible for, or can predict. These are known as emergent properties. “Capitalism” is simply an emergent consequence of countless individuals pursuing their own motivations and self-interests and ends. This does not come from a bureaucrat’s pen, but nature’s will. Other animals exhibit these traits too.
Consider the Beaver
What happens when you drop a bunch of beavers into a forest near a river? What do they do when left to their innate programming? What motivates those beavers to accumulate logs and construct their dams with no Beaver Theory of Wood? No beaver parliament determines dam policy or instructs them to act a certain way. They amass wood and build dams all on their own; because that’s what beavers do. It’s their nature.
Collect wood and construct dams is their default instruction set. How odd would it be to label it a “capitalist” beaver economy for log procurement and dam creation? As if these rodents adhered to some externally imposed market philosophy rather than simply acting upon their innate programming. Those fat cat beaver robber barons are at it again!
Only when an external force intercedes does the beaver alter its dam-building ways. The same goes for man.
Allow humans to act uninhibited and what do they do?
They trade. Specialize. Accumulate. Create hierarchies for production and consumption. Not because some intellectual told them to; these behaviors run on autopilot. The frontier towns of the American West didn't wait for permission to create markets, they didn’t dig up Adam Smith quotes to determine if they should trade with each other. When humans gather, commerce emerges like heat from friction.
In new environments without any central body mandate, people start building their dams. They grow things, create supply chains, farm, barter, they “capitalism”.
Every civilization, from Mesopotamian merchants to Aztec markets to Aboriginal trade routes, developed versions of this without a blueprint. These patterns sprung forth just as birdsong or wolf territorial boundaries do. “Capitalism” is a spontaneous expression of our species' behavioral repertoire.
The Phoenicians didn't need Ricardian textbooks to trade purple dye. Medieval guilds formed without consulting any economist. 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. Markets are as natural for humans as wolves hunting in packs or bees churning out honey.
We are the only species arrogant enough to claim we invented our own instincts.
When we call it capitalism, we begin the dialogue wearing intellectual ankle weights that obfuscate the fabric of what we’re observing. We’re debating it on the terms of the idealogue, and his premise should not be accepted. HNS is mankind’s innate imperative to cultivate resource networks. “Capitalism” is a manipulative, derogatory name for a natural thing. HNS is our hardwired coordination mechanism, just as sex is our encoded reproductive mechanism.
It’s kind of like believing property only exists because of governments.
Go observe a dog with a bone, bird defending its nest, child clutching their toy, and try taking it from them. Somalians have no “property rights”… so does property not exist in Somalia? How is ownership determined? If you sit long enough with this question, you’ll realize property in Africa is ultimately decided in the same manner as New York or London. The savage and the civilized both use physical enforcement to determine who owns what.
Property predates law similar to how hunger predates restaurants. Governments didn’t create property rights; they codified and streamlined a natural phenomenon.
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.
You’re Always Voting Your Temperament
Where do economic beliefs come from? The books you read? There are many books on political and economic schools of thought that disagree wildly. Are your economic and political stances the product of finding all the right ones?
You sought out those specific books because they confirmed and amplified your intuitions. This is known as the elephant and the rider: we gravitate towards information that confirms our priors. Where did those priors come from?
Economic stances are political ones with dollar signs; political stances are moral ones with policies attached; moral stances come from your temperament; and your temperament is biologically imposed.
Lions, Giraffes, and Their Optimum Environments
Smaller government resonates with the high-agency. Larger government with the low-agency. You’re always voting your temperament; meaning the underlying reasoning is predicated on "what environment is best suited to my thriving?".
“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.”
Who thrives in pure HNS? Consider why some promote laissez-faire societies and others a dominant central point of control. Your motivation for one over the other doesn’t come from textbooks or where you went to school.
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.
Both are trying to cultivate the ideal environments for them to flourish. We have different abilities, risk tolerance, moral priorities, and vote for what best suits are abilities. 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.
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 for “victims” of power laws. The strong and productive do not seek equality. Your temperament and abilities are revealed in through the political environments you lobby for.
Our economic beliefs are the subconscious promotion of environments best suited to our abilities… “in what system would I benefit most?” is overwhelmingly what we support!
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 are many wolves, and they are not all hunters. But they all need food.
The small-business owner has sympathies for the libertarian ethos. Note how the guys touting less government involvement are usually high agency and industrious. Risk takers, entrepreneurs, preppers. They’re capable in a “I installed my own kitchen cabinets” kinda way. The lion just wants to be left alone so he can hunt in peace.
They're lobbying for conditions where they’re most likely to excel. Our political beliefs are that which create dynamics ideal for our capabilities, with post-hoc intellectualized appended after the fact. 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 not designed to excel in surroundings with no constraints on predators.
As wealth accrues, you begin to see more redistribution favored by a polity that’s not primarily composed of self-sufficient hunters. Unsurprisingly, it’s those who stand to benefit from that redistribution that promote it fiercest. The giraffe explaining why the giraffe’s way is preferred
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.
Concluding
HNS isn’t an unalloyed positive. Unfettered market dynamics produce wealth and efficiency and also lead to monopolist abuses. From Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to today’s tech giants, some restraints are necessary to maintain healthy competition.
What’s optimal? Should we always inhibit 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 the country’s circumstances.
If you’re poor, you must unleash your lions; they’re not succeeding, you’re not succeeding. Your country is poor if they’re poor, but it’s not necessarily rich if they’re rich. As you become wealthier, the needs of giraffes (the majority) become dangerous to ignore. Anyone who always advocates for one kind of dynamic always is ignoring conditions that amplify or undermine how useful their beliefs are. Ignoring giraffe needs for too long is how you get revolutions.
Pure HNS for too long begets radical power laws and capital concentration; you must eventually mitigate this and redistribute some of the prosperity to keep society from growing to imbalanced. However, only once you’ve achieved national wealth do you have the luxury of redistributing it
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Part II:
Biofoundationalism Corpus: Chapters and Application
This is the current Biofoundationalism corpus. Numbered parts are core chapters. Subgroup essays fall under Applied Biofoundationalism: examples, extensions, and applications of the biological and thermodynamic frameworks developed in the chapters.
Each piece can be read independently, though it’s best understood when read in sequence.
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.