Moral Algorithms
Applied Biofoundationalism
If you chronically use the word "indigenous" in political contexts to frame people as victims, we can roughly approximate how active your left insula and ACC is.
We can triangulate how conservative you are by your use of the word "the" and your reaction to a puff of air in your ear. Political stances are exposed in subconscious linguistic patterns and visceral reactions you have no control over.
That being said, what conversation is actually being had in this
post? He’s responding to a guy trying to present “indigenousness” claims as some kind of concrete discussion about “who got there first”. BAP’s response is on the right track, however I don’t think he takes it far enough.
"Native" and "indigenous" should not be analyzed like you’re having a technical discussion; there isn’t any genuine concern for objective history embedded within them in contemporary politics. These words are effectively moral neologisms. They are not deployed to describe a group of people in any academic sense, these terms are facilitators of political narratives.
For liberal temperaments, these words are proxies for "the vulnerable and/or weak". If someone is depicted as vulnerable, they are more easily subject to harm; if someone is portrayed as weak, their situation is more readily described as unfair. The ethic of care and fairness is the substrate of liberal morality; all political information is filtered through this lens.
It doesn't matter who already was/wasn't in a country based on some arbitrary factoids curated to form a tidy tale. It is trivially easy to cherrypick data tidbits to promote a story that suits your moral priors; the higher your verbal intelligence, the better you’ll be at this.
Facts do not influence ethical axioms, because facts have nothing to do with values.
Accepting migrants to atone for colonization? Ireland never colonized anyone. Doesn’t matter. The Irish are wealthy and European, they fit an “oppressor” moral framework for an extremist liberal interpretation that no longer perceives harm and fairness domestically, but globally. Justification simply takes on a new shape for why they need to open their borders and aid the weak. The story is modified and the end goal is the same.
Narratives are not instruments of policy persuasion, but ethical justification.
Moral Algorithms
We approach most political topics knowing the outcomes we want and construct post-hoc rationalizations to defend positions we've already embraced. Everyone does this, to do this is to be human.
This is the conservative and liberal algorithmic baselayer:
Liberal moral foundations and framing:
provide care/reduce harm
harm reduction often accompanied by oppression claims
promote fairness (synonymous with equality)
The superficial heuristic liberals in decadent environments typically employ to assess care/harm and fairness/cheating is equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunity.
Liberals broadly refuse to accept genetic realities for disparate performance, so any non-equitable outcome is de facto evidence of an absence of equality of opportunity. They are all nurture, no nature. This is predicated on what’s possibly the most prevalent tenet of Western faith: the Blank Slate.
“This theory informs basically everything you’ve been trained to think about human capabilities and biodiversity. Whether you’re rightwing or leftwing, both adhere to Blank Slate gospel in their own way.
Blank Slate Theory is a religious origin story. It’s the liberal democracy version of Immaculate Conception.
Just as Jesus was immaculately conceived without sex as the son of God, citizens in a liberal democracy are immaculately conceived without genetic differences as blank slates.
In the liberal democracy genesis tale, everyone emerges from the womb as gray goo, with nothing biologically ingrained. Able to be molded into whatever policy makers deem best. The
Immaculate ConceptionBlank Slate precept is a fiction used to advance all kinds of misleading fabrications about the human condition and our organic variation. We lie about our innate differences, rather than embrace them. We pretend, rather than confront.Genetic configuration is neoliberal Original Sin, and the Blank Slate doctrine serves as our secular baptism, washing away the stain of biological determinism.
We can’t stand being told we have predetermined programming, as it’s definitionally limiting to our sense of self. We like hearing we can become an astronaut, physicist, or elite musician if we just put in the work.”
From Biofoundationalism Part II: The Moral Genotype
If you assume we’re all Blank Slate gray goo, it makes sense if the opportunities were the same then the outcomes would also be the same! A lack of equal outcome is thus sufficient proof of lack of fairness, producing harm. Blank Slatism is the holy scripture through which harm-reducing, fairness-promoting narratives flow.
In modern times, this noble-seeming lie is used to weaponize the application of care/harm and fairness/cheating moral foundations. Radical manifestations of this morality results in unrealistic expectations of equality, denialism of natural power laws, lies regarding why disparities exist, and leads to communist-type policy decisions at the social and economic level.
Blank Slatism is a non-negotiable religious precondition in Western societies, similar to not embracing Allah as your God if you lived in Iran. There is no amount of FACTS and LOGIC that will change the faith. It is not a conclusion you arrived at logically, and logic will not be what brings you out of it.
Understanding these liberal moral motivations and the grand “axiom” that underpins their narratives, here is the leftist moral algorithm and political output for economic migrants and societal underperformers:
Identify weak group (the moderate liberal identifies this nationally, the radical liberal applies this globally) —>
Attribute inequality of outcomes to lack of opportunity (unfair), or oppressor misdeeds (harm). This externalizes blame on the oppressor group —>
Disparate outcomes are thus due to lack of fairness, creating harm for weak. Harm will be reduced via policies that advance fairness —>
Assert moral authority and create post-hoc narrative for the disparity that blames the strong groups —>
Advance fairness-coded political solutions
Conservatives have moral algorithms too. I’ll deconstruct examples of these in other essays, you can see a quasi-variation of one here in Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment.
If you want an exercise in futility, go spend time researching if the IncaBinka tribe originally sprung forth from Andorra or whatever. Your FACTS are powerless here, because this is not a fact-based discussion, it's a moral one. Moral discussions benefit from factual grounding, however facts do not determine values. Facts inform the implementation of values, they do not alter them.
Facts don't care about your feelings, but more importantly feelings don't care about your facts. Understand the conversation you’re really having, it’s one of competing moral languages, not scholarly fact checks.
It is morally motivated feelings, not facts, that inform values, which craft narratives, which produce political orientations and stances. The moral is expressed through the political. This is all downstream of your temperament, and your temperament is a derivative of your cognitive architecture.
Presuming Deities
We are not genetically configured to all have the same morality and consider them equally. Nor could we even if we were all Blank Slates, as it implicitly presumes we can become God: perfectly ethical, balancing all values at all times, evenly incorporating contesting morality that often conflicts in practice. This is the presupposition of a deity, not a man.
You cannot balance all six moral foundations, they cannot exist in harmony within one human mind. To value all equitably is to effectively value none; you must have biases towards certain ones to advocate and defend them. You are a man, not an angel.
It’s to our benefit that we have opposing moral filters:
“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.
We are animals built for group cooperation; we are genetically fashioned to supplement each other’s strengths and compensate for 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.”
- From Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment
We are a species evolved for group strategy and collaboration. Hierarchies are how we organize, and dyads are how we balance. Your ancestors did not evolve alone; they were cultivated amongst each other, filling different civilizational roles. This means our traits gestated over thousands of years to not be the same, but complementary within a collective. Different by design.
It would not be evolutionarily advantageous if we all valued the same things in the same ways at the same times in the same environments. Moral variability is useful for human adaptability. All moral foundations have varying utility, contingent on environment; it’s conducive to collective survival we have ingrained ethical variation between individuals within a society.
No human is impeccably moral, because no human can neutrally incorporate and embody the six moral foundations simultaneously. We all have moral algorithms that are a product of temperamentally encoded sets of values, and these hardwired neural preferences are expressed through our political beliefs. Political biology. Biofoundationalism.
A balanced presence of liberal morality is a good thing; it’s indicative of a prosperous, domesticated environment. Whether it’s a positive is a matter of degree and the parochiality of its focus. Helpful when it augments, corrosive when it consumes. The dosage makes it so.
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About 55 years ago, in a Philosophy course, we examined Roseau’s “Tabula Rasa” theory that held that everyone is born with no Jung-Ian hard-wiring (like primordial archetypes). The theory being that behavior was learned. Bad boys were not born that way, instead, they learned by observing other Bad boys and new tracks were laid-down on their brain’s “tabula.” The class used the book “Lord of the Flies” to take sides on Roseau’s theory. Of course, we never resolved the issue. I resolved it personally after studying universal archetypes (ascent, descent, journey, water, etc) in Literature, some which the readers observed but the author denied.
I love the correlation between immaculate conception and the blank slate. I am reminded also of the south park episode ‘the goobacks’, about the time travelling immigrants from the future who all look the same, all differences disappearing through centuries of intermixing.
And then the blank canvas from different artistic perspectives, some seeing the canvas as completely determined by their mark making, others may consider the canvas a threshold with latent possibilities anchored by history, material. The former reminds me of old stories where the woman/mother was seen as passive vessel and the life was determined completely by the male ‘seed’.
I think the biofoundationalist canvas is a better one