This is essay is part of Applied Biofoundationalism. All chapters are linked at the end. Enjoy.
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 Bronze Age Pervert 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.
“The Blank Slate is civic theology and Western religious origin story. It’s the liberal-democratic Immaculate Conception: citizens emerge from the womb as commoditized pieces of clay, equal potential, infinitely plastic, unburdened by the original sin of genetic inheritance.
The myth presupposes evolution built the entire human body through selection pressure, then politely stopped at the brain.
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.
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. Biology is neoliberal Original Sin, and the Blank Slate doctrine is a secular baptism, washing away the stain of biological determinism.
In the liberal democracy genesis tale, everyone emerges from the womb with pure potential, nothing genetically limiting. The
Immaculate ConceptionBlank Slate precept is a fiction advancing fabrications about the human condition and our organic variation. We lie about our innate differences, rather than embrace them.”
If you assume we’re all Blank Slate fungible human matter, it makes sense that 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.
Blank Slatism is the holy scripture through which harm-reducing, fairness-promoting political narratives flow. Radical manifestations of this morality results in unrealistic expectations of equality, denialism of natural power laws, misleads regarding natural disparities, and leads to ideologically unmoored policy decisions.
Blank Slatism is a non-negotiable religious precondition in Western societies, similar to not embracing Allah if you lived in Iran. There’s no amount of “facts and logic” that will change the faith. It’s not a conclusion arrived at by evidence, thus evidence will not bring one out of it. Faith exists in the absence of proof.
Recognizing these liberal moral foundations and their religious presuppositions, here is the leftist moral algorithm and political output for economic migrants and societal underperformers:
Identify weak group: the moderate liberal identifies this nationally (parochially), 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. You can see a 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 wherever. The “facts” are powerless here, because this is not a fact-based discussion, it's a moral one. Facts don’t determine values and don’t alter the temperamental moral instincts driving the conclusions.
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.
It is morally motivated feelings that inform values, which craft narratives, which produce political orientations and stances. The moral genotype is expressed through the political phenotype. This is downstream of your temperament. We can triangulate your political stances without you saying a word.
Politics can be predicted with 83% accuracy from brain activity alone. No conversation needed.
Political affiliation can be predicted with 72% accuracy by brain structure alone (just the size of regions, no brain activity)
A 2022 study went further: functional brain connectivity predicted ideology even when participants sat quietly doing nothing.
Those with politically conservative versus politically liberal views perceive ambiguous faces as more threatening,16 respond to threatening stimuli with more aggression,1 and have greater blink startle responses and skin conduction responses to unexpected or potentially threatening images.59
This is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of political biology. Your ‘politics’ show up at the level of subconscious physical reaction.
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’re God-like: perfectly ethical, balancing all values at all times, evenly incorporating contesting morality that conflicts in practice. This is the presupposition of a deity, not a man.
You cannot balance all six moral foundations at once. 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 at all. 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.”
— 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 group-level 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 all moral foundations simultaneously. We all have moral algorithms that are a product of temperamentally encoded values. These hardwired instincts 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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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
In support, one might envision the intellectual monoculture of (Harvard?) to be a place that actively suppresses 'Thought mutations'. This might be comparable to a genetic universe that has no spontaneous mutations. No path or abilty for the system to adapt to environmental reality via 'selection'. No evolution... and a serious danger of extinction.
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.