What we call 'social constructs' are biological expressions we're unprepared to confront. What we call culture is the aggregate of these expressions: collective patterns of behavior emitted by organisms with patterned natures. Politics and culture aren’t mist floating above biology. We flatter ourselves by treating these differences as chosen. We should be less confident about how much we actually choose.
Conservatives are more comfortable invoking genetic disparities than liberals (i.e. the “redpill”). But they’re not immune to their own biological denialism. They correctly identify the belief that anyone can be anything as fiction. Then they espouse their own fiction: anyone can create anything.
When the topic is sex, race, criminality, athleticism, or IQ, rightwingers know genetics are real. But when it’s creativity or aesthetic orientation, formerly based guys rediscover institutionalism and resemble a New York Times op-ed: fund more studios, build better schools, and surely the art will follow. The conservative who mocks DEI then demands DEI for art has not heard himself.
The Left’s anthropology overstates external circumstances. The Right’s overstates internal agency. Same mythology, different political objective.
Does evolution stop at the brain? Or parts of the brain? The redpill cites biology opportunistically. The biopill accepts it jurisdictionally. No carve-outs. No sacred cows.
The claim here isn’t that conservatives can’t make art or that every liberal is creative, but that political dispositions are biologically ingrained and serve different societal functions, including the art they make. Some preserve, stabilize, ritualize, and coordinate. Others experiment, violate, destabilize, and discover. Much of what’s lamented as rightwing artistic deficiency is the byproduct of judging a coordination technology by the standards of exploratory expression.
Embracing biological reality except where it wounds your coalition is no acceptance at all.
OUTLINE
I. Prelude
II. Twin Myths of the West
The liberal denies human nature. The conservative treats it as optional.
III. Temperamental Blank Slatists
Reject the redpill, take the biopill
IV. The Aesthetic Nervous System
Nature doesn’t do coincidences at scale
V. Fascist Aesthetics: Historical Case Studies
Order can rent chaos, but never owns it.
VI. Rightwing Legibility. Leftwing Exploration.
Conservative art is a coordination technology
VII. Art of Confirmation vs Confrontation
One ends with a period. The other ends with a question mark.
VIII. Artistic Capture
The art gap is a measurement problem
IX. The Propositional Right
Conservative by conclusion vs conservative by nervous system
X. Liberal Halfbreeds & Status Games
Outliers projecting liberal preferences onto a conservative base
XI. Institutional Selection
Better sieves do not create different grain
XII. Patronage, Medici, & the Internet
The Medici model requires a Medici world. The internet sends its regards.
XIII. Playing the Right Game
One keeps the walls standing. The other makes them worth beholding.
XIV. Concluding: God’s Will, Determinism, & Biology
Submission to forces greater than you
II. Twin Myths of the West
A popular topic among pundits is the lack of rightwing art. Where is it? Why is it stale? How do we fix it? The entire conversation is framed as a managerial problem; the same way liberals frame how to get more women into computer science.
What makes this question ironic is that most rightwingers disavow Blank Slatism, meaning they recognize the biological basis for distributional gaps that liberals chalk up to ‘social constructs’. They’re often the first to remind you that “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck”.
The Blank Slate is the foundational Western myth:
Blank Slate is civic theology, a religious origin story. 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.
If neurology is moot, then group asymmetries are due to society, incentives, or oppression. With this supernatural belief, liberals launder genetic disparities into policy grievances and legislative agendas. Heritable wiring transforms into “purely socioeconomic factors”.
Conservatives accurately classify this as fantasy. Then they smuggle in another one with different branding. The Blank Slate’s fraternal twin: the Sovereign Individual.
The Sovereign Individual says:
You act alone. Reason and choose all by yourself. You are one-of-a-kind. Autonomous. 100% agency.
Differences in outcome reflect differences in effort. You just gotta try harder.
It implicitly presupposes humans evolved in isolation rather than within collectives.
We are social animals. Our traits were selected in groups, for group performance. We didn’t evolve individually. There’s no isolated sovereign: only an organism shaped by collective pressures.
Blank Slate and Sovereign Individual are twin myths against biology, differing only in who they praise and scapegoat.
The Blank Slate denies human nature. The Sovereign Individual treats human nature as optional.
Liberal Blank Slate: Equalize conditions and anyone can do anything. Outcome gaps = oppression gaps
Conservative Sovereign Individual: Equalize effort and anyone can do anything. Outcome gaps = dedication gaps
Both myths persist because they contain a fragment of truth. Environment matters. Effort matters. However neither is the ultimate cause of these enduring, consistent, group-level dislocations. Both ignore biology’s primary role.
One externalizes failure into oppression. The other internalizes failure into work. The Sovereign Individual is the nobler lie because it commends real virtues: discipline, accountability, and not being a perpetual victim. But it sneaks in false universalism: because a few people overcome some dispositions in some domains, everyone can override inherited dispositions in every domain. A fallacy of composition dressed up as a work ethic.
Conservatives correctly see intelligence, impulse control, violence, gender, race, and other traits deemed ‘social constructs’ as biologically derived. Then they reach creativity, openness, and morality and rediscover social engineering.
III. Temperamental Blank Slatists
Terms:
Temperament: An animal’s innate behavioral and emotional patterns. Genetic architecture governing moral instincts and default orientations.
What you do before you decide what to do. Your latency to anger, appetite for risk, threshold for disgust, loyalty to in-group. Biologically primitive and causally upstream of personality. Observable in infancy, consistent across lifespans, and not species-specific.
Personality is temperament adjusted by experience. Ideology is when temperament becomes moralized.
Dave Greene, Christopher F. Rufo, and Curtis Yarvin diagnose the conservative art problem in different registers while sharing the same implicit premise: insufficient artistic output reflects insufficient resources. Their stances, summarized:
Greene's argument is inspirational: conservative media fails because it produces backward-looking, demand-driven content that gives audiences what they want instead of what they should want. The biggest problem is capital allocation.
Solution: fund risk-taking, forward-looking projects. Create visions of the good that audiences aren’t asking for. Stop asking whether art makes money. Focus on capturing prestige and “aspirational” art.
Rufo’s argument is institutional: he’s written about it many times, an example here. Summarized: conservative art will not be fixed by donors or better messaging; it requires rebuilding the institutions that form creators and audiences (universities, publications, government) then using them deliberately.
His approach is practical. I'll address it specifically in Section XI Institutional Selection
Yarvin's argument is patronal: he says rightwing elites aren’t personally stingy but paralyzed. Unwilling to assemble the soft-power infrastructure that industrial-era money (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford) built.
Solution: patronage and counter-institutions. He’s advocating for a model with precedent beyond the 20th-century examples he cites (it goes back to Medici/Florence). His approach is the most pragmatic. I’ll address it in Section XI Patronage, Medici, & the Internet
These arguments are superficially different, but they’re three flavors of the same Blank Slate premise: disparities come down to determination. It reminds me of this:
“Why don’t we just create better institutions so conservatives make modern art?”
“These organizations develop content in a very predictable way, leading to predictable output.”
“No one cares about these conservative pieces of media because they contain no artistry, no purpose, and no love.”
“Leftists spend millions on niche art projects because they KNOW that being loved is the most important thing”
— Greene
Greene is reviewing a steakhouse for its dragon rolls to an audience that drove past three sushi restaurants to get there. His customers are not failing to order sashimi. They are succeeding at ordering ribeye. Risk tolerance is not an app you install on a conscientious mind!
Dave is being just as predictable as what he critiques. Treating conservative preferences as deficient while providing guidance filled with pleasant-but-vague platitudes like “point people towards higher spiritual aspirations”, “worthy of love and aspiration”, and “giving people better things”. What does this actionably mean? Ask 10 different people and you’ll get 10 different answers.
Let’s apply the same logic to a gender studies professor annoyed that girls prefer dolls: "The issue is they like the wrong toys. Dolls are too predictable, not aspirational. Give them something better, like trucks. Make the girls more like the boys." Different ideological target, same mentality.
The market for conservative content is predictable because it’s occupied by people who desire predictable things! Conservatism preserves boundaries, tradition, and standards. These impulses exist in contradistinction to disruptive, novel artistry. This is a “shortcoming” the same way women preferring nurturing professions is a shortcoming (it isn't).
What Dave describes as inadequate is Daily Wire reflecting its audience's cognitive profile and selling what they want, revealed through the most honest signal available: purchasing behavior. Ben Shapiro’s audience doesn’t want its priors disturbed; it wants them confirmed! Con Inc. produces content that feels like a spreadsheet because its audience finds comfort in the familiar. The defined. The structured. This is admirable in a thousand domains. Post-Romantic art isn’t one of them.
The rightwing art complaint rests on a contradiction. Strip away top-down political stories and it’s exposed: "A temperament low in openness that doesn't seek novelty resists... novelty? We'll fix this with institutions and money!”. This is analogous to saying "we'll fix the lack of Filipinos in the NBA with more jumpshot training".
Capture institutions and fund niche projects: this is a perfect description of what high-openness liberals do by default. This mistakes a neurological disposition for a transferable strategy. Does that work for race differences? Sex differences?
The conservative who laughs at liberal race rhetoric and nods along as it’s applied to creativity has not thought carefully about what he’s acknowledging. Both presuppose that a population-level trait gap is an institutional problem solvable by resource allocation.
Both reach for the same remedy and result: equality of outcome via social engineering.
This is woke thinking applied to phenotype gaps. “We need more funding and better institutions to solve social underperformance”… where have we heard this before?
It’s the same prescription Yale and AOC would offer for crime and literacy at inner-city schools. Same rationale, directed at politically favored populations. The rightwing rendition of “purely socioeconomic factors”.
Human biodiversity that undermines the Civil Rights Act is within the Overton Window, but temperamental neurology is a bridge too far? Based guys deride biological denialism yet become unwitting Blank Slatists the moment the subject goes beyond race or sex. Those certainly matter, but they aren’t all that matter!
Those treating art and creativity as social engineering problems are temperamental Blank Slatists.
They’re selectively redpilled. Genetics are real, but only for topics that upset liberals.
They don’t believe evolution stops at the neck; they believe it stops at parts of the brain governing threat sensitivity, openness, and disgust. Their words deny it; but their prescriptions implicitly treat it the way Brookings Institution does gender occupation choices. You cannot gerrymander the brain and call the remaining territory policy issues! You either take biology whole, for better and worse, or you’re ideologically manipulating it. The redpill uniformly applied ends with the biopill. We’re happy to have you onboard.
Are you willing to look at genetic gaps that implicate your own team with the same honesty you bring to gaps that implicate someone else’s? Biofoundationalism has no team, so we have zero problem with this.
Additional neurological research for claims found in The Moral Genotype.
Recurring asymmetries across time and place are nature speaking through history. Enduring, society-level distributions are biological expressions hidden under false social narration. Nature does not do coincidences at scale.
Conservative and liberal, like masculine and feminine, are dyads at different layers. Unresolved and meaningless without their counterparts. What’s masculine is unknown without feminine; what’s liberal is undefined without conservative. Each pole requires the other not just to be named, but to live and function. They are not interchangeable.
Stable differences in temperament — openness, disgust sensitivity, threat calibration, conflict tolerance, ambiguity comfort — reliably cluster. Those clusters express themselves morally, aesthetically, and politically. The organism ranks salience before the intellect narrates reasons. Political stances are not educated opinions, but phenotypic expressions of cognitive genotypes. These phenotypes don’t stop at voting.
The central trait for aesthetic difference is openness to experience: the Big Five dimension most associated with novelty-seeking, abstraction, and exploration. It’s biologically grounded and inversely correlated with conservatism at every measurable scale (individual, occupational, cultural). It is one of the most replicated results in personality psychology.
For moral references, we’ll use Jon Haidt’s Moral Foundations (slightly modified, explained here). Biofoundationalism uses its own thermodynamic moral dyads for root-cause analysis, but for this essay and the social layer it operates on, behavioral psychology is more appropriate.
Conservative Temperament:
Morality: Honor based (earned, not deserved). Protect in-group, secure boundaries, enforce standards, uphold hierarchy. Extol loyalty and bodily purity.
Big Five psychological traits: lower openness, lower neuroticism, higher conscientiousness, stronger disgust sensitivity, greater boundary vigilance, and heightened responsiveness to threat, contamination, and disorder.
Aesthetics: clarity over ambiguity, recurrence over rupture, symmetry over skew, and ceremonial reinforcement over interpretive drift.
Neurological profile: Larger amygdala and higher activation. Greater activation in the right insula: plays a key role in the Behavioral Immune System and disgust responses.
Conservatives have heightened threat sensitivity and elevated subconsciousphysical reactionsto stimuli. Including faster blink startle and skin-conduction responses to unexpected or threatening images.
They have lower openness to deviation, ambiguity, and outgroups (smaller and less active ACC).
The constitution of order.
Liberal Temperament:
Morality: Dignity based (deserved, not earned). Reduce harm (expand care). Flatten hierarchies (seen as oppressive/unfair). Emphasize fairness (as outcomes).
Big Five psychological traits: Higher openness. Lower conscientiousness. Higher neuroticism. Lower disgust sensitivity. Higher outgroup trust. Attraction to the unfamiliar, unresolved, and novel.
Aesthetics: Exploration over preservation, interpretive nuance over immediate legibility, and deviation over ritual repetition.
Neurological profile: Larger Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and greater activation. Higher activation in the left insula: linked to sympathy response rather than disgust.
Greater comfort with abstractions, outgroups, and aesthetic experimentation. Reduced threat reactivity (smaller and less active amygdala). Higher focus on outgroup care, and very sensitive to perceived harm.
Neurologically, the ACC is associated with conflict monitoring, error detection, and cognitive control. Psychologically, it results in higher openness via greater tolerance for competing interpretations (decoupling abilities), and comfort with variation and uncertainty.
Liberals are constitutionally chaotic: standard-violating, novelty-seeking. These are the neurological preconditions for creativity. They all correlate negatively with conservatism.
Modern art is a chaos-pole activity. It requires permeability, violation, appetite for the unknown. These are neural settings, not skills.
Your moral stances and politics are known without you saying a word:
Politics can be predicted with 83% accuracy from brain activity alone. No conversation. No AI. The organ confesses before the mouth does.
A 2022 study went further: functional brain connectivity predicted ideology even when participants sat quietly doing nothing.
Zero political stimulus. The amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus lit up differently for liberals and conservatives at rest. Idle, and still broadcasting allegiances.
Three tasks had strong politically predictive links: empathy processing, episodic memory, and reward evaluation.
Studies of neural activity and connectivity have repeatedly found that politically relevant differences appear in how people process threat, conflict, empathy, recollection, and incentives.
Liberals think evolution stops at the neck: the entire brain is exempt.
Conservatives think evolution stops at parts of the brain: the amygdala, ACC, and insula are exempt.
More than political stances, they’re divergences in what populations experience as salient, beautiful, repulsive, and worth dying for. The same nervous system that resists contamination and uncertainty won’t just vote differently; it will build, canonize, and judge differently.
One seeks the known; the other pursues the new. One protects the garden; the other grows the roses. The neoconservative and neoliberal both think the mason and the muralist are interchangeable units of carbon material.
The distinction between unfalsifiable theory and functional framework is reproducibility, scalability, and predictive power. Let’s apply this historically.
V. Fascist Aesthetics: Historical Case Studies
Authoritarian regimes are the cleanest stress test for the institutional thesis. If unlimited capital, censorship, captive audiences, and coercive power could produce frontier art, totalitarian states should have been aesthetic supernovas. They had everything our pundits prescribe and more: no political competition, institutional monopoly, and audiences who could be imprisoned for changing the channel.
Fascist movements couldn’t solve the creativity problem endogenously; they did so by conscripting temperamental outsiders: aesthetes, poets, homosexuals, journalists, bohemians. High-openness dispositions compelled into service and controlled through shame, blackmail, and violence. The allure of deviation meant having to tolerate deviants. The regime needed what it despised. It never resolved that contradiction.
The authoritarian playbook:
Identify high-openness temperaments
Extract their aesthetic capacities. Wrap the output in state iconography.
Discard or kill them when no longer useful
The relationship is inherently transactional and unsustainable.
The traits that made them artistically coveted were the same ones that made them politically unreliable. High-openness personalities chafe at instruction, resist direction, and resent being put in boxes. These “you won’t tell me what to do” impulses are part of why they’re interesting! Insubordination itself is a form of creative value.
This issue is not uniquely fascist, but authoritarian. Stalinist Socialist Realism faced similar struggles. The machine could standardize, canonize, scale, amplify, and distribute. It could not originate. Order can rent chaos, but never owns it.
Note: to aid readability of this essay I’ll link to it again at the end. Don’t let it interrupt your flow here, read it afterwards. It covers:
I. Italian Futurism & Mussolini’s Fascism
II. Salazar’s Portugal
III. Nazi Germany
IV. Patterns of Disposability
V. USSR
VI. Conservative Outliers & Their Temperaments
If absolute state power and unlimited resources couldn't generate frontier art, Substack posts telling Peter Thiel to be more ambitious aren’t the missing variable.
Conservative art is defined by how easily it’s defined.
Rightwing art is aesthetically legible. It engenders ceremony and mastery, not discovery and disturbance. Displays optimized for group cohesion, it’s fundamentally a coordination technology.
Orderly minds prefer orderly lines. Low in interpretability, high in signal. It doesn’t ask that you generate meaning, but that you receive it. The distinction is whether the work confronts or confirms existing worldviews. Orderly aesthetics reinforce them while chaotic aesthetics violate them. In modern times, the latter is what qualifies as ‘art’.
Chaos asks “What does this mean to me?”. Order inquires “How does this unify us?”
“Art should comfort the chaotic and disturb the orderly”
Liberal art: exploratory, ambiguity-tolerant, boundary-dissolving, transgressive. Willing to violate genre, totem, and custom so it can deviate or perturb.
Heraldry (coats of arms, crests, symbols of identity)
Classic architecture
Mythic reverence
These are all mechanisms that command and organize:
Ritual synchronizes behavior
Anthem synchronizes emotion
Heraldry synchronizes identity
Monumentality synchronizes spiritual reverence
Conservative art is less decoration and more banner for collective strength and alignment. Liberals look at these outputs and see kitsch because they're evaluating them as aesthetic objects when they’re fundamentally orchestrating ones.
Conservative art is a coordination technology.
Rightwing art travels well within its coalition but poorly outside it. Coordination technologies are addressed to the in-group by design. They require shared premises. A national anthem moves those with shared nationality. A liturgy inspires through shared faith. Liberal art's structural advantage is you don't need to belong to be disturbed. Thus, it exports better.
The cohort whose civilizational function is in-group alignment, maintenance, and hierarchy yields a patterned set of artistic outputs.
Country and gospel music extol structured virtues, routine lifestyles, and familiar emotional registers. Idealized domesticity. Embraced tradition.
Patriotic/military cinema celebrates institutional competence and earned honor within inviolable chain-of-command authority (hierarchy). Inspires allegiance with the creative risk profile of a savings bond.
Religious art glorifies celestial hierarchies and codified beauty. Cathedral precision. Iconography strictly following templates, deviations deemed heretical. Recognizable Gregorian chants remaining unchanged for centuries. Orderly worship.
Bach is an excellent example. He operated in an era where form brilliance was revered above emotional confession. Impeccably engineered compositions. Elegantly extracting every permutation of beauty from constraints and timing.
Conservative genius at its apex: creativity that submits to restriction
Athletic depictions applauding statuesque bodies and elite performance. The opposite of equality: it evangelizes excellence and dominance.
Nazi art lionized perfected form.
Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light. Weapons pointed at heaven: one hundred and thirty anti-aircraft searchlights aimed vertically into the night sky. Columns of luminous architecture. Unanimous and synchronized, coordinating onlookers toward shared national objective.
The light dome over the Reich Maifeld in Berlin during an event with Mussolini:
Breker vs Picasso
One affirms the ideal body, the other shatters it.
An Arno Breker figure tells you what to feel. Bodies of sculpted masculine certainty. Decisive. Direct. You do not need to interpret Breker statues; that is the point. Interpretation implies ambiguity: a form of disorder.
Breker statues stand resolved; the message delivered the moment you look. Whereas the Picasso is a puzzle: planes refusing coherence, eyes misaligned, jarring geometry. Breker validates, Picasso violates. One ends with a period. The other ends with a question mark.
High-openness aesthetics resist resolution because resolution itself is partly what they're rebelling against. The aesthetics of chaos.
Creating something disruptive and forward-looking necessarily involves destabilizing something else…
The Gaudi Hybrid:
What happens when a chaotic creative is tasked with building something sacred? The Sagrada Familia.
Gaudi is my favorite contradiction, illustrating the Biofoundationalist framework strangely well. A devout Catholic whose politics were conservative and whose constitution was incandescently not. A high-openness eccentric who upset the Barcelona establishment, he was a natural bohemian who also believed in episcopal authority. What does a quirked-out liberal halfbreed create when tasked with crafting a heavenly shrine?
Gaudi’s elegantly discordant disposition created the most majestically unorthodox cathedral ever made. An edifice that somehow both rejects and fulfills divine geometry. Some personal pictures from Barcelona:
Sagrada Familia’s front and back look noticeably different. One side is an impossibly elaborate tower; the other looks like it’s melting under its own semiotic excess. Columns branch like trees. You see new things the longer you stare. Celestial order devised by a chaotic nervous system.
The back
Conservatives can make art, but they make a specific kind of art with a specific kind of function. Modernity treats it as lesser because contemporary conventions view liberal transgression as art proper, everything else as propaganda, craft, or quaint Flyover nostalgia. It wasn’t always like this.
VIII. Artistic Capture
The art gap is a measurement problem. The ruler belongs to the other team and conservatives keep borrowing it.
Does it seek to reinforce or question settled perception? Much of what we call taste is really a preference for one of these over the other.
Guillermo Lorca’s "Las Jardineritas”. Seen at Moco Museum, Barcelona
For most of Western history, the dominant aesthetic was orderly. Associated with refinement, elegance, symmetry, complexity. The Parthenon. Mozart. Baroque designs. Da Vinci. Geometric tiling. Gardens of Versailles. Go to a European art museum and look at all the pre-Romantic exhibits (I do this all the time), you’ll see it.
Art’s shift to dissolution over perfection has a historical timestamp. Romanticism privileged feeling over form. Modernism took it further. The postwar avant-garde crowned transgression as the mark of legitimacy. This isn’t a neutral description of art.
Conservatives dominate other artforms that go underappreciated by this standard.
Memes. Podcasts. Viral political humor. Yes Chad. 4chan. All owned by the Right. All far more influential than anything an institution, newspaper, or film festival has produced in the last twenty years.
A popular meme acts as heraldry: symbolism for digital tribes, rapidly understood and recognized. A meme requiring interpretation has already failed. “The left can’t meme” is more sociological observation than partisan ridicule. The liberal instinct to qualify and contextualize is a handicap in a medium rewarding the immediate.
Memes are coordination technologies packaged as jokes. Tribal, in-group coded and outgroup mocking. Previously, a crest or icon synchronized identity and beliefs. Today, memes perform this function online.
The Right rules this arena for the same reason it excels at military logistics and not interpretive dance: memetics favor clarity and quick processing.
Algorithms optimized for engagement are natural amplifiers of conservative content: promoting the visceral over the nuanced and subjective. Twitter has been saturated by rightwing messages since it was tweaked for virality and reduced censorship; it just trends better.
Memes reward decisiveness. High-ACC minds don't do decisive, they do "well, actually…"
Ironically, conservatives rule the most influential artform of the 21st century and don't recognize it as one, because they're scoring themselves on the criteria of the NYT and Rachel Maddow.
The manosphere/MAGA ecosystem congealed into a societal wrecking ball while platforms and governments tried to kill it. Rogan and rightwingers dominate podcasting. Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate are household names. Soccer moms listen to Jordan Peterson. Dislike them all you want, but they command the zeitgeist and they certainly aren't liberal.
If artforms were measured by audience reach and cultural penetration rather than opinions from West Village and Pacific Heights, the picture would look quite different. Do conservatives want their own Picasso or social impact? Because they have the latter while bemoaning the former. Trump’s 2016 win relied on meme energy; no gallery has ever impacted an election.
The Right spreads culture digitally before old-guard legitimacy can catch up. That isn’t nothing.
Rightwing art discourse is steered by those unrepresentative of the group they diagnose. There’s a difference between conservatives who arrive there dispositionally (by temperament, naturally) and those who arrive there propositionally (by reasoning, logically). The former are natives; the latter are assimilated immigrants.
Propositional conservatives: high-openness, decoupling ability, arrived at rightwing positions through atypical reasoning, contrarian impulse, or intense lived experience that overrode liberal disposition. Conservative by conclusion.
This writes essays about the mass base.
Biofoundational diagnostic: ask what they read.
Dispositional conservatives read within genre and function: military history, business strategy, scripture, self-improvement. The bookshelf is a mirror.
Propositional conservatives read promiscuously: literature, philosophy, heterodox theory, poetry, elite opinions out of Davos. The bookshelf is a window.
Another diagnostic: ask them where they vacation.
Dispositional conservatives return to the same places: the lake house, family cabin, annual hunting trip. Relaxation in the familiar.
Propositional conservatives holiday in the foreign: New cities, new people, different cultures. Relaxation in the unfamiliar.
This distinction is invisible to Blank Slatists because they have no ability to see it, because they don’t even know it exists. Anomalies evaluate the needs of the masses using intuitions drawn from their own peculiarities. Prescribing for the rule within the exception.
Prestige is distinct from relevance and feels more real to a certain kind of mind. The Met Gala is prestigious; Joe Rogan is relevant.
A coalition dominating the digital attention economy somehow registers as symbolically inferior because faculty lounges and film festivals find it déclassé? Prestige is a liberal currency; its value is denominated by cosmopolitans.
Pundit lamentations about artistic deficiencies reveal more about the commentators than any deficiency. Liberal cultural prestige is experienced as real prestige to them; they see the Left as the cool kids. Seeking the approval of a consecrating class they otherwise reject, they diagnose themselves in the process of diagnosing others.
To experience the art gap as a wound means you inhabit a social world where gallery legitimacy, critic approval, and literary esteem register as status currency. Temperamentally conservative men in the Texas Panhandle could not care less about any of this. It simply doesn’t compute as a loss. They’re not even aware of it. Those writing essays about it have confessed to being half-outside the coalition they're addressing.
You only care what Brooklynites think if you’re within their social milieu. The desire for high-class legitimacy is an openness-adjacent impulse. A liberal trait.
While intellectual conservatives write anguished essays about their absence from the art world, liberals don't grieve their absence from combat sports, petroleum engineering, or country music. Why? Nobody mourns exclusion from a club they don't respect! The complaint reveals where the commentator casts his gaze.
A genuinely conservative response to the art gap would be identical to the liberal response to the MMA gap: indifference. Temperamental conservatives in Louisiana don't have an opinion on artistic trends; they don't care, because they're actually conservative.
These commentators have openness in their veins, evidenced by the noticing itself. They're liberal halfbreeds. Constitutionally unlike the base they speak for.
Yarvin: Parents both worked in State Department. Ivy League grad. Lifelong Silicon Valley resident. Atheist. Poet. Never lived around anything rightwing. His conservatism derives from reading historical esoterica and uncommon primary sources. Rightwing by conclusion, not existence or association.
Listen to him discuss anything outside political strategy and the defaults are dispositionally liberal. He writes reactionary theory in the cognitive dialect of a Bay Area programmer, because that's what he is.
Rufo: “Born and raised in Sacramento, Calif., he’s spent almost all of his life in liberal, coastal cities. He graduated in 2006 from Georgetown in D.C., and has lived in New York, Los Angeles, and Berkeley.” Source.
“I come from the Left. I was a radical leftist… I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics.” Now he works for a Manhattan thinktank. Source.
He strikes me as the most temperamentally conservative of the three.
Urban, elite-adjacent, institutionally credentialed, geographically mobile, immersed in progressive scenes and coastal trends. These are propositional conservatives with liberal wiring. My guess is a liberal halfbreed has a larger ACC (openness) paired with an insula calibrated for disgust responses (purity/outgroup sensitivity).
The capacity to reason yourself into an opposing tribe’s conclusions while remaining functional within your natural one is a rare phenotype. It requires openness high enough to embrace heterodoxy and decoupling abilities resilient enough to tolerate social costs.
On a personal level, I like these guys and think they’re sincere in their efforts. I’m not calling them double agents or dishonest in the least, I mean that.
But what I am saying is people vote with their feet.
These are high-openness men who have spent essentially no physical time around conservative ways of life. Their conservatism is verbal, not embodied. Political oddities proposing remedies for people like them and treating it as scalable and generalizable.
Innate conservatives care as much about art representation as Princeton’s faculty cares about liberal representation at NASCAR. People reveal biomarkers not only in what they profess but what they mourn. Halfbreeds projecting aesthetic anxieties onto a base that barely knows who they are and wouldn’t have much in common if they did.
XI. Institutional Selection
Art education optimizes for disruption and interpretation. The same selection pressure deterring a high-openness creative from joining the Army deters a high-conscientiousness student from getting an MFA. Not excluded. Out of place.
Institutional reflexivity:
High-openness people disproportionately enter and succeed.
They become the gatekeepers.
They calibrate eminence around their personality traits.
The next generation self-selects more heavily for openness.
The institution drifts further.
Engineering departments and military academies do the same thing in the opposite direction. Nobody writes concerned essays about the lack of liberal aerospace engineers because liberals don’t experience it as a status loss.
This is why selection must be distinguished from exclusion.
Some are screened out by woke politics, but far more are never seriously drawn in to begin with. The filtering is less culture-war thing, more simple temperamental sorting thing.
Every institution has its organic attractors. Computer science rewards systemizers. Medical schools seek conscientious rule-followers. Business majors attract extraverts. Introverts are put off by B2B sales the same way conservatives aren't drawn to theater.
If temperament underpins both educational choices and political affiliation, then we should see correlations between professions and voting patterns. And indeed, we do.
Research analyzed election records and mapped political donations by job:
Fine arts, film, music, creative writing, theater: among the most liberal-donating fields.
Engineering, accounting, finance, surgery: among the most conservative donating.
This tracks openness to experience exceptionally well. The more a discipline rewards interpretability, novelty, and innovation, the more liberal its practitioners. The more it demands precision, structure, and rule-adherence, the more conservative. Biology expressing as career expressing as political affiliation. Three layers of the same substrate.
“But not all!”
Blank Slate thinking hunts for exceptions and acts like they’re rules. Aggregates are not undone by anecdotes.
Individual variance within groups doesn’t negate distributional differences between them. Sure there are rightwing poets. There are also female pilots and male kindergarten teachers. And it’s no argument for how they’re overwhelmingly occupied the way they are: biological reasons.
Human traits don’t need to occur 100 percent of the time to reveal programming. It’s a fake standard. If 100% occurrence were required, nothing outside physics or chemistry could ever be known.
You can grow a lemon tree in Iceland with greenhouse technology; you cannot build a citrus industry there. Individual exceptions produced under artificial conditions do not scale and push against the grain of nature. Better institutions can redirect behavior at the margins. They discover, refine, and distribute human capital. However they’re amplifiers, not generators. They cannot change the substrate’s baseline.
Diversity mandates for conservative underrepresentation would fail by the same mechanism that race-based diversity policies do. They intervene only at the intake stage and pretend biological settings aren’t there. They assume you can grow a lemon tree all the same in any climate. I’m sorry, no.
The liberal temperament does not reproduce itself as well biologically. It reproduces itself institutionally. Explaining why it’s so protective of those pathways and so capable at monopolizing them: they are its uterus. Institutions are the nodes of universalist morality: rules extended to everyone, equally, regardless of kin.
The conservative temperament propagates itself the old-fashioned way (likely why biological emphasis is more relevant for them). They transmit themselves through children while their opposition transmits through establishments. Illustrating how conservatives win elections while losing newsrooms.
This is why more institutions aren’t an adequate answer. You cannot solve a genotype gap with an intervention that the genotype itself will eventually recolonize.
New rightwing art institutions will find themselves slowly inhabited by the same cognitive profiles they sought to compete with; because those are the people drawn to it, good at it, and willing to run it. The entity can credential and polish, but better sieves do not create different grain.
There's a historically validated alternative to sourcing talent: rent it. Don't try to create Michelangelo, hire him. This is Yarvin's recommendation, and it’s the most pragmatic version of the institutional argument. It warrants separate treatment.
The Medici model worked under conditions very different from ours. Renaissance patronage operated in a prestige economy where artistic greatness elevated both the artist and the patron. Capital and elite blessings mattered. Access to production and distribution were scarce. The patron’s money and the culture’s reverence moved in the same currency. The relationship was bidirectional.
A modern rightwing patron faces a problem the Medici didn’t: the artist’s own peer group. A serious painter, novelist, or filmmaker who accepts conservative patronage receives both money and an unsavory reputational signal that travels through her professional world. The people whose opinion she cares about will regard the association as shopping-at-Walmart contamination. The artist’s status is denominated in a currency Elon Musk can’t just go out and buy.
The Medici had no such problem because the Medici were the prestige hierarchy. The contemporary patron lacks this standing. The market is now segmented.
There are four distinct layers to patronage:
Capital: who funds it
Consecration: who decides what’s good
Production: who makes it
Distribution: how it spreads
The Medici owned all four. Today, they’re fragmented. The model works when:
Prestige is centralized
Capital, eminence, and legitimacy are the same axis
Gatekeeping is unified
Distribution is scarce
The internet has killed this.
The Internet & Gatekeepers:
Patronage thrives in an economy of permission where the patron holds the bottleneck. The internet has turned bottlenecks into firehoses.
Medici patronage was forged in an era of gatekeeping: when producing and distributing art required capital, infrastructure, and elite access. The internet has upended this dynamic. The blockage is no longer permission, but attention.
One idiosyncratic guy with a laptop, AI skills, and WiFi can now produce and distribute music, film, art, banger essays, and self-publish to a global audience at near-zero marginal cost, all on his own.
A big account on Twitter or Substack is worth more than bylines at The Atlantic or NYT. These platforms are where influencers set cultural trends and MSM chimes in after the fact.
The creative class no longer auditions for old-economy fossils. The fossils audition for them. Elite leverage has diminished. The game has changed.
Patronage is the most intelligent institutional approach, and it's undone by three modern flaws: the personality it needs to rent doesn't want to be rented, the prestige it's trying to purchase isn't for sale, and the distribution networks it relied on are algorithmically degraded. The Medici model requires a Medici world. The internet sends its regards.
The rightwing fixation on art is status-seeking disguised as strategy. Conservatives don’t want frontier art because they want frontier art. If they did, they would make it, naturally, like liberals. Sometimes a good tautology illuminates the obvious:
“How do we make great art?” is superficial top-down political framing. “How do we compete in a prestige economy we’re temperamentally ill-suited for?” is an informative bottom-up systematized lens. And the answer is: you don’t. Not well, anyway. Evolutionary logic encourages you to specialize, not homogenize. Don’t minimize your disadvantages, maximize your advantages. Instead of being a worse version of them, be the best version of you.
Ask instead what order builds that nothing else can:
ARTFORMS
Everything cited in the Rightwing Legibility/Art of Confirmation section. Unapologetically commit to what you are.
Pay homage to great works that modernity has forgotten. Ceremonial beauty. Heroic scale. Corny sports movies. Go full cathedral with a touch of Gaudi.
Commercial country music is a huge brand. Top Gun: Maverick outperformed every film that won Best Picture this decade combined. The audiences and cultural desire are there. What's missing is the acknowledgement that these things are art, not a sad consolation prize.
Who cares what LA thinks. Do libs care what Texas and Dana White think about them?
HARD POWER
Infrastructure: own what keeps the lights on while liberals argue about the lighting.
Logistics. Maintenance. Borders. Standards. Supply chains and trains that run on time. Hard systems matter more than symbolic popularity. Conscientiousness is an operational requirement here, not a personality quirk.
Shuttles delivering satellites, freight networks delivering millions of packages. Relentlessly moving the right materials to the right place for the thousandth time, under stress, without applause.
Yarvin has written more sophisticated sentences about power than almost anyone. He also doesn’t own anything. Musk has written next to nothing on the subject, and controls the world’s most advanced space operation, the dominant satellite internet infrastructure, the most significant social media platform, and the largest electric transportation and autonomous driving operation. Plus Neuralink, The Boring Co., xAI, God knows what else.
Besides Twitter and xAI, all of the aforementioned are atoms-based, physical enterprises that make contact with reality, some with extraordinary scale. Elon dominates things that move.
Yarvin talks about power. Musk embodies it. The gap between them illustrates conservative comparative advantage at its starkest: atoms moved vs sentences written. Abstraction vs action.
While liberal billionaires get fanfare with symbolic glamor — naming rights on museums, philanthropic foundations — Musk accumulates physical dominance. Elon should play Medici to find another one of him, not another Banksy. He has the gift of consecration for business, not art.
Military
The composition of West Point, military leadership, recruitment, and the moral default settings of the Joint Chiefs matter enormously at civilizational level. The country exists through the armed forces. It is the supreme authority through which all other authority flows. Over extended time horizons, there is no organization, none, more critical than the military.
Militaries are the most kinetic, structured machines man has ever designed. They’re intrinsically masculine, natively rightwing, with temperamental attractors perfectly suited for conservative men. Focus on making this institution as conservative as possible, not making Harvard less liberal.
Civilization is held together by force, aligned trust, infrastructure, ritual, and shared faith. Conservative excellence demands the same traits that modern art demands you abandon: risk calibration, long time horizons, discipline, fidelity to standards, and the capacity to perform essential functions without needing praise from The New Yorker.
There is an elegance to order that modernity fails to appreciate.
“Not art”. Okay, liberal.
An F-35’s vertical takeoff. A SpaceX rocket gracefully returning to earth. Marine drills perfectly synchronized. The conservative mind seeks resolution, precision, and coordination of bodies and machines.
These are not the absence of beauty, just a different species of it.
“But what do people who read The Atlantic think?”
The sophistication of mastery and complexity resolved, of ten thousand moving parts harmonized through discipline. This is the aesthetic the conservative emits organically and celebrates insufficiently.
Its artistic “failure” is aspirational mimicry, mistaking contemporary grading for universal standard. It doesn’t need the theater kid’s approval to be deemed extraordinary. It needs only to stop measuring itself by the theater kid’s rubric.
Liberalism is the aesthetic of dreams. Conservatism is the aesthetic of physics and motion. Art of mind vs art of body.
The cathedral took generations of orderly craftsmen laying stone. The ceiling’s mural took one chaotic genius. Stop mourning the ceiling you cannot paint and begin venerating the walls only you can raise. Conservatives keep civilization running while liberals decorate it.
The guy who painted the ceiling gets the biography. The thousands who laid the stone get a footnote. Partisan bickering narrates this as an injustice to be corrected. Biofoundationalism shows it’s a division of glory to be understood. The ceiling never lives without the walls. The walls lack purpose without the ceiling. A dyad is elevated, not undone, by its other side.
“Feminine beauty and meaning both decorate the world and magnetize masculine power and protection 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…
Feminine values provide a lattice that makes life worth living; masculine values allow them to exist at all.”
One keeps the walls standing. The other makes them worth beholding. A nation with only the first is sterile; a nation with only the second collapses. The conservative is essential, not deficient.
XIV. Concluding: God’s Will, Determinism, & Biology
Our substrates have a shape: governing what we find threatening, sacred, revolting, and worth honoring. Just as gravity shapes orbit and weather shapes land, biology shapes you. You don’t get to choose whether it impacts you, only how you make peace with it.
You wouldn’t plant mangoes in Alaska and blame the soil’s lack of ambition. Yet this is how we approach human coordination: prescribing template solutions to dispositionally distinct populations as if they’re interchangeable labor units, then diagnosing the poor results as policy failure rather than substrate malpractice.
The myth of fungible human material is load-bearing for politics and philosophy. If we can't chalk up disparities and behaviors to "social constructs" or “biases”, the alternative terrifies us: we’re accountable to nature rather than narratives. This does not mean every outcome is fixed. It means the field of options operates under constraints.
A diagnosis is not a death sentence; it’s the precondition for treatment. It’s a choice to be demoralized by what you are rather than equipped by it.
Cookie-cutter accusations dismissing genetics as fatalism, racism, determinism, etc. are tedious. “Nihilism” is nothing more than a bloated way to say “hey, this bums me out”. Pick your slur, any slur, and proclaim it with enough righteous indignation and poof, the conversation ends before it begins. Biology doesn’t become less real when its implications are emotionally and philosophically inconvenient.
The confusion is between limits on agency and elimination of agency. Conflating them is the error. Free will is bounded; that does not make it absent.
Gravity constrains flight. It doesn’t eliminate it. We built airplanes by navigating the constraint, not delivering passionate speeches about the injustice of falling. Steel has properties. Weather has patterns. Bodies and minds have limits. They all define the terrain within which agency operates.
Submission to forces greater than you isn't as uninspiring as it seems. Frame the restrictions religiously and we embrace it: "God's plan”, “He works in mysterious ways". Restate it without the supernatural mystique and suddenly it's nihilistic fatalism.
The difference between "God has a plan for you" and "your genotype has parameters" isn't a difference in proposition so much as packaging.
We accept soft determinism when it wears robes. We reject it when it wears a lab coat. Biology doesn’t confine you any more than God’s will.
Whatever secular or spiritual vernacular we use to recognize our submission to these higher powers — providence, fate, genotype, thermodynamics — a name doesn’t change its nature, only the emotional valence.
Is it fatalistic to be handed a map showing you paths you can walk and mountains where you can’t? Or are you enabled to navigate the land? You’re not diminished by a truthful map; you’re less lost. Cartography prevents you from walking boldly into a mountain and calling the collision oppression. The doctor who tells you your cholesterol is heritable has not condemned you to a heart attack.
Anatomy doesn’t “determine” your body; it constitutes it. Fast-twitch fibers don’t “determine” your athleticism; they define its ceiling. You were already constrained; diagrams only make constraints visible. Biofoundationalism removes ideological fog and doesn’t limit anything that wasn’t already limited.
Analysis that puts everything through a personalized political filter and always flatters its own team is no analysis at all. Honest dissection is sometimes uncomfortable. This biological accounting of a politically polarizing subject did not:
Demonize or evangelize anyone
Say “it’s all deterministic”
Advise nihilistic blackpilling.
It played no favorites, acknowledged innate strength and weakness for both poles, and gave operational guidance. This makes action more possible, not less. Whereas political ideology furthers falsehoods about fungible human cogs, then wonders why sermons fail to redistribute what nature did not allocate equally.
The conservative is not a failed artist. The liberal is not an incompetent engineer. A man is not an unattractive woman. A woman is not a weak man. Judging these things by the standards of their counterpart is how you corrode their complementary differences in service of the Blank Slate's religion of commoditized human biomass. These dyads become grotesque deformities when they reject their natural functions and hide behind ideologies that treat complements as enemies.
Your moral hardwiring is priced in; the environment you build with it is not. The choice isn’t between free will and determinism, but fantasy and reality. Agency is neither absolute nor nonexistent; it lives within form. Appreciating this allows us to build with the grain of truth, not against it.
Do you want to solve problems or protect myths? Which way, Western man?
A response to an outside comment for The Cathedral & The Ceiling that others may find useful:
COMMENT:
“In this binary view of artists versus builders, is there room for conversion? Or is the idea that we're born as one class or the other, so to speak, and that's all we can be?
I'm probably missing the point as I'm wont to do, but it is a more interesting question to me than the idea that polarities exist or whatnot. Order and chaos yes yes but how do we mix them optimally? How are we all a mix of both versus mostly one or the other?
We're clearly not static individuals in the normal sense of the word static (as in unchanging —I believe we are tied to the infinite, so we are a little static, with souls / something core, but I don't think those soul-cores can be polarised. Not permanently.
Tho I guess even that sentiment is in the mix no? The idea that people change? Eh, it is pretty incredible how the more things change the more they stay the same."
RESPONSE:
Temperament heavily clusters in predictable ways that produce aggregates with clear poles. Almost all of life operates on a dyad of some kind.
We're measuring neurological substrates, quantifiable differences, the moral codes they adhere to, and the aesthetics they generate. There are distinct patterns to them, repeated across timelines under radically different conditions. Liberals and conservatives conceptualize art differently for the same reason they conceptualize morality differently: different wiring.
There are halfbreeds (I named a few in the essay), outliers who recombine in unusual ways, and these rare exceptions reinforce rules. The modal expression of each pole is real and consistent, and the two modes specialize into different civilizational functions. No different than masculine and feminine.
——
On convertibility/infinite souls:
A fluid, infinite soul is the sort of mysticism that tends to feel slighted by genetics. It’s functionally a form of spiritualized Blank Slatism. The soul can be anything, a person can be anything: the spiritual overlay is really the only difference here.
Secular or spiritual, the presumption is the self as plastic and able to change as it pleases. It’s true we aren’t static: we do evolve with experience, but that evolution runs on fixed rails.
Core temperament and moral architecture barely move across lifetimes; the vast, vast majority don’t change. The most common directional pressure is parenthood, which tends to push people rightward: having skin in the game changes your threat calibration. But that’s still biology, not philosophy, and not a conscious choice.
We instinctively feel like mechanisms undo the magic. There’s no religious contradiction here when you understand that mechanisms are the magic.
——
>"How do we mix them optimally?"
This is the right question asked at the wrong scale. You don't engineer the mix inside an individual. This is Sovereign Individual thinking (Blank Slate’s fraternal twin, instead of “I can be anything” it says “I can do anything”).
We evolved in collectives, and our abilities are societally calibrated for this. The “optimum” blend manifests through complementarity at the population level, not through each person being 50/50.
A society with only conservatives is sterile. A society with only liberals collapses. The ideal isn't an internal balance, but an external distribution across the group. Not everyone can be everything, and we prosper precisely because of this.
This individual emphasis is a uniquely Western myth that’s completely contradictory to the environments we evolved in over millenia.
No single person will ever be the perfect moral blend; that is a description of God, not a man.
——
>”Is that all we can be?"
This is the frame I most want to invert. It’s depressing when it should be motivating. A woman who will never squat 400lbs or fly a jet as well as a man shouldn't feel diminished by this biological reality.
She should be enlivened by the reality that only her body can create life. That without her, those same men would have little reason to fly the jet or squat the weight in the first place.
You have encoded strengths and weaknesses. Don't be demoralized by what you can't do. Be activated by what you can do that others cannot.
"God's will" and "your genotype has parameters" are the same constraint in different registers. Submission to forces greater than you are not as uninspiring as it seems.
When soft determinism wears robes, it humbles us; when it wears a lab coat, it’s “nihilism”. You already submit to these forces, changing the name doesn’t change its nature.
——
>"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
You just articulated the thesis! Human nature and its dyadic cycles endure. That's exactly it.
Not directly on the main message of this essay but im surprised you didn’t wrestle with it
I feel like both conservative and liberal dispositions of art are being devalued though, the artistic sense is, as a whole, not interesting to nearly as many people as it was before. But isnt this because there’s no room for it in the brutal ebbs and flows of capital, thus there’s no real sense of any aesthetic project, no sense of a communal effort to build something great AND lasting that goes beyond money and touches on something base, that a whole community can rally behind
You go to a conservatively minded man in Rome and he can point to 7 different projects that are being cutrently built that give him a sense of artistic pride in his country, the liberal would most likely also agree. Now take a conservative in Rural Michigan and a liberal in Seattle and can you expect the same thing? And no I dont think commercial engineering and road maintenance, though artistic in its own right, is really the type of art that should be spoken about here. Some death of value is comorbid with the rise of the materialist view of art and has contributed to a society with an utterly dull perspective on these things.
Can we really just say this is a new world with new inputs so we shouldn’t expect anything else? You go up to any working class people on this issue and they will tell you the same thing, the death of the artistic (or to the conservative, maybe the religious) sense is somewhat of a modern tragedy, whether it be the dispositional conservative bemoaning the lack of churches being built, or the angsty liberal angry that there is no room for them and their artist cohort in the current economy
You have diagnosed a main issue but do you have any solution to this, or do you believe that we should move past the age of art, of outwardly facing beauty for inner value, and completely follow the flows of capital? Perhaps some third thing?
The solution seems obvious, at least to me, the conservative and liberal artistic senses often only efficaciously converge at religion, whether that be Religion of Country, Religion of Value, etc (to be clear I am not religious, It just seems as a whole the public needs religion for the lowest common denominator to ensure community and value, the liberal democratic notion of a society of educated moral individuals may very well be dead in the internet age where intellectualism loses to primal brain programming, algorithic ragebait, and over-information)
Right now the Religion is Money, and nearly everyone not in the higher class is dissatisfied with this fact whether they know it or not, people want values again, maybe even a (working) religion, the question is can we get there or is it a fool’s errand
A response to an outside comment for The Cathedral & The Ceiling that others may find useful:
COMMENT:
“In this binary view of artists versus builders, is there room for conversion? Or is the idea that we're born as one class or the other, so to speak, and that's all we can be?
I'm probably missing the point as I'm wont to do, but it is a more interesting question to me than the idea that polarities exist or whatnot. Order and chaos yes yes but how do we mix them optimally? How are we all a mix of both versus mostly one or the other?
We're clearly not static individuals in the normal sense of the word static (as in unchanging —I believe we are tied to the infinite, so we are a little static, with souls / something core, but I don't think those soul-cores can be polarised. Not permanently.
Tho I guess even that sentiment is in the mix no? The idea that people change? Eh, it is pretty incredible how the more things change the more they stay the same."
RESPONSE:
Temperament heavily clusters in predictable ways that produce aggregates with clear poles. Almost all of life operates on a dyad of some kind.
We're measuring neurological substrates, quantifiable differences, the moral codes they adhere to, and the aesthetics they generate. There are distinct patterns to them, repeated across timelines under radically different conditions. Liberals and conservatives conceptualize art differently for the same reason they conceptualize morality differently: different wiring.
There are halfbreeds (I named a few in the essay), outliers who recombine in unusual ways, and these rare exceptions reinforce rules. The modal expression of each pole is real and consistent, and the two modes specialize into different civilizational functions. No different than masculine and feminine.
——
On convertibility/infinite souls:
A fluid, infinite soul is the sort of mysticism that tends to feel slighted by genetics. It’s functionally a form of spiritualized Blank Slatism. The soul can be anything, a person can be anything: the spiritual overlay is really the only difference here.
Secular or spiritual, the presumption is the self as plastic and able to change as it pleases. It’s true we aren’t static: we do evolve with experience, but that evolution runs on fixed rails.
Core temperament and moral architecture barely move across lifetimes; the vast, vast majority don’t change. The most common directional pressure is parenthood, which tends to push people rightward: having skin in the game changes your threat calibration. But that’s still biology, not philosophy, and not a conscious choice.
We instinctively feel like mechanisms undo the magic. There’s no religious contradiction here when you understand that mechanisms are the magic.
——
>"How do we mix them optimally?"
This is the right question asked at the wrong scale. You don't engineer the mix inside an individual. This is Sovereign Individual thinking (Blank Slate’s fraternal twin, instead of “I can be anything” it says “I can do anything”).
We evolved in collectives, and our abilities are societally calibrated for this. The “optimum” blend manifests through complementarity at the population level, not through each person being 50/50.
A society with only conservatives is sterile. A society with only liberals collapses. The ideal isn't an internal balance, but an external distribution across the group. Not everyone can be everything, and we prosper precisely because of this.
This individual emphasis is a uniquely Western myth that’s completely contradictory to the environments we evolved in over millenia.
No single person will ever be the perfect moral blend; that is a description of God, not a man.
——
>”Is that all we can be?"
This is the frame I most want to invert. It’s depressing when it should be motivating. A woman who will never squat 400lbs or fly a jet as well as a man shouldn't feel diminished by this biological reality.
She should be enlivened by the reality that only her body can create life. That without her, those same men would have little reason to fly the jet or squat the weight in the first place.
You have encoded strengths and weaknesses. Don't be demoralized by what you can't do. Be activated by what you can do that others cannot.
"God's will" and "your genotype has parameters" are the same constraint in different registers. Submission to forces greater than you are not as uninspiring as it seems.
When soft determinism wears robes, it humbles us; when it wears a lab coat, it’s “nihilism”. You already submit to these forces, changing the name doesn’t change its nature.
——
>"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
You just articulated the thesis! Human nature and its dyadic cycles endure. That's exactly it.
Not directly on the main message of this essay but im surprised you didn’t wrestle with it
I feel like both conservative and liberal dispositions of art are being devalued though, the artistic sense is, as a whole, not interesting to nearly as many people as it was before. But isnt this because there’s no room for it in the brutal ebbs and flows of capital, thus there’s no real sense of any aesthetic project, no sense of a communal effort to build something great AND lasting that goes beyond money and touches on something base, that a whole community can rally behind
You go to a conservatively minded man in Rome and he can point to 7 different projects that are being cutrently built that give him a sense of artistic pride in his country, the liberal would most likely also agree. Now take a conservative in Rural Michigan and a liberal in Seattle and can you expect the same thing? And no I dont think commercial engineering and road maintenance, though artistic in its own right, is really the type of art that should be spoken about here. Some death of value is comorbid with the rise of the materialist view of art and has contributed to a society with an utterly dull perspective on these things.
Can we really just say this is a new world with new inputs so we shouldn’t expect anything else? You go up to any working class people on this issue and they will tell you the same thing, the death of the artistic (or to the conservative, maybe the religious) sense is somewhat of a modern tragedy, whether it be the dispositional conservative bemoaning the lack of churches being built, or the angsty liberal angry that there is no room for them and their artist cohort in the current economy
You have diagnosed a main issue but do you have any solution to this, or do you believe that we should move past the age of art, of outwardly facing beauty for inner value, and completely follow the flows of capital? Perhaps some third thing?
The solution seems obvious, at least to me, the conservative and liberal artistic senses often only efficaciously converge at religion, whether that be Religion of Country, Religion of Value, etc (to be clear I am not religious, It just seems as a whole the public needs religion for the lowest common denominator to ensure community and value, the liberal democratic notion of a society of educated moral individuals may very well be dead in the internet age where intellectualism loses to primal brain programming, algorithic ragebait, and over-information)
Right now the Religion is Money, and nearly everyone not in the higher class is dissatisfied with this fact whether they know it or not, people want values again, maybe even a (working) religion, the question is can we get there or is it a fool’s errand