Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver

Human Natural State. You are always voting your temperament.

Someone asked me the below question on Twitter. I find the entire premise of it wrong. Not uniquely wrong though. My issue is with the very nature of what we call “capitalism”.

Yes, DeFi (the pure version of crypto) counts as capitalism, because it’s simply money, commerce, and trade in a new medium. Money and financial infrastructure are just tools for commerce and trade. DeFi is a digital paradigm for new, old things.

This essay is not about crypto or finance, it’s a deconstruction of what is misleadingly called “capitalism”.

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Human Natural State

“Capitalism” is misleadingly named, because it’s simply the natural state of man. Our default mode. It’s incorrect to view capitalism as a intentionally crafted man-made system, implying it’s an academic construct that organizes human behavior based off theory, directive, or model. It isn’t.

Laws and governments can be lubricants for natural motivations and innate desires, but they do not create them.

Imagine if an academic told you that you only wanted a wife and kids, to have sex and be intimate, because of a country’s “Sexualist Breeder” system. Your desire for intercourse, mating rituals, and offspring are the result of central planners and sociologist modeling, actually. That girl you like, who has a prettier face than the other girls, you desire her because a state-made system said so. A fat ass, wide hips, we only want them because of intellectual theory.

Inane. Though when we ascribe academic and government credit to our innate motivations to accumulate resources, capital, and wealth, we have a double standard.

Calling an environment that allows you to pursue your self-interests, that’s conducive to behaviors man is pre-programmed to do “capitalism” is frankly, bizarre. Humans do this all on their own. You don’t get to take credit for natural imperatives. Man seeks sex, capital, and trade, without any theorizing from the tweed-jacket-wearing demographic.

Academics love this term, because it’s not good marketing to describe man’s capital-seeking ways as a subset of natural law. That designation doesn’t help scholarly counter-branding; you can’t call the natural thing you dislike “natural”, because that makes the academic’s solution “unnatural” (many such cases).

Lest you think I’m being unfair to our ivory-tower friends, here’s the lore of the term “capitalism”: borne from a socialist French intellectual and popularized by Marx. Lol. So the guys who didn’t like the natural system, named the natural system something that’s kinda pejorative, weird!

This is a weaponized term. It allows central planners to subconsciously manipulate your view and acceptance of organic human actions, both collectively and individually. This is not trivial. Language is a powerful tool. More on this towards the end.

So we got the term “capitalism” to describe the emergent behaviors and productive activities that occur when humans are left to their own devices. Power laws, but with money….. that’s a “capitalism”. Conniving rhetoric has been embedded into our understanding of it from the very start, originating from a literal socialist and communist.

This is as subconsciously subversive as having an asexual abstinence-promoting intellectual describe your heterosexual relationship with your wife as being part of said “sexualist breeder” system. How do you expect sex, children, and their pursuit to be framed based off just this name alone? You’re primed to dislike it before you even understand it.

A reset is needed. You don’t let your enemies define you, name you, and tell you what you are.

I’d like to offer a new name: Human Natural State (HNS)

To illustrate:

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Consider the Beaver

What happens when you drop a bunch of beavers into a forest near a river? What do they do when uninhibited, with full autonomy, to act out their innate programming?

They collect wood and build dams. Because that’s what they’re programmed to do. It's the default state of the wood-seeking rodent. How odd would it be to call this a “capitalist” beaver system for log procurement and dam creation? Acting as if their actions are foisted upon them by some beaver government that dictates how and when they should gather their wood.

Only when an external force (eg humans or a natural disaster) acts upon the beaver does it alter their dam-building actions; this is, in a way, similar to what government is to man. Only when a central body dictates that the way man is gathering his wood is wrong, does it change how he naturally does it.

• Drop beavers into a forest and what do they do? Build dams, collect wood.

• Drop humans into a territory and what do they do? They trade, forage, fight, and build.

You can look to wild west-style frontiers where there’s no outside force telling settlers what to do, to see what humans do when free to HNS as they please. They grow things, create supply chains, farm, barter, they “capitalism”. It’s just what we’re programmed to act out.

“Capitalism” is the term the aggrieved intellectual came up with to describe mankind’s innate desire to create networks and interactions that allow him to flourish. It is an intentionally manipulative, derogatory name for a beautiful, natural thing.

HNS is our hardwired coordination mechanism, just as sex is our hardwired reproductive mechanism.

I know what dissenters are thinking. They’re thinking “But property didn’t exist before man put pen to paper and concocted property rights. Without property, man cannot capitalism. Ergo, property comes from the state, so capitalism does too.”

You are correct on property being critical, and wrong as to how that concept originated and is enshrined. Deeply wrong. Critically wrong. Property rights do not come from lawyers and governments. This is discussed in Property Rights, Toilets, and the Way of the Dog, linked again at the end.

Noble governments create man-made laws that align with natural laws, facilitating orderly execution of the positive behaviors that man takes instinctively. Ignoble governments create laws that contravene our innate mannerisms, and impose a view of how man ought to be, rather than how he is.

“Capitalism” is a deceitful designation, because recognizing it as natural undermines the intellectual who thinks he knows better. The best governments, and places to live, have created laws that recognize and encourage man’s productive, capital-seeking programming.

How do countries become more prosperous and free? The answer is obvious. The way it’s accomplished is equally obvious: governments start to fuck off, and “capitalism” magically begins to happen.

You don’t get to take credit for what nature instilled.

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Natural Law Branding: The Way an Idea is Presented Matters

When we take intellectual credit for something awesome that occurs naturally, it’s ego-boosting. It tacitly gives central planners and economists credit where they deserve none. Further, the “capitalist” designation is useful for the socialist-friendly politician, because it connotes greed, as if this is some contrived system forced on you by robber barons, counting their gold coins in a vault Scrooge McDuck style.

Critically, if you were to describe it as HNS, as a natural imperative, then policies that contradict it are definitionally at odds with nature; people instinctively have an aversion to “anti-nature” designations, but “anti-capitalist”…. sounds like you’re just anti-greed or something; the moral branding hits very differently. HNS is not greed, it’s man’s natural state within a natural system.

To the leftist, identifying “capitalism” as a natural system is to lose a key psychological touchstone and cede ground in a rhetorical war. Rhetoric, associations, and branding are of utmost importance when selling your ideas. That’s why describing it as HNS is so vital. The message being embedded in the name itself is a powerful psychological tool.

Strip out the deceptive academic descriptions and show HNS for what it really is. This is not an econometric, data-based discussion; we are discussing the natural actions of mammals. If you’re using a chart to proselytize for your beliefs, you’ve already lost; no one is convinced of anything political or economic (but I repeat myself) this way. Focus on the behaviors and actions of humans to illustrate the HNS-ness of it.

HNS is pro-human and natural: because it does not fight man’s inherent productive tendencies, it recognizes and amplifies them. This HNS reframing is a powerful (and true) rhetorical device. There are major trends in organic produce, no-hormone farming, no preservatives, no sunscreen, exposing the harms of pharmaceuticals, etc..; people’s heuristics are potently calibrated in favor of nature. Conservatives should hop on this evolved attraction we have to exalt that which exists naturally.

HNS is how the nodes within the economic complex adaptive system organically structure their behaviors. It is not a man-made system, but rather a natural system that man exists within.

The more you deviate from HNS because a group of lawyers and economists think they know better, the more you undermine the natural and emergent phenomenons of resource allocation and information dissemination that occurs within a complex adaptive system. An economy is a complex adaptive system.

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The Temperament Informs the Economic and the Political

Where do economic beliefs come from? The books you read? Why those ones, you found all the right books? There are a lot of books on the subject that disagree wildly. Ok so how’d you end up thinking what you do? I know you’ll insist it’s the books, but it’s not; because you sought out those specific books for a reason. The elephant and the rider, we seek out information that confirms our priors. The better question is, where did we get our priors?

Economic stances are political derivatives. Political stances are moral derivatives. Moral stances are temperamental derivatives. Your temperament is biologically imposed. With a brain scan and amygdala size, we can predict your political beliefs with ~72% accuracy (I think this is low, and AI will expose that). There is a massive amount of implications in these previous five sentences, and it will be explored in an upcoming series called Biofoundationalism.

Lions and Giraffes

Smaller government resonates with the high-agency. Larger government with the low-agency. You are always voting your temperament... "what environment is best suited to me thriving" is embedded into your decision making, and political thinking, at a biological level.

Who thrives most in pure HNS? Why do some promote laissez-faire societies, and others a dominant central point of control? This motivation does not come from textbooks or where you went to school.

A lion would support free trade and no income taxes, a giraffe votes for some protectionism and progressive tax rates. Understand this and you understand economic and political stances. Inside mankind there are many wolves, and they are not all hunters.

HNS environments are hypercompetitive. Those who don’t fare well in them tend to lobby for centralized seizure and redistribution of resources, providing restitution to the “victims” of power laws. At the root of economic beliefs is the subconscious promotion of an environment best suited to maximize the strengths of its advocate. You are always voting your temperament.

Notice anything about the guys advocating libertarian-style, no regulation, HNS societies? They’re high agency, usually industrious, disagreeable types. Risk takers, entrepreneurs, preppers. They’re capable in a very “I installed my own kitchen cabinets” kinda way.

They're not lobbying for an economic system, but rather for conditions where they’re most likely to excel. Our firmly held beliefs are that which create political and economic environments ideal for our abilities. You are always voting your temperament.

They're evangelizing an open, naturally competitive society because it’s the environment most conducive to their prospering. They're promoting their optimum dynamic, with post-hoc intellectualized justifications. These are lions, explaining why the lion’s way is preferred.

HNS is deeply Darwinian, which is why it’s so cutthroat and competitive. Creative destruction, survival of the fittest: resource edition. It’s convenient for the giraffe to describe failing at this as “greed” rather than concede he’s just not optimized for it. Nature is brutal when left to her devices, and societies have a lot of giraffes.

As you push leftwards, you begin to see more and more redistribution favored, and a mitigation of HNS and its hypercompetitive elements. Unsurprisingly, it’s those who stand to benefit from those redistribution efforts who promote it fiercest. Those who have little status or resources, and can’t quite cut it in the domain of the lion, adopt giraffian socialist beliefs. This is the giraffe telling you it wants rules more conducive to the giraffe flourishing. You are always voting your temperament.

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What’s Ideal?

What’s preferred for a nation? Is it always HNS and unleashing the lions (high agency, act upon the world), or do we need a giraffe-friendly (low agency, world acts upon them) society, replete with safety nets and mandatory resource redistribution?

Larger government invariably hampers the most productive, the high agency, who are the value creators of civilization. You need them. Badly. You have nothing without them. Your country is poor if they're poor, but it’s not necessarily rich if they’re rich.

Giraffe considerations are necessary though. You need low-agency support, because the majority are in fact giraffes. 80 - 20 rule. But they are not what create wealth. They should not be driving the decision making. An unfortunate pitfall of democracy is as a nation grows wealthy, the game theory lends itself to buying giraffe allegiance (detailed in Gain Dependents, Gain Power).

If you’re poor, you must unleash your lions. As you become wealthier, the needs of the giraffe become impossible to ignore. Anyone who advocates unequivocally for one kind of environment always, no matter the condition, is what we call a political radical. An ideologue who’s just screaming “I vote my temperament as aggressively as I possibly can at all times”.

Because all productive domains follow Pareto distributions, and your high-agency must always have an environment where they can excel, some form of pure HNS to center-right economic rules should be the spectrum. With the center-right as far left as you go, as you always need to be enabling your lions to amass resources. Only when you’ve achieved a sufficient amount of consistent wealth do you have the luxury of concerning yourself with its distribution, a good problem to have.

Pure HNS if you’re poor and need to accrue wealth, evolving to center-right as you become prosperous. If you’re rich enough, the overall health of a country is improved by assisting those who cannot keep up in HNS. You don’t become rich by subsidizing the laggards, and you can’t redistribute anything if you’re poor.

But don’t call it capitalism. Like and share if you’re an HNS respecter.

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