Predictable Results in Unpredictable Times

1. The Western concept of human nature as inherently beastly and selfish is a cultural illusion.

The idea that we are involuntary servants of our animal dispositions is an illusion—also originating in the culture.

A cultural obsession. Western civilization is uniquely haunted by a grim specter: the belief that humans are fundamentally greedy, aggressive, and competitive animals. This self-contemptuous anthropology assumes that without external constraints, human society will inevitably collapse into a violent, chaotic state of nature.

The ethnocentric trap. Modern disciplines like Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Rational Choice economics perpetuate this myth by projecting the values of the classic bourgeois capitalist subject onto the entire human species. They mistake local, historical cultural practices for universal biological imperatives, effectively declaring "I am the species."

A unique contempt. While other civilizations have occasionally toyed with the idea of natural human wickedness, none can match the sustained, systematic contempt for humanity that characterizes Western intellectual history. This dualism pits a savage "nature" against a fragile "culture," a division virtually unknown to the rest of the world.

2. The "Metaphysical Triangle" of anarchy, hierarchy, and equality has governed Western political thought for millennia.

The political science of the unruly animal has come for the most part in two contrasting and alternating forms: either hierarchy or equality: monarchial authority or republican equilibrium...

The structural matrix. Western political philosophy operates within a recurring metaphysical triangle composed of three points: primordial anarchy, hierarchical domination, and egalitarian balance. This structure assumes that the natural state of humanity is a chaotic war of all against all that must be resolved.

Two opposing remedies. To prevent natural human self-interest from destroying society, Western thinkers have historically oscillated between two structural solutions:

• Hierarchy: A system of top-down domination (like monarchy or autocracy) that uses external, coercive power to restrain human appetites.
• Equality: A self-organizing system of balanced, opposing powers (like a republic or democracy) that pits self-interests against one another to achieve equilibrium.

A totalized metaphysics. This structural logic extends far beyond politics, organizing Western conceptions of the physical universe, the human body, and the cosmos. Whether in the balance of bodily humors in medicine or the gravitational equilibrium of Newtonian physics, the same dialectic of elemental conflict resolved by hierarchy or equality repeats itself.

3. Thucydides' account of the Corcyrean civil war serves as the foundational nightmare for Western political design.

Point for point, feature for feature, Hobbes' state of nature parallels Thucydides' account of the Corcyrean revolution.

The archetypal collapse. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides described the bloody revolution (stasis) at Corcyra, where class warfare dissolved all social bonds, laws, and religious oaths. This historical horror show became the ultimate empirical proof for Western thinkers that human nature, when unchecked, is a destructive beast.

The corruption of language. During the Corcyrean crisis, even language itself degenerated as words changed their meanings to serve factional self-interest—a rhetorical distortion known as paradiastole. Cautious plotting was praised as self-defense, while moderation was condemned as cowardice, proving that culture and truth are the first casualties of natural greed.

A shared blueprint. This "Thucydidean Moment" directly inspired both Thomas Hobbes and John Adams, though they devised opposite solutions to the same nightmare:

• Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides to argue for an absolute sovereign to keep men in awe.
• John Adams used the same text to argue for a complex balance of republican powers.

4. The ancient Greek debate between physis (nature) and nomos (convention) falsely devalued culture as artificial.

Man-made and artificial, culture was not true in the way nature was.

The fateful dichotomy. In the fifth century BC, the Sophists popularized a rigid opposition between physis (the objective, invariant laws of nature) and nomos (human-made laws, customs, and conventions). This dualism established the foundational premise of Western social thought: that nature is real and authentic, while culture is merely a superficial, subjective artifice.

The devaluation of culture. Because nomos was seen as contingent, variable, and man-made, it was frequently cast as a false or weak cover for the raw, underlying truths of physis. This perspective led to several cynical conclusions:

• Justice and morality are merely "scraps of paper" designed by the weak to restrain the naturally strong.
• Human laws are fragile spiderwebs easily torn apart by natural greed and the drive for domination.
• The natural law of the cosmos is simply that the stronger rule the weaker wherever they can.

The Sophistic legacy. This ancient division set the stage for the next two millennia of Western philosophy, creating a binary where nature is always privileged as the ultimate truth. Whether viewed as a pure state of innocence (Rousseau) or a brutal state of war (Hobbes), "nature" remains the intractable reality that culture must either serve or suppress.

5. Kinship offers a universal alternative to individualism by defining the self through a "mutuality of being."

They are, then, the same entity in a wa)', even though in different subjects.

The transpersonal self. While Western social science treats the bounded, autonomous individual as the basic unit of humanity, kinship systems across the globe operate on a completely different ontology. Kinship is defined by a "mutuality of being," where relatives are intrinsic parts of one another's subjective existence and identity.

Dividual existence. In these societies, the self is not a self-contained atom of self-interest, but a "dividual" entity composed of the relationships that produced it. This relational existence manifests in several ways:

• The body is treated as a social responsibility, crafted and cared for by the community rather than the individual.
• Experience, illness, and even death are shared, with kinsmen symbolically dying or suffering for the transgressions of others.
• Agency and intentionality are transpersonal, meaning one always acts with the other's being as an internal condition of action.

The naturalness of kindness. In a kinship-dominated world, the Western concept of raw, competitive self-interest is viewed not as natural, but as a form of madness, witchcraft, or social death. By ignoring kinship—the one universal principle of human sociality—Western philosophy has built its theories of human nature on the highly unusual behavior of the modern bourgeois male.

6. Christianity and medieval monarchy institutionalized the politics of Original Sin to justify coercive rule.

Through the Middle Ages into modern times, society has regularly been viewed as a necessary and coercive antidote for our inherent egoism.

The theology of control. With the rise of Christian orthodoxy, St. Augustine's doctrine of Original Sin cemented the belief in humanity's innate depravity. Because Adam's sin was transmitted to all mankind, human beings were viewed as naturally wicked creatures who, if left ungoverned, would devour each other like big fish eating little fish.

Political Augustinism. This theological pessimism provided the perfect ideological justification for medieval monarchy and feudal hierarchy. Coercive government was not seen as a natural good, but as a punitive, providential remedy designed by God to keep fallen humanity from destroying itself:

• The king ruled as the "vice-regent of God" or christomimetes (impersonator of Christ) to enforce order.
• The institutionalized violence of the state—the judge's death penalty, the executioner's hook—was deemed necessary to keep the wicked in check.
• Universal fear of the sovereign was the only force capable of securing a fragile earthly peace.

The latent contradiction. Even within this rigid hierarchical system, the memory of Eden preserved a radical, egalitarian counter-narrative. Since God originally created humans free and equal, medieval thinkers acknowledged that private property, slavery, and monarchy were artificial conventions (nomoi) rather than natural laws, leaving the door open for future republican rebellions.

7. The American Founders engineered a republic based on the pessimistic assumption that all men are knaves.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.... It may be a reflection of human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.

The constitutional design. The architects of the American republic were deeply read in classical history and Calvinist theology, leading them to a profoundly pessimistic view of human nature. They viewed the human being as an atom of self-interest, driven by the twin passions of ambition and avarice—the love of power and the love of money.

Counterbalancing passions. Rather than trying to make citizens virtuous, the Founders accepted human selfishness as an immutable fact of nature and designed a government of counterbalancing powers to neutralize its destructive effects:

• They pitted interest against interest, passion against passion, and power against power.
• They established a system of checks and balances among the branches of government to prevent any single faction from seizing total control.
• They advocated for a large, diverse republic where a multitude of competing factions would keep each other in check.

The republican paradox. This design created a profound paradox: a commonwealth built entirely on the rock of self-love. To sustain this system of organized selfishness, the Founders eventually had to rely on the unifying passions of nationalism and patriotism, effectively turning the nation itself into a secular form of kinship to bind the hearts of its citizens.

8. Modern capitalism morally recuperated self-interest, transforming a deadly sin into the definition of freedom.

The individual's singular attention to his own good turned out to be the basis of society rather than its nemesis-as well as the necessary condition of the greatest wealth of nations.

The great inversion. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western thought underwent a radical moral revolution: the transformation of self-interest from a destructive sin into a supreme social virtue. Thinkers of the "selfish system" argued that human greed and material need, rather than causing anarchy, were the very forces that brought people together into society.

The Invisible Hand. This moral recuperation culminated in the economic theories of Adam Smith and the French materialists, who argued that the public good is best served when individuals pursue their own private interests:

• Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees famously argued that "private vices" produce "public benefits."
• The division of labor and market exchange turned mutual greed into a system of peaceful, self-regulating interdependence.
• The "Invisible Hand" of the market replaced the coercive hand of the sovereign as the ultimate organizer of social order.

The neo-liberal consensus. Today, this economic mythology has become our dominant native folklore, conflating possessive individualism with basic human freedom. What St. Augustine once lamented as a tragic spiritual slavery—man's endless subservience to his bodily desires—is now celebrated as the bedrock of democratic liberty and rational choice.

9. Non-Western cultures view the cosmos as a network of social relations where animals possess human nature.

...Amerindian thought likewise holds that having been human, animals must still be human, albeit in a non-evident way:

An animistic universe. In stark contrast to the Western dualism of a soulless, objective "nature" opposed to a human "culture," many non-Western peoples live in a fully socialized cosmos. For these societies, plants, animals, rivers, and celestial bodies are not inert objects, but other-than-human persons endowed with souls, consciousness, and intentionality.

Perspectivism and hunting. This ontology, particularly visible in Amerindian and Siberian cultures, reverses the Western hierarchy of nature and culture:

• Animals are believed to possess a human nature under their superficial skins, living in their own societies with chiefs, houses, and rituals.
• Hunting is practiced not as a technical exploitation of resources, but as a sensitive, interpersonal dialogue and courtship with animal persons.
• Through "perspectivism," different species are understood to perceive the world through their own bodily lenses, though they all share the same underlying cultural concepts.

Humanity as the universal. In this worldview, humanity is the original, universal state of being from which all natural forms were subsequently differentiated. While the West believes we are animals at bottom who must be civilized by culture, these cultures believe that animals are humans at bottom who merely wear different natural clothes, rendering our "natural" animal instincts a highly localized illusion.

10. Evolutionary biology proves that culture is the true, primary nature of the human species.

Yet in anthropological fact, nature and body are the ground of the human condition for us; for them, it is culture and mind.

The evolutionary timeline. The Western belief that we are biological beasts first and cultural beings second is flatly contradicted by the paleontological record. Archaeological evidence shows that simple cultural practices and symbolic capacities existed in the hominid line for millions of years before the biological emergence of Homo sapiens.

Cultural selection. Because culture is vastly older than our species, the human brain and body evolved under the continuous pressure of cultural selection:

• We were biologically designed, body and soul, specifically for a cultural existence.
• The evolution of our large, social brains required the systematic deprogramming of rigid genetic instincts.
• Our biological imperatives (like sex, hunger, and aggression) are highly plastic, requiring symbolic systems to give them form and direction.

The ultimate realization. Human nature is not a fixed, pre-social biological entity, but an open-ended capacity to realize ourselves through specific cultural traditions. As Clifford Geertz observed, we are born with the equipment to live a thousand different lives, but we only live one; culture is not a fragile mask over our animal nature, but the very condition of our biological survival.

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