The foundation for Sortocracy's "State of Nature" is man's primordial morality of sexual selection. What follows is an explanation of that foundation.
The best moral explanations start with the subjective experiences of the moral animal, aka "conscience":
The Irrationality of Fairness
Visualize two wild males together. A third of the same species is in the vicinity. They approach each other. A 2 vs 1 fight breaks out.
Take your time to visualize this and sense your reaction.
Now visualize a situation in which two wild males of the same species approach each other. A 1 vs 1 fight ensues.
Again, take your time... sense your reaction.
Compare your emotional reaction to the two situations. The first produces -- at least in many of us -- a different mixture of emotions than the second. One aspect of that difference is qualitative: We instinctively understand the 1 vs 1 fight but emotively question the 2 vs 1 fight. The emotive question isn't so much "Why does the lone male fight rather than run?", as it is, "Why are these two males united against the one?" In a dispassionate moment of thought, one realizes the most obvious explanation is ruthlessly rational: Because the 2 are more likely to win the fight! With that realization, a second-order question arises: How could evolution favor a mode of dispute processing other than war -- selecting for the formation of the largest, most cohesive army prior to initiation of intraspecies force? Then, a third-order question arises: Why wouldn't nature have, long ago, selected for emotional understanding -- acceptance as "fair" -- the rationality of 2, or more, ganging up on any smaller number, including 1?
The Irrationality of Sex
During, and especially upon, maturation we experience powerful emotions toward the opposite sex. We don't experience powerful instinctive (high time preference) emotions toward reproduction until the reproductive results of sex -- offspring -- obtain. Our immediate, instinctive perception, emotions and actions center on sexual attraction and competition. Although some species retain asexual reproduction as an option, most advanced multicellular species are entirely dependent on sex for reproduction. The facile explanation for sexual attraction, that it is our only route to reproduction, begs the question: Why not clone one's self? This question is reinforced by the rationality of war: The more closely related comrades are, the more evolutionary advantage there is in victory over less-related others. A clone army is the most rational objective of reproduction -- particularly given the fact that nurture can develop variations in phenotype -- form and function -- from the same genotype, providing specialized war making and reproducing castes, as in the eusocial insects.
The Irrationality of Death
Humans don't experience their own prospective death as an immediate emotion, as they do fairness in conflict or attraction in sex. The immediate, death-related emotion they experience is toward physical pain, in conflict, hunger, thirst. For the young adult, the pain of lost sexual love is more immediate than the remote prospect of death. Many risk and lose their lives to it. Nevertheless, we sexual beings are programmed for death more certainly than sexual reproduction. This isn't a "death-drive" in the sense of an emotional sex-drive or sense of fairness -- it is more deeply-ingrained than emotion. It is a ruthlessly physical consequence of evolved senescence. It makes no rational sense for the organism's physical foundation, its genotype, to throw away a reproductively viable vehicle, for the same reason it makes no rational sense to prefer sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction of specialized clone armies.
"We" Have All Been Here Before
From the point of view of rational evolution, cellular life is supremely rational. They reproduce by cloning. When two clone armies of the same species meet, fairness consists of eat or be eaten. The individuals of single celled species don't die of senescence, but divide into two clones -- rejuvenated. The most advanced sexual species dispensed with all of these rational evolutionary advantages. Moreover, in sexual species, there is a memory trace of this sacrifice for the attainment of sexual love -- and it is in every cell of our bodies. Our bodies are vast clone armies that have undergone specialized development so advanced that the most evolved eusocial insect colony looks like a disorganized riot of selfish individualists. We remember this "past life" in every cell of our sexual being: The loving unity of comrades in an eat or be eaten war. So there is another "we" to consider: Each individual sexual being consists of a cellular civilization in which each of its citizens is in asexual loving unity with its clones as "we are this sexual being". Every cell loves being a part of something greater than itself.
Transcendent Life Over Death
This, cellular, level of love between clone comrades is buried like the memory of a past life -- a life that was sacrificed for sexual love. Indeed, the senescence-toward-death of the sexual being is, precisely, that sacrifice of clone comrade love toward a higher, sexual, love. We've been cut off from nature, by the artificial, from Mother Earth herself -- so we must pause and reflect. We have feelings of love for our comrades in arms during war -- even though they aren't really clones except in fictive kinship. This memory of ancient intercellular love is more or less fictive and no more relevant to our sexual love than is memory of a previous life. We are new beings -- sexual love beings toward death. It is hard for us to understand, separated from nature as we are by a long history of primate evolution in which fairness has progressively eroded in gang conflict; and, now, conflict going beyond mere violence to womb wars as the demographic destiny. The warrior caste is overshadowed by the reproductive castes. This is characterized as "The Better Angels of Our Nature" in direct correspondence to a husband's description of his wife as "My Better Half." We have lost sight of the other half of sexual love: Love of Enemies. Other than some simple-minded masochism posing as "JudeoChristianity", what rational sense can the phrase "Love of Enemies" make -- particularly as an aspect of sexual love? We are increasingly told this sexual love of one's enemy is morally expressed as homosexual love. But the visceral emotion experienced when we witness 2 men unite to fight one man -- the evolutionary seed of war and clone comrade love -- corresponds to a visceral emotion, now labeled as the diagnostic category of "homophobia". In reality, "homophobia" is a latent sense of fairness that is suppressed, not "man-love" homosexuality. Love of one's enemy emerges only in sexual selection's 1 vs 1 conflict on fair terms. This aspect of sexual morality is denied civilized men to the point that they are cut off and alienated from the half of their sexual beings: Intrasexual selection. Submission to a fair contest is the closest the sexual being comes to the creative consciousness of evolution. In man, this submission achieves a moral dimension that transcends even female choice of sires, and risk of death in childbirth. The male, in risking death, enjoys no immediate prospect of reproduction, as does the female. In men, this is accorded moral territory:
Honor.
Civilized Man's Moral Horror of Death
For civilized man, deprived of transcendent death, he experiences an immediate, visceral and inchoate loathing of death that -- unlike the abstract notion of one's prospective death -- is moral:
To the extent that life is unfair, in the sense of violating the creative power of sexual love, evolution reverts to the cellular level: "All's fair in comrade clone love and war." This reversion of evolution is destruction of creation. It is dysgenic. This destruction of creation is felt, viscerally, as a moral horror of death in societies deprived of the masculine aspect of sexual love and the creative power of fair evolution. Organized religions throughout history promise eternal life. This, pig-in-a-poke immortality is an ersatz emotional substitute for the transcendent god-like acts of creation embodied in sexual being. Civilization may, ultimately, offer substitutes for death in life extension and transhumanist genetic engineering if not cybernetic uploading of "mind". Civilized man, filled with an inchoate moral horror of death, and it's "irrationality", welcomes these substitutes as would the mortally wounded accept morphine: Out of desperation and alienation. He has forgotten his own heritage, descended from the Creator that transcended death in mortal sacrifice for the creative power of sexual love. But this substitute, pig-in-a poke, immortality is nothing compared to nearly a billion years of sexual selection and its joyful sacrifice of immortality for sexual love.
