ARP Audio

Alexis Mordecai
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Listen to my audio retellings of my Renaissance Letters on Substack, which you should definitely read. You should definitely subscribe! americanrenaissanceproject.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 18 APR

    Letter 11: Apes of Wrath

    This is the Sixth and Final Renaissance Letter of Series 2: Planet of the Apes: (2-6: 11). Feel free to read in any order. If you want to read sequentially or want to peer at the Table of Contents: Click here. NOTE: Letter 11 was originally published in two parts; I have collated them into a single seamless piece here, and this will be the post listed in the table of contents. Warning—this article is 6,500 words, so if you would rather read this in manageable chunks, click below. Letter11a—Reign of GrainLetter 11b—Polaris Just like both posts obviously! Feel free to challenge or ask for opinions in the comment section. Letter 11: Apes of Wrath Originally Drafted: January 2026-April 2026Originally Published Letter 11a: 04/09/26 Letter 11b: 04/15/26 Complete: 04/18/26Last Updated: 04/18/26 What's Right? You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” —George Taylor (Charlton Heston), Planet of the Apes Enrico Fermi was a 20th-century Italian-American physicist who helped pioneer modern nuclear physics and worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear bomb. Five years after the Trinity Test, in 1950, Fermi returned to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and while chatting casually with colleagues over lunch, the conversation drifted to UFOs and the possibility of alien life. Considering the vastness and age of the universe, the number of galaxies and stars, life should be pretty common. After all, life is just chemistry and physics. If intelligent life is even moderately possible, and if a technological civilization can spread from star to star, then over millions of years, the galaxy should be teeming with life, full of at least detectable signs of it. We should see probes, radio chatter, megastructures, or at least … something—anything?! But…all we get is silence. This led Fermi to cut through his fellow physicists’ speculation with a blunt question: “So… where is everybody?” That disconnect between the mathematical probability of alien life and what we actually see has come to be called the Fermi Paradox, and it is a question we have grappled with ever since. One theory for why we don’t see alien life is known as the “Great Filter.” It proposes that somewhere between dead matter turning into life and a civilization becoming advanced enough to spread through the galaxy, there’s at least one brutally hard step that almost nobody makes it past, which is why the universe looks so quiet. It was proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in an essay he wrote in the late 1990s (“The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?”). Hanson posed it as a question, and then argued that the odds hinge on where the “hard step” is. If the toughest barrier is cellular (abiogenesis, complex cells, multicellularity, etc.), then we might be “almost past it”; if those steps are relatively common, then the filter is more likely ahead of us (self-destruction). Personally, I say, why not multiple great filters? I believe the jump from unicellular to multicellular life is one filter, and the capacity to understand and manage a species’ power is another. We passed the first one, but from 5:29 a.m on July 16, 1945, in the middle of the New Mexico Desert, with Fermi present, we reached the second one. And we were not ready. Nuclear weapons have given us the power of the gods for a species that is still trying to understand the implications of having the power of man. To be fair, we have done well avoiding nuclear apocalypse, outside of that one close call in 1962 over Cuba. Oh, and that one time in 1969 when Nixon was drunk and ordered the U.S. to nuke the DPRK in retaliation for a U.S. plane shot down over North Korea. Then there was that time in 1973 when Israel panicked and almost used them in the Yom Kippur War. That time in 1983 when NATO did a military exercise, and the Soviets nearly used them. And that is just the intentional close calls. This does not even get into the whoopsy-daisies, like that time in 1961 when a B-52 bomber carrying two 3-to-4-megaton nuclear bombs broke up midair near Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping the nukes in the process, where, I shit you not, only a single switch prevented Goldsboro from becoming a crater. And it just goes on and on and on. I could give you fifteen more examples. Author’s Note: For that 1969 incident with the DPRK, it was Henry Kissinger, THE Henry Kissinger, who got Nixon to back off on that. Not only was this basically the only positive contribution of his lifetime, but how assured does that make you feel, knowing the only thing between you and nuclear winter is HENRY KISSINGER? I consider all of this to be suboptimal. The irony, of course, is that this type of shit was what we were trying to avoid when we first organized into societies. We didn’t create them for fun! It gradually emerged as the best way to avoid the constant threat of death and extinction. (…Oops.) So…what happened here? Well, that takes us back to that exponential growth of Letter 7. In fact, we pick up where we that left off—the Agricultural Revolution. If you want to check that out (after reading this), click here: Part 1: The Great Reign of Grain Before agriculture, many humans lived in small, relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Leadership tended to be informal and temporary, grounded in skill and trust rather than durable authority. Anthropologists call these ‘band societies,’ where wealth and status rarely hardened into fixed classes. Many groups also practiced something like ‘reverse dominance’: collectively ridiculing, resisting, and sometimes ostracizing would-be strongmen to prevent them from consolidating power. In that sense, the pre-agricultural social world came with a kind of built-in freedom. So why would we give up such a free, decentralized system for something more restrictive? Let’s first take a look at our biological “gamer stats.” Strengths: We are big monkeys with big brains and high cognition. We are capable of coordinating and organizing. Unlike the other apes, we walk exclusively on two legs, and we can throw stuff at range and on target. We also sweat as a means of thermoregulation, which is absolutely elite. It gives us a massive endurance advantage. Drawbacks: We have to eat a shit-ton of calories. We can’t be like a crocodile, surfacing to snatch a meal every two weeks—we have to eat constantly. That means leaving the relative safety of the cave or dwelling to hunt and forage so we can fuel the industrial engine that is our brains and bodies. While we are skilled at both, walking the tightrope is a challenge. We are physically weak for animals of our size, and no amount of chicken, broccoli, or creatine can save you from that. That makes us more susceptible to injury, and because of how our bodies are built, it is hard to compensate for serious injuries on our own. Even something as simple as breaking your thumb can critically compromise your ability to hunt or defend yourself from being hunted. But because we have massive noggins, we can actually address such problems. Never underestimate the power of friendship. A lone person can hunt, gather, and survive for a while, but they cannot reliably absorb bad luck: injury, illness, drought, a failed season, or a tiger. The moment humans learned to cooperate at scale, they discovered a way to make randomness less lethal. By living together, sharing food, pooling labor, caring for the injured, and passing knowledge on, groups could stabilize the lower layers of life long enough to plan beyond tomorrow. However, because we are a live version of Pac-Man, we still have to keep eating, and since we are all living together, we are also all fucking each other and having kids. Human children are, from a survival perspective, useless. They are a one-way funnel of resources. They cannot hunt, they cannot forage, they cannot defend—unless the defense is sacrificing the child to whatever is chasing you—and, as any parent can attest, you have to watch them 24/7 because it almost feels like they are trying to kill themselves. As the number of these groups and children grew, the demand for resources increased, and the nomadic lifestyle became increasingly untenable. But what if, instead of eating the seeds we gathered while foraging, we collected them and planted the best ones? Now we do not have to move. Now we can plant a seed and, to some extent, make the plant grow where we want it to. Now you have agriculture. Agriculture creates a surplus that can be stored, enabling permanent settlement and specialization. Once people can stay put and coordinate, you get some people farming, some building, some defending, and some organizing. Now, as you probably know if you’ve ever had siblings or lived in a dorm, living in a shared space brings some… complications. People want different things, someone is salty, people feel slighted, and so on. To make sure we do not ruin the good thing we have going, people accept a trade: we give up some freedom to do whatever we want in exchange for the protections and benefits of shared life. You agree not to harm me, I agree not to harm you, and we both agree to the mechanisms that make that bargain real. Now we have a social contract. But a contract is not self-executing. Making it real requires coordination, and coordination requires decisions. Who farms the land (labor)? Who controls the land and owns the surplus (property)? Who sets prices (markets)? We need a shared set of standards so this whole arrangement can work. However, since we are no longer a small band but a collective working in tandem, we cannot rely as easily on a simple custom or a wise sage. If two people want the same chicken, one to eat and the other for eggs, well, we cannot exactly share. But we also do not want people handling the problem by killing each other, which kind of defeats the whole point of living together. So

    48 min

  2. 15 APR ·  BONUS

    Letter 11b: Apes of Wrath—Polaris

    This is Part 2 of the Sixth and Final Renaissance Letter of Series 2: Planet of the Apes: (2-6: 11). Feel free to read in any order. If you want to read sequentially or want to peer at the Table of Contents: Click here. Give a like ❤️.Subscribe ✅Share 📣Restack 🔁Comment. 🗣️ This is the second part of a two-part letter. To check out Part 1: Click Here Part 2: A North Star/SDN10 A common theme in this series is our relationship to our chimpanzee and bonobo cousins. As a reminder, chimps tend to live in environments where food is scarcer, competition is fiercer, and aggression is a workable survival strategy. Bonobos, with richer and more stable resources, can more often afford social bargaining, de-escalation, and cooperation. Being related equally to both, where do humans lean? It depends on the conditions, doesn’t it? We are in constant tension with opposing biological pulls, so the environment tends to be the deciding factor, as it often is in biology. When we think resources are running out, the mind narrows, and instinct takes the wheel: more suspicion, more territorial behavior, a greater appetite for force, and a greater willingness to accept “necessary” cruelty. When resources feel stable, we can afford diplomacy, patience, bargaining, and empathy. Author’s Note: Notice how this grafts onto reactionary and progressive ideologies. Reactionary politics tends to assume chimp conditions: scarcity, threat, zero-sum competition, and the need for discipline, hierarchy, boundaries, and force to keep order. It leans on rhetoric about being exterminated, overtaken, and replaced. It even ties back into sex, unspoken fears about cuckoldry, reproduction rates, and who gets to “carry the future.” Progressive ideologies tend to lean more into the bonobo side: diplomacy, freedom, and peace. That often invites ire in a world that feels, and is by design, very cutthroat. Lobster Boy (Jordan Peterson… remember when this was about him—no? Check it out after.) was not wrong because he appealed to biology as a plane of understanding. He is wrong because he forgot, or intentionally excluded, that a great deal of biological behavior is dependent on environmental conditions. For once, and only once, we will appropriately incorporate Darwin into a political discussion. The whole “survival of the fittest” thing is the one best suited to the environment, not the “strongest”. Survival goes to those who adapt, not those who dominate. Environment shapes behavior, and humanity has the special ability to shape that environment. It is kind of our thing, for better or worse. Over the last thousand years, we have built an environment made for domination and conquest. While diplomacy is usually cheaper than brute force in the long run, our perspective and long-term focus do not usually extend beyond the length of a human lifetime. And to be fair, both strategies proved relatively effective for humans until the turn of the twentieth century. Then the two world wars happened, a lot of people died, we built weapons that could level cities, and then spent the next fifty years making them stronger and more numerous. Perhaps ironically, in our pursuit of domination, we unknowingly turned everything on its head, rendering that avenue incapable of supporting the species' future prosperity. We changed the environmental conditions on this planet—and now we must adapt. The stakes of the game have changed, and you can see it everywhere. Aggression as a means of achieving political ends is diminishing in value with each passing day. Hey, how is that Iran War going, btw? The problem is that, in their failure and incompetence, leaders will slowly lose control of their own situations and fall back on what they understand: conquest and destruction. But now that destruction implicates the entire species. Now there is a big red button in the middle of a room, and if anyone presses it, the room explodes and kills everyone. That “feels” like enough incentive, but that assumes people value life over winning. But what happens when someone realizes they cannot win, and the goal becomes making sure no one else wins either? When a leader who gambles on aggression loses and faces personal or political ruin, they may decide they have nothing left to lose and, in one final act of nihilism, say fuck it and launch nukes at their enemy, or simply burn the house down with them. So now we are playing a game of keep-away from the person who really wants to press the button, while also trying not to press it ourselves, because it does not take much pressure. At the same time, you cannot de-escalate by giving in to demands just to avoid pressing the button. That only makes every player more likely to threaten it whenever they want something, which in turn makes it more likely that someone eventually presses it. “Give me X, Y, or Z, or I will turn the world into a parking lot.” This is not a tenable long-term solution. Even if there is only a 5% chance of the worst happening, the more situations we create, the more we keep flipping the coin; the greater the chance that one of those flips lands on tails. And all it takes is one unlucky flip, and then we are f****d. I do not think we will go “extinct,” but we will set ourselves back a millennium. This is not an inevitable but like a current, we are slowly drifting towards this reality. Luckily, diplomacy and cooperation are the conditions on which we built society in the first place. It is how it started, and we have now come full circle. A society’s ethos shapes its incentives and institutions, and those institutions shape human behavior in return. Humanistic values tend to foster humanistic behavior, which in turn produces humanistic outcomes. Punitive values encourage punitive behavior and produce punitive outcomes. I think society is best understood, and functions best, when it tries to manufacture bonobo-like diplomacy to limit chimp-like aggression. To get bonobo-like diplomacy, you need bonobo-like conditions. That means conditions that are less environmentally strenuous, more resource-rich, and where needs are easier to meet. Bonobos can get by with some shelter and a cornucopia of fruit. Humans need a little more. From Maslow, we learned that people require physiological needs like food, water, and air, along with safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Yet that sense of purpose is sharpened by Self-Determination Theory’s three core “nutrients”: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And what does society get in return? I think it gets what Maslow later described as his “bonus” sixth layer: self-transcendence. Beyond self-actualization, people seek meaning outside themselves through service, unity, spirituality, or devotion to a higher cause. People who feel invested in and supported are statistically more likely to support others and feel worthy of support. This relationship is what makes such a society possible and sustainable. It is the return on investment that keeps the relationship reciprocal rather than one-sided. So what would a society built around human needs look like? The more the social contract demands of people, the more it owes them. More rules mean more restraint, more compliance, and more obligation. In return, society owes protection, stability, fairness, and real opportunity. This is the basis for the SDN10, or the “Societal Charter,” of Social Democratic Nationalism. It’s not a policy platform so much as a skeletal outline of what we want society to accomplish and intend to build. The Societal Charter/SDN10 Simply put, to create a functional, cohesive, and free society, its institutions must: * Guarantee the 4 securities, * Protect the 3 freedoms, * Build the 2 capacities * Serve the 1 mandate. Now let’s go through it: first in list form, and then with slightly more explanation in outline-style sub-notes. In Short I. Guarantee the Four Securities * Personal Security— Protection from violence * Economic Security— Protection from desperation * Institutional Security— Protection from oppression * Political Security— Protection from repression II. Protect the Three Freedoms * Individual Freedom — The freedom of autonomy * Public Freedom — The freedom of expression * Practical Freedom — The freedom of practice III. Cultivate the Two Capacities * Agency— the capacity to think and act independently * Community—the capacity to think and act collaboratively IV. Serve the One Mandate To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an interdependent society through democratic institutions with distributed power that serve all its people. Slightly Expanded To create a functional, cohesive, and free society, that society and its institutions must: I. Guarantee the Four Securities * Personal Security — Protection from violence * Protection from physical violence by individuals AND the state. * This is the bare minimum for which society was created. If you cannot do this, you might as well not even pay taxes. * Economic Security — Protection from desperation * Protection from economic insecurity. This must include publicly provided access to the bare necessities required to function in a modern society with any real degree of capacity. This includes the Core 5: * Nutritional food * Clean water * Stable shelter * Education * Unconditioned health treatment. * Institutional Security — Protection from oppression * Protection within and from legal institutions: rule of law, due process, equal protection, rehabilitation, and defined civil liberties. * Because power becomes most dangerous when it is institutionalized. A free society must ensure that its legal institutions do not merely maintain order, but are themselves bound by law, reciprocity, and human dignity. * Once institutions are seen as self-serving, captured, or beholden to those who run them,

    31 min

  3. 9 APR ·  BONUS

    Letter 11a: Apes of Wrath—The Reign of Grain

    This is Part 1 of the Sixth and Final Renaissance Letter of Series 2: Planet of the Apes: (2-6: 11). Feel free to read in any order. If you want to read sequentially or want to peer at the Table of Contents: Click here. Letter 11 is split into two posts: This is Part 1. Give a like ❤️.Subscribe ✅Share 📣Restack 🔁Comment. 🗣️ Letter 11: Apes of Wrath Originally Drafted: January 2026-April 2026Originally Published: 04/09/26Last Updated: 04/14/26 What's Right? You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” —George Taylor (Charlton Heston), Planet of the Apes Enrico Fermi was a 20th-century Italian-American physicist who helped pioneer modern nuclear physics and worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear bomb. Five years after the Trinity Test, in 1950, Fermi returned to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and while chatting casually with colleagues over lunch, the conversation drifted to UFOs and the possibility of alien life. Considering the vastness and age of the universe, the number of galaxies and stars, life should be pretty common. After all, life is just chemistry and physics. If intelligent life is even moderately possible, and if a technological civilization can spread from star to star, then over millions of years, the galaxy should be teeming with life, full of at least detectable signs. We should see probes, radio chatter, megastructures, or at least … something—anything?! But…all we get is silence. This led Fermi to cut through his fellow physicists’ speculation with a blunt question: “So… where is everybody?” That disconnect between the mathematical probability of alien life and what we actually see has come to be called the Fermi Paradox, and it is a question we have grappled with ever since. One theory for why we don’t see alien life is known as the “Great Filter.” It proposes that somewhere between dead matter turning into life and a civilization becoming advanced enough to spread through the galaxy, there’s at least one brutally hard step that almost nobody makes it past, which is why the universe looks so quiet. It was proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in an essay he wrote in the late 1990s (“The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?”). Hanson posed it as a question, and then argued that the odds hinge on where the “hard step” is. If the toughest barrier is cellular (abiogenesis, complex cells, multicellularity, etc.), then we might be “almost past it”; if those steps are relatively common, then the filter is more likely ahead of us (self-destruction). Personally, I say, why not multiple great filters? I believe the jump from unicellular to multicellular life is one filter, and the capacity to understand and manage a species’ power is another. We passed the first one, but from 5:29 a.m on July 16, 1945, in the middle of the New Mexico Desert, with Fermi present, we reached the second one. And we were not ready. Nuclear weapons have given us the power of the gods for a species that is still trying to understand the implications of having the power of man. To be fair, we have done well avoiding nuclear apocalypse, outside of that one close call in 1962 over Cuba. Oh, and that one time in 1969 when Nixon was drunk and ordered the U.S. to nuke the DPRK in retaliation for a U.S. plane shot down over North Korea. Then there was that time in 1973 when Israel panicked and almost used them in the Yom Kippur War. That time in 1983 when NATO did a military exercise, and the Soviets nearly used them. And that is just the intentional close calls. This does not even get into the whoopsy-daisies, like that time in 1961 when a B-52 bomber carrying two 3-to-4-megaton nuclear bombs broke up midair near Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping the nukes in the process, where, I shit you not, only a single switch prevented Goldsboro from becoming a crater. And it just goes on and on and on. I could give you fifteen more examples. Author’s Note: For that 1969 incident with the DPRK, it was Henry Kissinger, THE Henry Kissinger, who got Nixon to back off on that. Not only was this basically the only positive contribution of his lifetime, but how assured does that make you feel, knowing the only thing between you and nuclear winter is HENRY KISSINGER? I consider all of this to be suboptimal. The irony, of course, is that this type of shit was what we were trying to avoid when we first organized into societies. We didn’t create them for fun! It gradually emerged as the best way to avoid the constant threat of death and extinction. (…Oops.) So…what happened here? Well, that takes us back to that exponential growth of Letter 7. In fact, we pick up where we that left off—the Agricultural Revolution. If you want to check that out (after reading this), click here: The American Renaissance Project is built (mostly, for now) on the volunteer work of one person. While I am an unbreakable force of human will and would be writing anyway, these letters do take time and energy to make. While I do not want money, I would really appreciate it if you could: * Give a like ❤️. * Subscribe ✅ * Recommend 👍 * Share 📣 * Restack 🔁 * Comment. 🗣️ Part 1: The Great Reign of Grain Before agriculture, many humans lived in small, relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Leadership tended to be informal and temporary, grounded in skill and trust rather than durable authority. Anthropologists call these ‘band societies,’ where wealth and status rarely hardened into fixed classes. Many groups also practiced something like ‘reverse dominance’: collectively ridiculing, resisting, and sometimes ostracizing would-be strongmen to prevent them from consolidating power. In that sense, the pre-agricultural social world came with a kind of built-in freedom. So why would we give up such a free, decentralized system for something more restrictive? Let’s first take a look at our biological “gamer stats.” Strengths: We are big monkeys with big brains and high cognition. We are capable of coordinating and organizing. Unlike the other apes, we walk exclusively on two legs, and we can throw stuff at range and on target. We also sweat as a mode of thermal regulation, which is absolutely elite. It gives us a massive endurance advantage. Drawbacks: We have to eat a shit-ton of calories. We can’t be like a crocodile, surfacing to snatch a meal every two weeks—we have to eat constantly. That means leaving the relative safety of the cave or dwelling to hunt and forage so we can fuel the industrial engine that is our brains and bodies. While we are skilled at both, it is a tightrope to walk. We are physically weak for animals of our size, and no amount of chicken, broccoli, or creatine can save you from that. That makes us more susceptible to injury, and because of how our bodies are built, it is hard to compensate for serious injuries on our own. Even something as simple as breaking your thumb can critically compromise your ability to hunt or defend yourself from being hunted. But because we have massive noggins, we can actually address such problems. Never underestimate the power of friendship. A lone person can hunt, gather, and survive for a while, but they cannot reliably absorb bad luck: injury, illness, drought, a failed season, or a tiger. The moment humans learned to cooperate at scale, they discovered a way to make randomness less lethal. By living together, sharing food, pooling labor, caring for the injured, and passing knowledge on, groups could stabilize the lower layers of life long enough to plan beyond tomorrow. However, because we are a live version of Pac-Man, we still have to keep eating, and since we are all living together, we are also all fucking each other and having kids. Human children are, from a survival perspective, useless. They are a one-way funnel of resources. They cannot hunt, they cannot forage, they cannot defend—unless the defense is sacrificing the child to whatever is chasing you—and, as any parent can attest, you have to watch them 24/7 because it almost feels like they are trying to kill themselves. As the number of these groups and children grew, the demand for resources increased, and the nomadic lifestyle became increasingly untenable. But what if, instead of eating the seeds we gathered while foraging, we collected them and planted the best ones? Now we do not have to move. Now we can plant a seed and, to some extent, make the plant grow where we want it to. Now you have agriculture. Agriculture creates a surplus that can be stored, enabling permanent settlement and specialization. Once people can stay put and coordinate, you get some people farming, some building, some defending, and some organizing. Now, as you probably know if you’ve ever had siblings or lived in a dorm, living in a shared space brings some… complications. People want different things, someone is salty, people feel slighted, and so on. To make sure we do not ruin the good thing we have going, people accept a trade: we give up some freedom to do whatever we want in exchange for the protections and benefits of shared life. You agree not to harm me, I agree not to harm you, and we both agree to the mechanisms that make that bargain real. Now we have a social contract. But a contract is not self-executing. Making it real requires coordination, and coordination requires decisions. Who farms the land (labor)? Who controls the land and owns the surplus (property)? Who sets prices (markets)? We need a shared set of standards so this whole arrangement can work. However, since we are no longer a small band but a collective working in tandem, we cannot rely as easily on a simple custom or a wise sage. If two people want the same chicken, one to eat and the other for eggs, well, we cannot exactly share. But we also do not want people handling the problem by killing each other, which kind o

    18 min
  4. Letter 10: A Hierarchy of Needs—Audio Version

    26 FEB

    Letter 10: A Hierarchy of Needs—Audio Version

    Letter 10 Audio Reading This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit americanrenaissanceproject.substack.com

    29 min
  5. Letter 9: Atlas Wept—Audio Version

    26 FEB

    Letter 9: Atlas Wept—Audio Version

    This is Letter 9: Reading This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit americanrenaissanceproject.substack.com

    31 min

  6. 24 FEB

    Letter 10: A Hierarchy of Needs

    This is the Fifth Renaissance Letter of Series 2: Planet of the Apes: (2-5: 10). Feel free to read in any order. If you want to read sequentially or want to peer at the Table of Contents: Click here. Give a like ❤️.Subscribe ✅Share 📣Restack 🔁Comment. 🗣️ Letter 10: A Hierarchy of Needs Originally Drafted: October 2025-February 2026Originally Published: 02/24/26Last Updated: 02/24/26 What’s Down? Remember the famous Snickers ad: You are not you when you are hungry! My favorite of these ads is the one with Willem Dafoe, playing a cranky Marilyn Monroe. In part because he nails it, and, in part, it is a role that you can only imagine Dafoe taking (and taking with glee). Personally, I become more of an a*****e when I’m hungry and tired. For me… I didn’t even know that was possible. Like, that’s amazing, but perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. You could be talking about Palestine, the Holocaust, smallpox, the collapse of America—if I haven’t eaten, I couldn’t give less of a shit. I’m thinking about how the guy’s cheeseburger at the table next to me looks fucking delicious. Fuck them kids! Long live the empire! Now…does this make me a bad person or an uncaring neanderthal? But there is some evolutionary basis here that I will happily pass off the blame to. Part 1: A Hierarchy I Can Get Behind! Eating and sleeping are among the “non-negotiables” of life, and trying to negotiate with a non-negotiable leads to some snags, both in the area of being alive and in your potential to use your brain. The Snickers ad ain’t wrong. (Although giving them a Snickers will likely kill them faster.) When you are fed and have slept, when the baseline is handled, you get a minute to think. Your mind stops screaming about immediate survival and starts doing what it was built to do: thinking, planning, reflecting, and imagining. That is when you can (best) ask questions, do some introspection, and understand your relationship to others and the world. Authors Note: I am going to add author’s notes from time to time to when I want to add something that may be relevant or irrelevant. You can skip over them if you want as these are added “in post”. Anyway back to the regularly scheduled programing! You can say that your body has an order of operations. This phenomenon has been extensively studied, most notably by Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). Maslow was an American psychologist often linked to humanistic psychology. In 1943, he published “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in which he described human needs as tending to organize into rough layers or levels. I’m sorry, are you subscribed? If not, let’s change that—we are building something special around here! Sometimes I send free subscriber-only perks! I don’t want your money, only your subscription! Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has 5 of these layers, with basic needs at the foundation and more existential needs at the “top.” * Physiological: The essential biological requirements, such as air, food, and sleep, that keep the human body alive. * Safety: The desire for a predictable and secure life, including protection from danger, financial stability, and health. * Love/belonging: The emotional need for connection through friendships, intimacy, and being part of a supportive group. * Esteem: The pursuit of self-respect and the desire for status, recognition, and appreciation from the people around you. * Self-actualization: The personal drive to reach your full potential, grow your talents, and find true self-fulfillment. In general, physiological needs (food, sleep, shelter) and safety needs become dominant when they are unmet. You know, when you aren’t thinking about existential questions?—when you are dead from starvation. You can’t do shit then. But when they are met with some reliability, attention, and energy become available for other concerns, such as belonging, esteem, and growth. Author’s Note: It is important to note that Maslow’s hierarchy is not absolute or rigid, nor did Maslow believe it applied in all circumstances. You can be homeless and still care about growth, for example, but, in general, it’s a decent way to show how needs lay out in tiers.” The model frames human fulfillment as a progressive satisfaction of deficits followed by growth toward potential. Maslow distinguished “deficiency needs” (the first four levels, which stem from lacking something – we seek food, security, love, or esteem when they are deficient) from “growth needs” (self-actualization, and something he would later call self-transcendence), which arises not from absence but from a positive desire to grow. This distinction highlights that truly fulfilling one’s life is not just about alleviating deficiencies but about pursuing personal development and self-expression. Philosophers and scientists have long distinguished needs from mere wants or preferences – needs are things that are “necessary, indispensable, or inescapable” for fulfillment. Fulfillment is a multifaceted phenomenon incorporating psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Psychologically, we know people require health and security, belonging and love, esteem and achievement, autonomy, competence, and meaning to truly flourish. Philosophically, this is echoed in concepts such as the pursuit of purpose and the enjoyment of fundamental capabilities. Sociologically, it’s clear that environment matters: a nurturing community and stable conditions can dramatically expand an individual’s ability to meet these needs, whereas adverse social conditions can thwart even the most determined person. Even if someone is safe, comfortable, and surrounded by others, they may feel unfulfilled if life seems empty or pointless. Recent scholarship reinforces this: “Being able to experience meaningfulness is a fundamental part of having a life worth living.” It is compelling that human beings across cultures share these needs, even if they manifest differently in varied environments. The universal nature of these needs hints at a common human family that spans cultures, continents, and time, where we all share a focus on creating well-being and a sense of life satisfaction. Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, is a modern, research-driven framework for universal human needs. It argues that well-being and growth depend on three basic psychological “nutrients” that must be satisfied across cultures: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is the sense of agency and choice, meaning you feel like the author of your own decisions rather than being controlled by outside forces. Competence is feeling effective and capable, with real opportunities to learn, master skills, and meet challenges. Relatedness is feeling connected, cared for, and included through close relationships and belonging to a community. SDT holds that these needs are essential and universal, and studies show that when they are supported, people report higher well-being, while blocking them undermines motivation and mental health. So, how are we doing as a society at ensuring people’s needs are met? —HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! 😂😂😂😭😭😭 —wait, really?! Part 2: Misery Loves Company So there is this weird country called the United States (of America, I think?) that embodies the ethos that hunger, poverty, and sleepless nights are great promoters of human ambition and progress. So the theory goes, the more people who are desperate, the more they will strive towards bettering themselves. In fact, helping these people is anti-American and is tyranny! This is a fascinating take, for sure, indicative of the fact that we live in a healthy society, set to prosper for centuries. So, leave it to me to criticize such a sound approach, but I’m starting to wonder if there might be some flaws in this philosophy… like maybe society would benefit if more people didn’t have to dedicate their entire lives to survival. What if chronic deprivation shrinks freedom to whatever keeps you alive? What about all the studies showing that people are more productive and contribute more when they have stable work and living conditions? To some extent, I know I am preaching to the choir, but let’s just take a step and look at the consequences broadly. Between 52% and 68% of the US population lives paycheck to paycheck, so over half (AT BEST) of the U.S population is shackled from jump. Take all of these people, and think of all the contributions, ideas, innovations, artistic creations, and flush them down the toilet. Author’s Note: Obviously, obviously, obviously people who live paycheck-to-paycheck can, have, and will create and contribute to society. Challenging economic conditions just makes it much more difficult to have the time and energy to do so. So immediately, the nation is crippled, America has fallen, and cannot get up! The kicker, the coup de grâce, is that we do it for like—no reason. Well, no good reason, obviously, there is always a reason. Their reason is to hoard wealth, obviously. I am not saying anything… BUT— * Is there an incentive for powerful elites to keep life hard, or make it harder on working people, convincing them to accept being squeezed today in the hope of squeezing others tomorrow? * Are there entire careers built around reinforcing this myth: that dominance hierarchies are rooted in nature, stretch back hundreds of millions of years, and appear across virtually all animals? Therefore, to challenge them is to challenge nature! 🦞🦞🦞 * Are scarcity and exhaustion tools to prevent solidarity, perhaps among the working class, by keeping them too hungry and weak to look up, but providing enough crumbs to fight each other over? Again, I am not implying anything—…because I will say it explicitly—yeah! What I mean by 'no reason' is that it’s not like

    29 min
  7. Letter 9: Atlas Wept

    19 JAN

    Letter 9: Atlas Wept

    This is the Fourth Renaissance Letter of Series 2: Planet of the Apes: (2-4: 09). Feel free to read in any order. If you want to read sequentially or want to peer at the Table of Contents: Click here. Author’s Note: I made some last-second additions and cuts, and I moved a few sections around. As a result, the citations are currently inaccurate, especially the ones marked “Ibid.,” which just means “same as the previous citation.” In the coming weeks, I will return and correct them to make sure everything matches. The text itself, however, is final. Still need to do this as of 02/24/26! Warning: I am going to spoil a video game called BioShock, a 2007 first-person shooter released by 2K Games. You have been warned. Hey, it’s Alexis! I thought for this letter I would have a voiceover, considering the length of these letters is getting to be memoir length. I hope you enjoy. This was recorded January 19. Letter 9: Atlas Wept Originally Drafted: October 2025-January 2026Originally Published: 01/19/26Last Updated: 01/19/26 What’s Up, Have you ever played BioShock? The original one—not BioShock: Infinite? … I will assume not. It is a horror first-person shooter, and an excellent game choice if you think you are sleeping a little too well at night. You crash somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, swim to a lighthouse, and take an elevator that descends into the depths to reveal Rapture, an underwater city built by industrialist Andrew Ryan. Andrew Ryan is a zealot for free-market capitalism. He fled Soviet Russia and became a staunch opponent of collectivism. After WWII, he went on to create a new Eden, one where government, religion, and morality could not reach. A place where the strong could rise, unrestrained by the weak. His slogan was simple: “No gods or kings. Only man.” By the time you arrive, Rapture is in ruins. All that remains is an Art Deco-inspired dystopia consumed by madness. Its people have torn themselves apart chasing a gene-rewriting drug and the illusion of unlimited power. You are guided by a man on the radio named Atlas. He guides you to take out a mentally deteriorating Ryan before it’s too late. That has nothing to do with anything. I just wanted to share a fun game from my youth. Part 1: Ayn Can’t Anyway, Ayn Rand was an atheist writer and philosopher. She grew up in Russia, saw the Bolsheviks nationalize her father’s business, and never forgave collectivism for it. She carried that anger into a whole worldview: history, she said, is a struggle between creators and parasites. Civilization moves forward when brilliant minds are allowed to create for their own profit. It collapses when society demands that those creators sacrifice themselves for the collective. She called her system Objectivism—a philosophy that emphasizes the primacy of reason, individual achievement, and self-interest as moral imperatives. In her moral framework, altruism is not a virtue; it is a moral trap. Dependence is not a neutral fact of life; it is a kind of spiritual death. The ideal human was a lone genius: a productive, rational, self-sufficient man of the mind. Her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, imagined what would happen if those minds went like, “nah” and dipped. ✌️😚✌️ The plot follows industrialists who grow tired of carrying an ungrateful world on their backs. They retreat to a hidden capitalist enclave and let the rest of civilization collapse. Rand saw this as prophecy. The world survives, she argued, only so long as its geniuses choose to carry it. Every invention comes from a lone visionary. There is no such thing as a collective brain. No such thing as shared insight. Only the originators and the copycats. Now, Ms. Rand is no longer with us, which is unfortunate because she will never be able to answer a simple question I have: What the fuck are you talking about? What Earth dimension are you from? … I guess that’s two questions. Some caveats. First, I am not an economist, and I have no intention of ever being one. This is not a breakdown of how markets, shares, risk models, or liquidity work. Luckily, there are enough economists to populate a medium-sized city who have already dismantled libertarianism, including Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Mariana Mazzucato, and Thomas Piketty. And yes, there is even friendly fire: libertarian-leaning economists who have gone after Rand’s Objectivism too, including Bryan Caplan and Murray N. Rothbard. There is a distinction between Rand’s Objectivism and modern libertarianism. Rand framed her philosophy as moral: the pursuit of profit wasn’t just practical, it was good. Libertarians tend to be more agnostic, arguing that markets and minimal government simply work better. Luckily for us, my critique has nothing to do with morality and centers on the fact that both ideologies are based on premises of humanity that are loads of horseradish. Start with invention. Most breakthroughs are not lightning bolts in one person’s skull. They’re the slow result of multiple people, ideas, accidents, and iterations. When conditions are ripe, you often see the same basic discovery pop up in multiple places because the environment is pushing everyone toward the same solution. People then put their minds together to tinker, experiment, and improve upon the previous iteration. So let’s use an example from Letter 7, the invention of soup. Soup was a civilizational game-changer because it turns scraps into calories by boiling them into something usable. No longer did the precious fats just drip into the fire and vanish. It pulls nutrition out of connective tissue and bone and makes the hard-to-use parts suddenly edible and valuable: collagen and gelatin, marrow, minerals, whatever your ancestors could wring out of bad luck. Who figured that out? No, seriously. Who is the genius here, the one who deserves credit, profit, and control over all future bowls of soup? Who is the soup king? Picture a band of prehistoric humans huddled around a fire, stumbling toward boiling by trial and error. Which of these esteemed cavemen is responsible for its creation? * Ooga Booga, who first realized fire could be controlled and carried. * Ooga Aagah, who hunted and brought home a hunk of meat. * Googa Dooga, who threw heated stones into a vessel of water to see what would happen. * Ooga Googa, who tossed in herbs and roots and discovered flavor leaches into water. * Arrooga Boogoo, who tried again with bones and scraps and got something rich enough to matter. Now imagine believing one of them deserves the exclusive “rights” to soup and the authority to define how soup gets made forever. That would be stupid. Right? That’s the entire point of working in groups. Most of modern life exists because collective creativity stacks over time. Not because a hundred thousand geniuses sat down and invented “society,” but because a million small contributions piled up until they became structure. In such conditions, ideas begin to take on a life of their own. Ooga Googa may never have had another smart idea in his life. But because he was there, because he participated, because he contributed one tiny piece to a shared process, he helped push a real creation into being and improve on the previous iteration. That’s what humans do. It’s what sets us apart from every other form of life on this planet. Chimps can make tools too, but a thousand generations later, they’ll still be working with variations of the same ones. We, for better and worse, have intercontinental ballistic missiles. We’re a species with recurring drives: belonging, status, safety, meaning, control. But how those drives express themselves is never fixed. It is shaped by context, culture, incentives, technology, scarcity, and whatever a society rewards or punishes. What are the incentives that Rand’s worldview cultivates? Rand’s perspective leads people to imagine themselves as unappreciated geniuses in a world of parasites. It breeds distrust, arrogance, and contempt for shared responsibility or achievement. Worse, it fosters deception, especially when others have something to gain by your honesty. You don’t want to be the sucker who loses out, do you? Instead of working together to improve, we aim to be the first to capitalize. Instead of trying to innovate, we now focus on replicating behaviors and riding others’ coattails to the top. Notice that the focus and incentive structure have now shifted from the rewards of invention to the rewards of profit—money. Now it’s not about making anything, you are selling something! And in those conditions, success is determined less by who’s actually capable and more by who can convince the most people that they’re capable. This is foreshadowing. Part 2: The Gravity of Reality That’s what makes all the talk about “individual freedom” so slippery, even as Rand and modern-day libertarians worship it. What the fuck is a “productive, rational, self-sufficient man of the mind” in the real world? What does “freedom” mean when most people’s beliefs, tastes, ambitions, and even personalities are shaped by narratives and incentives they didn’t choose, in a world sculpted by generations they never met? Libertarianism smuggles in a fantasy that freedom automatically equals empowerment, an assumption built on pixie dust and wishful thinking. And it assumes something it has no right to assume: that people will treat others’ freedom as sacred in practice, not just in principle. That’s naive on its own, but it becomes genuinely absurd once you add capitalism, because the incentives pull the other way. In competitive markets, the rewarded behavior is not “respect everyone equally.” It’s “win,” and winning often means finding leverage, pushing costs outward, and turning other people’s needs into your advantage. For libertarianism, which treats power as someth

    31 min

  8. 19/10/2025

    Letter 2: Botch-ulism Campfire Edition/Reading

    Subscribe—You know you want to! It’s all gas, no breaks, on the American Renaissance Front: Just like I did with Letter 1, this is an audio retelling/reading of Letter 2: Botch-ulism. If you like this, give this a like and subscribe. Perhaps give the original post a read and a like as well (you can find the audio there to). And for those of you who are already subscribed, or just subscribed—thank you it means more than you know! Letter 8 is in the works. Have a good one, stay hydrated, and give a call to the one person you have been putting off talking to. — AM Share this to one person who you think would be intrigued by the work I’m doing here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit americanrenaissanceproject.substack.com

    13 min
  9. Letter 1: Campfire Story Edition.

    26/09/2025

    Letter 1: Campfire Story Edition.

    I decided to try something new: an audio and video version of my first letter, We Are the Children of the Stars. It’s not a word-for-word reading—it’s more like an oral retelling or podcast, or like I am telling you the story around a campfire, with the letter as a template with some extra thoughts that didn’t make it into the original. Let me know what you think in the comments—do you like this format? Would you like to see (or hear) more of these in the future? Hope you are taking care, —AM Thanks for reading The American Renaissance Project! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit americanrenaissanceproject.substack.com

    11 min
  • 9 Episodes

About

Listen to my audio retellings of my Renaissance Letters on Substack, which you should definitely read. You should definitely subscribe! americanrenaissanceproject.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Alexis Mordecai
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Alexis Mordecai
  • Show Website
    ARP Audio