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 f**k 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,
