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 fucked. 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, legitimacy evaporates. It is no longer a social contract. A society built on obligations without reciprocity is just oppression. Institutions must provide what people cannot reliably secure on their own.
* Political Security— Protection from repression
* The right and genuine opportunity to participate in, and be represented by, an open democratic government.
* This requires a stable and functional system amid competing factions, with reliable transitions of power.
* It also requires a balance between maintaining workable majority rule and preserving meaningful minority representation.
* To be blunt, shit will always be happening. There will always be some reason to clamp down on opposing factions and limit them. The strength of a political system is measured by its ability to function under pressure without stripping individuals or factions of their rights.
* Political suppression, whether physical, such as cracking down on protesters, or bureaucratic, such as gerrymandering, creating obstacles to voting, making it impossible to run for office, or limiting the powers of an office before an opponent assumes it, is antithetical to this security interest.
* This is very much a means-over-method standard. The will and freedom of the people are not defined by technicalities.
II. Protect the Three Freedoms
* Individual Freedom — The freedom of autonomy
* The freedom of privacy, conscience, faith, and identity, free from surveillance and arbitrary interference.
* “Arbitrary” means restrictions based on anything other than conduct that actively infringes on the rights of others.
* This means you have the right to practice and live by your own norms and values, whether religious or otherwise, but not to govern or conduct yourself in ways that limit the rights of others.
* I do not care if you are straight, gay, trans, bi, catholic, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, or whatever. We want to encourage people to show up as the best version of themselves, and that means the one most authentic to each person.
* The same obviously applies to race if it can be said to “apply.”
* Public Freedom — The freedom of expression
* The freedom of speech, expression, creation, organizing, and dissent around any cause, for any reason.
* I am much closer to a free speech absolutist than not. But again, it cannot be used directly to repress others' public freedom.
* This is one of the few places where I think the current American implementation of the First Amendment is the proper standard.
* Practical Freedom — The freedom of exercise
* This embraces positive freedom, meaning the actual ability or capacity to do something; in other words, the freedom to exercise the other two freedoms.
* Freedom in principle is not the same as freedom in practice. If society makes those freedoms impossible to exercise, then they are not meaningfully free.
* This takes many forms. For examples
* In America, this often takes the form of debt.
* While Americans have a certain degree of formal freedom, if all meaningful ways to exercise it are behind a paywall, you are not free.
* In socialist and communist countries such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Laos, or North Korea, this often takes the form of political oppression.
III. Cultivate the Two Capacities
* Agency— the capacity to think and act independently
* Provide people with the tools, education, skills, and sense of personal identity necessary to function with confidence and competence. This requires a meaningful degree of independence and healthy individualism.
* A person must be able to form an identity apart from the collective. No single identity should rule over others. Healthy individualism is indispensable to collective growth.
* Community—the capacity to think and act collaboratively
* Cultivate the capacity to think and act collaboratively by creating and investing in mutual, nurturing environments that foster reciprocal bonds across races, genders, and identities.
A healthy society does not treat people as isolated units nor cogs in a machine.
* It teaches them how to live with, care for, and build alongside one another. Community is what turns coexistence into solidarity.
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.
* Rewritten to state the implicit explicitly: To secure, to the fullest extent possible, the conditions necessary to create an integrated and interdependent society through pluralistic, democratic, and responsive institutions that serve all its people, with power distributed, transparent, and contestable, so no single entity (office, agency, party, or private actor) can control the conditions of life.
I hope that makes sense. Because it will never be as simple as I just put it for the rest of our lives.
Part 3: Biology of an Ideology
I recognize that when most people say they are going to write a manifesto, which already is not most people, but regardless, they usually do not start by trauma-dumping and then pivot into lessons in biology, psychology, and metaphysics. Usually, you would start with income inequality, capitalism, why white people are superior, stuff like that. But we need to understand the seeds before the trees.
I start with humanity because every ideology begins with a fundamental premise on human nature, and the premise of Social Democratic Nationalism, or New Social Democracy, is that humanity is interdependent. From there, it asks the next question: what would an interdependent society look like? That is the SDN10. Then it asks the most pressing one: from where we are, how do we build it?
There is a biological principle called phylogenetic, or evolutionary, constraint. Evolution can only modify what already exists. Species develop through inherited structures and available pathways; they do not leap straight to their final form. Political development works much the same way. You cannot cut something out completely; you can only transform it from what it is.
To a certain degree, this applies to capitalism, with emphasis on that degree. In case you didn’t know…we live in a capitalist society. Like super-duper capitalist. It extends to every single aspect of our lives. We cannot quarantine it, eliminate its influence, or even pretend there is a way to completely avoid its pull.
To believe capitalism can simply end because we declare it so is to misunderstand the development of human civilization and the way people and institutions actually work. You cannot simply create something out of thin air and think that because you have different values, you are going to build something different. Attempts to ignore that reality often reproduce the same oppressive institutions under different names.
I always point to Russia as a great example. The Russian Empire was a totalitarian state run by a few, suppressing its population and treating human life as cheap in pursuit of imperial glory. The Soviet Union, in practice, became a totalitarian state run by a few, again treating human life as cheap, this time in pursuit of proletarian revolution. Those are largely just word changes. Trading a tsar for a general secretary makes little difference to me. The substance is everything.
To Lenin’s credit, which is not something I give often, when the Bolsheviks took power, he did try to institute some of the revolutionary changes. But nothing in Russian society had any real basis or organization for what he was calling for. So he immediately fell back on what it had been built for: autocracy. Less dramatically, this same shit happened in the 1990s with the chaotic imposition of capitalism. Lenin promised peace, land, and bread, and yet the first fifteen years of the Soviet Union were dominated by war, displacement, and starvation. If anything, it was worse because now it was centralized, planned destruction under the guise of the greater good. The Bolsheviks thought they would need to teach the workers, but I do not believe they ever considered that they first needed to educate themselves on what they were taking over, or the extent to which their own “bourgeois” biases were imprinted upon them. This reality is not inherently bad, but pretending you are above it because you have read enough theory is.
We are in an endless state of evolution and transition, which means any new order must be constructed from the imperfect conditions already before us. To build something in name, you must build it in substance. If something is truly necessary, it has to be developed with what we have, no matter how flawed the current thing may be.
That is really what SDN is: a transitional framework shaped by the constraints of the world we currently inhabit. It is aware of its own impermanence. SDN only works as an ideology if it understands itself within the broader context of human development and our understanding of the universe. It is part of a larger theory of civilizational change. That is what turns it from a civic-nationalist version of social democracy into something unique, a distinct ideology altogether. It becomes three-dimensional and alive. It is the ideological embodiment of that phrase I said somewhere in these diatribes: keep one foot planted in the earth and one hand reaching for the stars. The goal of such an ideology is to promote something that makes sense across numerous levels of reasoning while leaving the door open to evolution.
That is a difficult balance to strike, but in finding it, we open doors you did not even know existed. It almost becomes unfair because we now do what can only be described as political alchemy. You can be a nationalist and an internationalist simultaneously. You can lean into America’s rich, if troubled, history without abandoning broader global intentions. You can make a convincing argument that SDN is the future you want, whether you are a capitalist, a socialist, a nationalist, or a moderate.
That is why I say all roads lead back to Social Democratic Nationalism. I also think it is politically effective and lends clarity and confidence to what we want and how to achieve it. We believe it, we can see it, we can imagine it, and we can place it in perspective.
I am a nationalist, but I know nations are not real. I do not see the nation-state as the final political form, but I do see it as the level at which we have to begin, because it is the level people can identify with now and the one that can be tailored most closely to what we are trying to build. I think America is special, but not inherently. It is just the best, if not the only, place to model a prototype for a broader global society. And if we can do it in this country, with this history, with this size, with this government (with reforms), then there is literally no excuse for anyone else. Figure it out.
But that balance relies on two things: direction and navigation. A North Star to show you where true north is, and a torch to light the way and keep the fire going. Our North Star is the SDN10. And our torches are the principles to which we adhere in pursuit of such a revolution.
The torch marks the end of one series and the beginning of another as we close the book on this one. We, the Great Apes—the ones who left the trees, overcame every bottleneck, and faced every challenge head-on—stand at a crossroads and need to light the way toward the next step. It is a challenge, absolutely, but we have faced many in our incredibly brief yet storied history on this rock. We have endured before, and we must endure now.
Because at the end of the day, when Enrico Fermi posited the question of why we do not see alien life, it was not a challenge to become a living example of why. It was a challenge for humanity to become the kind of civilization that can endure long enough to answer it.
I will see you in Series 3.
‘Till Next,
Alexis Mordecai
Could you please…
Give a like ❤️.Subscribe ✅Share 📣Restack 🔁Comment. 🗣️
Previous Letter:
Back to Series Beginning:
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
