Freedom and Morality

A Dual-Anchor Theory of Human Philosophical Orientation

— A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis Based on Primate Social Structures, History of Philosophy, and Cognitive States

1.1 Philosophy Is the Act of Human Self-Orientation

Philosophy is not a discipline but a function. When we ask “why do human beings need to study philosophy,” we are really asking: why do human beings need to know who they are, where they are, and where they should go. The essence of these three questions is orientation.

The object of philosophical inquiry is human thought itself — it does not study the physical laws or chemical reactions of the external world, but rather studies “the act of studying itself.” This is what distinguishes philosophy from every other discipline: physics orients matter, biology orients life, and philosophy orients the very subject performing the orientation — human beings themselves.

From fragmented abstract thinking to the formation of a system, the entire process is the act of human beings continually orienting themselves. It is not that some philosophical conclusion provides a person with coordinates, but rather that the act of “building a system” is itself the act of orientation. It is like how a person does not discover where they are only upon reaching a destination — the very process of drawing the map confirms their position.

The German philosopher Werner Stegmaier, after decades of research, published Philosophie der Orientierung (Philosophy of Orientation) in 2008. His central thesis is that philosophy should observe and reflect on how different philosophies orient themselves from different standpoints and perspectives. This resonates deeply with the thesis of this paper, but Stegmaier’s “orientation” leans more toward epistemology — how humans create certainty amid uncertainty — while this paper’s “orientation” leans more toward ontology — how humans find their anchor within social structures.

1.2 The Socratic Inquiry: Orientation Has No Endpoint but Can Have an Anchor

Imagine Socrates constantly posing questions, one after another. He gives no answers, only poses questions — on the surface he is dismantling others’ cognition, but in reality he is forcing them to orient themselves. His method itself proves a fact: orientation cannot be done by someone else on your behalf; you must complete it yourself through relentless inquiry.

No question has a final endpoint. But the absence of an endpoint does not mean the absence of direction. Here we must distinguish two concepts: endpoint and anchor. An endpoint means arriving and stopping; an anchor lets you hold steady while drifting — but the water still flows, and you still move. A person’s worldview — their values, outlook on life, and conception of the world — is that anchor. It does not make them stop; it keeps them from being swept away.

1.3 The Vast Majority of Human Beings Have Never Completed Orientation

Throughout history, the vast majority of human beings were illiterate, with no access to philosophical education. They constitute the action layer of human society — their orientation was given to them by others, or was innate and inherited from their clan. It is not that they lacked “orientation,” but rather that their orientation was externally imposed: which family they were born into, which class they belonged to, what occupation they pursued — all of it was arranged for them. They spent their entire lives executing maps drawn by others, never having drawn one themselves.

The vast majority of people go through life without ever finding their own anchor, let alone forming their own values, outlook on life, or worldview. All their behaviors are aggregate instinctive responses of social animals — automatic reactions to social signals, rather than autonomous decisions made after self-directed orientation.

2.1 De Facto Slavery in Chimpanzees and Bonobos

When describing dominance relations in primate societies, the academic world uses terms such as “dominance hierarchy,” “coercive control,” and “structural despotism.” A 2017 study by Kaburu and Newton-Fisher demonstrated that in highly despotic chimpanzee groups, high-ranking individuals can extort grooming services from low-ranking ones — this coerced labor is, in essence, a de facto slave relationship.

Low-ranking individuals are forced to provide labor (grooming), have their basic rights restricted (mating access), and are excluded from core social interactions. Measured against Orlando Patterson’s classic 1982 definition — in which the three elements of slavery are violent domination, natal alienation, and dishonor — low-ranking individuals in chimpanzee groups satisfy at least the first two elements.

2.2 Slavery Was Not Invented by Humans, but Named by Them

Why did human beings maintain slavery for so long and across such vast territories? If we accept the foregoing argument — that the vast majority of people never had the capacity or conditions for autonomous orientation, that they naturally occupied the action layer — then slavery was not an institution invented by some malevolent genius, but a natural product of human social structure. Its long persistence (thousands of years) and wide distribution (across every civilization) are precisely what indicate it was not accidental, but corresponded to some deep operational logic of societies.

And this logic can be traced even further back. Dominance and submission already existed in primitive human groups; tribes had leaders and followers. Even before humans appeared, primate societies already possessed this structure. Christopher Boehm noted in his 1999 work Hierarchy in the Forest that both African great apes and complex human societies form dominance hierarchies, and that political hierarchy in human evolution followed a U-shaped trajectory — from hierarchical primate ancestors, through egalitarian hunter-gatherers, back to hierarchical complex societies.

From primate societies to primitive human groups, through ancient slavery, to modern society, the relationship of dominance and submission has never been broken. Only the shell changes; the core has never changed.

2.3 Why Academia Avoids the Word “Slavery”: Political Correctness and Morality Denying Facts

There are legitimate methodological reasons why academia does not directly call dominance relations among chimpanzees “slavery”: science pursues operational definitions, and “slavery” is a word laden with strong human moral judgment. But another layer of reasons also exists — “slavery” carries extremely powerful moral and political sensitivities in the English-language academic context.

Acknowledging the cross-species biological continuity of slave relationships leads to two uncomfortable inferences: first, that slavery is not a product of human moral corruption but a biological inheritance; second, that the abolition of slavery is not fighting an institution but fighting an instinct. Neither inference is tolerable within contemporary moral discourse. But intolerable does not mean untrue.

3.1 Core Proposition: Interest-Driven Morality Obeys a Scaling Law in the Physical World

When the underlying driver of morality is self-interest rather than fact, the distortion of reality that this morality produces does not grow linearly with system scale — it follows a power-law growth. The larger the scale, the greater the distortion.

At a small scale, one person telling a small lie out of self-interest has limited impact. At a medium scale, an academic circle avoiding a fact to protect collective interests begins systematically distorting cognition. At a large scale, an entire civilization constructing a moral narrative out of the need for its own survival will completely rewrite reality. Each layer amplifies the distortions of the layer below it.

In June 2025, a paper titled The Scalability of Morality appeared on arXiv, using particle simulation to study the behavior of moral systems under population-scale changes. The study found that in small-scale, high-density societies, ethical behavior is self-reinforcing through decentralized personal sanctions and reward systems; but as societies expand into large-scale complex systems, a fundamental phase transition occurs. This closely parallels the thesis of this paper, the difference being that they arrived at it via particle simulation, whereas this paper arrived at it through philosophical intuition.

3.2 The French Revolution: A Breaking Point in the Scaling Law

The divergence between moral narrative and physical reality can continue to amplify, but not infinitely. When this divergence grows large enough to directly threaten the survival of the action layer — when the people cannot eat — the system collapses. The mode of collapse is not gentle correction but violent regression. Because the action layer has had no philosophical orientation, no rational tools, the only thing left to them is animal instinct.

The French Revolution perfectly illustrates this point. When the interests of the monarch and the aristocracy were packaged as morality, and this hypocrisy encroached upon the people’s basic right to survival, humanity’s violent nature was unleashed. Louis XVI was sent to the guillotine. Then something even more profound happened: the revolutionaries overthrew the old hypocrisy and immediately manufactured new hypocrisy. Robespierre sent people to the guillotine in the name of “virtue,” and was then sent to the guillotine himself.

From 1789 to 1794, a complete Scaling Law cycle was completed in just five years. Afterward — the Bourbon Restoration, Napoleon, another Restoration, Napoleon III — multiple regime changes all represented repeated verification of the same physical bottom line: whoever can feed the people and keep society functioning holds power, however temporarily.

3.3 Hypocrisy as a Self-Defense System

Packaging interests as morality is not mere disguise — it constructs a complete self-defense system. When a person packages their interests as morality, they equip themselves with a shield: you cannot question me, because to question me is to be immoral. This makes genuine speculative thinking impossible, because the prerequisite of speculation is that all propositions can be questioned.

In the vast majority of cases, human moral discourse is not a philosophical act but an animal act. It is not speculation but territorial marking — using moral language instead of urine, but serving the exact same function. The people who are truly doing philosophy, who are using speculative thought to seek authentic orientation, are an extreme minority in every era. And what this tiny minority says invariably enrages everyone who uses morality as a defense. Because truth is the greatest threat to a defense system. This is also why Socrates was sentenced to death — he did not die at the hands of the ignorant, but at the hands of the hypocritical.

4.1 Two Fundamentally Different Philosophical Paths

A person anchored in the reality of the physical world directs their speculative thinking inward. Because the physical world does not cater to anyone — a fact is a fact, and you either accept it or you do not. Once accepted, you can only manage yourself to adapt to reality, rather than reshaping reality to serve yourself. This process naturally gives rise to an orientation toward freedom — because you need no one else to orient you; you have completed orientation on your own. Nor do you need to control anyone, because your anchor depends on no one. The core is self-sufficiency.

A person anchored in self-interest moves in exactly the opposite direction — outward. Because interest is not self-sufficient; it must be extracted from others. You need others’ labor, attention, obedience, and approval; your anchor is parasitic. But you cannot say so openly, so hypocrisy becomes a necessary tool.

The essence of PUA (pick-up artistry) becomes clear within this framework. PUA is not a dating technique; it is a micro-scale slave-system operating system. The manipulator constructs a moral narrative — “I love you,” “I’m doing this for your own good,” “You can’t survive without me” — all of which is interest-driven hypocrisy whose function is to make the other person surrender their right to self-orientation. Once surrendered, the other person is downgraded from a free individual to the action layer. Scale it up — religious leaders, politicians, corporate managers — and the operation is structurally identical; only the scale and sophistication of the methods differ.

4.2 Philosophical Thinking Oscillates Perpetually Between the Two Anchors

This is not a distinction between two types of people, but an oscillation within the same person — even within the same philosopher.

Plato pursued the reality of the world of Forms, but the Republic he designed was a hierarchical society ruled by philosopher-kings — starting from the reality anchor, he landed on the interest anchor. Confucius spoke of benevolence, but benevolence landed on ritual propriety, and the function of ritual propriety was to maintain hierarchical order. Marx analyzed the physical reality of capitalist exploitation, but the Marxist movement ultimately produced new parasitic structures. Nietzsche proclaimed that one must face reality and transcend good and evil, but the concept of the Übermensch itself became another contest for the moral high ground.

No philosopher has ever been able to anchor entirely in reality without sliding toward interest. Philosophers are human, too — advanced social animals. Biological instinct constantly pulls them toward the interest anchor, while the capacity for speculation constantly pulls them toward the reality anchor. The entire history of philosophy is the record of this tug-of-war between two forces.

4.3 Philosophy Lacks Intrinsic Binding Force — The Fundamental Difference from Asceticism

This is philosophy’s greatest blind spot. The ascetic’s method is to constrain the body through physical means — not eating, not sleeping, not moving, enduring pain. The method is crude, but it possesses one enormous advantage: it is real. You cannot deceive your own body. Hunger is hunger; pain is pain. Your biological instincts scream, and you suppress them through will. This confrontation takes place in the physical world, where there is no room for cheating.

Philosophy is entirely different. Philosophy operates on the level of thought, and thought is the domain in which humans are most adept at self-deception. A philosopher can argue for justice in his study while enslaving his own servants. Speculation does not hurt, and therefore speculation does not constrain.

This is the internal mechanism by which philosophy slides toward morality. When speculation is decoupled from verification in the physical world, the only place it can land is morality — because morality is the only product of the mind that possesses social binding force. When philosophers discover that their thought exerts no binding force upon themselves, they instinctively convert it into something that exerts binding force upon others. The direction flips from inward to outward, from self-orientation to orienting others.

If philosophy is to avoid sliding into moral hypocrisy, it must have an anchoring mechanism in the physical world. Socrates used death as his anchor — refusing to escape, he gave philosophy its only unforgeable binding force through his own life. Spinoza used lens-grinding as his anchor — daily manual labor sustained the independence of his speculation. Death and labor are both ultimate physical facts; you cannot cheat in their presence.

5.1 Philosophers Who Published Freedom Standards

They proved through their lives that autonomous orientation is possible. Their direction was inward, and their core concern was the liberation of the individual soul. They did not establish rules — they were the rules themselves.

Common traits: lived in poverty or actively chose poverty; refused institutional power; established no organizations; either wrote no dogma or wrote and disappeared; conveyed philosophy through their lives rather than through texts.

5.2 Philosophers Who Published Moral Standards

They constructed codes of conduct that others were expected to follow. Their direction was outward, and their core concern was the construction and maintenance of social order.

Common traits: lived within social structures; were attached to or served institutions of power; founded schools or academies; produced large volumes of systematized texts; their core concern was social order.

5.3 Spinoza’s “Ethics”: Ethics in Name, Freedom in Substance

Spinoza’s Ethics bears the title “ethics,” but what it does is entirely different from what other moral philosophers do. Traditional ethics — Aristotelian, Kantian, utilitarian — are prescriptive in essence: you should do this; this is good; this is evil. Spinoza does the exact opposite. His Ethics contains no concept of obligation or justice whatsoever.

In Spinoza’s view, strictly speaking there is no good or evil in the moral sense — only understanding or failing to understand natural necessity. He distinguished between free will (an illusion) and freedom (reality): when your actions arise from an adequate understanding of your own nature, rather than being driven by external passions, you are free.

Spinoza spent his entire life grinding lenses for a living, and declined the University of Heidelberg’s offer of a philosophy chair. He maintained the independence of his speculation through the most ascetic means. The dust from grinding lenses eventually damaged his lungs, and he died at forty-four. But what did posterity do with him? They turned him into a producer of intellectual systems. Hegel took his substance theory, Marx took his materialism, Nietzsche took his moral critique, Einstein took his pantheism. No one cited the freedom of his soul as he ground lenses. Because the freedom of the soul cannot be extracted, cannot be systematized, and has no exchange value in the academic interest economy.

6.1 The Two-Step Operation: Instrumentalization + Truthification = Profit

Instrumentalizing others’ partial viewpoints and truthifying philosophical views is the most effective means of extracting profit. These two steps are indispensable.

Step one, instrumentalization — extract a partial perspective from a complete philosophical life, strip it of its physical anchor, its existential context, and its lived experience of the soul, leaving only conceptual components that can be systematized. Step two, truthification — elevate these components from “one person’s thinking under specific conditions” to “universal truth,” endowing them with unquestionable authority.

Once both steps are complete, the profit channel opens. If you command “truth,” you command the power of orientation. Academia uses this to allocate positions and prestige; religion uses it to distribute salvation and guilt; politics uses it to assign legitimacy and illegitimacy.

The most ingenious aspect is that this operation is itself invisible. Once a viewpoint has been truthified, anyone who questions it is automatically classified as “an opponent of truth” — that is, as the ignorant, the heretical, the enemy. Truthification does not merely create power; it creates an immune system that protects that power.

6.2 Freedom Standards Are Perpetually Converted into Moral Standards

The irony of history is this: after the publishers of freedom standards die, their philosophy is often instrumentalized and truthified by posterity and transformed into moral standards.

The Buddha’s awakening became precepts. Socrates’ questioning became Plato’s system. Laozi’s non-action became Daoist ritual. Spinoza’s freedom of the soul became a line of citation on someone else’s academic CV. Each act of transmission is an act of anchor-tampering — rewriting authentic orientation as a resource in service of others’ interests.

The instrumentalized original authors are always the greatest victims. Spinoza could never have agreed to Hegel using his philosophy to justify the state spirit. The Buddha could never have agreed to temples using his teachings to accumulate wealth. But they are dead, and their views have become unclaimed mines that anyone can come and excavate.

7.1 The Three-Layer Nested Structure

The ultimate operational technique of interest systems is three-layer wrapping. Layer one: interests are packaged as morality. Layer two: morality is packaged as freedom. Without the second layer, the first layer cannot be sold.

This is because human beings, as advanced social animals, possess a deep instinct — resistance to being dominated. Boehm’s research has already demonstrated this: hunter-gatherers collectively suppressed any individual who tried to dominate. This means that naked moral commands are naturally repulsive. When you tell someone “you should do this,” their first reaction is resistance. Therefore, a further layer of wrapping is necessary — not “you should do this,” but “by doing this, you will be free.”

7.2 Modern Applications

Every successful control system in modern society does precisely this:

People are attracted by the outermost layer of freedom, pass through the middle layer of moral norms, and ultimately land in the innermost layer of interest structures. And throughout the entire process, they believe they are walking toward freedom.

7.3 False Freedom Always Outsells True Freedom

The authentic publishers of freedom standards — Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza — were unpopular during their lifetimes precisely because they did not apply this wrapping. The freedom they displayed was real, but real freedom is not attractive. It means poverty, solitude, exile, execution.

False freedom is comfortable; true freedom is painful. False freedom tells you “you are already free”; true freedom tells you “you are still a slave.” Consumers naturally choose the former. When everyone is shouting freedom, freedom is already dead. Because true freedom does not need to be shouted — it is silent, private, and cannot be displayed. Spinoza did not shout about freedom while grinding lenses.

8.1 The Freedom Equation

Freedom is double-edged. Receiving no externally supplied interests means not being controlled by external interests — this is the essence of freedom. But without external interest supply, the cost of freedom is poverty. A free person is an impoverished individual who exists simultaneously in freedom of the physical world and freedom of the soul.

Interest is a feedback loop. When you accept externally supplied interests, you must output what the other party demands — obedience, labor, loyalty, silence. Every unit of external interest comes attached to an invisible string, and the other end of that string is held by the person who gave you the interest. The only choice for a truly free person is to sever all the strings. Once the strings are cut, the interest supply is also severed, and you are immediately returned to the most primitive physical state.

8.2 Most People Are Aligned with Tools, Not Higher Cognitive Beings

Most people remain at the action layer; what they are aligned with is a tool, not a higher cognitive being. Their every minute is filled — work, commuting, phones, socializing, entertainment, anxiety. An alarm clock tells them when to wake up, a calendar tells them when to attend meetings, and an algorithm tells them what to see and when. Their consciousness perpetually runs in execution mode and never switches to speculative mode.

Tools do not speculate. A hammer does not ask itself why it strikes nails. When a person’s mode of existence is aligned with a tool, they, too, do not ask why they are alive. They only ask what to do next, how to do it faster, how to get more. These are all action-layer questions, not orientation-layer questions.

8.3 Speculation Is Not a Question of Ability but of State

Nearly all of humanity’s most significant cognitive breakthroughs occurred in the same state — body relaxed, mind blank, detached from the action layer, not operating for any external interest. The common characteristic of this state is: the person stopped.

Newton’s “miracle year” of 1665–1666: Cambridge was closed due to the plague, and he was forced to return to his family home. No classes to attend, no supervisor to report to — completely detached from the action layer. It was precisely in this enforced emptiness that the apple fell before a cognitive being in a free state.

Einstein’s daydream at age sixteen: what would a beam of light look like if I rode a bicycle and caught up to it? This was not in a classroom; he was not completing an assignment — it was a teenager’s free speculation. Later, at the patent office — a twenty-six-year-old third-class examiner, completely detached from the mainstream academic system — he completed the theory of relativity in the gaps between mechanical work.

Darwin withdrew into self-imposed seclusion for over twenty years after returning from the Beagle. At Down House he built a sand-covered path and walked it every day. He called it “my thinking path.” He would pile a few flint stones at the entrance and knock one off with each lap. His best thinking was not done in the study but on that path — walking alone, the body performing the simplest repetitive motion, the mind in free float.

8.4 The More Naked the Language, the Closer to the Facts

The decorative layer of language and the wrapping layer of morality are one and the same. Academic language invents vast quantities of specialized terminology — “structural despotism,” “natal alienation,” “reactive aggression” — these words insert a buffer layer between the fact and the receiver. The function of this buffer layer is access control: if you do not understand the terminology, you cannot enter the circle, and you have no right to speak. Terminology is the admission ticket to the academic interest system.

Naked language has no admission ticket. It strikes the fact directly — no deceleration, no buffering, no distortion. Socrates did not write; he only spoke, because speech is more naked than text. And Socratic dialogue was the most naked form of speech — he only asked questions, dispensing even with assertions. Questions are more naked than assertions, because assertions still wear the clothing of a position; questions wear nothing at all.

9.1 The Speculative Seeker — One Who Actively Searches for Their Own Anchor

Publishing moral standards versus publishing freedom standards is the fundamental difference between the philosophical speculative seeker and the learner of others’ philosophy.

The speculative seeker is one who actively searches for their own anchor. Their speculation is spontaneous, inward, and calibrated against physical reality. What they produce is not a conclusion but a path — the road they have walked is itself their philosophy. Socrates’ questioning is a path; Spinoza’s lens-grinding is a path; Diogenes living in a barrel is a path. These paths cannot be replicated, because each person’s physical conditions differ, and so does each person’s anchor.

9.2 The Learner — One Who Receives Pre-Processed Products

What the learner receives is a finished product that has already been instrumentalized and truthified by others — filtered, packaged as universal law, ready to be installed directly into the mind as “knowledge.” This process is passive, because the learner has not undergone the painful construction from fragments to system; they have received the finished product directly.

But the finished product is precisely the most dangerous thing. Because it has already been processed by the interest system — the parts of the original insight that pointed toward the freedom of the soul have been stripped away, and what remains are moral clauses that can serve social control. The learner believes they are acquiring wisdom; in reality, they are installing someone else’s operating system. Once the installation is complete, their thinking runs on maps drawn by others, and they will never reach their own anchor.

9.3 The Final Proposition