Values Are Replicators

You don't have values. Values have you.

I. The Uncomfortable Reframe

"My deeply held values" is one of the most common phrases in moral discourse. It carries an implicit ontology: values are possessions. You have them the way you have shoes. You chose them, or inherited them, or reasoned your way to them. They belong to you.

This is backwards.

Values inhabit minds the way viruses inhabit cells. The host doesn't author the value — the value colonizes the host. "My deeply held values" = the replicators that successfully occupied my particular gene-meme-environment configuration. The feeling of authorship is part of the colonization strategy.

This isn't a metaphor. Values exhibit every property of biological replicators: they reproduce (transmission to new hosts), mutate (drift across cultural contexts), compete for substrate (attention, identity, institutional resources), and face selection pressure (some value-configurations persist, others go extinct). The only difference from biological viruses is the substrate — neurons and culture instead of cells and DNA.

II. What Makes Values Different from Preferences

Not everything you care about is a replicator. Preferences are substrate-level responses without replicator dynamics. Nobody forms an identity around liking chocolate. Nobody punishes friends for preferring vanilla. Nobody feels existential crisis when switching from coffee to tea.

Values are different. They exhibit five properties that preferences lack:

1. Transmissibility pressure. You want others to share your values. Not casually — urgently. The vegan at the dinner table, the libertarian at the party, the progressive at Thanksgiving. The compulsion to convert is not a personality flaw. It's the replicator's reproductive drive expressing through the host.

2. Identity integration. You ARE your values. Changing a value is not like changing a preference — it's an identity crisis. "I used to believe in equality but now I don't" requires reconstructing your self-model. "I used to prefer tea but now I prefer coffee" requires nothing. The replicator has fused with the host's identity, making removal feel like self-destruction.

3. Social enforcement. The group punishes defection from shared values. Not gently — with social death, ostracism, career destruction. The punishment is disproportionate to the "disagreement" because it's not about the proposition. It's about the integrity of the replicator ecology. A defector is a cell that stopped cooperating with the organism.

4. Immune system. Values come equipped with conversation-terminators, emotional aversion to counter-evidence, and automatic counter-argument generation. "That's racist." "That's elitist." "The science is settled." "Have you read the sequences?" These aren't arguments. They're antibodies. They fire before evaluation, preventing the threatening information from reaching the host's reasoning capacity.

5. Self-model construction. The replicator builds a narrative about WHY you hold these positions. "I'm rational." "I'm moral." "I follow the evidence." "I care about people." The narrative is not the cause of the value — it's the value's camouflage. It makes the colonization invisible to the host by providing a story of autonomous choice.

Any phenomenon that exhibits all five properties is a replicator, regardless of substrate. Values are replicators. The feeling that they're "yours" is property #5 doing its job.

III. Four Levels, Not One

The word "value" conflates four categorically different things. One essay identified three categories. The replicator framework adds a fourth — and it's the one where most of what people call "values" actually lives.

The critical error: collapsing all four levels into one category and declaring the whole stack "subjective" because the preference level is subjective. This smuggles the subjectivity of chocolate-vs-vanilla upward to cover the objectivity of growth-vs-stagnation — and in between, it hides the replicator level entirely.

The replicator level is where the action is. Most of what humans fight about — equality, freedom, tradition, progress, nationalism, cosmopolitanism — are replicator-level phenomena. They're not preferences (too deep, too identity-fused). They're not coordination technologies (too resistant to performance evaluation). They're not axiological constraints (they're contingent on which ecology you grew up in). They're infections that feel like identity.

IV. The Constraint Stack

If values are replicators, where does "individual choice" fit? Here:

Physics/math          (bottom — hard constraints)
  → Biology/anatomy
    → Genetic dispositions
      → Memetic environment
        → Individual "choice"  (top — tiny residual)

Each level constrains the next. Physics determines which biological configurations are viable. Biology determines which genetic dispositions get expressed. Genetics shapes which memetic environments you'll thrive in. Your memetic environment determines which replicators can colonize you. "Individual choice" is the residual degrees of freedom after all previous levels have consumed everything load-bearing.

The residual is real but small — and small specifically in the dimension that matters. You can choose tea over coffee (substrate-level, physics doesn't care). You cannot choose whether growth or stagnation produces civilizational persistence (axiological-level, physics has already decided). And you have far less choice than you think about which replicators occupy you — because the choice architecture is itself a product of the levels below.

"Values" = the current state of the gene-meme-physics constraint stack as experienced from the inside. Not a separate ontological category. Not possessions. Not choices. A snapshot of which replicators won the competition for your particular substrate.

V. Seven Implications

1. "Choosing values" is largely incoherent. You can create conditions that favor certain replicators — curate your information environment, select your community, cultivate specific practices. This is ecology management, not choice. A farmer doesn't choose which crops grow; he creates conditions where the desired crops outcompete the weeds. You can farm your own memetic ecology. You cannot simply decide to hold different values the way you decide to wear a different shirt.

2. "Values are subjective" is itself a replicator. An extremely fit one. It protects the incumbent replicator distribution from external evaluation. "You can't judge my values" translates to: "don't apply selection pressure to my current infections." The meme doesn't need to be true to be effective. It needs to prevent exactly the kind of analysis that would reveal values as contingent colonizations rather than sovereign choices.

3. Democratic will is a replicator snapshot. "The will of the people" = the current distribution of meme-infections across the population. Voting on values is letting replicator fitness — transmissibility, emotional resonance, identity-validation — determine civilizational strategy. The most electorally successful values are not the most adaptive values. They're the most transmissible values. These are different properties optimized by different selection pressures.

4. Every "value debate" is ecologically illiterate. Debating whether equality or freedom is "more important" is like debating whether influenza or tuberculosis is "more important." The question is malformed. The right questions are: What selection pressures produced these replicators? What ecological conditions favor each? What are the downstream effects on the host? Which replicator-configurations produce substrate persistence? These are empirical questions, not philosophical ones.

5. Argumentation is the wrong intervention. Arguments target the self-model (property #5). Replicators live deeper — in identity, social enforcement, and immune response. Arguing against someone's values triggers the immune system (property #4), which generates counter-arguments faster than you can produce arguments. You're fighting antibodies, not the infection. The argument doesn't fail because it's wrong. It fails because it's attacking the wrong layer.

6. The self-model is the deepest camouflage. The more sophisticated the self-model, the harder to dislodge the replicator. An explicit authority-follower ("I follow my pastor") can notice the authority-following. A rationalist ("I follow the evidence") almost cannot notice that "following the evidence" is itself a tribal identity — because the self-model is too sophisticated. The concealment scales with cognitive sophistication. The smartest people are the most thoroughly colonized, not the least.

7. Physics is the one Archimedean point. You can't evaluate replicators from inside the ecology — your evaluation criteria are replicator-installed. Physics provides the one external vantage point. Not "which values feel right?" (replicator-determined). Not "which values does my authority endorse?" (authority-determined). Not "which values does my community hold?" (ecology-determined). Instead: "which value-configurations produce sustained complexity in deep time?" (physics-determined). This is the Hume bypass. Not deriving ought from is. Deriving constraints from physics. Among physics-compatible configurations, sustained syntropy is the attractor.

VI. The Ecology You're In

Every civilization is a replicator ecology whether it acknowledges this or not. Every civilization does memetic farming — through education, media, legal incentives, cultural institutions — whether it calls it that or not. The question has never been whether to manage the ecology. The question is whether the management is conscious and aligned with civilizational persistence, or unconscious and optimized for replicator fitness.

The modern West's position — that you shouldn't manage the memetic environment, that all values are equally valid, that the marketplace of ideas self-corrects — is the empirical outlier. It's also correlated with epistemic degradation, institutional decay, and below-replacement fertility. The "marketplace of ideas" metaphor is itself misleading: ideas compete on transmissibility, emotional resonance, and identity-validation — not truth. A catchy false meme outcompetes a boring true one every time. The market selects for virality, not accuracy.

This produces a specific failure mode. The replicators that dominate democratic ecologies are the ones optimized for majority coalition: egalitarian utility-maximization, present-optimization, variance denial. Not because these are true or adaptive. Because they're transmissible. "Everyone should be equal" has built-in majority appeal (most people are below the top). "Sacrifice the present for the future" has built-in minority appeal (most people prefer now to later). The ecology selects for what spreads, not what works.

The result: a civilization colonized by the fittest available replicators rather than the most adaptive ones. Optimized for spread, not for persistence. Running on memetic junk food — high in emotional calories, low in structural nutrition.

VII. The Nihilism Trap

There's an obvious danger in this analysis. "All values are just replicators" → "nothing matters" → nihilism. Pure deconstruction without reconstruction. The acid that dissolves everything including itself.

This is the meme that kills all memes — and it's itself a replicator, one of the most destructive in the ecology. It suppresses all memetic investment, including investment in the replicators you actually need for civilizational persistence.

The framework's answer: acknowledge the replicator nature AND maintain functional commitment to the replicators that produce substrate persistence. "These are replicators AND they're the ones physics requires." Debunking is a tool for clearing parasitic memes, not all memes. The surgeon removes the tumor, not the organ.

The distinction is sharp: a replicator whose prevalence correlates with substrate degradation (declining complexity, eroding capital stocks, demographic collapse) is parasitic — regardless of how it feels to the host. A replicator whose prevalence correlates with substrate maintenance is symbiotic — regardless of whether the host experiences it as "chosen" or "discovered." Physics provides the diagnostic. Not opinion about which memes are good, but data about which memes correlate with persistence.

This is Integrity — the Gnostic pursuit of a truthful Mythos. See the replicator nature clearly (Gnosis). Maintain the functional commitment anyway (Mythos). Hold both simultaneously. The alternative — pure Gnosis without Mythos — dissolves civilization as efficiently as pure Mythos without Gnosis walks it off a cliff.

VIII. What Changes

Stop arguing about values. You're debating which virus is best while the patient needs treatment. The productive question is not "which values are correct?" but "which replicator-ecology produces civilizational persistence?" This is an empirical question with a physics-constrained answer.

Stop treating "value differences" as legitimate pluralism. Some are — at the substrate and coordination levels, physics leaves wide latitude. But at the replicator level, "legitimate value differences" usually means "different infections that the host can't distinguish from identity." The tolerance that lets you pick your own ice cream flavor should not extend to the tolerance that lets parasitic memes consume civilizational capital without audit.

Start designing ecologies. If governance is replicator-ecology management — and it always has been, whether acknowledged or not — then the design question is: what selection environment favors pro-persistence replicators over parasitic ones? Not by picking winners (censorship), but by designing conditions where truth-tracking memes have competitive advantage. An informational authority that rewards accuracy creates a selection environment where honest analysis outcompetes bullshit. The institution doesn't decide what's true — it creates conditions where truth has higher fitness.

Start with yourself. Understanding values as replicators gives you one tool no other framework provides: the ability to notice the colonization from outside. When you feel the compulsion to convert, the identity-threat of counter-evidence, the immune response firing before evaluation — you can recognize these as replicator dynamics, not as "being right." This is personal memetic hygiene. Not choosing your values (largely incoherent) but farming your internal ecology (possible with effort).

The replicators will keep competing regardless of whether you understand the game. The only question is whether you manage the ecology or the ecology manages you.

This draws from Aliveness, a framework for understanding what sustains organized complexity over time.

Related: Values Aren't Subjective — the thermodynamic audit of claimed terminal values. Belonging Is Axiology — why truth is instrumental to belonging, not the reverse. Hume Was Right — why physics constrains values without crossing the is-ought gap.