Neural Nations · working essay

Geopolitics as Group Adaptation

Kari McKern · Neural Nations · draft, 3 October 2026

1Pods, not villains

A Shark Bay dolphin puts a sponge on her nose to forage over the seabed. Orcas off Patagonia ride the surf onto the beach in seal-pup season. Nobody calls the first lazy or the second evil. Each pod has adapted to its setting, and what it does comes from the pattern of cooperation it lives inside, not from individual moral choice.

Human societies are pods too, scaled up to millions of primates who will never meet. To coordinate them, people need shared abstractions: money, law, rank, property, nation, god. Once enough people coordinate around an abstraction it has causal force. Nobody can touch a border, but millions change their behaviour because of one.

This essay applies that view to geopolitics. States are pods adapted to different ways of making a living from the environment. Geopolitics is what happens when pods adapted to different settings have to share one planet.

2Setting fixes topology

CAMS reads a society through eight functions: Helm (command), Shield (force and order), Lore (meaning), Archive (records and memory), Craft (skilled production), Flow (exchange), Stewards (owners of land and stores) and Hands (mass labour). Each function is scored on Coherence, Capacity, Stress and Abstraction. Two combinations of those scores carry the argument:

• C × A, shared symbolic organisation: how much of a function's work runs on abstractions its members actually share.
• K − S, functional headroom: whether a function has surplus to work with, or is spending more than it has.

The connections among the eight functions form a topology: which pairs are tightly coupled, and through which channels pressure and meaning travel. The way a society extracts its living makes some couplings cheap and others expensive. Once those couplings are set, they persist long after the original setting has changed.

• River valley. Everyone is stuck in the same basin. Rice and wheat need earthworks, levees, storage and accounting. Helm, Archive and Stewards couple tightly, Hands are mobilised for public works, and wealth means land and stability. The adaptive problem is keeping a crowded valley fed and calm.
• Coast and sea. Fish produce fishermen, fishermen produce boatbuilders, and boatbuilders produce explorers. Flow, Craft and Shield couple, wealth is portable, and power imbalances can be turned into trade advantage. The adaptive problem is access.
• Open continent. With no natural borders, Shield and Helm are coupled as a standing condition. The adaptive problem is the buffer.
• Steppe. Mobile wealth, with Shield and Flow coupled. The adaptive problem is moving faster than the settled neighbour.

None of these is better than another. Māori Aotearoa and Aboriginal Australia were close to optimal for their settings and technologies. The open question is what happens when topologies meet.

3The eight Paladins

Picture each society as eight Paladins, eight functions standing in a ring and each holding two measures: how much shared thinking it carries, and how much headroom it has left.

Helm, at the Throne, decides what happens next for people who will never meet. Given surplus and a shared story, it deliberates. Under strain it simplifies, hunts for an enemy and reaches for the sword.

Shield, on the Battlefield, keeps force and order. In good times it guards, and in hard times it begins to rule. It is the only Paladin that grows in a crisis.

Lore, in the Temple, makes the meaning: why we suffer, who we are, what is owed. It keeps the deepest models and is the last to fall when the walls come down. The same Lore can say "this is our common misfortune" or "they did this to us", and the age turns on which it says.

Archive, in the Library, keeps the record, in tallies and laws, songlines and statistics, so that strangers can trust the same numbers. When Archive burns, the way back is long, because the memory has to be rebuilt along with the granary.

Craft, in the Workshop, turns abstraction into things. Squeezed, it cuts corners, and its pride turns to grievance.

Flow, in the Agora, keeps goods moving so the baker need not live on bread alone. When the roads close, every Paladin grows smaller and more suspicious.

Stewards, in the Manor, hold the land and the stores, and decide who eats when the harvest fails, in plain view or behind closed doors.

Hands, in the Fields, move the earth. Their labour is the surplus the other seven spend, and the cost of coordination lands on them. In almost every state they stand lowest, and their stress is where the songs of redemption begin.

Three of them make headroom: Hands, Craft and Flow. Two keep the shared models: Lore and Archive. Two are switches, deciding which model gets acted on: Helm and Shield. Stewards stand between them, handing out the surplus. A society's topology is which of the Paladins stand closest together.

4Myth as the surface of topology

Every topology has a few stories that fit it. The dominant myth is the one that justifies the coupling the society already leans on, so the Zeitgeist is the shimmer on the surface of a deeper structure.

When Throne and Temple stand together, the king is the order of the cosmos and heaven grants its mandate. When Battlefield and Temple close ranks, the people are besieged, the enemy is within and purity is a weapon. Where Manor and Library are joined, law and contract are sacred and what is written is what is true. Where Agora and Workshop run together, the horizon calls: the frontier, the voyage, progress without end. When the Fields find the Temple, the last shall be first, debts are forgiven, and jubilee or revolution comes. When Library and Temple remember together, there was a golden age and we must return to the founders. When Throne and Battlefield fuse, the strongman rises and the nation marches as an army. And where Agora and Manor embrace, the market is nature and prosperity is the mark of virtue.

That is why each bloc is sincere and each bloc projects. When one power accuses another, it reads the other through its own attractor. A maritime power sees a riverine state securing its valley and calls it expansion. A riverine state sees a maritime power securing access and calls it encirclement. Both readings are honest, and both are wrong in the same way.

5Three inherited topologies in today's system

Maritime-expansive: Britain, then the United States. Coupling runs through Flow, Craft and Shield, under the frontier myth. Its strategy is global access backed by force. Under strain it constricts toward Shield–Lore, the besieged people, and its Helm splits between two attractors. That is what a society looks like when its headroom-generating functions are intact but the switch between attractors has become unstable.

Riverine-bureaucratic: China. Coupling runs through Helm, Archive and Stewards, under the mandate of heaven plus the record. Its instinct is internal stability, not expansion. From inside its own attractor, its behaviour reads as housekeeping. From inside the maritime attractor, it reads as threat. The anti-China rhetoric of the COVID years, "China virus" and the rest, was one topology reading another through the wrong myth.

Continental-overland: Russia. Shield and Helm are coupled as a standing condition, under a fortress myth. Ukraine sits on the seam between this topology and the maritime one. That is why it has become a contest over topology, not a dispute that can be split down the middle. Each side treats the other's adaptive strategy as an existential trespass.

6The entity one layer up

The central CAMS thesis is that primates are bound to orders they built from abstractions, and those orders compete one layer up under rules of their own. In geopolitics the next layer is visible: alliance blocs, the dollar system, trade regimes, deterrence.

No leader chose mutually assured destruction, yet half the world's technical talent serves it. That is because it is the stable state of two coupled topologies under threat. It is not a moral failure of individuals. It is the constriction attractor running at planetary scale, and the higher-level entity is real because changing it takes coordinated action by many people at the level below.

7Constriction and hysteresis

Primates manage aggression as much as they manage thought. With headroom, societies can be deliberative, generous and plural. Under sustained strain, the same machinery narrows: coupling concentrates along Helm, Shield and Lore, the range of responses shrinks, and resentment finds a target. Pressure becomes resentment only through attribution and topology: who is blamed, and which channels carry the blame.

The way back is not the way in. Constriction is fast and re-differentiation is slow. The post-1945 institutions and the 1990s globalisation window were surplus-era behaviour. After 2008, COVID and Ukraine, the system constricted together. Sanctions, blocs and decoupling now persist after the strains that produced them. That is hysteresis in the strict sense: the system remembers the excursion.

The most dangerous configuration is not the strongest pod. It is two pods constricting toward Shield–Lore at the same time, each reading the other's constriction as confirmation of its own myth. The Palestinian greenhouses smashed after the Six Day War are what that looks like on the ground: the victor destroys the other side's headroom along with its army.

8Middle powers: Australia

Australia is a transplant of the Scottish Enlightenment into a frontier continent. Archive, Stewards and Flow are coupled into institutions that make representation more than lipstick on a pig: tariff schedules, the Bureau of Statistics, the State Library. Its adaptive problem is unusual. It is a maritime ally whose economy is embedded in a riverine region.

Read this way, Australia's best strategy is to keep its own topology differentiated, refusing to import its ally's constriction attractor, because its headroom comes from both directions. This is the Borrowed Nation question in geopolitical form. How much of the Helm's coupling is set at home, and how much is borrowed?

9What this frame offers

1. Moral agnosticism with a mechanism. Realism counts power and liberalism counts values. Group adaptation counts fit to setting, and it explains why every bloc is sincere and every bloc projects.
2. Behaviour predicted from topology. A riverine state puts internal stability first, a maritime state access, a continental state buffers. Each constricts under a recognisable signature.
3. Risk located in coupling. The warning sign is simultaneous constriction, not raw power.
4. A way out. Deliberation is a surplus behaviour. Re-differentiation needs headroom restored at Hands and Flow, plus shared models that survive the strain: trade, science, translation, and libraries holding each other's literature.

10Status

This essay states a framework and a set of propositions. The topology claims (which couplings dominate in which society, and whether myth shifts lead or lag coupling shifts) are hypotheses. They can be tested by scoring under the locked CAMS rubric, then coding dominant myths independently from texts, and checking that the coupling a myth binds predicts the coupling recovered from the scores.

This is a working essay. It states a framework and a set of propositions; the topology claims in it are hypotheses still to be tested against CAMS scores (section 10). Comments and contesting readings are welcome via the contact page.