Archie Mackintosh Challenges Charlie Kirk on Moral Absolutism in Relationships and Why Traditional Marriage Systems Collapse
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Archie Mackintosh Challenges Charlie Kirk on Moral Absolutism in Relationships and Why Traditional Marriage Systems Collapse
Archie Mackintosh, a left-leaning centrist with an anthropology background, reflects on his debate with Charlie Kirk about moral absolutism in relationships. While both agree that stable monogamy produces better outcomes for society, Archie argues that imposing rigid moral standards ignores genetic variation, attachment disorders, and evolutionary mismatch. He explores why prosperous societies consistently move away from traditional structures, questions why Charlie's preferred moral order collapsed under its own success, and proposes that morality should be adaptive rather than absolute. This analysis reveals the tension between top-down moralistic approaches and the biological reality that roughly 50% of adults develop attachment issues that make long-term pair bonding difficult.
Archie Mackintosh, now being called by Charlie Kirk's fans in the comments as "Mr. Man bun," reflects on his debate with the conservative commentator. People resonated with the civil, productive discussion in a world that is increasingly polarized. The debate centered on moral absolutism in relationships, a topic Archie believes left important discussion points hanging in the air. In this analysis, he reacts to the debate itself while sharing counterpoints he didn't have time to express and refuting logical traps he believes Charlie employed.
The Core Question: Why Do Societies Abandon What Works?
Archie's fundamental challenge to Charlie was straightforward: If stable monogamous relationships often produce the best outcomes for society, and if that structure really works for everyone, why do societies consistently move away from traditional monogamy once they become safer and more prosperous? Why do so many marriages still end in divorce even among people who try to make it work?
He posed an additional framing question: If you believe in free markets because they are decentralized and adapt to reality without top-down control, and given that individual ability to form healthy long-term pair bonds vary significantly with factors like genetics and attachment styles, why reject top-down control in economics but not extend that same rejection to human behavior in marriage?
Charlie's Response: The Law of Decay
Charlie answered by invoking the second law of thermodynamics, describing it as the law of decay. Societies tend to decay against the roots that created them. He pivoted to free speech, noting that the UK no longer has true free speech, with 30 people a day arrested for inflammatory social media posts. Someone named Lucy Connelly was facing prison time for a Facebook post critical of migrants. Charlie argued it's normal for civilizations to get away from how they once operated.
Archie acknowledges he can see where Charlie's coming from and completely agrees about how terrifying the decline in free speech is in the UK. However, he notes these are very different topics. Free speech is totally different from human relationships. Charlie, in Archie's view, was deliberately pivoting into a topic he's more able to control, that he knows more about, and that will resonate more with viewers watching his video.
Prosperity Leads to Degeneracy
When Archie pressed on why societies make this change once they become more prosperous, Charlie's answer was direct: prosperity leads to degeneracy. Once prosperous, you no longer have moral guard rails or limitations. You no longer have delayed gratification because you have instant gratification from a surplus of goods, and then you have a decline of a transcendent moral order.
Archie broadly agrees that prosperity leads to decline, but he's asking why. Charlie just says it's a rule that happens, but the deeper why is important. Charlie is very quick to reframe this transition away from an absolute moral view that aligns with his Christian background as a failure to achieve a transcendent moral order. Archie fundamentally disagrees with this.
There is too much ego in saying we already have the answer, these set of absolute morals, that's what's optimal. Especially because it didn't work. Those morals were widely imposed in the first half of the 20th century. If they were so stable, if this is the optimal morality, why did it collapse under the weight of its own success?
Finding Common Ground on Marriage
Archie made clear that he and Charlie largely agree on the foundation. He absolutely acknowledges that if everyone in society was able to maintain healthy long-term pair bonds, that would be best. There's strong data showing that independent of socioeconomic factors, broken homes are some of the strongest predictors of poor life outcomes. Even as countries become more socially egalitarian, rates of female depression and anxiety spike disproportionately.
This emphasis on common ground was intentional. Archie was making very clear that he's aware of all this research, some of it very uncomfortable. They both want the same thing: more monogamy in society. Where he disagrees is with Charlie's approach. Charlie's approach of moralistic top-down absolutism is not the way.
The Problem with Moral Absolutism
When you try to impose moral absolutism, Archie argues, inevitably due to variance in attachment issues, industrialized culture, absent parents, and screens raising kids, around 50% of adults in the West develop attachment disorders which make it very difficult to maintain long-term pair bonds. Additionally, there's variation in oxytocin receptors in density and shape, as well as vasopressin. There are going to be even 5% of people who feel these rules really do not fit them, and they will push back, creating ideologies that grow into more widely appealing ideologies which lead to change.
Archie believes this is what happened in the sexual revolution. It started with a push for female autonomy and then morphed into a really exaggerated expression of pushing for maximizing individual freedom. When you try to impose moral absolutism this way, it just inevitably causes pushback. If Charlie, as someone with a platform, instead said monogamy is great and works best for most people, but also acknowledged there are some people it doesn't work so well for, more people would hear the message he wants to push.
People aren't a blank slate. They can't all follow an imposed absolute moral order. There's real variation in genetics and attachment style. About 50% of adults have insecure attachment. Archie's core argument is that it's too optimistic assuming that if you impose a moral order for everyone to strive to, it will work, because there will inevitably be a minority of people who feel oppressed, who feel the rules don't work for them, who push back.
The Logical Trap: Are You Against Moral Absolutism Absolutely?
When Archie stated he's against moral absolutism, Charlie asked if he was against it absolutely. This made the room laugh. Archie believes the argument he made was very strong and Charlie didn't really have the knowledge or ability to refute it on an intellectual level. Instead, Charlie employed rhetorical trickery to try and make Archie seem like his argument stems from an inconsistent logical paradox.
The problem is you can be against moral absolutism without being a hypocrite. Archie is very open to having his mind changed. He doesn't have the ego to say he has all the answers, that his moral view is correct. An opinion that he rejects moral absolutism, that in itself is not a moral, it's an opinion. Morals in society are typically looked at as objective truths. Rejecting moral absolutism but not being totally absolute in that rejection isn't a moral, it's an opinion, and he's allowed to have an opinion.
The Straw Man: No Moral Standard at All?
Charlie then suggested it's all just preference, that Archie could basically do whatever he prefers, that there is no transcendent moral order. This is the beginning of Charlie's straw man. Archie says he rejects moral absolutism, and Charlie responds by saying he has no moral standard at all and just does whatever he wants. This incorrectly assumes a binary: that you either have moral absolutism or no moral standard at all.
Charlie stated definitionally that we must choose what moral standard we live by. He's very clear as to what moral standard he chooses. The lie of the West of modernity the last 30 years is that we're going to live and let live and there will be no moral standard. That itself is a moral standard and it's a really bad one. Charlie argued he has a moral obligation not to accommodate when people fall short, but instead try to lift them up towards the standard that is true and that he knows works.
An Anthropological Perspective on Morality
The reason Archie and Charlie disagree is that Charlie's worldview is very centered around Christianity, whereas Archie comes from an anthropology background. He studies societies across the world and a range of different cultures, and he's very aware there are around 300,000 years of evolution where humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies.
What morality actually is, Archie argues, is a combination of reputation management, emotional calibration, and adaptive altruism. The purpose of morality is to drive optimal behavior in order for you to cohesively fit into a society. The problem is human environments have been very variable. Under different environments, there are different sets of optimal morality. There isn't a one-size-fits-all.
What is risked if we impose moral absolutism is we take outdated, ineffective, suboptimal morals and lock them in forever. Morality should be adaptive. We should update it as we learn more about the world, as we learn more about ourselves. If we say we have all the answers now, there's so much ego in that. Of course we don't. We should be learning and growing. This is why Archie is a centrist.
That's not to say that in some societies, everyone's fine with murdering and hurting people. Across societies, even non-industrialized hunter-gatherer societies, we see consistently universal morals in terms of treating others with a degree of empathy in a way we would want to be treated. People are against murder, against hurting people, against unfairness, against stealing. That is deeply ingrained into human biology.
The problem with moral absolutism is it places equal weight on every single moral. Whereas in reality, there are some morals that are more fixed and some that are more loose that we don't know much about.
Why Do People Fall Short?
Archie asked Charlie: when he describes people falling short when they fail to engage in long-term monogamy, what does he think causes that? Why do some people struggle? Charlie answered there are many reasons. Economic is one, but the biggest is the death of religion and the death of Christianity in the West. In America, as the country has become less churched, so many social ills rise. The UK is unfortunately far less churched than America.
Archie studies the evolution of behavior, in particular sexual romantic behavior. If you track all the different hunter-gatherer cultures that we can study and track how agriculture shapes things, you see the ecological conditions really reliably predict the prevalence of monogamy, certain marriage systems, and what we refer to as attachment issues. They seem to be an ecological calibration to an environment.
In environments that are more unstable, it's less optimal for an individual to grow up with a tendency to rely on long-term pair bonds. There's a mismatch with the modern world. Coming back to industrialization, there are so many people who raise kids as absent parents. Daycare is massively linked to attachment issues. This causes people to struggle to bond long-term. Coming back to the genetic part, research shows that especially vasopressin mutations and oxytocin mutations mean some people really just do not have the proclivity for monogamy.
It's not realistic that everyone can just stick themselves into a moralistic view. We're in this weird position where absent parenthood, essentially absent attention during childhood, means that a huge number of people develop insecure attachment, which in Archie's opinion is essentially the brain's way of going, "My parents didn't give me much attention. I can't really rely on long-term pair bonds as an optimal strategy. So I'm going to develop a strategy where I grow up and I struggle to trust people. I'm more cautious and actually I'm more oriented towards short-term mating."
If the System Was So Stable, Why Did It Collapse?
When discussing what brings stability, Archie pointed out that we had what you might consider stability in the previous century, and then it became unstable. He asked: if moral absolutism like it was in the first half of the 20th century was so well imposed, why didn't it work out? Why did people reject it? It seems like a system which collapses under the weight of its own success.
Charlie keeps answering the question in terms of how, in terms of mechanism, but that doesn't answer the question of why these attitudes appeared in the first place. If this system was so stable, wouldn't you expect that everyone's happy? Wouldn't you expect that these attitudes wouldn't appear?
Charlie blamed modern feminism, calling it one of the worst decisions, not just worst ideas ever, largely from Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," which acted as if every woman in a monogamous marriage in the states is in some sort of tyrannical environment. This has led to the women of the West being the most miserable, most depressed, most suicidal, most prescription drug-addicted cohort on the planet. Charlie believes we need to appropriately challenge feminism and tell young women that it's okay, in fact it's courageous, to get married and have children again.
Breaking the Cycle: Hard Times Create Strong Men
This is Archie's key issue with Charlie's argument. In the comments on the debate video, you see this quote repeated: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men." We need to figure out how to stop this cycle.
Archie agrees with this observation. When you have comfort, at the neurobiological level, serotonin goes up. It puts a brake on dopamine. It reduces your motivation to go out in the world and engage and pursue and build and create and seek things outside of yourself. It also causes rigidity of the ego because what triggers neuroplasticity is difficult resistance, discomfort, stressful salience, epinephrine, and acetylcholine.
When you live in a comfortable world where you're not challenged, you don't learn to change your mind. You aren't receiving the signals that cause you to change your mind that trigger neuroplasticity. Because the brain is designed to look for threat, we start to look for problems where they don't exist. Then we start to tear down the very systems that we built in the first place.
But the problem is conservatives keep saying we need to get back to the good old days where this moral absolute order, this transcendent moral order as Charlie calls it, was widespread. That's how it was great. But we're not acknowledging the cycle. Once we get back there, then prosperity will cause degeneracy again. That system obviously is not the optimal solution because it collapses under the weight of its own success.
What Is the Solution?
The next question is naturally: what is Archie's solution? He acknowledges it's going to be complicated and wants to explore this in depth. He plans to make more videos about society, about this mismatch between the way our brains evolved and modern society. He thinks it's a great lens for looking at social issues, unique and neither left-wing nor right-wing on the political compass.
How to Have Productive Debates
Archie had quite a lot of people coming up to him afterwards asking how he managed to have such a good discussion with Charlie, noting it really seemed like Charlie listened to him. First, you need to emphasize common ground. Archie did this right from the get-go, saying he agrees with Charlie that monogamy is mostly better for society. He emphasized multiple times that they agree, that he's aware of all this data. The reframing was: I'm not attacking your worldview, I just disagree with how to get there. So it's no longer an attack, it's working together to find a better solution.
Second, you need to absolutely quell any emotional reactivity. If you start bringing emotions into arguments, it makes someone defensive. It weakens your view and suddenly starts to appeal to other people in the audience with the emotions that you have. If you're getting cheers from the audience, it's because you're appealing to them, not your opponent. That means you're not debating properly.
Finally, begin with some humor and self-deprecation. Archie joked about his man bun and said he was a little bit nervous. This was a really tense event. The room was overwhelmingly against him. Making a joke, disarming the room like this says to your opponent: I'm not here to attack you. I'm here to learn from you. Let's have a fun discussion. Let's see how we can both make the world a better place. That's what we both want.
Looking Forward
Archie is left-leaning, slightly left of center and very libertarian on the political compass. He doesn't like how liberals, especially in the US and the UK, are approaching political discourse. It seems to be: we're totally right, you're totally wrong, we're going to attack you as a character. There's no effort to really bridge the gap and find common ground.
If you have two aggressive, loud, opposing ideologies, neither are correct. In reality, truth is complicated, difficult, nuanced, and in the middle somewhere. That's why he's a centrist at heart. He thinks everyone should be a centrist.
Archie runs a startup where he researches human behavior and teaches founders and ambitious people how to become really productive, how to unlock the optimal potential of their brain. In addition, he explores academically how evolutionary mismatch can explain lots of social issues. For his channel, he plans to do more commentary looking at how science and evolution can explain social issues and how that can provide an important lens.
