Claim. Against the Communist claim that humans are products of their environment, UT holds that humans are subjects and rulers of the environment: the environment can only modify the ‘changed individual image’ (acquired character), not the unchanging core individual image with which one is endowed at birth.
Elaboration. Lee opens this section by adjudicating the Mendel-Morgan vs. Lysenko dispute (C. Individual Image of the Individual Truth Being). T. D. Lysenko claimed (via vernalization experiments transforming autumn into spring wheat) that living characteristics change with environment and dismissed Mendelian genetics as metaphysics. Stalin endorsed Lysenkoism; Mendelian scholars were ostracized in the USSR. Later experimental work abroad refuted Lysenko and reinstated Mendel-Morgan. Lee treats this as a case study of ideology corrupting science: Lysenkoism was ‘fabricated under the banner of the Soviet government’ to justify materialist dialectic.
The constructive UT position: every being is a unity of identity-maintaining and developmental aspects. The individual image corresponds genetically to inherited hereditary traits (the unchanging essential aspect). Through give and receive with the environment, part of the individual image undergoes change — this ‘changed individual image’ corresponds to acquired character. So environment is real but secondary.
Lee extends this to political philosophy. Communism claims Lenin could only have been produced by the specific circumstances of Tsarist Russia. UT inverts: Lenin ‘who was endowed at birth with an outstanding ability, appeared when the conditions inside and outside the country matured, and he led Russia to the Communist revolution, bringing the environment under control.’ The leader is subject, not product; environment provides occasion, not causation.
The argument is structural in UT’s anti-Marxist project: if humans are environmental products, dignity and moral responsibility evaporate; if humans are subjects with God-given individual images, leadership and moral agency are real. Critics from sociology will note that the dichotomy is too clean — gene-environment interaction is bidirectional and the ‘unchanging core’ is empirically elusive.
See also. ut-individual-image-as-individuated-universal-image, individuality-grounded-in-divine-individual-image, private-ownership-justified-by-individual-image-and-purpose-for-whole