Lots of talk lately about civil war:
However, something has changed. You can feel it in the air. Our nation has clearly never been this divided since the Civil War. A lot of people noticed it after the last election, but the truth is that these divisions have been deepening for decades, and they’re just now reaching a very noticeable breaking point. That’s obvious enough when you look at how the left and the right have been going at each other. It used to be a war of words, but it’s turning into something very dark.
Consider what happened last week in Berkeley after Trump supporters and counter protesters clashed for the third time. 21 people were arrested and 11 were injured (that we know of), six of who had to be taken to the hospital. At least one person was stabbed. The police confiscated confiscated knives, stun guns, and poles. One Trump supporter admitted to being surrounded, pepper sprayed, and beaten with sticks by a mob of “protesters.”
But wait, that’s not the dark part. After these groups clashed, the leftist protesters took to Reddit and admitted that they lost this particular battle (I can’t believe I’m using the word “battle” to describe it), and that it was time for them to attain more combat training and better weapons, including firearms.
Do you see what’s going on here? Conservative demonstrations, which used to be placid affairs (remember the Tea Party protests?) are now turning violent as conservatives grow tired of restraining themselves, and are no longer afraid to hit back. Liberal demonstrators are responding by ratcheting up the level of force that they’re going to bring to the next street battle. It’s a tit for tat that keeps escalating, and I shudder to think of where it’s going to end up.
This may not be hyperbole. There is an increasing aspect of the left which seems wholly unable to tolerate any K-selected attitudes exhibited by others. There are those in the comments saying that this can be averted if everyone will make an effort to listen to the other side, but I think they are wrong.
I think part of the problem may come from being in a wealthy country. Normally r-strategists would be designed to migrate outward, but in a nation such as the US, there is no wealthier nation to migrate to. So the r-strategists are stuck, trapped as K-selection closes in. Since they are designed to be driven mad by K-selection until they flee, and since they cannot flee, the result is something which is essentially ever-increasing mental insanity.
I do not believe any nation ever unites its r’s and K’s. They are the lions and lambs, not designed to unite. Rather, nations unite when their r-strategists are consigned to such a minority that should anyone in the nation notice them, they would immediately be destroyed.
After 9/11 the nation united. But it was not because we embraced our r-strategists. Rather, it was because when somebody said our chickens had come home to roost, the nation turned upon them. The events on 9/11 did not so much unite, as it turned everyone overwhelmingly K, and left the r-strategists so outnumbered they had to remain silent out of fear.
Similarly, we were united during and after WWII, but not because the communists and the capitalists decided we could all agree to disagree. We were united because the people, Tailgunner Joe, and even the Hollywood establishment decided that if someone didn’t like capitalism, they could find a way to support themselves outside of our capitalist system. The blacklist actually united a heavily K-ified country by leaving the left in fear.
In short, r-strategists cannot be united with others. They can only be either destroyed, or they can fill enough mass graves to kill all their enemies and make everyone left submit before them. They will never live in peace alongside their fellow Americans. As we try to live in peace alongside them today, you see what happens. If we even gather someplace to talk they will descend on it to try to disperse us with violence. The fact we never raided a Bernie rally, or threw explosive devices outside a speech by Elizabeth Warren means nothing to them. They violently demand subservience of our peaceful people, as they call us fascist.
The reason I think Civil War may be likely is two fold. One, the r-strategists will engage in violence in proportion with the degree to which a society has gone r. If a society is completely K-ified, the r’s will be completely peaceful. If the society has gone completely r, then it should prepare for the mass graves to begin filling up, first from violence, then from shortage.
The second reason I think this path may be leading to civil war is that I am not sure any society has gone as r-selected as we have. I do not think anyone saw “Caitlyn Jenners” in the French Revolution, let alone had them being hailed by the media for posing naked in some magazine shoot as they pined for a “boy toy” to play sugar mommy to. This is a period of psychological r-selection, probably facilitated by our massive technology-fueled dopamine overload, the likes of which history has never seen. If the rise of r causes a proportional level of mortality, and we already have had mass mortality events we cannot imagine under lesser periods of r without the trannies, what awaits us today?
Given the degree of r-selection, and the fact that it seems directly proportional to how much violence the left will produce, this may be the biggest bloodletting in all of history. And that ignores the amount of diversity the r-strategists have imported which will produce even more conflict once the free-resource spigot closes.
Possibly the only hope would be for a major threat to emerge and K-ify us, to hold us over until the cycle completes its normal path, returning us to a period of resource shortage and unpleasantness designed to re-establish the K-selected psychology in our species in sufficient quantity. Whether that will be a resurgence of the Cold War, an eruption of a World War, the arrival of a pandemic, or some other mass tragedy, embrace it when it comes, for however bad it is, it may protect us from something much worse.
Spread r/K Theory, because this decline needs to hit rock bottom
