Every so often I like to take opportunities to reiterate salient points that I think new readers who just arrived may have missed. This will be one of those posts. If you’ve been here a while, we’ll return to our regular programming shortly.
E. writes in a comment on this thread:
this morning, my world view has changed. An ex-Navy officer, I’ve always held the usual position that “if we torture their soldiers, then they will torture our soldiers.” It is incumbent on our (K-)honor, our ‘rule-observing,’ to fight them like gentlemen. THIS essay (esp. Trump’s quote) makes me wake up and see again that pilot being burned alive in a cage, and the thousands of beheadings and stonings and, and, and… (The gropings and sexual attacks on New Year’s in Germany are especially salient to me as a woman — I hope someone kidnaps that effing Merkel and drops her off in one of her “refugee camps” without her armed protectors!! (And I woke this morning thinking: the German PTB are claiming “this wasn’t refugees” assaulting hundreds of German women. No? Then whointhehell was it?! Native German men?!?!)
I was anti-waterboarding, because it IS torture… and I still (think I?) object to torture on the grounds of what it does to the torturer) and I’m having a little trouble giving up the “if we torture them, then they will torture our soldiers.” But that’s wrong. Whether or not we torture them, they will torture our people. We’re not protecting any of our valuable K-warriors (or our idiot bunny-civilians); it’s a remnant of the ‘we must be causing them to act this way’ bunny-propaganda that has been stuck in my brain.
E is being K-ified, and she sees the differences as they are emerging.
Increasingly I understand that what I was taught was good, was actually merely the r-selected emotional drives. That “good” emotion which we are taught to seek by the rabbits of education is made possible (and elicited within our brains) by our comfortable position in an r-selected world. This form of “good” is, in reality, good only so far as it makes you “feel” good – and it will only make you feel good when things are r.
It feels good to take a random guy who’s down on his luck and bring him into your house, feed him, clothe him, and get his life in order, so he can go out and enjoy life too. But it is an extravagance. You can only enjoy that “good” if you have the excess money – and the ability to endure him possibly robbing you blind.
That form of “good” feeling when helping an unknown random person only feels good because we are exhibiting the emotional framework of the r-strategist. By provisioning people down on their luck, you are avoiding conflict, which in times of r is a key aspect of the r-strategy.
In r-selection, when one bunny looks like he is about to fight, the other bunny gives him everything and runs away to another field of grass, where he has exactly what he had before, and he has avoided a costly conflict that was totally unnecessary. To facilitate that, nature makes the bunny look forward to the day they can give everything up to an interloper and run away. It is fun. They want to do it because it makes them feel good. The r-strategy’s urges are encoded as pleasure in the rabbit brain, not a grudging sacrifice or humiliating defeat. That “good” feeling is behavioral programming in your brain.
As a result of it, when one human is all screwed up and you have food to spare, you give him your excess food. Feeling good about it is your brain driving you to exhibit an r-strategy trait of conflict-avoidance. If you have the food, that is the strategy. The more rabbity you are, the better it feels.
The emotion isn’t logical. In reality, if you don’t know him, he may be down on his luck because he is a psycho – the type who will kill you and your family in your sleep – but you won’t think about that so much in the face of the free resources and goodvibes, unless you are a diehard K-strategist. Being nice to him is nice, but it is an extravagance that in K-selection can cull the niceness of such nice people from the world. Still, as you head toward r, the emotional programming doesn’t care, and it emerges unbidden.
Now notice how the psychology changes as K-selection enters the picture. If you had arduously scraped together just barely enough food for your family, you wouldn’t want to give it to an outsider. It is your hard work you’d be giving away to some stranger who hadn’t toiled himself. You would be irritated if he asked for it and you would be angry if someone else tried to force you to give it to him. Your work would have value. You would expect others would labor like you. That is the K-strategy’s emotional framework, and it will emerge unbidden once resources snap back. Among many, it already has.
Our leadership is another matter. Angela Merkel, as a rabbit, feels so good giving all these refugees everything, that like a junkie she is unable to contemplate facts which indicate she shouldn’t do it. She tells herself the rapes were an aberration. The crime is so rare it is immeasurable. All of the refugees are so nice. Nobody can prove it was migrants. Morals and decency demand she do it. I’m sure, if you force her to confront undeniable evidence showing that her addiction is bad, she will get angry – just like a junkie. She is a rabbitized emotional junkie, through and through, giving away Germany to the outsiders in preparation to run away to another Germany because she is programmed to as a rabbit. IT FEELS GOOD. Think about that.
I’m reminded of a scene from a Science Fiction TV Show. The protagonists created a sentient female android. She looked, acted, and even thought exactly like a human. She was programmed to infiltrate among the android enemy, travel to the android home-world, and then suddenly kill every android around, including herself, by disseminating a technical glitch among the central programming which ran all their bodies. One human, talking to the android before her insertion, said that he liked her, and felt bad that she had to die in a little while. She said gaily that she felt happy she was about to die, and then with a big excited smile she said something to the effect that, “It feels really good to me, to finally be about to fulfill the purpose I was designed for!” The moment all the other androids looked on quizzically as she detonated her software package, and killed everyone including herself, was pure bliss. She loved it.
For all practical purposes, Merkel is the same thing. She is designed to give everything away to the enemy, betray her own citizens who oppose it, and then abandon her country men as it all comes down – and do it with a dopamine-fueled smile. It feels good to fulfill her purpose, even if she doesn’t know what it is, and even if it kills everyone else. She is the human rabbit. It is what she does.
This is not a model of human emotionally designed for K-selection. K-selection isn’t even comprehensible to her. So thorough is the programming, she can’t contemplate that there isn’t another Germany to run to, or that resources might be limited. One million refugees, five million refugees – who cares? We must take them all!
She can’t imagine that when the resources snap back there will be a Civil War. She can’t even see that on her current path, she could (probably will) end up like every other leader who thought they could do anything – right up until they were pulled from a crashed car by a raging mob, killed in a medievally brutal fashion on the spot, and then hung from a lamp post because the sight of the mutilated body hanging was soothing to the mob’s overstressed amygdalae. There was a reason Hitler burned himself to a crisp in a bathtub full of gasoline. That was the sunny, flower-filled, happy Disney ending he wished for, compared to the other option. The other option is bearing down on Merkel, and she doesn’t even see it.
Similarly, in war, principles and morals are nice. It can make you feel good to say, “But I would never do that.” But if you lose your war and die, you take that goodness with you. That good feeling is, in reality, an emotional drive designed to produce the conflict-avoidance social-signaling of the r-strategy. It is a way of arguing to imaginary enemies, “I shouldn’t be hurt, even if we lose, because I do nice things and am a nice person.” Now, who would hurt such a nice person as yourself? Your good feeling adopting it is simply the emotional drives imbued within you by r. If the only drive motivating you were loyalty and a stalwart desire to eradicate evil, you wouldn’t give a fuck – everything would be on the table and you’d feel good using it. As with everything else in the r-strategy, where it is applied to K-selected war it will at best only weaken, and at worst it will fail.
The reality is that in this world, there are two forms of human. There are good people who bear good will toward their own and want their neighbors to be happy, and there are evil people who have a very strange, instinctual desire to see those around them mired in conflict and suffering. The dividing line is r/K, because it is the pack animals who have the love for their neighbors that is so strong they want their neighbor to be happy – badly enough to even jump on a grenade or take a bullet. You don’t see that in rabbits who need to avoid conflict at all cost – and who thrive when all others are mired in fights and misery as they run away laughing to other fields of grass.
As you get older, it is shocking how bifurcated the world is. If you are the kind of person who wants to be kind to others, even your enemies, then in war it behooves you to cut through your enemies like a fucking chainsaw, kill everyone as brutally as possible, and use whatever other means are at your disposal from torture, to razing villages, to hanging decapitated heads from your perimeter fence, to terrify your enemies into utter submission. Because as strange as it sounds, that is the only way your goodness will have any chance to make it into the next generation, since your enemies among the truly evil are already operating that way. Defeating evil must come first. Magnanimity is a distant second, if at all. A true moral compass, pointing to both loyalty and the success of good, demands no less – because less is willfully killing the good inside yourself through defeat, in a craven effort to save yourself after the defeat through the pre-defeat appeasement of showing kindness to enemies. As Trump would say, “What a loser!”
I reiterate all of this, because we are about to see it. We’re experiencing something very rare in mankind’s history. You can take tactical firearms courses until your trigger finger is one big callous. But you will never learn things as well as that vet who was actually shot at – the one who screwed up a couple of times, took his dings, and learned firsthand why you “don’t do that.” You think “don’t stick my head too far around that corner for too long.” His amygdala sees the bullets coming toward the corner before he looks, because he feels the one that nicked his cheek two years ago when he took too long a peek. Nothing can train you like that.
We grew up in r. We were taught to live by r-rules. We were inculcated with r-morals and r-emotions. And now, we are being thrown into K, where we initially will do everything wrong because we were trained to. We will learn these lessons best of all, because we will see firsthand how the r-strategy fails in times of K, and we will endure the consequences. Nothing will affect our emotional programming like being exposed to reality, and enduring the detriments which created the K-strategy in the first place.
A case in point. We have the knowledge that we shouldn’t let these Muslims in, and we should do whatever it takes to keep them out. We know it intellectually. It is as if we took the course. We’ve read what the Muslims did in the past when they invaded Europe. We know the history – it isn’t in debate. We even know, deep down, we should do something about the traitors who support the Muslims now – our instructor told us. We know bad will come from ignoring all of that. And yet we are letting it happen. We are the shooter who was taught in class not to look around that corner for more than an instantaneous peek. But if we hang around the corner for a sec, and can just ID that enemy position…
Put any Christian from the Crusades in Europe now, and he would be turning Merkel into a bloody smear on the wall, he’d have killed half the Muslims already, and the other half would be fleeing back to the Middle East. He would make Anders Breivik look like a pussy leftist sympathizer who lacked motivation. That Christian from the Crusades stuck his head around that corner too long and got nicked on the cheek. His daughter was seized and sent away as a sex slave so his village wouldn’t be razed, his wife was murdered, his kids grew up with no hope of ever attaining greatness as they were bled of jizya, and one son was executed for not bowing before an Imam. Do you wonder why he would insist on killing Merkel?
The lessons sit wholly differently in his brain. We’re not there. We still need to get the nicks, so we will understand just what is at stake and why we need to abandon the conflict-avoidant, r-moralized psychology we were imbued with since childhood. With time, and a few more Muslim-mob rape riots, a few more robberies, and a few more murders, we will get our nicks, and our psychologies will change to be more like the Crusader’s. At that point, God have mercy on the rabbits, because Lord knows a mob which thinks like that won’t.
Those of us with eyes open will probably learn more about r/K Theory, amygdala function, and the relation of all of it to these events, than any people in the history of mankind have ever learned. Nobody has ever gone into such a historical turn of events with a framework for understanding the biological mechanism which controls it. Nor has technology ever been so advanced as to record it, document it, and disseminate it so thoroughly.
At the end of this adventure, we will understand history, psychology, the rise and fall of governments and civilizations, and even mankind, better than anyone ever has. We’ll feel the initial quiet pause on everything at the collapse, as people try to process if this really could be real. We’ll probably suffer for a time in shortage, scrambling to figure out how to source food. We’ll know what it is to do whatever you have to in order to survive – from getting food to surviving crime. We’ll feel and hear the turbulence of unrest followed by the drumbeats of war, given the diversity in our cultures. We’ll watch the rise of movements. We’ll see the chaos of the mob. I believe we will even feel the joyous bliss of righteous retribution, and the exhilaration of emerging from dangerous times victorious. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, we will feel the warm glow of God’s love as we embark on the most magical of man’s endeavors – a spiritual, cultural, and intellectual Renaissance. I hope we can all see this adventure through to the end, but just seeing what we have seen so far is historic. Who knew how ridiculous society would get from free resources?
Whatever awaits us, it will be exhilarating.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
My mind is still reeling from this, your best post yet. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey, AC, do you think it’s possible for a r-slected mother to have a K-selected son? Because I’ve been pretty right-wing since I had a political ideology, and have only gotten more so in recent years. My mother, by contrast, is a pretty committed lefty who, when I recently pointed out the brutal facts of mass migration, called me un-compassionate. And racist. But she’s experienced far more resource restriction in her life than I have, and yet she’s still quite leftist. What’s up with this?
Tough to say. There is an early division in psychology, if researchers like Dweck are right. It is possible a very early childhood environmental experience has a strong effect in some instances.
Hey Calvin was your father more K? I mean women tend towards more liberal views then men. In my experience the subject of poltics matter less in the female social circle unless they are outright r, in which case they tend be more feminist or socialist. Men tend to be the ones that talk about the policies of each candidate in elections and debate. I had been told many times growing mainly by females (some of which I would put more K since their focus was on the family) to never talk about politics or religion at the table of another person house. If you think about the mother her worry is more focus of the social group. It is to keep the peace since they have to deal with the other parents and they know that it puts you at risk of losing friends. It makes sense, but to me it was the older males (manily the family or older friends of the family) that would ask me what I thought of an issues and be able to defend it with rational arguments.
Hey, AC, do you think it’s possible for an r-selected mother to have a K-selected son? Because, whereas I’ve been right-wing as long as I’ve had a political ideology, my mother is a liberal who’s recently doubled down on leftism. She’s experienced more resource restriction than I ever have, and she’s been married to one man since her 20’s, but her response to the brutal facts of mass migration was to call me a racist. And say that the migrants are mostly good people. Any idea what’s up?
I notice that the kids of narcissists tend to split. Some buckle under and never get their footing, following as narcissists themselves, others vow never to follow in those footsteps, and go the other way 100%.
A narcissist is an amygdala-stressor. I think they tend to either break the amygdala, or toughen it beyond the normal state. Did you have a solid warrior role model at some point? even a dog?
Though Mom is definitely a leftist, I wouldn’t exactly call her a narcissist. She’s been pretty generous to me and my sister our whole lives. By contrast, as a child, her family was poor. I grew up with a lot more luxury and free resources than she ever had, and I’m the right-winger of the family.
I was very close to my grandfather – her father, actually – from a young age. But that just raises more questions, because my mother was brought up in a two-parent household with a fairly masculine father who didn’t take shit from his wife. My own father is a far less masculine man, and he too shared in that benefit.
It seems to me that, for whatever reason, K-selection seems to have skipped a generation in my family. My parents are both squishy-soft leftists in stark contrast to their parents, whereas I’m a hard-core right winger. But, as I said, both of my parents experienced far poorer childhoods than my own – living in a trailer at some points – so where the contrast is coming from I haven’t a clue.
Sibling situation? Sometimes sibling relationships can form jealousy.
My parents are both materially more successful than their brothers, and older to boot. As to myself, my sister and I don’t get along, and she’s definitely a leftist.
As a rule, the envy is imbued in childhood. It is a young child who is repeatedly made jealous that the younger sibling gets more attention, or it is a dumb one who repeatedly envies that another is hailed by everyone as smart, or something else. During that early developmental period the brain adapts to do what it is called on to do, and does so very well. You can often spot a lot of things about an adult’s childhood, by contextualizing it in terms of what childhood environment favored the development of that programming and/or ability. Being older is common to the enviers, if the parents had a tendency to focus on the babies, and expect the other children to accept that the baby needs more attention than the more mature kids. Many do not accept that internally, and grow to envy the baby’s attention and status. As Christmases go by and the young one gets more expenditures than they do, and birthdays are a little brighter for the young one, and the young one is given more exemption from punishment because it is a child, and in fights the parent expects the older one to cut their younger child slack and be the mature one, etc, it adds up.
There is something else I am unclear on, and that is some spark that produces the initial trait of focusing externally on other’s, to the exclusion of one’s self. That is, why worry what a brother has, instead of worrying about how to get more yourself, and enjoying what you have. Some get the spark, and can’t focus on anything else but what their sibling has, while others never do, and can blissfully enjoy their own lot, never noticing what others around them have. Some older siblings actually grow protective of their baby siblings. I don’t know what the difference is.
You will notice this in adults. You can have a delicious meal delivered to two people, and one could get slightly less than another, enjoy it, and never notice. Another will freak out over the disparity, and be unable to enjoy everything, if they have a slightly smaller portion. One is focused on their own world and experience and thus can enjoy anything pleasurable even as others enjoy more pleasure. The other is externally focused on others, relative to themselves, to the point they cannot enjoy personal pleasure, if others have even marginally more. It is weird, and it seems to begin with a spark which some have, and others don’t.
[…] http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/k-ification-r-selection-and-where-reality-meets-the-rabbit… […]
“Defeating evil must come first. Magnanimity is a distant second, if at all. A true moral compass, pointing to both loyalty and the success of good, demands no less – because less is willfully killing the good inside yourself through defeat, in a craven effort to save yourself after the defeat through the pre-defeat appeasement of showing kindness to enemies.”
This made me think of two things: burning the ships (so that no retreat is possible), and committing a deliberate atrocity against an enemy (to so enrage them that no amount of “just-in-case” pre-appeasement will save you from their vengeance should they win). I’ve seen the latter in fiction but can’t recall where, and I’d bet it was not uncommon in Roman history.
“As you get older, it is shocking how bifurcated the world is. If you are the kind of person who wants to be kind to others, even your enemies, then in war it behooves you to cut through your enemies like a fucking chainsaw, kill everyone as brutally as possible, and use whatever other means are at your disposal from torture, to razing villages, to hanging decapitated heads from your perimeter fence, to terrify your enemies into utter submission”
That’s the Sherman/Dracula approach. And it has its time and its place, in 2nd and 3rd Generation War. It can work. Depending on what you want to hold and how, it’s also going to piss a certain percentage of people off. If you have enemies with resources, that will cost you. Will it cost you more, or less? Each calculation is individual and circumstantial. It depends on who your enemies are, and also who you are and the nature of your own appeal.
There are circumstances in which a brutal approach can become ineffective. Al-Qaeda in Iraq did just this in Anbar province. But the locals had another option nearby – and the Anbar Awakening wiped AQI out in revenge. The Islamists made a similar mistake in Mali, in part because their forces were a diverse mix of nationalities that had no inherent love for the Malian people.
In 4th Generation War, asymmetric commitment levels are an advantage, and the moral level of war matters. Too much brutality turns commitment levels symmetric, and doesn’t necessarily affect the population the way one hopes. On the other hand, there are insurgencies who have won with/by brutality. And we can see ISIS winning in Anbar now, with a lot of brutality.
With human beings, you always need to be seen to win. That’s a given. How you handle that display, and what it consists of, need to be thought through carefully.
If r/K wants to be maximally useful, it can become a framework for calibration and tactics (vid. your “flash mob mau-mauing the flak catchers idea). But brutality isn’t automatically K.
AC, I’m off topic again – sorry, approve or not, but it is “Feed the Blog with a question time” again.
I realize that a lot of what you focus on is practical, and you are not interested in establishing a grand theory of all human behavior, but more of a model that fits most of the evidence. So a question like I’m about to pose is off your usual blog posts.
But I was considering Israel especially after reading this http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/the_israeli_left_scrambles_in_the_wake_of_a_stunning_video.html and it got me thinking of rabbits in Israel. I mean there is a country that fiscally is pretty rabbity both in policy and finances (ie it has the money to be a rabbit, and not a wolf). But from a pressure sort of view, they are suffering all sorts of amygdala pressures from the violent front of things.
So what is your take on it? Is it going to become more like a wolf? In 1947 it certainly was. Or are there cultural barriers that make it harder for different cultures to adopt a wolf like attitude?
Again going into theory here, over practical a discussion could break out about how certain groups have favored genes for wolf and certain ones for rabbits based on the success in the past going back two or three thousand years, although I’ve seen elsewhere commentary that a genetic shift in a population through mating considerations can be moved rather fast, in as few as 5 generations if the pressure is mildly significant.
Anyhow, more wolf in Israel any time soon? they’ve been dealing with their own rabbits and invader ones for a longer time – at least since 1980, if not 1960’s.