Xenophobia and Fear

The Atlantic tries the classic rabbit tactic of linking competitiveness and fear:

Pregnant women in their first trimester, as it turns out, also exhibit more ethnocentric and xenophobic attitudes than those further along in their pregnancies. That’s a trend researchers have found across studies and across borders: The more vulnerable we feel to disease, the more likely we are to want to build a proverbial wall (and make Mexico pay for it!). One early study by Schaller and others found that people who are more worried about getting sick are more likely to associate foreign groups with danger and have more hostile attitudes toward foreign-immigrant groups. In another experiment, Canadians who were shown images of infectious diseases were less likely to support immigrants from exotic-seeming countries, such as Mongolia, than were those who saw images of other types of threats, like car accidents.

The findings have held up across cultures. Over the course of several studies, Murray and Schaller have found that countries that suffered a greater prevalence of diseases like malaria and leprosy were also more likely to be collectivist and conformist, as measured by things like personality variation among the country’s citizens and the number of left-handed people. (In some more traditional cultures, naturally left-handed kids are forced to train themselves to become right-handed.) The two researchers have also found that people in more disease-addled countries are less likely to be extroverted or open to new experiences. If people would just behave traditionally, act in unison, and eschew strangers, the behavioral immune system’s thinking seems to be, maybe they wouldn’t catch diphtheria.

Could a subconscious fear of disease be part of what’s prompting Trump supporters to cheer his plan to ban Muslims and Mexicans?

I want to attack liberals for trying to link these things with fear. To me, it feels as if it is a clear case of the liberal trying to make more competitive psychologies sound cowardly to the passing observer, unlike the brave liberal who proudly lets his wife, his family, and his nation be cuckolded by savage foreigners, as he sits in the corner watching without all that cowardly fear.

But I suspect that my initial feelings about the situation are mistaken. I suspect our larger amygdalae are not just better at discerning danger, and motivating us to oppose it. I suspect that our more complex amygdalae apply a similarly more complex suite of feelings to our brain to motivate us in a more complex variety of ways – and the liberal brain is completely unable to even begin to understand any of it.

It has often been said, liberals are sheep with only two speeds – graze and stampede. That liberal amygdala tends to either be coddled by ignorance, obliviousness, or outright denial into a state of blissful narcosis, or it is in epic panic mode, with no ability to discern nuance. The more liberal you go, the more the radical Muslim ISIS follower is a fine bloke to have a beer with, while a brief talk with Milo has them dropping like flies from mental breakdowns. The amygdala of a liberal is either at a panic level of zero, or redlining just above ten as it sparks and smokes into meltdown.

K-strategists are different. K-strategists analyze circumstances, and receive from their amygdalae a more complex motivational force. Like any human, K-strategists can feel utter panic, and feel driven by their amygdala to seek a pathway to escape – liberals understand that just fine.

A K-strategist may also feel a temporal fear-like-aversion which they know exists only temporarily, motivating them to execute a momentary tactical retreat, in preparation for a ruthless counter-attack. That is more of an intellectual, “don’t do that” aversion feeling, than what a liberal would describe as fear. It is like seeing a hot stove and not feeling fear, but knowing not to touch it. I don’t think liberals understand that one at all, judging by the easily-avoidable, stupid things they do which any idiot could see are going to hurt later.

The K-strategist may also feel anger, even feeling driven to die on the tip of a sword if necessary to stymie some enemy – a motivational force which I suspect could not be explained to a liberal any more than I could explain to you what another color beyond the visible spectrum looked like. You know what red, orange, green, blue and purple look like? You know how they are all different from one another? Picture another color just like them, but just as different from them as they are from each other – a color you have never seen. Liberals just don’t fearlessly die for their causes – they lack the emotional motivator. It is an emotional color they can’t imagine, having never seen it. It is a color beyond graze, and stampede. Kind of like stampede, only in reverse, turned around 180 degrees, and motivated by something completely different.

K-strategists can even feel love, and it will mix in the amygdala to create a mixed drive which will leave them motivated to die for that. The military man who jumps on a hand grenade can’t really see a description of his emotional drive reduced to the fear we see liberals castigate us for, or anger at any individual. It is an amygdala-applied cognitive force which I suspect you could never explain to a Bill Clinton. To him it is a color, just like red, but different from any other color he has ever seen. It isn’t stampede, or graze, or even stampede in reverse and turned around – it is like flying straight upward, for a totally different reason than motivated any of the other actions.

So when a liberal sees a K-strategist do something, and says, “They do that because they are afraid,” I think they are just looking at all the emotional colors they have ever seen, namely blissful ignorance and utter panic, and trying to liken the behavior they see to some emotional color which they are familiar with. If it isn’t consistent with bliss, it must be fear.

More and more, I think living within a liberal brain is one of the worst curses life could inflict upon you. From the lack of richness in one’s emotional life, to needing therapy after hearing Milo speak for a few minutes, it just seems as if liberalism is a living nightmare which liberals would really want to wake up from, if only they knew how nice it is to not be afflicted with the amygdala-deficiency underlying their malady.

Unfortunately for them, conservative thought processes are a cognitive color they have never seen.