Lots of disease in the news recently, and it highlights how people should factor disease into their catastrophe planning, perhaps even more than economic or civil collapse. Have enough food, medicine, and other supplies to bed down for four to six months or so, as well as protective and sanitizing gear, should you need to go out.
Of course historically, disease is a major K-stimulus. (There is even a germ theory of politics which asserts that conservatism is an adaptation to disease specifically, instead of an adaptation to the harsh realities of all kinds that emerge in shortage, including disease).
I suspect a pandemic will produce a K-shift on this go around even before an economic/civil collapse, whether Ebola makes the jump to pandemic here or it ends up being something else, and it will happen in the next decade. The four horsemen do tend to travel together, and when they arrive, a K-psychology is all that will remain after they leave.
But why would disease tend to accompany the K-shift, such as the plague arriving after the Medieval Warming Period ended? People tend to view disease as a static entity, but that is not the case. Diseases are dynamic, changing, adaptable entities – they tend to adapt to the host they infect, as they advance through the population. There is a reason pandemics will accompany resource limitations, and begin to emerge as resource availability begins to diminish. If resources are free, then the host population will tend to be strong and resistant, and diseases which enter the population will not get far, nor will they have much opportunity to adapt before they flame out. As a result, their adaptation will be limited, as will their effects, so long as everyone has plenty of good, nutritious rations to keep their immune systems strong.
As resources grow scarce however, those at the bottom of the economic ladder will find malnutrition set in, and this will diminish resistance significantly. (It would not surprise me if there was also an epigenetic component to this, throttling immunity during resource excess to limit undue autoimmune damage, and creating a coincidental immune-compromised-refractory-period at the beginning of a resource shortage, before amping up immunity to compensate for the immuno-compromising effects of malnutrition in subsequent generations.)
Regardless of the mechanism, as resources begin to grow short, a population will grow immuno-compromised, and disease will travel farther into the population for longer, infect more people, run a little longer in each person, and acquire much more opportunity to adapt. As the disease moves, only the fastest, most effective mutations, most capable of bypassing immune defenses and spreading easily, are selected for with each transmission. Eventually, given much more opportunity to adapt to the human host in the weakened malnourished population, that more-adapted pathogen will have the muscle to move in on more nourished and robust populations, and then you have real trouble.
In addition, resource limitation can force populations to enter niches they have little experience in, and which as a result, contain pathogens to which they are immunologically naive. In the case of Ebola, you will have Africans eating more bushmeat of questionable quality. Once the economic collapse happens for real, and all aid to Africa ends, that effect will increase dramatically, and I would expect lots of unusual diseases to begin to emerge in earnest, and tear through the malnourished populations there. If you’re well fed, you walk right by that dead and rotted bat cadaver. But if you’re hungry enough that you will die if you don’t eat, you stop, pick it up, and dig right in. On a Continental scale, especially in a place like Africa, nothing good will come of that. Add in globalism, quick air travel, and a plethora of malnourished humans all over the globe, and it is a recipe for disaster on a scale we can only imagine.
Another effect of the switch from r to K is geographical translocation. r’s will instinctually want to move to areas with freer resource availability, and this will further stir the pot. Already we see the spread of Enterovirus D68 throughout areas where floods of illegal children have been sent by the Obama administration. You can imagine what will happen when resources really crash, new pathogens arise, and suddenly there is a flood of third-world immigrants fleeing starvation in their home countries.
Of course, if a real pandemic hits on top of all of this, it will either initially crush the US healthcare system outright, or it will not. If it should not, then everyone elsewhere in the world who is infected, will begin a mad dash to get to the US to avail themselves of our free, top-quality healthcare. That will only make things worse.
The effects of this on political ideology can not be imagined now. If people begin to lose children, parents, siblings, friends, and loved ones because out-of-control liberals stupidly welcomed foreigners into this country, in complete and willful ignorance of reality, (and castigated anyone who objected to that with cries of racism), I would expect a sizable portion of the population will want blood. They will become imbued with a very deep amygdala pathway, associating liberals with rage, hatred, and vengeance, which once in place, will only be strengthened by each subsequent similar stimulation by liberal stupidity.
The liberal position will not be helped by the fact that should such a pandemic arise, it will savage the most poor, the most densely populated, those with little disgust and/or aberrant or promiscuous sexual tastes, and the least reality-aware. Liberals are not designed to flourish under any conditions but free resource availability, and no danger or exposure to reality. Limit resources or add some dangerous reality, and they will begin to drop like flies.
That homosexual guy who goes to the bathouse daily for group sex with people he doesn’t know, loves the densely populated city, and refuses to let the pandemic drive him to “irrational fear,” will be the first to drop, and any first-degree contact of his will likely not last long either. The coming pandemic will savage liberalism in a very material sense – have no doubt. Whatever liberals manage to survive will be a much reviled minority, and I would not be surprised to see the remaining majority, livid over the avoidable deaths of loved ones, decide to treat them with a harshness we currently can only imagine as a relic of a barbaric past. One thing about death, familiarity breeds comfort with it.
Today the amygdala strain of violence is greater than enduring the (at present) negligible damage to survivability that liberals are inflicting through their stupidity. Let resources snap, and the damage liberals do grow to include the deaths of loved ones, to maximize the amygdala strain of allowing liberals to remain, and let death become so ever present that the idea of violence becomes much less novel and straining, and it is only common logic where that will lead. Once violence is a relative amygdala relief rather than a relative strain, people will clamor to it just as strongly as they avoid it now. Once those first few violent outbursts remove all vestige of strain and actually condition the individual to feel relief, things will get very wild. These are the emotional currents which drive the type of history that until now, we could only vaguely picture as we read about it. I suspect it is coming in a way we cannot imagine, in large part because of how far our massive debt spending has swung the pendulum to r.
If conservatives are wise, they will begin now to attach to liberalism a sense that it is bringing disaster upon us through its stupid refusal to face reality, while acknowledging that we are not seeing consequences now, but asserting that we will one day. Explain the threat liberal policy poses to us, our loved ones, and our nation. If that neural connection can be made now in the brains of Americans before the storm hits, then when disaster comes, the populace will be primed to blame liberalism, drive it from power, and begin the process of effectively confronting reality through supporting conservatism. Only that will save lives in a crisis.
The bottom line is, God wants a certain model of human on this planet. He wants humans who recognize and adapt to reality, no matter how painful it is to do so. Liberals are just not designed to survive the unpleasant realities which are coming. How ironic they will bring that reality on themselves, through their own stupidity.
I wonder how is it that althrough africa has alot of those diseases arise on that continent that the africans are still an r-selected people.
When life is simple (i.e not technologically advanced) food is more plentiful after a collapse, leading to immediate r selection processes.
It’s only when resources are few that K selection occurs.
Yeah, Africa is a big argument against the germ theory, which I think is a much smaller part of the answer than r/K.
The problem in Africa is partly what you are seeing today. It is an unstable environment, where mass mortality wipes back a population, be it from massive drought/famine, or disease. That is almost like massive predation. For K to take hold, there must be a constant, moderated mortality, and it must be competitive, pitting individuals against each other for resources, not external an unrelated to competitiveness between individuals. It must kill back the least able, at a slow, constant rate. That is much different from wiping out 90% of a population every twenty years, and then providing a bloom of free resources to the survivors, so the fastest life histories can fill the void in the carrying capacity the best.
That said, I think another problem favoring r in Africa is foreign aid. Free resources corrupt, at the neurological level. You look at black families in America, circa 1900, and you see two parents, strong families, a sense of shared community, and a sense of morals and purpose. Their world was rough, and they had that constant stress over how to get food, and compete in the group, and as part of the group. That produces K. You look at the portions of black America today where welfare has been helicoptered in, and you see the change. It is a deep, pervasive change that permeates the very psychology of the culture. Baby daddy’s who aren’t around, single moms, degradation of responsibility, women, and marriage, reduced rule adherence, etc, etc.
Then find the blacks in America today who follow the K-strategist path, and you will have found areas and people that didn’t get or take free resources – where people worked hard for what they had. Resource availability actually split the population, both through self-selection and corruption, producing two models of human. That stress, of thinking if you don’t bust your hump you won’t eat, alters those brains, and produces K. It is very different from not caring because you know that food and a home is coming no matter what. That stress alters everything from amygdala development to the epigenetic markers on the genome.
But yes, I do believe Africa is a big argument against the comprehensiveness of the germ theory. IMO, resource availability is the big force that has molded our ideological natures, with any effect of germs on ideology a minor byproduct of the rise in illness during shortage.
Nailed it again! Yesterday talking with another K, I said those very words. “If my family get’s hurt by the inaction’s of libs, I will have nothing else to lose”. He said he had heard that many times already. I feel a landslide coming in November. I hope that Congress does something fast with it.
Thanks Banger. I hope for a landslide too, but we need to also recognize reality. I hate to say it, but as I walk this path and see the weirdness around me, I am beginning to suspect that things in our government may not work exactly as we think. As time goes on, I expect voting to determine the results of our elections less and less – a problem which will only be solved through the end result of the conditions which produced it.
The cyclic nature of r/K inserts a fascinating nature to this. r selection leads to collapse, producing a K selecting environment. K selection leads to a resource rich environment, leading to r selection and the cycle restarting.
How to prevent r selection as resource inevitably grows abundant due to high K… the best answers to this each cycle lead to the dominant race / civilisation.
It is fascinating. Our anti-commie streak after WWII did it for us, but then created the mess we’re in now by doing it so well. Now we get to watch it play out right in front of us, in a way most of our kind have to imagine from history books.
Shouldn’t the K-selected people sit back and consider the impact of abundant resources on r/K selection and adjust their production accordingly focusing even more on quality at the expense of quantity?
Yes, intellectually, if the goal was to foster K. However they won’t, because the goal is gene reproduction, and the force driving it isn’t intellectual, but rather emotional. The strategy chosen arises independent of any thought or conscious awareness in the majority. Over the ages nature has selected for a mechanism there which just goes r as resource become free, because the numbers have coldly favored that. So the resources produce dopamine which dulls the amygdala, which in turn produces r-slides, even as we know that is bad.
The cycle can’t really be fought, because once the amygdala is active, and driving production, it won’t want to shut down until resources are so free that things have gone r, and by then, you are on your way to collapse. Just as K’s would be better off ignoring their amygdala and cutting resources, r’s would be better served being harsh, cutting the welfarites off, and cutting government and taxes to fuel the economy, so as to continue copious resource production. But they can’t because they lack the amygdala-drive, so they collapse it all and produce K. It is very ironic, when you grasp it, but it is just how it works.
The US is the brightest nation in the world, and we had the whole world on a string. We knew borrowing and spending beyond our means was a path to disaster. But we did it all anyway, and now it will all come down, just as it has so many times in the past. It isn’t logical – it’s emotional, and driven so strongly that at the group level, logic seems totally out of the picture, and the whole illogical path is predictable.
Even despite the tragic quality, there is a strange elegance to it – maximizing numbers and diversity before bringing the guillotine down to select for only the best, and then repeating the process, all driven by an unconscious force with a power far beyond that of simple logic.
How then can a K-selection be made permanent considering those factors? Is going out to space the only way for K-selection to be permanent
I don’t really know where it goes in millions of years, but I suspect K’s will adapt to r’s by becoming less tolerant of them, and r’s will adapt to K’s by becoming even more scumbagish. I think both will tend to remain, because resources will wax and wane, and each is a viable strategy, excellent for its purpose.
As for space, I think that will promote libertarianism, in the form of small cells that go their own way, seeking to be left alone. It will mark a big split in human natures, and probably be the best option for K’s, should resources ever reach post-scarcity.
Merit-based resource allocation?
Y’mean capitalism, free markets, & limited government?