Relevant part of the article: “At the end of the 18th century, there were two great Western revolutions — the American and the French. Americans opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values. A quite different French version sought equality of result… They ended up not with a Bill of Rights and separation of powers, but instead with mass executions and Napoleonic tyranny.”
One psychology pines for the K-selected model of freedom and competition that arises under limited resource availability because that is what they are designed for – but they will tolerate the r-selected model as long as the costs are minimal. The other psychology pines for the conditions of r-selection – and is so terrified of the K-selected model that it will do anything to avoid it. r/K is everything, and viewing history through that lens can change your entire perspective.
Relevant part of the article: “Five Dallas County sheriff’s deputies who were ordered Wednesday to go inside the Dallas apartment where an Ebola patient stayed are now worried about their health…. Sgt. Chris Dyer, president of the association, said a lieutenant, sergeant and three deputies went inside the apartment to serve the containment warrant that asked the occupants not to leave. The deputies accompanied the county’s health director, Zachary Thompson, and its medical director, Christopher Perkins, to the apartment, Dyer said.”
I could see myself as a cop, told to enter the apartment, saying, “What are the chances it is Ebola?” After getting a fever, I could see myself never seeing that situation the same way again. That is amygdala development. Once that amygdala pathway is there, you will answer to it whenever similar situations arise. Thank God it turned out that the officer wasn’t infected.
Relevant part of the article, paraphrased: ‘Pedophilia is completely normal, and if your amygdala flags on it as aberrant, you need to punish yourself for being so intolerant and hurtful, so your amygdala will learn not to do that again.’
Relevant part of the article: “It had been a relatively quiet policy debate until the full-page ad appeared in Sunday’s local newspaper. “A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter,” it said. “Are you OK with that?”
The ad, placed by a socially conservative group in Minnesota, was meant to snap attention to a proposal to allow transgender students to play on teams based on their preferred gender rather than the sex assigned to them at birth.”
And that was the end of that proposal.
What you see in these last two articles is interesting. Leftists basically tell everyone, “Turn off your amygdala, or we will say you are a bad person.” If people follow their dictate (which they often will if resources are plentiful), the leftist is happy. However if the response is, “Kill the leftists for screwing with our amygdala!,” the leftist is given a choice between accepting the amygdala stimulating status quo, or being beaten and then drawn and quartered by an angry mob, which would be even more amygdala stimulating. The leftist will always choose the less amygdala stimulating option, and therein lies a political strategy.
Make opposition to your platform appear more amygdala stimulating than acceding to it, and you will be a successful K-leader. Here, by implying the leftists were trying to get men’s daughters molested sexually, pursuing that option became so worrisome to the leftist amygdalae that they just dropped the issue immediately. Very subtle point, but very important. As threats mount in the K-selecting future, the populace will become easier to trigger, leftists will walk on ever thinner eggshells, and leftist policy will be ever easier to thwart in this manner, if a wise leader can grasp that mechanism.
Relevant part: basically Socialist Bernie Sanders saying the middle class needs to fight against the billionaires.
Relevant part: Anti-gunners promising on Twitter to report any open carrier to police as a deranged man with a gun who is threatening people, so cops will show up and attack, while the leftist scurries down his hidey-hole.
That desire to get two people fighting and then hide is a very deeply imbued urge. It is borne of an attempt to make something which stimulates the leftist’s amygdala stimulate their enemy’s amygdala, combined with sheer cowardice making direct confrontation not an option. As with every other leftist tactic, the goal is an outcome which would terrify the leftist, were positions reversed, namely manly men coming to kill them.
From simple social out-grouping, to calling cops to a store in such a way that they might shoot a conservative, to out-right swatting, to deploying various other government agencies to harass and intimidate conservatives, leftists have a burning, innate desire to get K-strategists fighting each other, especially as things get crazy. It is not a coincidence and it is not an accident – it is a long-evolved strategy, and we should all expect to see a lot more of it in the next two decades. The obvious solution is to not fall for it, and instead focus on the leftist themselves as the source of the problem. Very quickly leftists would abandon that strategy.
There are two models of investing, just as there are two strategies to reproduce. One is amygdala-deficient, and one is amygdala-centric. Inherent to the amygdala-deficient model is a sense that resources will always be free, threat is to be denied and minimized as a means of avoidance, and one should gather the free resources as quickly as possible. It is generally lackadaisical in the face of threat, and prone to emphasize acquiring gains over protecting from losses. Blind to threats, it produces the very bubbles which feed it’s growth. The other model is prone to see a dangerous world, prioritize threat, become uneasy in its presence, and feel compelled to act to minimize the effects threat can have. Cautious and quick to protect itself, it produces the very collapses which feed it’s growth.
Since the amygdala can be set on edge by one thing, and it will affect how the amygdala handles another, it is little surprise that the current Ebola threat is causing a more threat-conscious investing strategy to emerge. If that continues, the stock market should begin to respond to all the threats which have accumulated lo these many years, which itself will become one big threat added into the mix, stimulating an already threat-conscious group of investors, as it makes them even more threat conscious. That’s a lot of threat.
