The rabbit is a social creature, because in r-selection, ability is not what gets mates – social success is. Since r-strategists are about producing quantity over quality, what will get an r-strategist mates is being able to get lots of other mates. Each prospective mate wants to get their genes into a child who will themselves have as many children as possible, so their genes will be spread farther than those of their peers. Like the chicken and the egg, it is a trait borne of circular logic. What gets mates? Social success. What is social success? Being able to get mates. Get one and you get the other. Get the other and you get the one.
As you follow the continuum from K-psychologies to r-psychologies, you will see this in the cognitive shift, from those who value success and ability on the K-side, to those on the r-side, who value social dominance and who almost loathe true success and ability as inferior in some way (perhaps due to such traits being wastes of time and effort that would be better spent mating and acquiring social dominance). As a result, as much as we want to succeed, or demonstrate our skill and ability in order to get mates, the r-strategist rabbits want to simply gain social status to get mates.
When John Scalzi claimed 50K unique visitors per day on his blog, it didn’t matter whether he had that accomplishment or not. What mattered from the rabbit perspective is if he could create that impression. As in all of rabbitry, the reality flows from the impression, which itself need not flow from any tangible reality. Scalzi claimed it, it was parroted in an article, people got the impression that he had social status, and as a result, social status flowed from the impression.
This offers the prospect of creating interesting brain hacks, if the K-strategist can train themselves to operate within the liberal cognitive framework. Presently Conservatives concern themselves with reality, and ignore social status. We assume that success is Thomas Edison, and not Kim Kardashian, and our arguments are formed around that assumption.
Instead, the Conservative should focus more on creating memes which socially diminish and denigrate liberals, making them appear impotent and inferior. Since to the leftist, reality flows from impression, and social dominance is all important, you must create memes which tie an anchor of inferiority and impotence to leftists, and let the reality flow from that.
As an example, what the rabbit meme Vox created does at its core is create an impression of inherent inability, unfitness, weakness, and social inferiority, and attach it cleverly to those who embrace the r-strategy of liberalism. Once those circumstances are created, and the meme’s permeation is great enough that the rabbit cannot escape it, it will prove amazingly unsettling to the rabbits, for whom impression is reality, and reality is impression. Here is a popular impression saying liberals are weak and impotent. Since to the rabbit truth is what other people think, if they self-identify as a liberal, then they will be accepting that people will think they are weak and impotent, and this will make them weak and impotent. (In many ways the rabbit’s perception is actually an accurate read of the reality in a r-selected world.)
At that point, a liberal brain will have only one pathway to alleviate the amygdala angst generated by the social damage it sees flowing from that meme – the rabbit can only tell itself that it isn’t a rabbit. To divorce itself from rabbitry, it must abandon every issue that is a part of the rabbit’s r-selected reproductive strategy, and then turn its back on the rest of the warren of rabbits.
If the triggering meme becomes popular enough, this will occur not only spontaneously, but subconsciously, and be experienced by the liberals as if an honest reassessment of reality. They will feel the same cognitive force which presently drives their stupidity, only it will drive them to a conclusion that happens to fit with reality – and one which will not destroy our nation and collapse our economies. As they see their change of heart better comport with reality, they will become even more certain of their non-rabbit status. Given the amygdala relief this will provide, you could end up with an even more ardent anti-rabbit ideologue than those conservatives who arrive at their ideological natures logically.
This can be accomplished with any meme that will lead people who encounter it to denigrate leftism. The only caveat is that, just as social status determines success among rabbits, so too will social permeation of the meme (not truthfulness) determine its effect. The meme must permeate the culture to the point that the leftist will find themselves constantly exposed to it, unable to escape it, and unable to deny it through a cognitive shielding mechanism like denial. Although truth plus permeation can produce success, truth without permeation will not. Among the rabbits, where you want the meme to take hold, permeation is more essential than truth, because a truthful meme which does not permeate can, like any other triggering reality the leftist encounters, be easily denied.
Ronald Reagan managed to make contemplation of liberalism triggering through constant denigration of liberals with pithy and humorous observations of their stupidity. Once the meme caught on that liberals were stupid, and that people laughed at liberals, liberals abandoned liberalism and shunned the label.
In such a case, the leftist will actually find contemplation of their status as a leftist so “triggering” that they will have no choice but to begin to see themselves as something else. The leftist is the only psychology I am aware of which can be driven to logic through the manipulation of illogical urges.
The only danger is if the triggering meme is too good. In the case of r/K it may be too powerful in this regard, and thus hamper its own effectiveness. Leftists who see it find it so triggering, that they can not mention it, even to denigrate it. Take all the hate directed at Vox on twitter, look at the attempts to sway John C Wright to the rabbit’s side, and then look to see if leftists ever even acknowledge r/K, despite its widespread permeation of the alt-right. Not a word. There is a reason for that.
It doesn’t mean r/K won’t have its effect. It just means that it will take a little longer, because the cultural permeation required will need to occur entirely on the conservative side, before it will enter the culture enough to impact our political debate. Once it does, however, watch out. It will change everything.
