r/K Selection, Early America, Libertarianism, and the Future Evolution of Man

AcThinker asked in the comments how r/K played into the formation of America.

One critical aspect of r/K is that people grow uncomfortable if they are exhibiting one psychology, but are living in the opposite environment. r’s do not like living in a K-environment, nor do K’s like living in an r environment. So the environment is what molded the psychology, but one result is that the psychology is only comfortable in the environment. People try to rectify this discomfort in a few ways. Some get involved politically, and try to structure their government in the model of their respective ideology. Others move to areas where the environment more closely mirrors their reproductive strategy.

When it comes to the formation of early America, what you saw was humans migrating from England, to a very harsh environment, where support from civilization was quite sparse, and populations were not densely packed together. One early colony at Roanoke actually disappeared entirely and nobody is sure what happened to it. Indians were often not welcoming, people were quite sparsely populated, and camps had to be protected.

I view the early migration from England to America as similar to what we might see today if humans were to make Mars into a new frontier. Imagine today a harsh environment began to be colonized. It wouldn’t be a utopia and you would have to struggle mightily to survive, but you would be left alone and could limit your interactions with fellow citizens and governing structures if you wanted to, allowing you to do what you wanted. Who would migrate toward that combination of harshness and cost, to enjoy the freedom and liberty of reduced population densities?

In r/K Selection there is a third model of behavior. It is the psychology that arises when individuals are spread out to the point they do not regularly encounter others. Individuals in the field refer to r/K’s density dependence, and the break down in it as populations think out. One primary hallmark of this third psychology is a breakdown in the reflexive desire to compete seen in K-strategists, or to avoid competition in r-strategists. If they rarely encounter others, the constant reflex for competition (K) or competition-aversion (r) that marks r/K morphs into a hybridized desire to pacifistically avoid conflict, unless fighting is necessary in which case to you savage your enemy as brutally as possible. In humans, this psychology appears closely linked to libertarianism, and the example which best illustrates it is the Grizzly bear. If a Grizzly Bear reflexively fought every Grizzly he saw, he would spend a lot of time fighting Grizzlies he could have let be. Likewise, if he ran from every challenge, he would be chased constantly.

Where you find this psychology in humans, they will often be armed and aggressive if threatened, yet strangely non-judgmental and pacifistic if left alone. They don’t care about out-grouping the weirdo, though they will emphasize functionality themselves. They don’t like groups (or authority) ganging up on anyone, and reject group-conformity, even if the group considers them one of its own. Self-sufficiency will be important to them, and they will have a propensity to know how everything around them works, so they can fix it themselves if need be. They don’t care to rely on others for anything, and they have a burning desire to be able to do whatever they want, with no external interference, even as they have a burning desire to not interfere in anyone else’s life themselves.

Those first colonizers set out for an environment which more closely matched their innate reproductive strategy’s ideal environment than the monarchy. Having arrived and survived, they structured the governments of the new world to exhibit their own libertarian, Grizzly Bear psychology, and this attracted more r/K breakdown psychologies from the Old World.

As time went on, some r’s came to live in America’s cities and enjoy the bounty libertarianism created. However the primary allure of America, the primary difference between England and America, was freedom – and the potential for limited interaction between individuals and government. In this case, the libertarians in Europe had an option to render their environment congruent with their psychology by migrating, and those small numbers fled Europe for the new continent.

Early America was unique in that the initial low population densities combined with the hardships of survival, and attracted psychologies unusually obsessed with freedom. The freedom those psychologies created acted as a further attractant and distilled these strange, independent, freedom-loving souls out of first Britain, and then Europe, condensing them all in one place in fairly high density. The result was the formation of a governmental structure and nation so imbued with that nature that is has survived as a free society even in the presence of the copious r-strategist liberal morons which infest this nation today.

Imagine if we could purchase gravitational drives and Mr Fusion powerplants at the local hardware store, and weld capsules that would take us to Mars, where the freshly terraformed, food-less, government-less planet awaited, these psychologies would be packing up right now with seeds, guns, ammo, livestock, and whatever else they could fit into their capsules to escape the r-selected utopias we’re all living in now. If you landed there, not many of those folk would want a government with lots of regulations and red tape, or a government-funded welfare state.

Unfortunately the r/K breakdown psychology of libertarianism is doomed in the short term. Where it congregates in great numbers, greatness follows, a glut ensues, and then it is inevitably diluted by the explosion of r-strategist rabbits. Lacking the drive to police its own ranks aggressively and purge the r’s who want everyone controlled, and the K’s who desire group-conformity in pursuit of success, libertarianism just can’t maintain its own purity as the success accumulates, and population densities grow. In leaving everyone else alone, they seal their own fate, since humans in dense populations will always go r or K, depending on resource availability.

I suspect that will change with the advent of cheap space travel, and the eventual ability of individuals to spread out, remain mobile, and self-sort in space. But until then, with all of us mired geographically, the one option in the political world everyone should be able to agree on will remain the minority strategy that only a precious few will embrace.