How Minor Strategies Can Emerge Within the r/K Paradigm (Where Libertarianism Fits In)

It is well accepted that r/K Theory will not always yield an ideal strategy for every environment. Subtle nuances of an environment can make certain mixtures of r and K-strategies advantageous in that particular case, and produce slightly different psychological qualities. This is why after r/K is taught in college, those who go further into the discipline are taught to further subdivide strategies into life history traits, specific to a species. One of the most well characterized examples of deviation from r/K is the fact that r/K is density dependent.

If you have a lot of individuals, crammed together in an environment which can support a high density, these individuals will interact, and you will get r or K, depending upon the need to compete for those resources, and exhibit practical fitness relative to peers, or the need to avoid such practical competition and demonstrate a simple ability to attract more mates.

If however, the population exists in very low density, and the land cannot support a high density population, things will change, since individuals will spread out and interact less. Since resources will be limited, individuals will need to be able to fight, and be aggressive/competitive. However, One will need to travel over a large territory to find sufficient food. So even though resources are limited most of the time, and such individuals will be aggressive when necessary, they will never be able to mass into a group, because the group would not have enough resources in their territory to support all of them. This will produce a more individualistic, less group-centric psychology, which seeks to be left alone, but will still be willing to fight with others, when necessary.

In such a model, mating can also become less competitive, since a potential parent may not have an enormous number of potential suitors to select among. This will make mating more promiscuous, and less selective. Carried to an extreme, parenting may even tend to shift in the direction of a single parenting model, simply because a mother and father would require too much food. A single mom may have enough food left over in the territory she covers to also provision her offspring, whereas if the offspring are raised in a territory which is already supporting two parents, she may not. Disgust reflexes might also diminish in this environment, since a spread-out population would suffer disease transmission less than a densely packed population.

If you look at this minor strategy you will notice two things. First, it would only be present in a small number of individuals in the human population, relative to r and K, since r and K would rapidly explode anywhere the environment provided lots of resources, with this cohort probably existing at the margins, colonizing harsh areas with little resource availability. Second, this model would seem to describe the modern Libertarian.

HBD Chick runs a brilliant site examining how in-breeding may have produced the modern Libertarian. The idea she is promoting is that if you inbreed enormously, people tend to become very tribal, supporting relatives, while being wholly untrusting of outsiders, since their inbred group ends up sharing a lot of genes. As a result, an individual favoring the members of their in-group, would be favoring the continuance of many genes they themselves carry – just they would be favoring them in closely related, inbred relatives. It tends to produce tribalism. But if you moderate the inbreeding effect, you may get an individual who just doesn’t trust outsiders, and wants to go their own way, but in whom there is less tribalism. If you follow her work, you will find yourself agreeing with her premise again and again, and blown away by the clever ways she shows how the data supports her premise.

However although she explains how such a trait would arise, unless it is adaptive, it will not remain, since it will be culled. Here, I suspect the Libertarian psychology may have persisted once moderate inbreeding produced it because it was adaptive to harsh environments, which would not support large numbers of humans. There may have been a feed forward effect as well, whereby a harsh environment, which could only support a limited number of people, created a moderate inbreeding effect, which enhanced the Libertarian psychology.

I view the spread of human populations like a dammed stream, filling a mountain valley with water. As we spread out, r’s (Liberals) probably headed into areas of rich resource availability. They avoided fighting and killing each other, mated freely, and raised children quickly in single parented families. As populations increased rapidly in those areas and resources became exhausted, K’s (Conservatives) began to predominate, competing with each other, mating carefully, and rearing high-quality offspring carefully in two parent families, and the r’s moved on. This was akin to how the water from the stream would first spread into all low-lying areas of the valley, here akin to resource-rich, easily survivable, and uninhabited areas of the world.

As time went on, K’s remained put with their groups, and slugged it out competitively, while some individuals began to spread laterally, into harsher areas with sparse resources, which as a result, did not favor r. These individuals ended up akin to the water which moved up the valley walls, after the stream filled all the low-lying areas. They reached areas which were more difficult to survive in, and lived there in smaller densities, where individuals were free from group-centric social constraints, since groups were either small or non-existent – and relatively unnecessary to survive.

Today, Libertarians can’t grasp why r’s want to control K’s with government, or why K’s oppose things like indecency in media, or single parenting, promiscuity in others. The Libertarians are just designed to focus on their own survival, and leave others alone, and they can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t do the same. To their psychology, it is illogical, and the root of a lot of problems which don’t need to exist.

Nevertheless, since people periodically ask me how this relates to Libertarianism, I just want to point out the flowing. If you look at r/K in nature, among wild animals, you will see descriptions of minor variants of strategy, and some of them could be construed as being an individualistic psychology, designed to leave others alone. It would be less reliant on urges to control others, or to produce group functionality by punishing deviations from group-centric, pro-sociality-producing social mores and values. It would probably include diminished disgust, more sexual liberation (or at least tolerance of it), and less of a desire to interact with (and control) others.

Although all of this almost certainly has some sort of genetic root, I get the impression from my readings that a lot of ideology is also adaptation to environmental cues. In short, although we humans have genetic political predispositions, we have also evolved genetically to be highly adaptable to environmental conditions. Perhaps suddenly fluctuating resource availabilities, sudden periods of war and peace, and sudden shifts in population characteristics culled our populations over the eons, only leaving behind those who had adapted effectively on the fly. Libertarians do tend to exist in areas with few other people and low population densities, which does not surprise me.

I suspect I get the question so much because Libertarians are extraordinarily mechanistic and logical in their mindsets. This may be due to their freedom from r/K and their strategy’s history of having to understand and solve difficult problems alone, in order to survive their harsh environments. As a result, they see the r/K material innately, and understanding it, immediately wonder why they are different. I know that the reason I have seen this is probably my deeply imbued Libertarian/hyper-logical instincts.

The short answer for those who wonder why they are Libertarian is that they are just the Grizzly Bears of the political world, as opposed to the K-type wolves, and the r-type bunny rabbits. Libertarians want to go their own way and do their own thing, and if someone pushes them around, they are willing to kill them for their freedom. There is probably even a lesson there, in the origins of the American ideal embodied at our founding.