Philippines – A Case Study In K-shift

Rules are what r-strategist psychologies seek to forestall the onset of open competition. Open competition is what K-strategist psychologies seek to avoid the onset of rules designed to protect r-strategists. As the population shifts to K-psychologies, it favors open competition:

President-elect Rodrigo Duterte said Tuesday that corrupt journalists were legitimate targets of assassination, as he amped up his controversial anti-crime crusade with offers of rewards for killing drug traffickers.

Duterte won this month’s elections by a landslide largely due to an explosive law-and-order platform in which he pledged to end crime within six months by killing tens of thousands of suspected criminals…

“Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch,” Duterte said when asked how he would address the problem of media killings in the Philippines after a reporter was shot dead in Manila last week…

Duterte raised the case of Jun Pala, a journalist and politician who was murdered in Davao in 2003. Gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead Pala, who was a vocal critic of Duterte. His murder has never been solved.

“If you are an upright journalist, nothing will happen to you,” said Duterte, who has ruled Davao as mayor for most of the past two decades and is accused of links to vigilante death squads.

“The example here is Pala. I do not want to diminish his memory but he was a rotten son of a bitch. He deserved it.”

This guy is going to stack the dead bodies like cordwood. Bounties on criminals, assassinations of journalists, and who knows what else. And he not only doesn’t hide it, he revels in it. This is a hallmark of a shift in the populace’s psychology.

As people’s amygdalae grow stressed by K-selection, they begin to exhibit different preferences in the style of their government, as you can see here.

In r-selection, people who have no amygdala stimulation will seek amygdala-shielding rules and conventions, and seek leaders who avoid amygdala stimulation. They want to maintain their copacetic state, ideally having the government structured to stifle al conflict, avoid any mortality or destruction, and maintain the peacefulness for them. They want peacemakers to defuse all irritations.

In K-selection the amygdala stimulation is already there and it is unavoidable, so they seek people who will take aggressive action designed to deal with the irritations, usually by ignoring the rules which r-strategists use to constrain conflict and aggression. They want bulldozers to destroy the irritations.

The shift toward K is not without danger, mainly because true K-strategists tend to not seek political leadership. Often what you will get is an r-strategist who pretends to be a K-strategist and then feels empowered to kill their enemies to make their amygdala irritation go away.

I don’t worry about that too much. My feeling is you cannot stifle K. Even if an r-strategist takes the reins, the system is designed to see K triumph eventually, as K-strategists rise up to challenge the r-strategists, and take the reins. Given that the K is inherently more adapted to K, they are inherently more likely to win any such conflict.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the political inclinations of Filipinos, as Duarte cuts a swath of death and destruction through their nation. Talk about mortal salience stimuli. All of that, on top of the existing shift toward K, and the coming collapse should make for a very instructive tutorial on the nature of a K-shift.