To the long list of degradations the people of Venezuela have to suffer because of their awful socialist government, you can now add dumpster diving. The Associated Press reports that people desperate for food have now turned to rooting through the garbage for meals:
Until recently, Julio Noguera worked at a bakery. Now he spends his evenings searching through the garbage for food.
“I come here looking for food because if I didn’t, I’d starve to death,” Noguera said as he sorted through a pile of moldy potatoes. “With things like they are, no one helps anyone and no one gives away meals.”
Across town, unemployed people converge every dusk at a trash heap on a downtown Caracas sidewalk to pick through rotten fruit and vegetables tossed out by nearby shops. They are frequently joined by small business owners, college students and pensioners – people who consider themselves middle class even though their living standards have long ago been pulverized by triple-digit inflation, food shortages and a collapsing currency…
Nearly half of Venezuelans say they can no longer afford to eat three meals a day, according to a recent poll by the local firm Venebarometro. The poll surveyed 1,200 adults at their homes the first week in April and had a margin of error of plus or minus of about 2 percentage points.
If you give a drug addict nearly limitless dopamine, they gradually lose their tolerance for adversity, lose their drive to do anything but acquire more dopamine, and lose their moral footing to their addiction.
What these people are undergoing is the opposite. Their endogenous dopamine is plummeting. Their brains are becoming inured to hardship. Their drive to do anything to relieve the angst is growing. Their amygdala is developing the ability to create angst, and in so doing, is developing the drive to act. Tolerance, acceptance, peace, and embrace of diversity will become mush less likely, while at the same time, braining somebody over the last moldy potato becomes more likely. The extent of this effect will vary among populations, but you will see the change in every human population to some degree.
Tolerance, the key catchphrase of the left, is the real enemy. Mankind as a whole is inherently noble and moral. When you hear a cry for tolerance, it is invariably tolerance for immorality and degradation of man’s noble spirit.
The brains and the epigenetic profiles of the populace in Venezuela will now begin the process of changing in the exact opposite way the brains and epigenetic profiles in the US have changed over the last sixty years. Amygdale will grow. Tolerance and acceptance will diminish, and what will inevitably emerge from that will be a nobler version of mankind.
[…] The Downsides Of K-selection – Venezuela […]
Most of us look at Venezuela as a cautionary tale. Why do I think that Obama and cronies look at it wistfully thinking “if only”?
“Mankind as a whole is inherently noble and moral.”
I’d quibble with this point, only because I think you overlooked an interesting avenue re: r/K. Pardon the disorganized thoughts, I’m writing this in a hurry and still thinking it through.
A pessimist, e.g. a traditional Christian, looks at us and sees “fallen man” – that human nature is inherently base and immoral, and it’s only through effort and grace that we can become otherwise. An optimist (Christian or otherwise) looks at us and thinks that Man is inherently good, even capable of perfection, but is corrupted by the imperfect world he has created around him.
What r/K suggests to me is that neither is quite right. Mankind is what it is, and the natural and human environments bring out the r/K behavioral traits differently in different people, based on their personal experiences and drives and their biological/mental/epigenetic/other idiosyncrasies. This leads to ongoing competition between the two camps, and the lessons learned by each inform what each camp considers conducive to their preferred mode – what each thinks is good and what each thinks is evil.
As K, what we think of as noble and moral reflect accumulated lessons about integrity, honesty, respecting property, industry, courage, a sense of disgust, protectiveness, orderliness, posterity, etc. accumulated and abstracted from millennia of experience. These traits and behaviors are so obviously right to us that we universalize them, seeing them not as refined knowledge about how man best relates to the physical and social worlds around him, but as aspects of the natural world itself – inherent elements of mankind and his environment.
But this very blog provides daily examples that these traits are not in fact universal to all mankind…that is, what we regard as noble and moral, the r-strategists do not. It’s not just one-off outliers here and there who diverge from what we would consider “inherently noble and moral”, but seemingly half the population. Yet they too would claim that their r-traits are noble and moral, and inherent to mankind.
I think you’re on to something with that line, but I balk at saying it’s inherent in mankind rather than tied to the individual’s understanding of and acknowledgement of the nature of reality. What is noble and moral reflects what is true. As a K myself, my bias compels me to see K traits as “true” in the sense of the best approximation of the larger reality we only perceive incompletely, and I can’t help but see the r perspective as an incoherent mess of rationalizations and ad-hoc explanations for why their map of the world is so wildly inconsistent with this imperfectly perceived reality.