Amygdala, Fights, And Violations of Expectation

I was reading this funny article about Gavin McInnes wearing his Trump T-shirt around New York, and that led me to this article by Jared Taylor which detailed his chasing down a necklace thief, and the weird primal reactions that took over when he caught up to him:

It must have been because of the accumulated shame of all those times I had reproached myself for not catching the robber in Washington, but I was mad enough to kill this one. To my amazement, I heard myself raging at him, cursing him. It must have slowed me down, and it warned him I was after him, but I couldn’t help it. I tackled the man and he went face down. I turned him over and shouted, “What did you take?”

He then did something that saved him from a terrific beating. He went completely limp. He laid his head back on the sidewalk, stretched out his throat, put his hands up by his head, and opened them wide. He was holding a gold-colored necklace, which he let me take without the slightest resistance.

I have since marveled at this many times, but in that space of perhaps a second, all my fury drained out of me. His complete submission took the anger out of me like the air out of a balloon. An instant earlier, I had been ready to kill him, and I’m sure I would have beaten him bloody him if he had tried to fight me. But on his back and helpless, I didn’t know what to do with him any more.

I found it interesting, because amygdalae like to hum along at a certain speed. Too slow is apathy territory, and too high becomes startle/freeze territory, which has been likened in some pieces to a “reset.” Here, once caught the thief’s amygdala went into ultra-high-startle/freeze, and oddly the same muscles that were spasming in Hillary when she her amygdala was startled, locked up in the thief, pulling is head back and exposing his neck. Interesting how deeply these things are wired. You wonder if it is the exact same neurological mechanism in wolves.

Jared was another story. He was in mid-high amygdala, and ready to fight. The sudden limpness of his thief playing possum totally violated his expectation of a fight, and that threw his amygdala into a similar ultra-high-startle/freeze/reset by hyping the ACC with the error detection, so the shock it sent back to the amygdala was amped up. When he came out of the reset, it dropped the amygdala into low revs, because the threat was gone. He literally had no idea what to do for a moment and froze to reset, and when he reassessed the situation after the reset, he had no drive to beat the helpless guy. Sadly, he isn’t a sadistic sociopath, so the thief got away unscathed.

Three points. One, note in the piece, the usefulness of playing the “What-if.” Nobody can react immediately, on the fly, to a highly stressful situation effectively. You react well because your amygdala notes some pattern, and triggers a trained response. Play what-ifs with yourself all the time. What if a guy came in here and started shooting? Where would I take cover? Which spot would give me the best position to return fire? What if a carjacker came up on my vehicle at 11 o’clock? How would I draw? Would I hit the gas? Turn into him? Turn away? Roll over to the side as I drove forward so I wasn’t visible through the window? What if a guy grabs my phone and runs? Those visualized scenarios will be priceless if something happens.

Two, thieves are r-strategists, looking for free resources. That is why they stalk the herd for the weakest prey. As a kid in high school, I viewed fighting someone smaller than me as profoundly dishonorable, to the point I would not do it no matter what a kid did, and I had nothing but contempt for anyone who would. The thief looks not only for smaller targets, but the elderly, and the female, and the sick. He will screw with anyone he can get away with screwing.

Third, Jared shouldn’t have been doing this half assed. That is a trait which will be culled out of K-strategists fast once real K-selection hits. First, he should have decided if it was worth it, based on the assumption he would kill the guy. If he wanted the thrill or experience, and that was worth the headache of explaining the dead body, then he could do it, but he would have to try to kill the guy. If what was stolen was worth it, then similarly, go do it. But the second you enter that realm, assume the opponent will try to kill you, and you have to kill him first, before he has the chance. Don’t be nice, get knocked out by chance, get stomped while you are unconscious, and spend the rest of your life slurring your speech and walking funny.

At the least, Jared should have tried to take an arm or a leg and broken it immediately, even before the thief could surrender, and violence should have continued on from there unabated until there was no more threat. If he ran down twenty thieves and just held them down, and let them roll over to talk to them, one of those times the possum would roll over and come up with a knife he had hidden on himself, and drive it into Jared’s stomach. If Jared survived, he would learn not to show mercy anymore. At the very least hobble him immediately, and then end the threat.

That is why cops, whose every interaction with a violent criminal can be pure K-selection, don’t screw around. They have that K-lesson trained into them, and they don’t take risks.

The real K’s I knew as a kid were scary, like the worst Biker-Gang-Sociopath scary, and they were that way for a reason. I have no doubt in a similar situation they would have quickly tried to kill that guy, in a way they could claim self defense. (Actually they would have killed him and disappeared, but this is a different age, with all the surveillance and forensics. You won’t get away clean today, especially in a city, so don’t even try. Either you end up arrested, or blackmailed by the surveillance machine, and neither is particularly acceptable.)

Life and death, and the application of violence isn’t a level in a video game you can get a second chance at. If you aren’t totally cool with killing your opponent, let it go. It won’t be that important. K-selection won’t be about winning, it will be about surviving.

And when that time comes you do enter life or death, have foremost in your mind that it may be you or him. Make it him fast, and have no mercy, because K-strategists who survive don’t gamble with their lives.