Amygdala Hijack, Rabbit Style

Breitbart lays it out:

“You are not the people, you are the past,” was the message to German critics of mass immigration on Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF’s NEO MAGAZIN ROYALE television programme.

The message was delivered in a video featuring a multi-ethnic crowd of disabled, gay and transgender people, as well as a Muslim woman wearing a face veil and a man wearing traditional Saudi headgear, all telling a crowd of Germans that they are “not Germany”.

This is purely rabbit argument techniques, specifically out-grouping. Notice how there is no logic or reason. It is a show of force, that in rabbits would immediately elicit a wave of emotional terror. The assertion that this is the future is an attempt to prevent your amygdala from short-circuiting the hijack by thinking as time goes on, conditions will change, so you have a way to avoid the consequences. The leftist is saying, this massive group of people who look different from you disapprove of you, and they are the nation around you, and that is only growing more true, so if you fight against this massive force you’ll lose for sure and there is no way out.

It isn’t laying out logical reasons supporting immigration, or explaining why they support it. It doesn’t want debate or discussion. It wants to trigger an emotional response, and avert any short circuiting of it through perceptual modifications. It hopes it can bully everyone into supporting leftism by threatening to make them unpopular with the group (and thus costing them business or mating opportunities relative to the other rabbits).

View this from the perspective of the rabbit who came up with it and understand, he mulled ideas over in his brain looking for the one which would terrify him, were he us. This was his worst nightmare, so he tried to inflict it on us. The best answer for a conservative to give is not a logical appeal, or even an explanation of how you will kill him. It is a short film showing normal Germans ridiculing him and his band of defectives, and pointing out how he will be reviled by the population for destroying the nation, and laughed at as a tool for the rest of his life, and that is only getting worse as time plays out. You need to make him feel like his leftist activism will cost him resources and mating opportunities relative to the other rabbits, for the rest of his life, and you need to do it with a sense of inevitability.

When I was a little kid, I would read a lot. Often I would do it outside, on the back deck. While I did it I would spread some birdseed on a table next to me and while I read, the birds I viewed as friends would zip in to the table next to me, take seeds, and zip back out to eat them in a bush nearby. I actually could tell the different bluejays, titmice, and chickadees apart, and even could identify different skull structures among them – as if they were faces. Most people would never believe titmice have face structures as different as John Stewart and Oliver Platt, but they do.

I remember one nuthatch. He would get on the pile, and if another bird came around before he found the sunflower seed he wanted, he would immediately fluff up his body to twice its size, extend his wings fully and raise them upward at 45 degree angles, arch his head back to point his beak vertically upward, and then he would rock slowly from side to side, to look bigger and threatening. The first time I saw him do it, my eyes went wide. “What the fuck is he doing?!!!,” I though to myself. Then he deflated, pulled in his wings, grabbed a seed and took off. Sparrows would leave when he did it, but Blue Jays would cautiously move in, take what they wanted, and leave.

In reality the nuthatch was powerless. He never fought. But still, he put up an impressive display, and so long as there was plenty of seed, and no other bird cared enough to fight him, he could claim victory.

Leftists are exactly the same. Their goal in arguing is not to be right, by some objective measure of truth. Their goal is to try and appear as if they will exact a steep cost, and hope everyone will side with them to avoid it. They are just like that nuthatch. They look silly and they are utterly powerless, but so long as times are peaceful and everybody has enough satiation that fighting would be a silly waste of time, they get what they want.

Now however resources are beginning to constrict, and people are beginning to view fighting as a productive way to resolve their differences. Suddenly their “diverse band of citizens” looks more like a motley band of comically deformed misfits, of a sort so rare that you never see any yourself.

As always, we are just waiting on the Apocalypse. After a few years of that, it will be interesting for anthropologists to look back on what will appear bizarrely ridiculous appeals by the left, to join their movement of failure. I can’t imagine how strange all of this bizarreness will look after K has returned in earnest.