As Apocalypse Approaches, The r/K Divide Increases

One example:

Let’s note, here, that over the past three presidential elections, a majority of gun owners have supported Republican candidates. But there was a time when gun owners weren’t so overwhelmingly Republican. In 1976, 50 percent of Republicans, 48 percent of independents, and 45 percent of Democrats owned a gun. That changed in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2000, 30 percent of independents and only 27 percent of Democrats reported having a gun in the home. That drop continued among Democrats; by 2016, only 23 percent owned guns.

Meanwhile, Republican gun ownership has stayed fairly constant. In 2012, 54 percent of Republicans owned guns. That’s nearly the same figure reported in 1973.

Now with significantly fewer Democrat and independent gun owners and the near majority of Republicans, the disparity between gun and non-gun owners’ choice for presidential candidates is expanding.

I think this occurs because it is how the mechanisms were designed by evolution.

As K approaches, K-amygdalae see the stress, develop, and adapt to it. As that happens, the K’s in a society begin to arm up, perceive threats more clearly, and get ready for a Mad Max-like existence.

If the migrant hypothesis is correct however, then rabbits are basically designed to flee to a wealthy foreign land when K finally hits. When they arrive in their new homeland, they are designed to bow down and capitulate, while being assiduously non-violent, and avoiding conflict at all costs, even by selling out their fellow migrants. So as K approaches, rabbits go hyper-r, and grow more conflict avoidant, more prone to betray their own, and more prone to exhibit the fleeing emotional motivators like anxiety, hatred for their own, depression, desire for the novel, etc.

In terms of the mechanism, I would assume sensitive amygdalae are even less capable of handling stress than normal, so they slip even deeper into denial, fantasy, and other cognitive band aids designed to temporarily alleviate the angst as K begins.

There is a limit to it, of course. I suspect after a couple of weeks of walking past piles of dead bodies in the streets every day on their way to work, and enduring five or six relatives being murdered, and being totally deprived of dopamine, that rabbit amygdala will finally be unable to do anything but adapt to harshness and become more K.

What this would point to is what I have long suspected. Our two political psychologies are on divergent paths. In the near future, partisanship, acrimony, anger, rage, hatred, and so on will only increase, until a major cataclysm like the Apocalypse goes down.

It is weird to think that if you create a boom in a nation and flood the populace with free resources, as began in the eighties through massive debt spending, you will trigger behavioral programs that will split the population into two factions that cannot get along, but here it is. No leader, no political idea can possibly reconcile these two psychologies, because this is how nature designed them.

Until the Apocalypse, we’re going to be a nation divided. The only question is whether a governmental collapse and/or civil war will make the fissures more permanent.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because everyone should understand why the big split is coming