There is an interesting aspect of the shift from K to r:
Carved from sharp volcanic rock and more than 700 years old, the stone formations can weigh upwards of 13 tons. Archaeologists have long wondered how these stone hats, which sit atop the heads of the famous Easter Island statues, were put into place with 13th-century technology…
Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, rises from the waves about 2,000 miles from Chile. The island’s famous statues have been studied by various teams of archaeologists and geologists since the 18th century. Previous studies determined that the statues are made of from one quarry on the island, while the hats come from a different quarry, seven miles away on the other side of the island…
“The best explanation for the transport of the pukao [hats] from the quarry is by rolling the raw material to the location of the moai [statues],” Carl P. Lipo, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, said in a statement. “Once at the moai, the pukao were rolled up large ramps to the top of a standing statue using a parbuckling technique.”
Parbuckling is an ancient and efficient technique for rolling cylindrical objects. The center of a long rope is fixed to the top of a ramp and the two trailing ends are wrapped around the cylinder to be moved. Workers atop the ramp then pull on the ropes to slowly roll the cylinder up.
The Easter Island technique likely involved a couple of extra steps, according to the research team. Once on top of the ramp, which was built adjacent to the statue, the hat was slowly rotated and tipped into place using wooden levers. The hat was also most likely modified before, during, and after the tipping process.
You are going to find things like this when you move from K to r. There is a drive people have, that is conditioned. But only the necessity of K conditions it. Once a society goes r, that drive will gradually fade.
So there will be windows immediately after the shift to r, where a K-drive to do something meaningful will cross with an r-level of resource availability, and the effect it will produce is grand sweeping efforts to produce something magnificent. Whether you are looking at things Like the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Moon Landings, or even these statues, highly r-societies that have been r forever will not just up and do them.
I view many of these things as markers of the societal peak, where K-greatness was temporarily given enough in terms of resources that it no longer needed to expend 100% of its struggle on survival, and it could then take its drive, and channel it into something for the eons.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because it too will last for eons
Mind-blowing hypothesis. Love it.
The hypothesis sounds nice, but I don’t think it fits with European history. When do you think did Europe turn r? Then look at Europe’s cathedrals. Some of them were built in the middle ages, many in the Renaissance.
Do you think Europe was r at that time?
.
Imagine today America underwent a series of famines, and then a plague swept through America, and killed all the r’s who were left. It took the welfarites and the ideological left who could nto see threat or plan ahead, and who had no disgust, and disappeared them all at once. It removed the r’s as it bombed the K’s who remained with mortal salience stimuli to exercise the amygdala.
What would be left were the threat-aware K’s with high disgust, and high living standards. And each of them had the resources of their r-family dumped in their lap, when the r’s died, and the welfarites were no longer draining the system of excess resources.
A world of K’s, heavily K-ified, and suddenly wealthy, which acted as the grease in the economic machine to get them all helping each other out and working together.
That is the famines following the Medieval Warming Period, which were rapidly followed on by the Plague. The Renaissance was exactly that. K’s laden with resources, who had extra energy beyond mere survival. Their K drive to act was poured into things beyond survival, and you see where it went.
That sounds a lot like the Skyscraper Index. Very interesting.