Elevators, Guns, and r/K Selection

Dave Cydell asks an excellent question in the comments:

Excuse this simpleton’s simple observation , but I read in your Haidt article that a person’s fear of elevators can be turned around step by step by step by step by step . Yet Czech president President Milos Zeman’s advocacy for gun control evaporated quickly as he suddenly advocated for more guns in the hands of more people, a 180degree change in cause . Did he trade his fears slowly or quickly?

This is a great question. The answer was, these were two different means of eliminating a phobia.

For those who didn’t read the earlier article, Haidt spoke of how to desensitize a person with an elevator phobia. First you show them the outside of the building, and make them wait until their panic, produced by their amygdala, subsides. Then you walk them inside into the entryway, and show them the elevator, and make them wait until their fear again subsides. Then you have them get in the elevator, but keep the doors open, until their fear subsides, and so on, until they are actually able to take a ride in an elevator, without significant fear.

That is one method of desensitization, which relies on the property of the amygdala whereby it weakens its aversive stimulus with time and consistent exposure. In essence, your amygdala can normalize stress, and then ignore it, if the stress is constant and unyielding for long periods of time. Just as a wristwatch, worn constantly ceases to be felt, so too can your mind learn to accept stress as normal, and not worthy of notice, although the mechanism is slightly different.

Milton Erikson had another method to desensitize. He distracted the amygdala with a greater fear. In a famous example, a patient who was afraid of elevators was very uncomfortable with women. So Milton arranged for the man to get in an elevator with him and a young girl Milton had prepared. As soon as the elevator door closed, she began telling the man he was cute, asking for a kiss, and placing her hands on him as she leaned in. The man, flustered, became more focused on that than the elevator ride.

When the doors opened and the men stepped out, Erikson pointed out that he had just taken an elevator ride, and not grown panicked over the ride, and from that point forward the man was cured. Now knowing Erikson, there was probably some hypnotic suggestion and other mind-molding going on before and after the ride, but you get the idea. From that point forward, when the man got on an elevator he thought of the girl, and her absence made the elevator ride comparatively minor, and unworthy of worry.

The amygdala focuses on threat, and given a small threat, it will panic. Given a bigger threat it will ignore the small threat. If escaping the big threat requires embracing the small threat, the small threat will not only be acceptable – it will be embraceable.

When K comes, it changes the magnitude of threats, and your amygdala sees that. When the only threat is that your neighbor has a gun, rabbits will go apoplectic over that, because it is the only threat they see, and as such, it absorbs their amygdala. Once the threat of Barbarians sacking your neighborhood and raping your wives appears, suddenly that gun in your neighbor’s hands appears completely different.

This is a good example of how the perception of the mind can be altered by the environment, making the exact same basic facts (a reasonable neighbor having a gun in his possession) appear wholly different. The brain’s computer actually changes it’s decision algorithm, producing completely opposite responses, based on what it is focused upon.

Politics is the exact same thing writ large, and none of it is a mistake or a quirk. It is the complex system that is perfectly designed to navigate the world of r/K Selection.