Some hope that the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and others last Wednesday will lead to more civility in politics. It’s clear that the attack was politically motivated — the Democratic shooter even carried a hit list of Republicans. The political viciousness has been everywhere.
While some will blame the violence on the grotesque picture of Kathy Griffin holding the President’s severed head or a play where the president is being stabbed to death, this Sunday Jill Abramson, the former chief editor of the New York Times, told CNN that it was “President Trump and the congressional leadership on the Republican side [who] are extremely divisive.”
But all these discussions miss something more fundamental that is driving all this, and, unfortunately, the viciousness isn’t likely to abate.
One reason that previous generations didn’t treat their presidents with similar levels of hated is because so much is at stake today. As government has grown, so too have the stakes…
Two baseball teams playing in the seventh game of the World Series are probably going to play a lot harder than two teams competing in August with no chance of making the playoffs. In the same way, as the size and scope of the federal government increases, interest groups will spend more on elections in an effort to influence the levers of government.
If federal spending still amounted to two percent to three percent of GDP — as it did a century ago — people likely wouldn’t care as passionately about election outcomes.
This theory misses a couple of things. First, spending was more under Reagan than it was under LBJ, yet LBJ had Hippies, r-ified by the fifties boom, bombing Police stations. Meanwhile Reagan, in a nation K-ified by Carter, had very little leftist violence.
Second, this fails to account for the strange SJW phenomenon, the obsession with importing foreigners as a proxy political force, or the cyclical nature of these things. It doesn’t even explain why the right and left cannot get along in the first place.
Yes there is more at stake, but there have been periods with less at stake and more acrimony, and there have been periods with more at stake and less acrimony.
What is really happening is our populations have been assaulted with free resources, and the weaker contingent of our people, predisposed by biology to the r-selected reproductive strategy, have gone massively r-selected, causing a consequent massive divergence between them and the remaining K-selected individuals who were not as corrupted. That shift in psychology is what has created this vicious rift between these r and K-selected mindsets, which now have split so much that they just cannot get along.
No other explanation makes nearly as much sense as simply understanding r/K Theory, which is why one day everyone will see politics in terms of r/K Selection Theory.
I was debating r/K with a liberal acquaintance. He pointed out that it is well known for there to be an inverse relationship between GDP (which he considers would mean more resources) and fertility rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
I wasn’t aware of the relationship before, so I didn’t have much to offer as a response. My guesses would be contraception being more readily available in more developed countries, or perhaps r/K may be relative depending on the race of the people (although this one would be very difficult to explain).
Resources and amygdala atrophy actually creates a desire to not rear, IMO, which jibes with r in r/K where parents don’t want to rear. In monkeys with amygdala damage, the mothers abandon their babies, so rearing is driven by amydgala-development. Even Muslims, in this plentiful world with limited conflict compared to the past, are seeing declining birthrates.
I cannot “feel” the mechanism through visualization myself, but I suspect having kids can seem like a big change. If you have lived your life as Paris Hilton, and everything is wonderful now, the change is intimidating and overwhelms the easily overwhelmed amygdala. How many kids would want to have a younger kid they had to sacrifice for and tend to all the time?
But if you came home from the trenches of WWII, then raising a few kids seems like nothing, and the upside of family swings the balance.
But I see the decline in birth rates as an outgrowth of the same reasons why liberals tend to have more abortions and use birth control more. They don’t want kids, and have limited tolerance for the idea of being forced to rear them. The idea of the sacrifice is just overwhelming.
So the key is that the urge to be promiscuous is separate from the willingness to rear.
It seems like the existence of studies indicating liberals having higher sex drives, or are at least more promiscuous (higher notch counts), may help back up the claim that rabbits have more of an urge to breed frivolously. I’m unsure if fatherlessness and high notch count is something that is common in Niger, so this might appear contradictory, if they are more K. (My personal belief is their race evolved in a warmer region, and are more r relative to other races, despite being more K relative to more developed parts of Africa. I may be completely wrong about this though.)
Amygdala underdevelopment seems to also be correlated with promiscuity. There is also that allele of a gene that’s been associated with gambling and addiction, possibly found more commonly in liberals. It’s likely this allele may also increase promiscuity.
[…] John Lott Thinks Things Will Get Worse Because Of The Stakes […]
Dear Anonymous Conservative,
Saw an article I’d like to share with you, about rock climber Alex Honnold, who recently free climbed 3000 feet. Of note in the article:
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Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who has been studying the brain’s response to threats since the 1980s, tells me he has never heard of any person being born with a normal amygdala—as Honnold’s appears to be—that shows no sign of activation.
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Forgive me if you’ve already commented on this, I did a cursory search on your site and didn’t find anything.
Thought you may find it interesting.
I enjoy your blog and commentary quite a bit. Nice new cover. Any idea when the Amazon edition may be on free promo again? I signed up some months ago but haven’t received any notice.
Warm regards.
I will do the ebook in the next week, probably. I keep meaning too, I just have to redo a chonjob programming thing on the list. And the cover is beautiful, I wish I had the ability and could take the credit, but that was betterbookcovers@gmail.com.
Thanks for the article, I never saw that. I’ll take a look.
Walter E Williams pointed this out more than a dozen years ago http://walterewilliams.com/why-we're-a-divided-nation/
The larger government gets, the more of our daily decisions will get made in the win-lose paradigm of the political process instead of the win-win paradigm of the free market and then it matters more who is in office. Eventually it matters enough to kill over.