K-selection And Amygdala Conflict

The triggers that activate aversive stimulus are changing:

Five months ago, a 3-year-old Syrian boy’s corpse on a Turkish beach galvanized public action for refugees. Now, strikingly similar images are generating little more than a collective shrug…

Boats arrive on Europe’s shores daily, or sink on the way — like the one that capsized off Turkey’s coast on Saturday, killing at least 37 people including babies and other young children.

Images from the latest tragedy, including the bodies of children, failed to generate the same level of shock.

Fears — that refugees will stage extremist attacks or molest women — threaten to displace compassion. And Europe has yet to find the magic solution to its migrant dilemma.

All amygdala. At first, when resources are free and threat is nonexistent, the horror of a child dying hit the amygdala with no countervailing stimuli to be relevance-weighed against it. It became the sole motivating stimulus in need of amelioration.

Now, with experience, the horror of a dead child is contrasted within the amygdala against the idea of being sexually assaulted, robbed, or murdered by migrants. Entitled foreigners showing up and demanding free access to the national wealth enrage, and this too countervails the effect of the dead child. Add in fear for the future of Europe, and suddenly the child’s plight is a mild bother, blamed on a father who risked his life unnecessarily. That is an amygdala with a larger number of circuits scanning for dangers which have been registered through past experience. As the process continues, the amygdala will become measurably larger, and the individual will become more conservative. These are liberals who have been mugged, and now their amygdalae know of mugging.

This is how a population goes from a pacifistic, rabbitized population driven to ameliorate all discomfort, to a population of warriors who will relentlessly and ruthlessly seek the destruction of their enemies at all costs. Europe is changing, and not in the way progressives see as “progress.” Even more – this is the warm fuzzy version of what will emerge in the real collapse.

Apocalypse favors the warrior psychology.