K-selection in a Microcosm

Ben Carson’s campaign turns K-selected due to dopamine restriction:

U.S. Republican Ben Carson’s 2016 presidential bid was thrown into chaos on Thursday when his campaign manager and some 20 other staff members quit amid infighting, dropping poll numbers and negative media coverage.

Barry Bennett, who oversaw Carson’s rapid rise to the top tier of Republican contenders and his later fall, said he quit over differences with another top adviser to Carson, Armstrong Williams.

Specifically, Bennett blamed Williams for an interview Carson gave last week to The Washington Post suggesting that the campaign was in disarray. “It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen a candidate do,” Bennett said.

Things had “boiled over” with Williams, Bennett told Reuters. “For the past seven weeks, I’ve been doing nothing but putting out Armstrong Williams-started fires,” Bennett said.

He also charged Williams was behind a story in The New York Times that suggested Carson was out of his depth on foreign policy.

Carson’s communications director, Doug Watts, also resigned due to differences with Williams, Bennett said. Some 20 staff in total left, he said. Among them was deputy campaign manager Lisa Coen.

Again, dopamine-deficiency-mediated group splintering. This happening is one of the first signs of dopamine restriction.

If Carson could have found a way to borrow poll numbers (in this case dopamine) using some sort of poll-number-debt spending scheme, and suddenly he was beating Trump by twenty points, nobody’s amygdala would be lit up, nobody’s amygdala would be focused completely on each individual failure, and nobody would be so angry that they would give up their job and walk out the door.

This is a microcosm of what is going on in our nation. We are borrowing dopamine we would never be able to get otherwise, and it is keeping everyone copacetic. In its presence, the population is, as a whole, brain dead. Once that dopamine stops flowing, expect aggressive splintering, which will accelerate as aggressive urges are reinforced by group-competition between black, whites, Italians, Irish, Germans, Hispanics, Asians, and so on. That sounds bad, but it will really be a marker of a competitive America which wants to win at every level, and that attitude will serve the nation well at the level of international competition. It will also reorganize our economy to be more successful. Competitiveness is good.

Dopamine is the brain deadener, and it’s effect is exactly why liberals are so stupid, and our nation is heading for disaster. Dopamine is what we are designed to pursue relentlessly. But when we attain that high, it changes us. It reduces our ability to attain more greatness, reduces our enjoyment of the periodic bursts of greatness we experience, and ultimately puts us right back where we started.

Twenty years ago, if I won the lottery, I would have immediately been on to a Charlie-Sheen-sized bender of fun. Today my first move would be a detailed plan to not overload my brain with dopamine all at once, and a set of goals which I would find almost impossible to attain, to keep me busy and focused.

Fortunately with an apocalypse coming, we won’t have to worry about that.

Apocalypse cometh™