K-Strategy Is On The Move In Latin America

It was not a banner day for Latin America’s leftists.

Colombia rejected a peace deal with Marxist rebels on Sunday, delivering a very public victory to the conservative former president who campaigned passionately against it. On the same day, voters in Brazil handed a resounding defeat to the leftist party that once controlled their country, knocking it down in municipal elections.

It was just another sign of the shift to the right in Latin America. In less than a year, voters have thwarted the leftist movement in Argentina and elected a former investment banker as president of Peru, while lawmakers impeached the leftist leader of Brazil.

“Put simply, conservatives are on the rise in Latin America,” said Matías Spektor, a professor of international relations at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a university in Brazil.

Many factors are feeding the trend. The sharp drop in commodities prices has eroded economic growth around Latin America and the support leftist governments once drew from it. The clout of evangelical Christian megachurches is expanding, and they are confronting socially liberal policies and channeling widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Notice migrants tend to be r-strategists, so as things turn K, the r-strategists flee to where there are more resources. So there may be more than just resource shortage at play here. Their rabbits are fleeing there, and showing up here.

A part of me wonders if that mechanism has a hand in the r-strategists evolving an embrace of out-groups. A desire to be surrounded by the foreign facilitates migration to the foreign lands where the resources are. We think they want migrants here, because they want oppressors to take us down. It appears that way to us, because the idea of fleeing is not in us. r-strategists are different – they are programmed to flee, just like every time they see an election result they don’t like, they are moving overseas in protest. “If Trump wins, I’m moving to XXXXXX!”

That desire to import foreigners may only be a byproduct – an attempt to satisfy the urge to be surrounded by the foreign, even as they don’t want to flee because our nation is so rich. If you can’t bring Mohammed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed.

So the real reason for the out-group-love-instinct to evolve is that it makes it easy to flee to the place where the resources are. If India were rich, and the US poor and shifting K, it sure would be easy for the leftists to migrate on a moment’s notice if they had a burning desire to be surrounded by a strange foreign culture, foreign food, foreign people, and so on.

This might mean that as K sweeps over the world, the most disordered and chaotic places may be destined to be the richest, since all the poor nations feel the K first, their r-strategists flee to the richest nation preferentially, and when the full K finally envelopes the globe, the richest nation is where the r-strategists have to fight, or be shipped back to their homeland, which by that time is so overwhelmingly K they will do anything to avoid being sent home. On the other side, either the K-strategists fight like hell and deport or destroy as many rabbits as possible, or they see their nation hippie-ized permanently, and relegated by their rabbity idiots to second tier status in a K-selected world.

There may be an innate churning to the world, designed to keep which nations are the richest and most powerful in flux. This may be in large part why the sole global superpower today is not the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or the Swedish Empire. It may be that Russia’s refusal to tap the debt spigot to the degree the US has, means that the next millennium may see a rise of the Russian Bear, as the US assumes a role in the world more like Turkey today. Let’s face it, no nation can possibly be great if it has enough Woody Allens and Barney Franks in it – especially when they are foreign imports with an average IQ in the high sixties and its opponent is filled with Vladimir Putins.

It is amazing how a little wealth and a few r-strategists can take down the most powerful empires on the planet again and again throughout history – and still the rabbits pretend to be somehow competent enough to not only partake in the decisions of government, but to actually lead the nation.