Krauser Goes On The Warpath

Over at Krauser, he describes his own violation of expectation amygdala hijack that had him unable to let go of a minor fine from a corrupt authority while he was travelling:

Another problem is bureaucracy. The FSU is teeming with it. I recently came a cropper of the apartment registration system. It goes like this: For a UK passport holder to get a visa to Russia or Belarus you must get a letter of invitation (which costs a fee paid to a specialist agency) and also have valid travel insurance. After a few days in the country you must register your address with the police (and pay another fee). This is especially a ball ache if you use Airbnb because many hosts will not do the registration for you…

I go to register and they tell my landlady they only accept travel insurance documents in Russian (unlike the embassy which is fine with English). This is a new rule and they find a rulebook in the bottom of a filing cabinet to prove it. So I must buy duplicate insurance from a small office in the next street. I get it for seven days and register thus. Days five, six and seven are public holidays. On day eight the police telephone my landlady saying we are both to be fined for the expiring registration and she knocks me out of bed so we can rush to the police station to see what’s up.

I buy new insurance for the remainder of my stay and pay another registration fee. That should be the end of it but the cops are determined to shake me down. The say I owe a 230 rouble penalty (about £115) and my landlady owes double that. A supervisor comes out and gives her a stern telling off while his two subordinates look a bit guilty at being involved in such a blatant shakedown.

Naturally I argue the toss, via Google Translate. The embassy accepted UK insurance and nowhere on the government websites in English does it say Russian documents needed. I show them the website that says after registration lapses I have five more business days to reregister. I also explain it was not possible to reregister before today because the police station was closed for holidays.

“Doesn’t matter. You should have stayed in a hotel on final day to reset registration clock” they say, in Russian.

At that point I’m happy to face them down and just be deported but the landlady is panicking about getting in bad with cops and whatever fate may befall her apartment business. I back down, because I’m not a bad sort really [1] I pay the penalty and chalk it to the game.

It’s because I was barely suppressing a furious rage at being shaken down for what was, ultimately, an inconsequential fee. I was typing into Google Translate “this is a robbery, they are acting in bad faith, finding a pretext for a shakedown” and my landlady wisely refused to show that to the cop sitting across the desk. I didn’t lose my head, but it was close.

Violations of expectation are the best place to analyze the amygdala in yourself. Notice Krauser is doing this, and I cannot overemphasize how it will change your control over your brain. When you feel rage, and just know it as rage, you can easily do crazy shit. When you feel rage, recognize the feeling, picture your amygdala, recognize the violation of expectation it sees, and then see the mechanism at play, that feeling of rage becomes more like words from your subconscious, apprising you of some fact about the world around you. You can listen, or you can focus your attention elsewhere.

One thing I would point out, Krauser was in Russia, which would itself turn the amygdala on. Just the new dress style, the new language, the new culture, the new architecture, and the new places will all light up the amygdala, and put it in high gear to start with. It is registering all the new things. To then get hustled down to the police station unexpectedly, and hit with a fine that violates the rules you expected, will all put the amygdala in high gear.

It is funny to look at these things afterward, and see how the amygdala guided your behavior, and overrode logic. That feeling the amygdala produces is fierce.

The lesson is, when the Apocalypse hits and we are all in high amygdala, it will not take much to get that first bullet in the air. And once one gunshot goes off, and we are all in high amygdala, you see how things can get out of control fast.

At the end of Krauser’s post was one fascinating insight into the drama-queen/sex-fiend girlfriend:

But isn’t it also interesting that [high amygdala] it’s a sign of rabbitry, and thus a sign to rabbit girls that you may be suited to them. Perhaps this is why grotty sluts actually like drama and seek it out – they are seeking out men with defective amygdalae because it’s a proxy sign of the rabbit breeding strategy.

That could be, and it perfectly explains the raging-argument/make-up-sex relationship model among some highly sexualized girls.

Interesting.

Spread r/K Theory, because you don’t want to go on a rampage through a Russian Police Station looking like this: