I’ve made the case a few times that rabbits aren’t human. Commenter Jay asked, are rabbits sociopaths? I think, rabbits are best described as narcissists, but narcissism can seem like sociopathy because both psychologies are produced by amygdalae that either don’t work or are turned off.
In the case of the Psychopath/Sociopath/Antisocial Personality, their amygdalae don’t flag emotional stimuli, due to the amygdala lacking the hardware. It just isn’t there. As a result, a child being molested or an innocent person being killed isn’t really a cause to get worked up over. I believe I knew a true psychopath growing up. He was a kind of imperturbable “all go!” personality, with no real remorse or regret that you could see. He saw something that looked good, and he pursued it, without flagging any consequence from it. He stole stuff, he lied to manipulate, he just never seemed to think anything through. The hardware just wasn’t there to flag relevant data.
But he wasn’t neurotic. He didn’t fear the consequences, engage in denial, or freak out over stuff. If bad came from his acts, he just accepted it stoically as some sort of cosmic destiny that could never have been avoided. He was just strangely oblivious, as if something that should have been amping him up and making him feel bad wasn’t there. Even as a kid I looked at him sometimes, and saw something amazingly different.
Grassroots rabbits also have an amygdala that is turned off most of the time. They exhibit many of the same behaviors. But the difference is, they have the hardware to flag the relevant data. They just consciously shut it off, to make themselves feel better. You realize this, because they can get agitated and neurotic when exposed to the data. They can freak out over the consequences of their actions. Bill Clinton supposedly freaked out after his loss in the race for governor. Hillary passed out at the very moment Benghazi was heating up. They can get amygdala hijacked. They can be made uncontrollably emotional at the mere mention of a name, like George Bush. They can’t make eye contact like Obama in the second debate with Romney.
Hannibal Lector doesn’t get amygdala hijacked, or regret things. He hears what you say, doesn’t care, and calmly assesses how easily he can get your body out of the building without being noticed. If he get’s caught, he accepts that stoically, looks to escape, and if he ends up in a glass cell in the basement of Dr Chilton’s dungeon after everything, he accepts that unemotionally. “Oh well… I wonder how can I escape this place?”
Another example of the difference may be visible within the realm of lying. Vox has noted that rabbits lie, all of the time. They believe these lies, even when doing so hurts their cause and reders them strategically incapable of achieving their goal. They embrace the lie because the lie feels good. It assuages an amygdala that can’t take the angst produced by the truth. It is borne of an amygdala-driven emotional drive. To them any long term goal is, out of necessity, fully subservient to their immediate emotional panic.
By contrast a sociopath will lie to manipulate, to achieve an end, but they can just as easily embrace truth if embracing truth will help them achieve their goals. They don’t care. Their lack of emotion makes them like a ruthless, goal-oriented machine, rather than a human. To a sociopath nothing is subservient to their panic because they have no panic. The machinery isn’t there.
Heywood made the case that, “If libs aren’t human, then they aren’t morally culpable for their horrible actions. They’re definitely human, and they deserve every last bit of divine wrath they’ve stored up for themselves.”
He is correct. However I believe so am I. Liberals have the choice, to be human or not. They choose inhuman, because it feels good. Likewise, a sociopath could choose good, logically. I suspect Mitt Romney was born with the hyper-logical, unemotional mind of a sociopath, and yet I think he has chosen to be a decent human being and do good. I think he’s even highly likable. But when a company is going to go under, and everyone will lose their jobs unless he fires 500 people, he can make that decision without remorse or sadness.
Now rabbit leaders may or may not be sociopaths. Some will be Narcissists, some will be Sociopaths, and many will be some mix thereof, with diminished amygdala function to start with, and the remainder of the amygdala actively shut down to avoid any discomfort. I suppose one leader somewhere could be human, and just hopelessly stupid, but that strains credulity.
I suspect the smart ones recognize that without their idiot army of grassroots rabbits, they would be nowhere. Nobody with a brain would trust them or vest any power within them. I’m not giving my life savings to Chuck Schumer for safekeeping, or asking Bill Clinton to tell me how to be moral. The rabbit Kings need that malleable mass of easily panicked and controlled fools to rile up, and pit against the decent people who just want everyone left free and unoppressed.
One final point to consider is that some rabbits can be converted, through harshness, to K-strategists. The key is an environment which gets them accustomed to the aversive stimulus of the amygdala, and then teaches them that a little aversive stimulus now, attended to and processed, can avoid a boatload of aversive stimulus later. We are seeing that occur, I think, as that Conservative Policy Mood rises due to various factors. People are realizing these decisions have consequences, they are experiencing consequences, and they are beginning to vote to avoid the consequences.
Of course the rabbit leaders see that and are trying desperately to offset it by importing as many foreign rabbits as they can to bolster their sycophant army, even using taxpayer dollars to fly them here as fast as they can, despite a public who vigorously opposes it. Hopefully we will realize the threat that presents to long term peace and comity, and get it resolved through the next election, if not through the courts now.
Whatever happens, the reality of freedom is borne of far deeper forces than mere words or even genes. It is a fundamental aspect of the world, designed to arise inevitably, over the long term. Given how far we have gone r, the coming K-shift will be far too powerful to be affected by any minor moving of the pieces by the rabbit leaders.
It is coming.
Rabbits do what they do to ease anxiety. Psychopaths do what they do because they have no anxiety. That’s been my experience having dealed with them both.
Okay. I’m reading over the article, and looking at the end, in which you say:
“Given how far we have gone r, the coming K-shift will be far too powerful to be affected by any minor moving of the pieces by the rabbit leaders.
It is coming.”
If I am reading this correctly–and I may not–what you appear to be saying is that civilization is doomed, in the very near term. Humanity is doomed, in the near term, by k-type reproductive strategies and degeneration. In fifty thousand years the descendants of H. Sapiens will be tree-dwelling rat-sized insectivores with brains that would fit in a tablespoon, and in another twenty five thousand they’ll have tails again. Never will another toolmaking sophont species arise. And in about half a billion years the sun will turn into a red giant, vaporizing everything within the orbit of Mars and turning Mars into a blob of molten rock hotter than Mercury is now. And around this lifeless, sterile expanse of dust and stone, the universe will decay and die very rapidly.
Given all this, why write at all? What’s the point? It is one thing to warn of possible negative consequences. It is another to wallow in impending inescapable doom.
Yin and yang. The good goes with the bad. The K-shift and the collapse it is designed to deal with will be unpleasant. But out of the chaos will emerge a model of human which will care, and which will demand virtue, in friends, in leaders, and in their nation.
The Black Plague wasn’t pleasant, now was the end of the Medieval Warming Period, which I believe played a role it its emergence. Yet the times which occurred following it were so markedly different from the Dark Ages. If you feel the misery now, it is the opposite of the joy you feel in Renaissance paintings. Such a societal rebirth is miserable – a lot of the lower castes get killed back, and harmless people who just happen to be less capable die horrible deaths. Yet, society with them is marked with a malaise, and it seems the truly joyous humans cannot create a joyous society when so voluminously diluted with such massive quantities of malaise.
Today, you can see a picture of a small, perfect baby’s hand in the Planned Parenthood videos of fetuses being “parted out.” We know one innocent woman journalist had classified documents planted on her computer, so she could be thrown in jail, forced into six or seven figures of debt in legal fees, and be rendered unhireable ever again, and it may have been done to one of our greatest Generals. Our government is almost hopelessly corrupt, only holding on to a possibility of honesty by a thread of one ballsy billionaire who I am sure somebody wants to kill. We all know the economic system is going down and the effects will be nothing short of horrific. And depending on where you live, real freedom to just do your own thing in peace may be a distant memory.
And nobody cares. It is malaise, and it is worse than death for our society. But it will be removed by the collapse.
The rebirth after the collapse will have inspired painters doing work that will lift our spirits again, and that will be representative of what life will be like, day to day. Like the Renaissance, it will be glorious.
On timing, I think in the next decade and a half serious trouble will begin. The real tremors that hurt people may be a decade or less away, but by around 2030-2035, I suspect you will begin to see a level of violence normalized that would shock us today. As society adapts, there will be a subtle shift, from sitting and observing when shit happens, to being driven to jump up and get out in it to seize the moment. It is a special neurological characteristic that develops itself when stress is applied and needs relief.
Once that is developed, politicians will become a lot more amenable to society’s desires, and the corrupt will become less common, because that little cognitive trait will affect everything from judges and courts, to protesting, to political movements.
My only fear is large scale war emerging from it, but even that may just be God’s way of resetting the balance, and thus out of our control. What I do know is after the turmoil, bliss will return.
As for the long term picture, my belief is our evolution is an upward curve with pauses only for too much success and rabbitry, and by the time this planet is uninhabitable, we should have the ability to get off it and move – assuming we keep our rabbitry in check along the way.