Political Ideology, Epigenetics, and the Amygdala

Some may wonder why the book spends time on epigenetic effects. It includes epigenetic effects because that will ultimately end up being one of the prime motivators of a culture’s ideological bias.

One of the things which I have seen first hand is the slowly corrupting nature of resource excess and peace. This doesn’t happen all at once to a culture, but rather creates a slow, perceptible slide from generation to generation. When I began martial arts training, I rolled with a club that was full of vets fresh from the Korean war. These guys were hard men, in a way you don’t really see today in civil society. The lead instructor had left the Special Forces in the Army, and you knew it within minutes of meeting him. He wasn’t scary, so much as you instinctually sensed that he was the immovable object and the unstoppable force. He could break a 2.5 foot 2×4 leaning against the wall with an inside stomp kick, while in cowboy boots – something he would often note was a very effective way to deal with the outer front of an opponent’s knee in a clinch, if you set it up right.

He was a really bad dude in ways I would never have imagined, had I not actually met and known him, but so were the other vets at the club. They didn’t just do one martial art. They were as proficient with firearms and blades as their hands, and they had a mental quality that is tough to describe, but which would instantly put “normal” people today on edge around them. These were men for whom the study of being able to destroy other men physically was almost a religious duty. You could have dropped these guys into the hardest prison in the nation, and there would be no doubt that the worst, most violent men in those prisons would have instinctually given them a wide berth. I just don’t meet guys like that today all that often, yet in my travels, I found they were relatively common back then in a few circles.

As I continued to study the arts I noticed something. Violent men, simply dedicated to learning how best to hurt others, began to give way to a more gentle, less threatening, more fun-loving variant of human. Vietnam era guys were tough, but they didn’t have that cold, violent, ruthless edge. Later generations gradually became more and more into fun than they were into the art of hurting people. Even today, I am pretty sure most martial artists would freeze up if they suddenly had a dead body at their feet to dispose of. That first group I knew wouldn’t have even blinked. They’d have instantly started running through a list of potential dump-sites they had made note of in their travels, as they mustered up some 12 mil plastic sheeting and shovels.

Today, I feel kind of funny writing about these guys, as if nobody would believe they could exist. I write that last line in the paragraph above, and I wonder, “Does even claiming to have known guys like that make me look crazy? Will readers today even believe guys like that existed in this country in any numbers, or will they blow this article off as fantasy?” But those guys were exactly like that, and they were different for a reason. Their eyes lit up describing the sky going bright at night, with the white phosphorus artillery shells even illuminating where they were, which was presumably pretty far afield behind the official front lines of the war they were fighting.

Even as I marveled at their steely fierceness, they came from even harder WWII era stock that was forged during a time when evil so threatened the world, we could have ended up enslaved if just a few things had gone differently. In that war, we flame-throwered Japanese to death on a regular basis, bombed civilians like it was a video game, and God have mercy on anybody who objected to any of it, or had any sympathy for anyone outside of our American in-group. Our very species was fundamentally different from the fun-loving, peaceful people of today.

If you view this article through that prism, you will begin to see why epigenetics is so important to politics. What is being altered in the mice epigenetically, in the study (full paper here), is the ease and degree of amygdala reactivity and conditioning to a specific encountered stimulus the parents were exposed to – in other words, the ability of the amygdala to learn to perceive and respond to a threat stimuli indicative of future harshness. Although the article references a specific gene for an olfactory receptor possibly being affected, there are genes for neurotransmitter receptors which affect amygdala reactivity and conditioning (A specific gene for this type of neurotransmitter receptor has been associated with ideological predispositioning.), and it would be surprising if the expression of these genes was not affected by epigenetics as well.

That is what I beleive was different in my old, Korean War vet friends. Experience had taught them that violence comes and when it does you don’t screw around – and for some reason, they seemed to have learned the lesson particularly easily. That is the foundational mechanism of political ideology too. As we don’t experience harshness, our society loses this ability to train our amygdalae to recognize various problems in the offing, and our debt bubble becomes no concern, our military is just fine with a gay/lesbian/transgender core force, and 80 lb elderly lesbian women make great Generals, so long as you don’t call them bossy if they snap at you.

The change described in that study on mice is not being done through genetic selection altering allele ratios in the population over time, or through the dopamine desensitization which occurs in an individual due to copious, prolonged, endogenous dopamine release due to pleasure and ease. Rather, the change that study noted is occurring through stress application to the parents, which is altering gene expression in the offspring. The offspring get the same gene sequences as the parents, with the same promotors and repressors, but their body is less able to read some genes, or more able to read others, or some combination thereof, due to changes made to the DNA molecule’s peripheral parts, or other accessory structures altered, added, or removed, all courtesy of the parent’s biochemistry.

A similar study done in humans, might say that repeated exposure to threat stimuli followed by the infliction of harshness, would produce humans whose children would learn to associate threat stimuli with subsequent harshness, faster than their parents did. In other words, the amygdalae of the children would more quickly learn to predict the onset of harshness based on an analysis of current conditions. They would probably also exhibit increased amygdala volume, and better structure their behaviors and decision making to avoid harshness later. This will be no surprise to those who read the book, and saw the research examining how epigenetic effects would affect the expression of an r or K-selected reproductive strategy in mammals. This is just yet another piece of confirming evidence.

Those Korean vets I knew came from parents who, (based on a cursory examination of the traits their kids carried), probably sliced a bloody swath during WWII through a place where the threat of their own violent end at the hands of a brutal enemy was ever present. Next thing you know, I’m sparring with guys who would have put the fear of God into a bar full of PCP-laden Hells Angels.

Take away the threat stimulus of war and shortage, and decades later I’m laughing, as I fight, at the ridiculous comedic antics of a twenty-something goofball opponent, who I couldn’t imagine ever killing anyone. For decades I marveled at that phenomenon as I watched it slowly play out in front of me, long before I ever knew why it was happening. It wasn’t genetic – it was too fast, and there weren’t enough people dying, or enough selective breeding. It wasn’t an endogenous bio-chemical desensitization, it was too gradual, over generations and decades. Epigenetics is the only mechanism I am aware of which fit what I observed, and I have no doubt, that is what it was. And the mechanism I saw there is the same one I see playing out in our politics as the decades pass, and each new generation seems to lack something the previous generation had. Today, as I look out on the nation, I see a rapidly growing cadre of imbeciles, totally blind to the economic destruction and national and cultural failure that each election brings us closer to. This is why those imbeciles are out there, and why they are growing in number.

Note that this would also indicate that if Republican leaders became confrontational, aggressive, demeaning, and willing to engender a conflict-filled environment when dealing with Liberals, they would not only shift the population towards the right today. They would make it easier for the next generation of Republicans to condition American amygdalae with conflict and promote a more Conservative ideology in the populace then too. Of course, given what is coming economically, that will occur sooner or later anyway.

Nothing in the book is there by accident, and I am pretty sure that there is very little to add of any meaning. It is at least fifty years ahead of its time, if not more. After the book finally catches on one day, it will be funny to watch people who hate it, grudgingly admit that all along, it was the one-stop-shop for understanding everything about the political battles which have molded our civilizations for eons.