Reviews Of Biohistory and r/K Theory

Two great articles at the alternative-right blog discussing Biohistory and r/K Theory as well as their utility in molding civilization, by John K. Press PhD., University Professor and author of Culturism, A Word, A Value, Our Future.

Part one is here.

Part Two is here.

The author discusses Penman’s division of Civilization (C) and Vigor (V), which differ slightly from K and r.

In the interest of completeness, r and K are forms of human. However when you look at society, or the organizations of the population, or cultural status, r/K would indicate that there are four stages of society, in line with Strauss and Howe’s Generational Theory. You could think of them as “r-into-K,” K, “K-into-r,” and r.

r-into-K is basically anarchy and the Apocalypse. It is the rabbits winning for long enough to destroy everything. It is hordes of savages running free, disorganization, violence, mayhem, and all the chaos of a Lord Of The Flies scenario. By this point, r’s have destroyed every civilizational structure that had kept some modicum of order. In the absence of all of those structures, you have a pure might-makes-right environment.

This eventually leads to K, both by adapting human amygdalae to become more K, by killing the less adaptable amygdalae off, and by only allowing those who form successful groups to persist. K becomes rigid and organized. It reins in the hordes, and establishes commonsense order using amygdalae that have been trained to see reality as it is. It is regimented, disciplined, and hierarchical. It is the US Military in WWII. You don’t worry about how Nazis feel, or if there is any decency among them, or if the German people have any redeeming qualities. We are at war with them, we kill them all, and if you speak a word against it you are put up against a wall and shot, because this is our fucking lives we are talking about here. It is a lot different, obviously, from what we see today, where low IQ Muslims who throw gays from rooftops and rape women at will, are invited to come live among us so everyone can support them with free stuff.

K produces safety and comfort, and this weakens K in the population, producing K-into-r. K-into-r is the interesting, vibrant phase. K is still dominant, but it is infused with just enough tolerance to allow a touch of r to flourish at the margins. r is creative. It innovates. It looks for creative ways to avoid the old violent competitions. It creates rule-based legal and civilizational structures that fend off pure K. This allows technologists to flourish without being beaten over the head until dead and having their shit taken by stronger, more powerful groups. But while tolerated in this phase, r is not allowed any significant form of authority or control, and is socially shamed where it tries to encourage too much r.

K-into-r produces great wealth, because it combines innovation, invention, and a redirection of K-urges to compete violently, into civilized economic competition based around intellectual innovation. This incredible wealth leads to full-r, which is the rabbit utopia of insanity and rebellion against all that is K. It decays everything that made K great, and seeks the destruction of everything that created the foundation of K-into-r. It denies simple K-realities as it spends in such a profligate fashion that even if it didn’t degrade every other facet of the society things would still collapse into r-into-K. It avoids conflict to the point of looking for opportunities to be a doormat to anyone with a hint of aggression. At its most insane, it can only be understood through the prism of the r-selected reproductive strategy taken to its most ridiculously extreme, and how it has fostered and encouraged its own survival throughout history.

Now if you look at the societal structure, obviously r-into-K, which is probably the most highly amygdala-stimulated period, will be the most violent and chaotic, because in that period, there are no rules or constraints and everyone is freaking out in the face of the new reality. That is not to say the entire population is K at that period, or that that period is even what you would expect of a stable, k-selected strategy in a K-selected environment. Rather it has a mania to it which is the result of coddled r-amygdalae experiencing utter desperation, panic, and uncontrolled rage. I think this would be the Depression era crime waves of bank robberies and mob battles through to Pearl Harbor, as the attack was unfolding in 1941.

At the other end of the spectrum is K into r, which is probably the safest, as it combines wealth and power with the morality of K, yet it has a lack of the neurosis, reality-blindness, and lack of self-policing that marks pure r. You don’t get gang-raped at a music festival during K into r. I see it as the 1950’s. Between those two are phases which are midway between violent and safe. Notice how safe and violent are not necessarily r or K, though r and K are the foundations of each.

So I think Penman created a more complex theory to characterize the population’s cultural status as a whole because culture varies more widely than the humans who make it up. Whereas r/K is a more simplistic theory describing what is happening to individuals in the population and why they evolved to be that way. It is as those different individuals mix in differing proportions with the environment presented to them (and which they create), that you get Penman’s more numerous and complex patterns.

I do like Dr Press’ emphasis away from the theoretical, and mechanistic, and his instinctual movement toward, “What do we do in light of this information.” That will be an important step to take.

At some point the Apocalypse will fade, and we will have a 1950’s era society again. At that point it would be terrific if we could say, “Here are five laws, which if implemented will protect our K-selected society by keeping it K, and avoiding the slide into r which will bring with it another Apocalypse.” Things like no-welfare/only-voluntary-charity, mandatory military service with stressful amygdala-developing phase, flat tax for everyone, voting only for landowners, competitive immigration policies to weed out r-strategists, and so on.

Right now, such ideas might be completely anathema to the rabbitized population, but I see a time coming when a majority of the population will all be on the same page regarding r vs K. Given the Apocalypse they just saw, they may be all too ready to implement any measures which would stave off the next Apocalypse.

Those amygdalae will recognize the benefits to avoiding bad consequences later on.

Finally, thank you to those who are telling others about this. Over the last year, r/K has fully permeated the Alt-right and NRX movements because these movements only care for how ideas answer questions. The rest of the world is much more socially oriented, which is why it has taken so long to see r/K begin bleeding out elsewhere.

Now that r/K has an established base of respected free thinkers who believe in it, it will begin to appeal to those intellectual lemmings who only consider ideas if they see other individuals believe in them first. As r/K moves into the discourse of the more establishment political scientists, I expect we will see it snowball ever more quickly to the point that it will have real effects, at which point everyone will say they saw it’s powers from the beginning.

It is an exciting time.