Scott Adams On Dopamine Puppets

An interesting post:

Here’s a funny article by David Wong of Cracked that talks about the dopamine high we sometimes get from outrage. The gist of it is that the brain gets some sort of chemical payoff from outrage, and we seek it when we’re otherwise bored with life. Politics serves up lots of outrage opportunities. That’s why we are drawn to it – for the high.

We rationalize that we are fighting the good fight and making the world better. But mostly it just feels good to get worked up about issues and share the experience with like-minded dopamine addicts.

He is absolutely right. But I would add something else. The purpose of dopamine is to shut off amygdala.

What does a shut off amygdala feel like? Take a moment, relax your mind, and imagine you were watching TV and you just won the lottery, so money will never be a worry to trigger your amygdala. Then you just left home with your wealth, and landed on a power boat, anchored off a little sandy beach in the Florida Keys. You are laying on the sunbed on the bow of the boat, the sea breeze is blowing over you, and the small waves in the shallow water are creating a delightful, gentle rocking motion of the boat as the waves lap against the hull. Nobody is around, you have nowhere to be, nothing to do, and you are just watching a few dolphins playing in the water about thirty feet away, and some gulls soaring on the breeze. You’ll go snorkeling later, you’ll enjoy some grilled steak and buttery mashed potatoes for dinner, and for now, the fluffy white clouds float aimlessly above you across the dark blue sky, as the hot sun beats down on everything and the cool sea breeze blows over you, smelling of the beach. That would be dopamine causing a state of no-amygdala. A similar feeling can come from the tip of a heroin-filled needle, or a white powder you snort up your nose, and strangely enough I would imagine your life could be a non-stop train wreck of total fucked-upedness and chaos, and you would still feel like you were on that boat.

I got the feeling myself once from acupuncture for a muscle tear. It was strange, because nothing tangible was different in my life save for eight or nine small needles stuck in my skin, each pulled fresh from their sterile wrapping in front of me. Yet I went from feeling normal, to feeling as if I had won the Powerball, in the space of ten minutes. As I made the shift, I actually puzzled over the illogicality of the feeling, and how it arose from nothing. The fairly severe muscle tear was fully healed in a couple of days.

I suspect those who need that feeling most are those with the weakest, most easily-freaked out amygdalae. If the normal rigors of life feel like a non-stop neurotic explosion of fear and freak-outs over the most minor things, then that little hit of dopamine will be your sanity.

If rage produces dopamine, then that is why I think you see the Triggly Puffs with their uncontrollable rages on the left, more than on the right. It is why Mitt Romney can lose, and the conservatives will head home with a sigh, but if Hillary loses then the tears flow, people wail, and Lena Dunham is comparing her hives with the hives of others around her, as they all marvel at the similarity. “Oh my God! Look, we all have the same hives!” Those hives are an amygdala relaxant.

If what I describe is an accurate view of the world, one way to reduce all the protests and outrage is to provide alternative sources of dopamine. I have in the past referred to this as my Pleasure Unit concept. The idea is that humans need a minimum level of pleasure in life, and we will do almost anything to get it. If we don’t have socially-acceptable sources of pleasure, we can easily turn to crime, risky behavior, drugs, or anything else that can give us a buzz. We might even go so far as to hallucinate that Hitler became President of the United States just so we can be outraged about it.

This filter on life suggests that the best way to bring the country together is to provide alternative sources of dopamine. Honest debate never changes anything. Facts never change anything. Reason has left the building. If we want unity, it will require new sources of dopamine to replace the outrage-induced kind.

Scott is quite obviously a genius, but I would not say more dopamine would bring the country together. This would be akin to giving a junkie hits of drugs, to keep them out of withdrawal. The longer you do that, the more of an addict you create. Increased dopamine will further atrophy amygdalae, and produce more rage down the line, even if he is right about people temporarily diminishing their angst over the summer (which he will be right about).

I suspect our massive partisanship today began with the post-war boom in the fifties pumping out the dopamine, advanced with the r-fying welfare of the sixties feeding it more, and got a big jolt the first time Ronald Reagan signed a piece of paper allowing the US to begin funding its budget with limitless borrowed capital. Add in the wonders of magical technology, and it is no wonder we are heading to an Apocalypse.

The Carter years were the beginning of what should have been a long and harsh amygdala-reset. If it had continued naturally, it would have re-acclimated amygdalae to harshness, and instilled a comfort with reality. Reagan bypassed that, and from a psychological perspective, our r-strategists have been on a steady decline into insanity ever since. Today, there is almost no reaching them, nor will there be until an Apocalypse clears their mind.

The only way to bring the nation together at this point is a long period of incredible hardship, punctuated at the start with some incredible, nuclear-level raging freak-outs by the amygdala-atrophied. The only way to tone down the rage is to expose people to the types of awful conditions that should cause rage and amygdala-angst, so our present circumstances appear as the relatively bucolic and narcotic circumstances they actually are.

There is one other interesting thing at the link. Some leftists try to “debunk” r/K Theory in the comments (and thank you for the mention, Anonymous White Male). Notice that all of the debunkings are vague, short sentences that only say it is wrong, but offer no further explanation. Nobody discusses the idea. Some insinuate that they have seen where others explained how it is false (a nice stab at producing subconscious group-think). One debunker who is challenged to support his assertion that r/K is wrong says we should look for youtube videos debunking the idea, as if they are everywhere. When somebody asks him for one, there is no response. One tries to argue the idea “fits” too well, so it must be made up in order to fit so well, and anybody smart would realize that. One tries to make it sound like r/K says everyone is either a rabbit or a wolf, rather than the more accurate assertion that these are why the ideas are linked statistically.

Leftists have two problems. The first problem is, there are aspects of r/K that make it almost undeniable, just on its face. One, it is the only thing which could possibly explain the ideological linkage between sex-issues, rearing-issues, marriage-issues, aggression-issues like gun ownership, the economic competition issues, and desires for either a freedom to strive or the control to prevent striving. What links all of those? Only r/K offers any possible answer. Two, there is the reversal and blurring of sexual dimorphism that accompanies the left’s ascension. Third, and most convincingly, there is the timing. Why do nations that come into wealth not become invigorated, and then see their prior success and experience, augmented by their new wealth, propel them upwards unstoppably? Why do they inevitably head toward collapse, expressing every facet of the r-strategy as they collapse, from sexual-deviance, to conflict-avoidant embrace of outsiders, to demands for equal provisioning for all? Even as Rome collapsed, we see accounts of farmers abandoning their farms and moving to the cities because the welfare was more generous than their salaries as farmers, as sexual debauchery rose to epic levels, military virtue declined, and barbarians were welcomed into leadership positions.

The second problem leftists have is the breadth of research, and their inability to focus on r/K Theory long enough to try to debunk it. The book amasses hundreds of studies, each of which fits like a puzzle piece, creating an incredibly detailed picture when looked at together. To truly debunk that, the leftists would have to examine it in detail. Yet each study, by itself is like a nuclear-level amygdala hijack. They simply cannot last through the entire thing. So the only resistance r/K gets is a token comment saying, “I saw where people were showing how that r/K Theory is really just some made up thing that alt-righter use to masturbate to.” Or “You can’t say every person is a wolf or a rabbit, because all people are different.”

At some point this will be taught in every political science class. When that happens, I do not see how any leftist will make it through any political science class anywhere, nor do I see how the left will continue to survive with any shred of its sanity intact.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because it could give you a little shot of dopamine