A case study of a woman with no amygdala:
“Tell me what fear is,” Tranel began.
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to — to be honest, I truly have no clue,” SM said…
in SM’s case, they’ve been totally calcified since she was a young woman. Now in her 40s, her fear-center is as good as gone…
SM recalls one particularly harrowing event:
“Okay. I was walking to the store, and I saw this man on a park bench. He said, ‘come here please.’ So I went over to him. I said, ‘what do you need?’ He grabbed me by the shirt, and he held a knife to my throat and told me he was going to cut me. I told him — I said, ‘go ahead and cut me.’ And I said, ‘I’ll be coming back, and I’ll hunt your ass.’ Oops. Am I supposed to say that? I’m sorry… I wasn’t afraid. And for some reason, he let me go. And I went home.”
That’s actually just one of two times that SM has been held at knife point. She’s also been held at gunpoint twice. And after the above incident, she didn’t feel like she should call the police. The threat had passed. She didn’t have any lasting trauma, because the event had failed to faze her.
This is no amygdala. This is slightly different from liberalism, though obviously it retains the inability to perceive and avoid future adversity.
Unlike this woman, politically left-leaning liberals do not lack all amygdala however. In MRI studies, the liberal amygdala is merely smaller in volume, and less developed than a conservative’s amygdala. This is an adaptation, produced by rarely encountering danger and discomfort, and therefore using the amygdala less. Being used less, such amygdalae do not develop the numerous normal pathways in the amygdala which perceive danger, and then scan the brain for resolutions to resolve the stress.
In this model, the amygdala atrophy underlying the rise of leftism over the last few decades is the result of the decadence of our age, and the ease and safety we enjoy today. Conversely, harsher times should precipitate a retreat of leftism, and the development of a more conservative world view in our populations.
As the amygdala atrophies, and fails to adapt to harshness and danger, it becomes less capable of coping with harshness and danger. This produces a need to avoid such stressors by all means. The liberal reduces stress not with amygdala pathways to solutions, but with a complex denial mechanism in the brain which takes the load off the amygdala. This denial mechanism allows the liberal brain to relax by creating a false reality in which the stressor is either minimized or denied. Muslim immigrants aren’t cause for worry, terrorists are reasonable and can be talked to, excessive government spending is not dangerous, crime is not a threat you need to protect yourself from, moral degeneracy is not bad for society, and so on. If you worry about any of these things, they would deride you as paranoid or unduly fearful. That is how they keep the stress at bay.
This cognitive hack removes the unpleasantness of fear, similar to the relief you would feel if a great problem in your life which was haunting you was suddenly resolved spontaneously. Because it is cognitively rewarding, the brain executes it for the reward of the relaxation. But the amygdala is not totally gone. Were liberal placed in the position of this young lady with a knife to their throat, they would quickly acquiesce to anything the knife wielder wanted.
The liberal’s cognitive hack is not an airtight mechanism that shields from all stress. It shields the brain temporarily from a stress that can still be denied because it’s consequences are not immediate, undeniable, and overwhelming. When the amygdala activation is elicited by the overwhelming nature of an unavoidably stressful circumstance, the liberal has a tendency to panic unduly, and seek any means to avoid having to confront the stressor, from appeasing and acquiescing to the demands of terrorists, to saying you should never fight back against criminals, to the path of resource addled stock traders who jumped out of windows at the onset of the Great Depression.
To paraphrase a commonly cited colloquialism, a woman with no amygdala has one speed – graze. Her amygdala is completely non-functional and dead to everything. Meanwhile a liberal with a deficient amygdala has two speeds – graze and stampede. If the fear is deniable, and the consequences are not wholly unavoidable and immediate, they will deny the threat and continue grazing. The stampede is what happens when a weak amygdala, unable to cope with stress encounters a stressor that is immediate and totally unavoidable.
It is easy to see the problem with the left. It is composed of brain-damaged individuals who deny threats exist, even as they make the consequences of those threat worse and worse through bad policies that are predicated on the ability to hedonistically enjoy the moment, absent any need to forestall risks of future adversity.
Sadly there are enough such individuals in high positions in the GOP Establishment, that combined with the left, the coming Apocalypse would appear unavoidable.
And people wonder why the conservative grassroots supports the most anti-establishment candidate in the form of Donald Trump.