Venezuelan Children Are Historically Malnourished

The tragic side of K:

Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death.

His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals.

Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid the food shortages and soaring food prices throttling the nation. They gently placed the tiny wings on top of Kenyerber’s coffin to help his soul reach heaven — a tradition when a baby dies in Venezuela.

When Kenyerber’s body was finally ready for viewing, his father, Carlos Aquino, a 37-year-old construction worker, began to weep uncontrollably. “How can this be?” he cried, hugging the coffin and speaking softly, as if to comfort his son in death. “Your papá will never see you again.”

Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. Now, it is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate, doctors in the country’s public hospitals say.

Venezuela has been shuddering since its economy began to collapse in 2014. Riots and protests over the lack of affordable food, excruciating long lines for basic provisions, soldiers posted outside bakeries and angry crowds ransacking grocery stores have rattled cities, providing a telling, public display of the depths of the crisis.

But deaths from malnutrition have remained a closely guarded secret by the Venezuelan government. In a five-month investigation by The New York Times, doctors at 21 public hospitals in 17 states across the country said that their emergency rooms were being overwhelmed by children with severe malnutrition — a condition they had rarely encountered before the economic crisis began.

“Children are arriving with very precarious conditions of malnutrition,” said Dr. Huníades Urbina Medina, the president of the Venezuelan Society of Childcare and Pediatrics. He added that doctors were even seeing the kind of extreme malnutrition often found in refugee camps — cases that were highly unusual in oil-rich Venezuela before its economy fell to pieces.

Imagine how much different the cognitive operation in these children is. Imagine the reduced dopamine. Imagine the heightened amygdala activation, even at rest. Imagine its unceasing nature.

These will be brains functioning on the opposite end of the spectrum compared to those in America these past few decades, and you can see how they would develop differently and adopt a different psychology.

Venezuela is now in the midst of real K-selection, for better or worse. Parents whose amygdalae can watch their children starve, and still remain functional will see their genes culled from the population, and because of that, what you will begin to see is the rise of K. Within Venezuela now are parents whose amygdalae are so wracked by the threats to their children that they are scrambling to do anything they can to keep their children alive. Where there are two parents scrambling for food, there will be even more advantage.

Look at how Darwin will favor two subtle psychological drives. The protection of offspring, at all costs, and the monogamous rearing of offspring by two committed, psychologically simpatico parents.

Think now in our world. If this hit, whose children would die? Who would look after only themselves and their pleasures, and leave their children’s survival as a second, optional choice? Who would be wracked, every moment of every day, looking for some way, any way to put calories in their child? What would the hippies and druggies do? Would single moms have a disadvantage? What about chicks busy riding the cock carousel? What about non-present fathers?

This is the Darwinian cauldron in which our ideology was forged. It is strange, because it is so horrible. And yet, just as Chinese philosophy presumes that everything in the world is composed of equal parts of opposites like Yin and Yang, that applies here as well. Eliminate this horror, and the world descends into a plethora of small-minded tyrants hell bent on punishing anyone who wants to strive to be better than they are.

But endure this horror, and one day you will have Marines selflessly charging head first into death, winning Medals of Honor with citations that will trigger awe in young children for generations to come. From firefighters charging into burning buildings, to husbands and fathers shielding their children and their wives with their own bodies, this is the tribute demanded for everything honorable and decent in our societies and our species. It is the reason the conservative ideology will emerge from such times, just as day follows night.

And its return now is a harbinger of that greatness’ return to our species. Morning is coming.

Spread r/K Theory, because freedom isn’t free, in a lot of ways