Victor Davis Hanson On The Fifth American Civil War

Even the most brilliant minds don’t seem quite so brilliant, if you know r/K Theory:

Third, when tribalism supersedes the individual, then all criteria of merit, character, and ethics recede into identity: Race, gender, and ethnicity replace merit and we begin to have black NASA engineers, white nuclear-plant operators, or brown jet pilots rather than missiles, power, and flights that are overseen and operated by the most skilled among us. When a society operates on a tribal basis — we see it often in Africa and the Middle East — everything from tap water to IVs are a luxury.

In short, will America remain a multiracial nation united in one culture in which superficial physical appearance becomes largely irrelevant (and indeed one’s racial DNA pedigree soon becomes almost undefinable), or will it go the tribal route that ultimately leads to something like the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq — or Evergreen State, Ferguson, and Middlebury?

Knowing r/K Theory is such a boost to your understanding it is funny to watch others ponder our political circumstances without it. They seem completely clueless.

Here, Hanson has no clue that there are two different environmental circumstances, and they affect what is possible. To him, man can do anything at any time. Live in a homogenous society, go tribal, it is all just at the whim of fate and desire. The reality is obviously different.

In times of r-selection and free resource availability you can have lots of tribes living side by side as leftism rises. Indeed, the most r-strategist in the group will insist on it. Accomplishments and efficiency will suffer, the smart will be contaminated by the idiots, and there will be disasters and failure, but since it is r-selection and resources are free, nobody cares.

But let things turn K and everything changes. Instincts deep in the human amygdala rise up, groups splinter along any demarcations, from ethnic, and racial to religious, to ideological, and you have tribalism. Then, diversity + proximity = war, and no amount of logic, reason, or pontificating, or even pleading in National Review will change it.

Finally, there is a growing rejection of the founding principles of the United States, its traditional Christian-based values, and the old idea of American exceptionalism. Federalism and the idea of a republic, after all, do not necessarily lead to radical egalitarianism or a society of absolute equals…

Progressivism.

It has an insidious appeal to human nature, offering contexts and arguments for dependency — which is defined as the consequence of some sort of prior unethical exploitation (rather than chance, bad luck, or personal pathology, perhaps in addition to exploitation) and therefore deserving of proper recompense. Progressivism promises a transcendence over nature’s limitations through superior education, proper training, and correct reasoning, as if poverty, illness, and inequality were not innate to human nature but results of selfishness and ignorance and so rather easily remedied…

These age-old observations often led to depressions among Western philosophers who grasped the Western paradox that the success of market capitalism and constitutional government might undermine the ancient virtues essential to their continuance.

Now if he would only grasp that the loss of those virtues and the breakdown in capitalism and constitutional government were part of a cycle that would yield the chaos, anarchy, and violence which would restore amygdala and reestablish the virtues that are essential to the formation and continuance of capitalism and constitutionalism. He would understand so much of history.

Without that knowledge, all of this just seems so blind to reality. A brilliant guy, but one little piece of data missing and all of his observations – in the 99th percentile for those blind to r/K – are rendered totally obsolete and meaningless.

In this latest arena of civil dissent, Donald Trump, the renegade liberal and most unlikely traditionalist, squares off against the elite that despises his very being not only for reasons of class and culture, but mostly for attempting to restore a traditional regime of citizenship, individualism, assimilation, territorial sovereignty, recognized borders, strong defense, deterrence abroad, and free-market capitalism.

In sum, behind the daily hysterias over collusions, recusals, obstructions, and nullifications, there is an ongoing, often vicious war over the very nature and future of Western culture in general and America in particular.

Knowing r/K Theory is such a boost to your understanding it is funny to watch others ponder our political circumstances without it. Yes we are entering a war, but why? Did man just decide that war sounded fun out of the blue? Why are we confrontational? Why is tribalism rising? Why are gun sales surging? Why is the left diverging ever farther from the right? Why Trump?

If you know r/K, you see the whole cycle, and it all not only makes sense, it is predictable and you can see where it is all going. And by comparison, reading the work of those who have never heard of it just highlights how much work remains to be done.

Spread r/K Theory, because it will make you a leader in the field