A while back, Michael Woodley did some fascinating research into how different generations compare to each other with respect to IQ. His paper generated quite a stir, because it provided evidence that Victorians may have been smarter on average than people today. A fundamental tenet of rabbits is that everyone is equally smart, all of the time, and we always will be.
To imply otherwise could indicate that rabbit policies of rewarding imbeciles with free welfare might generate a fast reproducing crop of idiots that will eventually drag down the greatness of the entire human race, ala Idiocracy. We all know that the rabbits are too smart to do something so stupid that it might destroy the whole human race, so every generation must be equally smart, genetics has nothing to do with intelligence, and any minor difference in IQ must just be due to a transient environmental effect. Or so the rabbit logic goes.
Victorians never took an IQ test, so Woodley needed some way to measure the average IQ that far back, to compare it to IQs today. His brilliant idea came when he realized that reaction time correlates strongly with general intelligence. Fortunately, back in the Victorian age there was excellent data for average reaction time, allowing Woodley to perform the comparison with people today. Of course his work showed that since mortality was reduced and the stupid stopped being culled, reaction times have gotten slower, indicating IQs may be diminishing with time, probably due to some dysgenic effect.
What I find interesting is this. The amygdala is one of the primary brain structures responsible for speedy reaction time, as well as more complex cognitive activity associated with the allocation of cognitive resources, through its ability to drive motivation and focus. So measuring reaction time may be more a measure of amygdala functionality and activation, than a loose approximation of some sort of neural firing time.
Overall IQ does not correlate with political affiliation according to most studies, however there is a split, with most conservatives having a higher General Intelligence, (think practical intelligence), and liberals tending to be better in Specialist Intelligence (the ability to perform abstract thought in a specialized field).
This would make sense in light of the amygdala model. General Intelligence is about reacting to reality, prioritizing what is important, and allocating your cognitive resources proportionally to that reality in front of you. Yes it would be nice if every poor person were to be given a million dollars. But there is other data that should draw one’s focus more in a smart person, namely that we don’t have a million dollars to give each poor person, and trying to get it could wreck the economy which supports us all. This is the type of intelligence you need, when survival is unsure, and screwing up could get you killed. It is no wonder it was highest back in the Victorian age, or that it is declining now that we are no longer actively selecting for it as rigorously.
By contrast, those who excel at Specialist Intelligence, particularly the creative, generally have a mind that doesn’t discriminate as clearly between the important and the unimportant, nor does Specialist Intelligence require a lot of quick reaction times or data prioritization. It does not even require a firm grasp of reality, and indeed, may benefit from some disconnect with reality. Einstein was a full blown specialist genius, but he attained the title by spending his days daydreaming about all the different ways he would see things while sitting on a light beam as it sped around at a constant velocity relative to everything. Einstein was a man who probably would do poorly in a gunfight. Most people with high g would have told him that he needed to focus his time on something more realistically productive. Most people though, would never have come up with Special Relativity or General Relativity. So although I wouldn’t want Einstein in a foxhole with me, nor do I think he would last long in the real world, Specialist Intelligence is not without its benefits.
Einstein was a sort of hippie-ish leftoid, if a very amiable one. He fled Germany as it grew militaristic, and even spent his days under full FBI surveillance, developing a 1400 page file, supposedly due to suspicion of his leftism. (A true rabbit, he advocated for a world government, knowing full well that it would be tyrannical, but saying he had more fear of another war. Better to live a life in chains, than risk any danger at all – the rabbit motto.) This is the kind of creative Specialist Intelligence which will thrive in an environment where screwing up will never get you killed, but which won’t last ten seconds once competition is necessary and actions can have consequences – like being culled from the gene pool. It is not the kind of psychology you want anywhere near your civilizational structure.
So where does this all leave us? Back where this site started, but with yet another perspective indicating that the ideas presented here regarding the amygdala, evolution, and ideology are actually grounded in scientific reality, and that an understanding of this model can help one to better understand everything we see around us on the human terrain.
This also demonstrates why the amygdala model of politics explored here is so powerful. Yes it is explanatory, yes it is predictive, and yes it is practically useful. It is a great argument against leftism. But more than that, it is denigrating and amygdala stimulating to rabbits, precisely due to how thoroughly it comports with all available research and common sense, at the very same moment it goes about explaining how liberals are unable to cognitively process simple reality.
The amygdala model is the perfect meme to seize the attention of a dreamy, unfocused leftist amygdala with the threat of status diminution, and then hijack it with a simple credentialist argument that also appeals to the common sense of any observers to the debate. It is perfectly designed to out-group, both with the “authority” and the mob. Best of all, once an individual sees it, they will see that amygdala mechanism everywhere – a constant reminder of how leftists are reality-detached tools that wouldn’t last two seconds in a state of nature.
As it spreads it cannot help but do good things in politics.
[…] Amygdalae, IQ, Reaction Times, and Ideology […]
How can this be captured in a meme or tagline? We need something that is obvious, cannot be refuted, and will trigger the amygdala of the opponent.
Something like the “Hill, No!” headline in the April 12 New York Post.
For the sake of accuracy, the headline is “Oh Hill No!”
Greetings,
I’ve been reading your blog for awhile, and my own experience with leftists and narcissists in general have disturbingly mirrored your content.
Nevertheless, I find myself puzzled by this particular article. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of leftists being soulless narcissistic robots pretending to be human who exist to make everyone miserable and destroy society, but are also day dreamy creative geniuses who can benefit society.
I must confess that I do not like the possibility of having to stomach the thought that the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo are rabbits. Though I can easily see it with modern “artists” like Pollock and Andy Warhol, who were both objectively horrible people in their personal lives, as well as with other old world talented but terrible individuals like Caravaggio and Bernini.
Perhaps there was an older article that explains the spectrum of Leftist types. Could you explain this further?
By no means do I say all artists are rabbits, or that all creative are rabbits. On the subject of Einstein, he was kind of a turd with his women, and I’m guessing he was not the most loyal guy, though you could get along with him.
I had a Flemish Giant rabbit as a kid, which is probably the best example. It was delightful. On the outside, it looked like a dog. It always seemed happy. I could rub the bridge of its nose, and behind its ears all day, and it would make little grunting noises to let me know where it wanted it. When it saw me it would run to me, for a piece of banana. But it wasn’t human, and didn’t love me, so much as what happened when I was around. I was just something which brought it pleasure. It could see me dead or suffering, and still enjoy a piece of banana.
As a very small child I almost got mauled by a German Shepard. It is seared in my memory. The family wolf, who was in the woods on the side behind me, saw the Shepard approaching to attack. I was, in the wolf’s mind, his pup. I got a big stick, and tried to use it between me and the Shepard to keep it away, but I was going to get destroyed. Then, the Shepard suddenly stopped and turned tail about six feet away, and ran away as fast as it could, as a gray flash shot by me and chased it over a hill. A few moments later the wolf returned and sniffed me all over to see if I was hurt, as I hugged him and pet him. That blind love and devotion make it still an affecting memory – that dog was a soul mate.
That is the difference. There is either a perception of loyalty and one-ness with those around you, or not. You can have a human wolf who is as creative as Einstein – the statistical association doesn’t preclude it. It is just that most of those ultra creative types are that way because they have a mind designed to be creative, probably evolved in nature to help them avoid head to head competition by exploiting a new resource stream or specialist’s niche, and with that will tend to go the r-selected psychological suite of traits. It is just like K’s tend to go to the military or police, r’s tend to go to academia or media, but not every cop is a Conservative, and not every Hollywood actor is a leftist.
Da Vinci especially feels like a K to me. Anybody who devotes his creative energies to helping his people wage war is likely just a creative K. He embraces competition and war for instinctual reasons. I don’t know that much about Michaelangelo, but bear in mind the Renaissance is a highly K-period, coming after the famines from the Medieval Warming Period’s end and after Y. pestis cleared out the ranks of the poor/malnourished.
On rabbit and wolf types, this isn’t so much a case by case, fit everyone in the box idea. It speaks to general societal trends, and the extremists at the ends of the spectrum, because things tend r or K, and nature has created the two ends of the spectrum. But as nature likes to do, there will be a myriad of mixtures, combinations, and so on that will, at the individual-level defy classification.
Thank you very much for the thorough and informative reply.
Pondering upon your post and looking back upon art history through an r/K lens has made many trends take on a new light.
For example: A popular mythology in the modern art world is that the rise of modern art is the product of a grand and noble rebellion against the tyranny of traditionalism.
However, considering how many hundreds, even thousands, of years that art followed a K oriented philosophy (i.e. created for the purpose of cementing, transmitting and preserving a tribe’s/nation’s cultural identity), for the nature of the art world to have changed so dramatically and so quickly, something unprecedented had to have happened.
Though there were some seeds in the Impressionists break from the established Salons and Academies, modern art as we know it today did not truly emerge until the Dada movement. It was from this movement that such modern art mainstays such as “conceptual art” and “found art” (like Marcel Duchamp’s infamous and execrable “Fountain”) first emerged.
But what was Dada? At it’s core, it was a rebellion, mockery, and attack on traditional culture. Note that it’s genesis was just before, during, and the aftermath of World War 1; a time of K-type conditions of a magnitude and consequence never before experienced in human history.
Thus, it could be argued that the r-type takeover of the art world was the product of r-type rabbits seizing upon a golden opportunity to attack traditional artistic institutions when the general public was experiencing exhaustion and backlash towards peak K conditions that the rabbits could pin on traditional culture. Or perhaps it at least created such conditions within the art community only, considering that 1950’s society was fairly K-type, while the likes of Pollack and the Abstract Expressionists were shaping the art world behind the scenes.
Regardless, one can easily see the r type takeover of art, by the fact that fine art is no longer about the aforementioned cementing, transmission and preservation of a culture’s identity and values. Rather, modern art has become a race to the bottom in the pursuit of narcissistic gratification through novelty and infamy. More specifically, it is the pursuit of status through the least amount of effort possible. Why would a rabbit care about craftsmanship, hard work, and integrity, when they can get status, security and adoration by pissing in a jar and kissing the right asses?
It reminds me of this one episode of “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist” that I watched a while ago. One of the contestants created a work involving a piece of slightly curved plywood with a balled up piece of paper in the center, and claimed it was “an expression of gravity.”
I think of the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, and how though they are long gone, we know for a fact, by their architecture, sculpture, poetry, hieroglyphics, etc. that they were brilliant people who valued timeless beauty and order.
Then I think upon the West being dead and gone, and future archaeologists rummaging through our ruins. Our culture, our spirit, our worldview…. represented by a curved piece of plywood with a balled up bit of crinkled paper in the center. It’s absolutely sickening.
One can even view the r and K type differences between two closely related but different art movements.
The Cubists: proudly isolationist and anti-war; creating art that functioned as obtuse code that only the elect could understand for the purpose of circle-jerking it off to their exclusive status.
The Futurists: Violent, powerful, kinetic laden visuals for the purpose of shaping society towards a revolutionary form of K values.
My apologies if this was a bit overlong and ranty, but your response really got my gears moving.
I loved the response. I am nowhere near as expert in art as you, but in passing, I see a lot of the old Renaissance art as the product of rigorous amygdalae, for lack of a better phrase. The sculptures, to me, represent amygdalae that accurately processed what needed to be removed, and what had to stay, and the goal of art was to assuage amygdalae through representation of a beautiful world. Bothered by imperfection, and viewing the work as superior in importance to the artist, the artist’s amygdala would see itself fire off in response to each errant piece of marble that needed to be removed, and they wouldn’t present the piece until it was perfection, and not a single part triggered the amygdalae on looking at it. Likewise, the public had amygdalae that would judge art with pieces that didn’t belong as bothersome and imperfect, and it would strive to see pieces which embodied perfection, which in their case seems to be the world around them which I can only assume they loved.
Today, it seems that art is about finding reasons that the imperfections are good and purposeful, and everyone sees the artist as more important than the pieces. Even the art seems designed to distract amygdalae with shock and awe, ranging from confusion to disgust to rage, rather than present amygdala assuaging-perfection in a pure representation of a beautiful world. I almost wonder if it is amygdalae that don’t like the world as it is, and seek a filtered version of it that distracts from the bothersome elements with amygdala-triggering deviations of some sort or other.
r/K is the main divergence in our populations, and I see it in a lot more than just politics, as I walk through the world. I hope you find it useful in your travels.