Glimmers of K-selection in Greece

When I was a young buck, I had an older friend I’ll call Mike. Mike looked like a 24 year old, 6 foot, 200 lb. version of Charlie Sheen with blonde hair. The biggest difference between him and Charlie Sheen was, Mike was way funnier and crazier, in that crazy Charlie Sheen way.

We were talking once over beers when he related the story of how one summer he fell in with a crazy cokehead friend. He was 19, and had just gotten a landscaping job. Mike was quiet and industrious back then, and the boss quickly sought to exploit this. “Ron” was the least industrious and least trustworthy of all the employees, so the boss paired him with Mike, hoping Mike’s moral boundaries would keep Ron in check. Instead, being older and wiser, Ron set about gradually corrupting Mike. By the end of the summer, and after a close call with a cop and a three inch high pile of cocaine, Mike realized he needed to get away from Ron before things went really bad, so he left the job and never looked back.

In the course of Mike’s story, it got to the part about how Ron’s family was rich, but he was so crazy they just gave him a trust which kicked out several thousand each month, and asked him not to come around. Ron took the landscaping job to pay what had become meager living expenses, so he could put entirety of the trust payments to good use on massive bi-monthly cocaine purchases and endless partying. Mike would kick some of his money in, they’d go out and buy a heaping pile of cocaine, split it up, and after doing landscaping all day they’d head out to the club scene in the vacation town they worked in, and just party together until sunrise. Then they’d take a hit to take the edge off, go back to work again, taking turns napping in the truck during the day, to be ready for the next night.

I never smoked, barely drank, and was fascinated to be able to find out what cocaine was like, so I asked Mike. His response was simple, “Oh, it’s great when you’ve just filled up your stash. You’re euphoric – you feel on top of the world. You’re so overjoyed you are giving it away, even insisting that other people take hits with you. Then it begins to run out and you start to get stingy. Then you’ve only got a hit or two left and you begin to panic, because you know those two hits have to last four days. Then you start desperately trying to find other people’s stashes so you can steal them. When you’ve got a lot of it, it’s great, but when it begins to run out it isn’t as much fun.”

I don’t know why, but that answer stuck with me. Now, as I look at r/K, I see that answer pointing to a much deeper truth about people, pleasure, and our future. Pleasure and pain (and the panic produced by it) are relative.

A reader emailed me this link, about how in Greece, they are doing surgery without painkillers, sheets, and even scissors.

From the email:

“One of our first looks at actual first world resource restriction… If they think it’s bad now, just wait until it finally comes to the point where there will be either enough money to maintain law and order or to continue to pay those who rely on the dole. It’s at that point when you have one group demanding law and order, and the other demanding their weekly welfare check, that the lines between r and K will be clearer than they’ve ever been. And at those stakes, not only will they be crystal clear they will be irreconcilable”.

Irreconcilable – the best word I can think of to describe it.

It goes nicely with this link about Greece likely defaulting on June 5th, which should trigger a further resource restriction which will make the first article’s descriptions sound like a well-provisioned glut.

Like cocaine addiction, r/K is relative. If you go to Africa, and say, “I’m sorry people, but you’re going to have to do without toilet paper for the next month,” everyone huddled around the village campfire will stop smelling their fingers for a minute, look around at each other confused and say, “What is toilet paper?”

If you say the same thing in America, it could very well trigger a revolution, or at least a voting-out of everyone in power. And if, after a toilet paper-less month, you put three packages of toilet paper on the store shelf and let a few hundred people in the store, you will probably end up with at least five or six dead bodies after the melee disburses. We get that now every Black Friday, over luxuries we don’t even need, and there isn’t even any resource restriction. Imagine if suddenly people don’t have food in the cities, because each truck they send in gets hijacked, and nobody wants to drive in there for fear of getting killed. Imagine three loaves of bread on the shelf in a store full of starving people, in a country which riots over Christmas gifts.

Moreover, Greece is a relatively homogenous, fairly unarmed society which has been getting acclimated to resource-restriction for a few years now – and where nobody is near starving to death. When this hits in the US, we will probably go very quickly from flush to broke, in a heavily-armed, racially, economically, and ethnically fractured society, filled with hostile and violent criminal gangs, from motorcycle gangs to street gangs. Even worse, the areas with the most violent gangs will tend to be the areas where the weakest and most vulnerable citizens have legislated away their right to own firearms to defend themselves, and made the police afraid to do anything decisive for fear of being imprisoned themselves.

As I look out on what is coming, I am just awed – most of all by the fact that we all see it coming, know what is causing it, and nobody has the least ability to stop it.

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8 years ago

[…] Glimmers of K-selection in Greece […]

Aeoli Pera
Aeoli Pera
8 years ago

Cocaine works by inhibiting dopamine reuptake. The return to functioning reuptake and lowered dopamine production will have essentially the same subjective feeling of “coming down” and the desperation you mentioned to keep the good times going. So if Pinterest goes down (or worse, Facebook), people are going to react like cocaine addicts. Then there will be violent outbursts and a withdrawal period.

Imagine every person in the world experiencing the worst menses of a BPD girl’s nightmare on the same day, and you have a good picture of how the first few days are going to look if the smartphones stop working.

If the food goes away, we’re going to have this response at the same time as hungry desperation.