Rabbits, Victim Mentalities, and Free Resources

When the environment is r-selecting due to a resource glut, it naturally favors docile, conflict averse psychologies. Imagine Vox Day, Larry Correia, and Woody Allen were all rabbits, living in a field of grass so large they’d never deplete it. Woody Allen goes up to Vox, and begins eating grass a little too close to Vox’s daughter. Vox confronts Woody, and Woody runs off. Woody gets the same resources he would have gotten if he fought Vox, but he doesn’t fight, so he doesn’t risk injury or death at the hands of Vox.

Now Larry gets too close, Vox confronts him, and they go at it. Both are going to take damage, and maybe even kill each other, all for resources they would have gotten had they run away. So over time, free resources will cull the population. It will favor conflict aversion, an expectation that resources should always be free, and even a subtle expectation that others will avoid conflict as well in their search for free resources.

If, as this site asserts, human r-strategists are imbued with this suite of perceptions and urges, you can see how victim status would arise. One day, a black Jewish female rabbit, who for some reason feels inferior due to her black Jewish female status, is roaming around a field of grass. Another white male heterosexual rabbit comes a little too close, and in a fit of self-pity she bawls, “But I am a black Jewish Female Rabbit! Baw Waw Waw Hoo Hoo! Why is he hurting me?”

Suddenly white male heterosexual rabbit, whose amygdala is so damaged that he imagines threats where there are none, gets afraid that an imaginary army of avenging minorities might hold a grudge against him. His desire for conflict avoidance kicks in, he runs away, and Black Jewish Female rabbit looks around wide eye’d at all the grass around her, reveling in her unexpected victory. What will black Jewish female rabbit do from now on, every time she experiences threat?

I just kept seeing this scenario, as I read through Vox’s post here. First, this woman’s amygdala is so accustomed to total ease and control that a guy makes a dongle joke to a friend at a computer conference, and she immediately takes offense. That is an amygdala unaccustomed to harshness.

Then she asserts to the interviewer that she tweeted her horror, out of a fear that the guy sitting five rows away was going to rape her, in the middle of a conference of 2000 computer geeks. The interviewer asks why she didn’t think any of the 2,000 other conference goers would stop the rape and her response is that they are all white males, as if they might rape her too, for good measure, all because she is a black Jewish female. The narcissism, self absorption, and expectation that everyone give her whatever she wants has to be read to be believed.

You can tell, the way she says “I’m a black Jewish female,” over and over, that she has used that phrase a lot. In the context she applies it, it isn’t a logical, thought-out response. It is a conditioned response thrown out in response to any threat or challenge – the type of response which can only be conditioned through frequent repetition when resources are free, and everyone avoids the fight.

If resources were limited so that only those who fought could get resources, all that would survive would be Larry Correia’s type. Given the scarcity of resources they would either kill her outright the first time she tried to play that card and take their resources, or they would humble her so completely she would have begged Vox Day to take her as a concubine, add her to his harem, and do with her as he wished, if only he would throw her some food scraps once in a while. Of course under such conditions, the only such feminists who would survive would be the good looking ones (who are seemingly few and far between), so she’d probably be out of luck there as well.

What these incidents should show you, is that we are beginning the transition from r to K, and the rules are changing. Gamergate is a great accomplishment, but it required motivation, and motivation required irritation. If this were the dot-com boom, I suspect those gamers would have been too busy making money and partaking of other sources of pleasure, to unite together and mount a fight. Games would have deteriorated as everything does under r-selection, but the gamers would have found bliss elsewhere, and left gaming until it got better again.

Yet now, all it takes is a single web post somewhere to set off an army of angry warriors, obsessed with justice and right. Feminists like this bimbo used to dominate only because people avoided the fight, but now there are so many people itching to fight that they are looking for fights in other people’s battles. This is a big change, and we are not all that resource-restricted yet. Wait until the economic system collapses. The rage will be epic, and rabbits will run.

The rabbits are noticing this rule change now, even though it is so minor, and it is tripping their conflict-avoidance circuitry. Scalzi, the pied rabbit piper, sees his blog traffic plummeting as his followers retreat into the shadows, even as Vox’s traffic breaks new records. Blue SF is beginning to realize the gains in its economic muscle as it advances on pink SF. In American politics, Democrats are trying to figure out what to stand for to avoid getting destroyed in the future. And legions of little tyrants like the bimbo in Vox’s post are noticing that their social attacks are generating very real counter-attacks, making them begin to retreat from their side as well.

All we need now is to see the common employment of 4g war (a form of war adapted to conditions of r-selected free resource availability, ie. it is too costly to continue to fight when you don’t have to) begin to reverse toward 3g (ie, fight or we will kill you and everyone around you and take your stuff), as nations begin to turn more K, exhibit increased in-grouping, and resource restriction forces national conflicts waged with less concern for collateral damage on the enemy. As Grozny showed, 4g only works as a strategy if your enemy is hesitant to obliterate the innocent civilian populace around you, and content to leave if the costs are too high. I have a feeling WWIII will show that 3g war can be very effective against 4g, if you don’t mind rendering an entire people to dust.

Until then, revel in the wailing of our adversaries, as their r-selected rabbit psychologies begin increasingly to run face first into the K-selected reality of the wolf-world we are seeing emerge around us.