r/K and Rearing Strategies

One thing about the Alt-right. The people here have mechanistic minds, probably borne of being raised in a world where they have been intellectually marinated in extraordinarily technical sciences from an early age. This creates a significant intellectual barrier between the new right, and the old right.

It is not surprising this barrier would rise, because most of the members of the old right couldn’t even have learned much of what the new right was taught. When guys like Charles Murray were in High School, the structure of DNA was still cutting edge information only being learned by a few select graduate students, and calculus was some weird thing those super geeky professional engineers used to make rocket-ships fly. I studied the structure of DNA in tenth grade (and even had to read the Double Helix to get the social story behind it) and was doing calculus by 11th grade – in High School. My guess is most of the intellects of the old right never even studied calculus or DNA even after four years of college, or their graduate studies.

When you have one generation that has studied complex mechanical topics from childhood that the most educated among the older generation have never even looked at, you are bound to have divergent views of the world.

Case in point:

Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society. About a decade later, they fell and leveled off among the college-educated, who almost entirely raise their kids in Ozzie-and-Harriet style families today (except that Mom usually works outside the home).

So shortly after the population experienced one of the most massive explosions in dopamine signaling ever seen (courtesy of resource availability in childhood and illicit, dopamine-agonisitic, illegal drug use in adolescence), you have a shift toward low investment single-parenting. A similar period, after a subsequent shortage and relative reduction in illicit drug use, and the trend stalls.

The article goes on to recognize that many poor families still have single parenting issues, but notes, however:

Food and clothing has become less expensive (thanks, Wal-Mart) and most households classified as poor have smartphones, microwaves, and big-screen TVs that did not exist in the 1960s.

That is resource availability, even worse, administered without the stress of having to acquire such resources through struggle and competition, courtesy of welfare and public assistance. Bear in mind, these people are in “poverty” and yet they have big screen TV’s and smartphones, both of which are almost better dopamine stimulants that a machine that administers a cocaine-filled food pellet every time you hit the lever. Add in an X-box, and you might as well be a junkie. It also says something profound about a society’s level of resource availability when poverty is seen in conjunction with such dopamine-eliciting luxuries.

Barone is a brilliant guy, but in lacking any sort of scientific background, he cannot see any environmental or biochemical mechanism underlying these changes. As far as he is concerned, things could just as easily have gone the opposite way, had a few smart guys said a few smart things to the children of the sixties. To him, there is no measurable or quantifiable force or mechanism to be understood, it is all the vagaries of individual free will, writ large, and thus wholly indecipherable.

The funny thing is, if you showed him a population of animals, where at one point in time they had two parent families, and two kids, and then years later they had transitioned to single parent rearing with six kids, I’ll bet he would ask what had changed in the environment. I’ll even bet he would look at resource availability especially hard, had there been a noticeable change in it. If he was really smart and studied the issue, he might even ask about the dopamine signaling intensity within the population.

But none of these people will do this in humans.

I’m not saying that there is a clear answer to the problem, but at least we should try to get the mechanism behind the problem right, so we can get that much closer to a solution. Without the mechanism, we will find ourselves having to battle idiots like this, which will only take us further away from solving the problem:

What to do?

“Redistribution” has become a bad word. But the economy toward which we’re hurtling — in which more and more is generated by fewer and fewer people who reap almost all the rewards, leaving the rest of us without enough purchasing power — can’t function.

It may be that a redistribution of income and wealth from the rich owners of breakthrough technologies to the rest of us becomes the only means of making the future economy work.

While I may not be able to give a good answer to how to solve the single parenting dilemma, aside from not subsidizing it with government assistance and throwing all children from single mom’s into Kung Fu, Karate, Judo, or BJJ classes, under strong male instructors, from birth, I am pretty sure Reich’s idea would pretty much put the coup de grace to what is left of the great America we were so lovingly handed by our forefathers. If we are going to save any vestige of this nation, we need to get the idiots out of the conversation first. A full, mechanistic understanding of the problem is the only way that will ever happen civilly.

r/K Selection Theory as political ideology, and dopamine signaling intensity as its driver is that mechanistic understanding.

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9 years ago

[…] r/K and Rearing Strategies […]

Max Wylde
Max Wylde
9 years ago

I think people, generally speaking, like to think of human beings as above mere biology or social influences. That would be true, because I tend to think humans can, indeed, control their own behavior and mindset if they want to, especially if told why they should. It’s just that people really aren’t encouraged to, in my opinion. I think that if you’re not aware of your own mindset and how it’s influenced by all kinds of things, you’ll end up a mess.

I tested this years ago. I sold my own XBox and I haven’t had a game system in my place since. I don’t watch TV very often, and I don’t even have a cable or satellite provider, except for Internet. I watch movies from time to time, but not very often anymore. My place has been described as boring, but very clean. Since I started doing that, I’ve been more apt to go out and do things with my time than to hang out at home, and I save a lot more money. I have to admit, it’s been kind of a rough transition. But I’m more fit than I’ve been since I left the Army.

Which leads me to wonder if we were less interested in holding up in our domiciles that we might be more extroverted?

mysterian
mysterian
8 years ago

“…but in lacking any sort of scientific background, he cannot see any environmental…”
it could be that he, like many others, have internalized the foundational premise of environmentalistism: humans are not part of it.