This is another great video by Bill Whittle.
As I watch it, I am astounded at how the r-selected environment actually disfavors quality like this. Bill literally wouldn’t be able to produce these videos today without subscribers at BillWhittle.com. Meanwhile Bill O’Reilly cruises through Foxnews, and rakes it in doing videos saying “Yeah, we should have free speech, but…..”
The reason lies in amygdala. Those who are K are trained to embrace amygdala activation, where it is warranted. When Bill is provocative, we focus in on it, and feel the aversive stimulus, because we have been trained to embrace that aversive stimulus. When we have embraced that aversive stimulus in the past, we have been motivated to act, and then we have seen how that action forestalled far worse consequences later on. That has made us grateful for feeling our aversive stimulus, and that training motivates us to seek it out in the future.
The rabbits are different. Corrupted by free resources, they are trained to avoid the aversive stimulus wherever it pops up and then avoid the consequences later on, because having resources everywhere makes consequence-avoidance easy – at least for a time. All of life is a short-term discomfort-avoidance exercise for them. Those conditions train them too. Once they avoid the discomfort, and then avoid the consequences, they say to themselves, “Boy it was good I avoided that discomfort.” Show them an uncomfortable truth in the future, and they will deny it and avoid it with all their might, as they wonder why you are so crazy for promoting such feel-bad.
Liberalism, as an r-selected reproductive strategy is basically an ideology of corruption, willing to do anything and bribe anyone to avoid reality. “We’ll give you power if you’ll use that power to take stuff from other people, and give it to us, so we don’t have to work for it.” Conservatism, as a K-selected reproductive strategy is supposed to be the party of anti-corruption, but when the corrupting forces of resource availability are everywhere, corruption bleeds over, even into Conservative media.
So Bill O’Reilly sees an issue through the lens of, “How do I minimize everyone’s amygdala stimulation, avoid confrontation myself, get myself the most followers possible by making everyone not “feel-bad,” and who cares what the long term consequences are?” The result is a reality-blind psychology, with a lack of motivation to act, rooted in an instinctual avoidance of all cognitive discomfort. That is not the psychology that produced the greatness of America. But then things are too easy right now for that psychology to take root widely.
Once the economic tide shifts then the harshness will return, people will once again become trained to listen to that little amygdala-voice and see it as a friend, and then the citizenry will demand quality, and reproduce the greatness of America.
Until then, BillWhittle.com needs members to keep the flame of K alive, until such time as the collapse nurtures it into a roaring American inferno of greatness once again.
I really enjoy the r-selected and k-selected fiction you create.
It really is two different cognitive models. As Vox just said, post all the cites to peer reviewed studies, all the easily followed logic, all the common sense observations, and if those fact are painful to the rabbit, they will block out the entire logical chain, and all they can register from the writing is “Blah, blah, I’m smart, facts support my case, blah blah.”
If they don’t see anything to attack, they make a snarky comment to try and feign social dominance, and then take off. It is like they come off an assembly line.
I should also show how you respond to this, which is not with a logical chain of reasoning designed to honestly convince such an opponent. That is treating them like a human, and they are not really human. Rather you just use a snarky argument designed to make him feel stupid. I’d say,
“Yeah, because I’m sure when the economy collapses, and everyone is starving, they will become super double-plus happy/tolerant, and just want to sit in a drum circle, sing folk songs, have promiscuous sex with everyone, and they will be super tolerant of guys trying to sleep with their daughters. It’s not like shortage is in anyway associated with war, or that ideology tracks economic misery, or that Conservatism and Liberalism are exactly the same as the issues described by r/K Theory.”
The goal isn’t to convince, its just to highlight the stupidest deviations from logic, so observers will think them obviously stupid, and not listen to them anymore. In r-selected times, social status is all that gains mates, so threaten that, and they will tend to flee for safer pastures, and leave you alone. It is weird when you want truth, to realize that they don’t care about truth, and the only way to make them cry uncle is to make them feel stupid, but that’s the way it is.
you treated that comment nicely.
..the progs always decry ad hominem attacks yet that is their primary go to method. I think one of your essays pointed out that narcissists always employ the techniques that they themselves wither under.
strange how GCM felt the need to comment at all. your blog must really hit a nerve.
cheers AC
On the other hand, a word of encouragement … I found this site (and your book) about a month ago and am still working through your ideas, but I am finding that they are allowing me to form a remarkably useful model to explain behaviors which have baffled me for decades. I am not sure that I would have ever thought of the approach you are taking – thank you for your efforts.
Bravo! Keep up the great work.
Let’s dispense with the idea that K=smart and r=stupid. Smart and stupid lie on a perpendicular axis — does the organism think through problems or blindly follow its instincts? Smart people switch between r- and K-behavior as the environment warrants.
When your government is a fountain of free money, K-behavior is maladaptive. My uncle’s told his four children not to have more than two apiece, so they can afford to send them to college. I pointed out that he’d just spent (wild guess) $40,000 remodeling his home (he said it was a *lot* more than that!) How much of that money went to people who ever attended college?
Agreed.
One big reason Bill Whittle isn’t as popular as Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly is his voice — he always sounds like he’s about to cry or just finished crying. Bill, I share your heartbreak over our nation’s imminent demise, but learn to talk like a man!
I always thought Bill had the “cool guy’s” voice, speaking to a sort of relaxed jock history with non-abusive parents and a lack of angering/frustrating siblings. Beck, on the other hand sounds a little panicked to me, but that might just be him dealing with some crazy stuff in his life.
Now O’Reilly’s voice – that drives me nuts. I always feel the undercurrent of vituperativeness as an amygdala on a hair trigger.
I wanted to comment on this post after I saw that video, and this comment of yours is very appropriate.
After seeing this video, I was so moved I wanted to cry. It wasn’t just the words the man was saying, there was something in his manner that struck a chord with me. There was something in his anger and outrage that I identified with very strongly. I also saw a pain and heartbreak. Perhaps I am wrong, but that was my sense.
I don’t want to overdo it on “the feels”, because logically I know that I can be fooled and that even a good man, is only human.
But thank you for this post, and again, thank you for all the posts you have written.
Bill is a good guy fighting the good fight, which is why he is fighting into a headwind. If he was a blowhard, or a phony, he would have an easy run in the media, and be on every Sunday show. More and more, I am thinking corruptibility is a prerequisite for media success.
I’m confused.
Am I more r or K if the whole ISIS thing looks like a construct of Deep Politics in the US/UK, and the terrorists who attacked the Texas art gallery as likely low-IQ dupes channeled into that act by people paid from tax receipts?
I recall a couple decades past when Homegrown Terrorism SPLC drivel was driven by militia groups. In no time at all, if a militia group had a meeting, at least 7 of every 10 people who showed up were tax-paid. It’s not even certain the White Aryan Nation had any non-informants.
A rabbit sees threats from every angle of the hemisphere. But in today’s panopticon, Orwellian world, is not a K-selected creature surrounded as well? One cannot put ones back to the wall when there are no walls.