We’re seeing increasing levels of weirdness in our culture of late. Gay parents are just as good as straight parents, women should be Army Rangers, everyone needs a free cellphone, with minutes and texts, and even the age of dependents will be increased to 26 by the ACA (meaning fathers will probably have to pay child support to their ex-wives, until their children are 26 years old). To understand this, you must grasp how r/K strategies are imbued within an individual, and to grasp that, you need to understand a brain structure called the amygdala.
I have come to a point where I view the amygdala as an organ designed to make us perceive reality. It does this by whipping our brain with aversive stimulus whenever we encounter something we need to pay attention to, or whipping us psychologically until we do something we don’t want to do. Those whose amygdalae are deficient will tend to not get this whipping, and thus they can pursue all manner of silliness, absent any neurological consequence.
Of course, like all body structures, there is a genetic component to the development of the amygdala and there is an environmental component. Take, for example, the old cliche of the Conservative being a Liberal who was mugged. Here, we will see three basic levels of genetically determined amygdala function.
Some individuals will come with an amygdala which is, right out of the box, highly functional. These individuals can visualize a mugging, and attach all of the negative aversive stimulus to it, without ever having experienced it. Once their amygdala realizes there is something bad out there, it will whip their brain with aversive stimulus until such time as they take measures to eliminate the possibility of mugging as much as possible. They will elect Conservatives to office who will be tough on crime. They will get a gun to protect themselves, maintain situational awareness, and alter their routes to avoid areas where they are likely to be mugged.
In an environment where resources are extremely short, and you only get one chance to do things right, this ability to foresee threat, and deal with it preemptively is the optimum strategy. Obviously, this is an innately Conservative individual.
Other individuals will come out with less functional amygdalae. These individuals will have to actually be mugged. During the mugging, all sorts of brain structures and negative emotions pour forth inside their head. This will develop their amygdala, growing brain structures attaching the concept of a mugging to negative, aversive stimuli. Now, with a developed amygdala, these individuals will proceed to behave exactly as the first individuals did, for the same reasons. When they contemplate the possibility of mugging, they will experience all of the aversive stimuli, and be motivated to act to preempt any such event from occurring. These are the Conservatives, who were Liberals that got mugged.
The final group of individuals are individuals whose amygdalae will always be deficient. They get mugged, and then go home. There, they write a blog post about how ashamed they are that their people so oppressed this poor mugger that he had to resort to pistol-whipping innocent citizens to support himself. Then they tell themselves that being mugged wasn’t so bad, they deserved it, and it will never happen again anyway. Obviously, in a truly K-selected state of nature, this type wouldn’t last long. However they can do quite well, as long as there are no consequences to be experienced in their r-selective environment, where competition/aggression is actually an unnecessary risk, given the free availability of resources.
So as this example describes, amygdala functionality is produced by a combination of both genetic and environmental pressures. This produces a population of individuals who have a genetic predisposition to an r or K environment, as well as an ability to mold their overall, population-level strategy to changing environmental circumstances.
The main issue today, is that in modern society people can shield themselves from reality for their whole lives if they choose. Our military keeps Al Qaida at bay. Our police force keeps the local savages at bay, and our economy (at least by comparison to third world economies) allows us to keep any economic consequences at bay, at least for now. So we are left with a psychology within our nation which neither cares about reality, nor wants to consider it.
Women in the Rangers? What could go wrong? Gays in the Military? What could go wrong? It’s not like we could ever lose a war. And even if we did lose a war, and got conquered by the radical Islamists, what would be bad about that? National Debt? What could go wrong? So we default someday, big deal. National Healthcare? It’ll be great. We can get rid of all the confusing insurance forms. Nothing could be bad about it. Consequences smonsequences. We’ll be fine.
In every case, an individual’s amygdala should be flooding their brain with negative/aversive emotional stimuli, and yet, it isn’t, because those neural pathways were never laid down. Let a man watch his buddies die in combat, because the woman on their team couldn’t lug her 150lb pack fast enough, and he will learn to express aversive stimuli at the thought of women in combat. I’m sure hardened veterans of the Normandy invasion would laugh in the faces of feminists who want to see women Rangers and women SEALs. Absent that experience, it is truly, to the Liberal, as if no bad can possibly happen.
If the rules of nature hold in humans, the easiest way to truly defeat this psychology is to let the bad come, and let it sting that part of society which can form new amygdala pathways. Let the National Debt go to default, let the global economic system collapse, and then let everyone who can form new amygdala pathways experience the misery, and burn those “reality” pathways into their heads, teaching them there are consequences, and they should be avoided. Or, as we saw, let Al Qaida attack, and then watch as the nation begins to laugh at the sheer stupidity of democrats.
There is another way, and that is to find a way to trigger the amygdala in public debate, and associate the triggering with the negative consequences. Bush could easily have done this after the 9/11 attacks, by repeatedly connecting the attack to the previous Liberal policy of conflict avoidance. Sprinkle in emotional words like cowardice and stupidity, and you have the recipe for a real ground-shift in political opinion. Non-Liberal moderates would associate the aversive stimulus in their heads with Liberalism, and Liberals would associate their own strategy with humiliation and ridicule. The net effect would be a shift towards Conservatism in the populace. Of course you can’t view your own legacy and reputation as more important than the long term health of the nation, if you want to follow that path. You have to have the goal of protecting America and it’s freedom as paramount to everything, including your own interests. It must be your only goal.
John Jost of NYU actually showed that one could precipitate a conversion towards Conservatism merely by exposing an individual to images of mortal salience (ie. death). However, we probably will not see Republicans try anything like that anytime soon. It would require Republicans think outside the box, and hire psychological specialists to craft a true strategy to alter not just what the populace thinks, but how they think it. Plus most Republican politicos would probably tell you such a strategy couldn’t be done, and Milton Erikson was a fraud to boot.
In many ways, the Liberals of today should be viewed as kids who don’t know the video game they are playing is real, and that the consequences of failure will be painful. Unfortunately, it seems as if it will take real world pain to develop their brain, and teach them that the game, and it’s consequences, are real. Unfortunately, we are all going to have to suffer some during this interlude, so the slower among us can learn these lessons. Of course, being more K-type in our psychology, we will come out of it just fine, as it is precisely this environment that we are designed for. I truly pity the rest.
