Pressing The Narcissist’s Buttons – Practical Debate Tactics for the Modern Liberal- Additional Research

In “Touching the Raw Amygdala,” we discussed how to trigger the dysfunctional Liberal amygdala in casual debate with Narcissists, and Liberals. We asserted that Liberals are not arguing to create a cogent case for their position, but rather they are trying to manipulate social hierarchies to advance their own relative advantage over others. On brain scans, researchers have found two distinct patterns of brain activities, one associated with competition and reward and the other associated with social behaviors and self-awareness. These two patterns are associated with dopamine activity, which relates to all facets of ideology through dopamine receptor allelic variation.

In the series, we maintained that an unemotional countenance is vital to upsetting the Liberal’s brain function. I was bothered as I wrote that particular section, because I, myself, would have doubted that aspect of the piece in my less experienced past. Without concrete experience, it can be difficult to understand some concepts, and this is one. Nevertheless, it was, in my now experienced opinion, among the most important pieces of information within the series, so I want to briefly revisit it here.

In psychology, one definition of the word “affect” is an expression of emotion in response to the provocation of another. From the time we are babies, we are programmed to seek an emotional response from others, and if we do not get it, we will tend to develop a compulsive desire to seek it. It is this innate desire for affect, from others, which can become distorted by the intense malleability of the young developing mind, and produce aspects of certain personality disorders and psychologies, Liberalism among them.

Those reading this who don’t care if others pay attention to them or not are probably, in part, that way because when they wanted to elicit emotion in their parents as an infant they were immediately satisfied by a smiling and cooing parent. This satisfied the urge for attention, ending it, and short circuiting the type of long lasting desire and frustration produced by a parent’s ignorance in that circumstance.

In contrast, a long lasting period of desire for affect, and frustration when not receiving it, would have burned into the brain a Hebbian neurological foundation of a lifelong compulsion to desperately seek attention from those around you, by any means necessary, even if self destructive. I firmly believe this desperation for affect is a foundational Liberal (and Narcissist) trait.

We maintain here that Liberalism, as an r-strategy, is partly produced by low-attachment/low investment parenting. Often this form of parenting would likely involve a single mother being less than immediately responsive to their baby emotionally. (ie. “I’m in the middle of my mani/pedi – the baby can wait.”) How would this reduced supply of reliable maternal affect condition the developing Liberal, if at all?
Here, in this video, we see what is known as the “Still Face Experiment,” by Dr Edward Tronick. This is a difficult video to watch, as it involves a baby being placed under conditions which cause it extreme emotional distress. Were we not about to see our society destroyed by Liberals, and if I didn’t feel it important for Conservatives to be aware of this facet of Liberal psychology, I would not present this video to you. For those who don’t wish to view the video, I will summarize it’s contents below.

In this experiment, a mother removes all emotion from her face, and looks at her baby blankly. The baby first becomes curious as to why the mother isn’t showing emotion, and supplying it with affect. The baby very quickly progresses to trying to elicit emotion from the mother by crying and waving its arms. When that doesn’t work, and the mother continues to look on with an expressionless gaze, the baby begins to freak out, until it actually begins having muscular convulsions twisting it’s body, as it screams. At that point, the mother grabs the baby, smiles, and coos it back into a state of relaxation with an aggressive supply of smiling, cooing affect.

Notice how being confronted with an unemotional face, unresponsive to the baby’s efforts to elicit reaction, trips the baby’s stress pathways (probably through the amygdala), and this produces a whole raft of physiological responses, culminating in involuntary muscle contractions and a raw, emotional agony.

Given the Hebbian nature of neural synapses, if this were to occur repeatedly, these behaviors would find themselves burned into the neurological pathways of the brain. As a result, the emotional and physiological effect would gradually increase, requiring less stimulation to provoke, and producing a more accentuated effect. I suspect this is what occurs, to some degree, in the low-investment model of r-selected parenting, such as manifests in every aspect of Liberal psychology, even down to preference for the smell of coffee over the smell of babies. (To see the study, scroll the page all the way to the right-most column, then scroll down to the section titled, Conservatives and Newborn Babies.)

In r-strategists, the low-investment parenting behaviors produces a low level effect in developing Liberals similar to this “Still Face” effect. This conditions the Liberal individual to seek to see emotion in those around them, and this effect ends up being present, even into adulthood. This is why Mike Wallace went mad in that courtroom as a lawyer unemotionally explained what an untrustworthy sleaze he was, and it is why Colonell Connell’s rebuke of him was so traumatic that he could no longer argue on behalf of his debate position.

This effect probably also serves some sort of adaptive function as well, in the adult Liberal. Perhaps it makes them hyper-driven to elicit emotion in those around them, thereby enhancing their drive to perpetually manipulate the emotions of others while they pursue a strategy of navigating social hierarchies. This would jibe with the study here showing that individuals with low dopamine function (as the Liberal likely possesses), tend to have brains which are more active in areas associated with social behavior and self-awareness than reward/motivation.

Interestingly, Eric Berne also hypothesized that many of the destructive behaviors he saw in his practice arose from a failure to reliably acquire attention from the mother, or “strokes,” as he referred to them, during the earliest years of life. In it’s most extreme form, this psychological urge to elicit affect becomes a personality disorder such as Borderline Personality Disorder, where an individual will seek any form of drama, by any means possible (from argument, to malicious action, to infidelity), all in an effort to simply acquire affect from their partner, regardless of the longer term effects of their behavior.

Of course the salient point to draw from this is that if someone is Liberal, they probably have a dysfunctional brain. As a result, they are very likely to have been conditioned to experience some form of amygdala reactivity, just as the baby in this video does, in response to an unemotional countenance, unresponsive to provocation. If that is the case, you can produce a similar reaction within the Liberal, making them feel a sensation of anxiety similar to that experienced by the affect-deprived baby. Combined with additional amygdala stimulation, such as public humiliation and out-grouping, one can often overwhelm the amygdala, triggering a neurological fireworks show unlike anything you would have thought possible while viewing human interaction in purely personal terms.

I know, because I have precipitated a far worse response than the baby exhibited myself, using the unemotional countenance while interacting with an adult Liberal. And I have made the amateur’s mistake of trying to exhibit visibly exciting emotions, so as to further excite them into stratospheric levels of overstimulation, only to see the counterintuitive effect of the Liberal/Narcissist calming down, and regaining their physiological footing. Although it was confusing at the time, in light of this work, it now makes perfect sense. Of course, you have to moderate the unemotional countenance to comport with social expectations in personal interactions, but the principle is the same. No matter how much the Liberal waves their arms and cries like a baby, you really don’t care. You just look on, unemotional, and explain to them how pathetic they are.

Thus one is probably best served by combining an out-grouping stimulus designed to stimulate the Liberal amygdala with an emotionally unaffected countenance designed to perpetuate the agitated psychological state, and the amygdala stimulation producing it. If done correctly, parts of the Liberal brain will become so overstimulated they may even shut down entirely.

I encourage you to experiment with it yourself in your next debate with a Liberal.

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AUsername
AUsername
11 years ago

Am surprised this blog hasn’t drawn more commenters (besides that quasi-parody GBFM guy; am not a fan of many elements of the blogroll), as while your theory is oversimplified to an extent/may be missing some “nuances” (suggestions follow), it has a lot of truth in it, plus real world application to any kind of argument or persuasion (out-grouping seems to work on a much larger number of cases than logic and morality, indicating that your “most people are K” may be overoptimistic). The post at http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/?p=358 was particularly good.

Given that the left has been the master of strategy for at least the past 100 years, something you may want to think about (how it ties in to the theory and perhaps strategies to counteract it) is the idea in the comment by Trust August 26, 2012 11:32 AM at http://voxday.blogspot.de/2012/08/fake-republicans-for-obama.html. The left is similar to the r-adapted squid in that it sometimes pretends to be the right (e.g. in a mixed system, the crash is always ascribed to too little regulation, not too much socialism).

Along the lines of that idea: in a state of transition from resource abundance to resource scarcity, r-types may go through a phase of pretending to be k (or perhaps they are actually in a stage of evolving to be k), and this is where some of the particularly bad things ascribed to ks occur. Masquerading as ks may also be a way to avoid having to actually change (i.e. they can still be r types and increase their personal power, while their fellow r types can ascribe the bad stuff to conservativism, hence both sides of the argument become r-controlled – witness practically all of the Muslim world, where liberty is a foreign concept)

Basically, this is the case where people are “socially” conservative (loudly proclaiming the utmost in austerity) while not behaviorally conservative (using their position to partake in the opposite). Examples abound in the Muslim world, e.g. the Saudis (avid consumers of prostitution and producers of rape), and also to an extent in witchhunts/the Inquisition (single good-looking women being a target, also those with property to confiscate). The European version of the “socially conservative but not behaviorally conservative” r masquerading as k type was arguably inspired by interaction with Islam, per this post: http://conancimmerian.blogspot.de/2012/08/who-really-killed-pax-romana.html

Islam is a religion that was founded in a period where their region went from relative abundance to resource scarcity (partly due to environmental changes and partly due to Islam itself, as per the above URL), and hence it fits well with this transitional theory.

AUsername
AUsername
11 years ago

Another idea along the lines of my prior comment (assuming it will be posted), this one is more contrary to some typical conservative positions:

Perhaps some policies are falsely put in by r-types (r types masquerading as k-types) as “conservative”, when they are actually self-serving for the r types. For example, if Levitt is right that abortion reduces the amount of low parental investment r-types in the population (more than its availability enables promiscuity; well before widespread medically-safe abortion, prior eras had plenty of promiscuity), then the conservative “restrict or ban abortion” position is one that increases the frequency of r-genes (and thus r-memes). Even in the case of an outright ban, the impact of pregnancy, birth etc is such that anyone with even moderate resources and organizational skills/drive would allocate them to discretely travel to a nearby country; the only people it’s truly banned for are those that lack these. In such case, the kids produced inherently take resources to raise, which presumably couldn’t come from someone lacking these resources, but instead from either the public sector (welfare state), or the private (via petty street crime, or via adoption which reduces the resources that the adoptive parents have to adopt other types of kids, or to have their own).

Along the lines of the recent news controversy (rape and abortion), the story plays as tailor-made marketing for the Obama re-election effort (perhaps Akin is a closet-r, or maybe just that clueless). Occasionally one reads of the kids produced by no-abortion rape situations (such kids are probably at least partly r-types) becoming prominent speakers against abortion, and making their case in a way that attempts to outgroup their opponents (“are you saying I shouldn’t exist” Correct answer: yes). They echo their fathers’ aggressive narcissism (and that of socialists, and of r-types more generally) in that they propose ordering society (and inflicting misery on others, via forced physical support by the mother) to ensure their existence.

There is a good essay by the Association of Libertarian Feminists (and also some writing by Rothbard) on why one should support abortion rights. Garrett Hardin is also good on this topic.

Iten
Reply to  AUsername
11 years ago

Obama doesn’t have any conservative bifeels, but since nearly every political party in Canada is socialist/fascist, Obama would feel comfortable as a member.

AUsername
AUsername
11 years ago

Finally, on a related note (as my 2nd prior comment is kind of about women stuff), some of your prior posts have the idea that to be a k-type female is to be the feminine, motherly type. Yet the nature of the k-type and conservativism is identified as inherently having masculine-associated qualities (achievement, competition) and the r (socialist “niceness”, group consensus is all) inherently more feminine. While certainly the conservative side has plenty of the feminine motherly types, there are also those of us who are stereotypically-manly type women (worldly-success oriented, not personally into marriage/kids although supportive of others, Coulter is an example) who are on the right for the same reasons that men are.

Likewise (tying back to my first comment, assuming its posted), sometimes k-types play on the r-team despite their k-nature (and logical and moral objections to the r-program), out of the perception of inherent outsiderness or pragmatic self interest.

Username
Username
Reply to  Anonymous Conservative
11 years ago

Hey Anon, you’re very welcome. The right has a lot more tolerance for differences of opinion than the left (re the blogroll approach, its often fun to read stuff one disagrees with), and if I were currently blogging would do the mutual link thing. It takes me a couple of days to reply too (reading being a free-time activity), and am all for the no-censorship approach (also something that is done far more on the right than the “moderates” and left).

Regarding “moderates”, the left/r-type is more aggressive politically (perhaps because they get out their aggression through interpersonal games rather than through objective competition) and “moderate” inherently gets defined by the more aggressive side. Between the left’s “lets kill A” and the right’s “let’s leave A alone”, the “moderate” drifts to “let’s just beat the hell out of A”. But actually, “let’s help A” would be the opposite of “let’s kill A” – and “let’s leave A alone” is the moderate position.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, it’s rare that one stumbles upon well-written, interesting/novel ideas either online or in books, so I like sharing recommendations (a couple more good ones are below) and of course always like to hear what others recommend

Along the lines of the ancient civilizations theme:
http://cogitansiuvenis.blogspot.de/2012/06/most-important-law-western-civilization.html

(the deep thought comment there is me)

and:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html

When thinking about it, basically every society in the world (with few exceptions like the US to some extent in the 18th-19th centuries) has been fascist, including nominally feudal (see Rothbard on Middle Ages big gov/redistributionism), pre-modern non-Western (ancient Egypt’s mass-agriculture command-socialist system providing grain for late-Republic through imperial Rome’s welfare state, the Aztecs, Incas, big government in early China), “modern Western” and communist ones. What I mean by fascist is not a bunch of snazzy-uniformed goose-steppers getting unpleasant towards my ancestors – but instead, the more general definition of a society where people are NOT free to go about their lives and business activities, and where there is a parasitical bureaucracy/command structure with pretensions at sharing (and the associated nomenklatura class, i.e. its good to be a Clinton). Hence the US’ brief exception to the rule of fascism was extremely precious, and people in the Progressive era rival those of the 30’s and 60’s in being most guilty for giving it away for nothing (particularly as in that era, economic crises were short-lived and the consumer was generally advancing – there were tremendous opportunities to at least become property owners/middle class; ironically its when wealth is increasing that people tend to do the socialist-dissatisfied thing). If the left’s approach is thesis-antithesis-synthesis (along the lines of the left-right-moderate example above; its negotiating by asking for the moon and settling for the earth), William Jennings Bryan was the ultimate synthesis (giving basically far-left ideas a “moderate” folksy, ostensibly K-type face): central banking, inflating away nice Midwestern farmers’ debt, and saving the consumer from Evil Rich industrialists’ high prices by switching from tariffs to an income tax instead.

Although people think immigration is the driver, it’s actually the left’s economics that drive the whole game, including why they push for the immigration of left-voting populations: when there is at least a significant percentage of K’s, there’s going to be resistance to redistribution. Although the majority of the populace (including many left voters and r-types; I’d argue that most of the population is actually more r than k, even in the West) is not in favor of mass immigration (especially in Europe), the majority of the populace also wants ripped abs, yet is overweight or obese – because eating junk food matters more. Likewise, getting socialist goodies matters more to them than their objection to mass immigration. The former is a short-term individual desire, the latter is more of a long-term and society-scale objection. In order to make freebies happen at the maximum level in the short term, the immigrants that voters object to consciously, they subconsciously know they need as an ally (hence why left and “moderate” parties are still in power).

Left economics also feeds into the r-goal of turning over the society to a colonizing force, in that by weakening native businesses, the place becomes ripe for being bought up on the cheap by larger foreign companies. Yet this outcome is also what the r/left subconsciously wants, as in the tribal societies where human psychology developed, your status relative to a tribe hundreds of miles away was irrelevant, what matters (for your individual prospects) is your status relative to those of your own tribe. Hence people object to their small business or professional neighbor (“tax the hell out of them”) and high tax rates start at relatively upper-middle type incomes, while the far greater wealth of Hollywood celebrities etc is more hypothetical/far away and not a social threat. It’s easy to love those far away, its the neighbors people hate.

“Man is wolf to man”. So while some elements of social conservativism may go against principle, the left has made politics a matter of survival (broadly/allegorically speaking) – and they never let a principle get in the way of politics. The wishful thinking that “worse is better, after the crash we’ll be free” has proven to be wrong (see Argentina: after the crash is just more of the bad stuff) and “don’t vote/for the lesser evil, it just legitimizes it” is the wrong concept – politics is like being attacked in a street fight: even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. Legitimacy or not isn’t even a question, and “if my arm gets broken, I’ll be even more motivated” is a disaster. Even though a move (or election/candidate, see Romney) doesn’t get you to a win in one feel swoop, if it maybe buys time and room to maneuver, one should take it.

P.S. On the women stuff topic, have some more thoughts there, will reply later (assuming you don’t mind the longwinded philosophizing)

Gunnel
Reply to  Anonymous Conservative
11 years ago

Thanks for this info.I am writing a coermntamy for my school newspaper as well as a feature story that will hopefully get published at Salon.comI am a 29 year-old white conservative trying to find way to make people aware that minority involvement within the Republican party is critical. We need to get back to grassroots campaigning to make our beliefs relevant to all demographics. These numbers just reaffirm my disappointment with the inability for Republicans to pull some of these conservative people’s votes over to the party.Ironically, my name is Shay also!Good work finding this

Alberto Ravell
11 years ago

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7 years ago

[…] a buffoon filled with self-importance. Therefore, it does not take much to send them into a fit of narcissistic rage. That they are one of the “good people” is a sacred belief so have fun mocking their […]

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7 years ago

[…] a buffoon filled with self-importance. Therefore, it does not take much to send them into a fit of narcissistic rage. That they are one of the “good people” is a sacred belief so have fun mocking their […]