Ever wondered what happens when you put two highly intelligent and well-read conservative/libertarian types on a podcast and get them talking about r/K selection theory and its applications to politics?
Wonder no more:
Grab yourself a tall drink, sit back, relax, and enjoy the brilliance.
There is a very great deal buried in that long video, but it is well worth watching and listening to all the way through, multiple times. Among other things, it serves as an excellent in-depth course on the entire subject of r/K theory and its applications to modern politics.
And make no mistake- the theory and its applications need to be understood, thoroughly, by all of us here in the alt-right (or whatever it is we’re calling ourselves these days).
The reason why r/K selection theory, as synthesised and presented by Anonymous Conservative in his book, needs to be understood in a political context is because, suddenly, a great many quandaries and knotty problems with accepted “mainstream” theories about political and social phenomena resolve themselves quite neatly.
Once you put together the basics of r-selection versus K-selection, and the ways that environmental factors drive both, with research into the ways that the amygdala affects risk perceptions and the subjective weights that people put against various economic and social phenomena, you’ll realise just why it is that liberals and especially progressives appear to be bat-crap crazy.
It’s not your imagination. They are, in fact, defective in at least one rather important respect: their amygdalae tend to be less developed and active than those of a more conservative stripe, and as such their ability to anticipate harm and perceive risk is diminished.
The really fascinating aspect of political r/K theory, though, has to do with the ways in which a primarily K-selected, apex-predator species like ours can become relatively more r-selected.
This aspect has everything to do with civilisational cycles. As Bill Whittle points out in the video, when a civilisation first gets started, its people are extremely K-selected. Trust is high between members of the same tight-knit group- and almost non-existent with anyone else. Conflicts between competing tribes and groups are common. Resources are scarce, life is difficult and dangerous, and children are few and far between; the children that do come along are invested in very heavily in order that they might in turn become strong and capable members of their tribe.
But, over time, as prosperity increases due to economic diversification and specialisation, and the stability that comes with that prosperity permits people to invest in things other than mere acts of survival, that civilisation enters its golden age. Resources become plentiful; it is possible to raise larger families; arts, music, literature, and higher intellectual pursuits all flourish. Without the immense sacrifices made by the K-selected progenitors, all of these things would be impossible.
As more time goes by, however, resources become so plentiful, and external threats become so rare, that the people become soft, weak, and indolent. They lose sight of the virtues that their elders taught to them. They indulge in lassitude and lasciviousness; they worship idleness and dissipation; they become immoral in the extreme. Their sole interests lie in pleasures of the flesh and the propagation of a self-loathing, deeply diseased mentality that seeks to invert the standing moral order by pretending that good is evil, black is white, and up is down.
And just as inevitably as the general course noted above will be the collapse, brought about by a citizenry no longer capable of making the sacrifices and difficult choices required to maintain a strong and virile culture.
As both speakers note above, this pattern has been repeated endlessly throughout human history. The United States of America is now coming toward the tail end of this ruthless cycle, and there is little that anyone can do to stop it.
But the counsel need not be one of total despair. Yes, the collapse will come, and future generations will come to think rather like William S. Lind does when he notes that (and I paraphrase loosely here) God created Switzerland, to show how a republic could be made to work- and the United States of America, as a warning to everyone else. Yet what follows afterward will be a new and strongly conservative, likely strongly Christian, culture that will, at least for a while, remember the terrible lessons of the collapse of America’s imperial democracy in its very bones.
And thus the cycle will begin anew. Which is precisely why, as I have said before, we should not despair or be overly afraid. We are going to be given the kind of opportunity that few generations in history have ever received. We are going to have the chance to rebuild a strong culture from the collapsing ruins of a weakened one.
Could there possibly be any greater opportunity than that?
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