In this work, the Left/Right divide around group competition isn’t about two groups of ideologues competing with each other. Rather it is about one psychology in our species that is composed of group-centric individuals who seek to form altruistic groups and try to win competitions with other groups, and one psychology composed of selfish individualists, who seek to parasitize any group they can, while pursuing their own personal self interests at every turn.
The left is pursuing an individualistic strategy within a group competitive species. John Jost (himself a Liberal) has done a lot of work showing that Liberals are more open to out-group interests, and less loyal to in-group. This allows them to do anything in their interest, up to and including allying with an out-group, against their own in-group, so as to use betrayal as a survival strategy.
How many Freepers could ally with Al Qaida, against fellow Americans, just to advance their own position? Liberals are actually driven to do this, and to think it is noble. They wanted to free the Uighurs in Guantanamo onto the streets of DC. They still oppose CIA blacksites.
In the 60’s Hippies sought to aid the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, and viciously opposed our own soldiers. Imagine if that war was fought on our southern border, we were roughly evenly matched, and America were to lose. The VC and NVA would have taken us over, and put Hippies in position of power, overseeing the occupation. Full blown defective retards, drugged up and physically pathetic, would have elevated their status above that of every other American, by being more open to out-group interests, and less loyal to in-group. By using betrayal of their in-group as a survival strategy in group competition.
The pdf makes a step by step case that K-selection (diminished resources forcing competition among peers to acquire them) produces a competitive, monogamous, high-investment parenting psychology. This is well established in biology (where it is called r/K Selection Theory), and it is in most basic biology textbooks. K-selection is the foundation of the Conservative psychology, and K-selected species in nature are where one should look for a more primitive incarnation of our psychology in other species. Think wolves, lions, etc. (as contrasted with the prey species, such as rabbits, which are r-selected).
r-selection (the plentiful availability of resources) offers no advantage to the fit, as both fit and less fit get free food, absent a need to compete for it. There, the most sexually prolific win by out-reproducing peers (even if all of their offspring are defective idiots – there is no competition for food to cull the defective idiots and make them less fit than highly adapted individuals) So r-selection produces a psychology of copetition aversion, early age promiscuity, and low-investment (get them out the door to make way for the next brood) parenting. Find an r-selected species in nature (think rabbits, who can never eat all of the grass available, due to predation reducing their numbers), and you will find a species which avoids competition between peers, is sexually promiscuous, thinks nothing of very young offspring having sex, and in which offspring are raised by single moms.
In group competition for limited resources (ie K-selection), the K-type psychology has evolved to seek to win the competition. Thus, K-types amass into functional groups, and compete for limited resources. As the competitions proceed, the population is culled for individuals who self assort into functional groups, and win. This favors K-types who exhibit pro-sociality, loyalty, altruism, etc.
Under this model, r-types would get wiped out if they tried to compete - they are less fit, less competitive, and less capable (due to the r-type’s aversion to competitive selection). Those r-types who survived this environment were those who adapted to exploit their competition-aversion and selfishness, to deceptively parasitize K-type groups, while seeking their own personal advantage at every turn, often through pursuing a strategy of betrayal for personal advantage.
K-types will be fitter, and better at acquiring resources. But loyalty, altruism and other pro-social traits come with a cost – you may end up dead for your peers. r-types will be less fit, and less capable, but they can do whatever they need to in order to survive during periods of violence, including fleeing, or betraying their own group. And if they can make it to a period of free resource availability, their r-strategy of producing large quantities of offspring, will allow them to build their numbers up significantly.
The pdf basically makes the case that r and K strategies are genetic, one of the genes which produces them has been identified as correlating with political ideology in humans, and thus this whole political debate we have is a battle between two genes, and two reproductive strategies. K-types want to amass into groups, and acquire resources in competition, while r-types attempt to infiltrate the groups, stymie their success (to stall the advance of the K-type allele into the population), and pursue their own self interest.
Understand r/K Selection Theory, and how it relates to group competition, and you will understand politics, in a way few do.
It will even explain the societal decline of successful civilizations. Give the r-strategy free resource availability, to reduce mortality due to competitive selection, and it will reproduce very quickly, like an invasive species. But r-strategists are not highly motivated to succeed like K-strategists – their environment never required high levels of motivation (which the pdf supports with genetic and personality studies of Liberals and depression/low incentive salience).
So if you have a population which has undergone competitive selections for fitness (ie K-selection), it’s large majority of K-strategists will be highly fit and highly productive (and highly Conservative). But their excess production produces free resource availability, which fuels the gradual growth of r-types (and Liberalism). r-types are mostly evolved to just reproduce their own defective offspring, using selfishness, and cowardice to stay alive, and promiscuity, early age at first intercourse, and single parenting to maximize their reproductive rates.
Thus, a successful society, through it’s success, creates a rapidly growing sub-population of non-productive individuals who reproduce ever faster. As they grow, they demand more and more free resource availability, while promiscuously producing single-parented offspring who do more of the same.
Inevitably, they will reach a point where their numbers are so great relative to the K-types, that the K-types will no longer be able to support them. At that point, the system will collapse, and a ruthless competition for resources begins (K-selection). You see this in the Roman Empire, Greece today, The Dark Ages following the Medieval Warming Period (which provided free availability of crops) and everywhere a highly successful society of producers has gradually found the few remaining productive individuals unable to provide for an entitled class of low-IQ, low-producing, sexually promiscuous degenerates, demanding free stuff.
We should have hit that point a while back, but we borrowed from China, allowing us to extend the period of free resource availability and delay the collapse, by feeding the r-types using government debt. Eventually, that debt will run out, and as it would in every other species in nature, the period of r-selected free resource availability will end. Resources simply cannot be supplied in limitless quantities forever. Unfortunately, I suspect that the cessation of incoming debt, combined with the need to pay back the old debt with interest, will provide a pretty harsh selection pressure to our population in the form of extremely diminished resources available to the poor. It will be ugly, even if we don’t end up with some Global Cooling lowering crop availability, or creating other problems.
Thank you very much for the detailed answer.
Let us say the palliatives like borrowing from China and intimidating oil suppliers fail, no rational political solution is arrived at because of the r-selecteds running the political show, and we have a collapse of the American system of government.
Do you think the r-types will be forced to adapt to the changed environment and behave like R-types? in other words, is the distinction wholly genetic? We see people “converting” to conservatism all the time, do we not? In fact, it is even a well-known process: a student is naturally drawn to leftwing politics because he stands to gain from them; then as the student becomes a worker and a taxpayer, all of a sudden he becomes conservative. This seems to militate against the gene theory.
Also, the American left does not fit the r-Selected paradigm in at least one way: while they are advocates for promiscuity, they are not advocates for fecundity. It is conservatives who make babies in this country.
My prediction is that following the collapse something that can be described as neo-feudalism will emerge. People will be forced to work at what they are good at to survive. The k-selecteds will either learn to work or they won’t survive. I think, most will learn to work.