No one can undertand politics without understanding r/K selection theory, which is why we have two political ideologies.
In Biology, there is what is called r selection and K selection. r selection involves culling a population aggressively, such as through predation. There is plenty of food, and resource, just life is short. As a result, an organism will develop a psychology which favors simple quick reproduction, as early a possible, and as often as possible. Such individuals will avoid competitions with peers, and adopt a promiscuous mating strategy.
Such an r-selected population will survive, but it will generally not evolve too far. This is Liberalism. No competition, be it war or Capitalism, combined with an embrace of promiscuity, and a desperate, selfish pursuit of personal interest.
K selection involve no such culling. Populations increase, until there are not enough resources to go around, and some must perish. As the competition begins, K selection produces a change in pychology. Since resources are scarce, there arises a competition for them, and only those who compete and win survive. Since only those who compete and win survive, the K selected organism evolves a psychology that is designed to produce as fit an organism as possible, so as to win that competition. Mating becomes a careful selection of the fittest mate possible, followed by monogamy, so as to mopolize that highly fit mate, and prevent others from benefiting from her gene’s. Careful child rearing becomes an imperative. And a drive to compete fiercely becomes innate to their nature.
This K-selected psychology is what is generally seen as producing superior evolutionary advancement, through it’s fierce competitions.
This is the origin of the Conservative’s psychology. Conservatives seek freedom, to compete with those who challenge them, be it in war, Capitalism, or even a shootout with a criminal. They seek abstinence until monogamy, and are obsessed with careful child rearing, in the form of “Family Values.”
This all relates to what Blankley is talking about in that our population is no different from any other organism’s. Civilization itself removes the Darwinian selection effect from our populace. Remove Darwinian selection from any population, perhaps through overabundance of resources, and you will get an increase in it’s numbers. Within that increase, r-selected members will increase as a percentage within the population, as they are simply designed to be more reproductive. They are designed to produce quantity over quality, as they say, and absent any selection for fitness, their offspring survive and reproduce. As a result, there will be an increasing number of less fit, r selected individuals who would be culled quickly in a state of nature, but are saved by their circumstances.
At some point, every population of organisms will reach a point where it hits the carrying capacity of the resources available. As Thatcher would say, in humans, this occurs when the Socialists have run out of other people’s money. At that point, a Competition for limited resources will inevitably ensue, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. When this happens, the r-selected component of the population will rapidly diminish in frequency, either through emigration or diminished reproduction, since they are not designed for competition.
I suspect this holds in humans as well, and it is why in history, Liberalism rises, a culture collapses, and then it re-emerges, Conservative and productive, yet doomed to repeat the cycle. So Conservatism will always be innate to our species. It is just that occasionally, our productivity will allow for the growth of an r-selected component of our species, and that will need to be cleared up by some unpleasant periods, before the balance is restored. Once the balance is restored, freedom becomes important to the population as a whole again, as the population becomes dominated by K selected psychologies.
This unpleasantness can be prevented, but we would need to apply a premptive selective effect to the population ourselves, such as by eliminating all but subsistence welfare, making parents pay for their children, instead of making the state pay the parent for as many children as they can produce. There would have to be elimination of economic reditribution, and we would have to start only accepting highly educated, highly skilled immigrants.
Since we can’t seem to get that done, we’ll experience some economic unpleasantness for period, as competition again forces her way into the arena. Once that is over, the balance will be restored, freedom will reign, and Conservatism will return in force.
The loudest, brashest males in pickup theory get the hottest women. They don't resort to being effeminate.
Cheers!
This theory can serve as one model for the rise and fall of civilizations, and in this context leftism can be seen as just another “fall,” but it is not a recurrent pattern throughout history: our particular leftism is very specifically a reaction against Christianity. The most heinously consequential (from a material standpoint) philosophical effect off fighting against Christianity has been the perversion of the legal notion of personhood (a Christian concept), and therefore the erosion all of the social and legal constructs that have been built around that notion.
With regards to K-selection, though, I’m not sure I agree that civilization removes Darwinian selection entirely from a populace. Perhaps if you consider “leftist human rights” synonymous with “civilized,” but consider this: Britain’s crime rate in the early industrial period was alarmingly high but it fell dramatically by the first half of the twentieth century. Why? Because they had hanged most of the criminal elements and effectively removed that tendency from the British gene pool. (Mind you, since 1960 they’ve been doing a very fine job reintroducing it through Third World immigration, and in both Britain and Ireland social revolutions have exposed tendencies that in a more civilized context would never get as out of control as they are today. We have the same problem in France, as well: crime is spiking all over Western Europe and not just among immigrant-derived populations.)