The rK Selection Theory applied to American Politics

Have you ever wondered why there is such a lack of commonality in political discourse today? In America, you are either a Trump-supporter or not. There is absolutely no bridge or commonality between the two groups. It is almost as if there is one type of person who is composed of fire, and the other type of person is composed of water. Why is this?

Well, there is a theory that precisely explains this dichotomy of behavior. This theory is called the “r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology”, and it is based on the observed survival behaviors of  creatures.

This post is primarily concerned with the application of the r/k Selection Theory as it is applied to mass mob psychology in the United States today.

Introduction

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Can you imagine an idea or a concept so shocking that it is banned from publication? Like, for instance, the idea that the earth orbited the sun, or that high voltages can alter gravity? Well, there is a theory that is actually banned from public distribution.  This theory is banned on TED, Facebook and Yahoo’s advertising platforms, for being too effective at supporting conservative ideals. Yet, the theory itself really isn’t political at all.

It is a theory that simply states that a given species, over time, will evolve by developing their own survival strategies.

Turtles behave the way they do, because it is the best way for them to survive in this world. Bees behave the way that they do because it is the best way for them to survive in this world. Giraffes behave the way that they do because they too have developed the best way to survive int his world.

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What is interesting is that people who have studied American politics have noted that various human groups or organizations have also adapted these same strategies. They have done so organically. It wasn’t planned, it has just evolved that way. As such, they are both awed and disgusted in how it is playing out.

Politics

This theory, when applied to political organizations and objectives, directly defines the behavior of the organization. It asserts that both Conservatism and Liberalism are a programmed psychology. It bases this fundamental and foundational premise on the behaviors of known population groups.

Liberalism, no matter what it’s current name is, is designed to exploit resource excess within our populations.

Conservatism, no matter what branch or ideology,  is designed to benefit  competitive groups that succeed in group competition.

Science

The r/K Theory is a well established theory with a great pedigree. However, it is not applied to political belief structures. It is applied to species under the assumption that every member of the species falls into only one strategy.

This is a pretty BIG assumption.

As such, typically, it is assumed that humans are a K-strategy species. This is because we maintain a traditional family environment. Now, if this were true than any deviance from this would be an aberration. Wouldn’t it?

I argue that humans are not a fully developed species. Rather, we are a species in flux with significant membership in both survival strategies. In the United States we have two (apparently) equally divided segments of the population. One embracing the r-strategy and the other embracing the K-strategy.

The  r-selected Reproductive Strategy

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In the “r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology”, if you provide a population with free resources, those who will come to dominate the population will exhibit five basic traits. These traits are called an r-selected Reproductive Strategy. These traits are all designed to best exploit the free resource availability. In nature, the r-selected strategy is best seen in the rabbit, which lives in fields of grass it will never fully consume. The five traits are,

• Competition and risk avoidance.
• Promiscuity.
• Low-investment single parenting.
• Earlier age of sexualization of young.
• No loyalty to in-group.

These traits are ultimately designed to maximize the numbers of offspring produced. Each of these offspring, though of lesser fitness, will be able to survive and reproduce freely themselves, due to the free resource availability.

The K-selected Reproductive Strategy.

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In r/K Theory, there is also a strategy that is exactly opposite to the rabbit’s. This strategy emerges under conditions of resource scarcity. It is called the K-selected Reproductive Strategy.

There, where resources are scarce, competition for resources is everywhere. As a result, some individuals will die due to failure in competition. This produces the K-strategy, which is best seen in the wolf. This strategy also has five psychological traits. These traits are…

• Competitiveness/aggressiveness/protectiveness.
• Mate monopolization/monogamy.
• High-investment two-parent child-rearing.
• Later age of sexualization of young.
• High loyalty to in-group.

This psychology is designed to form highly fit and competitive groups that succeed in group competition. It does this while capturing and monopolizing the fittest mate possible. This is a way of making their offspring genetically fitter than those of competitors.

Here, the goal is NOT to simply consume as much as possible yourself and produce as many baby-making machines as you can, with little regard to their fitness. No.

Here, the goal is to help your group succeed in its competition for the scarce resources, and then produce offspring of as high a fitness as possible, so they may carry your genes forward by succeeding in competition themselves.

Application to American Politics

The premise of this theory is that all of politics is really a battle between the K-strategist wolves within our society against the r-strategist rabbits. The wolves are designed to battle in a world of scarce resources and fierce competition, and the rabbits, are designed to freely graze the bounty of a sudden resource glut and rapidly explode in numbers to exploit such a glut.

Without labeling which political party is which, can you the reader, guess which political party is which?

The r-strategist rabbits want free food and a life of ease and abundant free sex. They want as many of their ilk as possible to share in the abundance. They want to produce as many offspring as possible, as fast as possible, without regard to offspring quality.

That’s right. The r-strategy fits the American Democrat party that is populated with Socialists, Progressives, and Liberals. Truthfully, Marxists are r-strategy rabbits in that they expect boundless support from the wealthy and successful.

The K-strategist wolves want order and defined limits on behavior. They want traditional two-parent families, and meaningful education and training for their young. They are competitive and protective of family, sexually selective and monogamous, imbued with regard for two parent family life, desirous that offspring wait until mature to mate, and loyal to in-group are designed to produce highly fit and competitive offspring, designed to compete in an environment of resource scarcity.

As you might have guessed, the K-strategy fits the American Republican party that is populated with Conservatives, Libertarians, and Neocons.

The K-selected Wolf

Let’s look at the K-strategy in more detail.

Wolves are a quintessential K-strategist species. Wolves are competitive and protective, because they must fight for food to survive. They carefully select the fittest mate, and monopolize that fit mate, so that their offspring will be as genetically fit as possible, relative to peers.

Both the male and the female have the same understanding that they are monogamous and will both mutually support the family and raise their children to the be the best. They will strive to teach their children to be as competitive as possible. Their children, if successful, will become dominant and would the best likelihood of successful procreation with the best and most suitable member of the opposite sex.

Traditional Family Values…

As such, they embrace two-parent family values, as offspring are reared carefully in a loving and supportive pack/family environment. This is so they will have the best chance of succeeding themselves in their own competitions. These values have been honed and proven over many generations. They rely on the proven techniques that provide the best likelihood of success. They typically shun new and unproven ideas as they carry a great risk of catastrophic failure.

Such things as family meals, family traditions, and traditional roles are all considered important. The man is expected to work, and the woman is expected to take care of the home and provide a nurturing environment for the children.

Competitive Schooling…

They do not allow offspring to mate until mature and proven in competition, so any immaturity will not lead to their offspring securing sub-par monogamous mates. The children are continuously educated and tested to make sure that they understand their roles and how to support and provide for the needs of the family.

Schooling and education is treated  as of great importance. The subjects studied have a practical purpose and is intended in creating a long lasting and stable source of income from which the family can utilize to thrive.

They train and develop loyalty to the team…

Team work is very important to the K-strategist. They train and learn how to cooperate and work together to the mutual benefit of all. Everyone is expected to perform a role, and to do it to the best of their ability.

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Strong loyalty to the pack…

Finally, they develop a strong pack-loyalty to maximize the chances of their pack’s competitive success, and by extension, their own. Males evolve to be courageous and strong as they set out to provision the family and absorb any risk, while females carefully nurture offspring back at the den.

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The r-selected Rabbit

Rabbits are quintessential r-strategists. Rabbits live in fields of grass they never fully exhaust.

Their goal is to produce as many offspring as quickly as possible. They flee from danger, because to fight for food that they can get elsewhere is an unnecessary risk.

They mate promiscuously with any mate, because their goal is solely to reproduce, absent concerns for genetic quality – when resources are everywhere, even the most defective offspring can find food, mate, and pass genes forward.

While males are off mating as often as possible, females raise offspring alone, and quickly send them on their way to whelp a new litter.

Begin having sex at an earlier age…

Offspring begin having sex early, to maximize numbers of their own offspring. They have sex early and produce children often. Often their preference is not to work, but rather to “be with their children”, when the fact is that often their is no father that is earning money enabling them to stay home.

Instead, they become wards of the state, living off the public trust.

Loyalty to in-group is unknown to the rabbit, because there is no competition for resources, since resources are everywhere.

Men will become more feminine…

Men who are overly promiscuous do not need to concentrate on strength or skills. Instead they need to concentrate in abilities that permits them to attract as many females as possible. Thus, to a K-strategist wolf they appear odd, and even shameful. They do not act like a member of their species should act. They are a perverted distortion of the ideal.

In an editorial earlier this week the New York Times gushed over photographs of President Obama riding his bicycle at Martha’s Vineyard, at one point exclaiming the president was an example of “rugged masculinity gone wild!”

“If Obama rode his bike into my neighborhood I’d make him have sex with me in the street!” 

After MSNBC’s Chris Matthews showed Obama’s bicycle photographs on his show Hardball, he trembled as he spoke to his guests. “I admit,” he snickered, “when I saw these pictures I felt a scorching-hot sensation shooting up my inner thigh and into my groin. And believe you me, my wife took advantage of that situation…if you know what I mean.”

The enthusiasm over the bicycle photographs stretches from media outlets coast to coast. The Boston Globe dubbed the photographs a “toxic elixir that soothes the aching heart” while the San Francisco Chronicle fawned, “If ever there was a time when America needed a macho, in-your-face, physical example of aggressiveness and old fashioned male moxie, that time is now and the man is Barack Obama.”

While the r-strategist rabbits might fawn and be enthralled with an impressive display of rabbit-like qualities, the K-strategist wolves take the opposite point of view. To them, this is perversion of the highest order.

Indeed, over time the r-strategist rabbits begin to adapt female behaviors and mimic the female gender. To make them stand out from the multitudes of like minded males, they create strategies to set themselves apart.

As such their strategies are those that appeal to the females of the species. They create other genders and dress, that on the surface appear silly, but who’s sole function is to fundamentally bring attention to them and their actions. They promote issues that appeal to the female gender, and downplay or even ridicule masculine traits.

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Among r-strategists, males will tend to exhibit smaller, more feminine, less robust physical qualities. This is both to better facilitate fleeing and for showy displays of flash and beauty, to facilitate mate attraction, and mating.

While this is going on with the male gender, there are also changes with the female gender.

Females would tend to be bigger and more aggressive…

Whether it is rabbits or humans, those who follow the r-strategist end up compensating for their weaknesses. In a world where the male is feminine and abandons the children to engage in promiscuous behavior, the mother must compensate by becoming larger and more aggressive. This means that they will become larger, fatter, and more muscular. They will start producing more testosterone rather than progesterone and that will result in numerous changes to their body shapes and behaviors.

The changes in testosterone will make them more belligerent and aggressive. The reduction in progesterone would tend to make their biology rebalance itself towards a heavier and fatter (read “pear shape”) body.

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The r-strategist females, by contrast will tend to grow big, assertive, and ill-tempered, to better occupy a more masculine family role, provisioning and protecting the offspring they raise alone.

Political Censorship

It’s funny how things work out. You try to restrict access to knowledge, people eventually want to find out what you want to keep hidden. I, myself, only really learned about the r/K strategy when it became a restricted subject content.

I personally, don’t know why.

Those who are trying to restrict dissemination of this theory are typically very liberal, or progressive-liberal in political philosophy. Yet, the strategy of the liberals fit the r-strategy exactly.

Heck, even ultra-liberal and Democrat donor, Hugh Hefner and his “Playboy” empire, used the rabbit as his symbol for his philosophy.

As of 2018, the American Democrats want…

• Unlimited migration to the United States.
• No limits on free access to food, shelter, medical services.
• No limitations on birthing and abortions on demand.
• Supportive of multiple genders and alternative lifestyles.
• Supportive of sex at very young ages.

The more conservative members of the political spectrum are just being K-strategy wolves. They just want to be left alone, with their family. They want to live their life and not have their precious and limited resources siphoned off by multitudes of people who did not work for their labors.

The Problems and Source of Conflict

When the fields are filled with grass, and the rabbits can multiply at will, happiness reigns. The wolves tend to keep to themselves and all is good. However, problems invariably arise when the rapid population growth of the r-strategy rabbits depletes the food supply…

This results in a condition whereas the resources are scarce, and the wolves will have to use their superior survival techniques to exist. Of course, the r-strategist rabbits will complain and squeal. They will redouble their strategy. They will try to overwhelm the resources in an effort to control the K-strategy members.

They will try to increase their numbers rapidly. They will do everything to unleash the abundance of the land and make it possible to produce even more offspring.

The K-strategist wolves will, of course resent that their resources are being consumed by those who are undeserving. For they neither labored for the resources, or qualify for the resources through membership or participation.

Eventually, conflict arises.

There is always a very contentious and often bloody conflict. While the r-strategist rabbits will try to overwhelm the K-strategist wolves though sheer numbers and vocal screaming, the wolves will eventually win. That is because they have trained their entire lives to be superior. They have perfected techniques of warfare and conflict. While the r-strategist rabbits have been enjoying life and a bountiful harvest, the K-strategist wolves have been working, preparing and getting ready for conflict.

This is a cycle that repeats itself over an over though the course of history. It is advisable that we listen to the lessons that can be learned here.

Another Opinion

This was drafted by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog. Rather than attribute the rise and fall of human civilization to the push and pull of r/K strategies, he suggests that it is the social construct that is at fault;

The dynamics of decadence are easy to understand: as affluence becomes the norm that is widely assumed to be permanent, shared purpose and sacrifice for the common good is replaced by self-absorbed decadence and an ethos of maximizing personal gain.

In his seminal essay The Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb listed these core dynamics of imperial decline:

(a) A growing love of money as an end in itself.

(b) A lengthy period of wealth and ease, which makes people complacent. They lose their edge; they forget the traits (confidence, energy, hard work) that built their civilization.

(c) Selfishness and self-absorption.

(d) Loss of any sense of duty to the common good.

Glubb included the following in his list of the characteristics of decadence:

-- An increase in frivolity, hedonism, materialism and the worship of unproductive celebrity.

-- A loss of social cohesion.

-- The willingness of an increasing number to live at the expense of a bloated bureaucratic state.

Glubb’s list may at first glance be largely psychological--self-aggrandizement and a focus on hedonistic pursuits--but the dynamics of decadence have economic, political and social ramifications.

First and foremost, the aristocratic financial and political elites secured their position at the expense of social mobility by erecting barriers that protect them from competition and accountability. In effect, they eliminated the risk posed by change by rigging the system to their benefit.

To fund their extravagant lifestyles, they took more of the earnings of those below them, widening the inequality between the aristocracy and commoners to extremes. Historian Peter Turchin reports that where the patricians of the Roman Republic had 10 or 20 times the wealth of an average Roman citizen, by the late Empire the elites possessed up to 200,000 times the wealth of the average commoner.

The heavier burdens on the productive class and the decay of social mobility divested commoners of a financial stake in the system, and the concentration of political power in an oligarchy disenfranchised them of political influence.

When social mobility and shared purpose are lost, there is little motivation to contribute to a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. People respond by reducing their productive participation and becoming dependents of the state, a phase captured by the phrase Bread and Circuses in the late Roman era, when a significant percentage of the Rome’s populace received free bread and access to costly entertainments in exchange for their political compliance.

Disenfranchised commoners with few prospects for advancement form a volatile political class; a small event can trigger a non-linear explosion that threatens the stability of a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many. To counter this threat, the elites bought the compliance and complicity of the masses with Bread and Circuses. As Glubb noted, the willingness to live off the state is a reflection of general decadence; if there is no other hedonistic pursuit within financial reach, then Bread and Circuses will do.

As the eventual collapse of decadent empires attests, Bread and Circuses are no substitute for social mobility, low barriers to accumulating capital and a political stake in the system. In the present era of decadence, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the modern equivalent of Bread and Circuses. But buying off the disenfranchised doesn’t transform an unstable system into a stable system; it merely masks the instability for a time.

The core belief of decadent eras is that the status quo is so powerful and permanent that it can withstand the predations of the few and the Bread and Circuses lavished on the many.

This is of course a false confidence. Every status quo is a social construct that is inherently non-linear. The decline of productive sectors, the divestiture of commoners from ownership of productive assets and the political disenfranchisement of commoners hollow out the economy and the society.

These dynamics of decadence weaken the social and economic order, creating conditions that favor a loss of faith in the status quo and the failure of key institutions.

Takeaways

• In the United States today is a build up between two survival techniques utilized by the human species.
• Typically, the r-strategist survival technique, is a “service for self” strategy based upon living in an area of abundance. It permits a hedonistic lifestyle. Which in itself is great fun, as we humans are genetically programmed to procreate. However, it is only viable as long as the resources are not restricted.

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• Typically the K-strategist survival technique is a “service for others” strategy that permits procreation in a land of scarcity.
• The r/K Theory is often censored from many American-based progressive software outlets.
• Famous r-strategist members include Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama.
• Famous K-strategist members include Erwin Rommel, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Judge Judith Sheindlin (Judge Judy), Donald Trump and Bruce Willis.

FAQ

Q: What is better, r-strategy or K-strategy?
A: Neither or both. It depends on the environment. If there is an endless supply of resources, then the r-strategy is better. If the resources are scarce, or they fluctuate, then obviously the K-strategy is superior.

Q: Can American democrats be K-strategist wolves? 
A: There was a time when the American democrat party was dominated by K-strategist individuals. For instance, when the democrat party founded the KKK, they were very family oriented and reacted to the changes in the political landscape by creating the militant KKK organization. Labels and species composition changes over time. Today, the American democrat party is dominated by r-strategist membership who is drawing the party towards radical r-strategist behaviors. Eventually it will either change, or be eliminated. Historically r-strategist behaviors do not possess longevity on this earth.

Q: What other creatures follow the r-strategy behaviors?
A: Aside from Democrats and rabbits, similar behaviors have been observed in mice, rats, mosquitoes and cockroaches.

Q: What other creatures follow the K-strategy behaviors?
A: Aside from wolves, similar behaviors can be found in many of the feline species such as domestic cats, lions, and snow leopards.

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Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

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Notes

1. Composed 28JUN18.
2. SEO Review 30JUN18.
3. Added quote from the twomindsblog 6OCT18.