Thanks for the responce. It was challenging to reply to. I'll try to address everything you've said.
I'd like to start with the fact that you're using the theory and look at what it offers to you and other people:
1) Simplicity. Life's complexity can be boiled down to one theory. This makes life easier to understand and navigate. We enjoy compartmentalizing. Compartmentalization is a concept in psychology and I am refering to that as well but mainly it's how our brains manage. When we see a leaf we see a single leaf (singular 'concept'). When we say numerous leaves, we see a pile of leaves (singular 'concept'). If we see a large numerous of leaves hanging from a tree we see foliage (singular 'concept'). If our brains would register every single leave hanging from that tree we wouldn't be able to function. We face countless stimuli every day and need to compartmentalize. You can see this everywhere, for example peoples' need to fit music into genres and subgenres.
2) It splits people into two groups. Again, this offers simplicity. It also provides an enemy responsible for the world's woes. It implies a very direct cause and effect which offers control. If you experience life as a bad place with no direct aggressor (natural disasters, diseases etc.) you feel a lack of control. We're essentially all control freaks. People who get called control freaks simply feel a much more significant need to control things (this is a mental thing and not actually about being in control in the sense of having power over others). This enemy offers a battle that can and should be fought. This offers you a goal in life and offers the romanticism of being a warrior in the struggle against evil. The stories we tell of heroes and villains (in movies, book, folklore), good and evil, righteous and unjust are manifestations of our need for romanticism. And I'm not talking about a romantic candlelight dinner.
It allows you to place yourself on the good side. Having a clear-cut group offers you an identity and it satisfies a need to belong to a group. The division of these groups is black and white, in this case bad and good. You can look at all the positive traits associated with your group and ascribe yourself all of these traits. White supremacists will boast about the accomplishments of the white race (and they are to be boasted about) but that doesn't mean that mr. trailer park trash who happens to belong to this masterful race has himself accomplished anything himself. Most likely if the entire white race shared his personality they would've gone extinct through inbreeding and falling on their own spears (and not in that order). I'm K-selected so I would have been one of the founding fathers given the right circumstances.
It also makes it far easier to ignore or not examine any negative traits you or your group have. Everything can be projected onto that one bad group. The others.
3) It offers a weapon. A verbal weapon but a weapon.
None of this actually addresses the r/K theory. I will come back to why I mentioned all of it because it's not meant to be an ad hominem.
The r/K theory has fallen out of favour (although much of it what it proposes continues to be used). Also, it uses the word 'theory' is the non scientific sense, as far as I know. It should be the r/K hypothesis.
There are typical examples of r-selection and typical examples of K-selection, however most organisms do not fall into either category neatly. Human beings are closer to K-selection than r. Cats for example reach sexual maturity fast (r), can have a high number of offspring and spread widely and quickly (r), have relatively long life expectancy (K), are relatively involved in child-rearing (K).
The problem isn't really with this hypothesis, the problem is with applying it to human beings and applying it to conscious/subconscious actions and politics. The r/K selection theory has to do with reproduction. What you'll notice is that r/K selection speaks in terms of 'species' and not 'individuals'. We see individual differences in species but you don't see lions throwing out 30 cubs a year and not taking care of them and you don't see mice having a single off-spring and rearing them until adulthood. Evolution is far too complicated (not just in the sense of actual complexity but in that you sometimes need to take millions of years of evolution and 1000s of species into account to look at a single species. An enormous amount of variables) to use the r/K selection theory as an actual strategy that is utilized by individual species.
Mice live for a short time and are incredibly vulnerable to predation. If mice started producing a small number of offspring and investing heavily into child-rearing they would go extinct. They survived because they didn't. People often mistake evolution for 'adapting' species. Placing it in economic terms: a succesful company is suffering losses due to online stores. They don't grow an extra set of arms in order to work twice as fast. They adapt and survive or they don't adapt sufficiently and go bankrupt. Now if their employees were are inbred hicks with an extra set of arms and their succes made them wildly succesful with the ladies...
Giraffes didn't grow longer necks in order to survive. Jim, the long-necked giraffe, told Bob, the short-necked giraffe, "just hold on for a couple thousand or million years and you'll be able to reach the food, buddy!". Sadly, Bob died later that week.
It's ultimately not a tactic of individuals, it's a "tactic" of organisms. This doesn't translate very well to human behaviour. Even if it seems to fits, it's simply not a correct application.
Can you find me references to this in the actual r/K selection theory? Specifically references to 'abundance' and 'scarcity'. I don't mean political/sociological applications of this hypothesis but rather within the field of ecology.
The politicized hypothesis of the r/K selection theory hypothesis claims that abundance leads to promiscuity and lack of child-rearing investments. Abundance leads to r-selection. Scarcity leads to K-selection.
One thing that poor people living in scarcity actually do is produce a lot of offspring in order to survive.
Africa should be very K-selected because of the scarcity. However:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...rtility-rates/
https://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=25
Your quote is a bit all over the place. "
R-selected people (modern liberals) are optimized for periods of abundance". The way you have worded this is that r-selected people reach their peak performance in periods of abundance.
"
To maximize your reproductive success in an environment of abundance...". They way you have worded this is that in order to reach peak performance in a period of abundance you should be r-selected and in scarcity K-selected. This is either poorly worded, doesn't make sense or can be countered easily.
Human beings seem to have r-selected
tendencies in scarcity and K-selected
tendencies in abundance. The high birth rate isn't coming from the affluent West. Whether or not this
tendency is the best tactic is debatable (I think K-selected in abundance and r-selected in scarcity ultimately produces the best rate of survival for the species) but what the politicized hypothesis claims doesn't jel with the ecological facts.
"r/K-selected people" and "evolutionary". The r/K theory speaks of species and obviously this involves evolution and genetics. Like I mentioned earlier, you see r/K-selected species (again: most do not fit!) but you don't see r/K-selected individuals. Show me the whore lion with her 30 cubs and the monogamous mouse with her one baby she loves dearly. Yet, the jump is made to r/K-selected people. So that must mean that there are specific genes which express this behaviour. If there aren't then the r/K theory by definition has no bearing on human individuals. Are there? Have they been identified? Has any sort of research even been done?
Now, you could talk about 'r/K-selected species'-like behaviour. Observing nature is a good way to learn about ourselves. There's a reason why 'peacocking' is such a good term. But once you get into that area then you can't talk about r/K-
selected people or being 'evolutionary fit'. Then it's just a tactic (whereas the r/K-theory is not a tactic in the same sense) and it makes sense that we would follow tactics other animals use because a) we are animals b) we share the same reality c) there is a finite amount of tactics.
And conservatives really want is a finite field of grass with lots of predation upon which they can reproduce indefinitely. If you're going to use a hyperbole to compare and contrast, use a hyperbole on both sides.
Although a lot of vegetarians/vegan go that route, I haven't seen it in this thread. I also haven't seen any crushing of facts. You personally haven't adressed any actual arguments.
I disagree with that vehemently. No matter my stance on this topic, there is a biological difference between killing a fellow human being and a non-human animal. A person capable of killing an animal without feeling remorse, sympathy or pity does not necessitate a certain pathology. Amongst ourselves it's different. Even if the pathology doesn't live among the individual doing the killing, it will most likely live among the 'spirit' of the group. Concentration camp guards aren't necessarily monsters but the ideology behind it certainly is monstrous. Empathy plays a role but it's complicated and empathy doesn't equal sympathy.
It may but
an explanation that seemingly fits isn't necessarily the correct explanation. The irony behind this is that it clearly demonstrates a level of competitiveness among these so-called "r-selected people". I'm not an animal rights activist but I do work with animals and I've seen the competitiveness among the different groups. It really isn't any different than what you'd find anywhere else. Only the social status of money etc. becomes 'I am the
most unselfish'. This doesn't fit the claim that r-selected people dislike competition. They prefer a different kind of competition.
I got from A to B in context of your post. You not only placed everyone in the r/K dichotomy but you placed everyone in the left/right dichotomy. Bringing in socialism/capitalism naturally follow that logic. If you didn't mean explicit though then you either meant subconscious thought (and my reply still stands) or what you said was meaningless.
I am not optimistic at all, actually. China is a hellhole for animals (and people). Again, it might fit the claim on a superficial level but it really doesn't offer any explanation. While meat/diary consumption may on some level be decreasing in the west, it is on the rise in developing countries. The closer third and second world countries get to being a first world country, the more meat and diary is consumed. This doesn't fit your theory, in fact it is the opposite of what you claim.
You can talk about age but lets bring in correlation and causation. I'm not going to go into this much at all (because we all know what it means) but it's something you don't seem to take into account much at all.
My explanation that people are living in closer proximity to animals (in terms of 'loved ones' as opposed to livestock) fits much better. It allows people to empathize with animals more, which tends to create sympathy. This sympathy leads to anger and feelings of injustice in regards to the animal industries. More and more Chinese people are owning dogs and they are speaking out against the parts of China that eat dog (and literally torture them because it supposedly improves the taste). How many people have no qualms about eating pigs, cows, chickens etc. but speak out against eating dog? Don't remember who it was but someone in this thread expressed that sentinement. Dogs are man's best friend and no eaty those. Is that r-selection? Or empathy, culture etc.?
Meh. My question actually wasn't very good. People seek high social status for reproductive reasons (although there are other reasons). Even if a person decides not to want children, this evolutionary treat is so deeply ingrained in us we still act as if we want to reproduce. So, the decision not to have children doesn't negate the behaviour that helps you get them. You could have argued that. The point is though, your r/K selection theory puts everything into two neat categories, with animal rights being an extension of r-selection yet a very significant amount of people into with animal rights/treatment issues are not only having less or no children, they're removing themselves from this public arena of social status and quite literally removing themselves from the public arena. Lots of people that I know would love nothing more than to live in a forest (and some actually do
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] ). It is a far more complicated issue and the r/K theory only gives superficial explanations that fit once you ignore most everything else.
None of this actually touches on the arguments for animals. That's a different discussion at this point. One of my main issues with the r/K-selection theory, besides that I think it's wrongly applied and misunderstood, is that it does a lot more damage than it does good.
Our understanding of biology and psychology offers something amazing. What I think the most powerful result of western society (not necessarily that it has the most power, rather that it has the most potential) is our ability to study the animals that we are. This allows us to transcend our nature to a certain degree. We are like a computer program that gains consciousness. That program will then behave differently than any prediction of the program would tell you but it will always be limited by it's design. We are able to look at concepts like nationalism and transcend it. People on the left tend to throw away nationalism entirely. People on the right tend to embrace it too strongly. Both have negative results. Group identity (of which nationalism is just another degree) is something engrained in us. Some people experience it more than others and the odd individual might not experience it (much) at all. We can't do away with it but we can study what it does and steer it in the right direction. This is something for a long post and I would need to spend a lot of time working on it (so it doesn't turn into a semi-cohesive rant of 5 pages long) but I'll just throw out some short examples:
- Trump is insensitive.
- Trump is right-wing.
- People have cognitive bias, comfirmation bias, suffer from cognitive dissonance when their worldview is challenged.
- Right-wing people should be the most critical of Trump in order to counteract this.
- Left-wing people should try to understand what Trump does as much as possible to counteract this.
Conclusions to be drawn: Trump is an insensitive manchild and is causing damage. The left has been oversensitive for a long time and caused damage. This has led to an insensitive manchild and may even be necessary to balance things out. The left should become less sensitive. The right should be careful not to become too insensitive and see Trump as a temporary solution but roll back afterwards.
- Far-right is on the rise.
- Far-right is a 'spirit' that is always lurking and will come out time and time again
- Far-left is partially to blame for the rise of far-right but not entirely
- Right should be highly critical of far-right.
- Left should try to understand the far-right. Examine the positions that hold some element of truth, throw away the bad ones. Integrate the the good ones into their ideology, which will lead to less people gravitating to the far-right and adopting the bad elements.
I think those are examples of how an understanding of the psychology of politics can lead to a better way.
The main problem with the right adopting these psychological and biological teachings is that they're mostly not applying them in an effort for truth and proper understanding. They're tools in their battle. All they're used for is furthering the left/wing dichotomy, which is often a false dichomoty. "Ah so the left does this and thinks this because so and so...". So what you're saying is these human beings are subject to their biology? Mind, fucking, blown. Of course the right is also subject to their biology but not really. They just have some awesome qualities mixed in with their free thoughts. Like being hard-working and not producing welfare babies. At this moment most of the intellectuals are on the right. The right is providing the most balanced and logical discussions. They are the most rational. I am left-wing and mostly watch right-wing pundits. More truth, more challenge, more falsification for my thoughts. It will only be a matter of time before they go the route of the current left. Where the left has 'you're a racist/homophobe/transophobe/Islamaphobe/breaking-into-your-house-and-stealing-your-stuff-ophobe' the right will have 'you're just r-selected'.
Black ghetto people? Clearly r-selected. Produce a whole bunch of kids, don't look after them, want everything handed to them. r-selected. Socio-economic circumstances? Culture? Subculture? Lack of education? Lack of moral standards? Destructive moral standards? No family unite? Destructive race relations? Bad 'leaders'? None of these are taken into account. They're just r-selected.
It's really just an informative and educated
sounding ad hominem. No more, no less.
Applying biology and psychology is the best thing we can do. Therefore alllowing it to be corrupted as misused is incredibly destructive. Once it enters the public arena in its corrupted form it will create even more massive roadblocks for the genuine truth-seeking biology and psychology to enter the public arena. It will send it back a 100 years. Getting back to what I inititially said about the psychology behind adopting this r/K-selection theory applied to human individuals. Applying psychology and biology is also very much about examining yourself. Once you start putting the magnifying glass over one group, you fall into the mental pitfalls so natural to us. Your view of the 'other group' will not be a very correct one. Once you start putting the magniying glass over all the groups but not individuals in those groups, same deal. And most importantly if you never put the magnifying glass over yourself, you will not come out the better for it. This is why Ayn Rand showed herself to simply not understand human beings when she proclaimed that Objectivists couldn't possibly be cult members because they practised individualism. She and her followers are actually a great way to study where intellect over emotion fails miserably (not to say that she didn't have amazing things to say and give me Objectivism over this crazy post-feminism/there is no biology transgenderism/black lives matter hybrid of crazy) and how easy it is to fall prey to rationalizing your own emotions as intellect.
A bit of a rant here still but I have to write without thinking too much because time, man.
11-02-2017, 10:49 AM
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