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July 8, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:15
3019 The Genetics of Politics | Liberals vs. Conservatives | Gene Wars [Part 2}
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
This is Gene Wars Part 2, The Genetics of Politics.
So, I don't want to go over Part 1.
It's right here in this playlist.
So, don't be going out of sequence, you cheaters.
So, I hope that you will follow me along with this.
This is fascinating stuff.
There's an old saying that says, a mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape.
This is certainly the case with this stuff for me and I hope for you as well.
Credit where credit is due.
I heard about RK many years ago and looked into the differences in reproductive strategies, you know, where the Rs have lots and lots of babies and don't really put any care or attention into their offspring, don't really care about monogamy.
Basically, they're just like rabbits, very good machines to turn grass and pretty much all the vegetables in my vegetable garden into new rabbits.
This is where they've got as much food as they want to eat, but there's this random predation from like owls and foxes and wolves and so on that they can't do anything about.
So just breed, breed, breed, breed, breed, because I might not be able to make it to maturity otherwise.
If you don't have a good chance to survive...
If you're not very powerful or don't have a lot of teeth or can't fly or whatever, then you're going to be breeding like crazy because not many of your offspring are going to make it to the adult finish line.
On the other hand, there's the K-selected species.
They tend to be larger, more complex.
And they invest a lot in their offspring, have fewer children, because hunting rabbits is more difficult than rabbits, quote, hunting grass.
And they're into monogamy and quality, delayed sexuality, in-group preferences, lots of rules, right?
So like when wolves fight, they use their teeth, and they can kill each other easily.
But what happens is the moment one...
Wolf bears its throat.
Terrible.
Once a wolf bears its throat to another wolf, and in submission, the conflict, the fight, stops immediately.
They're very, very into rules, and they ostracize those who don't obey the rules.
They're very strict rules about...
Who eats first and who eats most and all that kind of stuff.
So, this is R versus K reproductive strategies.
It's valuable and powerful to map these strategies to left and right in the political spectrum, to conservative or liberal in the political spectrum.
Now, I did get a lot of information from a particular source here.
There's a book called The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics.
How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans.
And I will put a link to that below.
We've got tons of other sources which we'll put links to below as well.
But credit where credit is due.
I thought of the idea, went looking for more data, and it's like, oh, well, one guy's done a lot of the work, so I appreciate that, and I'd certainly recommend the book as well.
So, that having been said, get ready to be stretched, my friends.
We are going into the genetics of politics.
We start with the amygdala.
I'll bring up a picture here.
The amygdala are these two little almond-shaped things.
I'm such a technical specialist.
Things in the back of your brain.
Amygdala actually comes from an ancient Greek word for almond.
Almond comes from an ancient Sumerian word, which means the nut that turns California into a desert.
And the amygdala is fundamentally...
Designed to create emotional associations, these strong Pavlovian associations between sense data and relevant outcomes.
So it gets raw sense data, and it tries to evaluate whether it's good for you or bad for you.
And this is implicit memory.
It's outside of conscious control.
So I'll give you an example.
When I was young, and I guess you could argue even more foolish than I am now, my friends, obviously, I grew up dirt poor, and so we had to sort of invent our own Cheap entertainment prior to video games and all that.
And my friends and I, we used to like to go into the woods and we'd make a little fire and we'd cook beans in a can and so on.
And then, because we were young and stupid, we'll get into reasons why, at least my excuses as to why, in a bit, we would go across this giant train trestle that was, I don't know, like a quarter of a kilometer or more across, maybe...
A quarter of a kilometer above a sort of rocky stream bed.
We go up there at nighttime, and we dare each other.
We dare cross from one end to the other.
Ooh, very exciting stuff.
You're a teenager.
What sense of consequences do you have?
Apparently not.
And there was even a guy in the apartment building who lost his legs doing this.
It's crazy stuff.
Anyway.
So, one night, halfway across...
The bridge.
I hear the train.
The train is coming, thundering around the corner.
I knew I couldn't get back to either end.
I was right in the middle of the bridge.
And there was a little sort of cubby where you could sort of sit, but it was across.
I didn't want to...
So I jumped to get away from the train, didn't quite make it, was hanging between these two train tracks, hundreds and hundreds of feet above the rocky ground.
And the train passed, and I'm so sorry, in hindsight, to the engineer.
I apologize a million-fold.
What a terrible thing to put you through.
But I was hanging, and the train with the sparks, because it was breaking and all, went by like...
Six inches from my face, I felt the suction of the wind pulling me in.
Terrible, stupid stuff.
Now, of course, for a long time, and even now, like I even now try not to think about this.
I don't really do, but try not to think about this before I want to go to sleep because it will interfere quite a bit.
And train trassels like you couldn't pay me enough to go on one now.
There's this basic anxiety or fear around it because that's my amygdala saying, hey, idiot, don't die for such a stupid thing.
And in the book that I mentioned, there's an example given of a friend of the author's who...
I was walking on a frozen lake and heard the crack of the ice and then fell in and it's really tough to get out.
I used to work as a gold pan or prospector and explorer up in northern Ontario after high school so I could save up money for college and we went through all of the, here's what happens because you can fall into the ice and you got to let your gloves freeze and slowly pull yourself out because you keep pulling, you just keep shredding the ice and you can't get out and you don't have a lot of time because it's really, really cold.
This friend of the author's, every time he'd hear that sound, he'd freak out, even if he was just walking across a puddle.
It's the crack of the tiger's paw on the sticks that your body is telling you.
If after that comes this giant tiger, then you're going to be anxious about that.
It's trying to keep you alive by freaking you out.
It's not only Fear, but it's these emotional associations between raw sense data and relevant outcomes.
And again, it's outside of conscious control.
Otherwise, PTSD, you could just turn off like that.
The amygdala primarily responsible is assigning emotional significance to encountered perceptions.
Reviews the sense data, raw sense data that's coming in, assigns emotional importance, particularly with regard to threats.
But it's wired into wide areas of brain activity.
It's pretty central.
Now, it needs training and experience to function well.
And so, there are times when your amygdala is going to freak out and it doesn't turn out to be something particularly important.
You know, surprise!
You know, that's not when you pull out your machete and go all postal on your friends and family.
And so, you know, surprise parties.
So, training and experience.
If you get uneasy and you don't confront that unease, you don't confront your fears, it all leads to A panicking amygdala that floods your system with stress hormones and cortisol and all that kind of stuff through the ACC, which we'll get to in a sec.
And the amygdala is not just like raw panic button.
It also helps read emotion in facial expressions, positive, neutral, and negative, because we're social animals, and we have tribal constants that most times we'd have to work with over the past sort of couple hundred thousand years of human development.
And so one of the threats we would face is not a predator, but an enemy within the tribe who wanted to do us harm.
So we're very good through the amygdala at reading facial expressions and evaluating whether the person is positive, neutral, or negative towards us.
Now, amygdala volume varies highly throughout the population.
It's not like an arm, which is pretty much the same length.
Some people have these little Tyrannosaurus arms, and some people have full-on stretch-o-matic orangutan extendables.
If you have a low amygdala volume, it's associated with an avoidance of eye contact, as well as an inability to perceive and to process threats.
This is really important.
So, They've done experiments where they've basically removed, it's more sophisticated than that, but basically they've removed or disabled the amygdala in monkeys, and that monkey does not process threats.
It would go up to a monkey that just beat it up and get beaten up.
They'll take the monkey out, put the monkey back in.
He's like, "Hey, friend!" Take the monkey out, put the monkey in.
"Hey, friend!" Same thing happens.
There's no capacity to process threats.
And I'm with Aristotle in terms of the mean on this.
You don't want to be hypervigilant and frightened of everything, but at the same time, Not experiencing fear is not the mark of the healthiest state of mind, as in sociopathy or psychopathy.
So amygdala volume is important to understand.
Now, K-selected species have a very strong amygdala development.
And the reason being that they have to plan a long way in the future.
Like, if you're a wolf, you don't want to wait until you're starving to death to go eat something.
You can do that if you're a rabbit, because, like, hey, look at me, fine rabbit hunter.
I found grass.
Ooh!
And so you have to look further down the time tunnel if you're a K-selected species.
And so you need a stronger amygdala in development to see over the horizon and consequences.
This is particularly true for people who developed in really cold climates.
Because in cold climates, half the year, you can't get any food, and you really need to plan to get your food.
It's not like, you know, pomegranates and papayas are dropping on your lap.
Oh, look, lunch fell from the sky.
I guess I'll have some.
You really have to be anxious.
Like, if you're going to eat your seed crop, that's really, really bad.
And if you're not going to plant, or you're too lazy to weed, or you don't want to chase away the birds, or all of this stuff is really, really bad.
And so, case-selected species have very strong amygdala And that's important to understand as well.
Amygdala dysfunction, when it's not working well, it's shrunken or cut off, it's associated with novelty-seeking, overeating, repetitive threat exposure, right?
So, also interesting, when they disable amygdalas in monkeys, they don't, right?
Normally monkeys take food and bring it to their...
They just stick their trough, right?
Like watching a busload of American tourists at a buffet, right?
It's like...
But basically monkeys will take their face and just eat directly out of that.
They overeat.
And novelty-seeking is really interesting because everything kind of feels new and you have this kind of curiosity about new things because you're not really learning very much with the amygdala dysfunction.
This associates, to some degree, a smaller amygdala with an R-type mindset.
So we talked about the R's will flee danger.
They can't fight.
They flee danger.
There's not a lot of ritualistic combat among rabbits for mates, but there are among more K-type species.
So they explore.
They like to explore.
Let's go someplace new because there's a threat here.
So the fact that they would like novelty-seeking would associate well with that, the avoidance of confrontation.
There's something called the Kluverbussi syndrome, which I thought was being crazy and having big teeth, but it's a human syndrome produced by deficient amygdala function.
It is associated with docility and rabbit.
Let me not combine those two words.
Rabbit sexuality like rabbits.
Maybe it's rabbit fetish.
I don't know.
But anyway.
So...
When you have a deficient amygdala, you get docility, like a rabbit, and you get rabbit sexuality.
And these, again, all are selected traits.
Amygdala damage is also associated with lower investment in child rearing.
Animals where you damage or disable the amygdala don't really care about their offspring and so on, so we'll go into the mechanics of why in a few minutes.
Amygdala damage is also associated with lower in-group preference and empathy.
So rabbits don't have a very strong...
I don't need to pick on rabbits.
It's just the most common example that people know.
They don't really have much of an in-group preference, right?
I mean, rabbits will not draw up a wagon circle around a wounded rabbit.
They're like, hey, I don't have to run fast.
I just have to run faster than you if the wolf is chasing us.
And if a rabbit gets taken or eaten, the rabbits don't seem to care that much.
They just don't have a strong in-group preference and they don't have very strong empathy, which makes sense.
As I talked about in part one, biologically, if you're best friends with another rabbit and a wolf sits on the other rabbit, running to his aid is just going to give the wolf two meals instead of one, and thus taking that tendency out of the gene pool.
Antisocial personality disorders and other manifestations of psychopathy, lack of empathy and association, is also associated with lower amygdala volume.
What I'm basically saying is that all rabbits are evil, but I think we already know that, don't we?
Reduced amygdala function, volume and or activity levels are all associated with deficiencies in morality and moral judgments, moral emotions, deficiencies in guilt and empathy.
People who are better able to read emotional cues than others exhibit more pro-social behaviors, and the amygdala is responsible for helping you to read emotional cues, positive and negative and neutral, in others.
And exhibit more pro-social behaviors because you can read and understand and recognize other people's emotions.
So basically, the amygdala produces discomfort until the threat is dealt with.
Now, this is important.
The amygdala is proactive.
Fight or flight is just, wolf, run!
Hide!
Dig!
Right?
I mean, that's what happens.
But the amygdala, basically, if you're in a threat situation, the longer your time frame, the more sophisticated your problem solving can be.
And so the rabbit only has run.
And all it has is run.
But if you're, like, some human being in, like...
Northern France in the 5000 BC or something like that.
Well, you're going to feel uneasy if you're not taking care of your crops.
If you just don't feel like repairing the fence around where your sheep are, it's going to bug you.
It's going to just nag at you until you go and deal with it.
Well, that's the amygdala.
It's dealing with not just short-term fight or flight, but long-term, ooh, this isn't going to be good for us.
It gives you emotional cues for solving problems in the long run.
So if you think about something like...
The national debt.
I can say this is a worldwide podcast, and I can't think of a country that doesn't have one.
I don't know.
Cutter?
Anyway.
So there are some people who are like, ooh, this national debt is really bad.
We've got to do something about it.
And there are other people who are like, eh, you know, it'll take care of itself, or we'll deal with it when we get there.
Or John Maynard Keynes' famous statement.
He was a very, I guess, lefty.
I would call him lefty economist.
Yeah.
He just said, people would say, well, in the long run, what about the long run?
What about the long run?
And he said, ah, in the long run, we're all dead.
Well, he was gay, so he didn't have kids.
Maybe that had something to do with it.
So the amygdala will produce this kind of sense of unease.
You know, like you have this thing where I had a thing.
I never did homework when I was a kid for a variety of reasons.
But I'd have a test coming up.
I don't know.
I'd be writing or reading or playing with my friends or whatever.
And I just feel this kind of unease.
You know, like, I should really be studying for this test, right?
And eventually I'd be like, oh, fine.
I'll go and study for the test.
And then the unease would go away.
That's the amygdala.
Give this unease until the threat is dealt with.
So it's anti-hedonistic, right?
Because...
It's the kind of thing that's like, if you're trying to lose weight, would you like a piece of cheesecake?
Eh, you probably shouldn't, right?
That's the amygdala, right?
Or you have the cheesecake and then you feel bad afterwards and it's trying to give you an aversion mechanism for doing that again.
So it's anti-hedonistic because it's telling you, plan for the long-term, look for long-term benefits rather than benefits in the here and now.
And it develops through exposure to adverse outcomes, and this is why our selected environments don't develop strong amygdalas, because the adverse outcome for our selected species is you get away, in which case forget about it, or you don't get away, in which case you're eaten.
But there's not a lot of, you know, we really ought to build this rabbit fort against the wolves, and we, you know, there's none of that.
It's like run, screw, eat, and try not to get eaten.
So amygdala volume is associated with the number of individuals in the group, as well as sociability.
And so it may support the skills needed for complex social life.
You know, social life is a lot of navigation, pluses and minuses.
You want to obey the rules of the tribe, but you don't want them to become so ossified that you end up with this 3,000 years stagnated Chinese empire or something.
So...
You want to challenge people, but at the same time, you don't want them to set fire to you because you're a heretic, right?
I mean, it's a lot of challenging, complicated stuff.
Maybe more due to my life than yours, perhaps.
But, you know, it's complicated.
MRI scans measure amygdalas that range in size from about 2.5 cubic millimeters to over 5, right?
So significant differences in size.
Those with the smallest amygdalas listed fewer than 5 to 15 people as regular contacts, while those with the largest amygdalas counted up to 50 acquaintances in their social life.
So a larger amygdala makes it easier and more positive and more enjoyable for you to negotiate and to navigate the complexities of your social life.
Primate studies also show that the primates who live in large social groups tend to have bigger amygdalas.
Quote, people who have large amygdalas may have the raw material needed to maintain larger and more complex social networks.
That said, the brain is a use-it-or-lose-it organ.
I remember thinking about that with my penis when I was a teenager.
It may be...
Sorry, that's not the researcher.
It's my aside.
It may be, says the researcher, that when people interact more, their amygdalas get larger.
That would be my guess.
So...
Let's look at some of the left-right stuff.
So, in general, liberals want social change and reject inequality.
And these are very, very general statements, and there's lots of exceptions and so on.
Conservatives are considered to resist social change, and they're willing to accept inequality.
So, conservatives tend to be more free-market oriented, which is, you know, you work hard, you get your rewards, and that's fine.
Whereas liberals are like, ooh, I want an equality of outcome, you know, let's take some from the...
Rich and give more to the poor and so on.
And they're very keen on social experiments, whereas conservatives are like, eh, I'm willing to change according to the market, but I don't want to change the rules.
So there are two main differences between liberal and conservative brains.
And again, this is...
All...
You've heard the caveats, but just remember them, right?
Again, and don't...
Try not to pick too much at every thread in this tapestry.
Just, you know, go with me if you don't mind.
Trust me, trust me, right?
Just give it a try.
Try it on for size, and we'll go for it, and we'll find the exceptions as we go forward, but just give it a try.
So, liberals possess a smaller right amygdala volume.
A smaller right amygdala volume.
Everything that that implies.
Novelty-seeking, a tendency towards perhaps promiscuity, a willingness to try new things, and a very low capacity to recognize threats and a desire for Equality of outcome.
All these kinds of things.
Liberals also have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, or the ACC, as we mentioned before.
They have larger anterior cingulate cortex, cortices.
So, long-time research has linked amygdala function with political affiliation.
And, by the way, there's the amygdala.
Again, this is a side view of the spinal cord.
We'll get to the prefrontal cortex in a bit.
The anterior cingulate cortex is behind the eyeballs and wrapped around...
The top part of an S, it looks like.
So, we talked about the amygdala, the larger anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. So, the ACC is a neural alarm system.
It's like the red button pushed by the amygdala in case of a significant threat and or danger.
So, it's like a low-rent kind of feel uneasy until I deal with a particular situation.
Oh, I've got to do my taxes, or whatever it is.
But when the amygdala freaks out, it pushes the ACC. It's triggered through significant physical pain, as well as social ostracism and exclusion.
And it's also triggered through perceived unfairness.
Now, I've talked about in this show for a long time that we rely too much on government power, edicts, guns, prisons, courts, and all that to...
Organize society.
And I've said, well, ostracism and social exclusion are the way that we should organize things because it's very powerful.
And social ostracism and exclusion activates the same pain centers in the brain as torture, as physical pain.
So this is very, very important.
It's triggered through physical pain, social ostracism, and exclusion.
Now, that's really, really important to understand because social ostracism is not personal death.
But it's kind of gene death, right?
Because if the women won't bang you or the men won't bang you, you don't get to have any offspring.
So the fact that we would have this significant aversion to the point where it's equal to physical torture, the significant aversion to being ostracized in society is because we need society to raise our kids.
We have this ridiculously slow development.
It takes a quarter century for the brain to finish maturing, as we'll talk about.
And...
That is a very, very powerful mechanism that's tragically underutilized in modern society.
It's much more flexible, much more fair, much more powerful than mere government power.
So, it's also highly stimulated, the ACC, during the experience of envy.
Envy is a very, very powerful emotion, and it goes right down deep into the brain.
So, envy...
It's two components.
One, it's a motivator.
There's an old saying which says, there's no poor people in America, there are only temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
You can get that brass ring, you can do it, you can achieve it.
And there have been studies, of course, that conservatives are much more likely to agree...
With the proposition, if you work hard, you can achieve whatever it is that you want or need.
Whereas liberals generally don't feel as strongly around that.
So there's envy, but envy is associated with, can I achieve this thing that I envy or not, right?
So if somebody's really good at table tennis, ooh, I just love it, are you going to go practice or are you just going to be resentful?
And...
The experience of envy is really, really important to understand.
If you envy somebody being popular, are you going to work to learn how to be more popular?
If you envy somebody who's got a lot of money, are you going to work to try and make a lot of money?
These are questions.
Or are you going to say resentment combined, what Nietzsche would call resentment, right?
Resentment combined with your envy to the point where you say, well...
That guy's got all this money.
I bet you he took it from me.
I bet you it's my money somehow.
And so I want the government to take that person's money and give it to me.
That would be, I guess, I'm sorry to use the slightly negative voice.
I don't want to sound too hostile to our selected people, but the experience of envy also is triggered through the ACC. So liberals have a larger envy center in the brain, and what do they continually do when they're running for office, or they're writing, or they're sleeping, or they're breathing?
What they do is they engage in this class warfare.
Ah, the rich!
We're going to go and tax the rich and give you money.
Well, that would only appeal to people who don't think they can become rich.
Right?
I mean...
That's clear, right?
So the despair, the depression, the hopelessness that goes along with envy appeals to this biological reality that liberals have a larger envy center in the brain.
Envy is also associated, interestingly enough, with a willingness to break rules.
So think of on the left...
Oh boy, that could be a whole show in itself.
I'll just touch on a few.
Think of on the left the degree to which liberals set up rules And break them simply by breathing, it seems, right?
So it's like, let's have Obamacare, except for these Congress people and all their friends.
So there are always these exceptions that are set up.
Insider trading is really bad, but we're going to exempt Congress from it, right?
And this kind of stuff generally comes from the left.
The right likes stable rules with unequal outcomes, right?
So on the right, when they're playing chess, They don't want the rules to change and they're willing to accept that some people are going to be great at chess and some people are going to not be great at chess.
Unequal outcome, equal rules.
On the left, it's equal outcomes which require unequal rules, right?
You get two moves for every one move because that person's better.
We're going to tax moves from the good chess players and give them to you.
You understand this is the way that it works.
Oddly enough, it doesn't work.
Marxism doesn't work when it's M-A-R-L. It's CKS, right?
When we don't say, well, all of these smart kids who worked hard and studied, they all got A's, whereas the kids who didn't got D's.
So we're going to take some of the A's, everyone's going to get a C +, right?
We don't do it that way.
But there's reasons for that, which we can talk about another time.
So envy is associated with a willingness to break rules.
A feeling of being outside the main social group, and thus there's a diminished or adverse loyalty to the main social group.
Remember, our selected species, low in-group preference.
And they appeal to government.
And that's the avoidance of direct competition, right?
So an avoidance of competition is key to our selected species, right?
I mean, the rabbits, they don't compete with each other for food.
It's like if you're a rabbit and Bob, your friend, rabbit is eating some piece of grass you want, step over to the right and eat the next piece of grass.
So you don't compete.
You don't compete with the wolves.
You don't compete with each other.
You avoid competition because competition can produce conflict which can injure you for which there is no point because you can't fight the wolf and there's no point fighting over grass.
So this avoidance of competition is really, really important.
And there's no point having social ostracism or exclusion.
Mean rabbits can eat the grass too if they want.
There's no particular point.
Because ostracism is to enforce very strict rules, which implies limited resources and high investment, high quality children.
And so there's no point.
So, liberals appeal to the government.
Now, this is not just liberals.
Once the system is set up, right, it's not rich or poor, lots of rich people, I'm thinking like the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, just about every major corporation, they all want rules bent in their favor so that they don't have to compete.
Plumbers and other tradespeople want massive licenses so they don't have to compete with kids out of high school who are willing to work for literal peanuts.
Unions have got to have a union shop, right?
You don't want to compete with people who are willing to work for less.
So, wherever you see people wanting to avoid direct competition by jury-rigging the system and creating special rules for themselves, that's coming from the R-selected mindset.
ACC activation is also present during the experience of empathy.
But there's also depression, which we'll get to involved in being a liberal as well.
So there is this liberal attachment to the underdog, which we'll talk about as well.
But conservatives experience less pain by inflicting social exclusion.
And...
I think there's really good reasons for that.
And again, I want to understand, I want to be very clear, this is not absolutely conclusive, 150% proven or anything like that, but these are interesting things to think about.
And once you start looking at the world through this lens, I think you'll find a lot of things will pop into focus that were unclear before.
So this would predict that liberals will experience empathy for the poor, but they would not possess the capacity for personal self-sacrifice to fix the problem because of the smaller amygdala.
And so they feel really bad about the poor.
And it's well documented that conservatives give a lot more money to the poor, a lot more money to charity than liberals do.
People on the right are comfortable without government charity or government welfare because people on the right, through churches and other organizations, give a lot more to poor people or to help out people.
Whereas liberals feel worse about poverty but don't do much to actually change it themselves, which is why they like government programs.
All has a biological basis.
So, R versus K in time, as we touched on before, the amygdala focuses on dangers and benefits in the future based upon past trends and triggers, right?
Conservatives look to the past to learn about the future.
If you talk to a conservative about national debt, they'll talk about Rome, they'll talk about France during periods of hyperinflation, they'll talk about fiat currency, they'll talk about debased currency in historical past, they'll talk about constitutions and why it was there.
And...
That's an amygdala function.
The bigger the amygdala, the more it learns from and is able to predict future dangers based upon past trends.
So conservatives are simply saying, look, we've learned these lessons already.
For God's sakes, let's not keep doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Whereas the liberals are like, hey, new, hey, something shiny.
Hey, there's no past.
They're in this constant revolving and accelerating door that doesn't lead anywhere.
Now, the ACC focuses on more immediate stimuli.
Run!
Wolf!
Flea!
No vorpal bunnies in the vicinity.
And this is...
I think...
I won't do the whole story.
You can look it up.
The grasshopper and the ant, right?
The grasshopper strums his guitar and lazes around all summer while the ant is busy storing up food for the winter.
And...
Grasshopper is, you know, are selected in the story of the ant, is K-selected, is planning ahead, wants to sit around and play guitar, but has to store up stuff for the winter.
This is agriculture versus, you know, eating plentiful fruit and nuts that are all around you.
And to some degree hunting as well, although agriculture requires more planning than hunting.
And agriculture is generally adopted in colder climates, and this is why this association exists.
So conservatives, they've got all these lessons built up in the amygdala, but they're going to talk about epigenetics, that genetically this information can be transmitted across generations as well.
So they look to the past.
What should we do?
Well, let's look to the past.
Whereas, I don't know, where do liberals look?
Fantasy cloud castles of Marxist progressivism?
I don't know, but not on...
The liberals sort of deal with it, appeal to it is emotional.
Don't you want to help the poor?
Well, the conservatives say, well, yeah, but let's think about this intelligently.
Like, there was a great poster I saw many, many years ago, which was a ship sinking down into the ocean.
And I can't remember what it said at the top.
Underneath it said, it could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
And that is a very K-selective thing.
Liberals focus on more immediate pains and pleasures.
You can see this around sexuality, and we'll get into more of this in Part 3.
But liberals will offer you sexual liberation in return for mere economic and property rights.
Ah, what a stuff meme when you got sex!
And that's more immediate, and that's more ACC-driven with a diminished amygdala.
So if you look at this picture, you see down at the bottom left, there's a homeless guy, and then these giant skyscrapers, right?
So...
If you are selected, you're going to look at that and say, this guy's poor because there are all these skyscrapers and nobody's helping him out, right?
Whereas the K-selected people look at this picture, not without sympathy to the homeless guy, but say, because we allow resources to accumulate to the people who are best able to maximize or increase them, that's why we have skyscrapers.
If you gave all the money that was used to build one of those skyscrapers to the poor guy in the park, you wouldn't have any skyscrapers.
That is a very, very important thing to sort of process and understand.
Okay, let's continue our tour of the brain with the prefrontal cortex.
PFC. Private first class?
No!
Prefrontal cortex.
Very front of the brain, behind the forehead, abstract thinking and thought analysis.
I have a double D cover.
Behavior regulation.
Mediating conflicting thoughts, predicting the probable outcomes of actions or events.
Don't climb a trestle!
Social control controls your impulses and sexual urges.
This is why you don't mate with Gumby's that are jumping up and down in front of stores.
Most strongly implicated in consciousness, general intelligence, and personality.
And a significant study show between 20 and 50% of personality is genetically inherited.
So...
It controls dopamine activity and rewards within the brain.
We'll get to dopamine in a sec.
So dopamine, of course, is an incentive motivator designed to help us pursue success, the thrill of victory, you know, and you finally beat that level on the video game or that woman decides to go out with you or whatever, right?
You finally see that I've got a new video out.
That stuff.
The PFC controls dopamine activity and rewards within the brain.
And it's like crazy stimulation, right?
It grows mad, right?
I mean, the brain has increased threefold in the past five million years.
The size of the prefrontal cortex has increased sixfold.
And it's the last section of the brain to mature.
It takes about 25 years to finally finish putting those bricks in place.
The prefrontal cortex also helps to suppress the fear response of the amygdala.
Right?
So, you've had this, I'm sure, like I remember when I was a kid, standing on a brick wall.
I was pretty young, but it was about five feet up.
It was a long way down.
And I was like, ooh, I really want to jump.
I want to see if I can do it.
Ooh, but I'm scared.
Right?
So, the amygdala is like, I don't know.
But the PFC is like, but if we jump and it works.
Oh, dopamine.
Oh.
Right?
It's going to be a dopamine high, right?
So I'm going to get the joy chemical if I land, but I've got the anxiety.
I don't want to hurt myself.
So I jumped and I did well.
I did a nice tuck and roll and I got the high, right?
So the PFC and the amygdala, the amygdala is like, ooh, look out.
And the PFC is like, yeah, but if we get it, ah, you know, joy, thrillerama, right?
Now, a specific variation in the gene for the D4 dopamine receptor manages dopamine activity, right?
So dopamine can be floating around.
It needs a place to plug in.
This is DRD4-7R. Now, liberals have a deficiency of dopamine as a result of possessing a less effective receptor gene and thus less capacity to experience the dopamine incentive mechanism, right?
So the incentive mechanism...
Combined with envy, kind of designed to have you say, oh, that guy's got great biceps, so I'm going to go to the gym and get great biceps, right?
Whereas if you have a deficiency of dopamine, your envy center is still going to kick in and say, well, that guy's got great biceps, but then you're going to say, but I'm an arts major, so noodle arms aren't going to make it.
Brandon Lee is my hero.
And so you're just not going to experience the same motivation mechanism.
So you're going to see things that you want, but you're not going to have the same motivation to try and achieve them.
Less optimism and diminished reward incentives.
So when you look at poor people, if you're case-elected, you say, well, get off your ass and go get a job.
But if you are selected and you have that particular brain configuration, you're more likely to say, oh, you poor thing, here's some money.
Because they're not going to believe that incentive.
Because they don't experience that same get up and go, achieve, walk like the Kool-Aid jug through walls to get what you want, stop at nothing, pay any price, bear any burden, achieve, achieve, achieve.
Because it's so great when you do.
They're going to be like, oh, yeah, there's great stuff in the world, but...
It's raining out and we feel like getting off the couch.
Less optimism, diminished reward incentives.
Allelic variations in the gene for this dopamine receptor are also associated with tendencies towards anxiety, depression, and neuroticism.
And these things are all important in the left-right continuum.
Variations in the DRD4 gene also produce hypersexuality, earlier loss of virginity, earlier sexual experiences, promiscuity, and a tendency towards infidelity.
All are selected, just like the other mindsets we've talked about on the liberal side.
Liberals also show an increased tendency towards depression as well as an increased libido.
So...
If you are kind of depressed, then sexuality is a great way of getting you the dopamine hit and the oxytocin hit, which we'll talk about in a sec.
The lack of ability to alleviate amygdala stimulation can produce an anxiety-avoidant mindset.
So on the liberal side, it's like, ooh, I feel anxious, but rather confronting it and dealing with it, and training your brain to overcome the amygdala stimulation of anxiety or fear.
Ah, you just avoid.
Avoid that stuff.
Everything's got to come with a trigger warning.
I need hug rooms with videos of puppies playing in case I hear something that upsets me.
They're just...
Anxiety-avoidant mindsets.
You know, whereas the case-elected species are like Ben Shapiro.
Walk towards the fire.
You don't try and flee from this conflict, as I'm sure you saw in his gun debate with Piers Morgan.
So when you avoid your anxieties and your fears, that strengthens the fear response of the amygdala, because it's not encountering any opposition.
So it floods.
Amygdala hypostimulation becomes the order of the day.
And this saying, the trigger warnings, is like, well...
I can't control my own fear response, my own anxiety response, so you have to control it for me.
People who are unwilling to confront their own fears and anxieties become hyper-controlling of others because they have not taken the responsibility to say, well, in my feelings, I should really deal with them.
I should learn how to manage.
My negative emotional experience is, no, it's your fault.
You make me feel this way.
You have to change your behavior.
And it's a confession of helplessness with regards to amygdala and stimulation.
Political correctness, trigger warnings, everybody's freaking out, and intellectual hysteria, but largely against imaginary threats.
Largely against imaginary threats.
And we'll talk more about this in more detail in Part 3, but I want to sort of lay the foundation of this here.
And liberals, they view legitimate conservative anxieties as mere paranoia.
What do you mean you're afraid of Muslims?
You're an Islamophobe.
What do you want to protect the institution of marriage for?
Why do you think we should target high criminal populations?
Why should we target Middle Eastern people in the security lineup?
Why should we care about national debt?
I mean, we've got to take care of people in the here.
They just, it's like, they don't...
They don't understand, because they don't have the amygdala to understand why conservatives are anxious about things.
Why are they bothered?
They're just paranoid.
Conservatives are also more prone to feelings of disgust, which we're going to talk more about in Part 3, but again, I wanted to mention it here.
So, when you're in a competitive environment, Oh yes, we're going to get to Churchill and Neville Chamberlain in a bit.
It's so funny, like I've assumed research for this, and I typed in Chamberlain's childhood, and I'm so Brit-centric that I ended up learning quite a lot about Wilt Chamberlain.
What a man-whore.
Anyway, a competitive environment boosts testosterone.
When you win a difficult competition, you get dopamine and you get long-lasting surges in testosterone, right?
So going into challenging, difficult competitions, you get joy juice and testosterone.
Now, as competitive environments diminish, so does testosterone.
And we're really looking at sort of Post-1960s welfare state for the poor and hyper-regulation and licensing and protective tariffs and all that for the rich and the powerful.
Competitive environments have significantly diminished, and so does testosterone.
When competitive environments diminish, people become competition-averse.
And so when you say free market, people think of dog-eat-dog cannibalism.
They're just averse to the whole thing.
Right, so this includes the rich and the poor.
The middle class generally gets screwed both sides.
It's, you know, tragically economic DP from every angle.
The rich use the power of the state to exclude themselves from competition.
The poor use the power of the state to provide resources for themselves without the need to compete.
And this adaptation to a non-competitive environment strives to survive.
So when you adapt to a non-competitive environment, you activate a whole bunch of gene sets, you activate a whole bunch of LLs, which we talked about in the end of Part 1, that are dependent on the continued existence of that non-competitive environment, which is why when you talk about privatizing stuff, or you talk about charity as opposed to government welfare, when you talk about privatizing schools...
People freak out because the genetic, the gene set within them, the R-selected gene set within them that relies upon a non-competitive environment fears genetic death from that and bites like a cornered rat.
I'm not going to go with rabbit that time.
In general, within the mind, excesses lead to desensitization.
So...
Higher dopamine receptor functioning is associated with a desire to win by following rules.
So, if you win by cheating and you're K-selected, you don't feel good.
You feel pretty good if you are selected, but if you're K-selected, you only get the dopamine hit if you win by following the rules.
If you cheat, it doesn't work.
Lower dopamine functioning is associated with a willingness to cheat, which results from a feeling of impotence.
And this is earlier when I was in boarding school in England.
You're taught, you know, it's not whether you win or lose.
It's how you play the game.
That's what matters.
And that's very K-selected.
I've basically been pendling back and forth between R and K my whole life.
Probably one of the reasons why I find this so fascinating.
So, oxytocin, colloquially called the love hormone, produces higher trust and generosity, and it's triggered by dopamine signaling.
This is why you get good sportsmanship that occurs, right?
So, you ferociously want to beat the other person, right?
I remember playing in tennis tournaments, and I just want to win, win, win, and then you shake the person's hand over the net, and that was something reinforced when I was young quite a lot.
So those who avoid competition also have less capacity to bond.
This is one of these counterintuitive things.
People who compete together, or compete against each other, bond well.
And competition within a social group promotes bonding.
Competition promotes dopamine, promotes testosterone, and dopamine signalings produce oxytocin, which is a bonding chemical.
A love hormone promotes social trust, promotes all of these good things.
So when you reduce...
Our capacity to compete with each other, you reduce...
In-group preferences, tribal functioning, love, connection, community, which is one of the reasons why, I mean, when you have no welfare state, you have to rely on each other.
You join what used to be called friendly societies.
You get to know your neighbors and they help you out.
Like when I got sick with cancer a couple of years ago, people chipped in to pay for my treatment.
I had to flee the socialist hellhole of Canada and go to America to get, well, I guess this scar put in and get the tumor taken out and so on because I was a year misdiagnosed up here in Canada.
So, you provide value to people, they provide value back, you've got a social safety net called, I know people, I help them, they also help me over time.
And so when you get the welfare state, the necessity of that diminishes, but also the welfare state, by diminishing competition among people, diminishes oxytocin and our feeling of, I was going to say bondage, of bonding towards each other.
So genetics and hormonal activity produce Lower monogamy, lower in-group preferences and lower parental investment, right?
Because all of these reductions in oxytocin Reduces monogamy because you are looking for new sensations, new excitement, new sexual partners, lower in group preferences, lower parental investment.
Oxytocin is well known as a bonding chemical between parents and children.
And therefore, because we stick around each other so much when we're raising kids, if you're not that invested in your kids, you're not that bonded with your kids, it's much easier to abuse and or neglect them.
Now, so, if you want an extreme end of this, right, the drug addicts, I had Gabor Maté on the show twice, I think, now, And he talks about this dopamine drive to get this stuff from drug addicts.
And drug addicts, they're willing to break the rules, they're willing to lie, to cheat, to steal, they'll take money from their mother's purse, whatever, right?
That's a very extreme end.
We see this desensitization of dopamine functioning.
People just got to get that hit.
Otherwise, life remains an increasing agony.
And all of this is a way of adjusting for R&K strategies on the fly.
Not waiting for intergenerational stuff to happen, but adjusting to it based upon social cues on the fly.
This is very important for humans who may win or lose.
It's significant competitions, competitions for mates, competitions for resources, and competitions for power also.
So let's look at depression and R. Those identified as ideological liberals tend to be more on the depressed side of the spectrum.
There's a theory.
A lot of this, of course, is theory.
But there's a theory which says that depression helps you avoid competition that could be negative for you.
So the way it works is this.
And we'll put this in a cycle at the end.
So kids, why do they play?
Why do they want to do sports?
Why don't they compete with each other all the time?
Well, to find out how good you are at stuff so that you can figure out whether you do or don't want to compete as an adult.
So if you are, you know, Les Nesman who fails at sports all the time, some Woody Allen type, who fails at sports all the time, then you're in the pecking order, right?
And so basically sports is a prerequisite for war or it's a stand-in for war or it's a training ground for war.
And so if you lose all the time at sports, you're really not going to be very good at war.
So it teaches you to avoid competition because you are not up to scratch.
And again, for whatever reason, it doesn't particularly matter at the moment.
Lots of courses, and you can go to bombinthebrain.com for more on this.
So, if you can't compete in sports, it tends to promote depression and competition avoidance, which is really important for you to not get killed in a sword fight.
If you can't dribble a basketball when you're 6, you can't win a sword battle when you're 20.
So, competition avoidance reduces negative adult consequences, right?
If you're the runt of the litter, you don't want to be taking on the alpha male of the pack, because you're going to lose, and that's really bad.
Now, one of the alleles of the DRD4 dopamine receptor gene increases tendencies towards depression.
And that's another really, really important thing to understand.
If you don't do well in competitions as a child, and not only do you not do well, because this always happens, I mean, everybody starts off doing badly.
It's whether you feel that you can do well, whether you feel you can compete if you work hard enough.
Every time, I mean...
The amount of hours of practice it took for me to become good at racket sports.
I'm teaching my daughter this at the moment, remembering, you need some patience.
It takes forever to get good at racket sports.
And a lot of frustration.
I remember throwing my racket in frustration because it's just, I know where I want it to go, I just can't make it reliably get there.
And so we all start off badly, but do you have the dopamine hit to get you motivated to keep moving forward?
I don't want to sound like we're just programmed.
By our dopamine, by our ACC, by the PFC, by the amygdala, by the hippocampus as well.
I don't want to say we're just machines programmed because there's choices involved in it.
Do we battle through?
Do we push through to get the dopamine reward, which then leads to the testosterone, leads to the oxytocin, which further motivates us, right?
I really think that...
Just about everyone would try if they knew how great it was to really achieve something and win at something.
It feels so good that it's worth the sacrifice that goes on.
So...
If you are conflict avoidant, right?
If you lose, and then for whatever reason, whether it's genetics, whether it's epigenetics, whether it's environment, whether it's feedback from coaches, whether it's choice, a big combination of all these things, you try at something and you just fail.
Fail bad, fail hard, right?
I mean, when I was, you know, you fall off that horse, you get right back on and you ride that horse again.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.
That's what was hammered into me when I was a kid.
And it's good advice.
And it's case-elected advice.
And it's designed to keep you out of promiscuity.
It's designed to keep you with an in-group preference, loyalty to your...
Your peers, it's designed to keep you out of teen pregnancy.
It's designed to keep you from being crippled by a lack of dopamine efficiency to the point where you have to go through novelty-seeking crazy stuff that's dangerous like trestle bridges and so on.
So it really is designed to help you all of this keep trying, keep trying, keep trying so that you get The value of competition, the necessity of competition.
If you avoid all of that stuff, you will grow up to be competition-averse, hostile towards the free market, wanting the quality of outcome, prone to depression, hypersexuality, all of that stuff, lack of investment in kids, all of that stuff that goes along with it, and a desire to set up rules only to give you advantage by breaking them, also known as statism.
We're going to finish this part off with epigenetics.
So epigenetics is a system that turns genes on or off, based upon environmental cues.
The process works by chemical tags, known as epigenetic marks.
And they attach the DNA, and they tell a cell whether to use or ignore a particular gene.
So they can't change the DNA itself, but they can say, listen or don't listen to a particular sequence.
So environment and experiences can program genes, and some of these genes can replicate to the next generation.
So when you throw in something like the welfare state, you're not just changing individual experiences, you're changing the genetic pathways of entire groups of individuals.
You are creating a well-fed Petri dish for the flourishing of the R-selected gene set.
Everything from smaller amygdalas to higher levels of promiscuity, higher sexual hormones, lower dopamine receptors, all of these are a gene set.
That in the welfare state and in protectionism for rich corporations, you end up creating an environment that feeds that gene set.
And that gene set, to colloquially anthropomorphize it, if you don't mind, anthropomorphize it, that gene set wishes to continue that environment, right?
An excess of resources produces our selections.
And welfare and protection of competition, that is, preferential legislation for corporations, creates an excess of resources.
Fiat currency, money printing, money borrowing, all create an excess of resources that feed the R-selected gene set.
The R-selected gene set will fight like hell!
Will fight to the death!
Literally, genetically, fight to the death to prevent The limitation of resources desired by the K-selected conservatives who say, turn off the money printing, bring back a gold standard, stop borrowing, stop spending more than you have.
Because, of course, the K-selected people see where that heads.
They get their anxiety, their amygdala is like, danger, danger, danger, danger, stop, stop, stop, stop.
You know, whereas the liberal mindset, the R-selected mindset is, hey, this is great.
Limitations, what limitations?
They don't have...
The brain structure to process where this is going to lead.
And so they pretend to be bewildered.
Maybe they are bewildered.
I don't know.
You can get it intellectually, but emotionally is another matter.
So epigenetics is one of the ways in which this occurs, right?
So epigenetically, if there's no father around, that programs you for an R-selected environment.
because that means that your dad is either dead, which means you're in a situation of extreme predation, or he's just screwing around and moving on, right?
He's just a spray and pray kind of seed bearer.
And so he's just moving on.
And so it's programming you for an R environment.
And then that R environment wants to keep fathers away from the next generation.
The R gene set wants to keep fathers away from the next generation, which is why you end up with this big mess.
So this is from an article against sources below.
Many view epigenetics as an annotation or editing of the genome that defines which genes will be silenced in order to streamline protein production or squelch unnecessary redundancy.
That annotation, they say, does not and cannot permanently change the original manuscript, i.e.
the DNA, but merely access to the manuscript.
So listen to this gene, don't listen to this gene.
It doesn't change the DNA itself.
How has this been shown?
A fascinating 2008 study, this is a quote, that looked at people born during the Dutch Hunger Winter, this is a time of terrible privation in the Second World War, 1944-1945, hints at the possibility that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance also occurs in humans.
Adults who were conceived during the famine had distinct epigenetic marks that their siblings born before or after the famine did not.
These marks reduced the production of insulin-like growth factor II and affected the growth of the famine-gestated children.
Notably, these marks were retained for several decades in the afflicted individuals.
While these observations suggest the possibility of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, the modifications could also have occurred in utero as a result of famine conditions, rather than being inherited in the germline.
Therefore, whether such a distinct phenomenon occurs in humans remains to be definitively determined.
Right?
So, moms didn't have enough food and...
As the fetuses were developing, they came out with particular epigenetic markers that lasted, I think, up into their sixth decade.
Here's another example.
Quote, However, in model experimental systems, there is strong evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
In one study carried out in mice, an environmental stress that resulted in aggressive behavior in males caused the same behavior in their offspring.
Notably, the offspring had changes in the DNA methylation patterns of particular genes.
Collectively, these and other transgenerational studies all point to the notion that selective pressure can be applied from the environment and passed on to daughter cells and offspring.
There's another example, like mice...
They heard a sound and shocks were applied to the mice.
And then Pavlovian style, after a while, whenever they'd hear the sound, they'd have a startled response, even if no further shocks were.
So the sound did not startle them originally.
They got shocks.
Eventually, even after the shocks were withdrawn, they still had a startled response to the sound.
When they had children, when the children were born, the children themselves had the startled response to the sound.
Though they had never been shocked.
So here we have an experience of alarm being passed along to the offspring.
This makes sense.
It's incredibly efficient.
It doesn't have to wait for generations to get weeded and needed.
So if you're a bunch of rabbits and some new predator comes along, You want the fear of that predator to go to all of your offspring.
You don't want to wait until the offspring will go up and say, Hi, new friend, and get eaten.
All of that stuff is very slow and inefficient and could get you killed.
Evolve before we all get eaten.
Quick!
Concentrate!
Focus!
Evolve!
Wait, that's philosophy.
But if you can pass along your anxieties to your offspring, they're going to have a much better chance of survival.
But this is when I say, you hit a child, it echoes through the generations.
You abuse or neglect a child, you are changing their offspring genetically.
Another article quote, For the first time, genes chemically silenced by stress during life have been shown to remain silenced in eggs and sperm, allowing the effect to be passed down to the next generation.
The finding obtained from detailed DNA scans in developing mouse eggs and sperm backs up mounting indirect evidence from statistical studies that the genetic impacts of environmental factors such as smoking, diet, stress childhoods, famine, and psychiatric disease can be passed down to future generations through a process called epigenetic inheritance.
Many geneticists had considered this an impossibility.
And this is what I'm talking about.
When you create an environment, a socialist environment, an environment where the government takes from the successful and gives to the unsuccessful, you are altering the DNA, accessibility of the population.
You are changing.
Put it as colloquially as possible.
You're changing the genetics.
You're reprogramming the genetics.
And you're reprogramming the genetics, not just of the people who first experienced the welfare state.
You're changing the genes they pass along to their children.
They are adapting to the welfare state.
They're adapting to socialism.
They're adapting to communism.
They're adapting to a situation of excess.
We can see this going on in Greece at the moment, in Puerto Rico at the moment, where you've had this ridiculous borrowing, this ridiculous excess, People have genetically adapted to that.
They've ceased to be able to distinguish threat from non-threat.
They have promiscuity.
50, 60, 70% of certain populations addicted to welfare grow up in fatherless homes.
This is our selected stuff.
You create welfare.
You create promiscuity.
You create a lack of sense of consequences.
You create a weaker moral sense.
You break down the oxytocin that results from competition that binds communities together.
You fragment the entire human experience.
You de-civilize.
You devolve the entire species.
It is genetic warfare.
To fundamentally change the social equations, to reduce competition, to eliminate people from the capacity to fail and to crash out and to burn.
You destroy civilization, not just in terms of the intellect or in terms of people's individual choices, but you reprogram the entire organism.
You reprogram the entire organism to only survive, which is in that environment, which is why when you talk about limiting resources, people feel like it's going to kill them.
It's not.
But to their gene set, it is.
Our selected gene set needs the welfare state.
It needs fiat currency.
It needs all of the excesses of socialism.
It needs to keep competition at bay.
It needs trigger warnings.
It needs safe rooms.
It needs to not be exposed to aversive stimuli, because otherwise it dies.
It's weeded out, it's pushed aside by the case-elected gene set that embraces competition, accepts failure, is able to organize society through ostracism rather than through endless regulations and laws.
It's win-lose for these gene sets.
This is why I'm saying politics is gene warfare.
So let's tie a little bit of this together.
The theory about conservatism.
And I know I've been somewhat negative towards the R-selected gene set.
I don't mean to be.
We'll talk about that more later.
So, childhood success.
You strive and you achieve, you get the dopamine hit.
This leads you to a pursuit of competition.
If you play by the rules, you only get the dopamine hit if you compete while playing by the rules, if you don't cheat.
Pursuit of competition leads to an acceptance of inequality.
I've won and you've lost.
That's the only way I'm going to get the dopamine hit.
And if I lose and you win, you get the dopamine hit and I don't.
An acceptance of inequality leads to the value called the free market.
Let some people win, let some people lose.
Those who win should get the resources so that they can create further resources and so on.
A free market creates the win-lose, which develops the oxytocin bonding.
Remember, you get dopamine, you get increased testosterone, which releases oxytocin, which binds families and communities together.
Strong families with monogamous, pair-bonded parents who stay together leads to childhood success, because single moms are terrible at raising kids, and single dads are terrible at raising kids.
And so childhood success, embrace competition, accept inequality, love the free market, create strong families, leads to more childhood success.
This is one way of approaching it.
There's some evidence of this.
Men who have greater upper body strength are more likely to take a conservative stance.
Weak men support the welfare state.
It's a little bit more complicated than that, and you can look at the details in the studies below.
But there is a link between a man's upper body strength and his political views.
There's no link between a woman's physical strength and her political views.
Genetic factors, I just wanted to mention this, a 2005 twin study examined attitudes about 28 different political issues, capitalism, unions, X-rated movies, abortion, school prayer, divorce, property, taxes, is in so under draft.
Twins were asked if they agreed or disagreed or were uncertain about each issue.
Genetic factors accounted for 53% of the variance in overall score.
So again, politics and genetics are very closely linked.
A study of political attitudes among Hollywood actors found that while the actors were generally leftist, male actors with great physical strength were more likely to support the Republican stance on foreign issues and foreign military.
It's the Woody Allen versus the Arnold Schwarzenegger, left versus right continuum.
Let's look at the liberal theory.
Childhood failure.
And failure doesn't mean you tried something and you failed, but you gave up trying something else.
Childhood failure leads to competition avoidance.
Competition avoidance has you thirst for inequality of outcome.
In other words, you want the benefits of competition without the stress and anxiety of competition, so you want to get better.
You want the equality of outcome, which requires a big state, requires socialist redistribution or communist or fascistic redistribution of resources.
That leads to weak families.
For reasons we've talked about, it weakens the necessity for social bonds, but a lack of competition also reduces the production of oxytocin, which bonds people together.
Weak families lead to childhood failure, which is why the kids are single moms do so disastrously.
And so this cycle just goes round and round and round until society collapses in an economic hellstorm that reestablishes the value of the case selection.
Again, remember, there's no certainty of cause and effect, but these associations are very strong.
Do you want an all-K society?
I don't think so, because you want the randomness and the creativity and the skepticism and the weaseliness to some degree.
The questioning of established rules that comes from the R. I think an all-K society ends up very, very stagnant.
And so again, I think a combination.
I think you want a lot of Ks, but I don't think you want all Ks.
It tends to be too stagnant a society.
So...
It is scientifically absolutely, completely, and totally impossible for an organism not to devolve once natural selection effects are removed.
I'm not talking about, I don't know, whether they say dysgenics or do nasty things to control people's breeding.
I'm not talking about anything to do with that.
What I'm saying is that right now we have a A system where the least successful breed the most.
And the most successful breed the least.
So we already have genetic programs in place.
The welfare state is a genetic program.
Without a doubt.
And it's just going the wrong way.
If you let competition accrue, then those with the most resources who've been the most successful will breed the most, and those with the fewest resources will breed the least.
The effects on R&K, when children go from an asset, sorry, from a liability, in other words, they cost money, to an asset where the government gives you money to breed, is staggering and absolutely astonishing when you think about it.
This fundamental thing where Children are not a cost that the expertise and competence and resource provision of the parents pays for, but they are a resource which other people who haven't bred fundamentally pay for.
I mean, it's just astonishing the degree to which this affects things in a fundamental way.
And the R-selected gene set...
It's not trying to create utopia.
It's not trying to create communism where all competition is eliminated and all the outcomes are the same.
Our selected psychology and gene set is not trying to create utopia.
It'll say all of that stuff.
It's not trying to create a utopia.
But what it does, it's designed to simply increase the population until the resources run out.
You increase the population until the resources run out.
And just breed, breed, breed, breed, grow, grow, grow, grow until the resources run out.
And that's foundational to what R does.
If you care about the environment, if you care about the future, you have to understand the world from this perspective that when we see political debates occurring, we're seeing...
Opposing genetic organisms, the R-selected gene set and the K-selected gene set, you are seeing opposing organisms fighting each other to the death.
Each of them trying to create environments wherein their own gene set will flourish.
This is how far.
We're still a long way from philosophy.
They'll use philosophy.
Oh, sympathy for the poor.
Oh, the rule of law.
Oh, you know, whatever.
They'll use philosophy or ideals and so on, but it's all nonsense.
Because what's fundamentally occurring is the genes are struggling to dominate each other.
The R-selected trying to drive out the K-selected.
The K-selected attempting to drive out the R-selected.
Each using ethics and virtue and compassion and all this kind of crap.
But it's not what's actually occurring.
What's actually occurring, as we've been talking about in this entire series, is genetic warfare.
The gene sets are striving to dominate each other.
Now, on the plus side, they're not trying to do it through violence.
When you have dysgenic processes going on in place and you have a massive overbreeding of our selected people, what generally happens is there's a big war!
And you send them off, they all die.
And that's really quite tragic, and that's not what we want.
The more sophisticated a society gets, the more K-selected you need, which is why they say, send your kids to college, that's K-selected.
But we'll pay to send your kids to college.
That's our selected because you're supposed to have the resources yourself to invest in your kids.
So if women's offsprings are more successful when they get a lot of resources, but those resources have to be earned through competition, they'll choose high-value, high-quality mates, which means men have more value in accumulating resources and working on their high quality, their ability to compete, their willingness to take on risks and to win.
When the state comes in and fires resources at women, it lowers the quality of their parenting, it diminishes their...
Desire for quality mates.
It diminishes pair bonding, which is why divorce keeps going up, and it creates the perfect storm for our selected breed fest, which brings about the end of civilization, unless we understand these things and intervene significantly ahead of time.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedomain Radio.
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