HowTheRightThinks

Quora Answer : In how many ways is the far right's concept of r/K selection theory inaccurate?

Mar 21, 2018

There's nothing wrong with the basic idea of r/K strategies. You either have a lot of cheap disposable kids, or a few expensive ones you really want to invest in and protect.

Clearly, biologically humans are a K species.

Everything else the right-wing want to say is just a metaphor. Which is vaguely interesting, has a couple of potentially plausible parallels, and a few gaping holes.

Some things that seem pretty wrong about the video :

• ants and other social insects are clearly r strategists. (A queen has hundreds or thousands of cheap offspring. Deadbeat males don't hang around to help, they just die. Individual ants and termites are pretty cheap and disposable.) Yet they build highly complex societies and have high (biologically defined) group "loyalty". So it's hard to see why the video thinks K implies more social complexity and loyalty than r.
• the video admits that liberals don't actually produce more children than conservatives. And often invest more in the few children they have. But then tries to fudge this obvious counter-evidence to its theory by asserting that leftists "import" immigrants and refugees with higher birthrates from elsewhere. That may be true, but the video offers no evidence that the immigrants themselves are leftists. The fact that leftists are welcoming of them doesn't make them leftist. The Muslim immigrants that the right get their knickers twisted over are often NOT "liberals" at all.

Plus why is "importing unrelated others" a valid substitute for having your own offspring within the r/K metaphor? And if it is, why isn't "demanding government welfare" equally valid as a substitute for K-strategy parental care within the metaphor?

Another argument that the video tries to make for why these imports are r-strategizing liberals is that they come for government welfare. Given the demonstrable willingness of immigrants to work, often "illegally" without government documentation, the idea that these immigrants are more attracted by Western government handouts than they are by the opportunities that the private Western markets afford, or even the simple peace and stability of the West compared to their homelands, is wholly un-demonstrated. And with it, any claim that these immigrants are either leftist or r-strategists.

The video asserts that leftists are more sexually promiscuous than rightists. Which, if it weren't for that darned contraception, would make them fit that r-strategy pattern. Er ... but why should we suddenly factor out contraception in this particular case? We have contraception, and leftists use it more than rightists, which is why they have fewer children. (See red vs. blue state teen pregnancy statistics for example.) Given that the video already says that biologically humans are K-strategists, and that the r/K distinction between liberals and conservatives is cultural, then there's no reason to ignore the cultural superpower of putting on a condom.

Another argument that the video gives for why leftists are "really" pursuing a high birthrate strategy (despite not doing so in practice) is the argument that they "sexualize" people younger by things like "sex education". But sex education is negatively correlated with teen pregnancy, for very intelligible reasons. Meanwhile, highly Conservative parts of the US are more likely to support Child marriage. (Tennessee recently refused to prohibit it.) It's very hard to sustain the claim that liberal attitudes to young persons' sexuality is focused on increasing reproduction rate, even in theory. And it empirically doesn't in practice. All you're left with is an empirically false conservative assumption that making young people learn and think about sex must be increasing their fecundity. But it isn't.

Actually you could construct an equally spurious "just-so" story the other way around. That liberal support for homosexuality, gay marriage and transexual rights is aimed at reducing reproduction rates by encouraging more sexuality that can't lead to children. I'm not sure this would be a particularly strong or plausible argument but it's certainly no worse than the video's argument for liberalism somehow promoting higher birth-rates.

The video lists a bunch of European leaders who are childless, claiming that they have no stake in the future. Interestingly it neglects to add the UK prime-minister Theresa May to the list. I wonder whether that's because she is a Conservative, and so breaks the alleged pattern of it being "liberals" who are these enemies of the reproductive nuclear family. Or maybe this guy genuinely doesn't know or forgot her.

It is kind of hilarious, though, to rattle off a long list of childless political leaders as evidence of their hostility to the family and lack of stake in the future, as a reason why they are ultimately ... yes ... indeed ... r-strategists promoting high-reproduction rates and lots of cheap and disposable children. Frankly, it's hard to know how to argue with someone who holds up your childlessness as evidence of your closet will to ultra-population.

Another fun bit of twisty logic is to argue that the Conservative's larger amygdala leads to more awareness of threats, which is why he's sensitive to the danger of economically destructive government welfare programs. Liberals, apparently, prefer security to freedom. Again, it's liberal recklessness (due to that small amygdala and lack of awareness of danger) that leads them to want less risk in their lives. Er ... right. I'm sure you can try to defend this somehow, but you have to admit that, as reasoning goes, it's gnarly.

There are plenty of other things he says that are part of the usual Conservative case against Liberals. A lot of them are wrong or misleading. Some have a grain of truth - yes, leftists, by definition, ARE trying to swap out the traditional values of your society and fit new ones - quelle surprise! But they don't really hinge on understanding the r/K model of reproduction so I won't bother with them here.

In fact, the main thing that stands out from the video is how little work the analogy with r/K actually does for the conservative argument. Yes, it makes it sound all sciencey, and that perhaps impresses naive viewers, but the fact that liberals have lowish birth-rates and their ideology is full of things that tend towards pushing population size down : from contraception to sex-education to abortion to homosexuality etc. makes trouble-free use of the analogy impossible. And from then on, most of the work of the video is not saying "look how these obviously r/K differences shape liberal attitudes". Most of the video ends up saying "look, liberals are like this, so here's some convoluted logic to explain why this is how an r-strategy presents itself in practice".

Seriously?

The analogy is doing no work for you. It's just a waste of your time and energy. Give it up!

In fact, it's worse than useless, some of it actually hurts the conservative case :

r-strategists are less competitive because they see the world as full of abundance, whereas K-strategists are more competitive because they see a world of scarcity. That distinction between liberals and conservatives is usually run by liberals as an argument for liberalism. It's hard to see an obsession with scarcity as a selling point. But then again this is not actually true of r-strategists in in nature anyway. Think about those ants again ... viciously competitive with the out-group. And basically even rabbits are a lot more competitive with each other than the video's kindergarten idea of fluffy bunnies assumes.

Finally, of course, there's that lip-smacking apocalyptic vision at the end. What if civilization collapses and we're all forced back to the forests and the fight for survival, where alpha K-strategic men will be alpha K-strategic men, beta r-strategist men will be clubbed over the head, and women will give up their power-dressing and pant-suits and take up their rightful role looking after the children in the kitchen!

What then, eh?

I see at least five problems here :

1) If you have to destroy civilization and knock us back into the stone age for your preferred political system to become a contender against the enervating effects of our decadently productive civilization, then that really doesn't smack of much confidence in its strength and stability as a political system. What happens if someone goes and invents agriculture again? Do you have to have a rolling programme of "Year Zeros" and potlatch all the surplus grain to ensure enough scarcity for K-strategy to stay on top?

2) Nor, honestly, does it sound much fun. Even as an alpha male with a harem of hot cave-women, I'm going to miss my sports-car and indoor plumbing. And antibiotics. And dentists.

3) Even if we do collapse back into forests there's no guarantee we aren't going to end up like our cousins, the bonobos, who also manage to be K-strategists in a place where nature is red in tooth and claw. But in a matriarchal society, with a woman still in charge.

4) On the subject of misogynist fantasists. Remember those Muslims you complained were "incompatible with our values"? It's pretty widely observed and recognised that places where "alpha" men end up with all the women, and "beta" men end up as eunuchs, are places where there's not a lot of water and big men end up controlling the oases (and therefore the few farms that can scrape out some food in those arid lands). You know the mentality that flourishes in places like that, right? The male entitlement, the scarcity of resources, the heightened competitivity, the cheapness of life, the women as property bought at a young age? All that stuff that's incompatible with "our way of life"? If you want to destroy modernity to make way for a world of scarcity that favours traditional male roles, you may find you have more in common with Osama Bin Laden and his gang than you would like to admit.

5) Finally, of course, the ultimate irony ... if things really do turn out to be the caveman fantasy of your dreams ... then those successful alpha males will immediately start trying to have more children with more women, spreading their resource grabbing capacity more thinly between them. Humanity will up its offspring count because more of the kids are going to die in the jungle. And the men will be trying to up their relative offspring count (out of increased competition with each other) and they'll become ... r-strategists. Or at least a hell of a lot more r-strategisty than we are at the moment. In which case, what's your beef with being an r-strategy species?

Quora Answer : Why does it seem like there's so much hate towards the left wing on YouTube while so many more sources says the left hate the right wing more? Why can't we just get along without hating each other?

Mar 15, 2018

Right wing politics is grounded in two apparently contradictory, but in fact compatible, impulses.

The first is "individualism". The second is "tribalism".

Both are opposed to the impulse underlying left wing politics which is towards "egalitarianism".

Why do the right accuse the left of "hate"?

Because, being tribalists, that's how they read left wing projects. As nothing but a similar tribalism with a reversed polarity.

Projects to uplift women or gays or ethnic minorities are seen as inherently anti-men, anti-straight, anti-white. The right see the left not simply as enablers of the other tribe but as traitors to their own and to the order their own tribe has built.

Now, why is this particularly obvious on YouTube?

Marshall McLuhan had a lot to say about this, despite having died before YouTube was invented. He saw that different media encouraged different modes of thinking. YouTube, like television, is a media of immediacy (images are very immediate), intimacy (close-ups of facial expressions, make it easy to express emotions. And for the viewer to relate to them.) It also supports the cinematic tricks of cutting images to tell stories (perhaps false stories through clever editing), and adding sympathetic music.

Politics on the internet 15 years ago used to be a lot more staid and reasonable because arguments were conducted almost entirely in text. I used to argue with right-wing "war-bloggers" on fairly "friendly" terms.

YouTube, though, is different. The right-wing tendency to accuse the left of treachery and hate (ie. working for the enemy tribe) coupled with a medium which is all about visceral emotion, makes for very little productive / rational dialogue. But successful political YouTubers can pull in hundreds of thousands of fans (and to an extent, therefore revenue, despite Google trying to disincentivate this). So now, the political YouTuber who manages to capture and articulate and express the most extreme emotions on behalf of his / her audience can become a star. It's a medium for demagogues.