Rightwing personality traits

[LaRocha]

Anyway, I think I've just confused the monogamy issue, read that article on Slimy Monogamy I linked to if you didn't, monogamy is an adaptation to circumstances where your offspring need a little more help.

Insofar as monogamy is the most commonplace strategy, it basically reflects the fact that children have a more difficult time thriving and maximizing their own breeding potential without significant parental involvement - without it, you're Veal.

That's what started the conversation, I did read that article.

I'm saying, monogamy doesn't sensibly fit into the h/g, agrarian societies, it's just there. The nine month gestation and years of direct parental supervision for the big brained child occurred long before sapiens-sapiens and erectus. Monogamy would've had to come into its own long before Homo, based on the physical necessity of the bigger brained biped coming out of the womb way too early. Based on the opinion of that article, which is a fairly popular opinion in human evolutionary theory.

We know that the father-son bond doesn't enter myth until well after agrarian societies are formed. The group is the father, initiates the son into adulthood well into the first agrarian settlements. The myth of father-son bond is what deceives us into believing monogamy existed to raise a child. We can't possibly comprehend the true egalitarian nature of these societies because we were brought up by one or two adults that had sole responsibility for us.

Monogamy exists before, during, and after the transition from group egalitarian sharing of parental duties to the family unit that emerges in post-industrial nations after the Second World War.

 

[xssve]

That Austrian geezer might say the subversive self isn't really trying to free you, but actively trying to annihilate you, as that aspect of you has no place in society, as society was formed to protect you from not only outward threats but also from that insistent inward will to destruction. The roles assigned may be harsh, stagnant, unchanging, but they keep the society functionally reproductive. We just assign value judgments such as "It's better to own things and control things" as opposed to "It's better to own nothing and control nothing" and go about trying to alter what the rolls assigned look like.

If an end result of capitalism is the cessation of functioning societies we'll get our Malthusian/Spencerian selection, return to feudal slave societies and just start over. Feudalism wasn't necessarily better or worse for the reproductive success of our species, we only assume capitalism is better because it allows for a significant increase in the population of our species. Who's to say that's even a good thing? What if the slave society would have kept the species alive longer? It's biologically irrelevant how an individual feels in their day to day life, the only thing of relevance is the continuation of specific genetic sequences.

That sucks, because 'I' apperceive conscious thought in myself and in others. I have a vested interest in the immediate well-being of myself and those I've been trained to take into consideration, not my species, I can't calculate the impact my actions have on my species. I make decisions based on immediacy and can't possibly make decisions with my society in mind. Some people are placed in positions to make guesses about policy with the society in mind, I'm not.

The flaw in this logic discounts the whole trend of human evolution to begin with: we aren't generalists and K strategists for no reason, the the one is synergistic with the other - your static society, the feudal state, is only stable as along as conditions don't change, but they do.

Species don't go extinct because they sudden;y decide to stop breeding, the go extinct for one reason only, they become overspecialized - so well adapted to a particular niche, that they cannot adapt to to new conditions should that niche suddenly change.

For the dinosaurs, they couldn't adapt to conditions that prevailed after the earth was struck by a sizable meteor, and they weren't generalists enough to prevent of predict that meteor would strike - we're way more adaptable than the Dinosaurs, we can, theoretically, not only predict that a meteor will strike, but, again, theoretically, do something about it.

If anything, Feudalism is practically pure Malthusian economics - read R.W. Southern's, The Making of the Middle Ages - his thesis is that Europe suffered through cyclic starvation where at the peak of any given cycle, as much as a Third of the population died out.

Put that together with the known effects of malnutrition on cerebral development, psychopathy and other anti-social personality disorders, and you pretty much have the social side of it: farmer A seeking to maximize profit, overplants his acreage to feed the growing urban population, demand - Farmer B rotates his crops, allows a portion of his acreage to remain fallow - he's an idiot to start with, because while farmer A prospers, this lazy ass is barely making ends meet - until - Farmer A eventually depletes his soil, whereupon his crops fail and his cow goes dry, while Farmer B is apparently suffering no commensurate ill effect - must be witchcraft, so Farmer A denounces Farmer B as a witch, who has cursed his farm, splits Farmer B's property with the Crown, and proceeds to deplete the soil in his new acreage - meanwhile the resulting starvation and malnutrition, the result of soil depletion but attributed to witchcraft, creates a whole new generation of the mentally ill who are susceptible to magical thinking and superstition, and instead of using a little value added technology - crop rotation may be low tech, but it's tech - instead you get witch hunts of increasing magnitude.

In short, it's very poor use of human capital, which, given that a feudal state is predicated on the fact that all the primitive capital is accounted for and apportioned, is all that remains.

In a purely capitalist culture, Farmer A would go bankrupt and have to sell his farm at a discount to Farmer B, who would make up for the portion of his fields that were lying fallow with the new acreage, and would thereby become as prosperous as Farmer A was before he depleted his soil, in spite of his being so "lazy".

The market would respond, other farmers would follow Farmer B's example, and gradually, the damage from malnutrition would subside, and there would be no need for witch hunts.

Instead, of course, the conservative crown benefited from the sale of seized lands to fund the troops needed to maintain this "functionally productive" society, and actively punish any advance that appeared to threaten the status quo.

Which is why, in a Thousand years of Catholic hegemony and aristocratic dynasty, orthodox European culture came up with exactly Two innovations, linear perspective and the evenly tempered scale, both the products of a barely tolerated minority counterculture - artists and musicians. These were not the products of "society", they were the product of people who fucked other people wives and got into drunken brawls. At best they got patronage from that particular "system", but it's purely incidental, accident, rather than design.

The rest of it was stolen outright from pagans and witches, and even then was only able to be openly alluded to after the Catholic hegemony was in decline - modern medicine for example, again, not "society", "society" basically had to have it crammed down their throats, kicking and screaming the whole way.

Malthus wasn't just guessing and creating abstract models, he was describing very real, tangible, well established system of medieval economics. In practically every sense of the word, this society was "functional" purely in spite of itself.

We have presumably evolved past the Malthusian model as a culture, but ironically, as much as conservative like to make that claim they simultaneously oppose the very processes of technological advance that are the means of deferring it, and pretty much guaranteeing that feudal Malthusian economics will once again rear it's ugly head as a result.

i.e., they oppose applying value added economics to every industry in question: they favor chemical saturation technology to biointensive agriculture, centralized energy production to micropower and the distributed grid, gentrified medicine to a more even handed healthcare infrastructure. conservative centripetal social conformity to acentric liberal diversity, all because centralization is easier to control, competition suppressed, profits predictable.

G.W. Bush blabbered on and on about "innovation" while cutting funding in every area of basic research from whence it emerges - they seem to think it falls out of the sky.

Capitalism is dynamic, and as much as they appear to revere it, they fear it even more - Bill Gates buried IBM with a little half assed operating system cobbled together in his garage, and a lot of devious marketing skill, and he doesn't fear IBM, he fears the Linus Torvalds of the world working away in their garages, throwing every conceivable obstacle at them that he possibly can, including calling them "evil".

All Capitalism is really is in a nutshell, is a system that limits the ability of entrenched interest to erect barriers of entry to emerging competitors in order to maintain a competitive economic ecosystem - capital isn't sacred, even in capitalism, competition alone is sacred, because otherwise, any system will axiomatically devolve into feudalism and stasis, and there isn't going to be anybody to see that meteor coming, or anyone with the political will to do anything about it.

 

[xssve]

And we all know, if we leave it up to Bill Gates, he might have some limited success by about the Third or Fourth meteor, because his first attempt is gonna be a beta test, that's just how he operates.

 

[xssve]

Escape Panic Characteristics

* Individuals attempt to move faster than normal
* Interactions between individuals become physical
* Exits become arched and clogged
* Escape is slowed by fallen individuals serving as obstacles
* Individuals display a tendency towards mass or copied behavior
* Alternative or less used exits are overlooked[1]

Wikipedia: Herd behavior.

This is pretty much a description of Malthusian economic behavior - the key avoiding Malthusian stressors is to act less like a herd animal, i.e., a certian degree of intelligence is required to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.

Or, as we used to say in the old Nav - "when in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout".

Currently, it is my considered opinion that conservative politics in general are a drug on the market of the collective intelligence of the entire nation.

 

[xssve]

That's what started the conversation, I did read that article.

I'm saying, monogamy doesn't sensibly fit into the h/g, agrarian societies, it's just there. The nine month gestation and years of direct parental supervision for the big brained child occurred long before sapiens-sapiens and erectus. Monogamy would've had to come into its own long before Homo, based on the physical necessity of the bigger brained biped coming out of the womb way too early. Based on the opinion of that article, which is a fairly popular opinion in human evolutionary theory.

We know that the father-son bond doesn't enter myth until well after agrarian societies are formed. The group is the father, initiates the son into adulthood well into the first agrarian settlements. The myth of father-son bond is what deceives us into believing monogamy existed to raise a child. We can't possibly comprehend the true egalitarian nature of these societies because we were brought up by one or two adults that had sole responsibility for us.

Monogamy exists before, during, and after the transition from group egalitarian sharing of parental duties to the family unit that emerges in post-industrial nations after the Second World War.

It only doesn't fit if you fail to take kin selection into account - even dogs practice that.

And I'm not sure where you're getting the notion that the father-son bond, in praxis as well as mythology, doesn't come into play until agrarianism, we don't know any such thing.

The monogamous dyad provides exclusionary breeding privileges, as well as being a co-operative economic unit, including divisions of labor, that optimize childrearing - this is true whether you have kids or not, and it essentially offers the same advantages to gay people or childless couples that it does to breeding pairs.

Kin selection is the fly in the poly ointment: evil stepmother syndrome, currently expanded to include evil stepfather syndrome, which it's entirely plausible to suspect to be more common these days. It even turns out that alpha Gorilla's in different troops are often related, again, it probably reflects some original nutritional advantage that is systematically perpetuated behaviorally.

It takes a more enlightened individual not to favor ones own offspring to the detriment of others, and not everybody is that enlightened - hell, a lot of parents play favorites even with their own genetic issue, according to some form of existential logic known only to them.

 

[DesertPirate]

A Short Spelling Lesson...

The last four letters in American ---- I Can

The last four letters in Republican -- I Can

The last four letters in Democrats --- Rats

End of Lesson!

-----------------

No need to thank me, I am just helping you expand your knowledge.

 

[LaRocha]

Holy shit, I just discovered the sexual role playing threads. These fucking people role play sex stories or something. Maybe we can make this a sexual role playing thread with right wingers vs. left wingers. I'll play Alexander Ovechkin, xxsve you play as Evgeni Malkin in the spirit of man on man ice hockey action.

 

[Dragonlipz]

A Short Spelling Lesson...

The last four letters in American ---- I Can

The last four letters in Republican -- I Can

The last four letters in Democrats --- Rats

End of Lesson!

-----------------

No need to thank me, I am just helping you expand your knowledge.

If you attended a public school, thank a liberal......(aka: Democrat)......the conservatives fought tooth and nail to avoid 'paying for something no one needed'

 

[Dragonlipz]

A Short Spelling Lesson...

The last four letters in American ---- I Can

The last four letters in Republican -- I Can

The last four letters in Democrats --- Rats

End of Lesson!

-----------------

No need to thank me, I am just helping you expand your knowledge.

Do you do numerology too? Or read used tea bags?

 

[xssve]

A Short Spelling Lesson...

The last four letters in American ---- I Can

The last four letters in Republican -- I Can

The last four letters in Democrats --- Rats

End of Lesson!

-----------------

No need to thank me, I am just helping you expand your knowledge.

To clarify my thinking on this whole RWA issue, it's an interesting hypothesis, and the description is accurate, but I question assigning it as a personality type: I think of it more as a syndrome, it's a particular set of responses to a particular set of social/economic stressors, which we can address later if anyone is interested.

The fact that the above represents typical right wing logic, and is often misrepresented by them as cogent and valid logic - it's an approach even used in congress, although it's the logical equivalent of a Raspberry, translating semiotically to roughly: "nyah, nyahnyah, nyahnyah, nyah".

It's purely symbolic statement, it alludes to conservatives self image as "real Americans", and dengrates liberals as subhumans, and as such, is a fine example of crypto-Fascism - there are very real fascist undertones, if not overtones here, but framing as a joke means that when the accusation arises, you can then accuse your critic of being paranoid, having no sense of humor, etc. "Hey, you're subhuman! Isn't that funny?" - and of course, if taken as the personal insult it's intended to be, and you respond in kind, now you're being "rude", typical of liberals of course, we've all seen the pattern repeated ad nauseum.

Now, personally, I have a hard time ascribing this to a personality type - desert pirate might have once been an intelligent, thoughtful human being, but his fear has driven him to choose sides, and he merely parrots whatever meme is currently making the rounds in conservative circles - he has been relived of the need to think for himself, to make decisions about complex issues he has neither the wit not the imagination to comprehend, he has delegated these activities to the group mind that appeals most to his sense of survival, and he hope his loyalty will be rewarded.

It's essentially a stress reaction, a panic attack, a simple mind overwhelmed with complex choices.

Naturally, it retreats to a safe haven, the shadow of authority.

I have to believe this, because I refuse to believe that in the Seven Million Years it took human intelligence to evolve, this is the best it can do.

 

[xssve]

Seeing it as syndrome, incomplete individuation, rather than a fixed "personality type" better explains the contradictions inherent in it's philosophies, notably, the simultaneous reverence and hatred of authority, the parent figure.

On the one hand, authority represents security and predictability, on the other, it represents the abnegation of the self: liberals are mocked for being in "lockstep", and the irony that in this and in every other issue they are in total agreement, to the point that questioning it means becoming one oneself, is totally lost - to admit to it would be to display individual volition, otherwise known as a spine, but even more disturbingly, it is to admit that this political identity is no identity at all, but merely an elaborate role engaged in to avoid punishment.

It's very stressful to split ones psyche like this, it's based in a fundamental insecurity, fear, and the pathology of fear is paranoia - thus, in true paranoid fashion, they create an an entire reality construct in which their irrational fears seem rational, their paranoia justifiable.

There does seem to be plenty of historical evidence that this sort of paranoia sets up a self-reinforcing feedback loop, to the point that it does indeed appear to resemble a personality type, and if triggered by some threatening event - the burning of the Reichstag, 9-11, etc., this paranoia can be focused on a convenient target.

Naturally, those in power, including the very authorities they revere, are well aware of this, they play the "common man", and in fact, might even be as dumb as you are, but they can draw on the expertise of trained psyops operatives, and the cream of psychologists and marketing experts who they have the money to buy, and who are willing to be bought.

There is nothing particularly spontaneous about it, it's essentially exploiting a minor syndrome, a universal experience in what we call the human condition, leveraging it into a full blown psychosis in order to turn it against they're political enemies, economic competitors, etc.

All conservatives should at least be aware that they also know that they're playing with fire: they know it's manipulation, but you don't, and if you ever realize you've been betrayed, you might turn on them, for which I'm sure they have contingency plans...

 

[xssve]

Holy shit, I just discovered the sexual role playing threads. These fucking people role play sex stories or something. Maybe we can make this a sexual role playing thread with right wingers vs. left wingers. I'll play Alexander Ovechkin, xxsve you play as Evgeni Malkin in the spirit of man on man ice hockey action.

Allright, you can play left wing, I'll take center.

I guess DesertPirate can play the puck.

 

[DesertPirate]

If you attended a public school, thank a liberal......(aka: Democrat)......the conservatives fought tooth and nail to avoid 'paying for something no one needed'

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can read it in English, Thank a Vet!

 

[xssve]

Did you think of that yourself?

 

[xssve]

If we then see right wing vs. left wing "personality types" as adaptive strategies, it it becomes easier to explore the dichotomy, to compare and contrast, to assign value in the objective, rather than the subjective sense, it provides a nexus of commonality that can facilitate true communication instead of just talking at, and past each other.

The right, representing entrenched interest, or capital, for short, per LaRocha, is primarily interested in "order", which represents predictability, and it's a centripetal value system in anthropological terms - inherently defensive, in biological terms, it represents homogeneity, which is, biologically, a systematic method that organisms employ to weed out deleterious or non-adaptive mutations - of course the trouble with that system is that it's a very crude methodology, it culls out deleterious mutations by essentially culling all mutations - the adaptive as well as the less adaptive.

By contrast, the left represents the process of mutation, which climbing up the abstraction ladder, represents not just chaos, but progress, the process of adapting to changing conditions, expansion of niches, etc. - mutation is the very engine of evolution itself, but it's also a threat to that percentage of a given population that has adapted to current conditions as every new mutation threatens to be more successful and/or competitive than the average or "norm" for that population.

Thus, the right clings fiercely to gender roles - out ancestors didn't have that much time to worry about gender identity, life was short nasty and brutal, and medieval philosophy largely stresses conservative values: order, accepting "one's lot", etc. - there is very little showing on the surface in terms of identity.

I actually started thinking about this due to the peculiarities of the local population here, slanted more heavily towards evangelical adaptations, often very medieval in their outlook, and needless to say, right wing by default.

This particular adaptive world view stresses, or "values" just about what you might expect: familial ties are important, they get yours and your children's foot in the door, preserve and incrementally improve one's "position" it stresses modesty - even a lot of the Native Americans here were raised and "Westernized" by Catholic boarding schools, employing that medieval value system, and you can always spot them in the locker room at the swimming pool, as they are too modest to undress, of even go to the bathroom in front of other people, it's sheer torment for them.

All in all, it's a system adapted to a much slower paced world, one where life spans are short and information is more persistent - without mass media, people debated issues literally for generations, whereas in the post modern world, you practically wake up in a world every day: information persistence is low because it increases and is disseminated at an exponential rate, attention spans are short, and things that people used to talk about for years, like Clintons BJ rapidly lose their entertainment value in the face of some new thing to cluck about.

Of course modesty get's you exactly nothing in the much faster paced post modern world, and the value dichotomy at play here is introversion vs. extroversion.

It's really a whole different subject, one that has piqued my literary interest, so I'll just try to wrap up what I've already got: the dichotomy between the system of predictable order that favors the "established" and the more chaotic mutational system that generates new adaptations is the Left vs. Right debate in a nutshell: as I say, the right stresses roles, the left identity.

Gender identity for the right is biological: if you have a penis, you're a man, if you have a womb, you're a woman, and you better damn well act like it. For the left, gender identity is more fluid, and in fact, it never really has been fixed except as a mytheme: your brain is much more ambiguously sexed than your body it doesn't have sex organs of it's own, it only has Testosterone and Estrogen, and it has to work with the body it's in, whereas most of what we consider gender roles reflect the biology of the body and economic necessity rather than the workings of the mind, the identity, the self, the "soul".

Again, this is a fairly natural progression in an affluent society where gender role isn't a matter of life and death - there is no time for dilly-dallying, commitments have to be made - and in many ways, that is affluence itself a result of the re-evaluation of gender identity as reflected in gender roles, which even the right wing seems to grasp even when they have a hard time admitting it, and ironically, bear much of the responsibility for - the Feminist revolution may have started with the suffrage movement, but it's icon is Rosie the Riveter, the symbol of economic emancipation, albeit, to the right, she merely represents cheap labor.

Even in right wing mythology, women have a political identity that they never had before the sexual revolution, I'm hard pressed to come up with a historical female doppelganger for Anne Coulter for example, a shrill, shrewish, harridan like public figure (there are plenty of male precedents, the Martinet), although Hillary Clinton is in some ways prefigured by Queen Elizabeth.

They are probably there, but for the most part, presumably they seldom rose above local celebrity status.

 

[Dragonlipz]

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can read it in English, Thank a Vet!

If you're thankful that you don't live in a Nazi-dominated world thank a liberal - the 'conservatives' (including Henry Ford - 'bad for business') were against WWII before the US was forced into it....

 

[xssve]

WWII is a fascinating interplay between Left and Right - Hitler basically got most of his ideas from the right wing eugenics movement, which was itself a hijack of the physical reform movement, re-framing it in the traditional blood/genetics framework.

There was in fact, a substantial demographic across all levels of society that were sympathetic to NSDAP ideology, US involvement was basically the result of the event at Pearl Harbor tipping the balance between racist tensions and Anglophilia, towards the latter.

 

[Huckleman2000]

Well, it seems the Republican National Committee is taking this stuff to heart:

[...]The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

"What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate...?" it asks.

The answer: "Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”
[...]
The most unusual section of the presentation is a set of six slides headed “RNC Marketing 101.” The presentation divides fundraising into two traditional categories, direct marketing and major donors, and lays out the details of how to approach each group.

The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”

Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.”

Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”

The slide also allows that donors may have more honorable motives, including “Patriotic Duty.”

 

[Huckleman2000]

So, whether this RWA business is a "personality type" or simply a set of attitudes exacerbated by difficult economic times, it seems valid enough for the Republicans to incorporate it into their fund-raising strategy.