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I've recently become fascinated by the concept that one's political affiliation tends to sync up with one's dominant survival strategy. If you rely most on comm

by lukifer 13y ago

I've recently become fascinated by the concept that one's political affiliation tends to sync up with one's dominant survival strategy. If you rely most on communities and relationships, you tend to be liberal; if you rely most on authority and hierarchies, you tend to be conservative; if you rely most on your own skills, you tend to be libertarian. http://www.meltingasphalt.com/the-ecology-of-personal-politics/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/the-ecology-of-personal-politi...

ctdonath 13y ago
Consider applying the r/K Selection Theory to politics. Makes a disturbing amount of sense: http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/ http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-sele...
- skorgu 13y ago
  It lines up in some ways, not in others. Liberals are known for their high fertility rate as well as their opposition to abortion to ensure the highest number of offspring. Likewise the conservative obsession with childhood nutrition, education and welfare lines up well with their high-investment child-rearing instinct. Sarcasm aside the infinite/scarce resource division seems like an interesting one to observe. See also the forager/farmer distinction[0]. [0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.ht...
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  An interesting article, but a little politically charged. The repeated emotionally loaded descriptions of liberals and conservatives cannot have been accidental.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  That blog entry is a load of crap. Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism". "The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each. It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans. But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles. What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce. What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually. And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless! [1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!
- whyenot 13y ago
  This makes about as much sense as applying continental drift to explain the series finale of Breaking Bad.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Well I don't know. The possible analogies are interesting: a social system is a reproductive strategy, it's a way of breeding and educating your population to serve some defined purpose (the objective of the system). Being able to characterize those systems broadly would be helpful.
yummyfajitas 13y ago
I think you are flipping conservatives and liberals. Liberals tend to rely on authority and hierarchies (the state, and similar authority figures), whereas conservatives tend to rely on communities and relationships (church, family, secular community orgs). Or am I misinterpreting something here?
- jbooth 13y ago
  Subject to debate, and everyone's gonna want to think that their "side" is the most enlightened... (end disclaimer) I think a lot of liberals see conservatives as authoritarian in that they support the police/military parts of government. Even your tea party libertarians tend to see the police/military as 'our people', culturally speaking and as a necessary part of the state philosophically speaking. Liberals tend to distrust police/military a lot more. So while your libertarian is a lot less friendly to 'The State' and 'Big G Government', typically they're thinking about zoning boards, the FDA, FCC and welfare when they're against those things -- not particularly hierarchical organizations compared to military/police. Basically, you're thinking economics, we're thinking marching orders. (as a liberal, I find it ridiculous when I hear conservatives talk about the tyranny of big govt while pushing for an increase in defense spending and more militarization of police)
  - johngalt 13y ago
    As a conservative I find it ridiculous when liberals talk of fascist police while pushing to limit civilian gun rights. We can make straw men all day. Regardless of arguing against caricatures of the 'other' side. I think a majority of Americans could agree on a majority of issues. The problem is the gamesmanship of politics.
    - jbooth 13y ago
      "pushing to limit civilian gun rights" is sort of willfully deceptive, as it implies gun-grabbing where most liberals just want registration along the same level as a driver's license. At least you acknowledged that it's a straw man. Most conservatives do actually support more spending on military/security and less spending on everything else -- that's not a straw man position really, I was just describing a slant on it.
bruceb 13y ago
You tend to be libertarian if you think you rely on your own skills and you think what you do as an individual has no effect on the individuals around you. There is the joke "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged" One could add: "A liberal is a conservative who just lost their health insurance" or "A liberal is a libertarian whose neighbor just blocked their waterfront view"
- johngalt 13y ago
  The reverse of the conservative one is: "A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."
i_c_b 13y ago
I've observed something kind of similar, although in my view, the axis is, if you rely on abstracted rules and disembodied systems and institutions, you tend to be liberal, whereas if you rely on much more on tightly shared unstated norms and cultural expectations, you tend to be conservative. If you live in a dense, cosmopolitan city, you need local government to make sure that all those diverse transient strangers around you are coordinating their lives properly through the shared explicit protocol of secular government. If you live in a distant suburb, on the other hand, it's not the cops that make you feel safe, its the fact that most people around you look and dress like you do, water their lawns, go to church, and generally display themselves publicly exhibiting the norms of your community. But of course, you better be exhibiting those norms too.

by lukifer 13y ago

ctdonath 13y ago

Consider applying the r/K Selection Theory to politics. Makes a disturbing amount of sense: http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/ http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-sele...

skorgu 13y ago
It lines up in some ways, not in others. Liberals are known for their high fertility rate as well as their opposition to abortion to ensure the highest number of offspring. Likewise the conservative obsession with childhood nutrition, education and welfare lines up well with their high-investment child-rearing instinct. Sarcasm aside the infinite/scarce resource division seems like an interesting one to observe. See also the forager/farmer distinction[0]. [0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.ht...
sliverstorm 13y ago
An interesting article, but a little politically charged. The repeated emotionally loaded descriptions of liberals and conservatives cannot have been accidental.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
That blog entry is a load of crap. Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism". "The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each. It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans. But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles. What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce. What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually. And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless! [1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!
whyenot 13y ago
This makes about as much sense as applying continental drift to explain the series finale of Breaking Bad.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Well I don't know. The possible analogies are interesting: a social system is a reproductive strategy, it's a way of breeding and educating your population to serve some defined purpose (the objective of the system). Being able to characterize those systems broadly would be helpful.

yummyfajitas 13y ago

I think you are flipping conservatives and liberals. Liberals tend to rely on authority and hierarchies (the state, and similar authority figures), whereas conservatives tend to rely on communities and relationships (church, family, secular community orgs). Or am I misinterpreting something here?

jbooth 13y ago
Subject to debate, and everyone's gonna want to think that their "side" is the most enlightened... (end disclaimer) I think a lot of liberals see conservatives as authoritarian in that they support the police/military parts of government. Even your tea party libertarians tend to see the police/military as 'our people', culturally speaking and as a necessary part of the state philosophically speaking. Liberals tend to distrust police/military a lot more. So while your libertarian is a lot less friendly to 'The State' and 'Big G Government', typically they're thinking about zoning boards, the FDA, FCC and welfare when they're against those things -- not particularly hierarchical organizations compared to military/police. Basically, you're thinking economics, we're thinking marching orders. (as a liberal, I find it ridiculous when I hear conservatives talk about the tyranny of big govt while pushing for an increase in defense spending and more militarization of police)
- johngalt 13y ago
  As a conservative I find it ridiculous when liberals talk of fascist police while pushing to limit civilian gun rights. We can make straw men all day. Regardless of arguing against caricatures of the 'other' side. I think a majority of Americans could agree on a majority of issues. The problem is the gamesmanship of politics.
  - jbooth 13y ago
    "pushing to limit civilian gun rights" is sort of willfully deceptive, as it implies gun-grabbing where most liberals just want registration along the same level as a driver's license. At least you acknowledged that it's a straw man. Most conservatives do actually support more spending on military/security and less spending on everything else -- that's not a straw man position really, I was just describing a slant on it.

bruceb 13y ago

You tend to be libertarian if you think you rely on your own skills and you think what you do as an individual has no effect on the individuals around you. There is the joke "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged" One could add: "A liberal is a conservative who just lost their health insurance" or "A liberal is a libertarian whose neighbor just blocked their waterfront view"

johngalt 13y ago
The reverse of the conservative one is: "A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."

i_c_b 13y ago

I've observed something kind of similar, although in my view, the axis is, if you rely on abstracted rules and disembodied systems and institutions, you tend to be liberal, whereas if you rely on much more on tightly shared unstated norms and cultural expectations, you tend to be conservative. If you live in a dense, cosmopolitan city, you need local government to make sure that all those diverse transient strangers around you are coordinating their lives properly through the shared explicit protocol of secular government. If you live in a distant suburb, on the other hand, it's not the cops that make you feel safe, its the fact that most people around you look and dress like you do, water their lawns, go to church, and generally display themselves publicly exhibiting the norms of your community. But of course, you better be exhibiting those norms too.