A great link sent by a reader:

As the clock approached midnight on Election Day, our collective bubble began bursting and my iPhone began blowing up. Myself included, members of my two professions, journalism and academia, were shell-shocked the presidential election didn’t go as expected. “This is so f—ked up!” a journalist texted me. “Oh my God!” pinged a professor. “We will be the ones ostracized if he wins.” When Donald Trump’s victory was official, another academic acquaintance observed, “It’s an indictment on all of us.”

Notice the out-grouping themes. Being right or wrong is not as important as having the group assuage their amygdala by accepting them.

There are r-strategists who are just dulled by dopamine, and who prefer conflict and angst avoidance to meeting problems head on. They are usually savable, as when the dopamine is pulled, their amygdala begins to adapt and they become more K.

However there are r-strategists who are r due to childhood experience. These are the characters who were beaten down, rightly or wrongly, by other children. Some people endure such experiences and nobly say, never again on my watch. But others decide they want to be the torturer on the next go-around.

My experience with them is if they go hard r, they usually do so because they have internalized a perception of everyone as hostile and selfish, or even outright evil. These are the characters whose childhood traumas were burned so deep into their brain that they will never be able to see the adult world around them. For the rest of their lives, either they are the children in the group humiliating another person, or that other person is in the group of children humiliating them.

It is weird to be frozen in that time, when eating alone at a cafeteria table was embarrassing, the opinions of the group were all important, and somebody else going “Neener Neener!” at you would be so horrific that it is all you would think about after a Presidential election decades later. But lay enough trauma on the brain at that age, and let it become so central to their existence that it is all they can think about for years afterward, and it will freeze their personality in that childhood mode.

Once frozen, I suppose wanting a governmental parent who can protect them from the other children is natural, as is always wanting to be part of the group that is terrorizing other children, rather than being the child that is getting terrorized.

I raise it mainly because I have found when presenting imagery to try and amygdala hijack these characters, crafting imagery that replicates those childhood scenarios is particularly effective, since it speaks most directly to their amygdala triggers.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because idiots trying to force their childhood torments on others need to be taken down in politics