Here is another graphic supporting the contention that Conservatism is actually a K-selected reproductive strategy, designed to arise under conditions of resource scarcity, and Liberalism is actually an r-selected reproductive strategy, designed to arise under conditions of free resource availability.

A reader pointed to the Economic Misery Index. There is a huge infographic at this link, which will be appended below this post. It points out the relationship between the Economic Misery Index, and violent revolutions such as the Arab Spring. If you increase economic misery (ie. restrict resources), you will get violence, aggression, and demands for freedom and free competition, among other traits. Those are K-selected behavioral traits that confer advantage under conditions of resource shortage, and their emergence under such conditions is no coincidence. Those Conservative psychological traits are designed to emerge when resources are scarce – when a wolf-like competitive K-selected strategy is the best way to survive.

What the Misery Index measures is resource restriction. Since we maintain that the K-strategy and Conservatism are one and the same, we predict the Misery Index should relate to the population’s expression of the K-selected reproductive strategy of Conservatism.

Above we laid a line graph showing the Conservative Policy Mood in the US (from this article at the WaPo’s website), over a bar graph of the Economic Misery Index in the US. On the right is the scale for the Misery Index, and on the left is the scale for the Policy Mood.

There are a few interesting points. First WWII caused a skyrocketing of Conservatism, and this artificial elevation of K-strategy generated a very low Misery Index once the war was over. K-strategists are hard workers, bent on winning. Not many vets came home from the kill or be killed battlefield of that war, looking to slack, craving a government to handle their every need, and wanting a destruction of the traditional family unit. Not coincidentally, they took action and produced copious resources. Notice how the low Misery Index readings rapidly eroded Conservative psychological traits in the populace, and how that raised the Misery Index, as the population adapted to the resource abundance by adopting a more r-psychology, designed to exploit free resources, rather than work hard to produce them.

Early on in the graph, a sudden jump in misery would either stall a decline of Conservatism, or produce a jump in the rate of Conservatism, usually within the space of a year (interestingly, crime (violent competition for resources by those less able to compete otherwise) has also been noted to jump within about one year of sudden rises in the Misery Index).

Vietnam obviously produces a jump in Conservatism, despite relatively low Misery Index readings, as does 9/11, validating war as a K-stimulus. Additionally, the end of the war in Vietnam, the abatement of threat from 9/11, and the end of WWII all served as r-stimuli, indicating that the removal of threat/war stimuli serves to produce increases in r.

Carter sends Misery and Conservatism stratospheric together (quite an accomplishment), only to have Reagan open the debt spigot, and flood free resources into the environment, crushing both Misery and Conservatism. This release of free resources through debt rapidly shifts the population towards the r-selected reproductive strategy of Liberalism, even despite Reagan’s brilliant oratory, political theater, and complete victory in the Cold War. The best leader, with the best arguments, in the most powerful position possible, succeeds in every regard, and yet he is no match for the corrupting effects of free resource availability.

The first Bush term is a bit confusing. The Misery Index rises slightly, and maintains a level which should provoke a K shift, yet the K-shift is somewhat slow in coming. One possible explanation is that just as war can propel the Conservative Policy Mood sky high with a very low resource restriction, a continued rush of borrowed cash flooding the ecosystem could temporarily drive Conservatism lower than it would otherwise go, despite a mildly elevated level of misery.

A second explanation is that the effects of the Misery Index are likely based upon relative levels of Misery. In the graph above, Misery had just dropped significantly under Reagan. If the Misery had been very low during Carter, the populace would have acclimated to that low level of Misery. Once acclimated to low Misery, any sudden rise would tend to provoke a K-shift, even if the rise were less than you saw at the end of Reagan’s term. However, having acclimated to a misery index of the magnitude that Jimmy Carter produced, that same level of Misery would be perceived as quite nice by comparison, and thus release more dopamine, elicit less anger, and be and thus be far less likely to trigger a K-shift.

One must remember, that the Misery Index is, loosely, an inverted measure of societal dopamine activity – dopamine activity similar to the effect of illegal drugs like cocaine. When Misery plummets, societal dopamine release will rise, however when Misery rises, dopamine activity will drop. Just as an addict eventually requires substantial quantities of drugs just to feel normal, it is possible that coming off of Carter’s misery level, the nation as a whole suddenly felt euphoric, even without pushing the Misery index to a significantly low level, and this served to foster an extended r-shift. Deny a family food, and then feed them, and they may change psychology towards r. However, take a well fed and very technology-supplied family, acclimate them to that level of comfort and entertainment, and a mere cable outage might provoke a K-shift, even as they ate heartily. Indeed, many K-shifts occur either concurrently with, or immediately after, sudden spiking of the Misery Index, the main exceptions being conflict stimuli such as Vietnam and 9/11.

If the effects of Misery are indeed relative, I suspect today’s youth, who are from birth acclimated to every comfort, technological accessory, and delicious taste in their freely availble food, are like dopamine addicts whose baseline pleasure requirements are quite high. They need those dopamine highs, just to feel normal. If economic conditions change, and suddenly everyone doesn’t have unlimited data plans, free Apps, social media, unlimited bandwidth, delicious food, free and easy college loans, the ability to acquire healthcare for themselves and their loved ones, and jobs given to anyone (even Womyns Studies majors), they may quickly, from a psychological standpoint, begin to make our most hardened WWII vets from the Pacific look like gay pansies. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was blood.

Also, during that post-Reagan period, a decades-long, constant threat stimulus was eliminated. One moment we were a superpower locked in a never ending struggle with the evil empire of the Soviet Union. The next moment, Communism collapsed, our enemies were gone, and the news was filled with experts pondering how we would now manage as the lone Superpower in the world. That was an enormous threat stimulus suddenly removed. Who were we competing against? A subtle question that I think is enormously important to our human natures and our motivation to compete and produce.

Finally, I think we underestimate how perceptions of political conflict stimulate a K-shift. Had Bush I approached politics more like Tom Delay or Ted Cruz, and constantly demonstrated how leftist policies were destroying the economy, and portrayed Leftism as an enemy to be fought, I think that a K-shift would have begun much sooner. However, being essentially a Northeastern Liberal, Bush I operated as if there was no real fight with the left. Even worse, those Conservatives who were still standing saw their own President ban guns, raise taxes, and fight pointless wars to rescue some Kuwaiti oil princes, or some ungrateful Somalians who would later kill our own military members. At every turn, from lack of loyalty to his own, to support for governmental control and oppression, Bush I fought to weaken Conservatism through wimpy acquiescence to, or embrace of, the left. Judging from the graph, he won, aided by free resources and diminished threat.

There is a lesson to the Political Conservatives in that. Better to take a wimp out by letting him lose in the General Election, than let him infest your movement for four years, erode any K-shift, and drive that curve downward. We probably dodged a real bullet with Romney.

Two years into Clinton’s term, the Misery Index drops suddenly, and the graphs suddenly diverge, with the Misery Index apparently suppressed on a fairly constant basis, even as Conservatism rises aggressively. I suspect that drop is due to the changes in the CPS, which were enacted in 1994, redefining how it measured unemployment, and thus altering what the Misery Index measured. (Overnight, a reading of 1.1 million unemployed was cut by 600,000 (over half), simply due to the change in methodology instituted in 1994).

Still, if you follow the curves after that drop, they do roughly rise and fall together, as would be expected since the index was still a rough measure of relative Misery from year to year. I suspect the rise after September 11th was more due to the attacks than economic misery, but misery probably played a part as well given that the dot-com bubble had just burst.

Of most interest is the growing divergence between the graphs. After the changes in 1994, it seems that Conservatism is now rising faster than the Misery Index is. What changed? There is a possible answer for this at this link. If we are failing to count the unemployed sufficiently, and the number of uncounted unemployed increases over time due to the changes in unemployment measuring implemented in 1994, that might explain some of the increasing disparity between the two curves, starting around 1994. That might also imply that the Conservative Policy Mood could be used, in some fashion, to model general economic conditions, if the government’s numbers prove to be unreliable.

This figure linking ideology to both the Misery Index and warfare, is why this entire blog exists, and why a whole book was written, amassing reams of support for this seemingly strange, obtuse subject. Everything you see utilized tactically in politics today has little to no effect on our political outcomes, by comparison to these r and K-forces. While everyone runs around endlessly debating the same old issues in the same old ways, while Liberals try to infiltrate academia and the media to execute some grandiose plan, while Conservatives debate whether Mitt Romney could have won if something was done differently, they are all ignorant of the real picture. There is a silent, unstoppable force, deep within our species’ psyche, effortlessly moving mountains of our history while we sleep, and it doesn’t really care about any of the things we normally focus on.

It is this force which controls our political destiny – more than any issue, more than any party, more than any political event, and more than any leader or individual – indeed, more than all of that combined. This force is why Ronald Reagan’s debt spending created an onslaught against our gun rights at the end of George H. W. Bush’s only term in office, and why we got an assault weapons ban passed in 1994 that could never pass today. It is actually why Charleton Heston lofted a musket above his head and bellowed, “From my cold, dead, hands!” as well as why that was a brilliant presentation of a conflict stimulus designed to provoke K-mindsets. It is even why that theater signaled the beginning of the end of attacks on our gun rights. It is why we elected a reprobate of uncommon immorality to the highest office in the land in 1992, and it is even why we will almost certainly wage large scale wars in the near future, as that Conservative Policy Mood graph skyrockets under assaults on our healthcare, increasing crime, and an impending economic collapse of unimaginable proportions.

Even more amazing, by the nature of our world, and our own evolutionary history, this force was perfectly designed to be taken by Conservatives, and used as a weapon to enormous effect. Any Conservative leader can introduce aggressive, confrontational, threat stimuli into an environment by being belligerent. However no Liberal, in the face of such stimuli, can remove that stimulus, or reintroduce tranquility, if we don’t want them to. At the end of the day, we call the shots, if only we will choose to.

The real engine which powers this hidden force is actually our world’s reality, so the force is almost useless to Leftists. Until reality can be replaced with fantasy in the real world, Leftists can do no more to stop our wielding of this weapon than they can do to stop gravity. They are helpless before us, and ply their political strategies only with our willing acquiescence to their evil and our passive acceptance of their fantasy.

The day major Conservative strategists grasp the force at work in the graph above, from the macro-level effects down to the effect on dopamine receptor gene transcription within neurons, is the day our battle ends, and our species begins a stratospheric ascent to levels of technological and societal advancement that we can only dream of.

That is why all of this research exists. The moment this becomes widely accepted as truth, is the moment our political battles will become infinitely easier to wage and win.