by Vox Day
The Psychological Explanation for the SJW
Although his work is primarily more focused on the ideological Left in general, and malignant narcissists in particular, the author named the Anonymous Conservative has written two of the more important books on SJWs. While I do not subscribe to evolutionary psychology per se, for anthropological reasons, the insights of its proponents concerning human behavior are often invaluable regardless of whether they are correct about the causal relationships or not. In other words, evolutionary psychologists are often very good when describing the what, as well as the what comes next, even if their explanations for the why are often nothing more than science-flavored historical fiction. If you happen to be curious about why I am an evopsych skeptic, I would encourage you to read anthropologist C.R. Hallpike’s book Do We Need God to be Good?, which demolishes any reasonable probability of a factual basis for the historical conclusions of evolutionary psychology without saying anything at all about its utility today.
And that utility, as described in The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, is considerable indeed. In an age where we tend to regard the scientific method as the font of all knowledge, we often forget that our ancestors made a regular habit of successfully making use of many concepts and properties without ever even attempting to understand their core nature. The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Indians all used crude forms of antibiotics, and the army of the Sri Lankan king Dutugemunu were known to have prepared cakes prior to their campaigns for medicinal purposes more than 2,000 years before Alexander Fleming identified and understood the nature of the relationship between bread mold and penicillin. When it comes to the brain and the mind, we may not understand why things work the way they do, but we can observe the way in which they appear to work and derive practical information from those observations.
The Anonymous Conservative relies heavily upon a conceptual model of natural selection theory developed by the famous ecologists Robert MacArthur and E.O.Wilson in 1970. Based on their work on island ecosystems, they observed that most species utilized one of two primary breeding strategies, which they named r/selection and K/selection. This r/K selection theory posits that there is a tradeoff between quantity and quality when it comes to the offspring of a species. They theorized that, depending upon the environment, it could be more advantageous to have fewer offspring with more parental investment, or more offspring with less parental investment.
Species that pursue a r/selection strategy have more offspring, and the parents invest relatively little time and effort into their upbringing. Rabbits are an example of an r/selected mammal, which matures quickly, breeds frequently, and rapidly produces many offspring. The species that pursue a K/selection strategy have fewer offspring and the parents invest considerably more time and effort into their upbringing. Both wolves and humans are examples of K/selected mammals, as they take years to mature, don’t breed as often, and don’t produce very many offspring. Prey animals tend to be r/selected while predators tend to be K/selected.
The terms are applied to humans in a comparative sense rather than a literal one; relative to rabbits or salmon, all humans are K/selected. But in relative terms, it is easy to observe that some humans orient towards a more r/selected strategy than others; there is a massive difference in selection strategy between a monogamous couple raising four children and homeschooling them for a combined 48 years and the professional athlete who fathers 9 different children on 9 different women and doesn’t even know any of their names. The important connection that Anonymous Conservative has made is to observe that these differences in selection strategies have tremendous consequences for the societies in which they play out.
We are a society with such a high level of free resources that we are tripping biological switches in many of our citizens, shifting their reproductive strategy to the r-selected reproductive strategy of the rabbit. Highly sexed and single parented, with individualistic females who seek self-sufficiency and view rearing as unrewarding, and hedonistic men who are unwilling to sacrifice or risk. These are consuming rabbits, and not producing, pack-oriented, K-selected wolves. Nature and evolution put these programmed psychologies in us because they worked well in nature, adapting our reproductive behavior to resource levels, but they are all hell on a functioning society. The problem is, the rabbits as a whole don’t produce sufficient resources to keep the party fueled, nor do they care enough about their pack to try. Start a war on poverty by handing out more free cheese and the number of single mom’d households will explode, and they will tend to remain in poverty, even with free food and housing to allow them to continue to multiply. As this number of r-selected consumers grows relative to the producers, it will inevitably trigger the return-by-force of resource restriction and K-selection.
—“r/K Selection and the Wolves and Rabbits of Politics”, Anonymous Conservative
In other words, one consequence of being at the tail end of the biggest expansions of global wealth and longest periods of relative peace in history is an observable shift in reproductive strategies on the part of many people living in Western societies. In the United States, this shift can be seen by the massive increase in the number of children born out of wedlock, which since 1950 has risen by a factor of 10 for all races, and from 2.5 percent to 29 percent for white Americans. This has happened for a variety of reasons that are not relevant to this book, but taken in whole, clearly reflect a tremendous reduction in the average investment that parents are making in their children. While there has been considerable amount of discussion and more than a few scientific studies about the effect that these rising illegitimacy rates have had on poverty, crime, and educational outcomes, there has been relatively little recognition of them as a fundamental change in reproductive strategies, much less the psychological, neurological, and socio-sexual effects of these changes on the offspring produced by them.
What is remarkable about the application of selection strategy theory to human society is that it tends to operate very well as a sociological predictive model, which is rather surprising because it has largely failed to be useful in the field of biology where it was first developed. However, taken in concert with neurobiology, particularly as it relates to a portion of the human brain known as the amygdala, selection strategy begins to provide us with at least a glimmering of understanding of what lies beneath the behavior of the social justice warrior.
The amygdala is a brain structure most commonly described as being responsible for the generation of fear. This definition is incomplete, however. The amygdala is primarily responsible for assigning emotional significance to encountered perceptions. What that means is that the amygdala essentially scans all incoming information and flags the information that it deems as important. Likely due to this, it is also strongly associated with the ability to perceive threat, and it is this which leads many to say that it is responsible for the production of fear…. When examining the amygdala’s role in political ideology, it is important to understand this structure’s purpose and operation. The amygdala provides what is called an aversive stimulus. This is an uncomfortable neurological sensation designed to both draw attention to what precipitates it, and motivate one to take actions which will shut it off by addressing the precipitating stimulus.
In essence, the amygdala motivates a normal person to alter their environment, in such a way that the amygdala no longer perceives the offending stimulus. Once the environment has been altered to remove the offending stimulus, the amygdala will lift the aversive stimulus, and allow you to proceed. To use the individual who fell through the ice as an example, once his amygdala was trained to cue in on breaking ice, and associate it will the agony of dropping into cold water, it motivated him (with aversive stimulus) to never let ice break beneath him again.
Activation of this aversive stimulus is conditioned, through being exposed to an event, and then suffering a negative outcome immediately following it. The more sudden and negative (read traumatic) the outcome, the more the
amygdala will flag the preceding piece of information as significant. If it is ever encountered again, you will pay attention to it, and prepare to deal with the negative event which follows it, because your amygdala will apply a psychologically uncomfortable aversive stimulus until you do.
—The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, Anonymous Conservative
The Anonymous Conservative observes the SJW psychological cycle appears to operate in the following manner:
Tell yourself you are innately superior due to intrinsic qualities related to your identity.
Feel bad about being superior.
Feel super-superior for not only being superior, but for also have the moral sense to feel bad about your own superiority.
He asks what amygdala-mediated process could be driving this continual process and concludes that the SJW brain is using the process to attenuate some tendency of his mind to gravitate towards negative thoughts about himself. This gravitation towards negativity can be the result of physical or mental inferiority, childhood trauma, abuse, failure, depression, or any number of reasons, but regardless of the reason, SJWs find these negative thoughts to be cognitively painful. When forced to face this pain, their brain runs through the usual routine in order to reduce the angst they feel and replace it with a newly charged feeling of superiority. This is why both the Narrative and the social justice identity are so vitally important to them; it is literally their shield against the emotional pain that constantly threatens to overwhelm them.
SJWs are creatures of pain. They are in a near-constant state of mild psychological distress, which is why so many of them are in therapy or on various psychotropic medications. This is why they are so sensitive, so fragile, and so prone to angry, incoherent rants for reasons that often seem inexplicable to others. They might well be pitied, were it not for the behavior that their suffering inspires in them.
Now, it may seem bizarre that individuals whose primary objective is to mitigate their emotional pain would make a habit of seeking out conflict, much less generating conflict where none previously existed. But that is because you are a normal, psychologically healthy individual whose normal state is not one of internal distress. It is only through conflict that the SJW can generate the feelings of moral superiority he requires in order to drown out his steady state of emotional pain. This is why the Narrative can never stop mutating, and why no solution will ever suffice regardless of how perfectly it complies with SJW demands.
It also explains why SJWs are so relentlessly critical of others. In a paper entitled “Holding People Responsible for Ethical Violations: The Surprising Benefits of Accusing Others”, funded by the Wharton Behavioral Lab, researchers found that people who accuse others of unethical behavior can derive significant benefits from doing so. Compared to normal people who do not make a habit of accusing others of crimethink and other moral failures, accusers are perceived by others to have higher ethical standards. In one study, it was found that the act of making accusations increased trust in the accuser and lowered trust in the target. This is precisely the purpose of the disqualify and discredit routine that SJWs so often utilize. In a second study, it was found that making accusations tends to elevate trust in the accuser by boosting other people’s perceptions of the accuser’s ethical standards. And in a third study, it was found that accusations boosted trust in the accuser, decreased trust in the target,and even more significantly, promoted dissension within the group.
In other words, SJWs transfer their own emotional pain into making themselves feel more positive about themselves while simultaneously elevating their social status at the expense of others and at the cost of group harmony. This is why group after group, organization after organization, find that acceding to the demands of the SJWs in their midst inevitably generates more conflict, not less.
But there is more to the recognizable patterns of SJW behavior than that related to selection strategy and neurobiology. We can also learn from the hierarchy of human socio-sexuality, which over the years has been refined from simple pick-up artistry used to score with women to a comprehensive taxonomy complete with a reliable behavioral model. It should be mentioned that whereas the previous aspects applied to both male and female SJWs, the socio-sexual hierarchy applies only to male SJWs.
The Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
When we examine any conventional human social circle, we reliably observe a broader range of distinctly identifiable social archetypes that go well beyond mere sexual activity. And it is based on these observations that I have expanded the Alpha-Beta division originally introduced by Roissy of Chateau Heartiste into a hierarchy that covers the broad spectrum of socio-sexuality. Keep in mind that this is a taxonomy of existing behavior patterns exhibited by men, not a theory of human behavior, and it is intended as a useful conceptual tool, not a definitive set of boxes into which all men must be forced. These hierarchies are both relative and fractal in nature; the Alpha on the high school football team will usually be a Delta on his college team since social hierarchies tend to resemble diamonds when it comes to their distributions. The television show The Big Bang Theory actually does a fair job of illustrating the hierarchy, although it tends to permit the lower-ranking men to outkick their coverage to a certain extent in the interest of providing eye candy to the viewers.
Alpha: The alpha is the tall, good-looking guy who is the center of both male and female attention. The classic alpha is the star of the football team who is dating the prettiest cheerleader. He is the successful business executive with a full head of executive hair and the beautiful, stylish, blonde, size-zero wife. All the women are attracted to him, while all the men want to be him, or at least be his friend. At a social gathering like a party, he’s usually the loud, charismatic guy telling self-flattering stories to a group of attractive women who are listening to him with interest. However, alphas are only interested in women to the extent that they exist for the alpha’s gratification, physical and psychological, and their primary concern tends to be their overall group status.
Alphas tend to be considerably more popular with women than the norm. Politically, Alphas tend to be either conservative or apolitical. You will seldom find SJW Alphas outside of Hollywood and Manhattan.
Examples: Donald Trump, Adam Levine, Tom Brady.
Beta: Betas are the good-looking guys who aren’t as uniformly attractive or socially dominant as the Alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to women, and tend to do well with them. They are popular, and in many circumstances, more broadly popular than the alphas. At the party, they are the loud guy’s friends who showed up with the alcohol, who are flirting with the tier-one women and cheerfully pairing up with the tier-two women. Betas tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic, rosy-hued manner, but don’t have a lot of illusions about them either. Betas tend to be happy, secure in themselves, and are usually up for anything their alpha wants to do. When they marry, it is not infrequently to a woman who was one of the alpha’s former girlfriends.
Betas are always more attractive than the norm, but they tend to somewhat underkick their coverage and partner with women who are a little less attractive than one might expect them to be. Politically, Betas tend to be moderate regardless of whether they are on the right or the left of the political spectrum.
Examples: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Zack Johnson on The Big Bang Theory.
Delta: The normal guy. Deltas are the great majority of men. They usually can’t attract the most attractive women, so they usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and tend to resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are comfortably in their league. This is ironic, because deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him and will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his non-stop dancing of attendance upon her. In a social setti
ng, the deltas are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making an occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them; if a man rhapsodizes about his better half or is an inveterate White Knight, he is almost certainly a delta. Deltas like women, but find them mysterious, confusing, and are sometimes secretly just a little afraid of them. A very physically attractive Delta will often wind up with a slightly less attractive woman than one might expect; this actually tends to work out well in most cases as these women often initiated the relationships and tend to remain head-over-heels about their husbands.
Examples: David Beckham, Jeremy Renn in the Avengers movies, Leonard Hofstadter on The Big Bang Theory.
Gamma: The introspective, the unusual, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter. Gammas are often intelligent, usually unsuccessful with women, and not uncommonly all but invisible to them, the gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex. This mostly depends upon whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. Too introspective for their own good, gammas are the men who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time and supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho-jealous ex-boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly romantic rhyming doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party, they are probably in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there… sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have have a worship/hate relationship with women, the current direction of which is directly tied to their present situation. However, they are sexual rejects, not social rejects.
