Book Review: The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics by Anonymous Conservative

I picked up this book on Jim’s advice, and enjoyed it. It’s a mix of evolutionary psychology, r/K selection theory, and revanchist politics. The anonymous author’s thesis is that leftism maps cleanly onto an r-type reproductive strategy. In this view, it’s simpler to view ideology as an expression of biological strategy. Cutting away the pretentions of culture, civilization, and morality, viewing humans as just another scurrying species roaming the earth, killing, fucking, fighting, and eating, Anonymous brings back social Darwinism like it never went out of style.

He writes

“Treason as a Darwinian strategy will be even more likely to arise within the model of group competition presented here because within every group, the r-selected anticompetitor has one primary Darwinian threat, and that is the successful, K-selected, individual competitor within their population.”

K-selected strategists stand in for conservatives: people who favor a high-investment parenting style along with economic and military competition for resources based around the patriarchal family structure. r-selected strategists instead seek to procreate as much as possible to suck down resources while avoiding conflict.

The chief predator of the leftist is the right-wing competitor. The author likens leftism to the split reproductive strategy of the cuttlefish and other creatures. When a male in a species with split r/K selection can’t compete with the most ‘K’ members, it may develop novel strategies of subterfuge to provoke distracting conflicts among K-selected males to then sneak in access to mates and resources:

“Often this will occur while promoting circumstances likely to provoke conflict, such as increasing proximity and diversity simultaneously, or stoking tensions through demanding concessions from their own group to any other groups with differing racial, religious, or class characteristics.”

This is the way that the Blue Empire typically triumphs over the Red Empire. The strategy followed by leftists is to curb open competition among men whenever possible, and to also prevent discrimination by the more capable against the least capable (“to each according to his need, from each according to his ability”). The left-wing social group is the cartel, the union, or the mob: it discourages direct and favors the weight of the masses to ensure continued access to resources.

What I appreciated about this is that it forced me to look at social issues from outside the framework of ideology and the established values of enlightenment debate (namely the conceit that rational discussion will create more effective political structures).

The author also cuts to why so many young men on the right tend to fantasize about ‘collapse’ scenarios: because K-selected people are far better adapted to resource scarcity than the r-selected are. He writes:

“In the collapse, K-selected conditions of free competition will again return, and this will both cull the population, and trigger ideological /strategy conversions in those who are capable. Once again, the K-selected psychology will emerge as the predominant psychology of the population.”

The book briefly tries to make sense of libertarians and comes up with an inadequate pioneer-type hypothesis for them — that they’re pursuing a social strategy more apt to a frontier with low population density and high resource availability. Libertarianism, when taken at its proposition of the non-aggression principle (forbidding legal aggression) is more of a hybrid strategy that sublimates competition  into economics rather than violence.

One way which leftists subvert this strategy is just by avoiding overt aggression, instead using subversion and activism to disrupt the social strategies that would be necessary to maintain a human population based on direct, rules-based competition.

Feminism can be interpreted within this framework as a sort of ideological contagion that enables women to pursue r-selected life patterns at the expense of the successful men. The difficulty of telling the difference between a solid partner for K-selected child-rearing and an r-selected mimic disrupts the reproductive strategies of men looking to invest in their children.

Besides waiting for Ragnarök, the author suggests ‘stimulating the amygdalae’ of liberals (meaning scare the shit out of them to help restore their ability to perceive threats in their environment), increasing group loyalty among the K-selected, cultural separation, political secession, and war.

On his blog, he writes:

“[Leftists] have no ability to just leave fellow Americans alone to interact freely, and succeed and be happy. They have to intrude, to alleviate an anxiety that they will never be rid of. Even worse, they are so instinct driven, they can’t even see intellectually that they are bringing about the very harshness which will be their undoing and destroy the very facade of civilization that they need, to keep from being killed violently for their evil.”

Whether or not his neurological and psychological theories are entirely true, it’s a promising rhetorical strategy. It dehumanizes the left, fosters cohesion among the K-selected where there would be instead be competition for the diminished pool of resources, and tampers with the tendency among right-wingers to feel excessive levels of mercy, pity, and restraint towards rival populations who seek to subvert and destroy them.

The spirit of universalism within the West makes even bitter enemies within a country tend to see each other as, nonetheless, part of the same polyglot tribe. Leftists tend to take this to an even greater extreme, proclaiming the ‘universal brotherhood of man,’ which tends to limit civil conflict to the cold war of democracy.

Speaking of ‘brothers…’