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There are essentially two types of mortality. One performs a selection for fitness, the other is more random, and doesn’t reward the more fit.

Random mortality is like a mouse encountering a snake. Since the mouse is totally over-powered, any mouse which runs into a snake will tend to get culled. Since the mortality offered by an overwhelmingly superior predator doesn’t reward fitness, all it does is cull the population back well below the carrying capacity of the environment, making resources available in large quantities to those who remain, and favoring an r-selected reproductive strategy.

This is why rabbits don’t denude every field of grass, and why each rabbit has way more resources than they can eat. It is also why Rabbits exhibit docility, promiscuity, single parenting, early age of sexual activity, and reduced/nonexistent loyalty. Liberals are, in essence, bunny rabbit people because both exhibit r-selected traits.

Selective mortality favors fitness, and culls those who are not as fit. War is selective, but only if everyone goes. If you pull the paper, you will see how WWII removed our nation’s warriors from the gene pool for the duration of the war. 20 years later, the offspring of those who avoided WWII were the Hippies. In that case, War favored the r-types, at least temporarily. Had we lost, and all our warriors been killed, our nation would have continued to be Hipipe like after the sixties. But we won, and our warriors came home. As the Census showed, as their offspring hit the scene, Bugliosi noted Hippyism suddenly died out. So war can cull the r-types, but only if everyone has to fight, and I suspect there the culling occurs as r-types flee to other territories to avoid the war.

Disease becomes complicated. In nature, where resources are produced by the environment (and exist as a somewhat static constant), a disease which kills everyone randomly will favor r, by killing back the population and increasing the resources available to each survivor.

In humans however, we produce our own resources. Our environment’s carrying capacity is dependent on our productivity. If a disease in America were to collapse our economy, the welfarites who can’t produce for themselves would get culled pretty quick, either by leaving for more socialist environs, imprisonment due to trying to take necessities of survival by force, or some other means. That’s K-selective, even if the mortality is random.

Disease can have another effect. I have noted, the Dark Ages peaked after the Medieval Warming Period increased crop production, providing freer resources, and removing selective effects favoring the fit. After a long period of freely available resources, the population had become highly r. As the population grew, and resource shortages began, competition began to get started.

Right then, Yersinia pestis swept through the populace (the Black Plague). It preferentially killed anyone who was poor and uncompetitive, since it preferentially killed those who weren’t well nourished. Picture our welfarites, ten to a house, in an environment where food is scarce and super expensive, and only had freely by the middle class and above. The plague would have killed back the whole Idiocracy, and fast.

All of a sudden, the Renaissance begins, as science, the arts, and all of the intellectual endeavors explode. Productivity takes off, and it is a golden age. Today, historians try to say the plague made people think about death, and this changed their thoughts about life, and they decided to become productive. How about it killed off the unproductive, who were leaching off the productivity of the productive, and killing the spirit of society?

Here, I think the coming financial collapse will reset the balance. When it comes, we will no longer have the money to support the welfarites. At that point, we should find the money to give them tickets to Hugo Chavez’s and Fidel Castro’s Worker’s paradises, with the condition they not come back.

I should add, ideology is not wholly genetic. We have evolved an adaptability. Some of the research shows that people, confronted with a danger, (such as would be presented by an environment of limited resources) will experience a conversion towards Conservatism, over all measures of the ideology, not just the specific threat presented. Probably due to stimulation and exercise of the amygdala, which promotes a lot of Conservative psychological traits, like rule adherence, aggression when threatened, competitiveness, etc.

When the collapse begins, a lot of people who are presently leftward leaning and anticompetitive, due to their comfortable lives, will likely adopt a more Conservative, competitive psychology, over all measures, including social values.

I would hope this will help to motivate the institution of measures to help maintain a more Conservative nation in the future, less tolerant of the Idiocracy’s demands for government largesse, and the Liberal’s desire that we give everything to our enemies, as a sign of good will.