Didn't anyone else ever feel that nerdiness led to social conservatism?

In My Humble Opinion
1

For various reasons including a recent birthday, I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood, and this topic from my childhood which I think about a lot came up on a blog I read recently. This blogger was speculating that the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein introduced a lot of teenage nerds to atheism and libertarianism. (The blogger wrote this in a morally neutral way, since both doesn’t believe in God and is not a libertarian.) This struck me because it was a reminder of how atypical my experience, me being someone who thought of himself as a nerd, was.

My line of thinking when I was a child and adolescent was:

  1. I’m a shy, quiet, timid nerd,
  2. Therefore I feel victimized and bullied by the cool kids,
  3. I see the cool kids as morally liberal, as libertine, being into “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,”
  4. Therefore I feel scared, intimidated, and put off by “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,”
  5. Therefore I found comfort and solace in traditional morality and conservative religiosity.

I actually read a few of Robert Heinlein’s novels as a teen, and grew to dislike him, precisely because of the above. I didn’t want liberal attitudes toward sex and religion in my science fiction–to me, those attitudes were the province of the very kids who looked down on me and made fun of me for liking science fiction!

Now, I know most nerds aren’t this way. Most seem to be either full-on liberals, or libertarians who are socially liberal. I know that the SDMB is a majority liberal forum, and also there are a lot of nerds here. The consensus among nerds seems to be that they don’t fit into mainstream society, so they’re into all kinds of “alternative” stuff. Even as I write this, I think about a nerdy female patient of mine, who, at our first visit, when I was taking her social history and asked about her living situation as I always do, told me she lived with “my boyfriend and his wife.” I asked whether those two were no longer officially together or whether it was a polyamorous relationship, and sure enough, it was a polyamorous relationship. She certainly didn’t feel her nerdiness led to traditional morality and conservative religiosity.

Another commenter on the blog made an interesting point. He said he had been the same way in adolescence, and just as he was verging on going off the deep end of social awkwardness, some “cool” guys from his church took him under their wing, and that helped him to be more socially normal. Thus, he tended toward seeing religion and tradition as things he wanted more people to experience, because for him, they were associated with positive feelings and everyone being the best version of themselves they can be. And thus it confused him when he started realizing there were people out there who hated religion. But, he pointed out, this could be due to people having different experiences in their formative years, and that for some people, the assholes who bullied them were the kids who went to church.

Realizing that is a bit of an epiphany for me, because it was so different from my own experience. I remember when the Columbine massacre was in the news, one of the things that I found so weird and confusing about it is that apparently, at Columbine High School, many of the the popular, homecoming king/queen, captain of the football team/cheerleading squad types were professing, churchgoing Christians. That was really hard for me to wrap my mind around, because in the milieu in which I grew up, it seemed uncool to be religious and the social mainstream was secular.

So, is that it? Nerds feel like they don’t fit in with mainstream society, so they look to alternatives to the straitlaced, 1950’s, Leave it to Beaver culture, but for me, the straitlaced, 1950’s, Leave it to Beaver culture was an alternative? I’m curious because I’m soon going to have to talk to my father again after a long hiatus, and I think I really need to air grievances about my upbringing, so I’ve been ruminating a lot on my developmental years. Did anyone else have a similar experience, and if so, why do you think you turned out differently?

Note: I’m aware the SDMB is a pretty liberal place, so a lot of people are going to be tempted to post snarky replies like “yeah, maybe for about 2 nanoseconds, before I realized that denying others’ basic human rights is a pretty shitty way to live,” but replies like that don’t really help elucidate the issue for me.

2

I never saw the cool kids as more liberal regarding sex, drugs and rock and roll. Just more successful. But, I wasn’t bullied, just ignored.

Also, the popular kids in my town were drinkers, not druggers.

I saw the popular, outgoing kids as also simpleminded and intolerant (with exceptions). Sort of a lite version of Trump. Liberal ideas were definitely counter to the prevailing attitudes at my high school. For those old enough to remember, I had a bumper sticker on my car that said “Breakfast without Anita is like a day without Facism.”

If you were bullied by liberals I could understand rejecting liberalism. I question, however, the assumption that those bullying you were liberal, even as you are using the term.

3

Since you’ve offered this, I have to ask: What’s your field of practice?

4

Nerds are, in my experience, people who hate how exclusive thing were, and thus try to be very inclusive. Nearly every nerd I met for a long time was liberal. And if you think they don’t have sex or do drugs, you just haven’t seen them hang out in large groups. Dopefests apparently had ton of sex in the past, even.

I did start running into conservatives, but that seems more to be in response to nerdery going mainstream. People felt a place of powers in this community, and then started to lose it. They suspected people of faking, and their assumptions may have been true in the past, but they weren’t now. The popular people were willing to be nerds–the popular people they had tried to get away from for hurting them.

There was also an attitude of not being able to refuse anyone in nerd circles of the past. So even huge jerks were let in as the only place that would have them. And those same people felt a sense of power being able to do what they want. Then these new people undermine that.

So, no, I don’t think it was about lwho bullied the nerds. It’s about this feeling that your culture is changing, and refusing to change with it. It is little-c conservatism blowing up to big-C Conservatism.

5

That actually does overlap significantly with my own experience. I like to talk about myself (folks may have noticed that…). Let me know if this sheds any additional light on your question —
3a) I did not quite so much see the cool kids as morally liberal, so much as I saw them as violators of authority. Why did I care? Because I was picked on by them, and my primary source of protection was adult authority when I was a kid. Certainly these kids violated authority in picking on me (they weren’t supposed to do that!). So other stuff they also did that went against what the adults (teachers, parents, etc) wanted from us kids, it all made them misbehaving discipline problems.

5a) And I did not quite so much find comfort and solace in traditional morality and religiosity, so much as I identified directly with The System, the Establishment. The line I was fed (as we all, were, yes?) by the adults was “If you are a good child and do what’s right – not just doing what you’re told but internalizing our values – you, and not those misbehaving miscreants, will inherit social power and be the ones in charge, whereas they will fall by the wayside, getting in trouble because of their childish inappropriate ways”.

So, so far, you should be seeing a lot of ratification of your initial observation, despite these minor departures in narrative.

What the fuck (you may be wondering) happened, then? (Because I am not a conservative-minded authoritarian type. Folks may have noticed that…) And does what happened on my trajectory have any bearing on whether or not nerdy people in general remain enamored of authority and obedience to it and so forth?

  1. By the time I was 14, it was smelling like a pack of lies, quite rotten. Firstly, the real authoritarians, the adult bossy people, were less and less solicitous of people like me. They acted more and more often like the only reason we were obedient and staying out of trouble was that we were too scared to rebel. Which was a lot like the attitude of the rebellious cool kids – they considered folks like me to be wimps, intimidated creatures who probably wished to be like them but who were too scared to do so, people who knuckled under to authority. They certainly did not view us as being true to ourselves and wanting to be “good” in the sense that the adults wanted of us. So I, too, became increasingly suspicious of authority. I’d been sold a bill of goods!

  2. Not one word about gender has been injected into this yet (but you knew it was coming, didn’t you?). It wasn’t obvious to me as a kid and adolescent that any of this had jackshit to do with gender either, but let’s take a poke at it, if you don’t mind. The first age at which kids are doing the rebel-against-teachers, rebel-against-parents disobedient routine is early grade school. Think of your own. Who were the “good” kids, the obedient kids? Who was “bad”? If your experience was anything like my own, you’ll recall the teacher asking a girl, nearly always a girl, to take name of any misbehaving kids if she had to leave the 2nd grade classroom to go pee or take forms to the principal’s office or something. Boys were the misbehavors, the little brats. The “nerds” of which we speak, I bet we’re thinking mostly of MALE nerds, yes? Sissies, they also called us, right? And pansies and faggots and whatnot. Girls had a somewhat different take on things: girls who got into trouble were seen as weak, undisciplined, can’t hold themselves up to a standard, whereas boys who got into trouble were seen as “getting away with” stuff. Girls who were “good” were more likely to be perceived as being good for their own reasons, not just due to fear of punishment if they did otherwise. The experiences of nerdy girls has its own trajectory but I’m not the best person to attest to them, maybe someone else will.

So, anyway, the respect for, and embrace of, authority and The Establishment and all that, that’s not just about nerdiness but can also be viewed a gendered thing. Certainly was for me.

  1. I think some of the boys who started off on my trajectory ended up authoritarian and conservative and also bitter (because we didn’t get half of what was tacitly promised). But others jumped ship much as I did, rejecting authoritarian stuff and realizing ourselves to be outsiders and marginalized people in a way, people who don’t benefit from things remaining as they are.
6

You know, the word “nerd” is pretty much meaningless now, it has so many permutations. It’s like calling someone a “dandy,” or a “corporate man.”

As long as you premise a question based on this term (“nerd”), you will never arrive at any understanding.

7

no, I think it’s more like this:

  • people who are extroverted and enjoy being around people all of the time are more likely to be politically liberal and want to live in or close to a city and will happily hang around with anyone

  • people who are introverted and want “space” are more likely to be politically conservative and live in the suburbs or rural area. and any social activities will be among people who resemble them.

8

I think it would vary wildly, because schools and kids vary wildly. If you took the 10 coolest kids from your school and moved them into a random school on the other side of the country, I’d guess a few would be cool kids at that school, while some would be average or uncool. And if you did the same thing with the 10 uncoolest, some would be bullied at their new school, but some would be ignored or maybe even be cool.

Also being a nerd doesn’t necessarily lead to being bullied. I’m a lifelong nerd, always one of the smartest in my class, helped other kids with homework, read in class when I was finished with my work, including reading sci-fi books. I was never one of the coolest kids, hardly dated until college and I heard about some parties after they happened, but I wasn’t bullied and I had friends. And in all my schools the honors classes always had cool kids in them.

While nerdiness or being bullied I would say doesn’t necessarily leads to one viewpoint or the other, I would think it would generally lead more to being more liberal or progressive. I would think a lot of nerds who read more would then be opening themselves up to new viewpoints and see other ways to look at the world and so reject the status quo and the current authorities. And some who are bullied might grow more empathy for others who are looked down upon and learn to come together and realize that not everyone who is doing badly in life is there because of their own mistakes. And many who are bullied aren’t just victimized by their bullies, but also by the authorities who either do nothing or not enough to protect them, so being bullied doesn’t necessarily lead to trust in current systems.

Also, my impression is that while people’s identities and interests are formed while growing up, their political identities are more formed post high school. After high school you can pursue your nerdiness as much or little as you want, and bullies don’t as much enter the equation for more people.

9

I have to say that really isn’t my experience at all. I don’t think political orientation maps well to extroversion/introversion.

10

As I’ve thought about the issue in retrospect, the idea has definitely come to mind that maybe my being put off by sex, drugs, and rock and roll was really a case of sour grapes–that because I didn’t seem to have gotten an invitation to the party, I told myself I didn’t like those things anyway. But that definitely was not what was going through my mind at the time. It just seemed to be my innate personality to be a shrinking violet, a milquetoast, and I was just terrified of the notion of doing anything the grown-ups had told us were “bad.”

I wonder if that’s just because you think of liberals as good people who are anti-bullying, so by definition they can’t be bullies? But I wouldn’t get hung up on the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” Elementary school for me was in the 80’s, and high school the early 90’s, and sure, in that era, when we were 8, or 15 for that matter, we weren’t concerned with who was voting Democrat vs. Republican, or who supported or opposed socialized medicine or same-sex marriage or whatever. All I’m saying is that my feeling of being a shrinking violet, and feeling put upon by more brash, boisterous kids who did break the rules the grown-ups told us not to break, like using curse words or talking about sex, or, once we became teenagers, underage drinking, trying pot, things like that, seemed to lead me to a set of beliefs and preference for a way of life which is generally today subsumed under the rubric of “social conservatism.”

Psychiatry.

Interesting. I do identify with those things. As I alluded to above, I viewed the cool kid as rule-breakers, and felt protected by adult authority. And I viewed myself as a “good” kid because I just sat quietly in my seat waiting my turn, unlike those “bad” kids who talked in class, threw paper airplanes, said mean or rude things, etc. And yes, I really latched on (though I don’t recall anyone explicitly telling me this; I’m sure it was my own wishful thinking) to this idea that once we all aged out of this morass of childhood, and made it into the adult world, everything would be completely different, I’d be rewarded for being a “good” kid; the “bad” kids would wind up in prison or on the street and I’d be the one with the good job, nice house, and beautiful wife. And how could it be otherwise? I knew that, for example, if you had tattoos, or were a male with long hair, you couldn’t get a good job. If you partied, got drunk and/or used drugs, you couldn’t get up and go to work in the morning, and might even go to jail. But we were obviously living in a world that more or less “worked.” There was running water coming out of the faucets, the lights came on when you flipped the switch, and the grocery stores were stocked with fresh produce every day. This meant that delivery truck drivers, plumbers, and linemen were all getting up and going to work every morning, which meant they couldn’t be “bad” kids, i.e., drinkers, partiers, drug users, premarital sex-havers. They must all be short-haired, clean-cut, early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise “good” kids who went home to their families every day and read their kids bedtime stories and went to church on Sunday morning. So, in the adult world, my milquetoastness would pay off, and I’d have the last laugh at all the “bad” kids.

I guess for whatever reason, that never happened to me. I think, anytime I encountered an adult who seemed too bossy and mean, I thus viewed him as one of the “bad” kids and thought he’d eventually get his comeuppance. I never came to view most adult authority figures as bullies. But it’s interesting you used the phrase “true to ourselves.” I’ve expressed displeasure about my childhood to my mother, but to this day she can’t help but view me as a “good” kid merely because I didn’t act out, despite the fact that in 5th grade I stopped doing my homework and started getting failing grades, leading to huge arguments with my parents for years. But even though I’ve tried to explain my perspective to her, she still thinks I was “good” and that in being morally conservative, I was being “true to myself” and taking a courageous stand, rather than merely being afraid, which is the true explanation.

Yes, but this didn’t lead to any problems with gender roles or gender confusion for me. I knew I liked girls, and I just told myself that the phenomenon of “chicks digging bad boys” was a function of immaturity, and that, as above, once we became adults, I’d be rewarded for my “goodness” and some cute girl would like me for being clean-cut and not brash and boisterous and quietly waiting my turn.

11

I think you’ve got the cause and effect backwards. You, as a youth, were conservative, for some completely different reason. You interpreted those who bullied you as being not like you. Therefore, you identified them as liberal.

I don’t think that my own school tormentors were coherent in their political ideologies, but to the extent that they fit in one or the other, it’d be more conservative than liberal. They valued conformity. They considered the existing order, which put them at the top, natural and desirable. They were very vocally against homosexuality, even while themselves engaging in homoerotic actions. They believed in people helping themselves, rather than helping others. Were the bullies of your school days different?

12

The cool kids who bullied me were the insiders. I was the outsider.

IMHO conservatives are either insiders, or they want to be insiders.

13

I don’t think that’s quite right. I realize we’re using the terms “conservative” and “liberal” in somewhat nonstandard ways, but the differences were real. Look at what I thought of as being a “good” kid: don’t be loud, don’t use curse words, don’t fight, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, etc. Of course in childhood I wasn’t using the label “conservative” to describe that mentality, nor “liberal” to describe its opposite. But, later in adolescence, when I began to be aware of the concepts of conservatism and liberalism, I noticed that what I thought of as “good kid” values seemed to line up more or less with what conservatives said, whereas liberalism in my mind was the opposite because it tended to say that most of those things were in fact OK.

It’s interesting. In my own mind, I guess I still have somewhat idiosyncratic definitions of conservative and liberal. For example, I went to a small liberal arts college. I deliberately chose a small liberal arts college because I wanted college to be about learning. I had heard of the phenomenon of college partying, but based on conversations I overheard senior year of high school, it seemed like all the kids who wanted to party were going to big universities. So off I went to my small liberal arts college, where, I assumed, all my fellow students would be reserved, soft-spoken types like me, and we’d all sit around listening to Mozart and having lively discussions about Aristotle whom we’d read in the original Greek while sipping tea, and the dorms would be quiet by 10PM because we’d all go to bed early so we could enjoy being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for our morning classes, or, on Saturday night, so we could go to church on Sunday morning. After my parents dropped me off, to say I was shocked would be an understatement. People were talking about where they were going to get “wasted” that night, they were using 4-letter words, the boys were making crude comments about the girls as though they were sex objects behind their backs, they were calling me “dude,” they were blasting Pearl Jam or the Beastie Boys… oh, my virgin ears! I think if home had still felt like a welcoming and supportive environment, I probably would have dropped out after a few days, had mom and dad come pick me up, and gone home to regroup and rethink my life.

But the point is, yes, at the time, I thought of those frat boy and jock types as liberal, because of what I’ve just described. And it was at college that I first encountered the idea that such people were considered conservative, and it confused me greatly. There were of course some “alternative” students, and I’d hear them complain about the student body being so “conservative,” which made no sense to me. Underage drinking, smoking pot, having premarital sex, consuming profane or obscene popular entertainment, using 4-letter words, were liberal! Sure, when polled, those frat boys and jocks leaned Republican, but that just seemed like a contradiction to me. Why would you support the party of family values if you didn’t believe in those values! Or, perhaps, the alternative types would complain that the jocks and frat boys were homophobic. But again, that just seemed to me like an inconsistency in their thinking that I couldn’t grasp. Being against homosexuality was a traditional value, so how could they have a problem with homosexuality but not with underage drinking or premarital sex?

But, going back to the earlier stages of life, childhood or adolescence, I don’t remember noticing the kids I felt victimized by caring that much about conformity or the existing order, or whether they believed in people helping themselves vs. helping others. All I knew at the time was that I was intellectually precocious and had interests like technology nad computers, and that being like that was considered geeky, dorky, and uncool.

I will admit that I eventually came to want to be an insider–to wish that I hadn’t been a nerd, that I had just naturally been a jockish frat-boy type who had played sports, had more friends, gone to parties, gone to the prom, called people “dude,” and listened to Pearl Jam. But that didn’t happen until my thirties. In my childhood and adolescence, I definitely didn’t want to be one of the cool kids, because I thought they were bad.

14

I’ve never let someone bully me, I always fought back regardless of the consequences. I guess that makes me the libertarian that I am (fiscally conservative, socially liberal) lol. I liked hanging out and being by myself equally as much. How does one solve my riddle?

I remember quite a few of the burnouts and drunks I knew, becoming really successful even though they were bullied, and the ones that were bullied hard (goth type kids, “emo” whatever it is, nerds), who never used drugs, became worse off than most of the others in comparison. The one thing I know is that ones that did poorly in life became liberal (most, not all) and the ones who made it, became conservative. I’ve always treated people how they treated me (dick to me, dick to them nice to me, nice to them). So I wound up somewhere in the “i do pretty good” area of life and am a libertarian.
I’m not making a political statement here, just an anecdote about what I’ve observed. My point being, that many of the artsy emo kids and ones who became broke liberals, also came from rougher backgrounds, while the burnouts and drunks I knew (also jocks and AP chemistry types), came from decent to well-to-do, wound up being conservative. I think it has more to do with economic background than social niche, regardless of bullies or being in the “in” crowd.

15

It’s always seemed to me that culture changes so much and so quickly that the difference between a rebel and a follower is one of context. If you’re in jeans and a leather jacket, are you a rebel or just another James Dean clone? 400,000 hippies at Woodstock probably thought they were counter-culture, but when 400,000 people do the same thing it’s not very counter anymore. I remember when guys with earrings and girls with tattoos were cutting edge; now they’re grandparents. I suppose my personal habits would be considered socially conservative (ridiculously so) but I don’t think it’s from any identifiable sense of rebellion. I was just so much of an outcast in high school that by the time I rejected all the groups who’d rejected me, there wasn’t anything left.

If I do carry a legacy from those times, I often think that I missed out on opportunities to learn a lot of social skills, and that I’ve never recovered.

That’s not my experience. My dad is quite extroverted (or certainly appears so to me), lives in the far western suburbs of Phoenix and really doesn’t enjoy cities. I’m more introverted and prefer cities. My dad is married, and makes friends with the neighbors, and that’s enough social activity for him. I’m not a complete hermit; I need some human interaction and if I lived too far out on my own I’d get hardly any.

Freudian slip?

16

I think step 3 is where things can vary significantly. In my particular case step 3 would read.

  1. I see the cool kids as being conservative and into country music (not rock). They were authoritarian and not libertine. Sure, there was drinking and sex, but the trappings were parties at the ranch and country music, not rock music and drugs.

Steps 4 and 5 therefore turn out differently as well after changing step 3. Of course I grew up in rural south Texas, which changes step 3 to look more like the above than the step 3 you mentioned.

17

I can’t link to any at the moment but I have seen articles that show step by step how the Alt Right has been radicalizing young white men online with a mechanism no different than how violent Muslim groups radicalize their young men.

18

When I was a kid, there were no appreciable differences between popular kids and nerds in terms of being liberal or conservative.

As I grew older, the nerdy crowd grew more and more inclusive, and more liberal.

Now, it seems, young online nerds have become ripe for recruitment by the hard right.

19

I definitely identify with that.

I think I wouldn’t have seen it that way, because for whatever reason in my formative years I came to identify so strongly with this Puritanical sense of morality that I basically developed a “one-drop rule” regarding violations of it. Because the cool kids at your school engaged in underage drinking and premarital sex, I would have ipso facto regarded them as “bad” kids and liberals. The fact that, say, they might have scoffed at what they regarded as “long-haired weirdos,” or didn’t do hard drugs, or loved the American flag or national anthem or whatever, would have been immaterial.

20

Premarital sex and underage drinking and minor vandalism and stuff like that were very much “conservative” behaviors in my youth. They were the kinds of things that conservatives are very willing to overlook and kids who did that stuff were definitely popular and tended to be socially conservative.