I think it’s even more base - conservatives don’t have empathy. They cannot fathom what other people are feeling. I think that is the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives. Everything else is derivative from that.
Doesn’t explain why some liberals become conservative and vice-versa.
I’m skeptical of all claims that conservatives’ brains are just different, as if there’s only liberalism and conservatism, black and white, and that’s it, as opposed to varying degrees of libertarianism to authoritarianism, and left economics and right economics.
I do think there’s something wrong with the brains of political extremists, but the thing that’s wrong with their brains is that they’re part of a cult that thinks it can do no wrong and is full of The Only Good Guys.
Old joke: A conservative is a liberal who got mugged. A liberal is a conservative who got arrested.
And a pessimist is an optimist with experience.
Oh, I live in a fairly conservative area (Nashville, TN), and I hear that attitude far too often. Distressing!
Ditka walked back on his statement:
He claimed that he was thinking specifically about in the NFL, then he doubled down and said that you have to stand for the anthem.
I am a Bears fan and I live in Chicago. I’ve been to Ditka’s restaurant once (and have no real plans to return), I appreciate what he did for the team and what he’s done for the city and all but as for his politics – no thanks. Ditka is such a nut that Republicans brought in Alan Keyes in 2004 to run against Obama for senate instead of him.
They had Perfect Apples in the 50s?
Of course. That’s how we ended up with the iconic ad campaign and slogan “Hungry for apples?”
Some of us start conservative. I was raised in an ultra conservative household. Clinton was the devil incarnate in my family.
After I moved out of that toxic place, I started thinking on my own. It took me a few years, but by my mid-twenties, I was pretty solidly liberal. Makes me the black sheep of the family.
Does that mean that my brain is different? I don’t know the answer to that, but I can say that nurture is not enough to force someone into a lifelong ideology that they are not psychologically receptive to.
I would say that most people switch ideologies for the same reason I did. Raised with one, and it takes a while to shake it off, it requires being challenged on beliefs that were previously unchallenged. At some point, nature takes over.
At its most basic, I would say that a conservative reacts with fear to the unknown, a liberal reacts with curiosity.
Still stereotyping. If that’s the case, then there would be no conservative scientists or astronauts, just as a relevant example. No researchers or botanists or marine biologists.
No, far right or authoritarian extremist politics comes down to one thing: belief.
It’s not an assessment based on the facts or the history. It’s a belief that the world is full of bad people and that we need the government to imprison and kill them all, and that we need to stop giving money to the undeserving bad people. That means more money for the productive good people.
It’s a belief in good and evil where good is defined as what you already believe and who you already associate with, so that when they commit wrong acts, they’re still on the good side, but when one’s opponents do anything, or nothing, they’re still fundamentally wrong and evil.
That belief doesn’t match reality, but like any religion or cult, it doesn’t matter. It is socially reinforced.
People with extremist beliefs universally think that the world is rotten to the core and that they’re better than most people, and they have a hero complex where they must save the world. And this means by violent crackdowns, one party rule, removing people from positions of power who disagree. It means repeating like a mantra how evil everyone else is and how they’re a member of this one group which is composed of The Only Good Guys.
Like Tom Cruise rattling off all the reasons why being a Scientologist makes you a heroic person who must save the world from the Suppressive Persons, with a crazed look in his eye that lets you know he’s a complete and total moron fully dedicated to the belief that he’s a hero saving the world from the vast majority of people.
The far extremes in politics, including communists, anarchists, and militants of all stripes (the right/authoritarians do not own a monopoly on wackadoodlery) all believe that their fringe idea that is extreme which most people reject is the only true path, and that makes them The Only Good Guys.
These are the Crusaders, Jihadists, communist revolutionaries, violent anarchists, racial supremacists, militant nationalists, and corporate crooks who believe that no matter what they do, it’s good, because they are The Only Good Guys.
It’s not a lack of curiosity. It’s simply a belief that one is superior and supreme, if not for racial reasons, then for other reasons. That belief is constantly reinforced by the group accepting you, others outside the group not accepting you and criticizing your group, your group criticizing the world with a biased viewpoint, and propaganda, not to mention the selective thinking that we all have where we confirm our own biases.
Such things are necessary to sustain radical, extreme, or factually wrong ideas. This is how religions, cults, fringe political movements, and conspiracy theorists manage to thrive in a world that runs on facts, in an information age.
I’m right because I’m good, and I’m good because I’m right, what I do is correct because I’m good, and I’m good because what I do is correct. My ideas are the best because they’re mine. Everyone else is worse and evil, and they lie. My group would never lie to me, because my group is good. The world needs me to save it, because I’m good. No one else can save it but me.
It’s a great way to feed one’s own starving ego and also feel righteous and part of the winning team. Even if you don’t win, you fought the righteous battle that will eventually be won. When you win, you helped the good guys win. It’s like a drug, addictive, and self-perpetuating.
It doesn’t come down to brain chemistry, other than the brain likes to feel rewarded and it likes to think of itself as good.
An exploitable bit of bad programming in the brain that we all share. When it is doing something actually productive or necessary, like eating food or getting a good night’s sleep or having a fulfilling relationship, that good feedback makes sense and is conducive to survival. When we’re doing something that isn’t immediately self-destructive but is bad in the long term, we can’t emotionally tell the difference. Junk food makes us feel temporarily just as good as better food. Drugs can keep us going and reward us better, temporarily, than a good night’s sleep. Being part of a cult or fringe religious or political movement or conspiracy group, believing one is on the only good side with the only good but secret information makes someone feel apart of something bigger, and special, a heroic savior who will one day triumph and save mankind from itself, because obviously, all the stupid and evil people around me need me to save them and/or punish them, because they’re stupid and evil.
That’s where it all comes from. “I am the hero this world needs” and a belief in one’s own moral superiority, and a belief that every other group is wrong and worse.
Instead of Good People and Evil people, I’d recommend suggesting that people are just people, and we’re all exploitable and vulnerable to flaws.
What we need to instead focus on is good ideas and bad ideas, moral actions and immoral actions.
If we do that, we stop blaming the opposition for being just as human as we are.
The effect of repeated hard blows to the head, Exhibit #9137…
Having met people like that, what he really means is that in the last 100 years people like him (successful conservative white men) haven’t been oppressed.
It’s actually weird because usually people like that are over sensitive to what they perceive as oppression against them (which is usually just not having their culture and values be treated as the default culture and values) while indifferent to oppression against others.
Ie lots of people like that think blacks need to get over their obsession with slavery and lynching, but think the term ‘happy holidays’ is oppressive.
The fact that he thinks nobody has been oppressed is kind of weird.
When Ditka was a player, and his teams traveled to Washington to play, did he not notice that none of his black teammates stayed at the same hotel that he did?
Maybe he noticed, but thought separate-but-equal wasn’t oppression. That was a pretty common view, remember.
And, sure, they couldn’t vote. But they would have voted for the wrong people so that was just as well.
Did he not notice that there were no non-white head coaches from when his career started until 1979?
He probably assumed, as did people such as the L.A. Dodgers official Al Campanis, when asked why there were so few black managers (and presumably also head coaches):
TX-32: Pete Sessions' Exposes Own Racism
A lot of people have been comfortable with that sort of thinking, for all their lives. It’s not the sort of thing that a Mike Ditka would question.
I wonder if he thinks the Rooney Rule was made up just for the hell of it.
Sports in general? Um yeah. That’s why Jackie Robinson had no trouble at all breaking into MLB. :rolleyes:
Thats not far off from what Jonathan Haidt more or less found in his moral foundations theory.
Liberals value fairness and harm reduction, don’t really value purity, ingroup or authority. The more you move to the right the less the first 2 matter and the more the last 3 matter.
My impression is that means the more liberal you are the more you care about injustice and unfairness and don't care if that is the way things were always done or what established authorities support or if it causes social unrest, while conservatives are more likely to view injustices as tradition, necessary for social order and an attempt to quarantine outgroups and impurities, and they value the fairness aspect less.I really don’t know if the country will survive the ideological balkanization that has happened in the US. We may see more empowerment of government on the city and state level as people realize their morals are at odds with each other and they are better off in their own enclaves.