Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).
Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___
Ask Johnathan Haidt. I am trying to get my hands on his books but the libraries have one or two copies of ones they do have and not at my local branch.
I’m convinced that conservatives are almost all mentally ill. Most are able to function day to day, which is how they go undetected and don’t access mental health services (for these issues).
Their illness is characterised by low empathy and other traits associated with ‘cluster B’ illnesses, probably in milder form than the ones seriously mentally ill people such as sociopaths show. However, the more seriously mentally ill such as sociopaths can be accepted within these groups due to their similarities.
People in these groups don’t feel remorse or follow other human positive norms such as valuing truth, justice, kindness etc. They aren’t able to understand most positive human traits and for example, when corrected would only understand that they’d been attacked and so go on the offensive and attack themselves.
They also show strong psychotic traits, which is why they will support conspiracy theories which align with their self interest with little insight.
Lack of insight is also a feature in itself, which deserves to be highlighted. There’s limited capacity for growth or improvement as they don’t have the innate capacity for what we would call humanity.
My parents are those college educated conservatives and their mental gymnastics are Olympic level. They also donate to charities and do volunteer work like meals on wheels. They don’t make any sense to me.
We don’t pay nearly enough attention to how flawed we are as a species, how easily we can discard reason and logic to validate feelings of fear, insecurity or shame, which is what drives conservatism, not reasoned arguments or fiscal responsibility.
When you discover in life that your brain does that trick, where it will ruminate on the things you feel and it’s not required at all to make sense or figure out things with logic, you can become free from at least one of your major flaws, which is how we tend to justify our feelings with irrational rumination. Learning to stop telling yourself stories will save your mental health. Smart people sometimes have as hard of a time as stupid people in this regard, because a smart person is equally likely to think their own rumination is factual and reasonable and are less likely to be self-critical.
“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
Educated doesn’t equate to intelligent. Be born in the south and grow up in that environment and you can’t help but come out of it either broken, or exactly like you’re suppose to.
born in south. Agree. Teachers can’t legally use my fucking name anymore because of ““woke””
Disagree with that statement. Education and intelligence don’t mean your world view can’t steer your wrong. Ben Carson is both, but that doesn’t stop him from saying insane shit
I note that they state their thesis–conservatives are more susceptible to believing lies–but they only talk about lies conservatives believe, without anything to compare to. That is, they state specific misinformation that conservatives are likely to believe, but they don’t say anything about whether they’re actually more likely to believe lies, overall, than liberals/progressives/leftists. Everything that they seem to be citing is anecdotal; they have specific lies that are believed, but don’t talk about the over rate of believe of lies.
I dunno, feels low like low-effort dunking rather than actually dissecting the why.
“Conservatives are dumb, not like us liberals” is a coping mechanism liberals rely on to displace blame for failed policy. Its never the fault of the Democratic establishment when a liberal initiative fails. Its never the fault of a bloc of moderate voters, prone to selecting the most conservative voices in their own policy for fear of upsetting the Swing MAGA Voter, for backing conservative Democrats during a primary. Its never the fault of party Mega-Donors for squashing legislation inside a Dem legislative committee or bright-blue state legislature.
The lies liberals tend to believe live somewhere between “We’re helplessly outnumbered by conservatives even in states we dominate” and “Don’t trust the Radical Left, their views are too extreme and will never work!” It is the lie of impotency relative to the conservative lie of hubris. Republicans believe they can Do As Thou Wilt and mold the world to their reactionary beliefs. Democrats believe they need permission from the billionaire class and their media troglodytes before they can impose any kind of policy change.
The first two years of Biden are roughly equivalent to what Trump has now in terms of power and support, but there’s a massive difference in results.
Trump is completely sidestepping the legislative branch. Congress passed more anti-trans legislation back in December, under Biden, than it has since Trump took office.
So much of the spotlight has been on DOGE running around the Treasury Office and hijacking servers, and rightfully so. Trump’s plan to get around the legislature appears to be to pipe his cronies directly into the hardware that handles payment processing.
No science behind this, but because their reality is based on them being a good guy in their mind. Simultaneously they are actually selfish but lie to themselves about that fact.
Now when a fact comes along and points out they are being selfish, they will seek any information that will allow them to continue the selfish behavior.
Tldr they lie to themselves so they can sleep at night.
Kond of you to assume I know how to read
In fact, there is a scientific explanation. The tonsils of the brain of conservative voters are approximately the size of a sesame seed, that is, slightly larger than those of progressive voters, according to a study published in the journal Cell Press iScience.
The amygdala controls the perception and understanding of threats and uncertainty in the face of risk, so it makes a lot of sense that people more sensitive to these issues have a greater need for security, something that usually coincides with more conservative political ideas.
The relationship between the size of the amygdala and conservatism also depended on the political party with which the individual was identified.
Tonsils of the brain?
Surgical tech here: …yeah my bad. I’ll leave it to the surgeon next time.
Because it’s a cult.
Fascism and religion run on the same hardware. The paramount values are obedience to a higher power, and the core belief in the scriptures/propaganda.
This is why centrist politics never work. Why make a step towards them when they will never make a step towards you?
Anyone who believes in the fairy tale of religion is going to be more susceptible to other lies.
But that doesn’t explain why some people are way more susceptible to being stuck in a cult than others.
Personally I think it’s genetic. It’s some kind of brain feature that leads to people having beliefs that are extremely hard to change. I say this is a feature, not a defect, because you only have to go back a few hundred years to find a society where not having the right belief system can quickly lead to ostracization and death.
It’s a survival tool that has suddenly found itself in the modern informational environment and it can’t cope. See it in action and it’s incredibly tragic.
Because being conservative is directly caused by being a gullible moron.
Can confirm, many “conservative atheists” I knew in the beginning of 2010’s (they almost all became christian if they didn’t leave conservatism itself) were conservative due to some combination of “we need conservative representation within atheists” and the “they told me I would eventually grow out from liberalism, I’m just doing the unavoidable”.
Yah even as a man of science and research, even I got about 3/4 through the article and started rolling my eyes.
This is a lot of over-explanation for the common state of stupidity that comes from having shit parents, shitty school and living in a poor, shitty area. Some people rise above their adversity and insecurity, through whatever arcane and secret paths one’s thought streams follow, others become defined by their stupidity and fear and insecurity and find a community that lets them validate such feelings.
You’re never going to get rid of the stupid segment of your population, and in fact if you want to mitigate the damage they can do, as a leader you should provide for them and make sure they’re not suffering like the rest of us, because it’s not the stupid themselves that are the problem, it’s what they become when they’re desperate and how easily they can be manipulated to serve others.
As far as I’m concerned we should just admit they’re gullible and want to blame someone for their failings. Let’s take that and manipulate them to our ends. Blame the billionaires, call them thieves, keep rattling the cage and provoking them. Tell them they’d have a Ferrari if Bozo and the rat didn’t steal from them. Sure it’s gross, but it’s what you’d do with a child refusing to take their medicine. It’s ultimately for their own good.
Gullible yes, probably motions too. You can be extremely intelligent and still have massive blind spots. My mom and Grandpa are both conservatives but I’d consider them intelligent. I was able to have discussions with them and convince them a lot of conservative policy is unnecessarily cruel and short sighted. Got both to promise me they wouldn’t vote for Trump, but they’re fiscally conservative because they’ve got money.
More insulated communities.
Way lower education rates with worse outcomes.
Being religiously indoctrinated as a child.
I was going to mention religious indoctrination as well - if you’re taught your entire life to believe in something not based on evidence, I think that you’re more likely to believe things without evidence.
And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming
Also known as the “I must know more than every scientist to ever live” effect
I honestly think this ties into a core flaw of conservativism, the same one that causes them to respect authority too much to question it. In their mind there’s an almost tautological essence that someone in power can do no wrong. They ignore missteps because they “must have earned their position” but then say they deserve their position because they haven’t made any missteps. Same goes for the climate change thing: surely they must have the right opinion on it, since they’re smart! And they’re smart because they have the right opinion. Isn’t life so easy?
This is also why they try so hard not to “lose”. To them, there are winners who never fail, and losers who never succeed. They will ALWAYS try to save face or say “let’s agree to disagree”, because they do not fundamentally accept that failure is a method of improvement. This ties into black-and-white thinking as well.
Lots of it stems from early childhood. If you are punished for asking questions, If you are rewarded for just repeating what your parents say, critical thinking gets buried deep within your mind. As the „we vs them“ tribal mentality, right and wrong stops being about the action and instead on the alignment of the person committing the action. So a priest molding children might not be nice, but he is one of the Christian tribe and that’s important. On the other, if an Democrat dies diverting, it’s by definition bad, because he is in another tribe. It’s simple as that, but hard to understand if you have a progressive worldview.
They want to feel safe and secure
I think it’s far/extreme politics rather than just conservative, they are quite beyond basic conservative at this point. Lemmy makes it easy to observe how the far left also believes lies and propaganda that confirms their ideology.
Tankies push false communism with the bourgeoisie still at the top giving scraps to the proletariat and passing it off as paltry socialism. There’s no societal change to the hierarchy, balance of power, or wealth.
It’s more a weird ultra nationalism where proletariats are being tricked into thinking power has been given to the people when the ones at top are abusing their power to oppress forms of counter thought to seize whatever they want and retain their wealth. I wouldn’t consider them left just because there’s some form of socialism. Lot of countries do if at the very least they fix roads and have fire fighters.
The far left doesn’t just mean tankies. Tankies are authoritarian, which is why they have also don’t care about facts (conservatism is an inherently authoritarian ideology). That’s why a liberal right doesn’t exist; it’s a contradiction. The liberal far left (so anarchists and socialists) are pretty extreme and still care about facts.
I did mean tankies for what’s obvious on Lemmy.
What is inherently authoritarian about conservatism? There are democrat conservatistes, it just often depends on the time cursor of what they want to conserve. Economically liberal and socially conservative is a very common stance too.What is inherently authoritarian about conservatism?
So the long answer is this. It’s a 20 minute video of a leftie analyzing what conservatives actually believe (as in what framework can be used to understand and predict their seemingly contradictory positions), with another 12 minute video next in the same series if you want to see the evidence. I strongly recommend it; he’s good at what he does.
Anyway, the short answer is this: Conservatism is an ideology built on hierarchies. It attempts to sort people based on their wealth and success within the capitalist system, with the people at the top of the hierarchy—aka the ultra-rich—being inherently deserving of their wealth and more capable of using it to the benefit of society. Think Reaganomics. This is why they don’t like social justice and welfare; to them it’s taking money—and therefore power—away from its rightful holders and giving it to people who don’t deserve it. Also, the guy who invented conservatism was a monarchist trying to find a way an aristocracy might exist within democracy in the wake of the French Revolution because he predicted that democracy would spread across Europe. His conclusion was that the new aristocracy would be the ultra wealthy, and they’d have power by virtue of having the most money*. I have to reiterate: The video is really good and you should watch it. Hell, watch the whole series; it’s downright prophetic.
*He used the subjective theory of value, or the assertion that the price someone is willing to pay for something is how much value it has. As a result, people with more money have more say in the value of things and therefore more power in society.
There are democrat conservatistes
Do you mean Democrat the party or democrat as in people who think democracy is good? If the latter then while they may say—and even think—that they’re democrats, you’ll still see authoritarianism in the the positions they hold and the politicians they support.
Economically liberal and socially conservative is a very common stance too.
Those people are only small c conservative because of identity politics, and don’t subscribe to capital C Conservatism as an ideology. Ideologically they’re much more accurately described as liberal/centrists who as an addon don’t like the idea of minority rights (which historically is a pretty common position).
I feel like your point of view and the one of this video is based on the USA’s Republican Party, which is considered far right rather than just conservative in Europe.
There’s plenty of traditional right/conservative parties in Europe who defend democracy, liberal economy, but socially conservative, for example German’s CDU (Angela Merkel) and its equivalents in other EU countries.liberal economy, but socially conservative,
I addressed this point here:
Those people are only small c conservative because of identity politics, and don’t subscribe to capital C Conservatism as an ideology.
Someone who wants to roll back social welfare and corporate regulation would be considered a conservative. Anti-immigrant sentiment, while bad for many reasons, isn’t incompatible with liberalism.
authoritarianism, in my view, is the degree to which power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. so, a dictator for example, who makes decisions for everyone in their jurisdiction, is a highly authoritarian form of government.
and so is a representative who was given power by the majority (>50% of the ppl they will be ruling over), without being given a strict mandate on what policies to enact, or instant recallability if they didnt obey such mandate.
in ur example of “economically liberal, socially conservative”, lets disregard the economic stance for a moment and see if the socially conservative stance would be authoritarian.
as i understand, examples of conservative social policies include: anti-abortion laws, anti-trans healthcare, abolition or diminishing of welfare, among many others.
in these examples, it is the state that exercises power over an individual’s freedom.
abortion laws decide for pregnant ppl if they will be allowed from deciding whether to bring their pregnancy to term.
anti-trans laws decide for trans ppl whether they can decide to take hormones or get surgeries that they want to have.
welfare cuts are a form of economic coercion, pressuring ppl to find a job with a living wage, or die trying.
all of these are examples of the state exercising its concentrated power over individual ppl, to make decisions for them (or rather, prevent them from having the decision in the first place).
of course authoritarianism is a spectrum. and a country can be authoritarian without being a dictatorship, there is nuance in everything. but i hope i cleared up why conservatism (which in my experience has always presumed a state to be necessary) is inherently authoritarian.
All democratic countries, even the most progressive, have the state exercising power over the individual people to make decisions for them. To use examples deemed good for left people: paying for everyone’s healthcare, paying for everyone’s retirement, who you are allowed to have sex with, who is allowed to buy or make those products etc… Whether they are deemed more or less acceptable depends a lot on personal morality and political ideology.
All democratic countries, even the most progressive, have the state exercising power over the individual people to make decisions for them.
correct. all states do this; it is their function.
paying for everyone’s healthcare, paying for everyone’s retirement, who you are allowed to have sex with, who is allowed to buy or make those products etc…
u gave no examples of decisions being made for people. all of these examples are instances where the state does not restrict what decisions the individual can make.
healthcare and retirement being a bit more complex ofc, but those are still not instances of decisions being made for someone else, it is still up to the individual whether to accept such payments or not.
this is a big difference between liberal and conservative views. progressives or liberals often want more freedoms for individuals and more restrictions on corporations, whereas conservatives traditionally would want more restrictions on individuals and more freedoms for corporations
I don’t understand the distinction you make on restrictions.
You have no choice than to respect those rules, or you will be fined or sent to jail. How is this not a restrictions on what you can decide?i think i see where the misunderstanding lies.
so, if the state says that being in gay relationships is allowed… for me as a gay person, that changes nothing. all it does for me in a gay relationship is that the state wont be in my way because of my choice of partners.
now if u as an individual had an issue with my relationship, the state would (ideally) restrict u from attacking me on that grounds.
so, ig i agree that in that sense, the state will restrict an individual on how much power they can exert on other individuals. as the saying goes: ur freedom ends where mine begins.
How is this not a restrictions on what you can decide?
so as an individual, i may decide what gender i want to be in a relationship with, because the state wouldnt get in my way.
but if i wanted to decide for someone else what their relationships should look like, then the state would intervene.
on that point, as an openly queer person myself, i dont really see the state in a protective role of me in that way. if i got in a situation where im attacked on these grounds… empathy, warmth, solidarity, from bystanders and from friends, would be what i need. cops and other state actors are more likely to be the cause of discrimination, than the thing that stops it and heals the wounds.
so to ur original point that progressive countries still want to impose restrictions on ppl… i think that is a point where leftists would split between those who think a state is necessary to fight discrimination and power imbalance, and those who think states are the perpetuators of discrimination and imbalances of power.
and in my opinion, with the definition of authoritarianism that i gave, any ideology that necessitates a state will be inherently authoritarian, although a progressive one perhaps less so than a conservative one.
Maybe it’s the other way around… Maybe people predisposed to being lied to will end up with political views based on that lie.
