"Inside the Conservative Brain: What Explains Their Wiring?"

[applegrove]

Inside the Conservative Brain: What Explains Their Wiring?

By Avi Tuschman at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/15/inside_the_conservative_brain_what_explains_their_wiring/singleton/

"SNIP.....................................


If, as conservatives tend to believe, human nature is fundamentally competitive and self-interest prevails, then people live in a dangerous world. The “dangerous world” metaphor has long been associated with right-wing ideological views. In the last couple of centuries, though, this metaphor has taken the form of folk-Darwinism. University of Michigan philosopher Peter Railton has dubbed this worldview “your great-grandfather’s Social Darwinism,” in which “all creatures great and small [are] pitted against one another in a life-or-death struggle to survive and reproduce.”

In fact, folk-Darwinism’s ruthless “survival of the fittest” concept is a one-sided (and frequently distorted) view of the fuller scientific picture of evolution that has developed over the second half of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, biologists have made major advances in understanding how evolution motivates various kinds of altruistic cooperation in nature—in addition to self-interest (which we’ll learn about in part VI). Nonetheless, public opinion’s idea of folk-Darwinism, which situates people in a dangerous jungle world, has generally been evoked to support a right-wing moral philosophy.

Numerous political psychologists have commented on the right’s “Darwinian” dangerous-world metaphor. The Authoritarian Personality group at UC Berkeley remarked how highly ethnocentric subjects had “a conception of a dangerous and hostile world” that resembled an “oversimplified survival-of-the-fittest idea.” One conservative subject recalled the discipline that he used to receive from his father: “I always accused him of being harsh. . . . And apparently this all falls in with Darwin’s theory too.” Others who have linked folk-Darwinism’s dangerous-world motif to conservatism include the British psychiatrist Roger Money-Kyrle (1951), Princeton political psychologist Fred Greenstein (1975), and Berkeley metaphor theorist George Lakoff (2002).

The social-Darwinist survival-of-the-fittest idea appears most obviously and prevalently in the discourse of the extreme right. Adolf Hitler saw life as a zero-sum struggle between the races, in which one group would always seek to dominate the other. In a 1928 speech that Hitler gave in Kulmbach, Bavaria, he envisioned a conflict between races in pseudo-Darwinian terms:


The idea of struggle is as old as life itself, for life is only preserved because other living things perish through struggle . . . in the struggle, the stronger, more able, win, while the less able, the weak, lose . . . it is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by the means of the most brutal struggle.



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[applegrove]

1. Are the people on the right just looking into their own dark hearts and projecting

their baser nature onto the world?

[MichiganVote]

2. Damn, they have wiring? Like reason? Wow. Primeval.

[Precisely]

3. Bad potty training

[davidn3600]

4. Unfortunately the human race isnt all that altruistic

We are an incredibly violent species. Look at what we've done to ourselves throughout history. The genocide, the destruction, the racism, the war, etc.. We are destroying eco-systems. We are putting countless species into endangered status and extinction. We are in process of destroying the planet.

Altruistic behavior only exists with the social contract. Why? Because we believe in the idea that benefiting society would in turn benefit ourselves. Ultimately it is a selfish drive. In the end, people really only care about themselves and their family.

The big question is if you remove the social contract....what would happen? If there is some catastrophic event and the governments around the world all fell....what would happen? That is when you find out how altruistic the species is....

[applegrove]

5. When you are a wealthy society and have a social contract you extend your empathy to

those outside your family. That is real. At least for liberals.

[coldmountain]

6. I have the conservative wiring

I know I'm wired like a conservative but intellectually I know better and think it's a moral struggle to fight those impulses.