This is an example of one of the things that most baffles me about the right in the US today.They have this whole narrative about government overreach, but the reality is that while, for example, government agencies did have DEI policies, they were internal. There was no interference in businesses - the businesses that had or have DEI policies chose to on their own.
When you stop thinking of conservatives as acting in good faith and realize that they have always been bad faith actors, it makes a whole lot more sense and life gets a little easier because you no longer waste time and energy trying to bring just the right but of information or perspective to show them the errors in their logic.
I’m not trying to show them anything, and I’m not talking about good or bad faith.
I’m talking about the rank and file conservatives who believe the self-serving lies of the bad faith actors in office, and specifically who believe the astonishingly obvious lies that a private company choosing entirely on its own to implement some policy (like requiring masks or following DEI hiring practices) somehow represents government overreach, and that the government then interfering to dictate what the private companies can and cannot do somehow represents the elimination of government overreach.
That’s not just the lies of bad faith actors - that’s blithering insanity.
And again, I’m not talking about the people who spin that insanity - I’m talking about the people who believe it - who seemingly unquestioningly believe, literally, that freedom is oppression and oppression is freedom. I have no idea how they manage to do that, and it baffles and fascinates me.
I am also referring to rank-and-file conservatives. The ideology itself is one of bad faith, from the perspective of anyone who does not believe in rigid societal hierarchies, Just World fallacy, power over orders, or DOES believe in rule of law.
The ideology is not honest about the goals that it communicates (ex. slowing societal progress to keep things “safe” and protecting the status quo). The actions of practitioners of the ideology, throughout history, including its modern origin of protecting monarchy, show that it is simply about establishment and enforcement of hierarchies of power, where everything from morality to facts are based upon the individual’s position in the hierarchy, and those lower or outside of the hierarchy are open targets for abuse and exploitation.
The ideology is so fundamentally opposed to democracy and universal self-rule that it is not possible for good faith engagement on any level.
That’s not just the lies of bad faith actors - that’s blithering insanity.
For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity. My point is that any overlap between objective reality and “beliefs” spouted by conservatives is purely coincidental. Conservatism is not a reality-based ideology but rather one that seeks to force reality into whatever its practitioners’ preconceived ideas are, or what they are told by authority. Willful, voluntary delusion and denial of observed reality are features, not bugs.
For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity.
Broadly, though more in the context of Nietzscheanism vs. stoicism, I’d noted the distinction between those who believe that reality can be forced into alignment with preconceptions and those who believe that conceptions must follow reality.
Sort of like the linguistic distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism, but on a much greater scale.
(And as far as that goes, I think that prescriptivism is obvious bollocks).
I’d never really considered that same distinction in a broad political context though.
I suspect part of the problem is that I’ve never been even the slightest bit authoritarian. I used to be further to the right (never really past barely right-of-center, but still much further than my current hard left), but since I never had any use for authoritarians, my experience with the right was mostly old-school right libertarians - people who advocated for some government interference in private lives because they believed it to be necessary to mitigate harm.
I don’t think I’d ever really considered the idea of people believing, if not stated quite this way, that authority can literally change reality - can force reality to take forms other than whatever it is by which they’ve chosen to be offended.
So… yeah. It’s likely not that they so grossly misperceive reality but that the whole idea of trying to accurately perceive it in the first place is foreign to them, since they believe that it - whatever it might be - really is subject to the dictates of puffed-up egomaniacs in suits. So all they need to do is get the “right” puffed-up egomaniacs in charge, and it’ll just magically change to whatever they prefer.
Oh… and…
Yeah - they stay trapped in that delusion because they never see their preferred puffed-up egomaniacs’ failures to alter reality as a counter to their delusion. Instead, to them, it must be that the puffed-up egomaniacs with [D]s after their names have altered reality in the “wrong” direction. So the solution is to try even harder to get the puffed-up egomaniacs with [R]s after their names in office, so they can wave their magic wands and reshape reality into the form they prefer.
And that’s another benefit to binarism too. I’ve been mostly ascribing the tendency to binarism to the need for self-affirmation and the benefits of backhandedly convincing oneself that one is a good person simply by dint of the fact that one is not part of the (falsely) dichotomous “bad” opposition.
But yes - it also undoubtedly spins off, to some degree, from the misconception that the only reason the world has problems is that the “wrong” puffed-up egomaniacs with magic wands are in power.
Indeed. It’s also not that everyone who embraces the ideology understands that it relies upon “magic” or what they even believe in (dispassionate self-reflection is antithetical).
And definition of the preferred reality is also relevant in understanding why people embrace the ideology and why it should not, in my opinion, be given legitimacy for the real and unnecessary harms that it brings. Nearly all of its characteristics revolve around exerting power and control over others and leveraging the Just World fallacy to justify it.
The ideology is strongly associated with fear and rage responses for a reason; it allows significant cognitive load related to coping with a chaotic reality that one doesn’t have control over to be completely avoided. It’s like having a heroin auto-injector that prevents one not at the top from feeling bad while those at the top can leverage it to reduce cognitive load necessary to justify megalomaniacal behavior to themselves and others.
My parents are both conservative - white Protestant evangelical Christian conservatives. In my 20s, I first became liberal, then atheist, then leftist. I’ve given up talking to my dad because he won’t discuss in good faith, but my mom still… tries.
I genuinely think the problem with conservatives is that they pay attention to and trust the wrong sources. We all have to trust people at some point, we can’t experience or verify literally everything ourselves. And the people we listen to have to trust who they listen to, forming large and complicated trust networks.
Most people don’t spend any significant time or effort vetting their sources. And if you don’t weed out bad sources, or learn to be skeptical of people you might already trust, then your trust networks become corrupted. By that point, questioning someone you trust could be a slippery slope - if they were wrong (or worse, lying) then that means soooop much of the trust network might fall, too. And that is legitimately terrifying for folks. It certainly was for me. It was honestly hellish, realizing that I had to rebuild from the ground up my entire trust network, and now I have anxiety about needing to keep my mental guard up at all times lest I be fooled again.
No wonder people get invested in politics and culture wars as team sports, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. It’s painful to stop.
I could go on and on about this, but I don’t have these thoughts formalized very well, so it’d just be rambling at this point.
When you stop thinking of conservatives as acting in good faith and realize that they have always been bad faith actors, it makes a whole lot more sense and life gets a little easier because you no longer waste time and energy trying to bring just the right but of information or perspective to show them the errors in their logic.
I’m not trying to show them anything, and I’m not talking about good or bad faith.
I’m talking about the rank and file conservatives who believe the self-serving lies of the bad faith actors in office, and specifically who believe the astonishingly obvious lies that a private company choosing entirely on its own to implement some policy (like requiring masks or following DEI hiring practices) somehow represents government overreach, and that the government then interfering to dictate what the private companies can and cannot do somehow represents the elimination of government overreach.
That’s not just the lies of bad faith actors - that’s blithering insanity.
And again, I’m not talking about the people who spin that insanity - I’m talking about the people who believe it - who seemingly unquestioningly believe, literally, that freedom is oppression and oppression is freedom. I have no idea how they manage to do that, and it baffles and fascinates me.
I am also referring to rank-and-file conservatives. The ideology itself is one of bad faith, from the perspective of anyone who does not believe in rigid societal hierarchies, Just World fallacy, power over orders, or DOES believe in rule of law.
The ideology is not honest about the goals that it communicates (ex. slowing societal progress to keep things “safe” and protecting the status quo). The actions of practitioners of the ideology, throughout history, including its modern origin of protecting monarchy, show that it is simply about establishment and enforcement of hierarchies of power, where everything from morality to facts are based upon the individual’s position in the hierarchy, and those lower or outside of the hierarchy are open targets for abuse and exploitation.
The ideology is so fundamentally opposed to democracy and universal self-rule that it is not possible for good faith engagement on any level.
For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity. My point is that any overlap between objective reality and “beliefs” spouted by conservatives is purely coincidental. Conservatism is not a reality-based ideology but rather one that seeks to force reality into whatever its practitioners’ preconceived ideas are, or what they are told by authority. Willful, voluntary delusion and denial of observed reality are features, not bugs.
Ah… yes. I see something I’d been missing.
Broadly, though more in the context of Nietzscheanism vs. stoicism, I’d noted the distinction between those who believe that reality can be forced into alignment with preconceptions and those who believe that conceptions must follow reality.
Sort of like the linguistic distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism, but on a much greater scale.
(And as far as that goes, I think that prescriptivism is obvious bollocks).
I’d never really considered that same distinction in a broad political context though.
I suspect part of the problem is that I’ve never been even the slightest bit authoritarian. I used to be further to the right (never really past barely right-of-center, but still much further than my current hard left), but since I never had any use for authoritarians, my experience with the right was mostly old-school right libertarians - people who advocated for some government interference in private lives because they believed it to be necessary to mitigate harm.
I don’t think I’d ever really considered the idea of people believing, if not stated quite this way, that authority can literally change reality - can force reality to take forms other than whatever it is by which they’ve chosen to be offended.
So… yeah. It’s likely not that they so grossly misperceive reality but that the whole idea of trying to accurately perceive it in the first place is foreign to them, since they believe that it - whatever it might be - really is subject to the dictates of puffed-up egomaniacs in suits. So all they need to do is get the “right” puffed-up egomaniacs in charge, and it’ll just magically change to whatever they prefer.
Oh… and…
Yeah - they stay trapped in that delusion because they never see their preferred puffed-up egomaniacs’ failures to alter reality as a counter to their delusion. Instead, to them, it must be that the puffed-up egomaniacs with [D]s after their names have altered reality in the “wrong” direction. So the solution is to try even harder to get the puffed-up egomaniacs with [R]s after their names in office, so they can wave their magic wands and reshape reality into the form they prefer.
And that’s another benefit to binarism too. I’ve been mostly ascribing the tendency to binarism to the need for self-affirmation and the benefits of backhandedly convincing oneself that one is a good person simply by dint of the fact that one is not part of the (falsely) dichotomous “bad” opposition.
But yes - it also undoubtedly spins off, to some degree, from the misconception that the only reason the world has problems is that the “wrong” puffed-up egomaniacs with magic wands are in power.
Mm… yeah. Things are falling into place. Thanks.
Indeed. It’s also not that everyone who embraces the ideology understands that it relies upon “magic” or what they even believe in (dispassionate self-reflection is antithetical).
And definition of the preferred reality is also relevant in understanding why people embrace the ideology and why it should not, in my opinion, be given legitimacy for the real and unnecessary harms that it brings. Nearly all of its characteristics revolve around exerting power and control over others and leveraging the Just World fallacy to justify it.
The ideology is strongly associated with fear and rage responses for a reason; it allows significant cognitive load related to coping with a chaotic reality that one doesn’t have control over to be completely avoided. It’s like having a heroin auto-injector that prevents one not at the top from feeling bad while those at the top can leverage it to reduce cognitive load necessary to justify megalomaniacal behavior to themselves and others.
My parents are both conservative - white Protestant evangelical Christian conservatives. In my 20s, I first became liberal, then atheist, then leftist. I’ve given up talking to my dad because he won’t discuss in good faith, but my mom still… tries.
I genuinely think the problem with conservatives is that they pay attention to and trust the wrong sources. We all have to trust people at some point, we can’t experience or verify literally everything ourselves. And the people we listen to have to trust who they listen to, forming large and complicated trust networks.
Most people don’t spend any significant time or effort vetting their sources. And if you don’t weed out bad sources, or learn to be skeptical of people you might already trust, then your trust networks become corrupted. By that point, questioning someone you trust could be a slippery slope - if they were wrong (or worse, lying) then that means soooop much of the trust network might fall, too. And that is legitimately terrifying for folks. It certainly was for me. It was honestly hellish, realizing that I had to rebuild from the ground up my entire trust network, and now I have anxiety about needing to keep my mental guard up at all times lest I be fooled again.
No wonder people get invested in politics and culture wars as team sports, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. It’s painful to stop.
I could go on and on about this, but I don’t have these thoughts formalized very well, so it’d just be rambling at this point.
Stay safe out there, gang.
I’ll say it again, louder for the ppl in the back.
YOU CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME
THEYRE CALLED CONSERVATIVES
deleted by creator