slatten49 wrote:
Eagle, The internet offers varying views on both liberalism/conservatism...for example:
Is Political Conservatism a Mild Form of Insanity?
By William Todd Schult, Ph.D.
Posted Sep 06, 2008
A few years ago I was standing on the deck of a beach house on the 4th of July and a person who had obviously drunk too much told me, “The secret of my life is that I always need someone to hate.”
I was reminded of this exchange while watching the stupendously ruthless Republican National Convention over the last several days. Is there anything that conservatives do not hate? Maybe drilling. In fact, they appear utterly phallically obsessed with drilling (a practice that, in about 10 years or so, might reduce gas prices by 2 or 3 cents per gallon). But otherwise, what we learned from the recent hatefest is that Republicans hate community organizers, liberals (surprise!), Madonna, the “east coast elite,” the “angry left” media, trial lawyers, people who are too smart, people who are “cosmopolitan”—the list goes on into eternity.
Listening to this litany on Wednesday night in particular reminded me of a research article that came out roughly 5 years ago on political conservatism and motivated social cognition (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin). In a nutshell, the article—by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers—seems to suggest that conservatism is a mild form of insanity.
Here are the facts. A meta-analysis culled from 88 samples in 12 countries, and with an N of 22,818, revealed that “several psychological variables predicted political conservatism.” Which variables exactly? In order of predictive power: Death anxiety, system instability, dogmatism/intolerance of ambiguity, closed-mindedness, low tolerance of uncertainty, high needs for order, structure, and closure, low integrative complexity, fear of threat and loss, and low self-esteem. The researchers conclude, a little chillingly, that “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and a justification of inequality.”
The above list of variables is more than a little unsavory. We are talking about someone full of fear, with a poor sense of self, and a lack of mental dexterity. I always tell my students that tolerance of ambiguity is one especially excellent mark of psychological maturity. It isn’t a black and white world. According to the research, conservatives possess precisely the opposite: an intolerance of ambiguity and an inability to deal with complexity. Maybe that’s one reason why Obama seems so distasteful to them: he is a nuanced, multi-faceted thinker who can see things from several different perspectives simultaneously. And he isn’t preaching fear, either.
Eagle, The internet offers varying views on both l... (
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This sounds a lot like the bullshit I was taught in a lot of my psychology classes when I was a young man. As I got older, I realized that Liberals stood for nothing. Liberalism is basically a point of view that shuns absolutes, personal responsibility, accountability and consequences for your personal choices. They favor something today and tomorrow, they will be totally against whatever it was they favored as a policy or trend. They think they have the right to reach in your pocket to expend your wealth for any of their agendas and because they attended Harvard, or some elite school, they know more then you. You can see the results of this kind of thinking we have had since WWII. Our nation is in a big mess.
The American People know something isn’t right and they are beginning to wakeup to that very fact. The smoking guns are just about found in the hands of the Liberal everytime you find one. They have a hatred for our religious traditions, which this nation was founded upon, for life and common decency. They have paralyzed just about every level of government in our nation, bankrupted every major municipality and have strattled the country with an enormous debt that will be our undoing. In the final analysis, the Liberal minded person who follows this kind of thinking will see his/her ass in a situation that will
not be very pretty. They will be held accountable and there will be consequences for sixty years of deception.