The Psychology Of Liberals And Conservatives

In the spirit of deconstructing (heh) feminist and manboob psychology, here’s my stab at doing the same for the underlying psychologies of liberals and conservatives. I’m working under the premise that political ideology is at least partly genetic in origin, which evidence is beginning to suggest may be the case. Whether it’s one gene or thousands of genes that contribute is irrelevant to the larger picture.

Liberals are naive novelty seekers, and this manifests as, for instance, a (claimed) love of open borders and diversity, and a penchant for risk and undue optimism in the face of evidence to the contrary. Conservatives are commonsensical guardians, and that manifests as a wariness of untested outsiders and a respect for the tried and true. Neither ideology, if restrained from its worst excesses, is necessarily “bad”; logically, if liberalism or conservatism were really bad and fitness-reducing, they would have been selected out of the human gene pool by now. No, it’s probably fairer to say that in an environment of low level threats and approximate mental, emotional and psychological equality between men, (such as might be seen in an isolated, small hunter-gatherer tribe), liberalism (i.e., “foragerism”) is the more “fit” ideology; whereas in a threatening, unstable environment where human traits, both positive and negative, between people and races are unequally distributed, conservatism (i.e., “farmerism”) is the more “fit” ideology to hold.

Now… did you all notice my reframe in the above definitions? See how easy it really is to throw a snarky leftist back on his heels, in the defensive crouch? Open-minded? How about naive. Adventurous? Careless. Tolerant? Undiscerning. You can do the same with women by reframing their objections. That is a core concept of game.

A reader adds:

Liberals do indeed score a lot higher on the personality trait Openness to Experience. However, conservatives score significantly higher on the personality trait Conscientiousness. Which means conservatives tend to fuck things, including their own lives, up a lot less.

Anyway, if you haven’t you should read up on the work of Jonathan Haidt.  Very worthwhile.

I’m in a generous mood, so I’ll say this about that: a wholly conservative society will probably stagnate into dullness, albeit a dullness that pleasantly avoids total dystopia. A wholly liberal society, thrilling as it is, will probably go extinct from being overrun by barbarians, or will implode from a lack of attention to the time-tested details that scaffold civilization. Maybe both ideologies are found in humans because a mix of the two maximizes group fitness. /generosity

Liberalism is ascendent right now (spare me the hand waving about Republican electoral wins, who have been forced leftward for generations just to compete), and we can see from that the whole project beginning to unravel under their Open-minded and Novelty Seeking tutelage. Their power has grown beyond their control, and if it can’t be stopped at the voting booth, the boardroom, or the classroom, it WILL be stopped when the less enlightened hordes bring their pandemonium, whether quickly by arms or slowly by alms, crashing down upon the gated communities.

And, man, when that happens, will that be the most satisfying “I told you so” I ever contemptuously dripped like sun-warmed ice cream outta my mouth.