Posted on 01/12/2014 2:26:26 PM PST by ChinaGotTheGoodsOnClinton
I wonder if any Freepers are aware of Jon Haidt. His theories explain a lot and explain why we are in this current battle of Freedom vs. Fairness.
He is a self-identified liberal so don’t let your friends when you explain this to them get away with saying he is a right wing wacko.
Basically he has found that there what he calls “Moral Foundations” that humans everywhere subscribe to. These are in our makeups, and we filter information to fit them into our moral foundation.
Basically there are 5 of these:
1)Care/Harm
2)Fairness/Cheating
3)Loyalty/Betrayal
4) Authority/Anarchy
5)Purity/Hedonism
Everybody is born with these because of the human survival instinct. But instead of weighting these all the same the every human falls into 2 ways of attaching importance to these moral foundations.
The liberal attaches more weight to these foundations starting with care/harm the most important and decreasing from there to the lowest which is purity/hedonism. The conservative weighs them all equally.
If you keep this in mind, like a decoder ring liberals start making sense. The irony is by making "Do no harm" and "Fairness" the only things they think are important causes a lot of harm and unfairness because this approach is too simplistic.
Moral Foundations Theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Foundations_Theory
. . . .
TED Talk: Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives [video]
. . . .
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt (Author)
We can spend a lifetime trying to figure out why they do their illogical harmful things but the basic difference between liberals and conservatives is the issue of control. Liberals love to control others. Conservatives just want to be left the hell alone.
My 2 cents. I draw a distinction between liberals and leftists, and I despair that so many consider the way the two terms are used amount to nothing but a semantic exercise. If by ‘liberal’ you mean ‘leftist,’ I agree with you...they’re evil. They are rapacious people with a totalitarian impulse, who would be happy with the world as a concentration camp as long as they got to be the guards. I regard liberals as naive idealists. They are people who think that there can be a heaven in this world, and look for human gods to give it to them. Liberals are the livestock of cunning leftists. Leftists understand semantics and the use of language much better than conservatives do, which explains why they make such good use of euphemisms like ‘progressive,’ ‘same-sex’ and ‘undocumented.’ It’s also why they are so dominant in academia and the media. Politics to the left is a study and discipline of how to manipulate the opinions and emotions of the greatest number of people...facts be damned.
“No, but they are easily manipulated by those who ARE evil, because ...”
Agree with most of your post but one can either participate in evil or not. The reasons do not matter. Justifications and ignorance do not matter. People saying ‘I didn’t know’ or “I was just following orders” share the responsibility of a given outcome they participated in. The Germans who turned their back on the gassing of the Jews are very much the equivalent of the pusssified men in your example.
They are evil in their actions because they help perpetuate evil. Now one can argue degrees...but evil is evil.
I find that people hate addressing this because they don’t want to say that their liberal ‘friends’ and members of their own families are evil. But it is what it is.
Sorry that we disagree. I don’t agree with your blanket assertion, that is all.
Please don’t take my disagreement personally. I am not saying you can’t believe in that blanket assertion, that is your right. I simply don’t agree with it.
Yup, I mean leftist. I make no distinction simply because I don’t see any ‘liberal’ as we used to know them, stand up and attempt to take their name back from the leftists.
I very much believe words mean things. Today, Liberal and Leftist are the same thing. They willingly merged their belief systems to achieve power over the hated right. So they should be treated...in their preferred term ‘equally’.
I don’t take it personally at all. And I understand your reluctance. It’s not an easy idea to accept. But I ask that you give my posts -serious- thought, as I do everyone reading it. Do your level best to rip the logic behind it apart in your own minds. Seriously, no joke or sarcasm intended.
But I really think that when you remove the emotion of it from the equation and just look at the actual “if/then’ of it, it’s impossible to refute.
Liberals have minds?
the house burns down, the son is arrested for something and the daughter finds out she’s pregnant?
Yup. And it’s all mom and dads fault! (and Bush’s too.)
Thanks for the courteous response...I have been on FR for a while and seen enough personally contentious arguments start that didn’t need to go that way, and didn’t want this discussion to go down that road, so...thanks. I certainly didn’t mean it as an attack on you or your point of view.
I sometimes engage in the exercise of viewing things as a black and white in order to find the endpoints, and then look at where a cleavage point exists along a continuum between the two.
For example, take abortion.
You can take one end of the spectrum and say that once the sperm has penetrated the egg and division occurs, then any action to stop further division is immoral and wrong.
The other end of that spectrum would be people who believe that a pregnancy can be “terminated” at any point from the egg dividing once to the last toe of the infant still being inside the mothers’s body during birth.
Once the two ends have been defined, one can look along that continuum to see where the cleavage point occurs, a rule can be defined, and the system can be converted into a black and white situation, at least from my own viewpoint. On one side, you are against abortion. On the other side, you are for it. It is a cleavage point.
But it isn’t always easy or even possible to do. I have tried to do this with liberals, because I simply don’t think ALL liberals are the same. (I know you disagree with this, but I simply see it differently)
I just cannot always put people who hold a belief in what I might see as as a key liberal trait (be it on immigration, taxes, or the welfare state) in the same class as someone who subscribes to ALL of them, just because I don’t see all issues as being equally damning.
I think you and I are different on this...I am not saying you are wrong and I am right, but I cannot make that leap in the context I described.
And by the way, I did read your entire post...I know you probably get people who read to that point and shut off. I made it a point not to succumb to that.
I’m sorry, this theory is just too kind to progressive/liberal/Democrat philosophy.
I see their philosophy as consisting of 3 things:
B as in Big. Anything big is ok, big government, big labor, big banks. Individuals are small and therefore to be controlled.
H as in Hate. They hate anyone that does not agree with them. Hence they use personal attacks a lot. How often does a liberal call someone a racist?
O as in Oh shut up! If you don’t agree with them, you have no place in the conversation, you are evil. They will use all the tools of government (i.e. the IRS) as well as the media to silence you.
There is no “figuring out the liberal mind”.
Waste of time.
thanks for this post China...
I saw the Ted talk and i think that ‘those’ people
are not true liberal. Ted was talking about reasonable
people who are liberal. Most of what i see of people who
are called liberals are something other than liberal in the true sense.
That is another way to divide it but the gender roles have gone south in our society.
This dichotomy exists in the aborigines of Australia, the Eskimos and everywhere else that Haight has studied.
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