A brief excerpt from Angela MacLeod Irons’ C2C review of Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”:
(Haidt and his researchers) asked 2,000 Americans to complete a questionnaire designed to evaluate the six moral foundations. One-third of the group was asked to fill it out as themselves, one-third was asked to fill it out as they thought a typical liberal would, and the final third as a typical conservative would. The researchers found that moderates and conservatives were the most accurate in their answers whether they were pretending to be liberal or conservative. Liberals were the least accurate, particularly if they self-identified as “very liberal.”
Golly, who’da thunk that the ignorant, gun-toting, bible-thumping racist warmongers would be better than their self-professed intellectual superiors at intelligently assessing the real-world mindset and views of their political opponents?
All sarcasm aside, it’s well worth your time to read MacLeod Irons’ edifying review of what sounds like a very interesting book.
Progressives (there is nothing “liberal” about them) are looters and thugs. Their pieties are all premised on state coercion. Their social engineering is tyranny at gun point. They guard their dogma as sacrosanct and easily justify their ends by ruthless and deceptive means. They deserve no respect as adversaries as they are mostly enemies of reason, liberty and common decency. Compromising with progressives is like mixing a milk shake with dog shit and expecting it to still taste like a milk shake.
Some of those who are extremely “liberal” (& are who are anything but in the classical sense of the term) will read something like that & suddenly claim to be “moderates” & believe their claims to be true.
Further evidence that liberalism/leftism are mental illnesses. Not only do liberals et al not have the imagination to think as conservatives might but they lack empathy, as well.
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/archives/sunnews/straighttalk/media/2013/07/20130710-203505-g.jpg
The ‘Left’
Levin ‘pedopile’, Trudeau ‘stoner’, Wynne ‘thief’
They want the young to remain ignorant of math, or any hard science for that matter, and instead be really informed on drug use and buggery.
This way they can slip into the night with the cash and everyone will be looking the other way…
You see this on Twitter every day. It’s easy to predict and see through the beliefs and arguments of Progressives on Twitter. It’s all groupthink and one dimensional. They have so much trouble doing the same for Conservatives/Libertarians that it’s hilarious. And they don’t understand how one can agree on a few issues with them, but disapprove of their tactics. Their brain can’t process it. It’s their way or nothing at all.
I’ve started reading it. I don’t agree with some of the author’s point of view, but it makes for some interesting (and occasionally eye-opening) reading.
John,
That’s why they want to take everyones guns away!
I don’t agree with everything either – a lot of it is conjectural, in an exploratory way – but yeah, it is thought-provoking, or food for thought, particularly the six “moral modules” they list/posit after having examined what different cultures around the world see as moral virtues.
John, I tend to agree with your post, especially after our family’s experience with extreme progressive/liberal thought and actions.
Leda, exactly. Outlawing firearms is always one of the first political control consolidation policies of today’s radical progressive liberal.
This review is interesting and thought provoking. What makes a liberal, and what makes a conservative? Are they born that way? Is it upbringing, living experiences?
Our oldest daughter was born and raised in a conservative family, went to the University of Manitoba and to a liberal faith based degree offering college. She married an NDPer and is now a socialist. How did this come about.
A further question is when did classical liberal democratic thinking evolve into Marxist statist thinking?
I read Haidt’s book two summers ago. Well worth the read.
six moral modules,,, I thought there were ten.
Interesting that ran into a web site with this material a couple of months ago and didn’t realize there was a book about it. I view the inability of “liberals” to think like Libertarians/Conservatives to be a fundamental cognitive defect. One of the additional characteristics of statists (who are almost all “liberals” is a failure to forsee the consequences of their actions when they pass laws. They pass a law which has quite obvious consequences to the Libertarian/Conservative population and then claim to be perplexed when “unexpected” consequences ensue. Of course their solution to this problem is to pass yet more laws to deal with the results of the first law.
I suspect that another factor is whether people are true individualists or just a part of a group. I find “liberals”, when confronted, are only able to stand up for their ideas in a group of similar thinkers as they are almost always unable to rationalize their beliefs when they are alone. When one gets enough of them in a group they suddenly become bolder and try to shout down anyone they disagree with. Also, “liberals” are generally ignorant of history and thus don’t have the benefit of all of the lessons of history; “liberals” assume that such old knowledge doesn’t apply to them now which is somewhat curious as people are much the same now as they were 2000 years ago.
This is a testable hypothesis and I would predict that “liberals” have a less complete model of the world than Libertarians/Conservatives and a tendency to ignore reality and instead substitute the way they would want things to be rather than the way they actually are.