I was watching a video by Georgia Dow in which she talked about a study showing how fear drives people to be more conservative. What that reminded me of was the rationalization I keep stumbling upon almost every day lately: “the alternative is worse”.
We are mostly not revolutionaries willing to die for a cause. We just want to live our quiet lives, so we pay the thugs that offer us protection from themselves. The alternative is worse.
I can’t criticise people for trying to survive, but I think it’s important to be honest with ourselves. It’s all bad and the good option is really hard and a scary risk with too many sacrifices.
And let me get personal to drive the point home. Anxiety and depression are just my reality. I’m very isolated and avoid interactions as much as I can. I’m in a bad place and would totally tell you with great conviction that out there somewhere is worse. I also believe it could be amazing, but the chances of me suffering, actually, the certainty, makes me think it’s not worth it even trying.
Anyway. Be kind kind to yourselves, be kind to all the others, but be honest.
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Well, yeah. Conservatism is, at its heart, aversion to loss, to risk, to change.
That’s how they like to see themselves. But in reality it’s just hate and resentment bred by an unwillingness to use one’s brain…
That’s your justifcation for dismissing and avoiding them.
In truth, nothing is just hate.
Hate and resentment don’t just happen in a vacuum. They come from fear and insecurity.But it’s easier to dismiss, than acknowledge their humanity, empathize and work with them on their concerns.
And what is that fear and insecurity based on? Certainly not reality.
The fear and insecurity is based on reality, in that it often stems from massive inequalities and injustices. The problem is that it’s directed at the wrong people.
For example, around where I live, a lot of conservative beliefs are centred around a fear of immigrants, and it’s along the lines of “there’s not enough housing for the people already here, so we should stop letting other people in”. The lack of housing in this area is genuinely at crisis point, and the fear and insecurity arising from that is very much based on something real.
Where the right and the left differ is on who they blame for this. Those with conservative beliefs blame their non-English neighbours. Those with more progressive beliefs blame government decisions that have resulted in too little house building and too many wealthy people buying houses not to live in, but to visit for two weeks a year or to let out on AirBNB.
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Obviously I cannot speak to what the situation is in the US, or even necessarily the entirety of the UK. I can just say that in my specific geographic area, it is largely second homes, holiday homes, AirBNBs, etc that are the problem, because the number of houses lost to the residential market through this is pretty much exactly the same as the number of households currently legally classed as homeless (which often means not necessarily on the streets, but being “housed” in hotel rooms and the like). If every single house that is not currently being used to home a family was confiscated from the owners of second homes, holiday lets, AirBNBs, etc and repurposed into residential housing, there would not be a housing crisis here.
Private landlords have, obviously, been raising rents in the last few years, but a big part of that is a matter of supply and demand. If one house gets 50+ families applying to rent it, of course prices are going to rise. We don’t tend to have multi-millionaires buying up huge swathes of houses here, with the average property “portfolio” being less than 5 houses. It’s simply not possible to get thousands of individual landlords to collude on prices, so if the actual problem - a lack of houses available to live in - was fixed, competition would be sufficient to keep prices under control. If no one is applying to rent a house because they’ve already found somewhere else to live, prices will drop quickly.
And which of those two views is based on reality?
I think people can have multiple views in their head at once. Since I come from the sciences it reminds me of the quantum physics analogy. In quantum theory you make a state concrete by projecting the state onto a representation. There are many choices each a different way of measuring the system or understanding the dynamics. Some are more useful and less confusing then others when trying to answer a specific question but they are all valid. Where you get to human issues is what conclusions you try to draw based on your analysis of course and that is open for debate.
Rejecting someone else’s reality is an important skill for establishing boundaries, but it’s also critical to remember that it’s still real to them.
While this is, by most measures, objectively the best era to live in for humanity, the orphan grinding machines are still grinding along. There’s plenty to fear.
There’s certainly plenty to fear but none the stuff those people choose to fear because of their wilful ingnorance is actually real…
Fear is the path to the conservatives. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to eating an entire tub of ice cream in one sitting. Eating an entire tub of ice cream leads to regret. Regret leads to promising oneself to start exercising. Promising to start exercising leads to purchasing a gym membership. Purchasing a gym membership leads to going once and never returning. And that leads to watching more Fox news on the couch. The circle of life, it is.
Not aversion to risk imo
And that’s why I think conservatism is kind of ignorant, because life itself is about change and progress, not about stagnating in one place. I’m very progressive though, so I’m more about taking a risk and seeing what results. To me life is about moving forward and ahead and not going backward into the past.
Conservatives don’t want to regress, either, and that’s part of the aversion to change. To the conservative mind, most changes will be bad, and result in regression, not progression. So we advance carefully and cautiously, not in great leaps.
I think fundamentally conservatives feel that humans are flawed beings and they can not change things for the better.
This is why slogans “make America great again” are conservative - the golden age is in the past for them.
Importantly, the golden age is mythological. Since evidence is irrelevant to conservative beliefs, rather functionality is relevant, the narrative of a golden age is appealing because it is achievable since it was already achieved in the past. What I mean by functional is that it is important that their beliefs serve a purpose but it is not important whether their beliefs are based in objective evidence. This is why conservatives who are fully aware of the complexity of US history want to propogate a sanitized version. They believe the sanitized version instills correct values while telling the whole story would influence people to perform those bad behaviors. It makes sense if you don’t think about it, and thinking about it is inherently traitorous.
It IS mythological as in, there never was an age without turmoil and unrest and inequality. I know they think that a “golden age” is one where we live by the “old rules” of former times, but there’s good reasons why those former times and those rules were left behind and/or changed.
Their version of what ‘correct values’ are, is totally different than mine. They have a saying here, “Utah values,” by which they mean values that favor big families, religious beliefs, and capitalist goals. That’s fine, but those aren’t the values I want for myself or my family.
So they can try to drag the U.S. backward all they want, but I’m not going along, I’ve come too far to go backward.
And I’m not sure WHICH golden age they mean - I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and though people THINK those were “happy days,” I remember the turmoil, the political unrest, the protests about police brutality, the hate, the huge problem of drug abuse and alcoholism everywhere.
I think the golden age is a fictive past that never truly existed (and nobody would really want to go back to anyway).
It does not matter when was it. You are thinking about this factually, meanwhile it is psychological/intuitive feeling, has little to do with reality. Each conservative will answer differently. Some will even point to Ancient Rome. Does not matter.
Well that’s kind of my point, no matter which age they are pointing to, none of them were really “golden.” There’s never been a time when there wasn’t war and disease and suffering and inequality, so it really is a psychological construct and not a reality.
For the sake of argument, let’s say there was such age. Changes nothing.
That’s what I’m saying.
That’s very true, I’ve noticed over the years living here in the Red state of Utah, how fearful the conservatives are about EVERYTHING. They just passed a law to keep trans people from using public bathrooms - even though there are probably four trans people in the whole state. Now the Gov is signing a bill making it easier for anyone to have a book banned from school libraries if it has any mention of human relationships or sexuality.
As my grandma used to say, our state motto should be “running Scared.” I think the reason our teen suicide rate is so high here is not just because of the anti-LGBTQ biases but also the culture of anxiety and fear everywhere you go.
