This post is an reaction to public news, by which fourteen years old Jonathan Krohn formulated the manifest of conservatism in his book Define Conservatism. The common criticism of conservatism is based on the vagueness of this philosophy, in relation to liberalism in particular.
- Belief in natural law.
Here we can met with biased stance often, because proponents of conservatism tends to neglect just these laws, which are supporting a synergies and evolutionary advantages of collectivism and strong central government.
- Belief in established institutions
Belief in institutions, the government in particular makes a belief in individual somewhat problematic, just because established institutions tends to subdue individual freedom very often. Here's no intersubjectively accepted criterion of level, by which institutions can affect the life of individual safely without violation of individual freedom. - Preference for liberty over equality.
This may sound well, but by principle, the freedom of individual begins exactly where freedom of others ends the maximal freedom of individual exists just in completely egalitarian society. - Suspicion of power—and of human nature.
This is vague stance as well, because just the established institutions are dispersers of true power. Human nature can lead to misuse of conservative principles by the same way, like misuse of libertarian ones. - Belief in exceptionalismus.
This belief manifest often in biased meritocratic elitism, which defies the individual right very often. - Belief in the individual.
The general reason, why individuals are organizing itself into "established institutions" is just to promote the collective opinion (groupthink) over the opinion of individuals.
“...Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism...”— Karl Marx, 1867, Das Kapital (a hoax?)
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CIP recently defined the main quality one needs to be a conservative as the ability to believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time. It seems, conservative approach to life leads to hypocritical behavior in lawful way.
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers (PDF)
Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact
For example, in our country the health care reform was started. Because we are postcommunist country, this reform got the opposite direction, in comparison to the Obama's health care reform. What our government did for example, it introduced the additional charges for every visit of physician or hospital. This is undeniably right-wing decision: why to pay for health care in mandatory way, if only those, who are using the health care should pay for the doctors?
But what our government "forget" to do was to decrease the original mandatory fees accordingly. What's worse, it did these new charges mandatory as well, and it kept the whole money flow obtained in the hands of governmental health care insurance company. Of course, the reform made in this way missed its own main target: i.e. to privatize health care - it just strengthened the role of government and the level of redistribution at the governmental level. Such "right-wing" politics is only evasion for another increasing of taxes.
Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism
PLOS ONE: [url=http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0036552]Right-Wing Politicians Prefer the Emotional Left[/url]
Liberals have false sense of uniqueness, conservatives have a false sense of consensus. Liberals value uniqueness, art, dissidents, etc. and are therefore more likely to see themselves as unique. Conservatives value conformity and tradition and therefore are more likely to see themselves as part of the "true majority". So oversimplified: liberals think they're unique snowflakes, and conservatives think everyone in their group is just like them. Many liberals are very disagreeable despite having pretty much the same positions, and many conservatives assume everyone around them agrees with what they are saying. In my experience many so-called free thinkers tend to disagree with mainstream, but with each other too. This slows-down the achieving of consensus between them and their acceptation with mainstream, which is cohesive instead and it has an advantage of intersubjectivelly accepted religion.
The AWT point is, the same type of cohesive behavior we can find inside of boson condensates and/or black holes, whereas the sparse particle systems exhibit the individualistic repulsive interactions. The community of scientists and mainstream science proponents exhibits cohesive sectarian behavior, which expels all uncomfortable opinions outside of it with means of boycott, ignorance and open censorship.
And vice-versa: the opinions, which play well with intersubjectivelly accepted religion are accepted smoothly instead and they do propagate across such a sectarian groups in superfluous way, i.e. like the boson condensate. The characteristic aspect of such condensate is, it cannot exchange the informations from outside, so it behaves like the interior of dense cohesive black hole.
Having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? (via Woit's blog) The conservatives are typical by their hypocritical attitude: although they've mouth full of noble ideas about how to falsify the theories, but when their pet theory faces falsification, they just seek for excuses why not to do it. The SUSY and string theory has been falsified so many times in recent past, but what we are listening is just the "narrowing of parameter space".
Religious people tend to be conservative like the mild autists, the conservatives are forming less frequent but stronger and deterministic relationships (you may imagine it like the density fluctuations connecting the nodes of foam inside of boson condensate or black hole). The progressives are liberal and they tend to form more frequent but superficial interactions (like the particles outside of black hole which are bouncing each other). Analogically the conservatives tend to form close lobbyist groups with respect to government, whereas the progressives force the changes from bottom up. Note that economical relations are perceived in exactly the opposite way with both groups: the conservatives are libertarians, whereas the progressives do favor the socialist, centrally driven economy. The conservatives maintain only limited social relationships, but they do want to make business with each other. The progressives don't mind various artificial rules, which are restricting the market.
As you may guess, I'm completely neutral with respect to both groups. The socialistic tendencies of progressives work better at long-term macroeconomical level, in times of economical depression in particular . The conservative approach works better at the microeconomical level, where the governmental interventions often fail flagrantly. This economical politics works better at short-term level, especially in the times of economic boom. On the other hand, the free market economy operates with actual prices only, so it cannot apply to various strategical and long-term decision, where it often fails instead. Do you like this model? Just think in balanced unbiased way of mutual dualities.
Psychology study shows that completing a
calculative task versus a non calculative task predisposes one to being more selfish
States with More Religious or Conservative Populations Search More for Sexual Content on Google
Racial Resentment Drives Tea Party Membership: New research finds a strong link between tea party membership and anti-black feelings.
The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists All Look The Same. It describes a simple mathematical model which models conformity and non-conformity among a mutually interacting population, and finds some interesting results: namely, conformity among a population of self-conscious non-conformists is similar to a phase transition in a time-delayed thermodynamic system. In other words, with enough hipsters around responding to delayed fashion trends, a plethora of facial hair and fixed gear bikes is a natural result.
Conservatives may get disgust easier. And the disgust leads people to lie and cheat: cleanliness promotes ethical behavior. CIP recently defined the main quality one needs to be a conservative as the ability to believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time. It seems, conservative approach to life leads to hypocritical behavior in lawful way.
Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness
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