Are liberals less imaginative than conservatives and libertarians? I highly doubt it.
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Jonathan Haidt has found that when you give conservatives a questionnaire and ask them to answer it like a liberal, they’re able to do so with ease. When you ask them to answer like a libertarian, they’re able to do that too. Libertarians aren’t nearly as adept as conservatives, but they’re still fairly good at imagining how a conservative or a liberal might answer the questionnaire. Alas, the real outliers are the liberals. In numerous studies, with respectable sample sizes, Haidt has demonstrated that liberals simply don’t have a clue. When you ask them to answer the questionnaire like a conservative, they answer it like a fascist. When you ask them to answer it like a libertarian, they answer it like a sociopath. The liberal conception of what makes the average conservative or libertarian tick is, Haidt concludes, way off.
Liberals haven’t just demonized their political opponents, they’ve demonized the very act of trying to think like their political opponents.
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Are liberals less imaginative than conservatives and libertarians? I highly doubt it. The virtues and vices are, it seems, to be found everywhere to varying degrees. Why, then, do liberals do so terribly on this “ideological Turing test”? And why do conservatives do so well? Haidt maintains that conservatives do well because they base their moral thinking on all six of the moral foundations (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, Liberty, Care & Fairness). Liberals do poorly because they base their moral thinking on only two of them (Care & Fairness). Haidt’s explanation is fascinating. But it’s got way too many moving parts and a fatal flaw: namely, it implicitly presumes that liberals are somehow spectacularly deficient in imagination. I find it hard to believe that any sizable group of human beings could be spectacularly deficient in any virtue (or vice). That’s why I’ve come up with a simpler explanation for Haidt’s robust findings: liberals suck at this test because shutting down certain parts of your imagination has become central to what it means to be liberal.
You must understand your enemy before you can defeat him.
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Liberals haven’t just demonized their political opponents, they’ve demonized the very act of trying to think like their political opponents. Trying to sympathize with, say, a Trump supporter, has come to constitute a kind of thought-crime for many liberals (and almost all progressives). So it’s not that liberals have less imagination than conservatives or libertarians; it’s that they’ve set up mental firewalls that actively prevent them from even going there. Just as Odysseus’s men stopped up their ears with wax so they wouldn’t be tempted by the seductive song of the Sirens, many liberals have, it seems, set up taboo boundaries which more or less ensure that they’ll never have to empathize with a conservative or a libertarian. Strategically speaking, this is decidedly unwise. The three truly great treatises on the art of war—Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War (1521), Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832), and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—are in agreement on this: you must understand your enemy before you can defeat him.
—John Faithful Hamer, The Goldfish (2016)
Originally Posted on Committing Sociology
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re: “Are liberals less imaginative than conservatives and libertarians?” Yes. Moral foundations are tools of social imagination. The more of them one employs the easier it is for one to imagine what it must be like to think like somebody else. Moral foundations are the color sensors of the social eye. The centuries-long conversation about social issues between liberals and conservatives is like a conversation about rainbows between a colorblind person and a fully sighted one. The colorblind liberals think conservatives are crazy for seeing moral colors that “everybody knows” just aren’t there. The fully sighted conservatives think liberals are… Read more »
Thomas Sowell – writer of “A Conflict of Visions” – provided new labels to describe the rift between political views and ideas, calling them “Constrained” (Conservative), versus “Unconstrained” (Liberal), which I feel does a good job of understanding political behavior. Steven Pinker renamed them to Tragic versus Utopian visions. Marxism, Feminism and various other progressive belief systems rely on a vision that holds a good human nature – Sowell calls these folks the “self-anointed” – with their belief that they are more morally correct and further along in their human development. In general – the young, the more educated, the… Read more »
“Liberals haven’t just demonized their political opponents, they’ve demonized the very act of trying to think like their political opponents. ” This is precisely why all liberal ideologies eventually become oppressive and an enemy of free speech. People who are conservative and libertarian in their thinking start from a point that ALL ideas are worth considering. Freedom is an absolute. Liberals and “progressives” hold no such beliefs. Only those ideas and beliefs that make it through their filters are deemed worthy on consideration. This freedom becomes relative. Hence, while liberals and “progressives” often tend to think of themselves as free-thinking… Read more »
I’ve read Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu, and I have to agree.
I’m rather liberal myself, but what I see around me is a wax factory, the further left, the more wax applied.
Stings a bit, but it’s true.