Well, yeah. Conservatism is, at its heart, aversion to loss, to risk, to change.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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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.
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
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.