this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I think some people have trouble conceptualizing those around them as human. From what I can tell it's not intentional cruelty, at least at first, they just struggle to conceptualize and understand the idea that all of the people around them have just as dynamic and complex inner worlds as they do. When it's a struggle to make that connection, it's easy to go through life ignoring the plight of those around you, disregarding them with the same ease most people dismiss a warning on a computer.
As someone formerly in the same boat, I think belief in the Abrahamic religions makes it hard to identify with the plights of others, because if you believe in a just, loving god, then "those people" have the religion and hardships that they do for a reason (and the reason is usually either "it's part of God's plan" or "they made bad decisions").
When you base your entire worldview on a faulty premise, you can use sound logic to get all the way to libertarianism without a problem. Once I reexamined and discarded my belief in the Christian god, it was like flipping a switch; I went from douchey religious Libertarian to bleeding-heart socialist almost literally overnight.
My favorite part of Libertarianism is that Saint Rand collected Social Security.
It exemplifies the shameless selfishness of the libertarian philosophy and really links well with the conservative mindset of "I got mine, fuck you".
Indeed. That's one of my biggest problems with religion and why it makes me uncomfortable even though I ostensibly believe that people have their right to spirituality. Ultimately, with spiritual premises, people can come to faulty or unpredictable conclusions even with sound logic, and that somewhat unnerves me.
Definitely.
Although, to be completely fair, as toxic as I believe theistic religions to be, religion and politics are far from the only areas with this problem. Cosmologists, trained philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, and physicists all suffer from this same issue. Something as basic as assuming the universe is finite vs. infinite leads to drastically different conclusions in a wide variety of fields, and there's a decent argument to be made for each contradictory assumption
Defining your initial and boundary conditions properly has a huge impact on your results, even if you do everything else right. Edit: so it's even trickier in areas where we don't know what the initial or boundary conditions are
The huge difference with the professions you mention is that in all of them successful participants don't wed themselves to any premise. They can allow for the possibility of two competing premises, or even usefully imagine a world with a counterfactual premise, and accurately communicate the uncertainty or incongruence of their views (it is technically possible for political science to work this way too, but rare to find someone who hasn't picked a "team" outside of academia).
The irrationality and intellectual danger lies not in adopting hypothesis but in granting them the status of dogma.
I would also argue that the potential for real world harm of adopting a wrong premise is way less for a cosmologist or mathematician than for a religious leader or politician. Relevant SMBC: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/purity-3
Don't get me wrong, I don't think they should be in equal footing. I'm just saying that it's worth remembering that a healthy dose of skepticism and analysis of the baked-in assumptions is valuable in many fields, and pointing out how otherwise reasonable people can end up voting conservative based purely on a single unexamined assumption.
Edit: and I always appreciate a relevant SMBC link, especially one that properly recognizes the power of chemistry ;)
You're completely correct. Ultimately this is a problem we suffer from in general with a multitude of topics, and I think the only way to really get around it is by trying to be respectful to people who have different beliefs from your own, as long as that respect goes both ways of course. Important to mention though is that it can be a little harder also to argue with spirituality because while we could theoretically eventually come to a solid proof of whether or not the universe is finite, I am unable to disprove the existence of any given deity and I am also unable to prove or disprove any of the specific tenets of that deity.
Well said.
Absolutely. This brings me to my favorite philosophical topic in recent times, The Paradox of Tolerance, described by Wikipedia as:
Really, you've probably already heard this before, and I only bring this up because it seems like it's always relevant these days and because it was first described by Karl Popper, who was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
Absolutely, I'm familiar with the paradox of tolerance but I think it's always good to spread it around a bit more. How I conceive of it is that tolerance is not a principle but a social contract, and when one side breaks that social contract the other side is no longer beholden to it either.
You and I may have had a very similar conversation back on that "other" site, lol. At least that's where I first heard about the "social contract" model as a way to explain why it's not a paradox at all.
Quite possibly, though I've forgotten where I originally learned it so it's possible we just both learned it from the same place. I'm just glad to see the knowledge becoming more common, it was really annoying during the era when people would be like "Doesn't choosing not to tolerate nazis make you just bad as them?" The answer's obviously no, for so many reasons, but people understanding the paradox of tolerance makes it less common to be asked that.
I'm skeptical that many conservatives have dynamic and complex inner worlds ... I don't see much evidence that they think much about anything, but rather offload as much as possible onto others. My mother, as she gets older, appears to actively avoid thinking for herself and has begun the decline into right-wing thinking. She likes the Daily Mail to do her thinking for her.
It took me years around that sort to realize the common denominators: it's a fundamental lack of curiosity about the world combined with a legitimate inability to see the world through any perspective but their own.
Throw in some ill-defined fear, insecurity, and anger at their situation in life.
Indeed, I guess as any of us gets truly elderly it's harder to keep curiosity going - our brains aren't as flexible, so we try and go with that we know. I think that a lot of right-wing media purposefully courts nostalgia so they can get their hooks in.
I think that all people and many non-person animals have dynamic and complex inner worlds, but Conservatives definitely have a blind spot when it comes to political evaluation. Unfortunately, it's our nature as our species to seek out shortcuts. One of the ways we do this is by finding trusted sources to do some level of evaluation for us, that way we don't have to think about as much. With Conservatives, many of them learned to trust certain sources from their parents, religion, or their own misguided fear. These sources are conspiratorial and hate-mongering, and they usually don't apply any critical analysis to them. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle where their sources tell them to trust no one and to be hateful and from that they don't pick up any new sources, causing them to enter an echo chamber they can't escape. It's honestly kinda sad and I somewhat pity them, but I still will do what it takes to defeat them politically.
I agree, and I honestly think its the push for individualism over community that causes people to unknowingly become solipsistic like this. I think a lot of people don't even realize how much trouble they have conceptualizing those around them as human, let alone having empathy for them
That definitely doesn't help. In an atomized society there are fewer incentives to work with other people which causes people to either not develop proper social skills or to develop malformed ones.