Liberals are smarter than conservatives

[Edward theurj Berge]

Continuing this thread from Gaia IPS (Google docs link here), here’s what a new Harris Poll revealed about Republicans:

 

67 percent believe that Obama is a socialist.

 

57 percent believe that Obama is a Muslim.

 

45 percent agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president."

 

38 percent say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did."

 

24 percent say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

[Christophe]

Hi Shashank,

I admit I am confused now. You say you are not a conservative, but you quote an article that was featured on Fox News, and you continue to act as if you were serious about what you say.

But of course you are not. This is just an intellectual exercise, right? With no effect on the real world whatsoever. Phew! For one moment I thought you really mean any of these things that you wrote.

Maybe I still misunderstand you. It's kinda hard to pin you down on anything. You are not this, you are not that, you don't over-generalize your points, you make careful exceptions... Somehow you act like a sliding signifier, forever moving around contexts, always shifting, evading...

You said:
I agree that propaganda is inevitable when one tries to address a large mass of people (at least in our present setup). I’m not sure what the second part refers to, the political parties or individual citizens having to make choices?

What I was trying to say, somewhat clumsy, is that we should have a choice of what we want to believe. I prefer diversity over monocultures, you know. People need accurate information from neutral sources, in order to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.

You said:
I use Nietzsche because he understood resentment clearly (there are other problems with him of course).

Again, I am confused. In my books, Nietzsche used the term 'resentment' originally to describe the anger and the envy of the Bourgeois (Amber) Class versus the Avantgarde Progressives. You seem to use it the other way round. ??? what's going on here?

cheers

[Edward theurj Berge]

Here's another excerpt from the Adult Development Forum from Mike Jay:

There is actually a quite simple (IMHO) answer to the dilemma many are experiencing...and it was probably confounded by early researchers who merged values and cognitive ability...thereby thinking that values occur in an hierarchy and what some of you are saying and what confounds Herb is the inability to see Edward Haskell's idea of the neutral position and how difficult in a values context it is to either move off of positive or negative, with or against, assimilate or contrast...

The short story is this, God can be thought of in many cognitive forms, and abstractions, and i realize that some of us get hung up in the values net of say a fundamentalist, who is labeled that way in our society and thought to be a bible thumper, but actually i know a lot of fundamentalist atheists and liberals, in my definition.

When you stop merging values an cognitive ability, you'll see that people of varying cognitive ability can still believe in God and and bible and other things, as well as people who are just as fundamentally against those beliefs holding their own, rather closed, fundamental views which are juxtaposed.

Mistakes by Graves, Beck, Hall/Tonna, Kohlberg perhaps and others to understand that as time and connectivity have gone on, that memes (as someone mentioned) get assimilated in non-traditional, as well as traditional ways and it is this developmental framework (fischer) or web, that allows for seemingly strange bedfellows, IMHO.

Herb and I and others have done enough scoring of people in hierarchical complexity that we can find what seem to be strange mixtures of values and beliefs, as well as cognitive ability which the higher it gets, the more abstractly it can support the seemingly stranger than life mixtures.

But then again, that's the short story, it's a lot more complex.

If you try to find a generator (Michael and I have discussed this lightly before) of the hierarchy and use a value, then you get a values hierarchy which is generated by the generator, and it won't hold up, which is why it's important to go back to math and understand the non-values content of hierarchical cognitive ability, and realize that the generator is the key.

In every values paradigm I've seen generated, when i went back to try to understand the generator, it was never the same value, so in concert with this, the liberals have a values generator which creates a hierarchy where fundamentalism in the traditional sense is low-level thinking, yet if you change and see dogmatism as a good thing (by the way it might be nice to read Lessons of History by the Durants), then you end up with the right on top...so to me, people are confusing apples and oranges which is in large part you will find (once you clarify values), the same number of people on either side, with different values generators at the core....

This for you meme fans is why I labeled values basins as attractors (probably strange attractors in the quantum world) and why you will continue to see sophistication as these attractor basins seek to remain relevant and we really only just begun to get a feel for what a global system on quantum effect really generates in terms of developmental games.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Since Lakoff came up in the above discussion, he has some interesting things to say in the following excerpt from his article “Why ‘rational reason’ doesn’t work in contemporary politics”:

Quote:

Real reason is embodied in two ways. It is physical, in our brain circuitry. And it is based on our bodies as the function in the everyday world, using thought that arises from embodied metaphors. And it is mostly unconscious. False reason sees reason as fully conscious, as literal, disembodied, yet somehow fitting the world directly, and working not via frame-based, metaphorical, narrative and emotional logic, but via the logic of logicians alone.

Empathy is physical, arising from mirror neurons systems tied to emotional circuitry. Self-interest is real as well, and both play their roles in real reason. False reason is supposed to serve material self-interest alone. It’s supposed to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?,”which President Obama assumed that all populists were asking. While Frank Luntz told conservatives to frame health care in terms of the moral concepts of freedom (a “government takeover”) and life (“death panels”), Obama was talking about policy minutia that could not be understood by most people.

Real reason is inexplicably tied up with emotion; you cannot be rational without being emotional. False reason thinks that emotion is the enemy of reason, that it is unscrupulous to call on emotion. Yet people with brain damage who cannot feel emotion cannot make rational decisions because they do not know what to want, since like and not like mean nothing. “Rational” decisions are based on a long history of emotional responses by oneself and others. Real reason requires emotion.

Obama assumed that Republicans would act “rationally” where “rationality” was defined by false reason — on the logic of material self-interest. But conservatives understood that their electoral chances matched their highest moral principle, strengthening their moral system itself without compromise.

It is a basic principle of false reason that every human being has the same reason governed by logic — and that if you just tell people the truth, they will reason to the right conclusion. The President kept saying, throughout Tea Party summer, that he would just keep telling the truth about policy details that most people could not make moral sense of. And so he did, to the detriment of all of us.

All politics is moral. Political leaders all make proposals they say are “right.” No one proposes a policy that they say is wrong. But there are two opposing moral systems at work in America. What moral system you are using governs how you will see the world and reason about politics. That is the lesson of the cognitive science behind Moral Politics and all the experiments since then. It is the lesson of all the research on embodied metaphor. Metaphorical thought is central to politics.

Finally, there is the lesson of how language works in the brain. Every word is neurally connected to a neural circuit characterizing a frame, which in turn is part of a system of frames linked to a moral system. In political discourse, words activate frames, which in turn activate moral systems. This mechanism is not conscious. It is automatic, and it is acquired through repetition. As the language of conservative morality is repeated, frames are activated repeatedly that in turn activate and strengthen the conservative system of thought — unconsciously and automatically. Thus conservative talk radio and the national conservative messaging system are powerful unconscious forces. They work via principles of real reason.

But many liberals, assuming a false view of reason, think that such a messaging system for ideas they believe in would be illegitimate — doing the things that the conservatives do that they consider underhanded. Appealing honestly to the way people really think is seen as emotional and hence irrational and immoral. Liberals, clinging to false reason, simply resist paying attention to real reason.

Take Paul Krugman, one of my heroes, whose economic sense I find impeccable. Here is a quote from a recent column:

“Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.”

He is following traditional liberal logic, and pointing out a literal contradiction: they denounce “cuts in Medicare” while wanting to eliminate Medicare and have proposed bigger cuts themselves.

But, from the perspective of real reason as conservatives use it, there is no contradiction. The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system — a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned. It is a system where some people are paying —God forbid! — for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

Indeed, one of the major findings of real reason is that negating a frame activates that frame in the brain and reinforces it — like Nixon saying that he was not a crook. Dan Pfeiffer, writing on the White House blog, posted an article called “Still not a ‘Government Takeover’,” which activates the conservative idea of a government takeover and hence reinforces the idea. Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe. Facts matter. But they have to be framed properly and their moral significance must be made manifest. That is what we learn from real reason.

[xibalba]

very easy to demolish that crap

Obama a socialist?
what a joke,
In Europe, Obama would be categorized as a right-centrist.

Harry Truman acted as a savage, as Hitler did, by dropping nuclear bombs on japanese civilians and by lying to americans by teelling it would be the only way to end war.

Such a nerdy muslim he is with his church affiliation

He is a surfer boy of Hawaii

According to some nutsy christians of the US, the anti-christ is supposed to be a jewish. So antisemitic and so racists they are .








theurj said:

Since Lakoff came up in the above discussion, he has some interesting things to say in the following excerpt from his article “Why ‘rational reason’ doesn’t work in contemporary politics”:

Quote:

Real reason is embodied in two ways. It is physical, in our brain circuitry. And it is based on our bodies as the function in the everyday world, using thought that arises from embodied metaphors. And it is mostly unconscious. False reason sees reason as fully conscious, as literal, disembodied, yet somehow fitting the world directly, and working not via frame-based, metaphorical, narrative and emotional logic, but via the logic of logicians alone.

Empathy is physical, arising from mirror neurons systems tied to emotional circuitry. Self-interest is real as well, and both play their roles in real reason. False reason is supposed to serve material self-interest alone. It’s supposed to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?,”which President Obama assumed that all populists were asking. While Frank Luntz told conservatives to frame health care in terms of the moral concepts of freedom (a “government takeover”) and life (“death panels”), Obama was talking about policy minutia that could not be understood by most people.

Real reason is inexplicably tied up with emotion; you cannot be rational without being emotional. False reason thinks that emotion is the enemy of reason, that it is unscrupulous to call on emotion. Yet people with brain damage who cannot feel emotion cannot make rational decisions because they do not know what to want, since like and not like mean nothing. “Rational” decisions are based on a long history of emotional responses by oneself and others. Real reason requires emotion.

Obama assumed that Republicans would act “rationally” where “rationality” was defined by false reason — on the logic of material self-interest. But conservatives understood that their electoral chances matched their highest moral principle, strengthening their moral system itself without compromise.

It is a basic principle of false reason that every human being has the same reason governed by logic — and that if you just tell people the truth, they will reason to the right conclusion. The President kept saying, throughout Tea Party summer, that he would just keep telling the truth about policy details that most people could not make moral sense of. And so he did, to the detriment of all of us.

All politics is moral. Political leaders all make proposals they say are “right.” No one proposes a policy that they say is wrong. But there are two opposing moral systems at work in America. What moral system you are using governs how you will see the world and reason about politics. That is the lesson of the cognitive science behind Moral Politics and all the experiments since then. It is the lesson of all the research on embodied metaphor. Metaphorical thought is central to politics.

Finally, there is the lesson of how language works in the brain. Every word is neurally connected to a neural circuit characterizing a frame, which in turn is part of a system of frames linked to a moral system. In political discourse, words activate frames, which in turn activate moral systems. This mechanism is not conscious. It is automatic, and it is acquired through repetition. As the language of conservative morality is repeated, frames are activated repeatedly that in turn activate and strengthen the conservative system of thought — unconsciously and automatically. Thus conservative talk radio and the national conservative messaging system are powerful unconscious forces. They work via principles of real reason.

But many liberals, assuming a false view of reason, think that such a messaging system for ideas they believe in would be illegitimate — doing the things that the conservatives do that they consider underhanded. Appealing honestly to the way people really think is seen as emotional and hence irrational and immoral. Liberals, clinging to false reason, simply resist paying attention to real reason.

Take Paul Krugman, one of my heroes, whose economic sense I find impeccable. Here is a quote from a recent column:

“Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.”

He is following traditional liberal logic, and pointing out a literal contradiction: they denounce “cuts in Medicare” while wanting to eliminate Medicare and have proposed bigger cuts themselves.

But, from the perspective of real reason as conservatives use it, there is no contradiction. The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system — a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned. It is a system where some people are paying —God forbid! — for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

Indeed, one of the major findings of real reason is that negating a frame activates that frame in the brain and reinforces it — like Nixon saying that he was not a crook. Dan Pfeiffer, writing on the White House blog, posted an article called “Still not a ‘Government Takeover’,” which activates the conservative idea of a government takeover and hence reinforces the idea. Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe. Facts matter. But they have to be framed properly and their moral significance must be made manifest. That is what we learn from real reason.

[Edward theurj Berge]

While reading it I thought that it sounds a lot like Lakoff. Sure enough, the author studied with him.

[xibalba]

hi Gaddy

always fucked up as usual, brother
:-)


still with adam smith and his fucking corrupted hand?
the world is different today, no longer an extension of the self-absorded mindmapping of captain Cook et al.
The cash is no longer in the english banks, 300 years of stealing, these bandits.
:-)
The wheel has turned now, time for other idiots to take the financial lead, c´est la vie. and their time will come too, etc..
I don´t take that sort of human political business in whatever it is too seriously
hahahah



Gadfly said:

Well, thanks Mr. Lakoff for defining this for us. Was his reason emotional? Circular? Ken Wilber would have fun with this. The performative contradiction. Anyway, I think Mr. Lakoff has it backwards no matter how much he trys to be physiological.

Anyway, I'm with Cicero or Gotama Buddha who said that we have to get beyond our own emotions.

Or as they used to say, we are a nation or laws, not men. We have an obligation to be as objective as we can be no matter how difficult. And it's difficult, very difficult. We need to try to get beyond our own personal desires.

Now I'm with Mr. Obama - everyone deserves medical care (not healthcare). The question is however, "how do we get it"?

The idea that it is to be defended based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution will probably work but it's a twisting of the Constitution going back to the New Deal. Is it interstate commerce? Now I think the idea was that it should be done via a Constitutional amendment. For where in the Constitution does the Federal Government have this right? This power? Is it all about just getting your own way no matter the virtue?

Anyway, as Madison said, it is limited Federal Constitution based on enumerated powers. The rest goes to the States.

He knew all about those guys over in France and England. ;-).

Love Gaddy


Gadfly said:

Oh Mr. X - cut it out, you're running off the rails again.

Those Frank-fart school guys went out with the hula-hoop. They ain't liberals, they're in outer-space. God knows what they were talking about. They just wanted to philosohize when the rest of the Western World was getting on with it. Like inventing things. Talk is cheap. ;-)

They had the obnoxious idea that because they anointed themselves intellectuals they could talk about anything - which means talking about things they knew nothing about. Or very little. One wonders if they could tie their shoes? ;-).

Actually most were, what you say, neurotic?

Love Gaddy


xibalba said:

very easy to demolish that crap

Obama a socialist?
what a joke,
In Europe, Obama would be categorized as a right-centrist.

Harry Truman acted as a savage, as Hitler did, by dropping nuclear bombs on japanese civilians and by lying to americans by teelling it would be the only way to end war.

Such a nerdy muslim he is with his church affiliation

He is a surfer boy of Hawaii

According to some nutsy christians of the US, the anti-christ is supposed to be a jewish. So antisemitic and so racists they are .








theurj said:

Since Lakoff came up in the above discussion, he has some interesting things to say in the following excerpt from his article “Why ‘rational reason’ doesn’t work in contemporary politics”:

Quote:

Real reason is embodied in two ways. It is physical, in our brain circuitry. And it is based on our bodies as the function in the everyday world, using thought that arises from embodied metaphors. And it is mostly unconscious. False reason sees reason as fully conscious, as literal, disembodied, yet somehow fitting the world directly, and working not via frame-based, metaphorical, narrative and emotional logic, but via the logic of logicians alone.

Empathy is physical, arising from mirror neurons systems tied to emotional circuitry. Self-interest is real as well, and both play their roles in real reason. False reason is supposed to serve material self-interest alone. It’s supposed to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?,”which President Obama assumed that all populists were asking. While Frank Luntz told conservatives to frame health care in terms of the moral concepts of freedom (a “government takeover”) and life (“death panels”), Obama was talking about policy minutia that could not be understood by most people.

Real reason is inexplicably tied up with emotion; you cannot be rational without being emotional. False reason thinks that emotion is the enemy of reason, that it is unscrupulous to call on emotion. Yet people with brain damage who cannot feel emotion cannot make rational decisions because they do not know what to want, since like and not like mean nothing. “Rational” decisions are based on a long history of emotional responses by oneself and others. Real reason requires emotion.

Obama assumed that Republicans would act “rationally” where “rationality” was defined by false reason — on the logic of material self-interest. But conservatives understood that their electoral chances matched their highest moral principle, strengthening their moral system itself without compromise.

It is a basic principle of false reason that every human being has the same reason governed by logic — and that if you just tell people the truth, they will reason to the right conclusion. The President kept saying, throughout Tea Party summer, that he would just keep telling the truth about policy details that most people could not make moral sense of. And so he did, to the detriment of all of us.

All politics is moral. Political leaders all make proposals they say are “right.” No one proposes a policy that they say is wrong. But there are two opposing moral systems at work in America. What moral system you are using governs how you will see the world and reason about politics. That is the lesson of the cognitive science behind Moral Politics and all the experiments since then. It is the lesson of all the research on embodied metaphor. Metaphorical thought is central to politics.

Finally, there is the lesson of how language works in the brain. Every word is neurally connected to a neural circuit characterizing a frame, which in turn is part of a system of frames linked to a moral system. In political discourse, words activate frames, which in turn activate moral systems. This mechanism is not conscious. It is automatic, and it is acquired through repetition. As the language of conservative morality is repeated, frames are activated repeatedly that in turn activate and strengthen the conservative system of thought — unconsciously and automatically. Thus conservative talk radio and the national conservative messaging system are powerful unconscious forces. They work via principles of real reason.

But many liberals, assuming a false view of reason, think that such a messaging system for ideas they believe in would be illegitimate — doing the things that the conservatives do that they consider underhanded. Appealing honestly to the way people really think is seen as emotional and hence irrational and immoral. Liberals, clinging to false reason, simply resist paying attention to real reason.

Take Paul Krugman, one of my heroes, whose economic sense I find impeccable. Here is a quote from a recent column:

“Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.”

He is following traditional liberal logic, and pointing out a literal contradiction: they denounce “cuts in Medicare” while wanting to eliminate Medicare and have proposed bigger cuts themselves.

But, from the perspective of real reason as conservatives use it, there is no contradiction. The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system — a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned. It is a system where some people are paying —God forbid! — for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

Indeed, one of the major findings of real reason is that negating a frame activates that frame in the brain and reinforces it — like Nixon saying that he was not a crook. Dan Pfeiffer, writing on the White House blog, posted an article called “Still not a ‘Government Takeover’,” which activates the conservative idea of a government takeover and hence reinforces the idea. Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe. Facts matter. But they have to be framed properly and their moral significance must be made manifest. That is what we learn from real reason.

[valli]

hey folks

testing how this reply comes, whats with all the repeats?

[xibalba]

hI gaddy


I don´t agree
I was connected and I am still deeply connected to Krishnamurti.
I still see him as a kind of good friend who helped me , when I was still quite young, how to understand myself. He will always have a very special place in my heart, no matter what the cheap new age gossipers style Conrad said of him.

He had such tremendous insights on the nature of suffering, its relationship to desire producing psychological time.


cheers



Gadfly said:

Hey Mr. X. If I reall in Huxley's last book, Island, we were all going to take the drug SOMA and live heavenly ever after. I guess it all depended on the drug. Of course it was his pretend drug. ;-).

Just curious, do you have Walmart in France ?

I read the other day that the Frenchicos were going crazy for Dominos Pizza, true? You know that crappy Yankee pizza with the rubber cheese.

You gotta Mc Donalds there? :-).

Anyway, you like kelamuni who figures everybody is driven by some philosophy so it isn't really Gaddy talking but Adam Smith. Who did he get in there?

No matter how much I try to connect with you on some level you put me into some box with Rush Limbaugh or something.

Funny this post-modern crappola that reduces everything to opinion, ideology and bias. You think it may be de-humanizing and part of the dominance those dudes say they dislike so much?

Look it our friend Krishnamurti who liked to lecture the world - but wasn't he cut-off in lonely world and about as separate as you can get? Could it be a reflection of his own desire for connection which he himself couldn't achieve?

Love Gaddy

[Christophe]

So I was thinking about this liberal vs. conservative thing. After listening to Zizek's 2009 YouTube lecture 'The Return to Hegel' , I am ready to admit that Wilber's Version of Integral is still more radical than I was able to see lately. If I understand Zizek's Point correctly, then it should be possible for an individual to undergo the most radical of transformations and still for others appear almost unchanged except for minor details.

In other words, I think it is possible that Wilber's Integral transformation is so radical that it is almost indistinguishable from totally normal and boring conservative values and behavior. In Deleuze's words, the ultimate revolution will look like a repetition, except that it virtually changes its own past (??? will have to re-read Deleuze to make sense of this).

While I think it is possible that this is the case for Wilber himself, many of his followers IMO do not get the subtleties of this non-dual understanding. The all-accepting, non-critical attitude of the Integral Movement makes it attractive also for conservatives, while the necessary critique and constructive debate (and yes also the polemic pointing out of absolute NO-GOS) is not sufficiently encouraged.

This again is true for WIlber himself, too. Sitting at Miami Beach, sipping Coca Cola, philosophing about the nature of Spirit is very nice and sophisticated, but also reachable by neo-marxist critiques. I'd love to see a more polemic approach towards this problem. I would not even mind a new appearance of Wyatt Earpy, if you know what I mean ;-P

C.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Yet another story confirming the obvious, from Social Psychology Quarterly, 2010:

"Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds."

[Christophe]

Just for the record: I think the Liberals' illusions are in no way smaller than the conservatives'. The Liberals worldview seems to be so overwhelmingly mainstream nowadays, it's no wonder that KW, like JH, is re-emphasizing the conservatives' side. Of course it only seems to be that way, be careful of the pre trans fallacy yada yada. Aaaah mah goddess this dialectics shit gives me headaches...

[Edward theurj Berge]

The link below is broken. Here's an working link to the article.

theurj said:

Since Lakoff came up in the above discussion, he has some interesting things to say in the following excerpt from his article “Why ‘rational reason’ doesn’t work in contemporary politics”: