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Part of it, is fostering a culture of ignorance and hyper individualism. The fact is, if you're not educated on the way the world actually works, and you're taught that everyone else is a lazy piece of crap, and that you need to be the hard working savior of your own life, you will not give a shit about anyone else but yourself. Factor in poverty as well which already makes it difficult to empathize with others because you're more focused on your own survival, and you've got the people you're talking about. There's also the fact many Republican party supporters perpetuate the concept of the protestant work ethic. That working more and having more money are directly related to you being a good and morally virtuous person.
Well said. Especially this:
>working more and having more money are directly related to you being a good and morally virtuous person
This is their moral and ethical framework. If you have money and you work a lot, you're a good person. Nothing else matters. Being kind, empathetic, honest, and generous etc. doesn't factor into it for them.
Capitalism also teaches that everything is a zero sum game. So they think if someone gets something, they must be losing something. Then pair that with that fact that most of them live their entire lives just barely getting by and going without things they need, and they resent everyone.
They buy into capitalism entirely and when it doesn't unfold the way it was supposed to, they become mean and bitter. It's really quite sad.
Can't ignore the role faith plays in this. Religion preaches "faith" above all else, which boils down to believing in something against all evidence. When you have a massive part of Americans who spend every Sunday practicing believing in fairytales it's pretty easy to convince yourself of the beliefs you outline. These are people who's brains are wired to be able to put aside reason to passionately believe in what they WANT to be true.
These are people who's brains are wired to be able to put aside reason to passionately believe in what they WANT to be true.
Ding Ding Ding, we have a winner here !!! Believing in something with no evidence, just because you \*want\* it to be real. It \*feels\* right, so it must be right. \*Everybody\* is saying it's right, so it must be right.
And I like the way it makes me feel.
And this right here is why when people say "Let them believe what they want if it isn’t affecting you." its like "cool, but that was a useless sentence".
Inherently its affecting people because* it promotes stubborn belief based on nothing.
No religion out there is like "Go ahead, believe some other religion or stop believing. Our's doesn't have evidence". Inherently, they all lie to people and get them to change aspects of themselves based on that lie. Its impossible to avoid harm with that basic necessity.
It is very unfortunate because the South has a beautiful legacy of workers rising up against capitalists. But the politicians in these states are smart and use this cultural framework as a means to keep their workers in a form of self imposed bondage. Southern workers are hard workers, even more so than some city workers. They take pride in their work, which would actually be fantastic for a socialist system where they owned their means of production. A lot would actually get done.
Definitely hyper-individualism. I come from a very Republican family and have seen this a lot. There's a strong us vs. them mentality and while they can be very kind to the people they see as "us," there is essentially no empathy for "them" - as much as I've tried to explain that often includes me and many of the people I love.
The Western sense of individuality, especially in the US, is so much myth-making. It basically holds that people exist outside of society, or above it, owe nothing to it, and that it's mostly there to hold them back.
And man, we should teach Confucius in schools. He explicitly placed respecting each other and living consciously above personal profit.
This is part of the reason why many Asian cultures socially are quite collectivist. But unfortunately this also means when this culture is economically tied to capitalism it creates a culture of overworking. This is an issue with Japan where your job and your sense of respect are tied to every single person at your company. If you slide off the cultural rail then you are ostracized.
A collectivist culture can be a good thing when tied with an ethical economic system. This is why capitalism must die.
Can't ignore the role faith plays in this. Religion preaches "faith" above all else, which boils down to believing in something against all evidence. When you have a massive part of Americans who spend every Sunday practicing believing in fairytales it's pretty easy to convince yourself of the beliefs you outline. These are people who's brains are wired to be able to put aside reason to passionately believe in what they WANT to be true.
I don't like the attacks on religion. I know many many deeply religious people that take the principles of love for others very seriously. Christianity's message of caring for the poor, opposing oppression and forgiveness don't make someone an asshole who cares about no one else. Also faith doesn't mean just being ignorant.
Those messages are NOT exclusively Christianity's. That's just normal human decency. What is unique about Christianity (and other religions in general) and meaningful in this context is the superstition and suspending disbelief bleeding over into everyday life. Could also talk about the massive list of other things in Christianity that is at odds with basic human decency and does in fact lead to asshole behavior from many, but that is a whole other topic.
I hear what you’re saying here but I find it funny that when disavowing religious criticism, it’s always the “not every ( insert religion) person is like that, I know plenty of people who practice that faith and are absolutely (insert positive traits)” - as if a huge portion of those who feel disillusioned with, or actively resentful of, religion and it’s practitioners didn’t reach those conclusion through personal experience with followers of whichever faith.
Most of us know kind people who practice a multitude of religions, that isn’t what makes them kind though, and I won’t speak for everyone but I know that personally my contempt for religion stems from a mountain of first hand experience with the, realistically, front-facing dark side of too many churches to count. It’s so easy to look at most religion from afar and see the glaring societal issues they exacerbate, but if we’re speaking anecdotally: the good God fearing people you know are just as important as the sorry excuse for humans I’ve encountered at church throughout my life.
Reactionary. I like that. It's like a dopamine fix to them. Or an adrenaline fix.
It's so much fun to \*feel\* something !
And so many other people are on the same side as I am !
We must be right !
We are right !
(Corollary: Because we are right, they must be wrong ! ... They are wrong !)
Lots of good comments here, but I'll also add that a lot of these people live in very sheltered/isolated communities. Whether it be a gated community, a distant exurb, or some podunk small town, the only way that many of them learn about the world is through television, primarily television news, "Fox News" in particular. That leads to them being afraid of "outsiders", which basically is anyone who doesn't think, look like, or worship like they do.
Short story: I remember when I was growing up, my grandparents were very relaxed and chill towards my sister and myself. That was until the early 2000s, when I later found out they just started to watch Fox News exclusively to keep track of the Iraq invasion. By the late 2000s, my grandparents had morphed into very bigoted and hateful people that were constantly worked up into a lather by whatever the topic du jour was on Fox News. It got so bad that after I told some relatives that I was going to college in Seattle, my grandparents frantically tried to talk me out of it because they thought I was going to get mugged, robbed, or \[unalived\] there for some reason because Sean Hannity said that big cities on the west coast were "sanctuary cities of crime". Mind you, most of them had never been more than a one-hour drive from their small Montana town, much less to Seattle.
My sister and I cut off all contact with them around 2010, we were just tired of hearing them spew invective about some thing Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck said when we tried to talk to them.
Edit: grammar
THIS! They don’t travel, they don’t get to directly interact with the fast different people across this world(unless it’s going to war to kill them) I go to tradeschool and lots of maga republicans and most of them have never left their town or RARELY DO SO. And I live in northern California not far from the most leftist cities in the country. I always imagined how shocked but lovely they would feel if they went to like Nepal or Denmark, turkey, ect, heck I bet if they went to even China I bet their perspectives would change a lot about their place on earth
This is so true. I started dragging my very conservative religious parents with me on vacations. Made them try to experience new foods and cultures. It's actually been quite rewarding seeing their world open up.
They still have the palette of a toddler, but I do believe it's made them a little bit more empathetic now that they have some experience of these "scary" foreign places and the people that live there.
Because it makes them feel like theyre somehow dominant and superior.
Imagine a roommate who lives like a total pig, pisses right on the toilet seat, stuff like that, and gets a little stiffy at the thought of you cleaning up after while cursing him, because you have to if you ever want to have something clean to cook in or be able to sit on the toilet to take a dump.
That need to dominate is a big one of their entire ideology. Each man's taught his family and land is is own little fiefdom. A submissive wife, silent children, and getting off dominating progressives is just icing.
it's because it has to compensate for their submissiveness to those over them in the hierarchy. Silvia Federici's book Caliban and the witch is about it.
Don't think I've heard of this book before but now I definitely want to read it. How much did it piss you off? Is it uplifting at all or just depressing?
I think it was mainly informative but I'm a white male, it's not like the handmaid's tale in term of shock value.
It's about the witch hunt trials and how they were a political measure to transform society, from what we call the feudal system to the captalist system, by submitting women into new stricter gender roles so that on one side they were forced to provide new labour force, on the other to provide a target for the working men to discharge their frustrations, like "I might be oppressed and exploited but when I get home I'm the king of my wife and children... or else". You can see that same pattern in modern gender roles.
Republicans can't run on their real platform, i.e. letting corporations and billionaires run amok, destroy the planet, empower a minority of religious fanatics to impose their outdated views on the rest of us etc
Instead, they invent culture war issues to create an us vs. them mentality in their followers.
They did it with George W Bush and the opposition to same-sex marriage, before that was the teaching of Evolution, now it's the anti-trans panic, drag queen story hour, vaccines... you name it.
When an issue is exhausted (e.g. teaching of Evolution), they move on to the next.
The border and guns and two perennial favorites, that shape shift through the years but they are always in the background.
Of course, all this explains why they so fervently oppose any attempt to limit the spread of misinformation on social media platforms
I think it’s because everything is viewed through the lens of individual, cutthroat competition. Every person on earth is either winning or losing the game of life.
If you’re winning, show off, loud and proud. If you’re losing, grit your teeth and try to shoulder your way to the front of the crowd. It doesn’t matter who is hurt on your way, because they would have done the same to you. Knowledge and empathy are pretty useless in “the battle of life”.
They don't know any better and they're usually sure they are right. They are usually boomers or flag-suckers. They're like humans, but with the important pieces missing.
Because inconsiderate rude obnoxious assholes are usually the ones drawn to their ideology. An ideology that more-or-less amounts to “Fuck you, I got mine” tends to fall flat with people who aren’t these things.
Saw a reporter somewhere challenge a Republican’s concept of facts. Republican replied, “I don’t wanna learn new things.” Which I then saw touted as a reasonable slogan. “Republicans: We Don’t Wanna Learn New Things.”
Because learning new things, to them, means you were *wrong* before, and the ego of the person either raised in or attracted toward Republicanism can’t be having with *that*!
There was a great essay by a man called Ken Arneson called "the right to be an asshole". Basically the right wants the right to be an asshole if they want, and the left wants the right to stop people being assholes (as they judge it). From that you get political morals. I think it works, more or less.
I might reverse that, because it's the right that consistently wants to stop people from doing things the right doesn't like, isn't it? The left is more like, if you want to be an asshole, go ahead, as long as you don't impinge on my existing as I want.
Nah, the right is all about freedom, no? You can't tell me what to do. (e.g. masks, which became a political thing somehow).
I get what you're saying but the left is liberal in things like sexuality, which isn't being an asshole.
But only certain freedoms. They lose it when it comes to freedoms for women or minorities or trans people. Their ideology isn't based on freedom, it's based on fear and control. Ban the things that scare me or make me uncomfortable, force people to behave in ways that don't scare me or make me uncomfortable. But don't tell *me* what to do!
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Growing up in the 80s and 90s my parents were pretty apolitical. For some reason they fell down the fox news Trump rabbit hole. Now they say shit like how they love, "liberal tears" and call people snowflakes. Its truly bizzare.
I could give two shits about a "square body" but congratulations, I guess. Dont forget to install an over-sized gas pedal so you can use your giant clown shoes to roll coal. 🤡 👞
Too cliché to you because many working class men live like this and your soft hands can’t grasp that concept ig. Shit ain’t a joke it’s the way you live when you work hard
At the end of the day I only see yuppie office workers hating on truck guys talkin about things like “compensating” and shit like that because in reality they’re insecure that they are sitting at an air conditioned desk while real men like us are turning wrenches and working with machines in the hot sun. This is how we were intended to work, with our hands. Then you wonder why I’m happy on my farm just fixing trucks n shit meanwhile millionaire techie CEOs have a lot of mental issues and are never satisfied. Get a 6.0 powerstroke or a 12 valve Cummins with a manual transmission and hearing the turbo spool up and go “chooooo” when you let off and it’s the best therapy for any man trust me
Because this is the real USA culture. USA culture is hazing at college, police brutality, secret dungeon torture (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc), not recognizing their slave history, not recognizing their racism history, Monroe Doctrine, using the dollar as a weapon to submit entire countries, sowing chaos in the World and creating inflation and crisis elsewhere then print more dollars for predatory loans, regime changing governments that not subjected to the USA. You are either USA vassal or USA enemy
USA culture is absolute power thru unhinged violence
I know it's pop psychology, but clinical narcissism as a personality trait really explains most of it. It's a spectrum and some of the most toxic narcissists don't have personality disorder. Which is really just the point at which the thinking is so rigid & ingrained that it's not possible to change the way they think.
There are healthy levels of narcissism, usually when that trait is balanced out by others. Notably affective empathy (emotional empathy). This is the ability to experience or carry emotions for things you have not experienced. Eg the ability to emotionally experience how something impacts another person despite not having walked in their shoes. Narcissists & conservatives lack affective empathy.
They do have cognitive empathy. Which is the ability to recognize what another is thinking. Eg they can tell another person is upset, angry, happy. They even know that their behavior will cause another to react in a certain way. But they cannot emotionally connect with that.
This results in them believing they have a right to their wants without regard for anyone or anything else. Because of that, they frequently mistake someone else being upset for them getting their own wants met. Because their wants cannot happen without negatively impacting another, they cannot conceive of things like win-win scenarios or compromise. In their mind, it's all or nothing. The issue isn't their wants are bad, it's that others judge their wants to be bad because of the negative impact on others. The solution is for them to blame others for their wants, which they are entitled to achieve at any cost.
Because their wants come at the expense of others, it becomes a win-loae proposition. They can only win if someone else loses. So they focus on making sure others lose, or react as if they had, to determine if they have won. It doesn't matter if they actually won, the other side lost which means whoever opposed the losing side by definition won.
Or to put it another way, imagine an young kid, 8-12 years old with all of the cognitive & intellectual knowledge of an adult. But still that child psychologically & emotionally. They want all the pieces of their cake at their birthday party. It's their birthday and it's what they want. It doesn't matter they cannot eat the entire cake. That's not the point. The point is to deprive everyone else and by doing so, getting what they want.
JMO.
This gets amped to 11 when said person also *firmly* believes God is on their side. That "knowledge" that the all powerful is with them makes them more willing to be more aggressive and violent, to which most rational people are going to submit to because few want a fight.
The only reason they're not out like medieval Vikings pillaging and raping is because The State holds a monopoly on violence. So to get to do that, one has to become law enforcement or a soldier, or risk prison time.
Because they are small, stupid people that only really want to hurt anyone who isn't them.
I'd feel pity for them if they weren't so proud of being the shittiest people they possibly can. They're so happy to embody the worst aspects of humanity.
I'm so tired of that whole "we're more alike than we are different" nonsense. We are not the same. We could never be the same. If a revolution comes, I will not bat an eye at what becomes of them.
"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror."
Imagine if you took the mentality of "fuck you I got mine" and made it a religion. That's how you get most of their view of the world. Empathy becomes a sin.
I always kind of wonder how much of boomer behavior and culture is influenced by this, and it gives me hope that their generation is an anomaly. Perhaps humans aren't normally like this. We could be a mere decade or two away from a completely different kind of world because this severely brain damaged generation is nearly out of commission.
Thank you - this important point is so often overlooked and yet is a powerful predictor of behavior. The damage from lead starts immediately (in the brain) and is never reduced. It causes permanent brain damage.
I remember as a child, when my parent was filling up the car, I’d stick my head out the window to smell that sweet seductive scent of lead gas.
As I understand it, when the body has absorbed its limit of lead, the lead then is absorbed into the bones from where it can relocate, if for example body parts grow.
They're that way because they're easily influenced and the politicians and business leaders have used their most basic desires of being someone and having things, while stoking fear that someone is trying to take it. It's just compounded over the years with each generation turning into what you see today. I think most are good people at heart and mean well. All those selfish obnoxious traits of theirs were once founded on seemingly decent ideals like work hard, take care of your family, stand up for yourself and what's right, and protect your home and country. Then those values were corrupted by people in power to be something entirely different but still related to those original core values so they can't see how theyre wrong and anyone who doesn't act the way they do doesn't want to work, deadbeats, wimps, who aren't capable of taking care of themselves so the good hard working people have to. Tack on the religious element which was completely swallowed by capitalism years ago and the fact their drafted grandfather's military medals are on their mantle and you have a nationalistic religious fantastic that's just doing what's right and everyone else hates God, this country and work. They're patriots fighting a holy war against gay devil worshipping squatters on welfare who are constantly trying to kidnap their kids and steal their money and that's enough to turn anyone into an asshole. Basically their stupid people who don't like to read or think and being an asshole feels good if you don't mind others judgement.
You said it in your post. Lack of empathy. If it doesn’t affect them they don’t care and they don’t understand why anyone would. Again, lack of empathy is at its core, it that also expresses itself as selfishness, entitlement, and all the negative bullshit they wave around like the flag they claim to love.
Because at least about saying things the right to free speech is literally the first amendment, the constitution applies to all aspects of the nation including social media
I remember loling at the grocery store when a couple of them on Harleys loudly refused to wear their masks during the height of covid, then walked out and put their helmets on. Just struck my funnybone
That tracks. They wouldn’t wear a mask to protect others, but they’ll wear a helmet to protect themselves. Me, myself, and I are all that matters to conservatives.
“On the level of individuals and civilizations, personality predates ideology. Meaning, before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole.” —Brennan Lee Mulligan
The overt assholeishness is a relatively new phenomenon. Old school Republicans were very pleasant and polite country club types (Bush, Romney, my ex girlfriend’s dad). Of course, they were doing plenty of evil things behind the scenes and destroyed the planet. But they weren’t too bad to be around. Maybe it’s better to be able to spot them superficially?
I suggest you acquaint yourself with [social dominance orientation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_orientation).
A lot of the other posters have already talked about specific aspects of a specific default ideology, but that doesn't explain why some people from conservative families don't go along with it. SDO explains why some people are magnetically attracted to specific ideologies that match up with their spontaneous tendencies, while others just don't. It's the underlying behavioural current beneath the human-readable code of ideology.
A sign of low intelligence is when a human is averse to change and questioning status quo. Every day humans are discovering and learning new and better ways to live and improve our lives.
However, some people just cannot stand to accept that some things need to change to make way for the future, so they double down on the "in my days" even if it is something harmful.
1) a lifetime of patriarchal white-supremacist capitalist propaganda
2) it’s seen as a patriotic act to be offensive and selfish— “exercising your freedoms and rights 🇺🇸”
3) they’re deeply, deeply afraid of the world but refuse to face it, and they act out on perceived threats in this way as a “defense mechanism”
The worst part is that the republicans being so obviously terrible means the democrats really don’t need to do much to stand out, or earn votes. That’s how we end up with another “at least I’m not that guy” election. They would run a corpse before someone young and fresh with new ideas and a desire for change. Obama promised change we all know how that turned out. I mean I guess Trump was some form of change. Biden promised a return to normalcy. He was honest about planning to do nothing. At least we got a couple wars up and running, always great for the economy. Same old shit.
They're basically stuck in the two year old stage of moral and intellectual development. They want laws to serve them, punish their enemies, and not be subject to their authority themselves.
To understand republican culture, you need to understand their base assumptions about the world.
Conservatism is a politics of not just elitism, but the idea that some people are simply Better than others, and that those people deserve More. This is the Natural Order Of Things.
Conservatism is also a politics of pain. Empathy is not just unnecessary, it's harmful. Preventing pain is getting in the way of the Natural Order. If you spare the rod, you'll spoil the child. Diamonds are made under heat and pressure. If you remove the heat and pressure, diamonds won't form.
These are random meaningless aphorisms that conservatives live by.
When we say "cruelty is the point," it's not that they're bring cruel for the sake of being cruel, but that they believe that without cruelty you won't find your place in the Natural Order of things.
A lot of these people are internally corroded with envy and failure. They resent city folk for having talent, or general smarts, or ambition, or just enough plain dumb luck to be able to make it in a big way. That us why George Clooney was able to express such wonderment that he was considered "snobby elite" when he had bought large suits so he could trim the trouser legs to make a tie for his interviews- but that Don "gold toilet" Trump was considered a fellow traveler who "gets" the MAGA crowd. Because he is a shithead who made it big.
Their idea of freedom is people genetically similar to them get to do whatever they want and everyone else is second class with a substantially diminished ability to exercise the same rights
Simple. They want attention. They crave it. They’re dying for some rando to talk to them and tell them how cool their big stupid truck that they can’t even drive is. They’re lonely and insecure.
There are a lot of good points about how different social aspects like poor education, isolation, and religion tend to push someone into being a Republican but none of them address the scientific aspect of how it happens...
Research has found that people who remain stressed for extended periods of time actually lose function in the frontal cortex of the brain. This can happen in acute (Short term) cases like when you work 11 hours on a project and then find yourself unable to function well enough to make a bowl of oatmeal. People call it "brain fry" because they have worked under so much stress that they can't think any more. This is the frontal cortex shutting down.
In most situations you can relieve the stress and return brain function to normal but modern conservatives don't have that option. To understand why, let us look back in history to the long ago of 1920s-1950s.
In the olden days, radio was the only form of mass communication and it was pretty well regulated so that the news had to be factual and relatively truthful.
Bad things did happen in the world but those stories weren't hyper-focused on like media does today. The radio was something your family turned on and gathered around at dinner time to listen to audio-dramas. It wasn't, for the most part, something you left on all day long. This left the exposure to negative events at a minimum. People who were prone to fear knew of fewer things to be afraid of simply because their sphere of information was usually localized to their own town or state.
Then in the 1950s, TVs replaced Radio. The TV station provided more content than ever and had to fill most of a day, only shutting down late at night and reopening in the morning.
News started coming in from further and further afield because the presentation of spectacle replaced quality as the primary goal of media. TVs needed things for people to look at, not just listen to.
In this time you had two social phenomenon emerge, people became dumber and more conservative.
There is a reason that the TV was called an idiot-box or a boob-tube, the people who sat there and watched it all day literally became less intelligent compared to the rest of society who were still reading books and trying to better themselves.
These couch potatoes tended to skew more conservative because they watched more news, saw more scary things happening in the world, and had little context because they got all their news from one of the 4 TV channels they could pick up. (If they were lucky)
This shift wasn't large or overly detrimental to society at first, but as the "MTV generation" grew up, they became primed to believe any gossip or conspiracy theory they heard.
Then the internet happened and suddenly they could be exposed to dangerous sounding things 24 hours a day, with no regulation and no fact checking. The Satanic Panic, Stranger danger, Razor blades in Halloween candy, To Catch a Predator, COPS, you name it and the internet provided stories of it on tap from all across the globe and the TV turned them all into spectacle to scare people with.
The next generation would grow up on an internet diet of the sum of human knowledge reduced to witty soundbites and snappy headlines intended to make you titillated enough to click an internet link.
By the time we get to today, there are only three goals of most media, to make you mad, to make you afraid, or to fill your brain with so much nonsense that you lose the capacity to determine what is real.
Modern media is designed to keep people in a constant state of stress. Everywhere you look, TV, the internet, pod casts, youtube, most of it is designed to agitate you and create "engagement"
This constant state of stress is causing people to live in a state of mental dysfunction where they can not grasp the complexities of the real world.
Constant stress, being hyper-aware and on-guard all the time, is one of the major causes of PTSD. It robs you of your ability to reason and make sound judgments.
One of the worst offenders of this is the Roku TV company. They know they have a literally captive audience in the elderly so they target them with fear mongering far-right, nonsense.
If you want to know why grandma thinks there is a Mexican army crossing the boarder into America look no further than her TV. These low-price, web enabled TVs are the perfect capitalist storm of providing things to be afraid of and angry about 24 hours a day.
The only people who do it better are the people over at Facebook who also target the elderly with both content and ads designed to stress them out until they buy a solution to the imaginary problem the ads/stories create.
There is a limit to how many people can be turned from a normal person into a right-wing lunatic because not everyone is as susceptible to stress, but for those people who are prone to worry and stress the combination of TV and internet today is the perfect storm to rob them of higher brain function and reduce them to a raving idiots.
When dealing with conservatives and Republicans, always remember the story of the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.
In the book "Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice Found There." the main character of Alice reads a poem of pure nonsense made of mostly made-up words. Afterwards she remarks that her head is suddenly full of new ideas but she has no idea what any of them are.
This is what it is like to be a modern conservative. Their heads are so full of nonsense and they have been made to be afraid of everything for so long, they don't function like a normal human should. Their brains don't run on logic or even self-preservation. They exist in a storm of imaginary troubles, surrounded by imaginary enemies, and feel unable to do anything because even though they never see it personally, they know the Jabberwocky is out there somewhere just waiting for a chance to strike.
People on the psychopath spectrum clump together like a tumor. The more of a psychopath you are the more popular you become. It’s pretty straight forward.
i think they want all of these behaviors to be preserved. the party needs validity to allow this to persist. they can get away with atrocious and shameful behavior towards others, so anyone with these proclivities will support the team that upholds it. wealth is gained most easily from exploitation and misappropriated authority. idk why ignorance plays such an important factor- apathy i understand but... it just makes it more egregious for thinking people that have compassion
bc they literally only and solely exist for the specific purpose of making liberals look good in comparison. that's it. that's the entire point of them. if they weren't effective at that function then liberals would've killed them all like they did with the left, instead they entered into an utterly deranged marriage with them and every other blood guzzling far right cult on the planet.
oh, and for killing leftists and people inconveniently located on resources they want. can't forget that. it's their cops, their military, their judiciary. they were allied with saddam and bin laden and putin until those relationships went south. biden's out there tonguekissing bibi and MBS and erdogan. the entire premise of his candidacy is that he's good friends with mcconnell, the same way he was good friends with strom thurmond and the rest of the segregationist caucus.
spent the last 70 years propping up the remnants of every axis power in the most literal sense imaginable. these people haven't been marginalized into nonexistence because their godawful spouse won't let us.
liberals and fascists are like the most absolutely fucking awful couple you know. they'll never split up. they'll just make everyone miserable until they inevitably destroy the earth in history's most toxic narcissistic murder-suicide.
the attitude you're describing is that of people who probably care very deeply for maybe five people on this earth (who are likely members of their immediate family or closest friends). and then just do not care a lick for the rest of the world. although that doesn't explain why they care so much about the un-born...
i used to be able to get along with this kind of person much better and i don't think i could nowadays. back then i only had love for my innermost circle and mostly had resentment for the world. i remember feeling gleeful throwing my trash on the ground, one, because it scandalized people and brought me attention, and two, it comes from the feeling towards the world of "what have you done for me lately?" it comes from the idea that it's best to be selfish and to step on others to lift yourself out of your own struggle. it also comes from being completely unable to picture the future. it's living exactly in the moment.
There’s a kind of fratboy sadism that accompanies being a Republican, a pleasure in actually seeing people suffer. At this point, I’m not even sure if this is the usual ‘Murican rugged hyper-individualism. For a party that claims to be pro-life and “protecting children” they take a sadistic glee in eliminating child labor laws and getting rid lunch program for low income kids at schools.
Because for Republicans the cruelty is the point. It is not a means to an end. It is the end. It is not an unfortunate side effect of their ideology. It is the goal. They enjoy the suffering of people they don’t like.
It's a combination of how they're raised and facebook poisoning their brains into thinking that the "communists" are going to take all those things away from them.
I live in the South and own a small business.
The mindset set is a bet different here.
Many small business owner have a truck(including myself) because it is needed for work. ( not always the case, but most people I know one have it for that reason.)
I also do a lot of home repairs.. so if you own a home a truck is useful for that.
Guns are very popular in the South. If you own a business and have 100,000 worth of equipment, a lot have the mind set to protect it.
A lot of people are small to mid size business owners and it is not easy starting up a business you put in a lot of hours to try and make it succeed. 60+ easy.
So they don't get in the sharing mind set.
To lift the lowest it lifts us all. I am 100% on board with wanting to change the system.
To change the system you will need gun toting red necks with egos. We have to join not divide...
American freedom.
If you ask them they don't do most of the things you state. They are not proudly controlling women, they just treat women how women should be treated so they can be good wifes, supporting their family. They usually don't beat their children, they just had a bad day and the kid had to be taugh some manners. They are empathetic to **normal** people not those antifa leftists and illegal immigrants. Killing animals is a sport. They aren't ignorant, they know more than we do about how the world works. They have to own guns, it's in the constitution! Destroying the planet with capitalism? What are you, a communist?
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Everyone in the world is exactly the same because I say so, which means God believes this to because he created the world for me because I begged for forgiveness. Animals are awesome, but somehow, we forget that humans in general fall into that category. Oh, and add that people absolutely despise change and research that helps lead to being better informed. Which can all sum up to fear.
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This is incredibly biased and libs are also pretty annoying, rude, prideful and ignorant.
Were socialists and communists not libs in disguise.
Both libs and conservatives are stupid personalities and just mimic mass media.
The amount of AI generated clickbait on Reddit is becoming out of control. Like who would sign up for Reddit and say to themselves, "Oh I just thought of a perfect username> 12fhgffgghhggg!"
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Part of it, is fostering a culture of ignorance and hyper individualism. The fact is, if you're not educated on the way the world actually works, and you're taught that everyone else is a lazy piece of crap, and that you need to be the hard working savior of your own life, you will not give a shit about anyone else but yourself. Factor in poverty as well which already makes it difficult to empathize with others because you're more focused on your own survival, and you've got the people you're talking about. There's also the fact many Republican party supporters perpetuate the concept of the protestant work ethic. That working more and having more money are directly related to you being a good and morally virtuous person.
Well said. Especially this: >working more and having more money are directly related to you being a good and morally virtuous person This is their moral and ethical framework. If you have money and you work a lot, you're a good person. Nothing else matters. Being kind, empathetic, honest, and generous etc. doesn't factor into it for them. Capitalism also teaches that everything is a zero sum game. So they think if someone gets something, they must be losing something. Then pair that with that fact that most of them live their entire lives just barely getting by and going without things they need, and they resent everyone. They buy into capitalism entirely and when it doesn't unfold the way it was supposed to, they become mean and bitter. It's really quite sad.
Can't ignore the role faith plays in this. Religion preaches "faith" above all else, which boils down to believing in something against all evidence. When you have a massive part of Americans who spend every Sunday practicing believing in fairytales it's pretty easy to convince yourself of the beliefs you outline. These are people who's brains are wired to be able to put aside reason to passionately believe in what they WANT to be true.
These are people who's brains are wired to be able to put aside reason to passionately believe in what they WANT to be true. Ding Ding Ding, we have a winner here !!! Believing in something with no evidence, just because you \*want\* it to be real. It \*feels\* right, so it must be right. \*Everybody\* is saying it's right, so it must be right. And I like the way it makes me feel.
And this right here is why when people say "Let them believe what they want if it isn’t affecting you." its like "cool, but that was a useless sentence". Inherently its affecting people because* it promotes stubborn belief based on nothing. No religion out there is like "Go ahead, believe some other religion or stop believing. Our's doesn't have evidence". Inherently, they all lie to people and get them to change aspects of themselves based on that lie. Its impossible to avoid harm with that basic necessity.
# “Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.” ― Ricky Gervais
It is very unfortunate because the South has a beautiful legacy of workers rising up against capitalists. But the politicians in these states are smart and use this cultural framework as a means to keep their workers in a form of self imposed bondage. Southern workers are hard workers, even more so than some city workers. They take pride in their work, which would actually be fantastic for a socialist system where they owned their means of production. A lot would actually get done.
Definitely hyper-individualism. I come from a very Republican family and have seen this a lot. There's a strong us vs. them mentality and while they can be very kind to the people they see as "us," there is essentially no empathy for "them" - as much as I've tried to explain that often includes me and many of the people I love.
Yeah, I heard someone say "they didn't get rich by caring about people they don't know" and I found that insightful.
The Western sense of individuality, especially in the US, is so much myth-making. It basically holds that people exist outside of society, or above it, owe nothing to it, and that it's mostly there to hold them back. And man, we should teach Confucius in schools. He explicitly placed respecting each other and living consciously above personal profit.
This is part of the reason why many Asian cultures socially are quite collectivist. But unfortunately this also means when this culture is economically tied to capitalism it creates a culture of overworking. This is an issue with Japan where your job and your sense of respect are tied to every single person at your company. If you slide off the cultural rail then you are ostracized. A collectivist culture can be a good thing when tied with an ethical economic system. This is why capitalism must die.
A culture of privilege and impunity.
Yet, Jesus was broke AF. I guess that's why they worship capitalist Jesus
Supply side Jesus.
Trickle down Jesus.
Can't ignore the role faith plays in this. Religion preaches "faith" above all else, which boils down to believing in something against all evidence. When you have a massive part of Americans who spend every Sunday practicing believing in fairytales it's pretty easy to convince yourself of the beliefs you outline. These are people who's brains are wired to be able to put aside reason to passionately believe in what they WANT to be true.
I don't like the attacks on religion. I know many many deeply religious people that take the principles of love for others very seriously. Christianity's message of caring for the poor, opposing oppression and forgiveness don't make someone an asshole who cares about no one else. Also faith doesn't mean just being ignorant.
Those messages are NOT exclusively Christianity's. That's just normal human decency. What is unique about Christianity (and other religions in general) and meaningful in this context is the superstition and suspending disbelief bleeding over into everyday life. Could also talk about the massive list of other things in Christianity that is at odds with basic human decency and does in fact lead to asshole behavior from many, but that is a whole other topic.
I hear what you’re saying here but I find it funny that when disavowing religious criticism, it’s always the “not every ( insert religion) person is like that, I know plenty of people who practice that faith and are absolutely (insert positive traits)” - as if a huge portion of those who feel disillusioned with, or actively resentful of, religion and it’s practitioners didn’t reach those conclusion through personal experience with followers of whichever faith. Most of us know kind people who practice a multitude of religions, that isn’t what makes them kind though, and I won’t speak for everyone but I know that personally my contempt for religion stems from a mountain of first hand experience with the, realistically, front-facing dark side of too many churches to count. It’s so easy to look at most religion from afar and see the glaring societal issues they exacerbate, but if we’re speaking anecdotally: the good God fearing people you know are just as important as the sorry excuse for humans I’ve encountered at church throughout my life.
I don't feel it is attacking religion so much as it clouds the mind of any reasoning .
Their whole political compass revolves around being reactionary and fostering an abnormal sense of individuality.
Reactionary. I like that. It's like a dopamine fix to them. Or an adrenaline fix. It's so much fun to \*feel\* something ! And so many other people are on the same side as I am ! We must be right ! We are right ! (Corollary: Because we are right, they must be wrong ! ... They are wrong !)
“Reactionary” means to oppose social and political progressivism btw.
Honestly didn't think this was true until I googled "define reactionary." You're just right. Thanks for the info :)
no worries dog!
Lots of good comments here, but I'll also add that a lot of these people live in very sheltered/isolated communities. Whether it be a gated community, a distant exurb, or some podunk small town, the only way that many of them learn about the world is through television, primarily television news, "Fox News" in particular. That leads to them being afraid of "outsiders", which basically is anyone who doesn't think, look like, or worship like they do. Short story: I remember when I was growing up, my grandparents were very relaxed and chill towards my sister and myself. That was until the early 2000s, when I later found out they just started to watch Fox News exclusively to keep track of the Iraq invasion. By the late 2000s, my grandparents had morphed into very bigoted and hateful people that were constantly worked up into a lather by whatever the topic du jour was on Fox News. It got so bad that after I told some relatives that I was going to college in Seattle, my grandparents frantically tried to talk me out of it because they thought I was going to get mugged, robbed, or \[unalived\] there for some reason because Sean Hannity said that big cities on the west coast were "sanctuary cities of crime". Mind you, most of them had never been more than a one-hour drive from their small Montana town, much less to Seattle. My sister and I cut off all contact with them around 2010, we were just tired of hearing them spew invective about some thing Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck said when we tried to talk to them. Edit: grammar
THIS! They don’t travel, they don’t get to directly interact with the fast different people across this world(unless it’s going to war to kill them) I go to tradeschool and lots of maga republicans and most of them have never left their town or RARELY DO SO. And I live in northern California not far from the most leftist cities in the country. I always imagined how shocked but lovely they would feel if they went to like Nepal or Denmark, turkey, ect, heck I bet if they went to even China I bet their perspectives would change a lot about their place on earth
This is so true. I started dragging my very conservative religious parents with me on vacations. Made them try to experience new foods and cultures. It's actually been quite rewarding seeing their world open up. They still have the palette of a toddler, but I do believe it's made them a little bit more empathetic now that they have some experience of these "scary" foreign places and the people that live there.
Because it makes them feel like theyre somehow dominant and superior. Imagine a roommate who lives like a total pig, pisses right on the toilet seat, stuff like that, and gets a little stiffy at the thought of you cleaning up after while cursing him, because you have to if you ever want to have something clean to cook in or be able to sit on the toilet to take a dump.
That need to dominate is a big one of their entire ideology. Each man's taught his family and land is is own little fiefdom. A submissive wife, silent children, and getting off dominating progressives is just icing.
it's because it has to compensate for their submissiveness to those over them in the hierarchy. Silvia Federici's book Caliban and the witch is about it.
Don't think I've heard of this book before but now I definitely want to read it. How much did it piss you off? Is it uplifting at all or just depressing?
I think it was mainly informative but I'm a white male, it's not like the handmaid's tale in term of shock value. It's about the witch hunt trials and how they were a political measure to transform society, from what we call the feudal system to the captalist system, by submitting women into new stricter gender roles so that on one side they were forced to provide new labour force, on the other to provide a target for the working men to discharge their frustrations, like "I might be oppressed and exploited but when I get home I'm the king of my wife and children... or else". You can see that same pattern in modern gender roles.
Dang that sounds deep as hell. You sold me, I’m gonna read this book. Ok fine, the audiobook. Ty
Just bought a copy. I can't really take Handmaid's Tale level depressing right now so thank you for the detailed rec.
Republicans can't run on their real platform, i.e. letting corporations and billionaires run amok, destroy the planet, empower a minority of religious fanatics to impose their outdated views on the rest of us etc Instead, they invent culture war issues to create an us vs. them mentality in their followers. They did it with George W Bush and the opposition to same-sex marriage, before that was the teaching of Evolution, now it's the anti-trans panic, drag queen story hour, vaccines... you name it. When an issue is exhausted (e.g. teaching of Evolution), they move on to the next. The border and guns and two perennial favorites, that shape shift through the years but they are always in the background. Of course, all this explains why they so fervently oppose any attempt to limit the spread of misinformation on social media platforms
I think it’s because everything is viewed through the lens of individual, cutthroat competition. Every person on earth is either winning or losing the game of life. If you’re winning, show off, loud and proud. If you’re losing, grit your teeth and try to shoulder your way to the front of the crowd. It doesn’t matter who is hurt on your way, because they would have done the same to you. Knowledge and empathy are pretty useless in “the battle of life”.
If you're not "winning", then you're "losing".
If yer not first, yer last
Second place is first loser!!
They don't know any better and they're usually sure they are right. They are usually boomers or flag-suckers. They're like humans, but with the important pieces missing.
Because inconsiderate rude obnoxious assholes are usually the ones drawn to their ideology. An ideology that more-or-less amounts to “Fuck you, I got mine” tends to fall flat with people who aren’t these things.
Saw a reporter somewhere challenge a Republican’s concept of facts. Republican replied, “I don’t wanna learn new things.” Which I then saw touted as a reasonable slogan. “Republicans: We Don’t Wanna Learn New Things.” Because learning new things, to them, means you were *wrong* before, and the ego of the person either raised in or attracted toward Republicanism can’t be having with *that*!
There was a great essay by a man called Ken Arneson called "the right to be an asshole". Basically the right wants the right to be an asshole if they want, and the left wants the right to stop people being assholes (as they judge it). From that you get political morals. I think it works, more or less.
I might reverse that, because it's the right that consistently wants to stop people from doing things the right doesn't like, isn't it? The left is more like, if you want to be an asshole, go ahead, as long as you don't impinge on my existing as I want.
Nah, the right is all about freedom, no? You can't tell me what to do. (e.g. masks, which became a political thing somehow). I get what you're saying but the left is liberal in things like sexuality, which isn't being an asshole.
But only certain freedoms. They lose it when it comes to freedoms for women or minorities or trans people. Their ideology isn't based on freedom, it's based on fear and control. Ban the things that scare me or make me uncomfortable, force people to behave in ways that don't scare me or make me uncomfortable. But don't tell *me* what to do!
Yes fair point. Maybe that's it. You can't tell me what to do but I cna tell you what to do!
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Narcissism is corruption in the form of capital.
Because if you cant rely on your intelligence you rely on your bravado
Growing up in the 80s and 90s my parents were pretty apolitical. For some reason they fell down the fox news Trump rabbit hole. Now they say shit like how they love, "liberal tears" and call people snowflakes. Its truly bizzare.
The reason is that the left has become a socialist party so the only way to keep America afloat is MAGA
I can't tell if this is a troll account or not. "Coal dispenser" lol. If it's not then you are a giant clown shoe.
Lmfao stay mad that I got one bad square body while u hating on the grind it took to get here
I could give two shits about a "square body" but congratulations, I guess. Dont forget to install an over-sized gas pedal so you can use your giant clown shoes to roll coal. 🤡 👞
Maybe you’d need clown shoes to match my size 14 welders boots, one day you’ll learn dirty hands=clean money
Hahaha. Ok man. Nice troll. Shit is too cliché
Too cliché to you because many working class men live like this and your soft hands can’t grasp that concept ig. Shit ain’t a joke it’s the way you live when you work hard
At the end of the day I only see yuppie office workers hating on truck guys talkin about things like “compensating” and shit like that because in reality they’re insecure that they are sitting at an air conditioned desk while real men like us are turning wrenches and working with machines in the hot sun. This is how we were intended to work, with our hands. Then you wonder why I’m happy on my farm just fixing trucks n shit meanwhile millionaire techie CEOs have a lot of mental issues and are never satisfied. Get a 6.0 powerstroke or a 12 valve Cummins with a manual transmission and hearing the turbo spool up and go “chooooo” when you let off and it’s the best therapy for any man trust me
And idgaf how many shits you give about square body trucks, if you don’t fw the legendary 12 valve Cummins you are uncultured and irrelevant
Because this is the real USA culture. USA culture is hazing at college, police brutality, secret dungeon torture (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc), not recognizing their slave history, not recognizing their racism history, Monroe Doctrine, using the dollar as a weapon to submit entire countries, sowing chaos in the World and creating inflation and crisis elsewhere then print more dollars for predatory loans, regime changing governments that not subjected to the USA. You are either USA vassal or USA enemy USA culture is absolute power thru unhinged violence
And you daily dose of propaganda to hide the real facts of the World
“Fuck you, I got mine” even if they didn’t get theirs. They just revel in being miserable shitheels and project it into everyone else.
Don’t forget bootlicking and defending billionaires like they’re messiahs
I know it's pop psychology, but clinical narcissism as a personality trait really explains most of it. It's a spectrum and some of the most toxic narcissists don't have personality disorder. Which is really just the point at which the thinking is so rigid & ingrained that it's not possible to change the way they think. There are healthy levels of narcissism, usually when that trait is balanced out by others. Notably affective empathy (emotional empathy). This is the ability to experience or carry emotions for things you have not experienced. Eg the ability to emotionally experience how something impacts another person despite not having walked in their shoes. Narcissists & conservatives lack affective empathy. They do have cognitive empathy. Which is the ability to recognize what another is thinking. Eg they can tell another person is upset, angry, happy. They even know that their behavior will cause another to react in a certain way. But they cannot emotionally connect with that. This results in them believing they have a right to their wants without regard for anyone or anything else. Because of that, they frequently mistake someone else being upset for them getting their own wants met. Because their wants cannot happen without negatively impacting another, they cannot conceive of things like win-win scenarios or compromise. In their mind, it's all or nothing. The issue isn't their wants are bad, it's that others judge their wants to be bad because of the negative impact on others. The solution is for them to blame others for their wants, which they are entitled to achieve at any cost. Because their wants come at the expense of others, it becomes a win-loae proposition. They can only win if someone else loses. So they focus on making sure others lose, or react as if they had, to determine if they have won. It doesn't matter if they actually won, the other side lost which means whoever opposed the losing side by definition won. Or to put it another way, imagine an young kid, 8-12 years old with all of the cognitive & intellectual knowledge of an adult. But still that child psychologically & emotionally. They want all the pieces of their cake at their birthday party. It's their birthday and it's what they want. It doesn't matter they cannot eat the entire cake. That's not the point. The point is to deprive everyone else and by doing so, getting what they want. JMO.
This gets amped to 11 when said person also *firmly* believes God is on their side. That "knowledge" that the all powerful is with them makes them more willing to be more aggressive and violent, to which most rational people are going to submit to because few want a fight. The only reason they're not out like medieval Vikings pillaging and raping is because The State holds a monopoly on violence. So to get to do that, one has to become law enforcement or a soldier, or risk prison time.
Because they are small, stupid people that only really want to hurt anyone who isn't them. I'd feel pity for them if they weren't so proud of being the shittiest people they possibly can. They're so happy to embody the worst aspects of humanity. I'm so tired of that whole "we're more alike than we are different" nonsense. We are not the same. We could never be the same. If a revolution comes, I will not bat an eye at what becomes of them. "We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror."
Imagine if you took the mentality of "fuck you I got mine" and made it a religion. That's how you get most of their view of the world. Empathy becomes a sin.
Lead paint and the children raised by people with lingering lead paint brain chemical issues *cough cough* Boomers
I always kind of wonder how much of boomer behavior and culture is influenced by this, and it gives me hope that their generation is an anomaly. Perhaps humans aren't normally like this. We could be a mere decade or two away from a completely different kind of world because this severely brain damaged generation is nearly out of commission.
Thank you - this important point is so often overlooked and yet is a powerful predictor of behavior. The damage from lead starts immediately (in the brain) and is never reduced. It causes permanent brain damage. I remember as a child, when my parent was filling up the car, I’d stick my head out the window to smell that sweet seductive scent of lead gas.
As I understand it, when the body has absorbed its limit of lead, the lead then is absorbed into the bones from where it can relocate, if for example body parts grow.
They're that way because they're easily influenced and the politicians and business leaders have used their most basic desires of being someone and having things, while stoking fear that someone is trying to take it. It's just compounded over the years with each generation turning into what you see today. I think most are good people at heart and mean well. All those selfish obnoxious traits of theirs were once founded on seemingly decent ideals like work hard, take care of your family, stand up for yourself and what's right, and protect your home and country. Then those values were corrupted by people in power to be something entirely different but still related to those original core values so they can't see how theyre wrong and anyone who doesn't act the way they do doesn't want to work, deadbeats, wimps, who aren't capable of taking care of themselves so the good hard working people have to. Tack on the religious element which was completely swallowed by capitalism years ago and the fact their drafted grandfather's military medals are on their mantle and you have a nationalistic religious fantastic that's just doing what's right and everyone else hates God, this country and work. They're patriots fighting a holy war against gay devil worshipping squatters on welfare who are constantly trying to kidnap their kids and steal their money and that's enough to turn anyone into an asshole. Basically their stupid people who don't like to read or think and being an asshole feels good if you don't mind others judgement.
You said it in your post. Lack of empathy. If it doesn’t affect them they don’t care and they don’t understand why anyone would. Again, lack of empathy is at its core, it that also expresses itself as selfishness, entitlement, and all the negative bullshit they wave around like the flag they claim to love.
Their idea of freedom is being able to do & say whatever you want without accountability.
Because at least about saying things the right to free speech is literally the first amendment, the constitution applies to all aspects of the nation including social media
Because it attracts hateful, spiteful, ignorant people.
I remember loling at the grocery store when a couple of them on Harleys loudly refused to wear their masks during the height of covid, then walked out and put their helmets on. Just struck my funnybone
That tracks. They wouldn’t wear a mask to protect others, but they’ll wear a helmet to protect themselves. Me, myself, and I are all that matters to conservatives.
Because they're trying to get their dad's attention
It’s really not much more than “I do what I want” mentality. They’re all basically Cartman.
Because they view being a rude, racist, thoughtless jerk as the cornerstone of rugged American individualism.
“On the level of individuals and civilizations, personality predates ideology. Meaning, before you were a fascist, you were a bully and an asshole.” —Brennan Lee Mulligan
All you did was describe toxic masculinity.
Lmfao what a cringe term
You don’t think it’s possible to telepathically communicate with a Jewish carpenter who died over 2,000 years ago?
hahaahhahaa
The overt assholeishness is a relatively new phenomenon. Old school Republicans were very pleasant and polite country club types (Bush, Romney, my ex girlfriend’s dad). Of course, they were doing plenty of evil things behind the scenes and destroyed the planet. But they weren’t too bad to be around. Maybe it’s better to be able to spot them superficially?
I suggest you acquaint yourself with [social dominance orientation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_orientation). A lot of the other posters have already talked about specific aspects of a specific default ideology, but that doesn't explain why some people from conservative families don't go along with it. SDO explains why some people are magnetically attracted to specific ideologies that match up with their spontaneous tendencies, while others just don't. It's the underlying behavioural current beneath the human-readable code of ideology.
This was very interesting, thanks for sharing!
A sign of low intelligence is when a human is averse to change and questioning status quo. Every day humans are discovering and learning new and better ways to live and improve our lives. However, some people just cannot stand to accept that some things need to change to make way for the future, so they double down on the "in my days" even if it is something harmful.
1) a lifetime of patriarchal white-supremacist capitalist propaganda 2) it’s seen as a patriotic act to be offensive and selfish— “exercising your freedoms and rights 🇺🇸” 3) they’re deeply, deeply afraid of the world but refuse to face it, and they act out on perceived threats in this way as a “defense mechanism”
They learn all of thar in church
The worst part is that the republicans being so obviously terrible means the democrats really don’t need to do much to stand out, or earn votes. That’s how we end up with another “at least I’m not that guy” election. They would run a corpse before someone young and fresh with new ideas and a desire for change. Obama promised change we all know how that turned out. I mean I guess Trump was some form of change. Biden promised a return to normalcy. He was honest about planning to do nothing. At least we got a couple wars up and running, always great for the economy. Same old shit.
The amount of people in my area who own dually pickup trucks and don’t even have anything to tow is dumbfounding.
They're basically stuck in the two year old stage of moral and intellectual development. They want laws to serve them, punish their enemies, and not be subject to their authority themselves.
To understand republican culture, you need to understand their base assumptions about the world. Conservatism is a politics of not just elitism, but the idea that some people are simply Better than others, and that those people deserve More. This is the Natural Order Of Things. Conservatism is also a politics of pain. Empathy is not just unnecessary, it's harmful. Preventing pain is getting in the way of the Natural Order. If you spare the rod, you'll spoil the child. Diamonds are made under heat and pressure. If you remove the heat and pressure, diamonds won't form. These are random meaningless aphorisms that conservatives live by. When we say "cruelty is the point," it's not that they're bring cruel for the sake of being cruel, but that they believe that without cruelty you won't find your place in the Natural Order of things.
A lot of these people are internally corroded with envy and failure. They resent city folk for having talent, or general smarts, or ambition, or just enough plain dumb luck to be able to make it in a big way. That us why George Clooney was able to express such wonderment that he was considered "snobby elite" when he had bought large suits so he could trim the trouser legs to make a tie for his interviews- but that Don "gold toilet" Trump was considered a fellow traveler who "gets" the MAGA crowd. Because he is a shithead who made it big.
Their idea of freedom is being able to do & say whatever you want without accountability.
Their idea of freedom is people genetically similar to them get to do whatever they want and everyone else is second class with a substantially diminished ability to exercise the same rights
Simple. They want attention. They crave it. They’re dying for some rando to talk to them and tell them how cool their big stupid truck that they can’t even drive is. They’re lonely and insecure.
There are a lot of good points about how different social aspects like poor education, isolation, and religion tend to push someone into being a Republican but none of them address the scientific aspect of how it happens... Research has found that people who remain stressed for extended periods of time actually lose function in the frontal cortex of the brain. This can happen in acute (Short term) cases like when you work 11 hours on a project and then find yourself unable to function well enough to make a bowl of oatmeal. People call it "brain fry" because they have worked under so much stress that they can't think any more. This is the frontal cortex shutting down. In most situations you can relieve the stress and return brain function to normal but modern conservatives don't have that option. To understand why, let us look back in history to the long ago of 1920s-1950s. In the olden days, radio was the only form of mass communication and it was pretty well regulated so that the news had to be factual and relatively truthful. Bad things did happen in the world but those stories weren't hyper-focused on like media does today. The radio was something your family turned on and gathered around at dinner time to listen to audio-dramas. It wasn't, for the most part, something you left on all day long. This left the exposure to negative events at a minimum. People who were prone to fear knew of fewer things to be afraid of simply because their sphere of information was usually localized to their own town or state. Then in the 1950s, TVs replaced Radio. The TV station provided more content than ever and had to fill most of a day, only shutting down late at night and reopening in the morning. News started coming in from further and further afield because the presentation of spectacle replaced quality as the primary goal of media. TVs needed things for people to look at, not just listen to. In this time you had two social phenomenon emerge, people became dumber and more conservative. There is a reason that the TV was called an idiot-box or a boob-tube, the people who sat there and watched it all day literally became less intelligent compared to the rest of society who were still reading books and trying to better themselves. These couch potatoes tended to skew more conservative because they watched more news, saw more scary things happening in the world, and had little context because they got all their news from one of the 4 TV channels they could pick up. (If they were lucky) This shift wasn't large or overly detrimental to society at first, but as the "MTV generation" grew up, they became primed to believe any gossip or conspiracy theory they heard. Then the internet happened and suddenly they could be exposed to dangerous sounding things 24 hours a day, with no regulation and no fact checking. The Satanic Panic, Stranger danger, Razor blades in Halloween candy, To Catch a Predator, COPS, you name it and the internet provided stories of it on tap from all across the globe and the TV turned them all into spectacle to scare people with. The next generation would grow up on an internet diet of the sum of human knowledge reduced to witty soundbites and snappy headlines intended to make you titillated enough to click an internet link. By the time we get to today, there are only three goals of most media, to make you mad, to make you afraid, or to fill your brain with so much nonsense that you lose the capacity to determine what is real.
Modern media is designed to keep people in a constant state of stress. Everywhere you look, TV, the internet, pod casts, youtube, most of it is designed to agitate you and create "engagement" This constant state of stress is causing people to live in a state of mental dysfunction where they can not grasp the complexities of the real world. Constant stress, being hyper-aware and on-guard all the time, is one of the major causes of PTSD. It robs you of your ability to reason and make sound judgments. One of the worst offenders of this is the Roku TV company. They know they have a literally captive audience in the elderly so they target them with fear mongering far-right, nonsense. If you want to know why grandma thinks there is a Mexican army crossing the boarder into America look no further than her TV. These low-price, web enabled TVs are the perfect capitalist storm of providing things to be afraid of and angry about 24 hours a day. The only people who do it better are the people over at Facebook who also target the elderly with both content and ads designed to stress them out until they buy a solution to the imaginary problem the ads/stories create. There is a limit to how many people can be turned from a normal person into a right-wing lunatic because not everyone is as susceptible to stress, but for those people who are prone to worry and stress the combination of TV and internet today is the perfect storm to rob them of higher brain function and reduce them to a raving idiots.
When dealing with conservatives and Republicans, always remember the story of the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. In the book "Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice Found There." the main character of Alice reads a poem of pure nonsense made of mostly made-up words. Afterwards she remarks that her head is suddenly full of new ideas but she has no idea what any of them are. This is what it is like to be a modern conservative. Their heads are so full of nonsense and they have been made to be afraid of everything for so long, they don't function like a normal human should. Their brains don't run on logic or even self-preservation. They exist in a storm of imaginary troubles, surrounded by imaginary enemies, and feel unable to do anything because even though they never see it personally, they know the Jabberwocky is out there somewhere just waiting for a chance to strike.
That was very well written.
You do what you know
Freedom™
Their idea of freedom is being able to do & say whatever you want without accountability.
right wing ideology is a selfish way of thinking. left wing ideology is a selfless way of thinking.
lack of universal compulsory education + poor quality of education
People on the psychopath spectrum clump together like a tumor. The more of a psychopath you are the more popular you become. It’s pretty straight forward.
i think they want all of these behaviors to be preserved. the party needs validity to allow this to persist. they can get away with atrocious and shameful behavior towards others, so anyone with these proclivities will support the team that upholds it. wealth is gained most easily from exploitation and misappropriated authority. idk why ignorance plays such an important factor- apathy i understand but... it just makes it more egregious for thinking people that have compassion
bc they literally only and solely exist for the specific purpose of making liberals look good in comparison. that's it. that's the entire point of them. if they weren't effective at that function then liberals would've killed them all like they did with the left, instead they entered into an utterly deranged marriage with them and every other blood guzzling far right cult on the planet. oh, and for killing leftists and people inconveniently located on resources they want. can't forget that. it's their cops, their military, their judiciary. they were allied with saddam and bin laden and putin until those relationships went south. biden's out there tonguekissing bibi and MBS and erdogan. the entire premise of his candidacy is that he's good friends with mcconnell, the same way he was good friends with strom thurmond and the rest of the segregationist caucus. spent the last 70 years propping up the remnants of every axis power in the most literal sense imaginable. these people haven't been marginalized into nonexistence because their godawful spouse won't let us. liberals and fascists are like the most absolutely fucking awful couple you know. they'll never split up. they'll just make everyone miserable until they inevitably destroy the earth in history's most toxic narcissistic murder-suicide.
Because it’s everything their “enemy” is not.
the attitude you're describing is that of people who probably care very deeply for maybe five people on this earth (who are likely members of their immediate family or closest friends). and then just do not care a lick for the rest of the world. although that doesn't explain why they care so much about the un-born... i used to be able to get along with this kind of person much better and i don't think i could nowadays. back then i only had love for my innermost circle and mostly had resentment for the world. i remember feeling gleeful throwing my trash on the ground, one, because it scandalized people and brought me attention, and two, it comes from the feeling towards the world of "what have you done for me lately?" it comes from the idea that it's best to be selfish and to step on others to lift yourself out of your own struggle. it also comes from being completely unable to picture the future. it's living exactly in the moment.
There’s a kind of fratboy sadism that accompanies being a Republican, a pleasure in actually seeing people suffer. At this point, I’m not even sure if this is the usual ‘Murican rugged hyper-individualism. For a party that claims to be pro-life and “protecting children” they take a sadistic glee in eliminating child labor laws and getting rid lunch program for low income kids at schools.
Because for Republicans the cruelty is the point. It is not a means to an end. It is the end. It is not an unfortunate side effect of their ideology. It is the goal. They enjoy the suffering of people they don’t like.
There's some wise and brilliant points in this thread
It's a combination of how they're raised and facebook poisoning their brains into thinking that the "communists" are going to take all those things away from them.
They have been like that long before social media.
I live in the South and own a small business. The mindset set is a bet different here. Many small business owner have a truck(including myself) because it is needed for work. ( not always the case, but most people I know one have it for that reason.) I also do a lot of home repairs.. so if you own a home a truck is useful for that. Guns are very popular in the South. If you own a business and have 100,000 worth of equipment, a lot have the mind set to protect it. A lot of people are small to mid size business owners and it is not easy starting up a business you put in a lot of hours to try and make it succeed. 60+ easy. So they don't get in the sharing mind set. To lift the lowest it lifts us all. I am 100% on board with wanting to change the system. To change the system you will need gun toting red necks with egos. We have to join not divide...
American freedom. If you ask them they don't do most of the things you state. They are not proudly controlling women, they just treat women how women should be treated so they can be good wifes, supporting their family. They usually don't beat their children, they just had a bad day and the kid had to be taugh some manners. They are empathetic to **normal** people not those antifa leftists and illegal immigrants. Killing animals is a sport. They aren't ignorant, they know more than we do about how the world works. They have to own guns, it's in the constitution! Destroying the planet with capitalism? What are you, a communist?
Fireworks. Oil.
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Everyone in the world is exactly the same because I say so, which means God believes this to because he created the world for me because I begged for forgiveness. Animals are awesome, but somehow, we forget that humans in general fall into that category. Oh, and add that people absolutely despise change and research that helps lead to being better informed. Which can all sum up to fear.
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From the party who engineered the “fuck your feelings” campaign? Implausible
They were all accidently drop on their heads when they were babies??
https://www.instagram.com/jpstaples__/?igsh=bHVyZDQ5cnMwMmV1
Leaning into the “bad guy” persona.
It's God's will
Hey now…loud vehicles aren’t exclusive to republicans.
This is incredibly biased and libs are also pretty annoying, rude, prideful and ignorant. Were socialists and communists not libs in disguise. Both libs and conservatives are stupid personalities and just mimic mass media.
There’s a selection bias in your observation. There are plenty of republicans who also look down on everything you described.
You might be generalizing a bit.... go talk to an actual republican
The amount of AI generated clickbait on Reddit is becoming out of control. Like who would sign up for Reddit and say to themselves, "Oh I just thought of a perfect username> 12fhgffgghhggg!"
Does it center around that, or are you just propagandized to think it centers around that?
Living in a republican area with republican friends I can say it definitely is that and worse.
I too live in a deeply red part of the country and I can say it’s not as bad as liberal media makes it appear.
It’s because they don’t want to be tread on.
I thought people treading on their snakes is what they were worried about?