I was watching a video by Georgia Dow in which she talked about a study showing how fear drives people to be more conservative. What that reminded me of was the rationalization I keep stumbling upon almost every day lately: “the alternative is worse”.
We are mostly not revolutionaries willing to die for a cause. We just want to live our quiet lives, so we pay the thugs that offer us protection from themselves. The alternative is worse.
I can’t criticise people for trying to survive, but I think it’s important to be honest with ourselves. It’s all bad and the good option is really hard and a scary risk with too many sacrifices.
And let me get personal to drive the point home. Anxiety and depression are just my reality. I’m very isolated and avoid interactions as much as I can. I’m in a bad place and would totally tell you with great conviction that out there somewhere is worse. I also believe it could be amazing, but the chances of me suffering, actually, the certainty, makes me think it’s not worth it even trying.
Anyway. Be kind kind to yourselves, be kind to all the others, but be honest.
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Well, yeah. Conservatism is, at its heart, aversion to loss, to risk, to change.
That’s how they like to see themselves. But in reality it’s just hate and resentment bred by an unwillingness to use one’s brain…
Fear is the path to the conservatives. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to eating an entire tub of ice cream in one sitting. Eating an entire tub of ice cream leads to regret. Regret leads to promising oneself to start exercising. Promising to start exercising leads to purchasing a gym membership. Purchasing a gym membership leads to going once and never returning. And that leads to watching more Fox news on the couch. The circle of life, it is.
Not aversion to risk imo
And that’s why I think conservatism is kind of ignorant, because life itself is about change and progress, not about stagnating in one place. I’m very progressive though, so I’m more about taking a risk and seeing what results. To me life is about moving forward and ahead and not going backward into the past.
Conservatives don’t want to regress, either, and that’s part of the aversion to change. To the conservative mind, most changes will be bad, and result in regression, not progression. So we advance carefully and cautiously, not in great leaps.
I think fundamentally conservatives feel that humans are flawed beings and they can not change things for the better.
This is why slogans “make America great again” are conservative - the golden age is in the past for them.
Importantly, the golden age is mythological. Since evidence is irrelevant to conservative beliefs, rather functionality is relevant, the narrative of a golden age is appealing because it is achievable since it was already achieved in the past. What I mean by functional is that it is important that their beliefs serve a purpose but it is not important whether their beliefs are based in objective evidence. This is why conservatives who are fully aware of the complexity of US history want to propogate a sanitized version. They believe the sanitized version instills correct values while telling the whole story would influence people to perform those bad behaviors. It makes sense if you don’t think about it, and thinking about it is inherently traitorous.
It IS mythological as in, there never was an age without turmoil and unrest and inequality. I know they think that a “golden age” is one where we live by the “old rules” of former times, but there’s good reasons why those former times and those rules were left behind and/or changed.
Their version of what ‘correct values’ are, is totally different than mine. They have a saying here, “Utah values,” by which they mean values that favor big families, religious beliefs, and capitalist goals. That’s fine, but those aren’t the values I want for myself or my family.
So they can try to drag the U.S. backward all they want, but I’m not going along, I’ve come too far to go backward.
And I’m not sure WHICH golden age they mean - I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and though people THINK those were “happy days,” I remember the turmoil, the political unrest, the protests about police brutality, the hate, the huge problem of drug abuse and alcoholism everywhere.
I think the golden age is a fictive past that never truly existed (and nobody would really want to go back to anyway).
It does not matter when was it. You are thinking about this factually, meanwhile it is psychological/intuitive feeling, has little to do with reality. Each conservative will answer differently. Some will even point to Ancient Rome. Does not matter.
Well that’s kind of my point, no matter which age they are pointing to, none of them were really “golden.” There’s never been a time when there wasn’t war and disease and suffering and inequality, so it really is a psychological construct and not a reality.
For the sake of argument, let’s say there was such age. Changes nothing.
That’s what I’m saying.
That’s very true, I’ve noticed over the years living here in the Red state of Utah, how fearful the conservatives are about EVERYTHING. They just passed a law to keep trans people from using public bathrooms - even though there are probably four trans people in the whole state. Now the Gov is signing a bill making it easier for anyone to have a book banned from school libraries if it has any mention of human relationships or sexuality.
As my grandma used to say, our state motto should be “running Scared.” I think the reason our teen suicide rate is so high here is not just because of the anti-LGBTQ biases but also the culture of anxiety and fear everywhere you go.
