The moral psychology of liberal and conservative politics

• If a group shares values it becomes a team and stops being open to experience.
• Take the red pill an open your mind to a new moral matrix
• What is morality and where does it come from? Not the blank slate, it is organised in advance of experience. So what are we born with

1. Harm / care
2. Fairness / reciprocity
3. In-group loyalty
4. Authority / respect
5. Purity / chastity ("political right does this with sex, left with food")

http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php

Haidt's questionnaire (27, 000 respondents at the time) shows a marked difference between Liberal and Conservative morality. Liberals value harm/care and fairness/reciprocity while conservatives do too, but to a lesser extent, but great value the other 3 morals (called dark morality but some). But are the last 3 traits morals at all? Haidt answers this with reference to The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych by Hieronymous Bosch, the analogy being that order tends to decay. Then Haidt pull the paper by Fehr and Gachter (2002) on Altruistic Punishment as something that reinforces this analogy. Perhaps this is what religion gives us (another conservative choice) religion.

The crux of the difference between liberals and conservatives is the rate of change that they want to achieve justice. Liberals, being open to experience enjoy revolution, while conservatives fear change.

"Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed; want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos."

"Conservatives speak for the institutions and traditions; want order even at the cost of those at the bottom."

Then Haidt encourages us to see the two forces as complimentary, as in many Asian countries e.g. "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease" - Sent-ts'an, c. 700 CE.

"Our righteous minds were designed to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth."

I find it hard to think about this in such a balanced way. To me conservatives are people who want to live in a hierarchy, and normally at the top. People who fail to overcome their mammalian and lizard brains, they live by impulse rather than consulting their pre-frontal cortex to ask: how could we do this better. That's not to say all conservatives are powerful, there are of course plenty of people who get a thrill out of being dominated, beaten up, treated like they are scum. This fits with the hierarchy view - conservatism a longing for a medieval style of sado-masochism, a sense of security through hormones and thrills. I wonder who writes about politics like this...