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  February 10, 2005


fingerwaggingDavid Pratt of Ecopundit writes:

Conservatives depend on external, authority-driven rules and ideologies. They've grown up asking the why questions. All children do. They've grown up breaking the rules, of course, because we all experiment with breaking the rules. That's human. The real problem begins with what each of us does within our own history of rule-breaking and question-asking.

Conservatives repent and atone to the rules, and accede to the "reasons" given by authority. In so doing, they learn to define themselves as rule-followers belonging within the secure boundaries of the authority structure. The problem with this is that it creates a myopic moral duality. It causes them to be angry and condemning toward anything not status quo, while they are still impulsively drawn to whatever the rules have forced them to reject. Conservatives close ranks around the rules. They are deeply frustrated, agitated, and aggressive toward anything that reminds them of their repressed desires and uncertainties.[archetype: finger-wagging, portrayed above] They often live double lives of hidden "sinfulness" and aggression, while maintaining upstanding "clean" public images. They tend to enclose themselves in rule driven groups and experiences that will not remind them of their unresolved vulnerabilities and uncertainties. They feel unhinged and assaulted by liberal "fancy pants" ideas.

For liberal/progressives the rules are open to constant challenge and reevaluation. When we break the rules and see the problems, we have learned to seek change and self-correction without condemnation. [archetype: shrug, portrayed below] We're expansive in our thinking, openness, and range of experience. We are also fearful of the thinly-restrained aggression of conservatives toward our more open beliefs and lifestyles. Today, in the U.S., with the "red states" moving toward old models of patriarchy, we are afraid. We are justifiably afraid. We can see that conservative certainty is breaking down the rules and laws that have been established to restrain them from (en masse) harming us.

shrugThis is a powerful reading of the psyches and fears of conservatives and liberals that are at once formed by our different Lakoffian 'frames' and help form those frames.

What is the evolutionary basis for these fears?

Is conservative aggressiveness what Hall calls the Alpha behaviour in times of adenaline-fired extreme stress: The manifestation of preparing for the culling of the weak, the self-sacrifice of the lower hierarchies in deference to the dominants, the eating of the young that allows a massively-overpopulated tribe of animals to bring its population into balance?

If this is the case, because of our separation from nature, and from our true natures, this normal balancing behaviour is manifesting itself in an utterly dysfunctional way. Neither liberals nor conservatives are playing their proper evolutionary role, taking their aggression out instead on the very nature it is designed to protect.

If this isn't the explanation, there must be another one. Why would our natures, conservative and liberal, be pitting us against each other so fiercely and fearfully at exactly the time we most need to work together to save not only our own species, but the rest of the planet that now depends on our intelligent stewardship?

6:14:43 AM  trackback []  comment []


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