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I'll be honest. I never heard of a "narrative scaffold" before this post. So I looked it up. It just means a template. For example, for story: setup --> complication --> increasing complications --> resolution --> aftermath. That is a narrative scaffold. There are lots of different ones out there, but almost all have beginning, middle and end as their main divisions. I like the world "scaffold" for the following way fake news and indoctrinated people use story, though. A narrative scaffold is where the target goes to get hanged along with rationality. Here's the way this particular narrative scaffold works in terms of story wars. I did not get this from anywhere. I figured it out on my own. 1. The setup: A preordained conclusion, then an activity. In this case: Orange Man bad. Bad Orange Man makes a speech. 2. Complication. Orange Man says bad thing. Bad thing said has different meanings. 3. Payoff. Bad thing said proves Orange Man bad. Other meanings that indicate different don't count, even if they are more rational. Why? Because Orange Man bad. 4. Conclusion Orange Man bad. This is one more proof. Notice that this narrative scaffold is not limited to Trump. It works for Jews, white people, blacks, gays, for any target. Just replace "Orange Man" with target and keep the rest the same. Even a man as intelligent as Jonathan Haidt falls for this form of story manipulation with its circular logic. The narrative scaffold replaces reality in his mind. Notice that once the narrative scaffold is in place, it becomes a premise. Logic still exists, but logic is no longer used to identify and evaluate reality. It is used only to prove the story is true regardless of whether it is or not. This case with Jonathan Haidt is fantastic because of how clear the "narrative scaffold" is exposed. When Joe Rogan showed him the video and the context of automobile factories before the term "bloodbath." Jonathan basically said, "Orange Man bad. He calls for violent civil war because muh bloodbath and asides mumble mumble mumble." Then an assistant said the video had been altered to cut out the automobile factories context following the term "bloodbath." And he has a full video showing the part left out. He showed the video. Jonathan basically said, "Nope. Orange Man bad. He made an aside. That's all. An aside. He calls for violent civil war because muh bloodbath and asides mumble mumble mumble." That's how a narrative scaffold locks in a mental frame that replaces reality. Even in super-intelligent people like this poor soul. As an aside, a true aside , do you know why people who talk about the automobile industry (or any market for that matter) use the word "bloodbath" when they refer to a financial disaster? Because of all the red ink in the accounting books. Blood is red. The ink is red. Helloooo... This metaphor has been used for centuries. But not for those who have been brainwashed by a narrative scaffold based on a conclusion in the place of reality and infected with circular logic. How's that for a story war? Michael

And I would expect this from you. I mentioned Jonathan Haidt on here years ago, and admire him greatly. His findings are no doubt correct. I am glad that you (and Ipresume Haidt) don't consider all liberals as de facto elitist.Yet you have decided how I see life, according to the simple conventional wisdom of the right - other people are either superior or inferior to me, and I look down on those inferior. Maybe I hate them. Anyway, I hate freedom and don't want anybody to have any. It is no use telling you that the facts of my life and loves and mind do not conform to your ideas because you understand what I think and feel, more than I do. You know better. Right? Politically we are mirror images and maybe you are my better half, but I don't think so because I can't feel so, and neither can you. Anyway, back to Cohn,isn't "fighting dirty against those who fight dirty" based on the principle that the end justifies the means if your cause is just. What about a fair fight? fi()

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Wow, I haven't posted here in a long time. Unfortunately I've been preoccupied with working on my PhD. Another point I want to make is that, unfortunately, I've been finding that many conversations in the Objecto-sphere have become rather monotonous and rarely are new ideas or new topics being addressed, and thus the discussion has become less interesting for me in recent years. I'm still an Objectivist, I just haven't seen too much novelty in the Objectivist world, which is another reason I've been less than present on this forum. However, I am back with an article I wrote. I couldn't get it published at more general libertarian-outreach-activism places so I thought here would be a good choice. All comments are appreciated! NANCY MACLEAN, LIBERTARIANS AND AUTISM Introduction Criticism of Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean has become a cottage industry ever since she published her demented smear job against Public Choice Theory "Democracy In Chains." Indeed, MacLean's work is full of absurd distortions, misrepresentative quoting, and obvious untruths. Her entire thesis is that Public Choice Theory is racist; frankly I wonder if Nancy is attempting to continue Duke University's proud tradition of racially charged false accusations. Public choice scholars and economists like Michael Munger (see http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=9115 ) and Steven Horwitz (see https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2017/democracy-chains-deep-history-radical-rights-stealth-plan-america-nancy ) have done an admirable job in effectively shredding MacLean's thesis, but MacLean knew, just like Mike Nifong and Crystal Mangum, that women's tears are almost always believed and as such she decided to play victim (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Nancy-MacLean-Responds-to-Her/240699). It is no surprise Oprah shilled her book; I'm sure that soon enough Lifetime will be producing a telemovie about the trauma she suffered at being critiqued. But the point of this article isn't to channel my inner Christopher Hitchens and say nasty things about MacLean's screed. Plenty of far better commentators have done this. Rather, I am going to make a qualified defense of something she did say whilst criticizing what she seemed to be attempting to imply with what she said. We all know how utterly frustrating it is when people deal with their political enemies through the use of diagnosis as a substitute for dialectic. The Soviet Union took this to its logical extreme through claiming that political dissidents were mentally ill, because clearly no sane person could disagree with Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism; more recent entries in this category include the so-called "Republican Brain Hypothesis" (see https://www.abbeys.com.au/book/republican-brain-the-science-of-why-they-deny-science-and-reality.do ) that was proposed during the culture wars against the Religious Right during the George W. Bush administration. MacLean decided to add to this genre of political pseudoargument through arguing that there is indeed a libertarian brain, and that libertarian brain is characterized by being on the autism spectrum (see https://reason.com/blog/2018/02/13/democracy-in-chains-author-nancy-maclean/print ). Katherine Timpf at National Review fumed (https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/nancy-maclean-libertarians-seem-autism-spectrum/). Like several other critics pointed out (see https://psmag.com/news/on-libertarians-autism-and-empathy and https://anintenseworld.com/2018/02/10/duke-historian-nancy-maclean-identifies-autism-as-the-source-of-a-malevolent-ideology/ ), MacLean's understanding of autism primarily in terms of lacking empathy and not feeling solidarity with others is based on an outdated portrait of being on the autistic spectrum rooted primarily in the "Mind Blindness" concept of Simon Baron-Cohen; more recent research has greatly questioned whether "Mind Blindness" is a correct portrait in the first place. But so far, the responses to MacLean have focused on the fact she equates libertarianism with a lack of empathy and solidarity with others, and the fact that she equates being on the autistic spectrum with lacking said empathy and solidarity. These are all valid critiques to make of her position, but so far there has been little attempt to wrestle with the question of whether or not MacLean is correct that there might be a link between libertarianism and being on the autistic spectrum. Not only that, but no one to my knowledge has questioned the unstated premise of MacLean's argument, which is that libertarian economics (and Public Choice in particular) is wrong because the brains which formulated these economics are arguably on the autistic spectrum. MacLean's argument is simply not an argument unless one accepts that having autism or Asperger's Syndrome introduces systematic error into one's economic reasoning. Indeed, for MacLean to be correct, having a brain that is positively drenched in "empathy" and "solidarity with others" is necessary to be a good economist. My argument is simple; yes, it is in fact likely that libertarians are disproportionately likely to be either on the austistic spectrum or have subclinical levels of symptoms typically thought of as indicating Asperger's Syndrome. Libertarian thought and philosophy often is characterized by the kind of cognitive style which, in its extreme form, is characteristic of austists and in particular the high-functioning autists commonly described as having Asperger's Syndrome. This is where MacLean is right. However, the implication that this kind of cognitive style makes you bad at doing economics is precisely the opposite of the truth. Indeed, having a degree of autistic symptoms can plausibly be thought of as an advantage for an economist, and that it is the caring-feeling-empathy-solidarity normie-brain which could represent a disadvantage for someone trying to perform economic analysis. On a personal note, I am not just a libertarian with Bachelors and Masters degrees in economics (and in the process of working on a Doctorate in the field), but I also have Asperger's Syndrome. Nancy MacLean's statements therefore constitute an allegation that my very brain is less capable at economic reasoning than it would be if I were neurotypical (i.e. not someone with Asperger's Syndrome). Of course, one must wonder why I would develop an interest in and devote substantial amounts of time and effort to the field of economics if I were mentally impaired at comprehending it! 1. Libertarians: More 'spergy Than Average How someone thinks, their "cognitive style" or what Ayn Rand called their "psycho-epistemology," is partially determined by biology. Of course anyone of any neurology can grasp that 2 + 2 = 4, but research has shown that the biology of the brain influences how people think. Dr. Helen Fisher, for example, researches how brain chemistry impacts things like people's love life and people's politics (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lOPtTbFCMY ). Neurobiology has political correlates, as Fisher points out; she characterizes libertarians as having brains highly influenced by natal testosterone. Jonathan Haidt and several co-researchers also, in a study of libertarian morality, point out that biological factors can predispose one (albeit often indirectly) to different political ideologies (see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042366&type=printable ). An interesting thing which Haidt et al. point out is that libertarians rely on reason more, and emotion less, than leftists or conservatives; this is tested using Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathizer-Systemizer scale (see p12-13). This scale is interesting in that it is linked both to being on the autism spectrum and also gender; "libertarians score the lowest of any group on empathizing, and the highest on systemizing. In fact, libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than empathizing... relatively high systemizing and low empathizing scores are characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism. We might say that liberals have the most 'feminine' cognitive style, and libertarians the most 'masculine'" (p13). In spite of Baron-Cohen's contested contention that people on the autism spectrum are less capable of empathy, the point remains that there is clearly correspondence between Haidt, Fisher and Baron-Cohen here; persons whom are on the autism spectrum can be described as having an atypically "masculinized" (i.e. shaped by prenatal testosterone) brain. Libertarians (on average) have brains which are more testosterone-influenced than the general population. It stands to reason, therefore, that brains-predisposed-to-libertarianism are more likely to also either be on the autistic spectrum or at least have more autistic-spectrum-traits than the average brain. This also provides a theoretical explanation for why libertarian communities are disproportionately male; strongly masculinized brain development is more likely to happen to natally male individuals. This "systemizer-brain" orientation is evidenced all over libertarian culture, as evidenced by the emphasis we tend to place on logical consistency and reason in general (to the point where our biggest magazine is literally named Reason). As Ayn Rand made clear, she was not primarily an advocate of markets, liberty and egoism, but rather of reason, and if one embraced reason all the rest would follow; agree or disagree with Rand as much as you like, but she serves as evidence of how libertarianism has deep cognitive roots. The fact that libertarian advocacy is ultimately rooted in the Enlightenment, which championed human reason, is further evidence of this. Whilst the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has fallen out of favor with academic psychology research, I distinctly remember discussions in libertarian communities about how libertarians are about 80% xNTx (it is even more extreme amongst Randians/Objectivists, whom are about 85% xNTx and particularly biased towards INTx individuals; indeed MBTI enthusiasts often characterize Howard Roark as an INTP, and Rand herself as an INTJ); this is massively disproportionate relative to the general population, which is about 12% xNTx. The xNTx style of cognition is the "rational temperament" focused on thinking rather than feeling, and high level abstractions over immediate sensory information. To the extent that cognitive style is biological, the implications are depressing for libertarians. The libertarian mindset is strongly correlated with a brain that is heavily influenced by prenatal testosterone, moreso than the average brain. Libertarianism appeals to an atypical style of mind, one that is likely to exhibit more characteristics of Asperger's Syndrome or the autism spectrum generally; libertarianism appeals to a mind which is more emotionally detached, more introverted, more abstract, and less invested in social relationships than the norm (Haidt et al.'s paper substantiates this; libertarians are less likely to define or describe themselves in terms of their relationships to other people). This is consistent with the fact that libertarianism is not a mass movement, and implies that most people will find libertarianism counterintuitive at least initially. 2. Good Economics Is Counterintuitive Too It has been noticed by many that even very mainstream economics requires thinking that goes "against the grain." As Bryan Caplan demonstrated in The Myth of the Rational Voter, the average American diverges substantially from the economic beliefs of the average economist, and diverges in systematic and predictable ways (in particular, the average American is less pro-market than the average economist). The economists in the survey are a general cross-section of economists, and not "just the staff of the Cato Institute," so it cannot be claimed that there is bias in the selection of experts; the experts are consistently to the economic 'right' (if by 'right wing' one means pro-market) of the average American citizen. Even economists generally associated with the left, such as Paul Krugman, are surprisingly pro-market relative to the average (Krugman, for example, is more pro-free-trade than Steve Bannon). Not all libertarians are economists and not all economists are libertarians, but the presence of libertarians within economics is unquestionably disproportionate relative to the general population. The point to emphasize, however, is that according to the experts, average people are (on average) systematically wrong about the benefits of markets. Caplan notices that even first year economics students come into the classroom bearing the imprints of multiple economic errors which need to be eliminated from their thought. In other words, even non-controversial neoclassical economics goes against the intellectual grain for many, many people. This should not be a surprise. After all, economics is the field that suggests (and this is anything but a controversial argument in economics) people who act selfishly in the commercial realm will make life better for other people alongside themselves; this is hardly the first thing that comes to the mind of most people when they're asked to picture a "selfish" person. Rather, they imagine some bloodsucking brute, not the local shopkeeper. Many people who run various local governments believe that rent control is still a good policy, even if it is literally textbook bad economics. Many people believe that cheap goods from overseas somehow are "exploitation." Many people don't grasp the fundamental insight that voluntary trade where parties have all the relevant information will always make both parties better off by definition. Even non-controversial, non-extreme, standard-issue economic reasoning does not come naturally to most people. Economists in general, not merely libertarian economists, don't think typically. This does not mean all economists have Asperger's Syndrome (economic reasoning can be taught, after all); it means that economic reasoning has to fight an uphill battle against the conventional mindset. 3. Neurology And Systematic Error What I have shown is that libertarians are defined by a cognitive style which overlaps neurologically with certain symptoms of being on the autism spectrum. This is what Nancy McLean is correct about. I have also shown that economists in general (across the political spectrum) are more pro-market than average people, so the "norm" (which presumably includes and is defined by the majority of neurotypical persons) is systematically wrong. What I have not shown yet is that the characteristics of the neurotypical cognitive style (higher levels of empathizing than systemizing, "solidarity with other people" as MacLean claims, that kind of thing) can systematically bias someone towards incorrect economic conclusions. This is what I will now attempt to do. I should clarify that I do not intend to claim someone must have Asperger's Syndrome or substantial levels of autistic-spectrum-traits in order to be a good economist; economic reasoning is a skill which can be taught. All I am claiming is that having at least some level of autistic-spectrum-traits helps avoid systematic error. The first argument that needs to be made is that economics, as a field, is focused entirely on systemizing and has literally no room for empathizing. In economics, society and individuals are dealt with impersonally, as either collections of logical rules or utility functions or value-scales. Every person is merely one item in a far larger picture. Economists think in terms of optimizing systems, not caring for particular individuals (this does not mean they do not care, merely that this isn't the focus of economics). Standard-issue general equilibrium economics is built from mathematical models borrowed from field theory in physics. Individual happiness is just a matter of "utility" - a simple quantity of pleasure/satisfaction. The economy is invariably conceptualized as a system... be it a physical system, a biological system, a network, a machine, but it is still a system. Not only that, but economists are addressing one of the most painful and difficult facets of the human condition - specifically poverty - and how to ameliorate it. We have to deal with difficult tradeoffs that may sacrifice ten lives to save twenty five other lives. This simply is not a field suited to mindsets that focus on things like "feelings" and "empathy" and "solidarity" and "caretaking" and the other things which Nancy MacLean associates with the neurotypical mindset; it is a field which requires cold calculation, and often literal calculation since at times economics is like physics or mathematics. In this situation, a systemizing-oriented brain is exactly what one wants to have solving the problems. It is easier to speak of temporary frictional unemployment than to be confronted with the day-to-day minutiae of someone without any marketable skills trying to secure a job interview. A second, and in my opinion stronger, argument could be made however. Let us look at several "textbook bad economics" policies. How are these policies sold to the polity? How are they justified? Rent control is a fantastic example: "to ensure affordable housing for the poor." The motive here is compassion, solidarity, empathy, a concern for the plight of the poor. And it isn't controversial to say it doesn't work. Welfare states are consistently justified in terms of compassion for the suffering and solidarity between human beings. But, pray tell, why are these welfare states almost always full of massive bureaucracies rather than policies which handle welfare through simple income transfers (for example via a negative income tax or basic income guarantee)? Given the many problems and flaws that bureaucracy and its associated incentives have, one would think that a genuine motive of compassion doesn't necessarily mean one will pick the least costly, most effective means of being compassionate. Of course some environmental protections are easily defensible on the basis of economic reasoning. But what about environmentalist attacks on genetically modified organisms (a proven-safe technology) or nuclear power (which is incredibly safe and efficient if modern technology is used)? Environmentalists consistently appeal to the emotions, to empathizing, to feelings and fluffiness in their campaigns to cast GMOs as "impure" and all nuclear power plants as Chernobyls-In-Waiting. Nordhaus and Schellenberger, both economists, campaign (through their think-tank the Breakthrough Institute, see https://thebreakthrough.org/about/mission/ ) for technological solutions to environmental problems, yet the environmental establishment still demands wind, solar, organic and biodynamic (the latter of which is based on a semi-spiritual framework rather than a purely scientific one). Environmentalism appeals to compassion, feelings, oneness with the earth and all of that emotionalistic illogical bilge, yet consistently avoids the policy proposals actual economists can demonstrate would be effective means to environmentalists' declared ends. Let us also look at the monster example: socialism. Socialism was motivated in many cases by compassion for the poor, by the desire to reduce poverty, by the desire to spread prosperity as widely as possible. Every attempt to try it failed miserably, and to the extent that any socialist system worked it only worked to the extent it preserved property rights and market incentives (for example Titoism, which avoided famine, yet did so through preserving property rights over farmland). It strikes some as counterintuitive to suggest that letting people keep things for themselves (i.e. property rights) can result in a larger and broader distribution of goods than forcibly taking those goods and collectivizing ownership, but the historical record makes it clear that property rights and markets are essential conditions to wide-scale prosperity. Again, not even left-leaning economists contest this; the Economic Calculation Problem is a fact, which is why contemporary economists on the left are Social Democrats rather than old-school Socialists. There is a systematic pattern; advocacy of bad economics is constantly rooted in the same motives Nancy MacLean accuses libertarians and persons on the autistic spectrum as lacking. Compassion and solidarity and empathy are certainly positive traits, yet they seem to be the driving force behind some atrociously bad policy preferences. This certainly doesn't mean that good intentions always result in bad policy, but it suggests a possible theory that I will summarize as follows: "Neurotypical drives towards compassion, empathy, solidarity and other associated feelsy-niceness override rational consideration of what means are actually effective at generating the desired positive outcomes. Because people with at least some level of austistic-spectrum-traits can detach themselves from the compulsive cries of 'feelings' more easily, they may be better judges of what is practically effective." Conclusion Nancy MacLean's book on Public Choice is frankly so bad the only use I can see for it is toilet paper, even though I generally prefer pages of Abrahamic religious texts for that particular purpose. However, she isn't wrong to suggest libertarians may be more likely to have Asperger's Syndrome or at least an atypically high level of autistic-spectrum-traits relative to the general population. But that doesn't make us wrong about the economics. Indeed, the opposite is likely to be true. Highly empathizing brains without much systemizing capability are not the brains you want to have evaluating different economic policies. Frankly awful economics is typically justified on the basis of empathetic, caring, emotionalistic rationales. The more people feel and the less people think (i.e. the more they empathize and the less they systemize), the worse their economic reasoning gets. Even by the relatively moderate (compared to libertarians) standards of the economics profession, the general population is deeply misguided about economic fact. Neurotypical cognitive biases towards "solidarity" and "empathy" can lead away from economic truth, not towards it. Even non-libertarian economists use cold, impersonal reasoning to justify intervention rather than appeals to emotion and fluffy-wuffy-snuggliness. Good economics goes against every instinct of the neurotypical brain, which is why it is so counterintuitive and so many prejudices need to be weeded out. Libertarians, on the other hand, are disproportionately likely to have the kind of brain able to overcome these cognitive biases and see where the policy which appeals to "empathy" and "solidarity" will be counterproductive to these ends. This overlaps (although is not identical) with the kind of brain that is often described as "on the autism spectrum" and in particular the higher functioning regions thereof. Whilst MacLean is justified in suspecting a lot of us are "on the spectrum" at least to some degree, her implication that this is a reason to dismiss libertarian economics is arguably the opposite of the truth.

Ellen, I actually do. A pretty accurate notion, believe it or not, comes from aggregating where people get their news. The people who only look at CNN and MSNBC, and only read NYT, WaPo, etc., believe what they are told. There have been studies on this (Jonathan Haidt). This segment of people have no curiosity whatsoever about peeking at Fox News, reading Breitbart and so on. So many of them still think the Russians elected Trump. That Trump killed people with the Coronavirus. And so on. The studies I have read go like this. Liberals/progressive have very little information about conservatives and constantly get it wrong when they predict what conservatives will do. Liberals also tend to be more intolerant. Conservatives are more open-minded about looking into the world of liberals. They tend to be more tolerant of views that do not align with theirs. Moral foundations Of the six moral foundations, care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression (these are Haidt's categories), liberals focus on care/harm and fairness/cheating practically to the exclusion of all else. Conservatives focus on all six categories with about equal weight. Think about the moral tones of the different news sources. When you see them through this lens, you start seeing a predominance of slant like this. The outrages from CNN/MSNBC and NYT/WaPo and similar are all about caring and fairness. Whether they are right or not is a different issue. They manipulate the slant according to agenda, not facts. So their audience just doesn't see the rest. And, since this audience refuses to look at other sources of news, they end up believing what these institutions tell them. We know who the term "fake news" mostly applies to. This is why liberals tend to believe information that is factually wrong and get outraged about it. Internet The good news about all this is the Internet. Legacy media is mostly liberal with a few conservative exceptions. But the Internet is all over the place and it is throwing a monkey-wrench in intolerant belief systems (not just liberal). Even though the percentage of liberal to conservative leans in favor of conservative, it is more fluid than fixed. Yet the general direction is toward the conservative side growing and the news bubble of the liberals diminishing a little bit each day. I believe the Internet is the cause of this. The cult mindset needs isolation for the cult to exist and grow. The Internet penetrates into the liberal bubble and slowly, but constantly erodes the pool of true believers. (Notice that anti-Trump Republicans tend to be liberal according to this standard, even though they have National Review and things like that to read. They are mainly elitist insiders, though. So keeping their money and power is part of their moral make-up and that makes the liberal/conservative standard for the general population more slanted away from morality for them.) Test Here's a test you can do on Trump-hating liberals to prove their ignorance of basic facts. Ask them if they think Trump is a racist. If they say yes, ask them what racist things he has done. They will say Trump said white supremacists are fine people and similar, most all of which is easily debunked. But the liberal news networks keep pounding the false narratives and those in that bubble keep believing these stories. Most of them will not be aware of Trump's promotion of opportunity zones, money for black colleges, prison reform (hell, most liberals don't even realize the devastation Clinton's 100 to 1 severity in sentencing terms for crack cocaine to powdered cocaine did to the black community), and so on. Black people are gradually waking up, though. So black support for Trump is growing like it has never grown before. Religious conversion The hatred you get from Trump haters is real, though. And so is their ignorance of most political things that fall outside their news bubble. This is why I keep seeing a religious-conversion-like experience when a liberal shakes off the bubble. They can't believe how blind they were before. These people show up a lot on Rush Limbaugh's radio show (which has over 50 million listeners at any one time). But there are other places where they show up (the Walk Away movement and so on). People who have despised Trump end up being one of his staunchest supporters once they pop the bubble. All this is a slow process, though. The legacy media, which is owned and controlled by elitists, use liberalism/progressivism aggressively as a form of mind control for keeping the herd in line and getting more and more authoritarian laws passed. I want to write more about this and organize it better, but my time ran out. You can look into any of these points, though, and see their validity for yourself if you step outside of the legacy media and social media tech giants (which have become co-opted news-wise by the legacy media power centers). Michael

A few more things on Jonathan Haidt: The first is a wonderful lecture he gave at Stanford that I just watched: Haidt boils morality down to six topics, but note, this is from a psychological point of view. This means these topics easily spark feelings of sacredness or outrage (from sacrilege) and otherwise strongly impact people in terms of psychology. Care/harm Fairness/cheating Liberty/oppression Loyalty/betrayal Authority/subversion Sanctity/degradation He has a lot of data researching this and his simple explanations and examples are very good. But one thing he said, in my view, raises his discourse to the level of profound insight (Ayn Rand level). He said when a morality is centered on only one of these values, i.e., when one is sacred, meaning blasphemy provokes outrage, the people who think like this generally trample all over the other main moral values.Wow! It's hard to impress me, but that observation did. Everything I have lived and observed up to now resonates with it and speaks to its truth. And it explains so much, even at the core story level. Haidt gives as example liberal morality, which is predominantly centered on the sacredness of care and nurture. (Don't forget, Haidt identifies himself as a liberal.) The opposite, the outrage, is harm. And liberals think in terms of groups, so their moral storylines are predominantly victimization stories. And note, you dare not joke about an oppressed victim to a liberal/progressive. I just wrote the following offline to a friend: Note, this same kind of thinking can be applied to any morality that centers on only one sacred notion. Think about Objectivist fundamentalists who hold loyalty to Rand as sacred. Everything else is out the window if she is on the table, whether it is excommunicating people in open betrayal to longstanding relationships, skewing public polls, mocking in lowbrow language what others hold sacred, a level of indifference to care and nurture of weak folks that borders on depraved (especially when talking about nukes and war), and so on. The only measure of integrity for these folks is loyalty to Rand, her memory, her honor, etc. That is in practice. In words, they always say it's different and talk about reason. I prefer to look at what they do as a better indication. This is a hell of a good lecture by Jonathan Haidt. I highly recommend it. On another note, the article Robert linked to in the opening post is already getting some traction in the mainstream: Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans? October 30, 2014 By Maria Konnikova The New Yorker From the article: Way to go, Joe! And the last tidbit from one of Haidt's websites: I seem to remember in one of the videos I watched he also called this "The Moral Psychology of Capitalism." At least, I think that's right. “Three Stories about Capitalism” is the name of a lecture of his I embedded in an earlier post. Regardless, I predict this is one dude who is going to be very important to our neck of the woods. Michael

Carol, I expect that from you. From everything I've seen you write, you have no idea what life looks like through the eyes of people like Trump supporters. I imagine you think it looks the vision through your own eyes, that they see life like you do, and they are simply too stupid to know they are hypocrites, deluded, etc. etc. etc. Obviously, unlike the people you admire. Huh? Jonathan Haidt has studied this perspective thing very carefully. Look him up. He's academic. He's science. He's one of the "superior" kind of person elitists hold up as one of their own. The results from his experiments show that conservative people (not the elitist conservatives, but ones like Trump supporters) are very good at understanding the views of liberals and other people. But liberals (the elitist kind) suck at understanding the views of anyone but them. The science is settled. Michael

Reason's Ronald Bailey pens an intriguing look at Jonathan Haidt's newest work, “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology.” I had yet to hear about libertarians as amoral calculating rationalists . . . here's a few paragraphs from Bailey's piece. Full text at Reason.com ++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Science of Libertarian Morality A social psychology study explores the formation of the libertarian personality. Libertarians are often cast as amoral calculating rationalists with an unseemly hedonistic bent. Now new social science research upends that caricature. Libertarians are quite moral, the researchers argue—just not in the same way that conservatives and liberals are. The University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work in the past probing the different moral attitudes of American liberals and conservatives. With time he realized that a significant proportion of Americans did not fit the simplistic left/right ideological dichotomy that dominates our social discourse. Instead of ignoring the outliers, Haidt and his colleagues chose to dig deeper. The result: a fascinating new study, “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology,” that is currently under review at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In probing libertarians’ moral thinking, Haidt and his colleagues—Ravi Iyer and Jesse Graham at the University of Southern California and Spassena Koleva and Peter Ditto at the University of California at Irvine—used the “largest dataset of psychological measures ever compiled on libertarians”: surveys of more than 10,000 self-identified libertarians gathered online at the website yourmorals.org. In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the harm and fairness scales—that is, they gave those issues less weight when making moral judgments—and scored much higher on ingroup, authority, and purity. In the new study, Haidt and his colleagues note that libertarians score low on all five of these moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” Haidt et al. write. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on harm and slightly above on fairness. These results suggest that libertarians are “likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.” [ . . . ] Taking various measures into account, the researchers report that libertarians “score high on individualism, low on collectivism, and low on all other traits that involved bonding with, loving, or feeling a sense of common identity with others.” Haidt and his fellow researchers suggest that people who are dispositionally low on disgust sensitivity and high on openness to experience will be drawn to classically liberal philosophers who argue for the superordinate value of individual liberty. But also being highly individualistic and low on empathy, they feel little attraction to modern liberals’ emphasis on altruism and coercive social welfare policies. Haidt and his colleagues then speculate that an intellectual feedback loop develops in which such people will find more and more of the libertarian narrative agreeable and begin identifying themselves as libertarian. From Haidt’s social intuitionist perspective, “this process is no different from the psychological comfort that liberals attain in moralizing their empathic responses or that social conservatives attain in moralizing their connection to their groups.”

Jon, You think I am going to explain the humor in that to you? I don't want to get bit. I could explain it, too. And even go into how the setup is perceived differently between you two and so on. And if you really want to go super-technical, I can get into how the background and detail patterns reflected fractally throughout the brain (including those used for humor) are based on the patterns of place neurons in the thalamus and grid neurons in the entorhinal cortex communicating and integrating their firings into knowledge (granted, based at root on studying rats, so there's that ). Essentially, you are on one grid and Peter is on another. As it stands right now, if I tried to explain Peter's grid to you (and I see it quite clearly, just as I see yours), you will essentially tell me that's not a grid. Why? Because can't see a different grid from within a grid. You have to step outside and think in what's called a meta perspective to see it. (Later...) Ah... fuck it... I can't resist. Let me prove it to you: Peter is the culture of the middle class masses as his default, especially for humor, and, when you tried to make a point about how his humor can land differently, you went off into Jonathan Haidt-land--probably without even knowing anything about Haidt--as if it were the same thing (see here to understand that reference, it's nothing bad, and if you study his books, he has quite a few other stories like that to ponder). After reading that, I bet all you can see is that you made Peter feel like you do. And if I tried to explain this grid difference further, I am pretty sure you would be convinced I am missing the point. Michael

Jordan Peterson did a study, saying that there were two separate kinds of politically correct types. One of them, the "PC Authoritarians" as he put them, was psychologically very similar to religious rightists. There's also Jonathan Haidt's hypothesis, that the left see morality entirely in terms of care/harm, fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression, neglecting the authority/subversion, loyalty/betrayal and purity/contamination dynamics, however the SJW left (and other parts of the left) show a substantial streak of the three "neglected" foundations as well. It might be that SJWs are what happens when the same "type" of person who is typically predisposed to conservatism embraces left-wing ideology instead (which seems broadly in alignment with Peterson's argument), but it doesn't really explain why the SJW style of leftism only became exceptionally prominent and culturally influential in recent years. There's the Haidt-Skenazy-Campbell-Manning hypothesis as well, which argues that protective and smothering and controlling parenting styles have encouraged the development of a "victimhood culture" where children ended up emotionally fragile and hypersensitive, and became used to using social-media-lynch-mobs and/or appeals-to-higher-powers to resolve their grievances. Again, the problem with this argument is it doesn't explain why SJW norms ended up being embraced by the kids. The likely reality is that we're dealing with a multi-causal phenomenon. Another factor that is often pointed towards is social media, which creates a peer-pressure-panopticon effect that habituates kids to constant social surveillance, twitter lynch mobs, and other things that essentially damage children's capacity to develop individuality. This is compounded by how protective parenting is generating more regimented children's activities, so the result is children are spending more time than ever being institutionalized and controlled and managed within hierarchical social-politics-from-hell environments (see this article I wrote here: https://libertyworks.org.au/hey-shorten-leave-those-kids-alone/). There are obvious answers, like leftist ideology being "cool" and all the arbiters of "coolness" being somewhat leftish. There's the simple university indoctrination argument but again it doesn't explain why PC metastasized now but not in the late 80s/early 90s.

The authors have made available for download a full-text PDF of the journal article Microaggression and Moral Cultures. Jonathan Haidt gives a very full rendering of the article at his blog as noted at Adam's link. I am firmly on the side of the authors (and Haidt). Microaggression is a concept that I think is best rendered with more descriptive words (such as 'a little verbal slight or put-down'). One could say I micro-aggress against another OLer each time I skewer religious beliefs and dogma, or each time I discuss something that triggers the vapours or triggers an emotional outburst or pearl-clutching. This process takes sometimes risible form, almost indiscernible putdowns engender indignant reaction, perceived slights against non-present victims are met with scolding, pursed-lips and hackles raised. The offense taken each time is measured on the same microscopic scale, to my mind, which makes the entire campus concept a weird mirror to particle-physics. To measure the elementary particles, one needs to peer very very closely at the results of collisions to spy the by-products. This costs, on average, many millions of dollars for each smash. The cost of investigating micro-aggression collisions is not clear, but I think it is (contra particle smashers) unlikely to pay off in knowledge of fundamentals. At best it adds iron to ethical suggestions drilled into each of us by school age. Don't be mean. Don't be racist. Don't be hateful. Don't be a bully. With the other conceptually bizarre item, "triggers," I was there during its birth as a mind-closer, on Usenet satanic-ritual abuse news groups. Anything that could 'trigger' a full on PTSD attack, or make the multiple personalities therein more multiply weepy, anything that might set off the sensitive folk who claimed to have been abused by satanic cults ... you can imagine. Pathology grew like bacteria on agar. So, I have a built-in prejudice against that word and the work it is meant to do, just as I carry prejudice against 'microaggression' ... if it is meant to signal a very small aggression, it merits being countered by a teeny sort of retaliation in kind, a micro-retaliation: >super-small biff! Super-small bam! back at ya< Here is Haidt giving a bit of social-historical background in another blog post: In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well. These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races. So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor. [...] The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) can trigger searing memories of past trauma—and intense fear that it may be repeated—has been around at least since World War I, when psychiatrists began treating soldiers for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. But explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently, on message boards in the early days of the Internet. Trigger warnings became particularly prevalent in self-help and feminist forums, where they allowed readers who had suffered from traumatic events like sexual assault to avoid graphic content that might trigger flashbacks or panic attacks. Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus appears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding that their professors issue warnings before covering material that might evoke a negative emotional response. I'm not quite ready to declare The Death of American Manhood. That would seem akin to the general end-times pessimism slash hysteria of an oracle or moralist or Randian Chicken Little. "What country were you born in, Mei Wong?" "Same country as you, Miss White Arkansas ..." BIF BAM BOOM

The Western Liberal Reconceptualization Of Religion Why would a devoutly anti-Abrahamic atheist such as myself be writing this article? This article is going to argue for the importance of a particular idea in Christian theology as a contributor to Liberalism. As an Objectivist, this is a somewhat begrudging admission for me to make, but as Ayn Rand pointed out, one's primary allegiance must be to reality. In brief, I argue that the West has a unique understanding of what "religion" is. This unique understanding of religion is an "unnatural" one which diverges from what the latest research in social psychology and evolutionary biology suggests the purpose of religion is. This divergence can fundamentally be understood as a product of Christianity becoming a principally orthodoxic religion (reaching its zenith in the Protestant doctrine of Sola Fide). This unintentionally resulted in a kind of individualism that flourished into freedom of religion and, by extension, freedom of conscience and speech, thus laying the groundwork for the rise of Liberalism. 1. The Purpose Of Religion Why did religion arise in the first place? Even those who believe at least one religion was legitimately divinely inspired need to explain why religion is a trans-historical, trans-cultural phenomenon. All civilizations have temples to something held as sacred. Why? Scholars like Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind), Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes) and influential figures in sociology such as Emile Durkheim have argued that religion comes about to facilitate social cohesion and behavioral regulation within communities. From an evolutionary perspective, the argument is that binding a tribal group together confers a survival advantage, and religion is a way to do this; the religious impulse was thus an evolutionarily beneficial trait. Religion creates a sense of identity, a sense of "us" versus "them," and ultimately emerges as a way to sacralize the group/collective "self." As Nietzsche put it, people make their gods in their own images; a people will enshrine an embodiment of their values and collective identity. Religion can thus be cynically thought of as a collective narcissism. In other words, religion emerged as a tribal, collective phenomenon to regulate how people act. We can still see this in religions like Judaism (explicitly linked to a tribal identity with millenia of history), Shinto (again an ethnic religion), and even to a substantial extent Islam (which historically emerged to unite warring Arab tribes into one single tribe, and which to this day forms a basis for a pan-Arab identity; as many reformist Muslims have pointed out, a great number of the Hadith sacralize the tribal norms of sixth century Arabia). In technical terms, religion generally exhibits strong orthopraxic and collectivist characteristics. 2. Christianity: The Oddball I am neither a Christian nor a Theologian, so I make no comment on whatever kind of Christianity is the "correct" or "real" message of Yeshua of Nazareth (that is a matter for Christians to sort out among themselves). However, Western Christianity at the very least evolved into an unprecedented kind of religion. Religion began as a tribal phenomenon intended to hold groups together and enforce norms of behavior through making the collective identity/values into a sacred thing (i.e. something to be unquestioned, something one may not subject to rational critique). Yet in the West, theological disputes eventually gave rise to an understanding of religion as a set of beliefs held as sacred by the individual. The clearest example, and perhaps pinnacle, of this shift can be found in the theology of Martin Luther, who argued for the doctrine of Sola Fide, or that an individual is saved through having faith in the right beliefs (interestingly, Luther was also at least arguably an early proponent of religious freedom). Whilst Luther almost certainly did not intend for the consequences of this doctrine to occur, the result of this idea was to reconceptualize "religion" as such. As the Christian faith became more centered around the beliefs of the individual, Westerners began to see religion as such as a matter of individual faith. The core focus of faith moved away from what the group held sacred and towards what the individual self held sacred. A phenomenon which arose from collectivist orthopraxy began to be reconceptualized as an issue of individualist orthodoxy. 3. Political Implications Of course this doesn't mean that Martin Luther was a classical liberal. Nor does it mean that Christianity is devoid of tribalism, nor concern with making groups cohere and comply with social norms (Calvinism being the obvious case of a tribal Christianity that defines the world into an elect ingroup and a damned outgroup). Nor does it mean Christians themselves are happy with classical liberalism (most of them are not). But Luther's idea had political impacts that cannot be understated. If the core site of religious adherence and devotion is the individual mind, the idea that every person should be left free to worship as they see fit becomes an obvious implication. Thus, we see majority-Christian societies being the first to embrace religious freedom, and even arguing that religious freedom is mandated by Christianity. To quote Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: "Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do..." If matters of religion are ones that individuals are authorized to hold their own beliefs on, then why wouldn't matters on science or anything else be subject to individual choice? After all, religious opinions were considered the most important opinions for a human being to hold, for those opinions were what determined whether or not a person was to escape eternal torture! Ergo, freedom of conscience became a natural extension of religious freedom as understood through this belief-centric post-Sola Fide idea of what "religion" is, just as freedom of religion could be equally understood (from a present-day perspective) as the outgrowth of freedom of conscience applied to religious matters. Again to quote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: "That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry." Freedom of speech, too, can be seen as an outgrowth of this shift in understanding of religion within the context of the historically-Christian West. Christianity is an evangelical faith that imposes upon its believers a duty to spread the Christian religion. As such, the act of speaking (and communicating information generally) about one's faith is a necessary component of one's faith. Should individuals be free to believe, they must also be free to speak about their beliefs. As the Virginia Statute says: "That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty..." Again, if this is true of religious ideas, why not ideas on less important subjects such as physics or politics? If speech is to be free, why not all non-verbal forms of speech (such as disseminating ideas through pamphlets and other publications)? Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press naturally flow from this reconceptualization of religion that came from Luther's idea that salvation comes through individual belief alone. 4. A Note Of Caution The Western reconceptualization of religion may have contributed to Liberalism, yet this reconceptualization has downsides. Most importantly, it has obscured the West's sociological understanding of religion. Many Liberal thinkers, inclined towards Deism and Natural Law ideas, believed that their convictions were in tune with a "natural religion;" the research however would suggest that the "natural religion" of humanity is tribalistic, non-rational and centered around encouraging conformity to social norms rather than anything to do with an individual's sincerely-held convictions. Projecting this uniquely Western understanding of religion (i.e. a matter of personal faith) onto other societies runs a great risk of mischaracterizing not only specific religions, but religion as such. Nor does it only run the risk of altering the perception of non-Western faiths; many contemporary Christian sects practice a Christianity which is de facto about tribal identity and norm enforcement, even if the sect's nominal theology accepts Sola Fide. Additionally, it can be argued that this Western understanding of religion actually contributes to the decline of religiosity in the West. As an atheist I applaud this, but the point is that if this Western understanding of religion is contributing to the decline of religiosity then this serves as evidence for how this understanding is flawed from a conceptual point of view. If religion is merely a matter of personal belief, religious organizations easily splinter and fracture. Commonly-held faiths become individualized beliefs of sole practitioners. If human beings have tribalistic needs that religion satisfies, these more individualized faiths necessarily lose their ability to satisfy those needs. Unless some kind of tribalism is incorporated into the religion, the religiosity of the individual may decay and leave the individual essentially faithless (presuming the individual's tribalistic needs are low), or the individual may remain "searching" and perhaps engaging in a wide variety of eclectic religious practices. People whom are "spiritual but not religious" or people who practice a kind of "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" could be examples of those who's religious needs are not being met, if they are not examples of those with naturally low levels of religious needs to begin with. Conclusion The role of religion, and particularly Christianity, in the development of Liberalism, is a contentious issue. Some argue that Liberalism is an inherently Christian idea. Others argue that Liberalism has nothing to do with Christianity and that Christianity cannot be reconciled with it. My antipathy towards Christianity inclines me to be more sympathetic to the latter position, but the reality is that Liberalism developed in the context of a civilization with an intellectual history that cannot be understood without looking at the Christian contribution to it. It developed in the context of a civilization where Christian ideas had political implications, for both good and ill. As an historical matter, the influence of Christianity on Liberalism cannot be discarded. A critical area in which Christian ideas influenced Liberalism is in Luther's elevation of the individual mind as the locus of Christian Salvation. Religion emerged to reinforce and sacralize collective identity and encourage pro-social action; the idea of religion as primarily a matter of individual belief represents an extreme deviation, and even an outright inversion. Religion, once external to the self and about the supremacy of the group over the individual, became understood as internal to the self and an essentially sacred right of the self. Freedom of religion, understood as an individual's right to determine their own beliefs and live by them so long as the individual respects the right of others to do the same, carried within it the freedoms of conscience, speech and the press; within the context of an evangelical faith that sees religious beliefs as the most significant beliefs a person may hold, each of these four freedoms require the other three. The immortal words of Thomas Jefferson's Virgina Statute illustrate how the freedoms of religion, conscience, speech and press are intertwined. But we should keep in mind how recent and specifically Western this understanding of religion is. The seed of it, the doctrine of Sola Fide, emerged only 500 years ago, within the context of Western Christianity, and is still not accepted by the largest of Western Christian organizations. This doctrinal dispute caused over a century of political struggle, however it reshaped our understanding of the nature of religion; in accordance with Luther's emphasis on the individual's faith as salvific, the West began to see religion primarily in terms of personal belief. It is nearly a certainty that the pre-Luther greats of Christian thought would not have seen Christianity (or religion in general) in these terms, and the vast majority of world religions are not centered purely on individual belief either. As Nietzsche put it, God Is Dead. It may be the case that Luther unintentionally contributed. Luther's sacralization of individual faith was critical to the development of the idea that individuals have rights to religion, conscience, speech and the press. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, champions of these liberties, were often willing to invoke God to defend these freedoms, yet also were inclined to questioning many of those who claimed to speak for God. They fostered freethought, skepticism of organized religion, and Deism. They pioneered methods and philosophies that led many to embrace agnosticism, even atheism, and championed rights that protected those who embraced such positions. Luther's idea had consequences Luther most certainly would've found repugnant. Yet those who value liberty owe him gratitude.

Some thoughts from the author of 'The Righteous Mind,' Jonathan Haidt (see OL mentions here), at Spiked online: The Fragile Generation -- my favourite conceptual creep is with the weasel-term "Fake News." Where the species-genera distinction is obscured mightily. On an unrelated note, "Hate whomever you want. It's your right." Lauren Southern bashes back at micro-aggressions from the folks at Reason TV.

Robert, I have the following book by Jonathan Haidt, which I haven't read yet. I got it because I liked the title. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Since I haven't read it, in order to get a quick gist of his thinking, I looked him up on YouTube and saw his most recent TED Talk (2012). Really cool. Also, I saw this (from 2014), so I'm throwing it in for the hell of it: I like Haidt's view of capitalism being driven by creating value and his recognition of it in the business environment. That's what Rand is all about. And I like how he reevaluated his thinking by looking at correct statistics. And I really like his view about morality being transmitted primarily by stories, core stories, not logic. Not because I prefer that (I would prefer logic were that possible), but because that is what I observe in human nature. Notice that stats made him reevaluate his thinking, but you can still feel the tug of the progressive morality in his presentation. I don't mind when the two world-views get mixed, but the stories back off when faced by striking facts. I'm going to pull Haidt's book off the shelf and throw it on my "read this now goddamit" pile . Ah, yes. And I'm going to read the paper. After all this, there's no way out of it. (Besides, I like Joe.) Michael

Incidentally, I just saw a long video by Steven Pinker that illustrates why we have to keep an eye on scientists at all times when they talk about morality. And power. Some background. I bought Pinker's most recent book, The Sense of Style, and am around page 100 so far. This is the best book on nonfiction writing I have encountered. I like to study the same material through different inputs when I really want to nail a topic, so I am fortunate that there are several lectures online where Pinker gives a discourse on style and plugs his book. I can read and watch the same material and, hopefully, some of it will stick in this stubborn skull of mine. (Pinker doesn't say it, but he is confining his lectures to the first three chapters--at least, the ones I have seen. There are more lectures I have not seen, so maybe he will expand in another, but I doubt it. He's telling all the same jokes with all the same pauses, asides, emotional tones, etc. It's the same across the board--and everything is straight out of his book, even the jokes and minor quips. ) But back to point. At 1:52:00 in the video, during the Q&A, a young man asked Pinker what he though about, at some time in the future, criminalizing science-denial. Man did my ears pick up. He actually asked about criminalizing what people think in the name of science. To Pinker's credit, he gave a nervous laugh, said no and gave some semblance of an explanation. But I started wondering. If science were supposed to be such a morally pristine environment, that kind of question should have been condemned in much stronger terms. Not just by Pinker, but the people around, too. Where were the collective groans? The fact that this was absent is an indication that this young man's musing is not an anomaly. This stuff is in the air. And people think it's normal. Pinker's next book is going to be on "scientism" and he fully intends to defend it, so I am interested to see how he is going to handle the result of the core story it will promote in the scientific community, especially among the young. The fact is a lot of conceit (I mean the low cheap petty vanity kind of conceit, not simple selfishness) is built into the attitudes of those who hold science up as some kind of religion. They are the keepers of The One True Way and everyone else is supposed to sit down and shut up when they speak. They love sniggering, too. We all know where that leads. You don't need a God to get massive disasters out of humans. Science will do just fine. Look at the mess atheistic politics has created and the mass murders it has produced--while touting science as its method. I say keep morality to people who study morality. If religions want to teach morality through mythological stories, fine. If science wants to study morality with scientific tests and analysis of historical data, fine. People like Jonathan Haidt (who I am also reading right now, i.e., The Righteous Mind) are doing a pretty good job. But he, at least, is not on a crusade to slay any monsters (like the New Atheists are). And his decision did not come from analyzing anything under a scientific lens. He made a moral commitment as an individual and kept to it. Science doesn't teach you to do that. This may be inherent to the scientific method in theory, but how to choose objectivity as a moral guide when your 'scientific method' peers are acting in an irrational manner and sending barrages of peer pressure against you can only come from a moral commitment. Haidt's moral commitment was to accept as reality what the data told him him irrespective of his political and moral beliefs and irrespective of what the scientific community believed--and to overhaul those beliefs if the data went contrary. When you look at his early work (when he was about as progressive as they come) as opposed to later, you see him changing by metaphorical kicking and screaming (all right, all right, he was not that loud ), but he changed and is changing more. I admire him for this, but not as a scientist. I admire him as a man. A moral man who chose to base his morality on right and wrong according to the best his honest thinking could lead him instead of "I'm superior to other humans because I'm a scientist" and "They're inferior human beings because they're not scientists." It takes balls to do what he's doing. It takes no balls to say, "Hey, let's criminalize science-denial." All you need for that is a mob. Michael

Now being circulated for commentary is a new "target article" to be published in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. http://the-good-news.storage.googleapis.com/assets/pdf/psychology-political-diversity.pdf This is big, folks. One reason being that Jonathan Haidt is expending a chunk of his political capital by putting his name on this article. Haidt has a history of carefully tempering any gesture of his that his fellow academics would perceive as contrarian (and there are some minor instances in the present piece) but he's pretty much putting it all out there now. The institutional reactions are going to prove interesting. Another reason is that the first author (in inverse order by seniority) is Joe Duarte, who has long been associated with The Atlas Society (where he and I collaborated on a presentation a few years ago). You will never—I repeat, never—see any ARI affiliate getting involved in this kind of effort. Robert Campbell

Ellen, But... but... but... it's peer reviewed and written by English academics, fer goddsakes... Don't you know your betters? It would be cute to see a list of measurements of snooty condescending vain attitudes toward normal people by academics, especially academics who study society as if people were cockroaches in Petri dishes. Joe Duarte started the ball rolling (see here for an article by Jonathan Haidt on his political bias in academia paper, much to the chagrin of the tut-tut-tutters) and would be just the man for the job. I don't know Joe except online, and even then at a distance. Let's just say I'm an admirer. Michael

I loved the picture of Gay Naturist Grandpa. I saw it earlier at Free Republic, in the context of a comment thread rant about the Castro district in San Francisco. The last Pride Parade I attended in Vancouver had a contingent of naturists. Middle-aged if not elderly, with sun-hats, walking shoes, socks, watches, fanny-packs -- but nothing covering the genitals (this was also a big Topless day, of course, with many bared female breasts). My reaction to the waggling grandpas (yes, all those who marched under the Naturists banner were men) was similar to the young kid in the Castro pic.** There was no theme 'of a little boy looking out on a gross world' intended. Dennis uttered his recondite "Does his mommy know?" remark, and I responded. Win some, lose some, as I said. Michael, I am glad you said this (without saying it), for it is wrong. My fault you intuited a non-existent 'theme' but still wrong. My plaints about mom were meant to be humourous ('pack mule'). I rather enjoyed the shopping, and mom in her finery. A trip downtown involved lunch at The White Lunch (a fave) and lots more. The Electric Photographer was also much fun. So, no, I am not telling you that the gross part for the little boy (me) is a good-looking mother shopping too much, there was nothing gross about the world except for stupidity and violence from my six-year-old vantage. I apologize for being unclear and using the fine humour brush in my remarks. Embedded in my remarks was a clue that I was kidding around: the wet socialist plaster setting in my mind, etc. No invidious comparison to Auschwitz or child soldiers was designed. The value on the table (for you) was jazzing up a petty feud? That was also not intended. I intended to illustrate Brant's "Bitch-slap" comment. I contrasted the tetchy remarks of Dennis to his earlier blowout on the 5 minute phobia thread -- the 'unvarnished evil' blurt. Do I consider Dennis among the bugs below? Nope. The thread subject is interesting to me and actually led to doing some more research on Jonathan Haidt's work on morals and political stripe. I will post those comments later, and perhaps help to return the thread to its rails -- after having contributed to running it off the rails. A petty feud between Hardin and Scherk would be a dire and uninteresting thing, I believe. If I have left the impression in your mind, Michael, that it is a feud, my mistake. I do not know how closely you followed argument in the 5 minute phobia thread, so I understand. I also understand that the comment I made was probably far too long and involved and suffused with a cheekiness that did not translate well. To recap, my criticism of Thought Field Therapy was principled and on point. Dennis's reaction was over-the-top and off-point. His invocation of Ellsworth Toohey and unvarnished evul was hilarious. That said, my remarks and the video of my remarks in this thread may have missed their targets. I want to say 'huh?' Michael, if you grasped a theme of looking down my nose at people, my mistake. I want to say you may have missed the actual remarks and their intent. I want to say that this is not all I want to do. I want to say, "I need to unpack this sentence." -- WSS was once a heifer looking out a gross world -- now a cow, WSS moos louder than the herd -- WSS is a cow, a moo cow -- loud quirky mooing Now it is unpacked, I want to put that mess back in its case. But, like Grandpa's waggly bits, it's out there and no repacking into the Speedo can undo the assumed damage. I want to say, "I never actually had decided to be a metaphorical cattle." I also want to ask myself, "If MSK can so miss my points, what can I do to correct his misapprehensions?" To that unposed question, I have no answer yet. However, this particular remark deserves a response: Is the premise true, that I do not like criticism? No, not really, but I may be biased or too wrapped up in amour propre to admit it. More importantly, I do think, is responding to and using criticism. Addressing criticism, whether I or you or anyone likes it or not, that is important. So, to MSK's criticism. The original complaint was that the video was a stinker and a dud. Fair enough. I pulled it down from Youtube (not because of the bogus privacy concerns). I thought about the criticism. Some of MSK's remarks I did consider closely, some I did not: -- I am trying too hard on the target people -- I am trying too hard to position myself as oh-so-superior This could be true. An over-eager effort to target and position (as viewed from MSK's POV) can lead to missed messages. The message can be entirely overlooked because of problems in delivery. Is this a problem (over-energetic targetting/missed messages) with many people MSK sees coming from 'the liberal mindset'? Yes. Now, Michaels says this is honest feedback from a friendly voice, and that I am starting to find a glimmer of a unique voice of my own. That is indeed encouraging. I am better than just a troll. ************************* In the end, the puzzle remains from the TFT thread: if few here have actually done the work to understand both the claims/evidence and the debate over TFT/5 Minute Phobia Cure, how can they have such firm opinions on its value? Why does their intuition trump the actual scientific labours to prove TFT effectiveness? If we cannot reach agreed-upon facts or methods for determining facts, why not? We all adhere to reason as our best and most precious tool. What, ultimately, is at issue? Reason, facts, evidence? Personalities, putdowns, snarkfests? Anyway, in the end, the thread is derailed. I will do my best to put it back on track, leaving aside the Scherk-Hardin feud. What tweaked my interest (besides Hardin's misspelling of Jonathan Haidt's name) was this notion of All or Nothing. That a moral, principled case can and should be made for laissez-faire, without reference to scriptures or consequentialism, I think we can all agree. But Dennis's point (among many) seemed to be that making a non-moral case for capitalism is both wrong and unnecessary. A yawn. On this point, I tend to agree more with our glamourous Australian, and with Brant: [A] moral defense of self-interested action is necessary for us to win, but 1) necessary =/= sufficient, 2) the necessity of a moral defense of self-interested action does not preclude the usefulness of other defenses of market economics, and 3) as stated before, consequentialist arguments and natural rights arguments are fundamentally compatible via the logic I previously explained. PS to Carol: Mom picked my outfits. She had the cash. Luckily I passed for a normal child most of the time. The only time I resisted mom's outfit choices for me was over The Hand-me-down Cowboy Boots. I refused to wear them to school (I said, "We are not allowed"). That is another story, of madness, nervous breakdowns, parental bondage, yadda yadda. ___________ ** Similar, but not identical. I was not offended or disgusted, and actually enjoyed the Wagglers appearing right behind our Mayor (on inline skates) and in front of the Scotiabank float featuring fully-packed Speedos and attached dancers. The only contingent in the Parade that raised my ire was the collection of 9/11 Truthers (also on inline roller skates). I actually told the guy who jammed a brochure at me to Fuck Off Completely. Their creepy authoritarianism marred my appreciation of the Anything Goes atmosphere and I will not go to another Pride Parade they are invited to.

This smells fishy, though. What do you find fishy now that you may have had a chance to look deeper into the research, Michael? Yes, more than plausible -- in thirty years of psychological research into political/ideological disposition, there are varied plausible connections found between temperament/personality traits and social behaviour/attitude that aren't exactly 'political.' If you are familiar with the Big Five factors of personality theory, you may not be surprised that research has apparently found strong correlations between high scores on the 'openness to experience' factor and liberal political attitudes. The line of inquiry pursued by the study featured in your link is informed by these interesting correlations, and by other findings that 'novelty seeking behaviour' could be correlated generally to the same factor. Not a big jump to testing genetic regions that were suspected to play a part in predisposing folks to that kind of behaviour. The current research tries to tie together a few of the converging lines with the novel finding of an actual variation on the genome -- laid alongside plausible social/environmental variables suggested by prior research. That's what I find to be startling and interesting -- findings that at once support several explications of observed differences. The general subject of this work has long fascinated me -- touching as it does a central psychological puzzle: "Why do people believe/act as they do in 'right/left' terms?" The related questions that I have always hoped might be answered are these: -- is temperament/personality a reasonable predictor of 'political values' or 'political orientation'? (and if so, how strong are the presumed associations) -- how exactly does research establish a 'conservative' versus 'liberal' personality? -- do longitudinal studies of personality/temperament suggest that 'conservative' or 'liberal' political orientations are enduring? -- does research on 'political personality account for a 'libertarian' orientation? for 'conversion' behaviour? -- what kinds of milieus tend to reinforce or weaken the posited tendencies to one pole or the other? Other OL readers who have the same interests as I might be aware of some earlier research by Jonathan Haidt. This research made a bit of a splash (search on "What Makes People Vote Republican?") since he appeared to chastize fellow liberals for a shrunken sense of morality. His particular angle is only one take on the more general variables, of course. I include a few links and abstracts at bottom to highlight some other angles taken. What emerges from the multiple strands of research may be a set of basic, relatively reasonable premises built on straightforward, valid observations -- there are real personality differences between folks who can be most firmly attached to one 'pole' or the other -- and there are actual 'ingrained' temperament/behaviour variations that are directed in part by genetic endowment. What this means, of course, what this portends, what this says about the morality of either pole . . . this is where the research conclusions can be used to buttress prejudices on either side. In much of the commentary surrounding Haidt's splash, for example, and at other times when the orientation/personality research appeared above the media waterline, it seemed that the information was simply added to a toolkit of psychological disparagement. The 'left' simpletons were in effect seeking a datapoint to support 'conservatism' as birth defect, and the 'right' stupidos did exactly the same thing in reverse. It's the old kneejerk 'argument by evulness' crap, in my opinion. I bet that as we each here ponder the predictions of this kind of research, we could test the presumptions and premises basic to the research against our own life experiences and against our own score on the five factors of personality. Do the predictions hold or not? Can one see oneself in the varied findings? Of course, the predictions of the research noted above are quite specific, and we would need to be tested for the gene variant to make a proper test of those particular findings . . . a striking aspect of this research is that it can be done again with different cohorts -- if the correlations hold on subsequent study, then fishy or not, we have some reliable information to further ponder. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes Geneticists who study behavior and personality have known for 30 years that genes play a large role in people's instinctive emotional responses to certain issues, their social temperament. It is not that opinions on specific issues are written into a person's DNA. Rather, genes prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a social group. Only recently have researchers begun to examine how these predispositions, in combination with childhood and later life experiences, shape political behavior. Thinking styles and the big five personality traits revisited The big five personality traits Neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness are known as the big five personality traits in psychology. The five-factor personality traits model (FFM) resulted from several decades of factor analytic research focusing on trait personality (see Antonioni, 1998). Neuroticism (N] is the opposite of emotional stability. People high on the N scale tend to experience such negative feelings as emotional instability, embarrassment, guilt, pessimism, and low self-esteem. People scoring high on the extraversion (E] scale tend to be sociable and assertive, and they prefer to work with other people. Openness to experience (O] is characterized by such attributes as open-mindedness, active imagination, preference for variety, and independence of judgment. People high on the agreeableness (A] scale tend to be tolerant, trusting, accepting, and they value and respect other people’s beliefs and conventions. Finally, people high on the conscientiousness (C] scale tend to distinguish themselves for their trustworthiness and their sense of purposefulness and of responsibility. They tend to be strong-willed, task-focused, and achievement-oriented. Nursery school personality and political orientation two decades later Preschool children who 20 years later were relatively liberal were characterized as: developing close relationships, self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under-controlled, and resilient. Preschool children subsequently relatively conservative at age 23 were described as: feeling easily victimized, easily oVended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable. Examining the Differences in the Moral Foundations of Liberals and Conservatives Liberals and conservatives have different moral foundations, according to research published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009. The moral foundation theory developed by Graham and his colleagues consists of five main moral foundations: Harm - caring for and not hurting others, Fairness - equality and reciprocity, Ingroup - loyalty to one’s group, Authority - respect for leadership, and Purity - the sanctity of social norms and customs. “Liberals generally justify moral rules in terms of their consequences for individuals; they are quite accustomed to balancing competing interests and to fine-tuning social institutions to maximize their social utility. Conservatives, in contrast, are more likely to respect rules handed down by God (for religious conservatives) or from earlier generations.” Unlike studies one and two, this third study also included libertarians as a potential political affiliation, who were more likely to violate the five moral foundations for money than either liberals or conservatives. Interestingly, although libertarians are often viewed as being similar to conservatives, the difference between libertarians and conservatives was greater than the difference between liberals and conservatives. “Libertarians may support the Republican Party for economic reasons, but in their moral foundations profile we found that they more closely resembled liberals than conservatives,” as Graham and his colleagues explain. Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show. Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work. Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions. The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research. Researchers Find a 'Liberal Gene' Liberals may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4. The study’s authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter affecting brain processes that control movement, emotional response, and ability to experience pleasure and pain. Previous research has identified a connection between a variant of this gene and novelty-seeking behavior, and this behavior has previously been associated with personality traits related to political liberalism.

Thanks for the Econotalk link. I enjoyed it, although I was already familiar with many of the concepts by way of Jonathan Haidt and Thomas Sowell. I think the most fundamental distinction is Sowell's Constrained vs. Unconstrained "visions." Basically, it speaks to the issue of Man's nature. Is Man good or corrupt? Is he "perfectible" ,or limited by his nature? Objectivism stands with Progressives on this issue, but for different reasons. I think this precarious balance in Objectivist ideology shakes out in actual practice when we see the various factions within the Oist movement. Here, more fundamentally, is the issue of free will. Advocating an "unconstrained vision" in the context of liberty requires a staunch defense of the doctrine of free will. And that topic is far from settled... Incidentally, even though you have gone some way towards qualifying your nuanced political positions, I still reserve the right to call you a libertardian.

Kacy, I don't mean this to be antagonistic, but why is your primary reaction that everyone on this board is wrong and your position is correct? Since you've said that you admire many of the posters here for their capacity for independent thought and reason, given the overwhelming consensus against you in this case, shouldn't your null hypothesis be that you are mistaken? I'm not advocating a popularlity contest of ideas, but I bring this up because I believe it underlies many of our disagreements and is indicative of some philosophical differences between you and SB and me. I'm not saying Kacy is mistaken, necessarily. He does have a point. But only *a* point. He is correct that fraud is most likely taking place since psychic abilities have never been proven to exist. This concern is no different than the FDA's interest in controlling questionable health products meant to cure cancer, but which might prove harmful. Kacy, as he so often demonstrates, is concerned with folks being harmed. So I would agree that he is correct -- in his context of values. The reason he finds resistance on this forum is because most everyone here has a different context of values, namely, most here are liberty-minded and concerned about an overreaching nanny-state. This doesn't mean they are wrong, it means their priorities are with larger issues related to government and freedom. So we see here again the psychological divide between liberals and conservatives (or certain libertarians). I have mentioned Jonathan Haidt's research elsewhere on this forum, but for the uninitiated: http://www.moralfoundations.org/ Moral Foundations Theory was created by a group of social and cultural psychologists (see us here) to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The foundations are: 1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance. 2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives] 3) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. 4) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one." 5) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions. 6) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions). Liberals like Kacy obviously score high on (1) and (2). The Objectivists here score highly on (3) (and possibly some others). Regarding (1) care/harm, Kacy has said in the past that the true measure of a country/society is how it treats its most vulnerable members (paraphrased). Note: this "true measure" does not include "freedom", or "liberty", or "social cohesion" or "technological progress." His focus is on care/harm -- his psychology weights this concern heavier than others. Regarding (2), his busy-bodied desire to regulate transactions between psychics and their customers is proof enough of his sympathies lying with fairness/cheating. I shouldn't have to go down the list, I'm sure most of you get the point. This should serve as an illustration of why these conversations between liberals and conservatives ( or libertarians) are so aggravating. What we have are not two dispassionate truth-seekers looking for a Single Concensus, but rather a clash between values. And this is why I don't see much use in engaging such things -- it is mostly futile. (MSK would refer to these near-intractable psychological traits as "cybernetic programs" which operate independently of conscious awareness -- most other people would refer to them simply as "personality traits." Furthermore, I would like to point out that this conception of human value-behavior spears yet another stake into the heart of Objectivism's laughably simple-minded notion that the field of philosophy is more fundamental, more important, than the field of psychology. As if.) Absorbing hit list. Thanks for showing. Trouble is, it reflects a 'one or the other' approach. If you don't "care" - and who knows that, the thought police?- you must mean "harm"?? And also does not go far enough, conceptually. Psychological cardboard cutouts (and I have a lot of respect for some psychology.) It hands over (without a fight) the "care" and "fairness" 'higher morality' to the very people who would harm and cheat fellow citizens the most, ultimately. I for one, will not hand the moral high ground to the 'carers'. There's a point at which the greatest self-interest comes round to meet the greatest benevolence; and I'm not even including in this economic-political freedom for everybody.

Kacy, I don't mean this to be antagonistic, but why is your primary reaction that everyone on this board is wrong and your position is correct? Since you've said that you admire many of the posters here for their capacity for independent thought and reason, given the overwhelming consensus against you in this case, shouldn't your null hypothesis be that you are mistaken? I'm not advocating a popularlity contest of ideas, but I bring this up because I believe it underlies many of our disagreements and is indicative of some philosophical differences between you and SB and me. I'm not saying Kacy is mistaken, necessarily. He does have a point. But only *a* point. He is correct that fraud is most likely taking place since psychic abilities have never been proven to exist. This concern is no different than the FDA's interest in controlling questionable health products meant to cure cancer, but which might prove harmful. Kacy, as he so often demonstrates, is concerned with folks being harmed. So I would agree that he is correct -- in his context of values. The reason he finds resistance on this forum is because most everyone here has a different context of values, namely, most here are liberty-minded and concerned about an overreaching nanny-state. This doesn't mean they are wrong, it means their priorities are with larger issues related to government and freedom. So we see here again the psychological divide between liberals and conservatives (or certain libertarians). I have mentioned Jonathan Haidt's research elsewhere on this forum, but for the uninitiated: http://www.moralfoundations.org/ Moral Foundations Theory was created by a group of social and cultural psychologists (see us here) to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The foundations are: 1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance. 2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives] 3) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. 4) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one." 5) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions. 6) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions). Liberals like Kacy obviously score high on (1) and (2). The Objectivists here score highly on (3) (and possibly some others). Regarding (1) care/harm, Kacy has said in the past that the true measure of a country/society is how it treats its most vulnerable members (paraphrased). Note: this "true measure" does not include "freedom", or "liberty", or "social cohesion" or "technological progress." His focus is on care/harm -- his psychology weights this concern heavier than others. Regarding (2), his busy-bodied desire to regulate transactions between psychics and their customers is proof enough of his sympathies lying with fairness/cheating. I shouldn't have to go down the list, I'm sure most of you get the point. This should serve as an illustration of why these conversations between liberals and conservatives ( or libertarians) are so aggravating. What we have are not two dispassionate truth-seekers looking for a Single Concensus, but rather a clash between values. And this is why I don't see much use in engaging such things -- it is mostly futile. (MSK would refer to these near-intractable psychological traits as "cybernetic programs" which operate independently of conscious awareness -- most other people would refer to them simply as "personality traits." Furthermore, I would like to point out that this conception of human value-behavior spears yet another stake into the heart of Objectivism's laughably simple-minded notion that the field of philosophy is more fundamental, more important, than the field of psychology. As if.)

Kacy, I would remind you that the environment you are in is one in which the personal decorum of everyone involved is highly regulated and formalized. This is not to say there is no sincere goodwill, rather the stability required for you guys to operate effectively as a team necessitates that people bite their tongues. I'm sure you are genuinely respected by your peers, but do you really think there is not a single person who privately has thoughts about you and reservations about some of your personal habits? Do you take their behavior at face value, in other words? I think you are laying WAY too much of your regrets over former social faux pas at the feet of this whole "respect" thing. In other words, I think you are oversimplifying. For example, you mention your marriage to M and the way you two bickered in public. You want to imply that this would not have happened were it not for the whole "lack of respect" dynamic that all of us were ensconced in. But do you not remember that both T.D. and I were embarrassed by you and FOR you whenever the public bickering occurred? He and I discussed it. How is it possible that he and I would have had a different perspective if we were all part of the same dynamic? Speaking for myself, my reservations were along the lines of "one should not air one's dirty laundry in public" or "keep it in the family" or simply, "that is pretty classless." (As I've matured, I would amend that to say I wouldn't entertain an argumentative woman in my romantic life under ANY circumstances, simply for my peace of mind) Since we were all close friends, T.D. and I didn't have the luxury of distancing ourselves the way some of your other acquaintances did. I seem to recall that we both tried to gently correct you (probably more for our sakes than yours), but you were not having it. No sir. You were convinced that you were absolutely RIGHT, and M was absolutely WRONG, and you were going to let her know it, by God. Damn the presence of any onlookers. You had irrationality to fight! And you probably WERE right most of the time, but you were more concerned with your EGO than you were with the larger context. Where in any of this does your "respect" epiphany play a role? Moving on: Now here, there is a certain danger. So you are not talking about active disrepect, but rather the failure to show due respect, the level of what is "properly due" being determined presumably by the person feeling slighted. You've made some noises acknowledging that some people have an inflated view of their self-respect, but seem not to understand the implications of it. I would paraphrase a comment Bob made over in the "Arbitrary" thread: who is the objective arbiter of what is "properly due"? You do not "stand outside of reality" to make that determination. You are imprisoned in your own solitary experience just like the rest of us. Consider some of Brant's experiences: So Brant was being his good-natured wise-cracking self and some other fellow interpreted his remarks through his own lens as disrepect. So the other guy went on the offensive. The other guy was not about to take no shit from no one. In your view, was his response legitimate? He was refusing do endure disrepect, after all. "somehow had the idea I had done something intimidating to him." I'm sure Brant was not being a jerk. Yet the other guy felt the need to enforce his need for "respeck." Imagine if you were in public and saw a family which included a toddler, and the mother was smoking a cigarette around him. Your concern for the child's health motivated you to tell the mother that doing so is not good for the child. And then imagine that the meathead father gets up in your face screaming "who the fuck are you to tell me how to raise MY family?" and works himself up into a lather and proceeds to beat your face to a pulp. What you are arguing for is a kind of ghetto thug society where only those who are willing to endure violence are the only ones able to say anything. Everyone else, who may or may not have helpful thoughts to teach which might improve things, are relegated to bowing their heads in fear, keeping arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Is this your ideal society? No thank you, sir. But this is only one of the possible outcomes of your perspective. All the way at the other end of the spectrum is the fact that when people are allowed to indulge their vanities, you end up with a race to the bottom where the most thin-skinned in the population win the "Victim Olympics." Consider the following website, and spend some time there. I assure you that the website is completely serious: http://www.microaggressions.com/ "Microagressions", indeed. This is the end of the Progressive road. As I characterized it in another thread: "The World become Maternity Ward of Mewling Babies." Since there is no objective arbiter, when people are left to their tender feelings and precious egos, this is what you end up with. Imagine trying to socialize with such people! You would almost never be able to say anything if you had a scintilla of empathy for them and attempted to be a Good Person in speaking with them. But the truly insidious element here is that such people have discovered the power of victimhood. By digging ever deeper into themselves for signs of hurt and pain, they have been allowed to wield their outrage as a club to silence others. Hence, Political Correctness, and the corresponding urge to supress free speech we see in certain sectors. As I mentioned earlier, Jonathan Haidt's exhaustive study of the psychology of liberals and conservatives shows that liberals score very highly on the "avoidance of harm" measure. (But you're not a liberal, right? Riiiiight) These types of folks are notorious for their guilt-tripping and political shakedowns of various people or institutions in order to get their way. The world has gone topsy-turvy where folks who scream the loudest about 'sensitivity" are in fact being quite agressive and manipulative. I would characterize is as _aggression through victimology_. The racket is VERY effective and now ubiquitous among all the various political/racial/ethnic factions. In anti-Semetic circles, they have characterized the dynamic thusly: "The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you." I think that's fairly accurate, and not just about organized Jewry. Any man reading who has been married can probably recall fights he's had with his wife... Bringing this back to a more personal level. What if Bob had a hissy fit about my post concerning the Jewish Question? What if before I posted it, he had been spazzing out about "anti-Semites" and whatnot. I might think, "Damn...I think Bob is a fairly cool guy. Oooo, maybe he has family members who were killed in the war. Maybe I should just keep this to myself." And I might be inclined to indulge that line of thought if I were a woman. Or a Canadian. But I'm me. I'm a man. And an American. If I truly believe something to be true and important, I will not let the personal neuroses of others stop me from asserting myself. (Of course, this is only possible because 1. I'm not a close friend of Bob's, and 2. we are relatively anonymous here.) "There are only two ways of telling the complete truth: anonymously and posthumously" -- Thomas Sowell Do you remember when I first started broaching this topic on Facebook with you? I made a similar argument about Jews and immigration and your only rejoinder was to wonder what our Jewish friend Dan would think if he read it. That was it. Nothing more than a diversion from the topic to the question of offending someone else in order to shut me down. In fact, Dan is well aware of my opinions and is capable of discussing things with me calmly. He might not agree, but he doesn't excommunicate me for it. And that is why he gets my respect, and you got...well...something less than respect in the ensuing discussion.

Geez Louise. I think you're reading far too much into this Mike. Let's review: "Honestly, Stewed, it's difficult to do the former without simultaneously doing the latter on a site like this. Apparently, you prefer contributors who dumb themselves down in order for you and other regulars to protect your egos, and keep your fragile self-esteem intact." It should be clear that WR was not saying it was you or the regulars here who were dumb, but rather that you had a preference that the contributors here dumbed themselves down. Why would he say this? Probably because he had made an argument concerning The Lord of the Flies which referenced Freudian allegory. His contention was that LOTF was not a parable about real life, but rather a parable about the author's bias towards Freud. And how did you respond to this contention? By asking, "Are you actually making a point, or using the moment to display your reading to the little people?" Speaking only for myself, when I encounter an intelligent troll, I try and pay attention to the substance of their transmission. Any emotional gloss or gratuitous aggression is brushed aside as I would an annoying mosquito buzzing in my face. I'm here to learn and discover useful things (among other motivations). I happen to think his argument merited consideration, but the irony of it all is that I actually agreed with YOU, and was more inclined to see WR's argument as an extension of his quasi-Christian denial of the reptilian hindbrain. Allow me take a moment to address the issue of WR. Up to this point I had simply evaluated him on his statements here. I didn't know him from Adam. Apparently he has been outed as this Darren guy. So I did a little investigation and it seems clear to me that Darren is WR. I haven't been following all the internecine gossip in the Oist community, but it is rather obvious to me that the dude has a SERIOUS grudge of the sort that makes my issues with Objectivism pale in comparision. One would think Leonard Peikoff raped his mother and shot his dog or something. I'll give him this: I think he is sharp as a tack, and funny, and occassionally illuminating. I do happen to share some of his concerns about Objectivism's shortcomings. But his harping on so much minutiae within the Oist community, his tedious hair-splitting over non-essentials, indicates there is something wrong there. If one is so inclined to troll Objectivism, there are plenty of juicy targets which have relevance to real life (for example, Objectivism's tendency to sacrifice social cohesion on the altar of free economic transactions), so Darren's behavior shows me he has issues which go beyond mere philosophical disagreement. I hereby rescind my previous insinuation that you (MSK) were psychologizing Darren's "neurosis" as a way of avoiding the substance of his argument. Looks like you were right. I hope for his sake the reason for his behavior is his having too much time on his hands. If his online work is in addition to him having a normal life, then I can only conclude there is a very unhealthy and obsessive dynamic somewhere in his brain. (In such a case I would suggest he allow aural gestalt to wash over him. I wouldn't expect miracles -- these things take time)Now, where was I? Oh yes. Darren's statement about the dynamic of fragile self-esteem did not come unbidden, and was not an irrational outburst due to his psychology. He had made a somewhat compelling argument regarding The Lord Of The Flies. Rather than engage him, you decided to imply he was merely showing off. (I realize now this analysis is moot if by that point you had written off any serious discussion with him due to his _personal_ insults, but humor me). This is probably a matter of interpretation, but it would be difficult for a casual reader not to see this as your feeling threatened. Why do I highlight this statement of his (other than the fact I think it has some merit)? A couple of reasons. 1) You pulled the same move on me in another thread. You sort of tore me a new one when I used the word "bleating" to characterize the Objectivist blind spot regarding the natural and inevitable growth of tendrils between powerful businessmen and the government. And again, it was the same "Are you here to teach all the _little people_?" nonsense. Frankly, I found it irritating and surprising in light of my admiration for the way you comport yourself here in a very balanced and fair manner. (To your credit, you went on to elucidate your thoughts on the topic which I found myself in complete agreement with). But why even go there with the "little people" insinuations? Why not brush my imperious statements aside and get to the meat of the issue? I don't really believe you think I'm another Darren. I'm pretty sure I have stated in another thread that I keep quiet here for the most part because the regulars are more regularly intelligent and informed than I. Nevertheless, even though I follow Socrates and admit I know that I don't know, the things I do know, I KNOW. Can I be forgiven for being aghast at the way some Objectivists carry water for folks who are their actual enemies? If such is my view, I can't help but see the ideological veneration of "productivity" and "business" and the "free market" as naive bleating in certain contexts. More to the point, lets assume I AM in fact teaching all the little people? So what? Do you not acknowledge the existence of your betters? Or does your self-esteem disallow that possibility? It's interesting how a book like Atlas Shrugged has such an aristocratic and elitist tone, yet in certain quarters, everyone is expected to be "equals" with only their commitment to "reason" the only differentiating factor. To think that no one can in principle be your better is not self-esteem, it is VANITY. I seem to recall that a central word in "Anthem" was "EGO". Is it possible this emphasis on EGO could explain much of the behavior we see in the Oist community? My view is that one is better able to absorb information and achieve one's goals if ego is PLASMA and not a SOLID. Otherwise, it is so easily shattered like glass. Every troll worth his salt understands this, and uses it to his advantage. BTW, Ninth Doctor is right: I have been impressed with your managing of this forum, enough to where I felt the need to verbalize it. Time and time again I would follow a thread, expecting you to veer to the left or right of what I considered Truth, only to find you skate right along that razor's edge of perspicacious objectivity. I can appreciate that your responsibilities here are quite difficult -- you don't have the luxury of referring to some carved-in-stone Orthodoxy to determine who is "in" and who is "out". You are trying to manage a chaotic system, making allowances for the inherent indeterminancy of free-thinking minds. Like herding cats. I rather imagine it to be like attempting to grow a functioning cell without the benefit of a membrane holding the whole thing together. I'm not really the enemy. Try and think of my eructations as mere friendly elbows to your ribs. 2) I highlight this issue because it has ramifications beyond this forum. The issues surrounding "fragile self-esteem" and "egos" and the responsibilities one has towards protecting or not protecting the egos of others is relevant to so much in the world, not just this forum. I can tell you this is an issue my colleague Kacy Ray and I have locked horns over in the past. To what extent should conversation be restrained in the service of the "other" and his or her emotional needs, or rather, their 'self-esteem", or "fragile ego", or "self-respect"? I would refer you to Kacy's thread "Is it altruism to endure disrepect?" for more on this. I would say Rand was rather imperious and arrogant in certain aspects of her behavior. But we find defenders of her behavior right here. Yet, on the other hand, poor Phildo Coates was run out of town for much of the same. Complex, no? What is the difference between self-esteem and an overweening self-regard? I'm reminded here of that Southpark episode lampooning the hippie liberals in San Francisco getting high off their own farts and smug sense of superiority. Most of the time, Objectivism stands apart from these excesses of both the left and right, but still, there are seeds of the disease, what with their emphasis on ego, and the concommitant "high dudgeon" (new word for me, thanks Brant), we see among Orthodox Objectivists. Like getting high on their own farts, some of these folks get high on their own sense of indignation over the smallest sleights. What a collosal waste of energy, although I understand every person needs their own personal "fix" in order to feel alive. "People seek conflict to the degree they can tolerate" -- Hyatt. The problem is that this seed is the very beginning of the Progressive disease, where "avoidance of harm" is taken to such an extreme that true instinctual independent thought is stifled in the service of not offending anyone. As Jonathan Haidt has catalogued, one of the defining psychological features of liberals is their high score on "avoidance of harm" markers. This tendency finds full fruition in places like Canada (hi Carol) where the feminization of the culture has reached an apex. Canada is civilized, but the argument has been made that "civilization" is primarily a feminine trait. I have not yet had the pleasure of visiting the Great White North, but reports from the field indicate it is a kind of "soft Stasi" where the emphasis on Correct Thinking hangs like a grey pall over people's behavior, gently (and not so gently) nudging them into a conformity of false smiles and insincere goodwill. But since the humanimal has natural aggressive tendencies, these progressive folks find themselves repressing such urges which end up extruding in all manner of passive-agressive and frankly bitch-ass snarky behavior. As an American, I prefer to have my enemies look me in the eye as they throw a right -- I like my punches straight, no chaser. Whew, I'm really on a tear, aren't I? Reining this back in, the comfortable and stagnant culture of Canada can be contrasted with the anarchic Wild West of the U.S. Should it be any surprise the U.S. and it's (waning) tradition of free and open exuberance is far more dynamic and productive than what we find elsewhere? Isn't that how the Life Process is? Messy, chaotic, containing elements of pain? Try and reduce that pain to zero and you snuff the life force out. OK, now I'm out of orbit. The point is, people need to man up and not be so thin skinned. We are drugging young boys with Ritalin to make them suitable citizens for this new feminized culture. On the one hand, it is understandable we want people to evolve and become more civilized, but it is precisely the pogo-stick which exists in the hearts of men which is the source of all that is creative and new. I understand that one must comport oneself with sensitivity in general social circles, say, during cocktail parties or at work. But we here are on a message board devoted to the discussion of controversial ideas! You realize of course the common rule about not discussing religion or politics at dinner parties. That's because such topics are fraught with passion and consternation! So if you open a forum for such topics, how can you expect the discourse here to remain rational and calm? You want to have your cake and eat it too, it seems. Yes, I'm a jerk. I can be arrogant and dismissive. But I yam what I yam. Why is it that every other minority group gets oodles of compassion and coddling, but we jerks are cast to the wastelands? I was born this way. If you prick us, do we not bleed? We jerks need TLC too, you know. I am not an animal, I am a human being! Darren made a quip about "decadent student" in reference to "studiodekadent". I'll admit that gave me an impish chuckle. No harm no foul. But what if SD got on his high horse and took offense to Darren's troll? Over a silly name? I'd consider SD a little bitch, that's what. More seriously though, I should clarify that the interpersonal dynamics I have outlined here are meant to apply only to adult males. You will never see me troll some young eager adolescent or college student looking to Rand as a source of direction. I have my issues with Objectivism, but in the vast pantheon of worldviews, I consider Objectivism to be _roughly_ where it's at. It simply wouldn't be sporting to crush such people. But the big dogs like you and your friends are fair game in my book. I would also lament women taking on the rough and ready mindset I have advocated here. For a woman to consciously thicken her skin in order to play rough with the boys would necessitate a part of her soul dying. It just wouldn't be ladylike. I'll confess to being something of a chauvinist. I'm among that minority who feel that Rand's views on a woman president are _absolutely_ an integral part of Objectivistism, and is to her credit. I lament the Progressive intrusion of women into what were traditionally all-male spaces, where men were free to think aloud without fear of that "high dudgeon." Welp. I think that about covers it. (ya hadda acks)

This is what I get when I click on the Evolution of Morality link Joseph Hall Health Reporter A filthy toilet bowl or foul play. Both elicit the same, crinkle-nosed looks of disgust on our faces, according to a new University of Toronto study. That common expression of revulsion suggests some of our moral judgments evolved alongside our distaste for physically repellent things, the study in the journal Nature suggests. "People often think of morality as the height of human evolution. This is what our species does. It's the pinnacle of evolution and development," says Hanah Chapman, a graduate psychology student at U of T and the lead study author. "What this research suggests is that our moral sense may be just as much guided by very simple emotional reactions as by complex thought," says Chapman, 27. The familiar facial expression – it is caused by a contraction of the Levator labii muscle above our lips – is the best evidence yet that people actually feel the same disgust at unfair treatment as when they see, smell or taste revolting things, Chapman says. "The capacity to feel disgust over social transgressions, that is something we would argue is evolved," she says. "We provide the best evidence for that." The sneering look, Chapman says, likely finds its evolutionary origins in the quite natural need to avoid disease-bearing items or putting poisonous things in our mouths. But the fact it's expressed when we encounter unfair or immoral behaviours could well mean that our touted sense of morality also has a primitive basis and that it is, at least in part, an evolutionary trait. "Disgust is involved in regulating a very important thing. It's the entryway to the body: are you going to eat this or not?" Chapman says. "And that this emotion, this very important function, is something that's become co-opted for regulating social and moral behaviour, we think that says something about just how important social life is for human beings." Indeed, she says, being a fair, co-operative and "moral" person would have obvious evolutionary advantages for a species that relies on its fellow creatures for survival. "It's about exchange, what is the norm for fairness in your culture, and I'm sure that is something that people have been confronted with ever since we lived in groups and co-operated with one and other," she says. "If I share my catch with you this time, or this food that I've gathered, are you going to reciprocate the next time?" Being evolutionary, disgust at social transgressions likely crosses cultural lines, Chapman says. But the degree to which a given behaviour triggers the emotion is likely regulated by cultural norms, she says. "This code of fairness is very common in human societies. Almost every human society has some idea for what a reasonable or equitable exchange is." "Where the set point (for fairness) is, that is something that will change a little bit. In Western cultures it tends to be 50-50." For the research, Chapman's team wired sensors to the faces of 27 U of T students, to record their muscle movements when confronted with both physically and morally objectionable things. Subjects were asked to drink sippy cups of bitter, sour and salty liquids and shown pictures of dirty toilets and injuries and other disgusting matter. Their facial movements were then compared to those they made when being treated unfairly in a laboratory game and were found to be precisely the same. In an accompanying perspective article in the journal, a trio of U.S. psychologists say the facial tick of disgust over tastes and such was transferred to more elaborate judgments about groups or behaviour during evolution. "This process had adaptive value, because by making things or thoughts disgusting a culture could communicate their negativity and cause withdrawal from them," write psychologists Paul Rozin and Katrina Fincher of the University of Pennsylvania and Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia.

If you get yourself to YourMorals.org and register, you can participate in a series of online tests that purport to measure your morality on a variety of different scales. Me, I find it fascinating and am going through the tests picking the ones that seem most intriguing. Welcome to YourMorals.org, where you can learn about your own morality while contributing to scientific research on moral psychology. Many aspects of personality are related to morality. Many aspects of behavior are influenced by moral motives. And many conflicts and misunderstandings are driven by differences in morality. But rather than simply telling you these things, we want you to see for yourself. After each questionnaire or experiment you complete, we'll give you an immediate report on how you scored, and what your score means. Here are the top seven questionnaires offered: Moral Foundations Questionnaire - What underlies the virtues and issues you care about? Why do you have the political orientation that you do? Moral Dilemmas - How would you act when confronted with difficult decisions? Identification with Humanity Scale - What groups are you most loyal to? Whom do you identify with most? Domain Specific Maximizing Scale - In what areas of your life do you feel pressure to make the absolute best decision? Perceptions of Politicians - How do you feel about this politician? (For participants in the U.S. only) Feelings About Fairness Scale - How do you feel about different 'unfair' situations? Presidential Candidates and Morality Survey - Which candidates for President in 2008 do you prefer? What do you think about morality and politics? -- if you click this link, you can see how I rate on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (I hope. I am the green bars in the graph) . . . for background to the kind of research going on here, check the Edge.com article by Jonathan Haidt, "Why Do People Vote Republican" -- a provocative essay from the liberal social psychologist.