August 22, 2012

• How a Conservative Thinks

  The purpose of this entry is to help others understand conservatives better, the primary target audience in this case is fence sitters somewhere between left and right, but also political leftists who might be curious.  Perhaps I can even point some leftists in the right direction (pun must definitely intended).  Although I can only speak for myself, I definitely believe that the same basic thought patterns are present in most conservatives.  There are vast differences in the way that people on the left and people on the right think, but most of them can be boiled down to issues of trust and freedom.

  Lessons from my childhood:

  For me, I began thinking about motivations and credibility at a very young age.  The first time I ever lied to my dad I received a sound whipping.  In addition to the whipping I grew up with Biblical teachings, and the Bible contains many admonitions against lying.  So in addition to being frightened of punishment from my parents, I was also frightened of punishment from God.  That is not to say that I never lied again after that (once more during childhood), but the amount of times I have deliberately lied can be counted on one hand, and I always confessed.  However, it was not long after that when I discovered that all of my peers shared my values, in fact very few of them did.  I learned very early on that when someone does not share my values they cannot be expected to behave in a similar fashion.

  In middle school I began thinking more deeply about motivations.  I went to a small private school where I was essentially the opposite of popular.  Being in that position allows one to observe human interactions from a 3rd person perspective.  I began to notice behavior patterns.  For example, if a student had a large pack of gum or mints, he would share with one or two of his close friends even if he received nothing tangible in return.  On some occasions he might share with an acquaintance or casual friend in exchange for nothing, and others he would not share with at all unless they offered something for barter.  In the case of tangible gain the student placed higher value on the other object than he did on the piece of gum or mint that he exchanged for it.  In the cases where nothing tangible was given I was able to ascertain that the giving was an attempt to win favor or gratitude from the recipient.  When it came to myself I had to barter if I wanted something that another student had, while others did not.  I observed that it was the same for the other unpopular students.  The one with the resources was not interested in gaining favor from myself or a handful of others, so we were only able to obtain goods through barter.  I deduced that people are primarly motivated by the acquisition of resources or security, and the strength and proportions of those motivations tend to vary. 

  These early experiences shaped how I would view and react to others in the adult world.  For others the early experiences that shaped their thought process will vary, but the results should be similar among conservatives.

  Trust:

  Trust is to be earned, not given.  Just because someone says they will do or not do a thing is no reason to assume they will.  First their credibility must be established before I take their word as fact, and even if it is established that a person does not tell deliberate falsehoods, that does not mean that their information is factual.  They could be a firm believer in something which is factually incorrect. 

  What a person believes determines their values, and their values determine how they act.  On average I find it easier to believe people who share my belief system than I do others.  However, just because someone says that they share my beliefs does not automatically mean that they do.  Credibility must first be established, and if it is a prominant figure who either needs to maintain or establish influence I cannot afford to automatically rule out that they might be motivated by those needs.  In general I have to watch and assess before I can trust someone.  Usually I have to know that person personally before I can trust them.  It is much easier to establish negative credibility than positive.  Establishing negative credibility can be done at a distance, but positive credibility has to be observed over time and validated by actions.

  It doesn’t matter how educated someone is, or how wealthy, or how connected they are.  I have no reason to take people I do not personally know at face value if I cannot independently verify what they are saying.

  It should also be noted that trust is long in building, but swift in breaking.

  When it comes to my personal heirarchy of trust this is roughly how it goes, from most trustworthy to least trustworthy:

  1. Family

  2. Churches I attend (certainly not all churches)

  3. Businesses

  4. Televangelists

  5. Government

  6. Thugs in the street (with NDAA 5 and 6 may soon switch places, or merge together)

  Another factor which plays heavily into trust is motives, and motive is a significant factor in the derivation of this list.  Entities with apparant motives I am more likely to trust, not on a personal level, but on a pragmatic level.  I have a method of predicting their behavior extrinsic to what they say and believe.

  Motivations:

  When someone says or does something I typically do not just say “OK” and go along with it.  I will think, “Why did they say/do that?”  Usually I will wonder what they have to gain from it, if I care.  There are situations which do not affect me, and in those cases I sometimes do not care one way or another.  For example, I could not care less if my neighbor is arguing with his wife over whether they should have blinds or drapes. 

  The reason why I, and other conservatives, find it easier to trust businesses than government is because of the motives behind each entity.  We know that the primary motive of a business or salesman is to make a profit.  We know that they would like us to buy their products, but they cannot force us to, and we know that they would like us to come back again later on.  Given their motivation, we can be reasonably certain that their biases and beliefs will not factor in as much, and that they do not generally care about our beliefs and biases either (but the same cannot be said about entertainers).  I happen to have a large DVD collection.  I have enough TV series and movies in my collection that I could probably watch a different movie or episode a day for the rest of my life.  What many of the DVD’s have in common is a statement that says something like this: “The views and commentary in this production do not reflect the views of __________ corporation.”  So while we may not be able to trust them on a personal level the way we can trust a friend, we can trust their motivations, and those will act as a behavior constraining mechanism.

  The same is not true of government.  When it comes to politicians, what is said and the motivation behind it are two different things.  Take welfare for example.  When it comes to welfare advocates we can rule out altruism or charity as a motivating factor because one cannot be charitable with another person’s property, and altruism involves self sacrifice.  Giving to charity of one’s own funds and resource is one thing, while using bully boys to distribute another persons property is another.  So I tend to believe that their motives are something other than altruism.  But anytime a politician is claiming altruistic motivations for something which will result in more power and control for them I automatically dismiss their stated motive on the following grounds:

  1. I do not know them personally, and they do not share my values, therefore I have no reason to take them at their word.

  2. One cannot be charitable with another persons property.

  I find myself in the position of having to look past their words and toward their actions and the consequences of their actions in order to determine their motives.  If they were truly altruistic then they would “practice what they preach” as it were.  They would cut their own salaries down to the level of minimum wage and distribute the rest to the poor.  Especially given that every cent of their salaries comes from hard working tax paying citizens.  Instead they do the opposite, giving themselves increasingly higher salaries while still talking about how people who actually generate wealth should give more.  There is a serious disconnect between their words and their actions.  There is also a disconnect between their stated goals and the consequences of their actions.  Rather than solving poverty they only compound it and cause it to multiply.  This leads me to believe that the consequences are the goal rather than the stated goal, and the consequences work out to their benifit as they have an ever growing dependant class which they can consistently rely on for votes.

  So again, it comes down to motive.  It always comes down to motive.

  When I read or watch the news and hear what a politician said or did then I typically ignore the stated motive, and instead go through the following list of questions:

  What do they get out of it?

  How will it affect them?

  How will it affect the country?

  How will it affect me?

  I never once assume that they are interested in helping me in any way for the sake of altruism.  They don’t know me, so they cannot care about me as an individual, even on the off chance that they are capable of some level of altruism.  They might cater to a group which I may be a part of but they always get something in exchange for it.  At the very least they get support and power. 

  At this point any liberals who are reading this are probably thinking, “That’s an extremely jaded point of view.”  Rather than call it jaded, which implies a disparity, I would prefer to describe my perspective as realistic rather than idealistic.  The realist gets taken advantage of and decieved less than the idealist, but that brings me to my next point.  Liberal and conservative beliefs about human nature are entirely different.

  Human Nature:

  Conservatives, regardless of religious preference, tend to believe that human nature is fixed.  People are people, and human nature is going to be what it is regardless of how much legislation and propaganda any government spews out.  A human can’t stop being a human any more than a dog can stop being a dog.  Even conservatives who believe in evolution still believe that there is nothing governments or propagandists can change the basic makeup of human nature.  The reason why we have laws and religion is to regulate the madness of humanity and provide some semblance of order on a mad and inherently selfish world. 

  Certain people believe that human nature can be changed through medication, surgery, and genetic engineering, and they think this is a good idea, while conservatives consider each of those ideas to be travesties.  Medication and surgery can change the personalities of individuals, but cannot cause changes on a meta-level that would affect human nature.  In theory genetic engineering could be used to create humanoid beings which might have a different level of intelligence and emotional capacity, but such beings would technically be post human.  The fact remains that human nature cannot be changed, and even if it could be there is no human being or groups of humans who I would trust with such a task.  I could trust neither their motives nor their abilities.

  For me, and other conservatives, freedom (risks included), is infinitely more valuable than someone’s utopian fantasies.  To anyone who wants to force their utopian construct on me I say you keep your “utopia,” I’ll keep my freedom.  Even if they would like to kill me for my love of freedom and for speaking out against them, I would rather be dead than live in a world with no freedom of thought or expression.

  Freedom vs. Security:

  In general, people on the left tend to value security over freedom.  Conservatives value freedom over a false sense of security through increased government oversight.  A person who gives up their freedom for security will have neither, and deserves to have neither.  We find our security in our freedom, and in our belief in God.  The more control we have over our resources, our property, and our lives, the happier we are.  Let me keep that money that the Federal and State government scrapes out of my paycheck.  I lose about $400 to the Federal government and about $100 to the state government.  I would rather lose whatever dubious “benifits” I MIGHT recieve from the government in exchange for a higher standard of living and more control over my resources.  Medicaid and medicare I am supposed to get when I am older, but I could just save the money on my own, and if I manage it poorly then it’s on me and no one else has to bear the brunt of my fall. 

  As it is now, I have no guarantee that I will ever get any of that money back.  Maybe those programs will close down, or maybe there will be a policy change cutting me off from receiving health benifits after I pass a certain age.  Let me have my own stuff.  I

  I would also rather have the freedom to bear arms and respond to threats against my person and family with deadly force than have a nanny state which takes up all the guns (like England and China), or even puts in place stupid laws requiring your assailant to use deadly response before you can respond with deadly force (South Africa).  I say “freedom” rather than “right” because rights exist independent of human laws, but freedom does not.  Those kinds of laws do nothing to hinder the ability of law abiding citizens to defend themselves.  Yes guns can be used to hurt people, but so can kitchen knives and bare hands.  What next?  Are we going to take up all the kitchen knives?  What about blunt objects, what about bear hands?  Start cutting off people’s hands?  What about people who possess superior physical strength such as myself?  Should we all be forced to become weak and flabby?  I’ll say this, laws or no laws, if someone is in my house going after my wife then I am going to deal with him right away.  I would rather deal with him myself than wait for the cops to get there.  I can deal with him right away, especially if I have a gun.  The more freedom I have to defend myself the more secure I will be. 

  Rights:

  Conservatives all believe in natural rights.  We believe either that the rights come from God or nature.  Either way, they are intrinsic properties of being human, and no amount of legislation can make them go away.  Some things are beyond the power of government to change, they are what they are.  For example, I am 31 years old.  It does not matter if someone is unhappy about me being 31, because no one can do anything to change it except for God.  No amount of legislation is going to change how long I have existed, and no harm done to my person is ever going to change my actual age.  Similarly I have certain rights which exist independent of the government, and as much as the government might hate it or refuse to believe in it, they do not have the authority to revoke my rights.  For the government to claim that they gave me rights is about as asenine as claiming that they gave me my age.  Some things exist intrinsicly as a property of existence.  They can violate my rights but they cannot change the fact that the rights exist.  They can take away my freedom though, which is why when they do curtail freedom it is all the more an anathema to me.

  Government:

  I do not see any figure in the government as my leader, even politicians who SEEM to embody most of my values, such as Ron Paul and Herman Cain.  On the contrary, they are my servants.  I do not see them as sources of emulation, and I certainly could not care less if they swatted a fly during an interview, or where they had their first kiss.  That sort of idolatry is a foreign concept to me, as well as an anathema.  So what?  I should get excited about some guy while he’s in power?  No way.  All I am thinking is “I hope he doesn’t cause too much damage.”

  If it seems like I and other conservatives are hostile toward government it is not because we don’t like order, but because we don’t like people telling us what to do.  When my boss tells me what to do at work that’s one thing, because in that case I am getting paid to perform a specific function.  In the case of government I am paying them, so they should be doing what I say.

  The only valid function of government is to protect us from external threats which could take away our lives and/or freedoms.  For example, with the right equipment and/or training I can protect my house from a burgler, or a group of burglers, but I could not protect my house from The Peoples Republic of China, or the entire Islamic World.  Not on my own.  That’s where government comes in as useful.  Anything they try to do which curtails my personal freedoms is an overstepping of their purview.  If the government decided that another government or a particular people groups is threat then I expect to have a say in whether or not we go to war with them.  Especially since my money is funding the war.  For example, I do not approve of putting our troops under UN commanders, and I did not approve of the war in the Balkans which was waged by Clinton on behalf of Muslims.  As far as I am concerned there should be no Muslims in the Balkans. 

  The politicians are supposed to do what I say, not the other way around.  The purpose of elections is to have a representative government.  They are supposed to be public servants, not the other way around.  Today it has come to be the other way around, and that is an anathema to me and to other conservatives.  They have no business taking any of my paycheck, or forcing me to spend my money on a commodity I either do not want or cannot reasonably afford, and they certainly have no business locking people up for speaking out against them.   

  Even if we had a monarchy, I would still consider the proper role of a king to be that of a public servant.  If he starts oppressing people then he has to go.  What good is a government if the people are forced to serve it rather than the other way around?  If that’s how it is going to be than we may as well be invaded and conquered by anyone, because all we are doing is exchanging one slave master for another.  Although to be fair, some task masters are worse than others.

  That is all I have to say for now.  I hope this was informative.

  • 7:07 pm
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