The right-wing conservative. Result of socio-economic stresses or psychological instability?

[excerpts]

"On the strife between ethnic groups in New York City during the 1960s, Glazer and Moynihan (1970) stated that it was best explained in terms of competition over scarce resources (named the “power theory”). This paradigm views the relationships between groups as a function of their competitive positions, suggesting that mutual group threat creates hatred. The "theory of economic interest” emphasizes this as a factor in right-wing extremism (RWE). The theoretical core of this argument derives from the model of rational decision-making.

Our aim was to gain a deeper understanding of personality as an indicator of RWE. Our findings question theories explaining the reemergence of the extreme right as being the result of socio-economic factors. Therefore we believe that social scientists should no longer attempt to explain Right-Wing Extremism as a social-economic phenomenon while simultaneously minimising psychological factors." [end excerpts]

Well Hallelujah! I've been saying that for years now. Hey! They're really nuts! So quit making excuses for them as if it's somehow our "duty" as liberals to find and bestow excuses upon them; granting their behaviour and the positions they take a kind of false equivelence. The "difference" between conservatives and everyone else isn't one of their having equally valid "just different" opinions, ones that the rest of us would have had we have grown up in the same area with similar up-bringings....

No! They're violent, agressive, angry and potentially all extremely cruel people. But they're also people who exude such high levels of self-righteousness that it makes them impervious to ever having any inkling of that fact or of it ever getting through to them.

In fact its that very sureness of purpose and rightness over their own opinions they display that seems to have placed a lot of doubt among the rest of us. We project our own reasoning onto them by assuming that if anyone like us was also that certain of the rightness of what they were doing, then just maybe that means their ideas on how to run a modern highly technological civilization may actually be valid - and that perhaps we should give their fears and fetishes some credence; that maybe their obsessive needs for maintaining certainty, order, and the status quo power structure - whatever the social cost! - may have some merit. We see so many of our aquaintences, and even our loved ones, doing and saying what they do that we have come to think that it's merely part of the human condition. It isn't.

It's a reaction taken by one small slice of man's wider population; one that appears to have been brought about by elements of the sedentary lifestyle we adopted some 10,000 years ago. This split from our natural lifestyle brought us into an environment where the stimuli are now as different for us as zoos are for other animals. We now have srangers living all around us for the first time in our entire evolutionary history; we are subjected to and encouraged to engage in ruthlesss competitivness for goods, but to do it using extremely complicated and/or sophisticated skills and crafts which the very possesion of will now grant each person a widely different relative social value....all where before we lived our entire lives among well-known kinfolk and clan whose egalitarian socio-economic structures made the hoarding of wealth (that is so common today) something that when not physically impossible, as it was for the most part, but when when rare condistions made abundance common it was almost always redistributed willingly (the Potlatch ceremony of the PNW coast tribes exemplified this situation beautifully...just as the way the Potlatch was attacked by the British also exemplified then and now the cruel insanity that had/has overtaken the rest of us).

Y'see... Fear of change (a classic conservative personality trait) simply wasn't an issue back when a new spear-point came along once every 50,000 years or so.

Now however, *constant* technological changes bring social changes that combine with the distrust and hyper-vigilence of strangers and strange ways makes an emotional or "reactionary" behavioural style not only anti-social, but a danger to our continued existence as a species. Nuclear war and global warming are just two serious threats they now either deny or embrace. Yet reason dictates the opposite approach in both cases. And they will continue to behave that way for every new disaster if the solutions to them also threaten their pre-existing beliefs the way capitalism has become so central to their beliefs here....or Islam is in Saudi Arabia.

Science has nothing to do with their rejection of AGW. What they cannot accept is any reassessment about the basic "goodness" of wealth and it's pursuit. They can't reasess it without a collapse of all those things they so self-righteously defended in the past.

So it's either them or us. And "we" are the other 70% of mankind not afflicted with "conservatism" as a predisposition, so....