Predisposed

What is the difference between people with left-wing beliefs and those with right-wing beliefs?

In July of this year, two cyclists from Washington, Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, were killed in Tajikistan. Both of them quit their boring jobs and went to ride bikes around the world. On the 369th day of their journey, as they were rolling along a country road as part of another group, they were overtaken by a car. The driver braked, turned around, and then crashed into a group of cyclists. Those who survived, the people who got out of the car, were shot, cut and robbed.

Two days later, ISIS (an organization banned in Russia) released another video: five people who committed this crime were sitting against the backdrop of a black jihad flag and vowed to slaughter "infidels."

Of course, you ask: why the hell did cyclists in shorts and T-shirts suffer to ride in Islamist territory?

The answer is that Jay Austin and his girlfriend weren't just adventurers. They were idealists. They went on their round-the-world trip in order to prove that evil is a fiction.

“You read the papers and are led to believe that the world is a big, dangerous place,” Jay Austin wrote in a blog post. “People,” you are told, “should not be believed. People are bad. People are evil." I won't fall for this bait. Evil is an artificially constructed concept that we invented in order not to understand the complexities of people like us, only with values, beliefs and perspectives that are different from ours ... In general, people are kind .... Magnanimous, and wonderful, and kind."

The sad story of Jay and Lauren serves as a vivid illustration of the startlingly interesting experience of John Hibbing, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. John Hibbing and his laboratory of political physiology argue that a person's physiological reactions can be easily predicted whether he is a leftist or a conservative.

Hibbing's article with the results of his research in 2008 was published in Science, and in 2013 he published a whole book: Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences. From the experiments of Hibbing and his group, it appeared that the left and the right had different physiological responses to threat. If the right one hears a loud noise, it reacts more strongly than the left one.

Hibbing showed people photographs that showed something disgusting - for example, a huge spider on a human face or an open wound with worms swarming in it, and could easily predict from their reactions which of them were left-wing and which were conservative. At the sight of disgusting photographs, the sympathetic nervous system worked much more strongly for conservatives - sweat came out. The leftists reacted quite differently - their reactions were much less pronounced.

Another series of Hibbing's experiments consisted of showing people a series of pictures, some of which were neutral and others disgusting. Conservatives lingered on the disgusting picture much longer than leftists did. From this, Hibbing deduced that conservatives had something he called "negative bias."

Being a man of the deep left, like almost all American professors, Hibbing sadly concluded from this that conservatives somehow pay attention to everything negative, threatening and disgusting, while the right people simply ignore these incentives. “Those who are in politics on the right and those who are in politics on the left simply perceive the world differently,” Hibbing explained.

This, in my opinion, is an absolutely amazing result. It is all the more striking that the author, being a liberal, does not seem to understand very well what he has said.

In a sense, he even pities the “conservatives”. See how unfortunate they are. They have cognitive damage. When they see misfortune, a problem, trouble, they stop at it and think about it, instead of telling themselves “I don’t care” and flitting to the next flower.

Frankly, this experiment gave me an answer to the question that has always occupied me: why are there so many leftists among the young, prosperous, well-fed, who grew up without problems and worries?

Answer: because "leftist" is not a matter of belief. This is a state of mind. This is primarily infantilism. It's an endless ability to ignore real problems "because I'm fine and I don't want to focus on it."

The leftist looks at life through rose-colored glasses and is very offended if someone recommends taking them off.

A leftist hears about an Afghan refugee who hired thugs to throw acid in his wife's face for taking off her hijab, but he doesn't want to focus on it. He reads about how a husband tortured and killed his nine-year-old wife in Afghanistan (she was sold to him at the age of seven for thirteen thousand dollars), and he hates to think of it as a problem. He doesn't think. He reads the news of how the Manchester stadium bomber was rescued from Libya four years earlier by the British Royal Navy. "We will not pay attention to these sad things," the leftist tells himself.

“They are disgusting, it’s easier to ban them right in the mind. They are unpleasant and therefore irrelevant. Everyone who notices them is just fascists.”

The leftist hears about areas in Paris where the police cannot enter, about Molenbeek, which has become a hotbed of terrorism: and if you think about it, then all these are problems that are difficult to solve. So there is no need to think about it.

All these facts do not fit into the picture of peace and happiness and therefore should be ignored. The only ones that really bother the leftist are the people who insist that all these facts are up for debate. These people should be declared racists. An explosion at the Brussels airport is an excuse for a leftist to gather for a rally against Islamophobia.

Leftist - he is like a domestic cat, caressed and kissed by his owners, going to everyone he meets on his knees. This cat is very happy at home. But if she gets into the big world, she won't last even a month. Not because people are bad. And because people are different.

It is true that between the left and the right there is not an ideological but a psychological difference.

The left is the one who believes that all people are good. All people are good, except for those who do not recognize that all people are good.

If refugees come from Afghanistan and Syria in a continuous stream, then they are exactly the same as us. Neither their culture nor their history is any worse. We need to meet them and apologize to them for the fact that they feel bad, but we feel good. They have different customs, but these customs are no worse, and you need to respect them, and cook a halal meal for them. If migrants in Cologne arrange taharrush, you need to think about what else to do for these poor people. If they arrange a gang rape of a volunteer, she must be silenced so as not to damage the cause of helping poor migrants.

Evil is an artificially constructed concept. Therefore, police and surveillance are not needed. The FBI, CIA, NSA are bad people who listen to other people's conversations - it's a shame. After all, all people are kind, aren't they?

All people are kind. Therefore, they all deserve prosperity and well-being. It must be guaranteed to them. Where the wealth will come from if they do not work is not important. This is an annoying and annoying question. Leftist ignores annoying questions.

On the contrary, the rightists are those who believe that, unfortunately, not all people are kind. People are born equal. But they are not equal. History, upbringing, environment, intellect, personal character, culture - all this leads to the fact that already at the age of ten or twelve one person differs from another.

And if you invite kind people with this other culture to your place - to a contented, well-fed, happy West - and tell them that they are very good, and you are to blame for them, then it may happen that kind people with this other culture will to crush no longer cyclists in Tajikistan, but passers-by in Westminster.

If a person were always and everywhere kind, then there would be no need for a state.