The Roots of Liberal Supriority

The Roots of Lib­eral Supriority

If you want to see a real life exam­ple of a “supe­rior” lib­eral, look no future than this con­de­scend­ing and unthink­ing state­ment from use­ful idiot’s blog:

Lib­er­als are fun­da­men­tally bet­ter peo­ple than conservatives.

I think any­one who’s argued with a lib­eral has had the unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence of being treated like you’re morally defi­cient if not out­right dis­hon­est and stupid.

It turns out there’s a rea­son for this: if feels good to be a liberal:

In healthy peo­ple, the more you acti­vate a por­tion of your frontal lobes, the more accu­rate your view of your­self is,” says Jen­nifer Beer, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy, who con­ducted the research with grad­u­ate stu­dent Brent L. Hughes. “And the more you view your­self as desir­able or bet­ter than your peers, the less you use those lobes.”

The nat­ural human ten­dency to see one­self in a pos­i­tive light can be help­ful and moti­vat­ing in some sit­u­a­tions but detri­men­tal in oth­ers, Beer says.

“Sub­jects made unre­al­is­ti­cally pos­i­tive judg­ments about them­selves more quickly, sug­gest­ing these judg­ments require fewer men­tal resources,” Beer says. “Per­haps, like the visual sys­tem, the social judg­ment sys­tem is designed to give us a quick ‘good enough’ per­cep­tion for the sake of effi­ciency.” (Source: Brain Activ­ity Lev­els Affect Self-Perception: ‘Rose-Colored Glasses’ Cor­re­late With Less Frontal Lobe Use).

The “cog­ni­tive effi­ciency” argu­ment is inter­est­ing. Jonathan Haidt has found that tra­di­tional con­ser­v­a­tive moral judg­ment takes into account more infor­ma­tion and fac­tors than lib­eral moral judg­ment. Lib­er­als are clearly more com­pu­ta­tion­ally sim­ple when arriv­ing at moral judg­ments, right or wrong. There may be social advan­tages to this, but one dis­ad­van­tage “may be” hold­ing a sim­pli­fied moral view of one­self. Is decreased frontal lobe activ­ity cor­re­lated with bases towards sim­pler moral com­pu­ta­tion? Only fur­ther research could answer that.

You can catch of video Dr. Haidt talk­ing about his fas­ci­nat­ing work below:

P.S. Note that there is also a rela­tion­ship between frontal lobe activ­ity and get­ting a grip on real­ity. Lib­eral and left-wing hero Howard Zinn wrote exten­sively about the Rosen­bergs who he defended as inno­cent of the charges of trea­son against them. To err is human — appar­ently, how­ever, to not care if you’re right or wrong, to turn off your frontal lobe, is lib­eral and left-wing:

When Sobel Rosen­berg con­fessed his espi­onage to the The New York Times ear­lier this year, Zinn told a reporter, “To me it didn’t mat­ter whether they were guilty or not.” (Source: The People’s His­to­rian? Howard Zinn was a mas­ter of agit­prop, not his­tory).

Tagged as: Liberal Supriority