Quote:
Originally Posted by slapass
No one is born Republican. You have to want to roll back the clock so almost by definition you need to be older.
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you're right. no one is born republican. no one is born democrat. what distinguishes left/right is a simple matter of how the brain processes a few basic moral questions. what underpins the idealogy is the individuals processing of a few moral questions.
we are born however with a basic framework of morality and the blanks are filled in by experience. we are born with a great deal of fascinating knowledge such as those relating to basic physics, being able to innately recognize at a few months old helpful and harmful people, knowing at a few months that one object should not pass through another or that bad behavior should be punished, not rewarded. it's actually extremely fascinating. This book sums up the most oft cited studies and early work in this area and its quite crazy to read.
https://books.google.com/books/conte...fife=w400-h600
without going into deep detail "conservative" doesn't mean "roll back the clock" in regards to how these issues are processed in the brain, it means "hey, lets slow down here because though change can be great, we are moving away from millions of years of evolution which have served us very well to shape our behaviors which improve our ability to survive and propagate our genes are often correct, so lets take it slow".
if you look at it strictly through the lens of a political ideology as something that was born 100 years ago or whenever, then the elegance and beauty of what it really is is missed... it's an evolutionary behavioral trait greatly improving our ability to cooperate and survive as a group, where EVERY culture into two basic groups, largely representing both basic behaviors similarly. One saying "move forward" one saying "well, lets be sure". If you look at it within a 50 year timeline, that all gets missed. Every culture has the same basic split - it just appears to manifest itself in different ways because of cultural differences.