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Alternative headline: What if your political or religious beliefs were rooted in a mental disorder? I don't mean to repeat the canard of "conservatism is a men

Alternative headline: What if your political or religious beliefs were rooted in a mental disorder? I don't mean to repeat the canard of "conservatism is a mental illness" - as a whole, it's not. But there is a growing body of evidence suggesting a minor correlation between certain subsets of conservative thought and certain phobias. For example, people who tend to be conservative also tend to be more readily disgusted. If you make a pill that treats those phobias, then you are by definition also "treating" their politics, too; even if this is just by accident. Nixon was smarter than we took credit for. Banning the drugs liberals and black people used wasn't just a way to get a bunch of quick and easy felony convictions on his political opponents, it was a way to arguably ban the promulgation of competing political views altogether. Certainly, his paranoia is something that could have been treated by the drugs he was banning.

ithastobe 6y ago
How do you explain rural people more conservative than urban? Do rural folks have more phobias than urban folks?
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Well, keep in mind that not all conservatism is the result of particular disgust phobias. Someone who just wants less government interference in their own property isn't necessarily suffering from any kind of phobia. And those views tend to be fairly popular in rural America, because it's just more compatible with that particular way of life. There's probably self-selection going on; people who want to be more socially connected are going to move towards the cities and people who want to get away are going to move towards smaller towns. The connection between disgust and conservatism likely only influences certain specific parts of the GOP tent. It can only explain why someone might spend ridiculous amounts of time complaining about, say, the fact that trans people exist. It wouldn't explain why someone would be opposed to, say, large government spending projects or feel like immigrants bring crime. We call all three of these "conservatism", but one is a technical complaint about how government should run, another is naked tribal otherism with no hint of disgust language, and and yet another is the "pineapple on pizza" meme as applied to whether or not a certain group of people should be allowed to exist.

ithastobe 6y ago

How do you explain rural people more conservative than urban? Do rural folks have more phobias than urban folks?

kmeisthax 6y ago
Well, keep in mind that not all conservatism is the result of particular disgust phobias. Someone who just wants less government interference in their own property isn't necessarily suffering from any kind of phobia. And those views tend to be fairly popular in rural America, because it's just more compatible with that particular way of life. There's probably self-selection going on; people who want to be more socially connected are going to move towards the cities and people who want to get away are going to move towards smaller towns. The connection between disgust and conservatism likely only influences certain specific parts of the GOP tent. It can only explain why someone might spend ridiculous amounts of time complaining about, say, the fact that trans people exist. It wouldn't explain why someone would be opposed to, say, large government spending projects or feel like immigrants bring crime. We call all three of these "conservatism", but one is a technical complaint about how government should run, another is naked tribal otherism with no hint of disgust language, and and yet another is the "pineapple on pizza" meme as applied to whether or not a certain group of people should be allowed to exist.