Amerika

Society suffers from a lack of people willing to look over the big picture and preserve what we have learned so far. People focus on distractions, the new, and the personal and ignore history and wisdom. This is the nature of the human: we see most what is closest to us.

For this reason, sometimes we circle back to older topics, such as Jonathan Haidt and his Moral Foundations theory, which basically says — following Hume — that individual morality is self-interested and self-rationalizing, causing people to seek the order in society that they seek in themselves:

Moral Foundations sets up six foundations or areas of concern that people incorporate in their political outlook:

1. Care: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies the virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
2. Fairness: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It underlies the virtues of justice and rights.
1. Equality: In our theoretical reformulation of MFT in 2023, we defined Equality as “Intuitions about equal treatment and equal outcome for individuals.”
2. Proportionality: In our theoretical reformulation of MFT in 2023, we defined Proportionality as “Intuitions about individuals getting rewarded in proportion to their merit or contribution.”
3. Loyalty: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all and all for one.” It underlies the virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group.
4. Authority: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to prestigious authority figures and respect for traditions.
5. Purity: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble, and more “natural” way (often present in religious narratives). This foundation underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple that can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions). It underlies the virtues of self-discipline, self-improvement, naturalness, and spirituality.

Leftists (individualists/egalitarians) emphasize care and the first definition of fairness, equality, where conservatives try to balance all six and care about all six. This explains why conservatives are so slow: they have a great deal more things to balance when making a decision.

As it turns out, the liberal emphasis on care and fairness supersedes everything else and creates a secular cult of group identity based on this:

As the graph illustrates, liberals value Care and Fairness much more than the other three moral foundations whereas conservative endorse all five more or less equally. This shouldn’t sound too surprising, liberals tend to value universal rights and reject the idea of the United States being superior while conservatives tend to be less concerned about the latest United Nation declaration and more partial to the United States as a superior nation.

“When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.” This is what people who had studied morality had not realized, “that we evolved not just so I can treat you well or compete with you, but at the same time we can compete with them.”

This mirrors what Crowdism found: that in groups, humans create a talisman-scapegoat dichotomy and ban mention of the things they fear, creating a means-over-ends mentality in order to manipulate each other.

Tags: care, egalitarianism, fairness, jonathan haidt, moral foundations