So I recently heard a rather interesting statement to me, that Conservatives are shown to be more generous than liberals. I was curious about this, and did a bit of research. So after some research, it seems that the source of this meme is, "Who Really Cares?" by Arthur C. Brooks. Now, conservative blogs that talk about this talk about this as a 'study'. And yet, the study wasn't peer reviewed. It's just a book that Mr. Brooks puts out and can be purchased on Amazon for a rather moderate price.
However, I found these counterpoints rather interesting. And upon investigation, Mr. Brooks was president of the American Enterprise Institute. Indeed, his other book titles include, "Big Government Vs Free Enterprise" and "Gross National Happiness."
So I think Mr. Brooks is the personification of the Right Reality vs the Reality Reality. Is it arrogant of me to call the Reality Reality such? I suppose it is, but I define a Reality as the paradigm by which you view the universe. A perspective.
Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Science? These might seem arbitrary but they aren't.
Such questions affect everything about how you perceive the universe, and also subtly effect your behavior. Conservatives, to me, seem to value Loyalty more than Truth. Liberals, however value Empathy more than Loyalty (hence their lack of cohesion as a political philsophy) but Liberals tend to put a much higher value on Truth than Conservatives.
And when Truth is not your highest virtue, you have a tendency to pick facts that suit your viewpoint. Everyone does it. Now granted, some people start from a truly 'neutral' point of view and work their way towards an inertia and are willing to correct themselves. Conan Indpendents are generally willing to do this.
I've never stated what my political position is on the map, and it is obvious I give a lot of respect to what I call Conans. There's some truth in that but I'm more of a non definable independent. To me, I fight Evil. I fight for what I consider 'Good' and that means any issue that is harming people or even a minority. There are some general principals that guide me but no hard fixed law, because I've found such are pointless. Right now, it is the Rush/Beck Republicans and Clinton Democrats I consider "evil" but some ideas advocated by any of the political philosophies could just as easily be such, but I'm part Wiggam in that I'm totally willing to join any group and advocate that group to fight evil, even if it means fighting the greater evil at the expense of a lesser.
Part of that is the understanding that for meaningful change, people need to form organized groups and work at that for a consistent period of time. That is why Conservative Ideology is winning over liberals, but it is only part of it.
Liberals fight back but they don't share a single ideology or message about how to do it. In fact the only thing REALLY stopping Conservatives from total victory is, quite frankly, most of their policies make them look like assholes.
That is to say, they are often great people individually, but they place so much conviction on their beliefs, that when they are actually applied, people suffer. People care more about emotional truth than academic truth. That's a given, and they've learned their lessons from that and created emotional truisms by merging Religion and Economics such that to be Rich is to be Godly. But I'm not touching religion in this blog any more than I have to.
My point is, that when people have a friend or family member suffer because xyz program got cut, then they remember it. Of course now with FOX, the Right Reality can say that your Medicare got cut because of evil Democrat's and their health care plan. Two totally opposing facts can be defined.
I want to say that Conservatives are more prone than liberals to pick and choose their facts based on emotional beliefs. Anecdotally, this seems to be my observation. But the truth is that I think this is really actually more based on emotional beliefs. The more emotional you are about something, the more likely you are to warp your truth or your perspective of reality to make it seem that way, and right now Conservatives are far more passionate than liberals. I'm not saying that Liberals are not passionate, but to be willing to pick up a gun and shoot people if you don't get your way kind of by definition makes you passionate. And while the VAST majority of conservatives are not violent, if you listen to what they say under the right circumstances, their threshold for 'armed revolt' is far lower than that of liberals.
But more to the point, there is an orchestrated campaign to harness the values of conservatives to the cause of the Elite. Read the comments on the internet, and I mean as objectively as you can. Both liberals and conservatives rant about the 'elites' and 'those rotten politicians in washington.' They can agree on that but not on the solution.
Well, I argue that this is by design. In fact, only by agreeing to form a purely grass roots movement to change the rules (like say...rebooting the constitution) can any REAL change be manifested. The Tea Party movement is working but its temporary. At some point, the liberals will actually become the thing that the Right is accusing them of being. They will get a spine and they will act like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. American liberals are NOT communists or nazis, but faced with desperation, even hippies get claws, and a movement of a comparable strength to the Tea Party WILL take place on the left.
So back to my point on Mr. Brooks. So he takes some interesting facts, specifically, amount donated to charity by state, and uses it to determine who is generous and who is not. Now, he uses time as well, but here is an interesting fact: Tithing donations to religious institutions are considered 'charitable.' Mr. Brooks therefore makes no distinction between a dollar given to a religion that pays a clergy member, builds a church, or pays for a soup kitchen.
So we come again to my point about differing realities. And its only going to get worse.
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