On conservatives and morality
The framework of many conservatives seems patently unhinged from reality. Everything in society is conceptualized as punishments and rewards, and individual achievement/success. The lack of achievement is perceived as a lack of responsibility and capability; laziness. Only when hit in the face with a blunt object such as physical handicaps and blatant, out-spoken discrimination are they willing to concede that outside forces factored into the failure/lack of that person's success.
This thinking muddles many issues, such as how discrimination is perceived. Conservative thought can comprehend overt racism, because it can be resolved into a lack of responsibility on the part of the discriminator; if you're good and just and want to make money, you don't call a nigger a nigger. What's incomprehensible, largely, for this mindset is the covert discrimination. The idea that broad social forces can have any impact on a person's life is anathema to the myth of individual achievement.
It's a convenient mode of thought, that the good are rewarded and the bad punished automatically. But it's unrealistic.
The myth of individual achievement can be summed up in the thought that if one is moral and self-disciplined, one succeeds in life. Lack of success (which is often measured in material terms such as monetary wealth and a handsome wife) is caused by failures of not only discipline but morality itself; the lazy bum is stuck in poverty because they had lax morals.
Things which can only be understood in aggregate or, Heavens forbid, more complex scientific reasoning than 'correlation = causation', tend to fly right in the face of this weltanschauung. The idea that people can achieve high social status through, say, nepotism or being born white (and male) is inconvenient, and has to be discarded.
This framework makes conversation tiresome. The fanatic capitalist delights in pointing out the abundance of alcohol and physical comfort available to a non-productive, broken member of society precisely because of the punishment/reward apparatus. The non-productive do not deserve physical comfort or alcohol, indeed they should be punished, because by being non-productive and broken they have demonstrated their lack of morality and worth as a human being! Trying to access broad concepts such as affirmative action becomes an exercise in calculus, because instead of even attempting to view the situation as a whole, the conservative mind-set demands to know why people are punished without any lack of moral failure. The idea that minorities struggle against various implicit discriminatory forces is immaterial to the discussion, because unjust punishments are doled out.
What's worrisome about this is the self-fulfilling prophecy it promotes. The poor minorities are poor because they're immoral! So why would I even want to employ a non-diligent, immoral person? Compounded with the fact that conservative thought is often coupled with religious, if not out-right evangelical, modes of thought, these people aggregate the very type of covert discrimination and intolerance their world-view demands to ignore.
Similarly, public services are deemed largely unnecessary, because morally right and responsible people can afford to buy cars and gasoline, put their children into private schools (where only the strength of their resolve and morals dictate success or failure), buy health-care from the best doctors, and security from private security contractors and insurance companies. And if one cannot, then one simply needs to work harder, pray harder, and not lay about like so much muck. And so it goes.
It is immediately clear how this kind of thinking is not only dangerous, but disastrous when these people are allowed to engineer societies. The rift between the social 'classes' (not to evoke Marx) grows deeper and wider as the immoral must be perpetually punished for their failure to lift themselves up, by their boot-straps if not through God, work and charity. Taxes are an unfair punishment, not a purchase.
I suspect this thinking also fuels some of the 'lol gummint' attitude many conservatives have. Ostensibly the heads of state and people governing the nation should be the most moral, the most diligent, the most ardent workers, since they're at the top of society. But, of course, politicians are but people too. And so government is ineffectual and bad, because it rewards lazy, corrupt good-for-nothings, instead of promoting selfless, God-fearing busy-bees. In particular when contrasted with CEOs, whose moral failures are rarely visible, and thus they make for good poster-boys for the myth of individual achievement. (Coincidentally, the CEOs must also be more bright than Nobel laureates, because they chose the path to greater material wealth. Never mind that the covert forces and nepotism are what promote so many heads of businesses to begin with.)
The whole back and forth with morality being rewarded with material wealth and associating material wealth with morality is an interesting if very confusing mire. It's also one of the lynch-pins in the disconnect many Evangelicals exhibit between the morals they claim to uphold and how they actually want to run society.
These deep, underlying wholly alternative modes of thought make dialogue with conservatives endless mine-fields, where chances of finding common ground and understanding are slim. Things must be reduced into the calculus of the punishment/reward dichotomy, endlessly, and often this gets further tangled with incentive/disincentive thinking, whereupon magical thinking is blended with reality, and the impossibility of unwinding that mess with reasoning terminates the conversation.
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Originally Posted by EyeKhan
