Based Camp - Moral Circles & The Conservative Brain

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be chatting with you today. Today, we are going to go in

00:00:05.300 to the famous circles or charts of interest. It comes from a study titled Ideological Differences

00:00:13.360 in the Expanse of the Moral Circle. And so this is a moral circle chart that everybody loves to

00:00:18.620 show. And I wanted to go into this in an episode because one, what the study actually says versus

00:00:24.880 what people think it says is hugely misinterpreted, mostly because the people who wrote the study

00:00:30.980 made a mistake in the way they described the procedure of the experiment, which led people

00:00:36.620 to completely misunderstand what was being shown in the graph, because the graph is intuitively not

00:00:43.040 what you would expect it to be. So there is actually data that looks at what people think

00:00:47.280 this is, which is on average, what conservatives and progressives care about. But it's not the

00:00:52.240 graph that you think you're looking at, okay? So first, what a lot of people think that this

00:00:57.120 graph shows that I have shown you is sort of moral expanses of what people care about. Where do they

00:01:03.160 put their intention with each layer of this circle representing moving out from like yourself to your

00:01:10.340 family to out, out, out. So let's go over what the various rings mean. The innermost layers include

00:01:16.740 category. It's like immediate family, closest friends, et cetera. Then you have the innermost

00:01:22.260 layers, sort of the middling layers, all people you've ever met, all people in your community,

00:01:27.280 all people in your country, which reflects sort of a broader sense of community. Then you have

00:01:31.100 the outer layers. These encompass all humans, all mammals, all living things in the universe,

00:01:35.940 including nymphs and trees. And then you have the very outermost layer, which is all things in

00:01:40.500 existence, like rocks and everything like that, okay? And what a lot of people interpret this chart

00:01:45.940 is meaning is the average of what conservatives and progressives care about. And in a way it's

00:01:51.700 telling because not a lot of people pushed back against this interpretation. I.e., you see here

00:01:56.180 conservatives care about things like family, friends, their countrymen. Restives, in this

00:02:02.660 interpretation, care the most about things like rocks and plants and stuff like that.

00:02:08.020 Okay. And well, I mean, people intuitively hear this and they're like, yeah, that sounds like the

00:02:13.340 type of brain dead thing a progressive would care about. The problem is, is they did ask that question

00:02:20.180 in the survey. It's just the data that they collected from asking that question was shown in a separate

00:02:27.220 chart, which I will show you in a second. And this chart shows data around the question of what is

00:02:34.740 the furthest extent of the things you care about, which makes progressives look a little less crazy.

00:02:43.300 I.e., conservatives often do not really care. It actually makes the conservatives look a little

00:02:47.700 sociopathic, with many conservatives not really caring much outside of their family, their friends,

00:02:53.220 et cetera. Yeah. And with, and I, and progressives being like almost sort of sociopathic in the other

00:03:01.380 extreme. I care about the universe and everything. I care about all things. Yes. Yeah. So let's look

00:03:07.540 at the real graph that, that actually looked at the answers to this rating and you'll see why nobody

00:03:12.820 shares it because it's done terribly and it's hard to interpret. Now, if you saw this graph,

00:03:18.500 you'd think that the first graph was the, what do you care about most? Not the extent of your

00:03:23.780 beliefs. And this graph was the extent of your beliefs question, but no, they did it oppositely

00:03:28.980 because they were bad at their jobs. Good God. That was great for memes. And they haven't really

00:03:34.660 gone back and commented on it much because they're scientists and they don't like that it's become

00:03:38.820 like a meme thing. And they feel kind of bad about messing it up to begin with. They sort of like

00:03:42.980 my read of what's going on here. But what you can see from this chart is this took the thing that you

00:03:48.580 care about most on average, basically gave people a number of tokens and you can slot them into

00:03:52.980 different categories. You could put like all your tokens on family and only like one or two on country

00:03:57.700 and stuff like that. Okay. Or you could distribute your tokens more evenly. And so when you divided people

00:04:03.460 into human versus non-human categories, what you see here is that generally the more progressive

00:04:11.700 somebody was, the less they cared about human things, more plants, animals, space rocks.

00:04:17.380 Or more, I would argue the more equally you care about all things.

00:04:21.540 Well, including non-human things. Yes. Including non-human things.

00:04:24.900 This is assigning value to non-human things, which I think is weird, but okay. And then I'll put another

00:04:30.260 graph on screen here, which can give you a bit more because it shows like the error bars on each of

00:04:34.180 these or the margins. So you can get an idea of how much they separate from each other. And what you'll notice

00:04:40.500 here is some interesting things, but in general, the broad trend is that yes, liberals actually do

00:04:47.780 care about non-human things more. Now, I want to, now suppose you're like, okay, but what if we did

00:04:55.060 like a heat map of what people were caring about? Okay. We graphed what people are caring about. And then we're

00:05:01.380 going to go into the neuroscience of this because the conservative and progressive brain are actually a little

00:05:05.140 different. Okay. Oh. So here you can see like a depth map or heat map of where people were actually

00:05:11.620 clicking. And it kind of showed that yes, the conservatives largely viewed their loyalty in

00:05:16.980 tranches, i.e. a lot of them were really loyal to family. A lot of them were really loyal to country.

00:05:22.900 And then you have a smaller like out there group, whereas progressives are much more unified in their

00:05:28.580 beliefs with sort of a out there, probably all plants and animals. Yeah. Like it's very,

00:05:33.140 it's much more outwardly focused with very little emphasis put on the nearest circle.

00:05:39.460 Yeah. And I, I'd say that I also understand this conservative idea of, okay, I'm distributing

00:05:43.620 tokens. What do I care about? It's going to be family a lot in country a lot. Yeah. Or when I think

00:05:50.740 of country, I mean like wider cultural system that I'm a part of. Right. Maybe not necessarily exactly

00:05:57.140 like just a country for arbitrary, like countrymen's sake. Yeah. And I think that's the way a lot of

00:06:01.140 people would interpret that. And then the second graph here that I'm showing, what you can see is

00:06:08.500 approximate distance from center, progressive versus conservative. And you can see that what

00:06:14.020 you actually get is progressives actually care about almost everything more, except for family,

00:06:20.900 where the conservatives. That makes so much sense that you always make the point

00:06:24.660 that like the urban monoculture works like a cult by starting with a separation between the person

00:06:31.380 and their family and their support network. The therapist goes and finds about all the terrible

00:06:35.460 things that supposedly were done by this person's parents in their childhood. And there's a lot of

00:06:40.100 hatred for one's inherited group and their traditions because they're backwards and savage. 1.00

00:06:45.860 Right. Yeah. So I think that why is this a meme before we go into neuroscience and stuff like this?

00:06:53.060 Why is this all out there? I think because it shows something that we all know to be intuitively true,

00:06:58.100 which is that progressives care about things outside of sort of their immediate circle.

00:07:05.780 People will be like, well, why can't you care about everything? Why can't you just like, I guess you

00:07:11.220 can say that, but care units are attention units. You can say care units are units of like, what are you

00:07:18.500 weighing? Right. And somebody who distributes too many care units outside of, because that's what I'm

00:07:25.220 saying when I'm, when I'm distributing a care unit, I'm saying when I'm making moral decisions or equations,

00:07:30.260 how much am I going to reference things outside of my immediate community?

00:07:35.380 And, or how much of your mental bandwidth goes toward certain things?

00:07:39.220 Yeah. And this actually matters a lot. If I'm thinking about the type of people I want in my

00:07:43.700 community, or I want to invest at, invest in, in members of my community, because these individuals,

00:07:49.700 I can invest in them, but then they will make decisions or the community can invest in them and

00:07:55.700 they will make decisions that benefit things other than the community. It's like, you know,

00:08:00.900 you have the old grandma who you're giving money to, to try to help her and her cat. And you learn

00:08:07.620 that she's been giving it all away to Rwanda. And you're like, well, you know, yeah, I gave you this

00:08:13.380 cat grandmother. You were supposed to be taking care of it. Like, what are you doing? Like, it's like,

00:08:17.540 well, I didn't give it all to Rwanda. And it's like, well, I gave you the money for you. Like,

00:08:23.780 do you not have any loyalty to that? And it's like, no, I don't because we're Rwanda.

00:08:28.980 Yeah. And I think that, that this is, this is why it makes sense for conservative cultures,

00:08:34.820 i.e. cultures that have survived a long time and aren't just like made up modern philosophical

00:08:39.700 hokum to want to reject and eject individuals who overemphasize moral weight of things far out of

00:08:49.300 the system. I mean, I would also argue just from a logical standpoint,

00:08:54.580 I've, I've definitely shifted from being very, very outward circle focused to very,

00:08:58.980 very inward circle focused because I'm aware of where I, as an individual can make the most

00:09:04.580 difference and you can make the very most difference at the local level, not, you know,

00:09:09.780 not very far away.

00:09:10.820 Oh, yes.

00:09:11.540 And honestly, if you really care about Rwanda, the best way you could make a difference is probably by,

00:09:16.820 well, one, either like donating as much of your income as you can to that and just focusing on it

00:09:22.580 exclusively or honestly going out there and helping, like getting on the ground and helping.

00:09:26.340 Yeah.

00:09:26.820 Um, if, if you can't make a lot of money and then, and then what, then it becomes your local circle.

00:09:31.060 So now you're, you've, you've shifted the circles and now you're, you're, you're, you're an inner

00:09:34.660 circle person. It's almost like they, they, they want to make the outer circles, their inner circles,

00:09:38.900 but they don't. And so they're feckless. And that's, that's what bothers me.

00:09:42.100 Yeah. It's almost like when I think having kids really switches this up for people,

00:09:46.180 because then you get invested in this sort of the intergenerational part of life,

00:09:50.100 investing in the next generation, thinking about how you're going to set things up for your kids,

00:09:54.260 for your country, for your cultural group. And you begin to realize that a lot of the signaling

00:10:01.460 of things far outside your immediate cultural group is ultimately signaling to make yourself feel

00:10:07.140 like a good person. I think, uh, I don't think that a lot of this is actually deeply caring about

00:10:13.780 these things as you see with a lot of progressive causes, you know, they care, they say, oh, I care

00:10:18.340 about human suffering. And I'm like, well, population collapse is going to lead to astronomical suffering

00:10:22.900 when social security systems and welfare systems collapse. Don't you care about that? Or I care about

00:10:27.140 the environment. Well, then shouldn't we be doing nuclear plants? Why are you shutting all the nuclear

00:10:31.780 plants down in Germany? Right? Like that's people who say they care about the environment doing that.

00:10:36.740 Like that's nuts, but it's because they don't actually care. They care about looking like

00:10:42.420 somebody who cares about the aesthetics of the environment or the aesthetics of family or, or,

00:10:48.020 or human suffering. Whereas I think conservatives, when you are allocating your points pragmatically,

00:10:54.260 like where am I actually going to be able to make an impact in the world? I think that that's

00:10:58.100 a big part of why conservatives allocate their care in this way, because they know that that's where

00:11:02.180 they can matter and where them, when you help communities that aren't your own overly, you

00:11:10.500 typically end up one causing communities that are less healthy and cause more suffering over the time

00:11:17.620 to proliferate and end up making your own community suffer. So just on net, you cause more suffering in

00:11:23.860 the world. I think you look at our video on, on Nietzsche and philosophy on this, where we critique it,

00:11:27.780 but we say, you know, it's not wrong on everything, but let's go into the, the, the brain and psychology

00:11:33.620 of all this. Psychologically, progressives tend to score higher on traits like openness to experience

00:11:39.060 a big five personality dimension tied to curiosity, imagination, and tolerance for ambiguity.

00:11:43.700 They're often more comfortable with change and uncertainty, which aligns with their inclination

00:11:48.580 towards social reform and making things up. Here it says innovation, but I'm going to say making

00:11:53.380 things up. Conservatives on the other hand, typically score higher on conscientiousness,

00:11:57.460 particularly the sub trait of orderliness, and they value stability, tradition, and structure.

00:12:02.340 You see, Simone, you are always meant to be a conservative. Orderliness, conscientiousness.

00:12:08.020 Oh, and why I was the black sheep of my family as I grew up in California.

00:12:12.420 Low anxiety, structure, order. This can make them more skeptical of rapid change and more focused on

00:12:19.380 preserving established norms. And, and I think that this is not as much what we see from modern

00:12:25.220 conservatism because we live in an odd time where the dominant culture is a progressive culture

00:12:31.380 and to maintain tradition. And what the conservatives largely make up today is people who are rebelling

00:12:37.780 against a domineering and fascist like social order, attempting to force people to live and think

00:12:44.820 what it believes. If you look, for example, let's say like the reason why the people who are labeled

00:12:50.660 anti-LGBTQIA or whatever are anti it now, very few are anti it because they're like, this is what the

00:12:58.900 Bible says. If you look at the most prominent leaders of this space, they're generally just anti-trans

00:13:06.660 and started as pro-trans, but moved anti-trans when engaging more with the science and with like JK

00:13:15.140 Rowling didn't go anti-trans because she was a Christian curmudgeon. Elon Musk didn't go anti-trans

00:13:22.500 because he was a Christian curmudgeon. Both of these people started as avidly pro-trans and moved

00:13:28.660 against it over time as they learned more about the the science and the social costs and the the

00:13:37.380 nature and psychological, you know, stuff. You can look up our trans episode. We don't need to go into

00:13:41.780 that here. But the point being is what motivates people to be a conservative today is often very

00:13:46.820 different than what motivated them in the past, which was maintaining traditions, which I think

00:13:51.220 changes a lot of the nature of the community. When the conservative community of today

00:13:56.260 goes towards traditions, they go towards them, not out of a fear of change, but because they

00:14:02.900 believe they work. Like you can look at someone like J.D. Vance, like why is he going towards

00:14:06.820 traditions? And I love that all the four horsemen of the atheist tobacco and stuff all now said,

00:14:11.460 because the evidence does show this, it turned out that the Christian traditions were probably better

00:14:15.620 and we shouldn't enough with them. And the one, the Muslim one who did end up converting to Christianity, 1.00

00:14:21.060 she even said when the people were like, why did you convert? You know, it wasn't like a

00:14:26.180 religious argument. It was, it was a functional argument. She was depressed. She had tried

00:14:31.060 everything and her psychologist was like, I know this is going to be offensive to you.

00:14:34.100 Oh my gosh.

00:14:34.500 Have you thought about just trying to pray?

00:14:37.540 Really?

00:14:38.020 And that's what did it for her. She tried and it worked and she started to feel better. And then

00:14:43.220 she, she got into it again.

00:14:44.740 And this is like Grimes saying she, she might, she might be getting Christianity because it helps

00:14:49.060 her quit vaping. Whatever it takes. 0.56

00:14:50.980 Whatever it takes.

00:14:51.860 Sometimes you just need, sometimes religious fixes problems. That's so true. 1.00

00:14:54.980 But yeah, I think that, that, well, no, but I mean that, that, that means that the modern

00:15:00.340 conservative today, actually the, when the old right tells the new, right, you guys have a lot

00:15:05.540 of progressive traits or, you know, you, you guys used to be in the progressive movement. I think they're,

00:15:09.780 they're right about both of those things, but they're misdiagnosing what's happening. What they picture

00:15:14.980 is happening is the Overton menu, just moving window, just moving further and further to the left.

00:15:19.700 And then people who, you know, in the nineties would have been like standard progressives in

00:15:24.900 their ideology becoming conservatives today. And I don't think that that's, what's actually

00:15:29.220 happening. The core reason why they look like progressives of the nineties is because that they

00:15:34.100 are the rebels trying to buck the social order. And that's fundamentally where the new right comes in

00:15:40.900 is most of them are people who are like, they didn't like the censorship of tech. They didn't like all

00:15:45.220 of these like anti-reality stuff. Like, oh, men, when they transition, don't have an advantage in

00:15:50.980 sports when like everybody knows that's like clearly, obviously not a true thing. And yet we're

00:15:56.020 supposed to repeat it. They are people who feel like in the same way that many of them built a grudge

00:16:02.900 against Christianity, telling them what to do in the nineties and in the eighties, that same instinct 0.92

00:16:09.860 and those same cultures are now antagonistic against the progressives. And it's funny that

00:16:15.860 it turned out that the way that you got these people to become Catholics, like, like say JD Vance 0.54

00:16:20.580 or something like that was just to have atheists tell them what to do. Like, you know what?

00:16:27.380 I'm going to become a Catholic. Damn it. And, and I actually think that this is where we're getting 1.00

00:16:32.900 a lot of growth in Christianity today is the urban monoculture overplaying its hand and trying to force

00:16:39.300 people to become believers. And I also think it's why when you look at faiths that are the minority 0.98

00:16:44.180 within their region, their members are typically much more faithful, i.e. if you are a Catholic

00:16:49.460 in a majority Protestant country and the Catholic communities in majority of Protestant countries

00:16:53.380 are typically much stricter in their faithfulness and much more believing and in their sense of

00:16:58.340 community than Catholics in Catholic majority countries where you see Catholicism dying out much

00:17:03.380 more quickly in terms of fertility rates and in terms of strictness of practice. And, and I think

00:17:08.740 that that's what we're seeing here is being a rebel is useful. And even within America, I think

00:17:15.140 that it is fundamentally wrong to try to raise your kids to be full America American. You can be

00:17:21.460 Americana so long as Americana is framed as a state of rebellion against those who control our society and

00:17:26.740 the, the, the people in power and everything like that. But trying to try to push for this normalcy,

00:17:31.780 I don't think works, but thoughts before I go further. I think you're right. And I think this

00:17:36.260 shows up in the fact that you see lower rates of fertility in countries that are more homogeneously

00:17:42.020 religiously conservative, like when it feels forced on you that back there's backlash.

00:17:49.460 Emotionally fear and threat sensitivity play a big role. Studies like those from John Himmering and

00:17:55.940 colleagues suggest conservatives have a stronger physiological response to threatening or

00:18:00.180 disgusting stimuli, e.g. images of spiders or rotting food measured in conductance or brain activity in

00:18:05.780 the amygdala. Yeah. The fear processing hub. This heightened sensitivity might explain a preference

00:18:10.500 for security, authority, and clear boundaries. Progressives, while not immune to fear, seem less

00:18:15.140 reactive to these triggers and more attuned to empathy-driven concerns, often prioritizing fairness

00:18:20.340 and harm avoidance as seen in John Haydite's moral foundation theory. Now I note here that this has

00:18:24.980 actually changed. John Haydite. John Haydite. Oh yeah. Where I do not think, I think in the 80s,

00:18:32.260 a lot of the conservatives, and I mentioned this on other videos, you can check it out,

00:18:35.380 really interesting, where we talk about conservatives motivated voters with disgust. You vote against

00:18:39.860 gayness because of disgust, because it makes you feel disgust. This system largely just collapsed and 1.00

00:18:45.380 fell out of favor, culturally speaking, where very little is motivated by disgust anymore. Then we had a

00:18:50.420 system that was motivated by fear of social shame. This is the cancellation system that progressives

00:18:57.700 really jumped onto. And the new conservative system is motivated positively through sort of vitalism,

00:19:04.580 which you see in Trumpianism and everything like that. This idea of like, be alive, have hope in the

00:19:10.660 future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You think for yourself. Now, let's go start a

00:19:16.500 fucking revolution. The entire world would be better off if these people were permanently removed 1.00

00:19:22.500 from these platforms. Like there is no downside and only upside to see people like Candace Owens,

00:19:27.140 Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, never be allowed to publicly broadcast their opinions ever again.

00:19:31.380 Tread on them! Tread the fuck all over them! Don't give a fuck about anybody that winds up at any of 1.00

00:19:37.620 these rallies and gets shot or whatever the fuck, okay? You gotta fight for your right! 0.99

00:19:47.700 Is free speech under threat in the UK? With the rise of so-called non-crime hate incidents,

00:19:53.380 arrests over grossly offensive memes, can you really speak your mind in 21st century Britain?

00:20:01.380 And there's very little disgust, but I can see why in the older disgust-based framework,

00:20:15.380 when these studies were done, disgust would be found more among conservatives.

00:20:18.500 Oh, here's a study I found actually, just in contrast to the one that you cited,

00:20:26.580 that in this case, researchers found that conservatives do not appear to feel more

00:20:31.300 disgust than liberals. Uh, when was it done? Remember, I told you that the way that people

00:20:36.500 motivate political action changed over time. Yeah, so this is, my guess is, is disgust,

00:20:44.100 a conservative emotion published 2019. When was yours? I told you.

00:20:50.260 Yours was later? No, the one I did was a long time ago. That would have been like the 80s.

00:20:54.820 What I said was, is that in the past, in the 80s and 90s, conservatives used disgust to motivate

00:21:00.980 voting behavior. Today, they don't use disgust to motivate voting behavior. They use vitalism to

00:21:06.660 motivate voting behavior. So it's just less. Which means that you would no longer see this trait

00:21:10.980 clustered in conservatives like you would have historically. So that makes perfect sense and

00:21:14.580 seems to validate my theory. Interesting. Okay. Fair enough. This is, this is interesting though,

00:21:20.340 because I, I kind of gave up for a while on reviewing studies on conservatives and progressives,

00:21:29.300 because after a while it became so obvious that it was just about people with agendas. Like

00:21:35.940 basically a bunch of researchers just wanted to publish a study saying conservatives are dumb or 1.00

00:21:42.340 conservatives are whatever. It's same. Like progressives are stupid. And, and then they, 1.00

00:21:48.100 you just, they're, they're just not really well done. They're not very interesting. There's not much

00:21:52.580 that I can act on. So I just, I kind of gave up on them, but I do think that when you see the averages

00:21:58.660 that come out, you see patterns and there is, we, that, that should help us understand what's going on

00:22:04.820 and what it actually does mean to, to be more progressive versus conservative. So that it's a worthwhile

00:22:10.660 discussion and I'm glad you brought it up. If you talk about threat sensitivity, research actually

00:22:14.500 suggests that leftists exhibit higher threat sensitivity to certain types of threats,

00:22:18.420 such as environmental issues and social inequality when compared with conservatives.

00:22:22.580 However, conservatives are more sensitive to what we would call real threats, such as physical

00:22:28.820 threats or social order threats or crime and terrorism. Interestingly, social studies have shown

00:22:35.300 that conservatives tend to be less threatened by social threats, e.g. out-groups, but more responsive

00:22:40.580 to physical threats, which goes against what a lot of progressives would want to believe that

00:22:44.500 conservatives are the ones afraid of people who don't think like them, which isn't true. They're

00:22:48.820 afraid of being stabbed by somebody who doesn't think like them, but it is fundamentally the progressives

00:22:54.740 who are more afraid and have a higher tendency of being afraid of people who think differently than them.

00:22:59.140 I think this, this reveals though, a very deep set understanding of how you relate to the world.

00:23:07.060 I remember, remember that interview around the pandemic that went viral of some woman who is

00:23:11.940 progressive saying that she was assaulted on, I think the New York subway and how that was just like,

00:23:18.260 you know, normal, like she wasn't supposed to do anything about it. And I think it had to do with this

00:23:22.580 broad concept that it's, I don't know, like it's, it's not your responsibility or there's nothing that

00:23:29.860 you can do about these immediate physical threats. And really the, your way of relating to the world is

00:23:36.340 so much more cerebral, so much more, I mean, if you want to be prerogative about it, you would be, or sorry,

00:23:42.500 derogative about it, you would say that it's performative, but I guess they would say that they're focusing on

00:23:48.420 the big problems that really matter. Whereas the conservative mind seems a lot more oriented around

00:23:55.300 what do I need to physically address in my immediate area now? Well, who can I actually

00:24:00.580 protect? Who can I actually help?

00:24:01.860 We try these like mass action solutions, as we've seen, whether it's, you know, social services or,

00:24:07.700 you know, UBI or anything like that, see our UBI video, they, they appear to make people worse

00:24:13.540 off intergenerationally. Yeah. Yes. And, and they appear to make cultures that they end up getting

00:24:18.900 bloated. They end up not serving their original function. Argentina is basically a case study to 0.97

00:24:23.540 all of this. The ways that progressives attempt to fix things doesn't work, but the ways that

00:24:27.780 conservatives attempt to fix things do work intergenerationally, i.e. because they're focused

00:24:32.500 on the cultures and people who they can influence, i.e. my own culture, my own community, my own people.

00:24:38.820 Yeah. And the paper I was talking about earlier is titled Who Fears Strangers and Spiders,

00:24:44.340 Political Ideology and Feeling Threatened. Neurologically, brain structure differences

00:24:50.980 pop in some studies. A 2011 study by Ryota Kanaya found that conservatives tend to have a larger

00:24:59.940 amygdala, potentially amplifying threat perception, or at least certain types of threat perception.

00:25:04.340 While progressives show more gray matter in their anterior cingulate cortex, ACC,

00:25:08.900 a region linked to conflict resolution and handling ambiguity, fMRI research also hints that conservatives'

00:25:14.580 active regions tied to rule-based reasoning more strongly, while progressives lean on areas involved

00:25:21.220 in social and emotional processing. I actually think what we're seeing here, and we've talked about

00:25:24.980 this before, is the mimetic virus. It's sort of like a self-replicating virus, which is represented

00:25:32.100 in the urban monoculture. When I mean it's a mimetic virus, I mean quite literally. It's a virus

00:25:36.820 that gets into people's heads and then starts replicating and then uses them to spread itself.

00:25:40.980 It needs a certain amount of structure, and so it's pretty bad at spreading in people below a

00:25:46.660 certain level of intelligence. In which case, those people only really conform to it when they realize

00:25:52.980 that they can use signaling their conformity to it to get other people to do what they tell them to.

00:25:58.820 This is what you see with the low IQ communities. They use the wokest concepts when they think that

00:26:05.380 they can browbeat someone into following them, or when they're afraid of bringing bowel break

00:26:09.220 themselves. That's really interesting.

00:26:10.980 Cognition is another divide. Conservatives often favor intuitive heuristic thinking,

00:26:15.780 quick gut level decisions rooted in tradition or group norms. Again, this might have changed. I don't

00:26:21.300 know. Progressives are more likely. I mean, it seems to me that now progressives make the gut

00:26:25.380 level decisions. It's interesting in looking at this research, you can see how much what aligned

00:26:31.140 people with conservatism has changed over time. It was, do you actually like, are you doing this

00:26:38.100 because of the tradition or are you doing like with progressives? Are you doing this because you're

00:26:42.180 part of the urban monoculture? Because there used to be an alliance with like elitist intellectual

00:26:46.740 culture and fighting back against the system, which, you know, you could say started with the

00:26:50.820 hippies, right? Are you actually fighting for individual freedom or are you fighting

00:26:55.380 with the ultimate goal of imposing your values on everyone else? And that sort of split, you know,

00:27:00.980 was now the progressives that are left are just the ones who want to impose their values on other

00:27:04.340 people. Yeah. Cognition is another divide. Conservatives often favor intuitive heuristic.

00:27:08.980 Yeah, sorry. I said that. Progressives are more likely to engage in analytical reasoning.

00:27:12.660 It seems to be one of your studies of like trying to make progressives sound smart.

00:27:16.420 Absolutely. Questioning assumptions and weighing abstract systems,

00:27:19.860 according to work by psychologist, John Just. This can make progressives seem overthinky to

00:27:25.380 conservatives while conservatives might strike progressives as rigid or simplistic. It's

00:27:29.700 interesting that I'm pretty sure this flipped because when I talked to progressives now,

00:27:33.220 one person has noted and I think I make questions is why do conservatives have like,

00:27:37.940 if you look at like eight of the 10 long form podcasts, why are they conservatives?

00:27:41.060 And as somebody was saying, when they were on the long form podcast, the gasm

00:27:44.500 newson has now done where he talks with conservative thinkers.

00:27:46.740 Oh God. And people love that.

00:27:48.260 I want to get, you know, it's got a review of like 2.5 or something on, on

00:27:52.260 what's the progressives bombing it. Like, why are you giving these people?

00:27:55.860 Oh, you think that, oh my gosh, how sad is that? But conservatives are loving it though.

00:28:00.260 They're like, wow, he actually listens. Just this idea of a progressive actually listening

00:28:04.180 to conservatives is mind blowing.

00:28:05.860 But the point being is the reason why conservatives have all this long form interview content and stuff

00:28:10.260 like that in long form talking content, like this show is you couldn't do this as a progressive.

00:28:15.380 Like I couldn't every day go over for like 45 minutes, something that is interesting without

00:28:21.220 updating my beliefs. It would just be telling you what you're supposed to believe. And most

00:28:25.700 progressives already know what they're supposed to believe. So they don't need to be told again.

00:28:30.900 You know, there is no curiosity about digging into these subjects because if you dig into things

00:28:37.620 like human sexuality or arousal or transness, you're bound to accidentally cross the line somewhere.

00:28:44.820 Uh, no, no, no. I, I, I listened to a decent amount of long form progressive content,

00:28:49.940 but it's mostly just building a case as to why something is something. So it doesn't need to

00:28:55.620 lead to a change in confines. So I don't really know what it is.

00:28:59.300 That is fundamentally, I think, you know, like what ContraPoints does and stuff like that,

00:29:02.820 like one long form progressive area where they do like broad philosophy, but they do it very rarely.

00:29:09.700 I don't know any that are regular shows like philosophy tube, ContraPoints, all of that stuff

00:29:15.300 is like once every-

00:29:16.100 So you mean just like philosophical discussion or do you mean discussion about current events?

00:29:20.100 I mean regular podcasts. If we're looking at regular podcasts,

00:29:23.540 eight of the top ten are conservative, like daily or weekly podcasts. I don't know, like the one I

00:29:29.460 can think of that's progressive is Hassan, but Hassan is mostly done in a short form context

00:29:34.340 and without really engaging with people who have different beliefs or attempting to update his view

00:29:40.020 of the world, which makes it, you know, less interesting unless you're just there for the shot

00:29:44.820 jock stuff. Hassan does very well. I mean, I do think that that's how you make progressive content

00:29:49.700 interesting is be shocking in how extreme you are, which is one reason why the progressives

00:29:56.260 who have done that and why progressives do well on platforms like TikTok and originally on systems

00:30:00.900 like Twitch before, you know, I wonder if that was moderation. Like, is it that the only reason

00:30:06.180 progressives seem to do well in any platform, whether it's Twitch because the Chinese are trying 0.95

00:30:09.540 to destroy us or old Twitter because they are very good at controlling bureaucracies and then putting

00:30:13.940 their finger on the scales. Once the finger is removed from the scales, they end up fleeing like

00:30:19.300 we've seen with TikTok. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Like, I don't spend enough time

00:30:25.380 on TikTok to be a good judge of any of this. I wonder if the blue sky is still growing.

00:30:30.100 I do too. I really do. Hmm. You're looking it up? Yeah, looking it up. It says it's gross and

00:30:36.660 slowed significantly. I mean, it would. And you get your initial boost, then it slows.

00:30:41.540 Actually, even the articles about it slowing are mostly pretty old at this point.

00:30:46.740 So, oops. I mean, it could continue to grow. I mean, it's astronomically small when compared

00:30:52.660 with two other platforms, so. Yeah. Well, any takeaways you've had from this?

00:31:01.060 That perhaps this isn't just a story of polarization. When we talk about very difficult

00:31:08.660 to cross political divides, perhaps it's also a story of a fundamental way of relating to the world.

00:31:15.780 And perhaps part of the reason why it can be so difficult for conservatives and progressives to

00:31:24.340 relate to each other and effectively communicate is because they have such a different contextualization

00:31:30.180 of self and a different contextualization of that which we must protect. So when people are talking

00:31:36.980 about protecting good things or, you know, we have to do this, it's just, it's difficult to have a

00:31:44.020 debate when your definitions are so different. I disagree pretty strongly. Yeah, I think that this

00:31:49.540 is what progressives tell themselves when they're trying to look like they're seeing both sides of the

00:31:54.180 issue. But I think the core thing is that conservatives, when they look at what they

00:31:58.260 want to protect and grow, it's typically realistic things. Like it is a real system that could potentially

00:32:04.820 work and improve the world. Whereas a lot of the progressive stuff, like shutting down nuclear

00:32:10.020 power plants and stuff like that, it's not realistic stuff. It's stuff that is based around personal

00:32:14.900 signaling. I think that that's the core difference is the conservative is okay with doing what actually

00:32:22.900 makes the world a better place, even if it makes them look like a villain. Whereas the progressive

00:32:27.220 cares more about looking like the good guy than doing good. And we've seen this from conservative

00:32:32.500 icons throughout history, like Ayn Rand, for example, like famously leaned into that. And I think that

00:32:37.700 we're seeing it even more was in the new, right? The acceptance of do the right thing, even if it makes

00:32:44.340 you, I mean, what is the pro natalist movement, but that what is hard EA.org, but that. Yeah.

00:32:48.900 Anyway, love you to death, Simone. I love you too. You're perfect.

00:32:55.540 What are we doing for dinner tonight? You can have potstickers or you can have green curry

00:33:01.380 with coconut rice. Green curry. Green curry. Your green curry is really good.

00:33:05.780 Well, then that is what you shall have, my love. Egg tower.

00:33:09.700 Go ahead. Take a bite, Octavian. It's ready for you. Whoa, whoa, whoa. 1.00

00:33:20.900 I put a ton of salt on already.

00:33:25.140 Yeah, you can taste it by taking a bite.

00:33:27.940 Right, Titan?

Based Camp - March 18, 2025

Moral Circles & The Conservative Brain

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript