Conservatism: How being a conservative is a mental disorder
1. Failing to embrace progress. By denying the value of new things, conservatives blind themselves to the benefits of progress.
2. Clinging to dubious "core values". Some "core values that have stood the test of time" turn out to be bogus. We see "core values" falling all the time with resultant positive effects. Eliminating slavery, allowing women to vote, equal access to public institutions for people of all races and religions are some obvious examples. In the future, we will come to embrace monogamous gay marriage. The affront to G-d is lack of love.
The positives of Conservatism:
1. The belief in being fair to individuals. The concept of "blind justice"
2. The belief in the supremacy of freedom beyond the scope of a few core values and core laws.
3. The belief that the cream rises to the top, leading to the striving of individuals for "self best".
Liberalism: How being a liberal is a mental disorder:
1. Failure to see unintended consequences of instituted changes. Indeed, there is an invisible hand, and when liberals freely change things they often get more trouble than they started with. There are too many examples of this to list. Interfering with financial markets, health care, poverty, to name three obvious areas, has led to trillions of dollars of debt and to much suffering.
2. Belief in and acting on junk science. As I have pointed out previously in this blog, there are levels of truth, some absolute (ie, in mathematics), some highly probable (physics and chemistry), and some most dubious (social/political science). This ties to item #1, where junk science leads to acts with unintended, bad consequences, with the results often worse than where we started. Liberals believe in the phrase "Do Something!" Often, the best action is to confirm findings and test in a small way, using appropriate endpoints before unleashing your "grand scheme" on the masses and the invisible hand.
3. Belief in fairness to groups as trumping fairness to individuals. A company does not hire a person. If I told you that person was not the best qualified for the job, that would probably settle it for a conservative. But if I told you that person was from a poor home, was African-American, was overweight, was female, was short, was blind, and that the person hired was male, white, tall, sighted and thin, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal who would not want to know more. Perhaps this is a case of group discrimination! Liberals believe that Justice should be peeking out of a corner of the blindfold. This is truly absurd. It is the liberal counterpart of the conservative "good old boy" network turned on its head. If one is bad, the other is worse. You cannot make up for bad behavior with other bad behavior. This is de facto retribution, which is the ultimate wrong.
4. The belief in equality as the ultimate good. There was a restaurant near my home. The owners clearly loved bean curd, as the name of the restaurant was "The Bean Curd House". It did not succeed, perhaps because they made a fatal assumption: they liked bean curd so everyone likes bean curd. The fallacy of equality is the major fallacy of liberalism. The only place where equality has a role, liberals oppose it: in the courts, where Justice should be blind to the differences in people. In all other areas, people are clearly unequal, to the great benefit of humanity and the world. Under the banner of equality, liberals try to impose democracies over people who would prefer strong autocratic leaders, liberals make it OK to be a pregnant teen, and liberals penalize success and reward laxitude. Equality as an institutional directive reduces the impact of object lessions, charity and role models.
5. Liberals believe that group inequality of wealth, power, influence, status, position = social injustice. This is the opposite of the conservative belief that cream rises to the top. Consequently, any group that does not have equal percentage of involvement in a specific area is the target of social injustice. One example that confounds this is the percent of African-Americans who are math professors. This number was traditionally low. As civil rights progressed, this number became higher. In the post civil rights era, the number has fallen again. How can we have an African-American President, institutions of higher learning that clearly have a liberal bent, and yet have a decline in math professors? Maybe it isn't always "social injustice". Maybe it sometimes is just individual preferences?
The positive of Liberalism:
1. Liberalism points out areas where conservative "values" are ethically wrong. Unfortunately, Liberals then move to make sweeping (instead of incremental and tested) changes that lead to unintended consequences.
2. Liberals do like to adopt new science.
An unfettered Conservatism leads to no real progress. An unfettered Liberalism leads us to more problems than we started with. We need to position ourselves somewhere between. We need to be Conservative, but to also allow Liberal experimentation to fine tune new concepts and ideas before widespread adoption.
