The liberal bane

In the following I define "liberal" as someone who is more open to new experience than a "conservative", and also has a values hierarchy different than a conservative, according to Jonathan Haidt's work: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind. These are personality types, that have consequences in political opinions and policies. I also use "liberal", "conservative" and "freeloader" as names for strategies that anyone can engage in, not putting people in rigid boxes. We can all be freeloaders (especially under conditions of a preponderance of well-meaning liberals who don't like to monitor and punish), though some people are mostly conservative or liberal. I am not using these words in the same manner that conservatives use "criminal" or "terrorist", where they draw rigid boxes around "those people" and claim that "we" are different.

It is not hard to understand why conservative people will sometimes pin their hopes for relief from hardship on dictators, demagogues and harsh, intolerant leaders. The germans who embraced Hitler and the Third Reich were humiliated by economic sanctions and unemployment, the US republicans who embraced Trump were humiliated by globalization (loss of jobs to China, Mexico and immigrants), unemployment and unaffordable health care (aka Obamacare).

It is harder to understand how liberals and people who embrace the liberal values of liberty, fraternity and equality can be overtaken by dictators and autocratic governments. How can we explain the Reign of Terror of the French revolution emanating from the enlightment liberal values of Rousseau? How can we explain that Robespierre, a man who was against war, the death penalty and slavery, who coined the phrase "libery, equality, fraternity" ended up as one of the architects of the reign of terror? That the Paris Commune, which started with artists, anarchists and lovers of freedom, ended up (in the words of Anatole France) as "A committee of assassins, a band of hooligans, a government of crime and madness."? What hypothesis do we construct to account for the russian revolution, which also started with good intentions of freeing the peasants and working classes, but ended up with one of the leading murderers in all history at its forefront (Stalin), with brutal repression, gulags and famines?

How do we explain the current fashion in liberal circles to silence opinions that contradict their small-minded caricatures of reality (aka ideology)? Well, that's one hypothesis right there, already mentioned by Jordan Peterson, that ideology is but a small window into the world. and ideologues mistake the window for the whole of reality. Thus patriarchy, which has some elements of unearned power and domination, is seen as representing whiteness and masculinity. Other aspects of masculinity, such as self-sacrificing for the good of the group, long-range vision, wisdom, competence, focus and compassion are ignored. Or consider reifying all evil in "white supremacy". The facts that Genghis Khan and Mao were asian, the imperialistic Zulus and the murderous Idi Amin were african, some native americans were fond of torture and cold-blooded killing, and that women are capable of as much brutality and domination as men are ignored. The racist reduction of a whole group of people to an enemy in general (not just with white men) is an example of how ideology reduces the world to a caricature.

Also mentioned by Jordan Peterson is the totalitarian impulse, which seems to be present in the left personality type as much as the right one (but not in the libertarian one!). This is not obvious from Jonathan Haidt's research on political personality types. Perhaps the surveys need to be modified to account for times of stress or feeling threatened, when this impulse might be activated even in liberals.

Another observation offered by JP is that the left is much more interested in rights than in responsibilities. If we take rights to be benefits offered to individuals by the higher level group, and responsibilities as costs required of individuals by the higher level group in exchange for those rights, we can add another hypothesis to explain the rise of totalitarianism in leftist groups: dictators are one example of freeloaders, that flourish in an environment where rights are revered more than responsibilities (the converse of dictators like Hitler that flourish in environments where responsibilities are revered more than rights is also possible). In an environment where punishment and monitoring are frowned upon, and where people want to look at benefits but not at costs, freeloading flourishes. Most freeloaders are low cost to the group (though they can destroy the group if they get too numerous), but from time to time one arises that extracts a high cost, like a dictator or psychopath.

In other words, liberals have no defenses against freeloaders, especially when they come dressed as dictators and others of a totalitarian bent (some people say psychopaths). The way this works in detail is as follows. First, liberals do not want to admit that freeloaders exist in their own ranks. No, they only exist in the ranks of the "enemy". I speculate that this inconsistency with the liberal character type (openness to new experience and ideas) is explained by the existence of a Jungian shadow, a taboo in consciousness, something I've written about in previous posts:
shadows1 and
shadows2. Second, by the time they notice the freeloaders among them, it is too late, as the freeloaders have accumulated power. The nice, peaceful, pacifist liberals are sent to a Gulag/prison, killed, dispossessed, erased and silenced by the less nice and totalitarian (freeloading) liberals. This happened in every documented revolution, except possibly the american revolution (which could be argued to have primarily been driven by conservatives). It happens in every organization that starts out with good intentions for liberty, equality and fraternity (or sorority) but no defenses against freeloaders. Even when there is no bloodbath, when people do not recognize that social change requires some effort to be productive instead of just destroying the old order, nothing good can come out of it (e.g. the Weather Underground). Sometimes the liberal propensity for openess and lack of boundaries encourages freeloaders who take advantage of the weak liberals, and sometimes the dictator type of freeloaders take advantage of the situation by saying they will be tough on freeloaders.

There is a complication here, in that freeloaders can actually be useful to a group. Laziness often breeds innovation, and people who do not play by the rules (and who might thus be seen as freeloaders and sometimes are) can sometimes find better ways of doing things, or point out things that everyone else is blind to. So monitoring and punishment of freeloaders (which coincidentally are part of the Ostrom Principles for avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons) are not always a good thing. In other words, there is an evolutionary tradeoff between the variation introduced by freedloaders and the reduced group fitness that they produce. This points to another liberal bane, the inability to see certain tradeoffs such as between group fitness and variation.

Three other tradeoffs come to mind which are often missed by liberals: the tradeoff between liberty and equality, the tradeoff between liberty and fraternity (or communion with others) and the tradeoff between fraternity and equality. The first is often pointed to by conservatives who make the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. There is less of a tradeoff between liberty and equality, when we strive for equality of opportunity, but if we try to enforce enforce equality of outcome, we can only do so at the expense of individual liberty, because people will have different skills and talents naturally. 

The second tradeoff was noticed by sociologists  studying intentional communities such as Ben Zablocki when he studied the Bruderhof. People in modern ICs want to maximize both communion with others and individual liberty, but it can't be done, because there is a tradeoff between them. We have to find the sweet spot between being sheeple who are very much connected to each other, and maverick individualists who keep getting in each other's way and can't commune with each other. Individual needs not only vary among themselves, but often conflict with group needs.

The third tradeoff, between fraternity and equality happens because polarity (large inequality) breeds attraction, especially in the sexual sphere. Even gay people will find that they are attracted to (especially in a long term relationship) people who are very different from them in some essential ways, for example gender wise (masculine vs feminine), or race wise (note Milo's lover is black), or introverted vs extroverted.

These tradeoffs are not excuses, as some conservatives have acted, to not pursue the values of liberty, equality or fraternity. But we must pursue them wisely, with awareness of the tradeoffs between them. Both conservatives and liberals should be able to do this.

Also, there is the idea that we all have intrinsic value, independent of what we produce, or of keeping our responsibilities. This might correspond more to a hunter-gatherer ethic, or a maternal archetype, something opaque to conservatives that liberals can bring to the table. 

If only liberals and conservatives can unite, some new culture with hope for human prosperity will arise. Otherwise, conservatives will outcompete liberals at the levels of family and community (since they care more about responsibilities than individual rights), especially as fossil fuels dwindle and the effects of climate change play out. This is a tragedy for human well being, since without individual liberty, without nurturing and communing and experiencing dyonisian ego transcendence, human life is not worth it. The conservative shadow comes out in totalitarianism and hurting girls, women (and sometimes young boys) through molestation and having bitter old men who can't find intimacy.