"Do you know why people hate liberals? If they're so fucking educated, why do they always lose?"
That's my whole political career. I agree with liberals on a lot of levels... but why do they always fucking lose? It's a legitimate question.
Because the human brain (along with every other animal on Earth) evolved to have an uneven sensitivity to negative versus positive stimuli - because it is more important for survival to be aware of potential dangers that might end your life than it is to be equally distracted by something nice, even if you find some conveniently sized food source or seemingly safe shelter, you must remain alert to predators or other unfriendly humans. The same is not true in reverse, in the presence of an immediate threat to life, no source of comfort or nourishment can distract you.
This negativity bias poses a big problem civilizationally because ultimately conservative "values" are nothing more than a thin layer of linguistic rationalisation that naturally grew over the instinctual, animalistic default to see potential enemies everywhere, seek comfort in the familiarity of the status quo and take risks only when absolutely necessary to protect the individual. It is, therefore, of course, extremely easy for those who've surrendered to the delusion that conservatism is somehow a reasoned moral philosophy rather than just the animalistic default perspective to push those same deeply ingrained buttons in others and stoke fear, to avoid risk, and avoid change.
Liberals face an uphill battle against this evolutionary disadvantage because liberal ideas are typically oriented around minimising discomfort, ultimately, for more people, and it's difficult to convince humans that maybe, we have collectively managed to make the world a lot less dangerous and perhaps now can turn our attention to the slightly less exciting process of fine-tuning civilization further, focusing on longer term dangers like the future state of the environment on Earth, and the many more nebulous challenges that we will surely still need to face if we are to survive as a species in the long term - and create a global human civilization even worthy of survival - and ultimately, "loftier" ideals...
When the alternative is the intuitively far simpler to understand but still, far dumber - like, ancient-ancestor-of-a-chimpanzee dumb - option of just hunkering down and protecting some arbitrary medieval way of doing things that must be best because, surely, it's just how it's always been! Or because God said it was so! And besides, we can't think about all that other shit yet!
Immigrants/gays/trans/Muslims/Jews/The Leftist Liberal Elite/ are coming to attack us, they want to take what's ours and destroy us, LOOK! DANGER! Panic and retreat... to protect the unavoidable stupidity of how it's always been since the first brains evolved in some kind of deep sea slug or whatever.
In a nutshell, IMHO.
letterfromjail.com
