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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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There have been many attempts on the Motte to somehow explain the left-right divide from deep archetypes or psychology, life strategies, etc. I think the supposed insight is a mirage. There are no perfect mappings to such clean sides, the two American sides are idiosyncratic cultural developments specific to time and location; their positions on issues does not follow from basic human first principles. But this is the particular battle that keeps your mind busy so it looks fundamental. Maybe an Indian would find that Hindu vs Muslim is the fundamental eternal opposition based on wholly different human types and brains.

This particular attempt seems weak to me, it's guesswork without evidence. Conscientiousness is one of the traits on the "big five" model of personality, and is about something like being organized and structured, keeping to a schedule, remembering rules, etc. Conformism as a concept maybe maps to low openness to experience. I can't really see how Conscientiousness and Conformism form two ends of some kind of axis.

Evidence is unambiguous that political opinion is significantly genetic, which would imply there are innate attractions to a general political aesthetic. We're in the very early days of understanding what those attractions are, so it's unsurprising there are many false starts.

Regarding plausibility of the specific idea, there is very direct path to grounding the concept. With a initial premise that public opinion is shaped by elite discourse it's a relatively straightforward conclusion, once you recognize an institution can disproportionally raise the status of some over others, that a long-lasting powerful institution could leave a mark on our social fabric.

I can't really see how Conscientiousness and Conformism form two ends of some kind of axis.

Given two points in a n-dimensional plane you can reduce everything to the relative proximity to each point. Conformist and conscientious behaviours aren't some inherent axis, they're just the two dominant behaviours that were advantaged by the introduction of organized religion.