What is Reddit's opinion of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion?

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Check out The Righteous Mind, a great and deep analysis of morality.

One of the takeaways I found fascinating is not that liberals and conservatives align differently on morality -- that's not really a surprise -- but that conservatives overall consider multiple different categories very important (e.g. sanctity, authority), while liberals HEAVILY consider fairness as a category that far outweighs the other moralities.

The short version is, it may feel satisfying to say that "Democrats will be fine with all that shit" and just sweep it under the rug, but I don't think that statement is true. I think the Democratic approach to leadership has plenty of its own flaws, but fairness is not one of them. I think Democrats tend to hold their own to higher expectations of fairness behavior than what we're seeing in the GOP.

(mods, please remove if my source is bad)

I like the book The Righteous Mind and its discussion of morality. One of the points it makes is that being loyal to one's tribe and obeying authority are deeply moral matters for some people - and that those are more important then being nice, or being fair. The President is the head of a group they identify with and thus they are loyal.

I recently read the book "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. He's a social psychologist and tries to answer your question: how can a rational individual vote conservative, when that vote seems to go against one's self-interest? He answers the question by analyzing people's morality systems, and goes on to say that people don't vote based on rationality (active thinking), but based on morality (feelings). The book is very well written and meticulously built up -- I strongly recommend giving it a read! Amazon link here

Some make headlines for obvious reasons but come on, most?

I don't doubt that some homophobes are closeted, but most is an exaggeration.

Read "The Righteous Mind". Our perceptions of right and wrong frequently stem from our upbringing, and they rarely make sense.

I absolutely love The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. It is not really an intro to psychology, but it focuses on aspects of human thinking that relate very strongly to the politically divided world we currently find ourselves in. What is the foundation of our morality? How do we make decisions? How do we change our minds? Fascinating stuff.

>You are basically saying over and over again republican voters are dumb as shit man.

A good portion are. Just like the Anti-vaxxers and herbal oils crazies in the democrat's wing. Hell even the fucking anti-vaxxers didn't raise much of a stink about the pandemic and wearing masks despite being hypocritical morons.

>Yeah because to republicans, it's not what is being said...its who is saying it that matters. Republicans were against drone strikes when obama was doing it, when trump was suddenly doing it more they loved it.

They loved him for it because he was actually listening to their concerns/fears. A health dose of the past 4 years have woken some up and they are starting to march away from the traditional republican values. Republicans tend to be hyper-focused individuals on a select few issues and dont' give a shit about anything else. I suggest reading this book if you want a in depth view of both parties

It goes way more in depth than I can possible cover in a reddit post and has citations to bring it up. Also it can argue the case better.

>To them its all about what colors you are flying and nothing more. These people will just latch onto whatever party gives them justification for being horrible people.

News flash: There's always going to be horrible people. And there's always going to be the silent people who will go towards where there is less crazies.

Haidt is a thoughtful human, worth serious attention; he wrote The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

From The Atlantic piece: >Speaking spontaneously, in response to questions from reporters, [Trump] returned to his “many sides” formulation and the moral equivalency of the marchers and counter-demonstrators. The president of the United States said that there were “very fine people” on both sides.

>In that moment, Trump committed the gravest act of sacrilege of his presidency. In that moment, the president rendered himself untouchable by all who share the belief that Nazis and the KKK are not just bad—they are taboo.

Hey, just for this comment, I recommend reading the book 'The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion' - [link]). It is written by a liberal, but he gains respect for the conservatives by trying to actually understand WHY they think how they think how they do. To give you a brief description, he thinks there are multiple moral 'axis' which people think on. One of the main one used used by the left is the 'harm principle', which states that actions are wrong if, and only if they harm others. He has other axis, such as 'cleanliness', which explore other interesting moral questions (is it "wrong" to have sexual intercourse with a chicken's carcass?). I found it an invaluable tool, especially for understanding the religious right.

The setpoint theory is Jonathan Haidt. There's a good TED talk on the difference between liberals and conservatives, but his book is even better:

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Backfire effect:

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Specifically about vaccine education:

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The ideas on Russia and subbing stronger biases are mostly my own. I've been looking for an answer to polarization for several years now. The research is not comforting. Once people are polarized, it's difficult for them to change. It becomes a type of addiction, where people seek it out more and more.

Russia is changing us and we don't know how to help the people who go down that road.

I can only suggest you read his book or his research papers at this point because you have the wrong impression about how the research was done and you are rejecting the results because of your assumptions.

[link]

[link]

I apologize I don't have free links for either.

You might want to read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion".https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion-ebook/dp/B0052FF7YM/

He explains that humans are fundamentally irrational creatures driven by intuition first then look for rationalization second.

People have an intuition about how the world should be. Religious people look for rationalization for that intuition in scripture and their faith tradition.

In conservative christianity, you're not going to convince anyone that being gay is NOT a sin unless and until they're willing to consider the possibility. They have to be willing to listen to the stories LGBTQ+ people tell about their experience. They have to meet and come to love LGBTQ+ people as individuals.

Their intuition about how the world should be has to change first.

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The problem is that most political theory research is focused on people who you can easily ask. It's similar to the problem with college research in which everyone turns out to be white and often male. Despite that for political theory research, it's much easier to just target the democrat/republican populations rather than just randomly ask unregistered people. So it's human nature just to go for the easier route. The people who don't register with either party or whatever simply don't vote very often if at all. They tend to be people who can't afford to take a day off to vote either from what I recall. That's part of the reason why there is always a push around this time a year to make voting day a holiday.

I know that republicans tend to be single issue voters. Abortion, religion, guns, whatever. It's not really a stereotype as it's the truth. Democrats will compromise on something if they are convinced it will bring a better result. Republicans will not. You can see this for example with the ACA (obamacare) as many democrats disagreed with some or all of the parts but they were willingly to compromise because the ACA greatly helped americans in poverty out for the most part.

A good book to reference on how each party markets themselves to their core voters and outside voters. Democrats will often focus their speeches or campaigns around key issues while on the other hand, republicans in their speeches tend to hit all the single-issues that their voters comprise of (guns, religion etc). If you don't believe me, watch speeches in the past for democrats and republicans. If you can find an copy of the transcript, go and highlight how many times democrats reinforce the points they are campaigning on and how many times republicans will basically signal to their voters they care about their specific single issue. The most balant and easy to see is actually trump's speech when he announced he was running for president. He basically targeted nearly every single issue for republicans in that speech.

Most gun owners will adamantly defend the 2nd amendment on either side of the aisle, but the vast majority do not voice their opinions. I used to vote hardcore republican but now vote for democrats because I saw back in 2008 what the party was morphing into. So I left. Doesn't matter if it's democrat or republican, I'll defend it against either of them. I'm willing to compromise on things like after the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting with the ban of bump stocks. Why? Because I still get to bear arms, but in my opinion, a bump stock was just a cheap way to get around the ban on automatic rifles and the risk of copycats doing the exact same thing would be similar to the washington DC sniper where people were scared shittless to go outside (instead they would just refuse to go to conventions/concerts/etc). And before people comment - You don't need accuracy to kill a bunch of people when shooting into a crowd of 500+ people that are packed shoulder to shoulder for a event. Get 2-3 copycats to do the exact same thing and you'll have much bigger problems with people demanding guns be banned instead of bump stocks. It would be also be a logistics nightmare on the police end. Police would be strained in keeping enough armed personnel for concerts/events and their usual routes/policing activity etc. So the bump stock is a sacrificial lamb as far as I'm concerned.

And of course we have a right to be outraged by these people. They stand in the way of our progress as a species in order to protect their personal faith in antiquated belief systems which have remained unchanged despite millennia of scientific advancements. But if we have any right to condemn them for failing to question their beliefs, then we must exercise the ability to question our own lest we be admit ourselves to be hypocrites. So I ask that you take a moment to question your view that having religion is a sign of intellectual inferiority, emotional weakness, gullibility, irrationality, or some other human defect. This is a convenient belief to have and one which I had myself for many years, but it's shamefully naive and as detrimental as any religion is to our efforts to unite as a species.

This view of religion is a result of misunderstanding the problem religion is solving. It's like thinking that a hammer is terrible tool because you saw someone attempt to use it as a screwdriver. Of course religion doesn't explain the physical world. That's not the point. You don't experience the physical world directly. Religion is a tool our species uses to understand the world that we do experience. The objective physical world around us that science so neatly explains only enters our conscious experience through our fallible senses and after being subjected to myriad unconscious filters and biases. We have innumerable reminders of this in the form of illusions. Consider the Muller-Lyer illusion or the Brainstorm/Green Needle illusion. Knowing that one line is longer than the other in the Muller-Lyer illusion doesn't change the fact that you perceive one line to be longer than the other. Not only is the reality you experience different from the objective reality, but even knowing what the objective reality is doesn't prevent you from experiencing it differently. Then consider the "Brainstorm / Green Needle" auditory illusion. The underlying stimulus isn't changing, but just by focusing on one phrase instead of the other, you hear that phrase. Together these illusions as well as others like them make it clear that (1) our experience is an inaccurate representation of reality and (2) the state of our mind can cause the same physical stimulus to be interpreted in very different ways. It's thoroughly established that explaining the physical world is outside the domain of religion, but consider the possibility that maybe religion can serve a practical purpose as a mental model for the experienced world.

Our survival as a species depended on our cooperation. Beyond our instinct for self-preservation, we needed to be able to see ourselves as a part of a larger whole and to be committed to serving that thing which is greater than ourselves. We needed to have an instinct for accountability to prevent any individual from jeopardizing the welfare of the group for their own needs. We needed to recognize actions which were beneficial to our survival so that we could facilitate and encourage them. We needed to recognize actions which posed a risk to our survival so we could inhibit and discourage them. Undeniably you experience things as "good" or "bad", but these aren't physical properties of the world like mass or density. No matter how much you analyze or deconstruct some action or some object, you can't find any trace of "goodness" or "badness", but that doesn't change how real your experience of it is. We find ourselves in a world which is a far cry from the one our brain was meant to function in and we struggle to navigate it. Religion creates a system for describing our experience and guiding it. It does so in the format of a narrative, a format which our brains find easily digestible. Does believing in God help us make predictions about the world? No, but maybe it gives us an explanation for why we feel like there's something greater than us that we should serve. Are some actions holy and others sinful? No, but maybe it helps us understand why we perceive "goodness" and "badness" in the world.

You don't understand religious people because they reject a system for explaining the natural world. Religious people don't understand you because you reject a system for explaining the experienced world. Religion isn't just a glitch in human behavior, its a tool for easing the transition into habitats which evolved faster than our brains could. Yes you can't reason with religious people because they don't reason their way into religion. It was just something which allowed them to make sense of the phenomena of conscious experience which aren't directly perceivable. What we need is a way to express and understand our spirituality which doesn't rely on buying into a belief system that precludes moral progress.

I suggest reading The Righteous Mind by Johnathan Haidt as some of these ideas are present in the book. I apologize for any such ideas I've misrepresented.

Ok I think we have a misunderstanding about what morality really is. To me having morals doesn't mean you do the right thing all the time. It means you have a code of right and wrong. When you make a decision you can pass it through this code and tell if it feels right or feels wrong. What you actually do though isn't constrained by this. There's always an interplay between doing what's right and doing what you think is best for you. So yes people will cheat to get ahead, have affairs, bully people. The important thing though is that they know it's wrong.

In fact, the majority of murders are actually done for moral reasons. What I mean is that the murderer has passed his action through his moral code and determined that they are justified in doing it. Usually this is because their moral code differs from societies moral code and they deem that since society won't punish the wrong doer they have to punish them. This usually involves people who take loyalty very seriously. Like the gangsters who say snitches get stitches. They aren't just killing in self interest, they also feel a very strong moral obligation to punish disloyal members. There's nothing strictly strange about this, group loyalty is one of our strong moral intuitions. A large part of our modern western society involves trying culture us away from this tendency so that we don't end up committing genocides and stuff.

Likewise infidelity provokes moral murder. Husbands and wives with an unusually high regard for loyalty can find the disloyalty of their partners morally unacceptable and since the government won't punish them they have to do it. This is why so many murders like this have the dumbfounding end result of the murderer turning themselves in and proudly confessing, saying things like "and I'd do it again".

This is interesting because it strikingly illustrates where our societies morals have shifted away from the built in innate morals we are inclined towards. I mean all the abrahamic religions for instance say adultery is punishable by death. Punishment for infidelity is extremely common through history and across cultures and when we remove those laws people find it hard to not take the law into their own hands.

> I don't understand your evidence that apes have anywhere near the sense of morality we have. Sure, they teach their kids how to use tools from generation to generation but they also partake in murdering each other and rape. So they aren't paragons of morality in the animal world.

So I'm not saying they have anywhere near the level of "morality" that we do. Just that they have a sense of morality. It's not an all or nothing thing. Also, it's humorous that you would point to murdering and rape and say that means they're not moral. If that's so then discussion over, we're not moral either.

So like I said a lot of bad stuff is done for moral reason but there's a lot of bad stuff done for selfish reasons. There's an interplay in evolution of social species between cooperating and benefiting everyone and not cooperating to benefit yourself. This is what's going on in apes and in us. We rape because it benefits us (the more we rape the more children we have and children is everything) but we punish rape because it's bad for the community. Or in other words it's bad when everyone does it, it's good when I do it.

> I'm curious about your hypothetical island metaphor with 200 people. You seem to believe they would all get along and form a religion out of that morality. I feel like you're ignoring the likely possibility that 100 may form one religion, and the other 100 form another. So, what happens to morality then? What if they are at war?

Yeah I think I answered this above but to be clear, of course all that will happen because they are people but they will still form a moral code that they judge everyone on. Their fights will likely be of a moral character. Arguing as to whether it's ok to marry that widow or not and who get's to decide who marries who, who raises the orphans etc.

Ok, this has been so much writing so if you've gotten this far thank you but I wouldn't blame you if you flamed out half way through I just want to end with some very very strong book recommendations:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. - by Jonathan Haidt

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker

If you don't want to read either of those books at least just search for videos of presentations that they did on those books. It will give you a good idea of where I'm coming from.

I can't speak to Lakoff's work, and I definitely disagree with GodoftheCopyBooks' approach to making a recommendation, but I do agree about Haidt. Here's his TED talk on the topic, but you should check out The Righteous Mind if you have the time to read it (long, but goes fast).

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> Perhaps some already have

It is possible. However, for those that have, their evidence does not meet the same level of scrutiny we use to convict people in courts of law or make airplanes fly. For such an extraordinary question as the purpose of life, it would be best to have evidence that at least meets those standards.

Further, we are notoriously biased as individuals and groups in our thinking. Knowing that, we have to be incredibly critical of ourselves.

Excellent book here if you've never read it on how people think... [link]. Video discussion on it as well... [link]

Just as I'm sure you wouldn't want the Democrat leadership to represent all democrats the republican leadership does not represent all conservatives. The two sides are trapped in the two large tents. It doesn't matter how terrible the candidate is people aren't going to switch sides. How bad would your dem candidate need to be to switch to the republican candidate ? I bet there's pretty much no reasonable scenario in which you do that. Same for the other side. And each side is judging the other half of the country based on who they voted for. Almost everyone is just voting teams and not paying attention to what thier side does and only fixate on the opposing team and what they do or don't do. It did not matter how bad trump was. These people weren't going to suddenly vote for Hillary.

What you are threatening is outright murderous fascism and that's worse than anything the other side wants. You have allowed yourself to become the monster you hate. Nothing good comes from the road you are on. And it only convinces the right that they have to make sure the left never gets power because it's supporters fantasize about mass murder.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion [link]

You need to read this book and give your fantasies of slaughtering millions of people a rest. (I'm sure you were real concerned about war crimes in between your murderous fantasies) (did you show this emotion when Obama committed war crimes or is that vitriol only saved for team red)

I'll leave you with the below then, and the thought that if our starting positions are believing the other side doesn't care, we're never going to get anywhere. Listen to the biography, not the ideology.

The Righteous Mind

General James Mattis: > “What concerns me more […] is we live today in an America with the most polarized electorate since 1865 […] We are sending people to Washington who are literally going there and proudly saying ‘I will not compromise on principle,’ and they declare everything a principle […] Right now I think we have more and more people who are reluctant to engage, because they believe the people they are talking with aren’t just wrong […], but today we say ‘They’re evil, and you don’t compromise with evil.’ We’d better get back to compromising and learning how you govern in a democracy with diversity […] Be willing to be persuaded by someone with a different point of view.”