Difference between Conservative and Liberal

[Brackstone]

It's 20 minutes long but it's a great dive into the human psyche! I encourage everyone to check it out and let me know what you think!

http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Diff ... licans-TED

[dean owens]

can't say i 100% agree but to try and explain the human mind in 20 min i think he did a good job. he was a little biased... but we all are. i want time to think on it and file it away. i'll be "testing" it on students i run into at unc and see how it plays out to them.

thanks for posting.

[sv-wolf]

He mentioned that one of his background influences was evolutionary psychology. EP has a strong academic vogue right now but consists of nothing more than unsubstantiated conjecture. It has never been able to dredge up a shred of evidence to back up its theories. His own arguments follow the same speculative pattern.

He assumes, for instance, that when common psychological profiles emerge from different cultures, this can only be explained by an innate biological programme. He neglects to consider the idea that though there are superficial differences between the cultures he studies there are many more similarities - in particular similarities in their authoritarian and competitive structures. That means the jury is still out on the question of whether his five principles are innate ideas or cuturally acquired ideologies. To be fair to him though, he does admit that his ideas are founded upon very controversial material.

I'm much more receptive to the cultural references he makes at the end of his talk. But his proposal that we need to transcend a 'for' and 'against' attitude is not a world-shatteringly original one. And it doesn't take a load of statistical research into psycholgical profiles to prove that we all think we are right, whatever our starting points or that our opponents are not stupid because they disagree with us.

The most interesting thing about his talk for me is that he fails to come to any significant conclusions - or at least, if he does, then he fails to reveal what they are. What he does conclude is very thin. But his agenda is pretty clear anyway. He locates his entire argument within the narrow boundaries of a conservative (and familiar) consensus politics.

The world is full of this kind of policitally charged, pseudo-psychological reasoning right now.