Dear MAGA: Open Topic 20190109

When discussing politics with liberals and leftists, there is a recurring common problem. It seems that during the discourse, facts can mean nothing, and they cannot be swayed by reason, no matter how unassailable or undeniable the facts are.
This is such a common problem that there are many conservative sayings and proverbs that all make the same basic point:
* Dan Bongino – “Liberals are immune to facts”
* The Mamet Principle – Liberal turned conservative David Mamet famously said: “In order to continue advancing their illogical arguments modern liberals have to pretend not to know things…”
* Liberals “feel”, Conservatives “think”
* Liberal reporters ask “How do you feel about” not “What do you think about”
* If you are young and you aren’t liberal, you have no heart. If you are old and you aren’t conservative, you have no head.
* Ronald Reagan – “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”
* Krauthammer’s Law – To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” Charles Krauthammer, 2002.
A simple anthropology of an individual human person can help explain this: Each person has a center of reason (head), a center of emotion (heart), and a center of action (hands). Healthy persons have a balance of all three. But many people just think about head and heart, and see head as uncaring Mr. Spock versus the heart (“Just listen to your heart – that’s what I do” – Napoleon Dynamite) and so they have this dualistic inner tension between being thinking versus feeling, and they feel like the thinking person is just mean. Healthy persons by contrast work through the cognitive dissonance over time and bring the head, heart, and hands into alignment and unity.
Think about this: If your entire worldview with all of its presuppositions are grounded on emotional ideas and reasoning, things that you FEEL must be true even though facts and logic say otherwise, when someone present FACTS, or presents difficult QUESTIONS, or asks for clarifying DEFINITIONS (the Columbo tactic – ask “What do you mean by?”), when someone says something that gets close to threatening to call out your entire sense of identity and your worldview as being imagined, when in Václav Havel’s words “one person cries out, ‘the emperor is naked!’ – when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game – ” don’t you think that the liberal will be threatened?
Everything they “KNOW” is built upon what they FEEL, not on the FACTS or REALITY.
The typical liberal mindset:
* What matters most is FEELING good about oneself, respecting all people, while spreading peace and happiness through the world.
* FACTS mean COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.
* COGNITIVE DISSONANCE feels UNCOMFORTABLE.
* CONSERVATIVES keep presenting FACTS.
* CONSERVATIVES are doing this to make me UNCOMFORTABLE.
* CONSERVATIVES are MEAN. CONSERVATIVES are EVIL.
* (Insert Dualistic Social Anthropology – Liberals are Good and Moral, Conservatives are Mean and Evil)
* Therefore liberals have no responsibility to treat MEAN EVIL CONSERVATIVES with love, peace, happiness or respect. (Apparently, conservatives aren’t “all people” who deserve “respect” once dualism and tribalism kick in.)
So to sum up, liberals FEEL their way with an immature EMOTIONAL understanding of the world, like that of a child. The are immune to FACTS b/c FEELING takes priority. If the FACTS don’t FEEL good, they reject the FACTS. If facts feel wrong, so much the worse for facts in their world.