Xanthippa's Chamberpot

Yesterday, I posted:  ‘A sober thought post-US 2012 election’.

I received an insightful and deeply analytical comment on it from CoreSlinger.  (Plus, he said I was right!)

It is powerful and should stand on its own:

Xanthippa:

I think you have hit the Republicans’ problem squarely on the head.

Many people, who would embrace the small-government, individual-rights, balanced-budget, common sense aspects of the conservative platform are not only terrified of the morally-constipated, holier-than-thou, bible-thumping religious zealots, but also horrified by the damn-those-gooks, war-for-profit fat-cats of the military industrial complex.

By forcing these groups into an awkward alliance and indiscriminately mislabelling them all collectively as “the right,” the Democrats have been able to overshadow the common sense of the true right, and convince large segments of the public that a vote for the Republicans is a vote for intolerance, oppression and war.

This is exacerbated by the fact that cultural Marxist indoctrination is everywhere. It has denigrated all of the strong, benevolent archetypes that people traditionally depended on for reassurance, safety, and security — God, father, and husband. But the deep psychological needs that gave rise to these archetypes in the first place are as compelling as ever, so people are only left with one place to turn to — the state.

The difficulty is that the average person doesn’t have the time or the inclination to really think through the issues. Therefore, a strong belief in God is one of the few things that enable many people to resist cultural Marxism’s gradual but relentless erosion of common sense, common decency, maturity, and self-reliance.

This is why the awkward alliance exists. Those who think independently are too few to stand against the indoctrinated majority alone. The result is and attempt to pit the two branches of the indoctrinated majority — secular Edenists and fundamentalist Christians — against each other.

And this is what has lead us to the spectacle we see today: the Republican party represents a sort of religious national socialism (a paradigm of the left) not unlike Nazi Germany of the 1930’s, while the Democratic party represents a sort of state-capitalistic collectivism (a paradigm of the farther left), not unlike present-day Communist China.

As a result, those of the true right — who want a small, non-invasive, financially prudent government that protects the rights of the individual and the freedom of the market — are left without a voice.

Rightists claim that leftists are fundamentally incapable of reasoning from cause to effect, if the outcome doesn’t please them. Interestingly, leftists accuse rightists of the same thing. The real truth seems to be that the two groups just think differently. In particular, it has to do with left-brain dominance versus right-brain dominance. Right-wingers are left-brain dominant and vice versa.

Interestingly, this is consistent with the way the nervous system is wired: the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. It’s also consistent with how the two sides of the brain operate. The left side of the brain is concerned primarily with symbolic processing, language, reasoning and the sense of being an individual. The right side of the brain is concerned with holistic processing, imagery, intuition and the sense of being one with the world.

As we mature, the left brain gradually assumes an increasingly dominant role. The thing is, modern cultural-Marxist-controlled schooling does a very good job of preventing this from happening; instead, it arrests mental development and turns out a population of narcissistic adult children. Paradoxically, the primacy of self is heightened in right-brain dominant thinking. The childish world view is not only “I am part of the world” but “the world is part of me.” It’s not far from there to “the world exists to serve me.”

And this is what we find in the world view of the left-winger. The leftist wants the rightist to be more concerned with the world than with his own family, because the leftist understands that he is not part of the rightist’s family, but he feels himself to be part of the world and the world exists to serve him. This is patently muddled and inconsistent from the rational point of view of a left-brained right-winger, but it resonates pleasingly with the intuitional perspective of a right-brained leftist.

Now, we must remember that almost everyone uses both sides of their brain, but they use them to different degrees, so one side or the other dominates. You could say that left-brain dominant people have feelings about what they think, and right-brain dominant people have thoughts about what they feel.

In summary, it seems that the majority of people want a small, accountable, financially prudent government that respects individual rights and freedoms, but not if it comes bundled with intolerance, oppression and war.

So this is the bundling we must undo.

And to do that we must ask ourselves, how can we frame our message of classical liberalism, based on natural intrinsic morality and inalienable individual rights, in a way that will be comprehensible and compelling to these chronically right-brained left-wingers from both sides of the conservative / progressive divide?