This is a question I came across on a forum I sometimes surf. And, I actually think it's interesting to actually discuss on this blog.
For a while, I used to believe that everyone did really want to make the world a better place, we just disagreed on what that looked like. But the past few years has soured me on that, and actually talking to right wingers, I have come to realize many of them literally don't want to make the world a better place. Their moral systems are inherently anti progressive, and based on weird things like divine command theory or even worse, some worldview in which suffering is baked into it, and trying to solve suffering is deemed a bad thing.
I guess this is why I fell out with conservatism. My conservatism was actually based on the idea of wanting the world to be a good place. I just had the "christian" worldview a la "understanding the times" which had an understanding that human nature was evil, what we had in America was the best we could do, and that any change would bring disaster. I mean, conservatives generally want to conserve in my ex conservative worldview. And generally speaking, given god gave us laws, and god was perfect, any deviation of those laws would inherently be worse and lead to disaster. So I always had reservations about liberalism and progressivism, believing that these were well to do naive utopians who had good intentions, but who would bring about society's downfall. If we got rid of capitalism, we would get rid of the incentive structure to work. If we got rid of the traditional family unit, it would create tons of bad situations with people born out of wedlock. If we got rid of God's law, people would descend into anarchy.
The reason I shifted left was because I later went onto college, majored in political science and criminology/sociology. I got a better understanding of human nature. Our political systems, our social systems. And all of this was based on facts. I started understanding that public policy actually is a field of study where people not only design policies to solve problems, but they dedicate tons of time researching them to ensure they do what they do. And over time, my worldview changed simply to align with my facts. Which made my formerly conservative Christian worldview look quaint and ignorant.
It was like...leaving plato's cave. Hence the blog title. I saw reality for what it really was, and left that old worldview behind. But, trying to talk to the right now, do many of them these days really believe that the world is the best it can be under social conservatism and laissez faire capitalism? I'm....not sure. Their worldview seems to differ from my specific brand of conservatism. Since leaving Christianity and conservatism, I've come across people who have...quite frankly, dangerous views.
For example, I used to argue with a Jehovah's witness on another site over the euthyphro dilemma. That is, whether god is moral because he says something is moral, or is god merely conforming to a morality outside of himself? I always went with prong 2 in retrospect. I kind of believed the Bible was intended to be an instruction manual for the best way to live, and we avoid it at our peril. And the fact that I started realizing my moral understanding of the world actually exceeded that of the bible ("pride" in biblical terms, not just accepting it at face value but actually questioning it and holding it to account), I didn't see a point in remaining Christian. For me, the Bible had to be backed up by demonstrable reality to be worth following. When it was demonstrated to me it wasn't I stopped believing it.
But this dude, well, let's just say he had a different answer to the dilemma, that God's word was moral because he deemed it moral, and morality was simply based on this being's wishes. That if God deemed it moral to sentence people to hell for all eternity (something I came to realize is the absolute antithesis to any sane sense of morality), that that made it okay.
Such a moral system is...shall we say, problematic. I mean, if it's moral to make people suffer for all eternity when there is another way of doing things, that's messed up.
But then there are other conservatives. Some seem the least bit interested in alleviating suffering. I've run into people who have had virtue ethics mentalities of "suffering builds character", believing if we eliminated suffering, it would make people weak. Once again, this fuelled my hatred of religion in my most angstheist days. These people are so delusional that they think that suffering is just part of the natural order of things and alleviating it is bad. While there might be some truth to the idea that strong men made good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times, bad times make strong men (I'm not really sure, but it can make sense evolutionarily), honestly, I do believe that we should strive to go beyond what we can accomplish in nature. That that's the point of society. To adapt to the world, sometimes by terraforming the environment to meet our needs. And while we might lose the old ways, I'd argue we're already well past the point and most tough guy conservatives wouldn't make it a day in a societal collapse. Rather, they demand people suffer within artificial systems like capitalism, which just seems like BS to me. There's nothing natural about capitalism other than its ruthless survival of the fittest mentality, and honestly, subjecting people to it in this systemic environment seems beyond cruel, especially when social democratic states have shown that we can soften the issues with it and arguably should. I would even go so far to say that the evidence surrounding UBI shows that could work too. And I even believe my ideals of moving toward a world with less work could work too, given increased automation. Some might argue this makes "weak men", but we already create "weak men" by "nature's" standards, so unless youre gonna go back to living in the woods and hunting dangerous animals for a living with sharpened sticks, we don't have room to talk.
Beyond that, a lot of the more modern "alt right" type conservatives seem especially lost. Many of them just have thrown anything even resembling a decent moral system out. Many of them do not simply advocate for not changing things for fear it would make society worse, they seem to literally not care about suffering at all. We've discussed a few of these people on this blog before who I have had discussions with, and their ideas literally disturbed me. They really shook my idea that people really do want the same things, they just have different ways of going about it.
So what's my prognosis here? Some conservatives might merely just not want to change society, fearing it would make things worse. And while this does lead to a world based on false and faulty beliefs of being against making the world a better place, at least these guys mean well. Some people are so lost and have such a terrible epistemological worldview that they are totally lost and do not believe in alleviating suffering or making the world better at all. And this disturbs me.
I know this once again goes against Yang's style of reconciliation with the other side, but I believe people of this nature must be fought against (through legal means of course, I do not support violence) as vigorously as possible. Their views should not be tolerated (beyond the legal minimum associated with my ideas of freedom of speech), and should be attacked and mocked relentlessly, and in political environments, the left should give them no quarter.
This is not really the same thing as cancelling btw. Again, I dont support violence or suspending of rights against people I don't like. I'm basically saying we shouldnt try to be buddy buddy with them and sing kumbaya with them, and it is a good thing to view them as a political enemy that can't be reasoned with and should be stopped at all (legal) costs.
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