The more educated and intelligent a population becomes the more liberal it becomes?

[Hardkill]

Many people have been saying that the main reason why about 50% of the people in the USA have been stuck in the right-wing dogma is because of how uneducated and unintelligent all of them are.

But what if hypothetical speaking everyone out there in the world who is still uneducated and unintelligent become smart and well educated individuals? How do we know that all of those people won't just end up becoming a world wide population of highly educated and intelligent conservatives like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Kayleigh McEnany, or Condoleezza Rice?

Edited April 20, 2022 by Hardkill

[zurew]

To answer your title: Its not necessarily about education, however it can be a factor. It is more about the value system.

Do you only value a very narrow and finite amount of things (like nationalism) or do you have a much more larger value system that is including everything (It cares about the whole Earth or the whole galaxy or the whole Universe).

The problem with valueing only a very narrow,finite amount of things, is that there will be a lot of things left out, and it will cause a lot of harm (that you don't see beforehand, because you excluding a lot of variables from you calculations, because you focus on a very narrow set of values) and in the end, it will bite you in the ass.

With good amount of consciousness work, when you realise that you are not just this finite human being, you will automatically have a bigger value-system, simpy because you will experience reality as part of yourself, and why would you want to left parts of yourself out, or why would you want to hurt parts of yourself? 

 

But to say something more gounded, we don't want to be necessarily very radical on either side, because practically and simplistically speaking, liberalism is about the notion that you realise that our finite model of politics is not sufficient anymore so we need to upgrade those political models to keep up and to try to adjust to this infinite reality.

We need dynamic models not static models. We need to constantly upgrade parts of our model ----> and here is the important part, that we shouldn't immediately drop things from out model, unless we fully understand why we want to drop that particular part and we also need to understand before we drop it that was the purpose of that thing being in our model.

[Hardkill]

I don't think that we can count on most people in a society to work hard on constantly developing themselves.

So, if a higher level of education, better economy, better infrastructure, and greater diversity are not enough to evolve a society then how do you think that a whole society upgrades their values system?

Edited April 20, 2022 by Hardkill

[zurew]

59 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

So, if a higher level of education, better economy, better infrastructure, and greater diversity are not enough to evolve a society then how do you think that a whole society upgrades their values system?

You are right, i can't decouple value systems from the things that you mentioned above. To be fair, i didn't say that those arent factors in the value system equation, but i think i mostly focused on the cultural part.

 

When we are talking about upgradeing value systems we are talking mostly about younger, new upcoming generations. There is a small amount of conservative people who are willing to change their beliefs and views on problems, those can be targeted also. I think these two targets requires different strategies.

For the younger generations, what you wrote above like higher level of education, better economy, better infrastructure are all important factors. especially the educational part. I think the education is the part that needs to get the most focus, because if you get exposed to certain ideas at a young age, that could transform your whole life down the road. To break it down further i think the most important parts are the kindergarten and also the primary school.

Teaching kids:

• about sexuality,
• about how the world is always changing never in a static state, so everything constantly need to be upgraded
• about the value of self-development and how it can pay you dividends
• about basic economics
• Teaching about the dynamics of being evil
• Teaching about introspection
• about the importance of system thinking and being multiperspectival,
• about actively seeking different perspectives, and trying to steelman positions
• the importance of openmindedness, 
• teaching about spiral dynamics especially during history classes (it could be connected),
• teaching them methods so they can climb the spiral dynamics stages,
• teaching them how important it is to first try to understand then you can expect to be understood and concepts like that
• teaching them about human realtionships (not only talking about sexual ones, but mostly about how to collaborate, and how important it is to collaborate with people to be able to solve complex problems),
• teaching them about philosophy maybe this would be in the secondary school, but i think it has a huge value, to know basic pholosophical concepts (especially about the importance of epistemology)
• etc etc

There are some other factors that you and i haven't mentioned, but i can put my finger on them. Why is that when you have a big family you have for example lets say 10 siblings, you all go to the same school, you all grow up in the same town etcetc. and at the end of the day there are some cases, where some of you become a liberal but others become conservatives. Why is that, how is that possible if the main factors are the things that you mentioned above? Maybe if i had to guess we can add friends here and also the relevance of browsing on the internet, and also the personality type as well.

Friends can have a very large impact on us, especially when we are still very young. About the internet part: browsing the internet, and getting exposed to certain rabbitholes and ideologies at a young age can radically determine what we will value when we will be grown ups imo. Especially when we know, that kids nowadays are much more prone to be antisocial so they spend more and more time on the internet.

I can't exclude the family either about being an important factor to the value system equation.

So basically, we can say that culture is a huge factor on us, how we will think about ourselves and the world, and how we will think about the relationship between those two.

 

About the 'changing the open minded conservatives' part, i think we need better arguments, more patience, and more scientific evidence and a lot of tangible examples for our arguments to show why our arguments make more sense.

I think the 'showing a lot of tangible example for our arguments' part is really important, so the open minded conservatives can relate more to out arguments. Raising our standards higher, not being toxic not engaging in name calling, not strawmanning the other side, but rationally breaking down their arguments, and then argueing back ( making a constantly shrinking surface what they can attack )

Edited April 20, 2022 by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

It's a bit funny, but psychology as a field unironically treats conservatism as a pathology or developmental deficiency. Of course, the smart conservatives will just call this proof of liberal bias in the social sciences ?