How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World?

 Whether you classify yourself as Liberal, Progressive, Centrist, or Conservative, this video is very important to understand why are what we are and how things have changed with the Baby Boomer Generation.


How do Conservatives and Liberals See the World? from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

After watching this video, I must admit that I have placed myself in a mind set that has in fact demonized the current conservative movement. I now understand a little more why their "moral" outlook is so diametrically opposite of mine.

However, one question social psychologist Jonathan Haidt did not address is why the religious Christians who follow the gospels of their Jesus Christ are of the Conservative narrative since the bases of their Christian faith is from their God, Jesus Christ whose whole narrative was compassion for the weak and disadvantaged, so I would assume based on the research by Haidt Jesus was a liberal in his political and moral compass. So I do find it strange that the Social Conservatives are so aligned with Conservatives when that is still opposite of their religious faiths tenets.

I my mind they would be more aligned with the Liberals than the Conservatives, so my only answer would be that they discount their religious faith because their predisposition by genetics is toward Conservatism that have the more "level" of the moral outlooks, based on Dr. Haidt's graph, than the Liberals who are more slanted toward compassion, liberty, and other moral values of the "Left." Hmmm, More research is needed to answer some of these profound answers before total understanding of human moral behavior can be achieved.

Now Dr. Haidt states that one of the moral issues that Liberals fail in and the Conservatives excel in is the moral value of "SANCTITY." Conservatives inject sanctity into their perspective of all things, including political ideology, social morality, fairness, individual responsibility, and so on.  As stated below, tho the graphic is about marriage the definition of sanctity applies here, thus religion is the base from which they perceive the world and why they demonize the opposition, who does not exude sanctity in all things and keep that part of their inner personality as private. Thus the conservatives have no room for compromise when their political position is a religion to them. That is why they see the US Constitution as SACRED and literal, not a working and living document to be interpreted relative to current realities and changed when obsolete or in need to deal with new issues relative to individual freedom and retaining the power to the people.