We Are All Conservatives

…and we all have the capacity to be progressive. The question is how we manage the two, and when.

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Imagine this: in a moment of complete selflessness, you decide to identify a dozen charities in whose missions you believe, and you give every last penny away to them,

I found myself unsurprised by the results of 2024 presidential election. It seemed inevitable that we would return

But why?

That we have treated conservatism and liberalism as poles on the opposite ends of a line is, I now believe, a dramatic misrepresentation of the nature of the human mind. In what we call “these polarized times,” we’ve built up an image if Us Over Here and Them Over There, with an increasingly vague and poorly attended middle.

[illustration of two opposites]

But, no.

Conservatism is a social and political manifestation of the human instinct to self-preserve. Protect myself, protect my family, protect my country, protect my values — at any cost.

Progressivism is not its opposite, but its extension. It is self-preservation with a longer lens, and a wider radius. Protect my community, protect the disenfranchised, protect those on the margins.

While one party would like to stake an exclusive claim in compassion, it is truer that both are rooted in fear. They are only apertures of fear that have different widths—one is a fear of one’s own self and immediate belief system being destroyed by invading values, the other is a fear of a society that does not attend to the needs of all of its members.

It is a mistake to see this as noble or selfless, because it’s still self-preservation.

As a Liberal, I am also a Conservative in many ways. I hoard money

The brain also operates this way. At its core, the first line of defense in the brain—the first system to process external stimuli—is the amygdala. It’s the oldest part of the brain, evolutionarily speaking, and it governs our emotions (from fear to ecstacy) and our fight-or-flight instincts. When you perceive danger (be it physical or emotional), the amygdala leaps into action and tells you to react quickly with a basic response. For obvious reasons, this was very helpful for a couple million years of human evolution, as we navigated a dangerous pre-civilization wilderness.

The prefrontal cortex came later, and is our distinction

This is worth belabor

This is not to suggest that “Conversatives don’t think” or “Progressives don’t feel.” Again, the critical point I’m wrestling with here is that these systems coexist, and that what makes us modern humans, capable of all our amazing achievements and advancements, is that we are just smart enough to keep these two systems in balance.

In a time of war, the National Amygdala takes over: we hunker down, build bombs, and drop them on someone. But in times of peace, we have the luxury of examining the fringes of our society and seeing where progress can be made.

I personally do not believe that so-called “woke culture” and its amygdala-dominated response, “cancel culture,” were progress—at least not in the sense that I’m talking about progress here. I believe that movement was a fear-driven response, a stay-and-fight instinct instigated by an attack. This is a

Progress happens at the boundaries. It is only when we are outside of our core comforts that we can learn and grow. After all, a tree with only a trunk bears no fruit.

The leap in logic from Conservative to Liberal social thinking

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