“The End of the World is coming on the heels of wokeism! Or rather, in heels and wearing dresses and makeup while hunting our children! We will be the last survivors of a terrifying but fabulous Trans-Zombie Apocalypse! The hordes of the Glamourously Damned will turn the next generation into transist, gayist, tolerancist, wokeist-possessed agents of Satin!!!”
(Literacy Could Have Prevented This)
Does the song sound familiar but the lyrics are different? There’s a reason for that. The cries of ‘societal collapse’ have gone up from (almost entirely) conservatives every time equality stubbornly rose out of the shrouded suffering beneath the veneer of social harmony. Sure enough, the world ended just like they said it would;
“I consider the movement for the extension of the suffrage to women as one fraught with grave danger to the State.” -Marie Corelli
“Woman suffrage means the destruction of home life and the desecration of womanhood.” – James L. Hughes
“I think I might just as well say quite frankly, and I say it with a sense of despondency, that woman’s suffrage is an experiment. I am afraid it may be a dangerous experiment.” -William Howard Taft
Sadly, society soon collapsed and the U.S. became a distant memory after August 26, 1920 when the movement to secure women’s right to vote was victorious.
This one has a beat you can dance to:
“Intermarriage is a dagger thrust into the heart of a culture and, through it, to the heart of all mankind. It is the doom of hope for any future of peace.” – Dr. Paul L. Lehmann
“Intermarriage between the races is unnatural, and should be prohibited, as an inestimable peril to the health and very existence of the race.” -Dr. Oscar Levy
“When the white man accepts the black woman as his sexual mate, there is a hybridization of the races that will surely result in the deterioration of the white race and the beginning of the end of our civilization.” -William Tucker (Not a Doctor)
And of course, on June 12th, 1967 when the Supreme Court ruled that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional in “Loving vs Virginia”, it was a short handful of years before the nation went full Cronenberg and was extinguished in a wave of animalistic mutant-dystopian-voracity that ravaged the land beyond any glimmer of hope. Who can forget?
And the most recent complete and utter destruction of America came about despite those who stood against it thusly:
“I think it’s harmful to the country to have same-sex marriage. I think it hurts children. I think it hurts families. I think it hurts society.” -Rick Santorum
“There is a reason that marriage between one man and one woman has been in virtually every society since the dawn of time. It has been the cornerstone of the family and of society itself.” -Brian Camenker
(And of course this pure gold nugget of nuttery:)
“If you read the Bible, you know that God’s pattern is that he instituted marriage between one man and one woman. Not two men, not three men, and a goat, not a man and a child, not a man and an animal.” -Pat Robertson
Then, after June 26, 2015, no one without great hair, stunning attire, and makeup on point could safely walk the streets.
(I mean, c’mon… this graphic is practically obligatory at this point.)
How many more times does the world have to end before the woke mob, umm… ‘wakes up’ to the danger of… Okay, I can’t anymore.
The reality is actually kind of simple; People whose existence and behavior discernibly harm no one wanting to be treated equally in a society has never caused societal harm. It may have harmed societal hierarchy, slightly, but with the exception of full-on rebellion, societies like ours keep chugging on for the better when people achieve greater equality.
The above examples are only a very small handful of issues which make it very clear that conservatives have always fought against human equality for people they consider ‘unworthy’.
But WHY?
To answer that question, we have to go way back…about 66 million years ago when we became primates. Because soon after that, at least in evolutionary terms, we developed a novel strategy; Tribalism.
Most of what makes conservatives what they are is a very high tendency to possess brain structures from a time of pre-civilization survival. They are hard-wired to operate out of fear for the sake of survival. This type of neural architecture lends itself to tribalism and authoritarianism. If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that conservatives are generally confused and irrationally aggravated by many of the things that civilization fosters. Enlightenment Principles and the legal, political, and economic systems those principles advanced were rife with complexities that are more difficult to grasp for people whose understanding of the world can be reduced to what they can fight, fuck, or eat. When an egalitarian society arises from civilization, it adds another layer that triggers their tribal anxiety; “Diversity”. To someone wired with the (at least) 20 million year-old evolutionary strategy of tribalism, ‘Different’ = ‘Dangerous’. Suddenly conservatives find themselves surrounded by people from different cultures from within and without our society. They are exposed to people who do not believe, think, or behave the same way they do. Their tribal wiring tells them that they are ‘surrounded by enemies’. There is no amount of reasoning that will help them circumvent that ancient impulse.
They find themselves in a society where all the ‘weird’ people who wouldn’t have fit in with their tribe and would normally be fed to wolves were now able to thrive. During tribal times, these ‘new people’ tended to be intellectually curious, highly creative, and eventually became the force that most drove civilization from a wheel to a spaceship in the blink of an evolutionary eye. In less than 6000 years, we made vast strides that our tribal ancestors could not have imagined. Today, many of those people are called ‘liberals’ which, to conservatives who have difficulty thinking outside of exclusive dichotomies, is “Anyone who disagrees with me!”
Ever wonder why U.S. conservatives seem to treat politics like a sport? Why they all seem to own and wear Trump paraphernalia? Why they’re almost universally white, Christian, and ‘straight’? That is the ‘tribalism’. Everything is ‘us vs them’. They tend to be unable to think outside of exclusive dichotomies or ‘black and white’. So for them, there are ‘two sides’ to everything. Everything is either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, or ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and their ‘side’ believes it is the ‘good and right’ one just because it’s their ‘side’. So anyone who isn’t a white, straight, Christian, or conservative is ‘suspect’. That brings us to the what of the why:
Due to their tribal ‘fear’ wiring, conservatives are motivated by old evolutionary tactics. Among those are tools that were part of a cognitive apparatus that helped our ancestors avoid threats. Those are ‘negativity bias’ and ‘apophenia’. Apophenia and negativity bias are large parts of our evolutionary strategy that persist today. ‘Apophenia’ is the tendency to associate a false cause to an effect or event due to a flawed perception of a link between something that is extraneous and something that happened. This is where we get ‘superstition’, ‘conspiracy theories’, and to an extent; ‘religion’.
Know anyone who ALWAYS wears the ‘lucky hat’ (Jersey, sunglasses, underwear, etc.) to watch sports because they were once wearing it when their team won the championship? Even though they know it’s a superstition, they still wear it because at some level they believe it will have an effect on the outcome of the game.
Conspiracy theorists (for the most part) operate on something similar: There are big scary powers out there, so mysterious event ‘x’ must be caused by those powers!
When we saw lightning, it was really frightening. So what did we do in our ignorance? We invented ‘sky gods’ to explain it away… and we believed in them.
Negativity bias is simply how we have a much greater tendency to react to negative stimuli than neutral or positive stimuli. For instance, if you get in a beautiful luxury car with a hot date, but the inside of the car smells rotten, you’re probably going to focus more on the smell than anything else. This was a good evolutionary strategy because by paying more attention to the things that were ‘scary’ or ‘gross’, one was more likely to avoid a potential hazard. Today, negativity bias is much stronger in conservatives.This means that conservatives tend to react to anything they don’t like or understand with greater hostility than non-conservatives. Yeah, I’ll bet you’re shocked, right?
Negativity bias was a good evolutionary strategy because it meant our ancestors would just avoid or kill things they thought were a threat rather than taking any chances. It’s not a coincidence that so many conservatives are chomping at the bit to resort to violence in order to eliminate anything they don’t like.
When we add up negativity bias and apophenia, we can see why conservatives are so much more susceptible to the Lie Machine that uses fear to condition people, We see why they’re more likely to fall for things like Q-Anon conspiracy theories. It doesn’t help in the slightest that conservatives have difficulty understanding how evidence works. The combination results in their tendency to blame scapegoats for anything they don’t like. Again, 10,000 years ago, this was just being extra-cautious in a hostile world. Today it is a serious threat to civilization. Remember why the Nazis killed so many Jews? They were absolutely convinced that Jews were an existential ‘threat’ to Germany. That is that ancient hardwiring that tells the throwbacks they have to ‘eliminate’ anything that might be a threat. Today’s conservatives are being similarly brainwashed to believe that everything they don’t like about society is a ‘threat’ to them. That means non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, Immigrants, Liberals, and anyone else that isn’t suitably similar to them. To the conservative brain, ‘different’=’dangerous’. That is part of the negativity bias function.
Now, here’s the why of it:
There is no “culture war” anymore than there is a ‘sun rising’ war. The evolution of culture, society, and people is simply inexorable; it cannot be stopped. But conservatives have been easily brainwashed, due to their wiring, to believe that there are ‘devious forces’ behind the changes in the social paradigm. Like blaming a sky wizard for lightning, conservatives can’t understand that what’s happening to society is a natural outgrowth of human diversity stepping ever more out of the closet and into the sunlight. They can’t understand that the push for social justice, equal rights, and fair universal treatment is simply a human compulsion. In a nutshell; the evolution of humanity towards the embrace of diversity and the improvement of civilization is never going to stop. Conservatives cannot understand this. Instead, as they have throughout the ages, they perceive these changes as an ‘assault’ on their tribe. To a tribal partisan, ‘other people’ getting equal rights means that their tribe is ‘losing’.
Let’s look at a few of the things conservatives are convinced are part of a nefarious plot to ‘corrupt society’;
Potato Head.
In 2021 ago, Hasbro toy company dropped the ‘Mr.’ from “Mr. Potato Head” in a bid to be more ‘gender inclusive’. The Right-Wing media went apoplectic and its audience mindlessly accepted its characterization of the move: “Liberals Destroyed Mr. Potato Head!”. They ranted and raved about how the ‘socialist liberals’ somehow managed to ‘force’ Hasbro to cave in and emasculate a toy.
This is funny because Mr. Potato Head was already pretty gender-fluid depending on how you dressed it. So it’s kind of a microcosm for the concept of gender to begin with… which is complicated.
Of course there was no ‘movement’ or ‘push’ or literally any campaign or effort by anyone to get Hasbro to do what they did. Hasbro made their decision based on the disposition of society. That’s right; they did it because they recognized the inevitability of society’s acceptance of human diversity.
Dr. Seuss
The estate of Theodore Geisel discontinued printing books that it felt were outdated and offensive. Again conservatives blamed liberal ‘cancel culture’ for the move despite the fact that literally no one directly pressured the estate to do so.
They feel the same way about all LGBTQ+ rights, BLM, Critical Race Theory, and pretty much anything that they perceive as a ‘threat’ to their primacy. It’s all an ‘agenda’ backed by George Soros, Obama, Clinton, Liberal Scholars, Social Media Companies, etc. They can’t understand that what’s happening is a result of very real but more abstract things like biology, systemic racism, and a number of organic issues that drive people to seek security, equality, and acceptance.
They can’t win a culture war because they don’t understand what’s happening. They’re so tied up in looking for individuals or groups to blame because their ancient fear wiring forces them to seek ‘something they can attack’. They cannot grasp the fact that humanity is spectacularly diverse and that as society evolves change is inevitable.
Of course conservatives throughout history have fought against the evolution of society. In some cases they’ve succeeded… but never permanently. They’ve never ‘won’ the war against progress, they’ve only set it back. We had the Dark Ages. If conservatives could have ‘won’ the culture war that brought about The Enlightenment, we’d still be in the Dark Ages.
The bottom line is this: They can’t tell the difference between the natural evolution of society and the deliberate manipulation of culture. They are hard-wired to fight threats that have physical form, and they simply do not possess the cognitive tools and the ability to learn complex realities about society and humanity. If they did, they wouldn’t be conservatives to begin with.
So, question answered. How about something even more encouraging? While researching the above quotes, this one about women’s rights stood out for a good reason:
“Fatherhood as a catalyst for feminist thought, of course, remains a common phenomenon to this day. The popular usage of the phrase “as the father of a daughter” when a man speaks out against the marginalization or mistreatment of women, for example, illustrates an uncomfortable truth: Many men are still awakened to everyday injustices toward women only as a result of their own personal relationships with women.” -Edward S. Martin
The closer we are to the people whom conservatives would marginalize, more importantly; the closer conservatives are to the people whom conservatives would otherwise marginalize, the more we all understand and accept not only their existence, but their place and their equality in society.
There will be setbacks. The tribalists will always fight against what they can only perceive as ‘threats’ to their tribe and its primacy. But what history has demonstrated over and over and over again is that justice, equality, and civilization will always win while the conservatives who try to claw back progress to a more primitive paradigm always lose.
They might as well go outside and try to blow out the Sun.
BSBuzzsaw 