Saturday, November 2, 2019

The Core Ideological Conflict: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up!

At its absolute core, the difference between conservatives and liberals seems to boil down to one thing: liberals believe that society can be fixed by grand architecture, while conservatives believe it can only be fixed by individual action.

Call it the difference between “top-down” and "bottom-up."
  • Liberals believe that it is the government's responsibility to put in place laws and institutions to coerce citizens to act in a certain way. Government can provide a framework to influence human behavior to benefit us all. A better society can be realized through community.
  • Conservatives believe that the only way to influence society in the aggregate is for individual people to take better actions that will organically combine to incrementally form a better society.  Societal improvement is based on the foundation of the individual.
As would be expected, each side disagrees with the other:
  • Liberals believe that the conservative view is flawed because there are situations where no single person has any incentive to change – indeed, it is to their advantage to continue acting selfishly – so they have to be artificially incentivized via external legal and social structures.
  • Conservatives believe that humans are flawed by nature and will resist coercion. Inequalities will exist because humans have naturally differing levels of skill, ambition, and tenacity and should be rewarded as such. Attempts to architect results removes incentives and reduces ambition and achievement which makes society worse over time.

    Thus the difference on the Left is the desire to build a giant Nanny State to make all our decisions and to take care of us from cradle to grave. While the other side believes in people living as unique individual adults who make their own decisions, right or wrong. Personally, I like the right side (pun intended).

    Excerpted from http://deanebarker.net/blog/post/2090/ Also, this post had absolutely nothing to do with Ben Shapiro...

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