Right and Wrong

...make a liberal tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, or disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal.  
Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (p. 569). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


A lot of research and pontification has been expended on what makes a person conservative or liberal.  One broad conclusion that is not particularly controversial is that liberal and conservative tendencies tend to apply broadly - those liberal on some subjects tends to be liberal on most.  Similarly for conservatives.  Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that their opposites are morally deficient.  Liberals find conservatives deficient in compassion and tolerance and conservatives find liberals deficient in some other stuff.

Some studies seem to confirm the liberal suspicion that conservatives, at least those of the so-called right wing authoritarian (RWA) personality type, aren't that bright, and looking at the Trump fans, I find this easy to believe.   The point of the quote that I put at the start is that various stimulants that tax the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and insula make people more conservative.  Supposedly, those with more limited PFC processing power are more easily taxed, so they more readily become conservative.

So how would I explain people like the Lumonator, who has a sky high IQ and is an archetypal RWA?   The first point is that one should not take the previous paragraph as definitive.  There is more than one way to be right wing.  Secondly, I would point out that he was exposed to a lot of left-wing (Communist) evil in his youth, and that might have frozen or fried his PFC in its current incarnation.  Finally, there is the fact that from an early age he has devoted a lot of brain power to abstract math and physics, possibly shortchanging more subtle social thinking as per Kolmogorov's hypothesis.  Similar notions might apply to the probably less extreme case of Fernando.

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