Reverie
1 min readApr 19, 2024

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You might enjoy a book called "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It explains the divide in politics in an even more nuanced way, essentially there are six aspects of morality that everyone's moral views will intersect with. And conservatives vs liberals often have different priorities.

These include:

Care/Harm

Liberty/Oppression

Fairness/cheating

Loyalty/betrayal

Authority/subversion

Sanctity/degradation (this means "things that trigger feelings of disgust in me but are not inherently harmful")

Everyone will have a position in each of these aspects of morality and will also prioritise certain aspects over others.

Liberals typically prioritise Care over everything else, and prioritise "Sanctity" and "Authority" the lowest. Conservatives usually will rank "Liberty" higher, and will also care much more about "Sanctity". (This explains why conservatives often feel things like anal sex makes being gay "immoral" despite it not being harmful, it just triggers their "disgust" feeling and thus they feel it's immoral).

It really opened my eyes to how conservatives think. Both my dad (who is a moderate conservative) and I read it and we both really liked it and felt it helped us understand each-other better.

A good review of the book here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iBDkwir2FsG4DAiDh/book-review-the-righteous-mind-3

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Reverie
Reverie

Written by Reverie

“The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds” — Cloud Atlas

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