How Ordinary Folks Support Ryan;s Cruelty

I have edited for those too busy and or lazy to read. BTW the theories of Kahneman won him the Nobel Prize for analyzing the way people meke decisions and perceive reality. His ideas of quick or instinctual thinking vs slow or more anlytical step by step thinking. E.g of quick thinking seeing a face of a person who looks obviously angry (instinctual) vs slow thinking e.g 24 x 26 which can't be done by most people while 2x2 = 4 becomes quick thinking
[/B]for nearly everyone. This explains why folks are often times impervious to facts wrt to policy arguments.

This helps explain to me for instance why when we are all against drug abuse you have people so determined to continue the drug war. I have often felt that they just get so scared they can't think and maybe I was right there.
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The Conservative Psyche: How Ordinary People Come to Embrace Paul Ryan's Cruelty


in 1987, 62 percent of Republicans said “the government should take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” but that number has now dropped to just 40 percent ...

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Even more frustrating for those who view politics as a rational pursuit of one's self-interest, facts don't actually matter that much. We begin evaluating policies emotionally, according to a deeply ingrained moral framework, and then our brains often work backward, filling in – or inventing -- “facts” that conform to that framework.[/B]



Dueling Morality Tales



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While liberals and conservatives often see their counterparts as horrible people these days, the reality, according to Lakoff, is that they're processing information through very different, and often diametrically opposed moral frameworks.



In a recent interview with AlterNet, Lakoff said, “Conservatives have a very different view of democracy, which follows their moral system.”



The basic idea in terms of economics is that democracy gives people the liberty to seek their self interest and their own well-being without worrying or being responsible for the well-being or interest of anybody else. Therefore they say everybody has individual responsibility, not social responsibility, therefore you’re on your own. If you make it that’s wonderful. That’s what the market is about. If you don’t make it, that’s your problem.



But it's not just about the moral imperative to be self-sufficient – that's always been central to the right's moral worldview. But beginning in the early 1960s, with the advent of the Right's deeply flawed “culture of poverty” narrative*, a defining morality tale about the public sector has been about how it does nothing but foster “dependency.” This, according to today's conservatives, makes virtually every form of government intervention in the economy profoundly immoral, as it keeps a segment of the population mired in poverty for generations.



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Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman refined earlier theories about how the brain functions on two levels – one instinctive and very quick, the other slower and more deliberate. He described the first as intuitive processing, or “system one cognition,” and the other as a process of reasoning, or “system two cognition.”



And the key point here is it appears that when system one is active, system two shuts down. Or, to put it another way, when we perceive an issue in emotional terms (system one), we make a quick judgment in which we don't think much about the details.

A number of researchers have posited that we stave off painful cognitive dissonance by a process called “motivated reasoning,” whereby we seek out plausible explanations for complex phenomena in order to make things fit into our previously held belief systems...


We often ignore new contradictory information, actively argue against it or discount its source, all in an effort to maintain existing evaluations. Reasoning away contradictions this way is psychologically easier than revising our feelings. In this sense, our emotions color how we perceive “facts.”



Everyone does this, but some research suggests that political conservatives, perhaps because they are more set in their views, and more averse to cognitive dissonance, tend to display more motivated reasoning than liberals.



When you hear someone like Paul Ryan proposing, for example, to shift $4,700 in health costs onto the backs of seniors living at the poverty level by 2022, it's important to understand that the consequences of those actions – the factual, real-world results of these policies – are often inconsequential to like-minded people on the Right not because they're (necessarily) bad people, but for the simple reason that the consequences don't register. 


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It also suggests that Ryan's vision can't be attacked with facts and figures alone; it has to be challenged with a progressive moral vision of a society that values fairness and understands that in a modern economy, the public sector serves and sustains the private.


http://www.alternet.org/election-20...wcih&rd=1&src=newsletter695643&t=1&paging=off