Why is The Right So Afraid of Everything #psychology #politics #uspolitics #trump

[nuxvomica]

6. This nicely aligns with part of my "hero's journey" thesis

It's not so much liberal vs. conservative as innocence vs. corruption, but those labels themselves also perfectly align, at least nowadays. Innocence is characterized by honesty, playfulness, and wonder, and corruption by sham, drudgery, and fear. This Lucas Bean video reveals that the liberal brain has a well-developed section dealing with curiosity, ie. wonder, while the conservative has an overdeveloped amygdala, the section dealing with fear. It all relates to personal safety. When we feel safe, we can be honest, playful and curious, but when we don't, we are most likely to lie, just follow orders (drudgery), and see the world as threatening. My thesis offers a further explanation of how these conditions develop.

In the ideal childhood, we feel protected and use honesty -- a reverence for the truth, play, and curiosity to learn and grow so that when challenges are encountered (rites of passage) we develop and discover our own personal power. This learning also reveals that the world is a dangerous place but rather than shrinking from it, we can use our power to transform it into a safer place for the innocent who come along behind us, so that this cycle can begin anew.

The onset of adulthood brings with it a choice: answer the call of the hero, what I call the "heroic impulse", and commit ourselves to innocence, or fall into what may initially seem an easier path, to just give in to corruption. The former is always the harder choice but I believe that over thousands of years, myth and literature have instructed us to follow the hero's journey so that we can overcome such reluctance.