Permanently Deleted

  • scraeming [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Not entirely sure, myself, given that all my dickhead relatives in the deep south are conspiracy-brained Facebook psychos, so their demands for a better world are a mix of impossible idealism and things that probably violate one of the laws of thermodynamics.

    Though, I would say that a good place to start would be with a concerted exploration of the "hypocrisy" in their worldview. We all know conservative, evangelical, et al, worldviews are constantly butting up against their own inconsistencies and internal contradictions, but I think that kind of "hypocrisy" only exists because the most common opposing viewpoint (aesthetically kind-faced Liberal Democracy) sees it as such and is, broadly speaking, the ideology that currently holds the most control over the current shape of society and economy. Liberals in the US are, of course, operating on the assumption that the current order of the world is, at minimum, mostly correct and ideal, and that our problems have solutions that exist so long as we behave morally within the framework of a liberal democratic hegemony. Conservatives, at their core, if you get them in like-minded company and a quiet room where they think nobody else will hear them, do not agree with that sentiment.

    The reason why American conservatives, in all their permutations, come off as "hypocritical" is because they are simultaneously forced to operate within the current liberal democratic hegemon, while also actively seeking to establish a different framework for society and economy than what we currently live in. A lot of public-facing political maneuvering by contemporary conservatives, reactionaries, and bigots of all stripes looks "hypocritical" because they are trying to shape messaging and policy within an ideological framework that they are budded off from, but also actively oppose at a bare-metal level, and seek to reshape to a framework better suited to their desires and beliefs.

    Conservatives are, in essence, idealists, but facing to a reactionary, conservative past, rather than the idealism of a progressive, utopian future, and are acting in accordance with their idealistic past formation of society. They believe they are acting in a way that is perfectly coherent and consistent, because in the ideal future, they will have beaten society into a shape that allows them to differentiate levels of freedom, rights, and enrichment based on racial, religious, and sex/gender-normative grounds as a matter of fact. In their idealized world, it will make sense, at the level of social consensus, that non-white, non-Christian, non-hetero, non-cis people are treated as lesser as a matter of fact. In their idealized world, everyone would agree that those groups deserve to be treated as lesser, and thus exploited or eliminated, and everyone who disagrees would be legally, socially, and maybe even pseudo-scientifically categorized as lesser, and thus excluded from influence of that same social consensus.

    In short, I would argue that if you take all the little "hypocrisies" and unfold them into a hypothetical world where those behaviors are no longer hypocritical, you'll have the world that conservatives want, because they're idealist rubes with no ability to materially examine the world as it currently exists, nor to materially examine their own worldview. That very same worldview requires that they abandon scientific and sociological knowledge to remake society in a more ignorant shape of the past where their way of living is allowed to exist unchallenged.

    • UlyssesT
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      19 days ago

      deleted by creator