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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Years ago I had a sort of harebrained thought, that one's support for authoritarian policies might be inversely correlated with one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm. That is to say, if you believe that you are well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself and one's family as a personal responsibility (e.g. "we don't call 911, we call the coroner"), and will hence tend to skew libertarian on the political compass. Conversely, if you believe that you are not well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself as a responsibility for the government, and hence tend to skew authoritarian.

I think it's fair to say that the current dominant iteration of Western left-liberal politics has a visible authoritarian streak, with their support for lockdowns and vaccine mandates, their hostility towards unfettered free speech, their concomitant support for online censorship etc. you've all heard this before. Conversely, the dominant iteration of Western rightist politics is more libertarian - most visibly seen in the hands-off approach to Covid taken by Republican states in the USA, but more broadly in their support for unfettered free speech.

Hence, my theory would predict that people with a low self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm will tend to lean left (because the current dominant iteration of left-liberal politics is authoritarian-leaning), whereas people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves will tend to lean right (because the current dominant iteration of right politics is libertarian-leaning). Note that this is entirely contingent and downstream of which way the wind is currently blowing: if the dominant strain of left-liberal politics was libertarian, it would attract people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm, and vice versa.

Who tends to think that they are well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Gun owners, martial artists, bodybuilders - in other words, young strong men. Who tends to think that they are not well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Old people, people with physical disabilities (the former two groups among the most vocal supporters of lockdowns, for understandable if misguided reasons), physically weak men, and women.

What's the mechanism? Certainly testosterone is linked to a greater propensity for risky behaviour, so it's plausible that individuals with a higher concentration of testosterone in their bloodstreams would tend to have a higher self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm. One data point: administering testosterone to Democrat men allegedly causes a rightward shift.

This is very much a half-baked theory that I'm keen to develop further, and I'd be eager to see data backing it up or contradicting it.

Note that this is only self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability.

I believe that you are mis-specifying your research questions. You cherry-pick two issues and conclude that "the current dominant iteration of left-liberal politics" is more authoritarian-leaning than the current dominant iteration of right politics, but that is almost certainly untrue. On many other currently dominant issues, such as crime and immigration, it is those on the right who take the more authoritarian position. And, re one of the two issues you mention, free speech, the authoritarian position is hardly the sole province of those on the left; it all depends on the speech in question.

So, if you are really interested in exploring this issue, and your post is not just an elaborate "boo outgroup," you need to compare the true outliers re support for authoritarian policies (ie, libertarians) to everyone else.

And, btw, here is a paper that weighs against your hypothesis. It finds that exposure to androstenone increases preferences for social order, which of course is a conservative position (see, eg, the recent discussion here of the German Green Party poster) and hypothesizes that detecting androstenone in others is interpreted as a sign of potential danger, which certainly implies a concomitant reduction in perceived ability to protect oneself from harm.

My comment was not intended as a "boo outgroup" comment. While I have misgivings about the authoritarian leanings of many Western left-liberal parties/movements, I also think many libertarians are completely nuts, and I'm glad not to live in a country in which gun ownership is common. If someone I know hung this poster on their house, I'd think they were a lunatic.

the authoritarian position is hardly the sole province of those on the left

I never claimed it was and I don't know why you're implying that I did. I made the much narrower claim that, in the West, hostility to free speech is more commonly found among left-liberal parties than right-leaning parties. This does not remotely imply that left-liberal parties are the only parties which are hostile to freedom of speech, in the West or elsewhere.

And, btw, here is a paper that weighs against your hypothesis.

Thank you, I look forward to reading it.

YW.

Re the free speech issue, I meant that it is by no means obvious that hostility to free speech is greater on the left than on the right. Rather, those on the left are hostile to certain types of speech, while those on the right are hostile to other types of speech. In my experience, very few people on either side support free speech in principle to any degree.

The idea that speech is innately valuable is intuitively wrong to many, myself included -- free speech as a principle has always been an underdog struggling against human nature.

I don't think free speech advocates generally believe that (all) speech is innately valuable. Indeed, most defenders of free speech will address the obvious fact that they are frequently defending shitty speech from terrible/crazy/stupid people. The argument is that "the right to speak your mind without being punished" - i.e., that the Powers That Be should not be able to define what you are or are not allowed to say - is innately valuable.

Obviously, there are failure modes (hence the typical leftist pedantry about how censorship by every media and financial platform in the world isn't really censorship, it's just "social consequences for your behavior"), and there are also arguments people have made here that actually, censorship is good and the government should restrict what you can say ("to what aligns with my values," of course), but "speech is innately valuable" is a straw man.

The argument is that "the right to speak your mind without being punished" - i.e., that the Powers That Be should not be able to define what you are or are not allowed to say - is innately valuable.

How can speaking your mind be valuable if the speech itself is not? What about you, random person, is so incredible that the mere act of saying your shitty thoughts out loud transforms them into something worthwhile?

You say it's a strawman, I say it's a necessary component to free speech. The human soul is not an alchemic chalice transforming lead into gold, here.

How can speaking your mind be valuable if the speech itself is not?

Because I would like to be able to speak my mind, even if I'm an idiot or a loon, without being put in jail or cast out of society. That is the principle being defended, not "Everything that comes out of everyone's mouth is worth hearing."

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