The Common Theme Radical Bleeding Heart image

What Do These Three Share?

What do these categories have in common? Why is it that certain people find themselves toward one end of all of these scales and others drift toward the other extreme?

Simplicity and Purity. There is a pattern. Conservatives seek a kind of purity and simplicity that the messy complexity of reality does not provide. They objectify their values, projecting all that is evil or unpleasant onto others. They become Do-Badders not because they love evil (at least not most of them) but because in their world all that is evil is the Other. They and those like them are Good and the harm they do to others — identified as Evil Ones — is therefore Good. They kill, torture, and destroy in the name of Good.

The Self-haters purify themselves in the same way, projecting all they hate about their own desires and weaknesses onto others, who can then be demonized and persecuted in the name of righteousness.

Their idolatry of their “superiors” is in harmony with their need for absolute certainty, for they can turn to their idols for all their answers, “knowing” that they are infallible. So they live in a world of simple purity, where anger is always righteous wrath, hatred is always the loathing of evil, and cruelty is really the just punishment of wickedness.

Of course these categories are all relative: we all have been provoked to hatred and anger; we all have had moments of self-loathing; and we all certainly have beliefs we can not bear to have questioned.

Common Weaknesses. In other words, conservatives are merely especially subject to weakness that we all share. But they are weaknesses. That is fundamentally why the powerful are so easily able to manipulate them for their own ends.

[Next: How the Powerful Seduce the Weak]