Comment on Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be?
chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months agoEh, there’s plenty of educated right wingers. Not fascists as much, but the kind of fiscally conservative economists who preach austerity are often as not highly educated, just lacking in empathy.
You’re speaking of pundits and politicians whose opinions are public and widespread. There is little reason to believe that those folks are sincere in their public statements. They are motivated by greed to lie in an effort to sway the opinions of uneducated people.
Among the general public, those that sincerely hold conservative political views are cognitively impaired. Source: they vote for things that are objectively against their own prosperity.
The educated and the well-travelled may have a broader set of view points to see how many different ideas and values work (or don’t work) in practice.
I don’t disagree on some just lacking empathy. But I also think not all education creates exposure to a wide range of ideas and values that stick (or the education is just too narrow), so you’ll still find plenty of people who are educated on paper, but not cognizant of a broad set of world views. I also think we are too quick to label foreign ideas==bad ourselves. Empathy is a two way street. The key in navigating this may be in identifying when an idea comes in good faith or if it is hostile.
Stiffneckedppl@lemmy.world 6 months ago
There are definitely plenty of well educated, intelligent fascists as well. It’s pretty dangerous to start thinking that what separates two ideological groups is intelligence.
EleventhHour@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I believe what they were separating was Fascist leaders versus fascist followers.
Stiffneckedppl@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I was mainly responding to the previous comment which characterized right-wingers as having “lesser cognitive ability”. Just saying that that kind of thinking sets up a “we’re superior” mentality that can too easily lead to the same kinds of consequences as thinking you’re superior based on race or social status. There are so many environmental and experiential factors that go into where a person lands politically and how effective certain forms of propaganda are on them. Blanket statements that characterize entire people groups as less intelligent are not in any way accurate or helpful.
ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
It already does, it’s called ableism and it has such deep roots in society it is everywhere no matter political leaning, which is why it is rarely addressed - because most of society still sees it as perfectly acceptable that disabled people are inferior (even though ableism impacts them too, not just because accessibility and inclusion benefit everyone, but because people just don’t like to think about getting hit by a car, having a stroke, or just growing old, nor about their child being born neurodivergent for example).