If The Russians Engineered a Trump Victory

[Bob Butler 54]

(03-25-2017, 07:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: You'll have to define "conscience" sunshine.  Myself my conscience dictates that I spend as little of my own money flushing it down the toilet as possible.  Give aways to the lazy and the stupid is as much a waste of money as give aways as big business.

Why should I be surprised at having to explain what a conscience is to a Trump fan?

Let's start with the dictionary.

Apple Oxford Wrote:conscience |ˈkän(t)SHəns|
noun

an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one's behavior: he had a guilty conscience about his desires | Ben was suffering a pang of conscience.

PHRASES
in (good) conscience
by any reasonable standard; by all that is fair: they have in conscience done all they could.

on one's conscience
weighing heavily and guiltily on one's mind: an act of providence had prevented him from having a death on his conscience.

It's about having a sense of right and wrong, and feeling obligated to do what is right.  For example...

If one knows that global warming will severely impact the planet, but that the worst of it won't hit until after one is dead, and letting the massive extinctions, migrations and other problems happen would save some money on one's tax bill, one lacking conscience would let the planet go kaput.

If one can pay for an existing health plan, but another plan would reduce one's own expenses while leaving many with no access to health care, putting their health at great risk, one lacking a conscience would care only about himself.

For a lot of folk with blue world views, a prime distinction between red and blue is that red folk lack a conscience.  The blue is a crisis based perspective.  One pulls together as a strong community to provide for common needs in troubled times.  One is ready to perceive problems and put money, effort and votes into seeing the problems solved.  By contrast, it is easy to perceive the red as dismissing, ignoring or procrastinating problem solving in order to save money at a personal and short term level, leaving the country to fester and rot.

And it is a values based thing, not at all easy to change, unless, perhaps, the problem becomes large, threatening and immediate enough that it could significantly effect the people lacking a conscience.  If a person lacks a conscience, if he cannot tell good from evil, or if he doesn't care about the difference between good and evil, there isn't much one can do about it.

Now it is easy to go vile stereotype with this.  To get the point across, I already have in this note.  One can say all Republicans lack a conscience.  All conservatives are Evil with a big letter 'E'.  You have to explain to some people what a conscience is as they lack them entirely.  Eric has advocated for the 'Republicans are Evil and must be utterly removed from power' perspective all along. While many people seem completely unable to comprehend any perspective but their own, at base the 'Republicans are Evil' meme should not be hard to understand. One should be able to see how people think that way.

I try not to go as far as 'Republicans are Evil'.  In rural areas, problems are not so severe. Most to everyone is able to get around them without a ponderous, corrupt, inefficient government taking one's money and mandating big changes in how things have always been successfully done in the past. All successful and common world views came into being as they fit some environment well in the past, and are still perceived of by some as working well. If one is willing to make an effort, it really isn't all that difficult to step out temporarily from one's own values lock. It does help, though, if one's own world view assumes that everyone's world view has historical reasons for coming about. Values have in the view of their holders lots of practical evidence that it they are still working, and can be backed up by logic, evidence and woo. (Of course, the logic is quite often convoluted doublethink, the evidence is often badly slanted and cherry picked to support one's own view, the holy and magnificent woo seems like stupid garbage to the other guys, etc...)

But I still see a lot of the unravelling culture's 'the government issn't the solution, it is the problem' meme as at core being selfish blindness.