Elyk

This image doesn't mean what you think. It purports to show that conservatives have more affinity for ingroups, and less for outgroups, and the reverse is true of liberals. But that's not what it actually shows. The conservatives are answering honestly, the liberals are answering performatively. It's a survey, you see. Self-report data. And one of the biggest self-serving lies that academic social science ever told itself, in pursuit of easy research methodologies and tasty grant money, was that assurances of anonymity would cause survey respondents to tell the truth about themselves. But people lie to themselves all the time. They don't like being confronted with unflattering or socially unfavored facts about themselves. Why do you think women's dress sizes are arbitrary numbers instead of real-world measurements? Why do you think an entire nationwide chain business thrives off selling unused gym memberships? Surveys don't tell you how people are. They tell you how people want to be seen, by themselves and others. So what these plots reflect is the goal philosophies of liberals and conservatives. Conservatives want to be seen as loyal, supportive, useful members of their tribe. In the modern era, tribe can mean family, region, race, culture, nation-state, or all of the above and more. This is more or less where conservative loyalties actually lie. They are tribal. But here's the telling part... liberals would consider that last sentence, "they are tribal", to be an insult. Their social, philosophical, and political ideals are that every person should work towards a sort of nebulous altruism, comprised first of cosmopolitanism, where one is equally loyal to every human being, then of universal altruism, where one is equally loyal to every living thing, and finally a sort of Buddhahood, where one is suffused with a formless and abiding love for the entire universe. But if this were actually what liberals were feeling, if this was their actual spiritual journey, and they were telling the complete and unvarnished truth, then that heatmap on the right would be 100% red. Or at least the same color throughout. But it isn't. It displays more preference for outgroups than ingroups. The most apparent explanation for this is virtue signalling. Since it is harder to love a cow than your wife, liberals will be at more pains to proclaim the former. This is why they will lecture their own closest kin, in the most hateful and abusive terms they can dredge from the depths of their souls, about veganism as a moral duty to cows. Not only that, since love for ingroups is how conservatives signal virtue, proclaiming love for ingroups, such as one's own family, race, or nation, is conservative-coded in the eyes of liberals. So not only do such declarations not signal virtue in liberal circles, they create a suspicion of vice. A black liberal may proclaim that he quite likes white people, and, while this might be seen as unusual, it would pass with little more than a raised eyebrow or two. Were a white liberal to say the same thing, it would trigger an immediate inquisition on the part of his fellow liberals, lest the faintest scent of heresy escape their notice. Black liberals, of course, are not policed for ingroup preference, and can get away with expressing it. Since virtue signalling tends to spiral, expressing hatred for ingroups is even encouraged. None of this makes sense to conservatives, among whom loyalty and support for ingroups is the single most important virtue of all. Favoring the stranger over your own kin, or your own community, is the worst possible sin in the conservative world view. To liberals, it's a virtue. "Refugees welcome" rallies are big virtue-signalling parties for smug boomer hippies to pat each other on the back for hating their own children and loving violent third world thugs instead. But which worldview is appropriate? Correct? Better? Well, one destroys your civilization, and the other doesn't. But also, one model of virtue is impossible, and the other isn't. You see, you cannot love everything equally. That's not what "love" means. The word "love" simply means "strongly prefer". That's why we can use the same word to refer to how you feel about your wife and how you feel about your favorite food. If you love your wife, it means you prefer her to other women who are not your wife. If you love bacon, it means you prefer it over other meats. To say "I love you" means "I choose you over others". Therefore, the idea of loving everything, or even everyone, is nonsensical. It does not determine your actions. It does not predict how you will chose between people, when forced, as we are all forced, to choose. It is unfalsifiable, and thus, not even wrong. To love everyone and everything is to love no one and nothing. Which is exactly the vibe that people who claim to be filled with universal love actually give off. Hence this picture.