I wear not motley in my brain

It's obvious to anyone with eyeballs that the liberal brain, by its very nature, is more susceptible to fads and fashionable nonsense than the conservative mind. Now, if a new study is correct, there may be scientific proof:
Frank Sulloway of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study, said results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Based on the results, Sulloway said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.
The compulsive acceptance of new social, scientific or religious ideas is, of course, a major reason why liberalism is so corrosive and destructive. For most new ideas are wrong, if not harmful. As David Stove wrote, in his brilliant essay "The Columbus Argument":
“No doubt it is true that, for any change for the better to have taken place, either in thought or in practice, someone first had to make a new departure. But it is equally true that someone first had to make a new departure for any change for the worse to ever have taken place...if in the past bad innovations ave been at least as common as good ones, we have every reason to conclude we ought to discourage innovations in the future as to conclude we ought to encourage them.” In reality, however, innnovations for the worse and "innovators-for-the-worse have always been far more numerous than innovators-for-the-better: they always must be so.”
Human societies are so complex “no one understands them well enough to repair or improve them,” therefore any new idea is far more likely to make things worse than better, in the unlikely event it changes anything at all.

Comments

  1. I believe it was Sir Humphrey who said, sage-like: "Many many things must be done ... but nothing must be done for the first time."

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  2. Exactly. Or as Lord Falkland said, "Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

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  3. Or as Mortimer Shy said, "the difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Liberals know there must always be some Conservatives; whereas Conservatives actually think there can be a world with no Liberals."

    This works even better with Democrats and Republicans, and better still with Adults and Children.

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  4. Without liberals I would have a much harder time being a reactionary, that's for certain.

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