The logic there tracks, If you boil it down, conservatism is about protecting what works and avoiding unnecessary risk, while liberalism is about exploring what could work better, even if it means mistakes along the way. They’re really just two adaptive strategies for dealing with an unpredictable world: one oriented around safety and order, the other around change and possibility.
Well said and thanks. Yeah it’s so true we need both. 100%. One to hold the ground on what we worked so hard to have. Stability. Predictability. Guarantees. Using reason and discipline to maximize the known. Meanwhile the scouts work the perimeter in the shadows and find even better things, we explore the unknown. Eventually the tribe follows and the cycle repeats. Strong sentinels protect our new turf; scouts forge yet again. Risk, creativity, and mostly it fails. Innovator culture is a meat grinder. It works but it’s cruel. We are ridiculed as delusional, emotional, indulgent, until one of us succeeds, and then that one person is worshipped. They start to believe it wasn’t luck. They tell the world it can be done if they just “work hard.” (As if the other scouts didn’t.) People stupidly believe the just-world narrative and the cycle repeats. Meanwhile all the sentinels are respected. I love the sentinels but they ridicule me. Someday that’ll change and I’ll make sure to amplify this concept to the world. I kind of wrote about it here. https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/hard-work-equals-success?r=1xoiww&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I think we can know the same facts and still disagree, because knowledge is never experienced in isolation from the mind that holds it. Even when two people share the same information, their brains interpret that information through different emotional, biological, and experiential filters. What appears as a rational conclusion to one person might feel threatening or false to another, not because of ignorance, but because of difference in emotional architecture. Reason is not detached from the body—it is embodied, infused with fear, desire, and memory. So disagreement can persist not in spite of shared facts, but because those facts resonate differently within the living, feeling human mind.
I suppose I’d argue that even if we processed the facts identically and they had identical meaning it would still be possible to have different values.
If both parties hypothetically new the entire state of affairs down to the atom and could recite them back to each other perfectly and agree they shared the same model, they could still care about different things because of emotional preference.
The facts of strawberry and chocolate don’t change that I like strawberry.
I know all the facts about capital flight that happens with rent freeze and I don’t care. They want to say it’s because I don’t know the facts. Not true. It’s because of aesthetic preference and a difference in what matters to me versus them. This drive them nuts.
The logic there tracks, If you boil it down, conservatism is about protecting what works and avoiding unnecessary risk, while liberalism is about exploring what could work better, even if it means mistakes along the way. They’re really just two adaptive strategies for dealing with an unpredictable world: one oriented around safety and order, the other around change and possibility.
Well said and thanks. Yeah it’s so true we need both. 100%. One to hold the ground on what we worked so hard to have. Stability. Predictability. Guarantees. Using reason and discipline to maximize the known. Meanwhile the scouts work the perimeter in the shadows and find even better things, we explore the unknown. Eventually the tribe follows and the cycle repeats. Strong sentinels protect our new turf; scouts forge yet again. Risk, creativity, and mostly it fails. Innovator culture is a meat grinder. It works but it’s cruel. We are ridiculed as delusional, emotional, indulgent, until one of us succeeds, and then that one person is worshipped. They start to believe it wasn’t luck. They tell the world it can be done if they just “work hard.” (As if the other scouts didn’t.) People stupidly believe the just-world narrative and the cycle repeats. Meanwhile all the sentinels are respected. I love the sentinels but they ridicule me. Someday that’ll change and I’ll make sure to amplify this concept to the world. I kind of wrote about it here. https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/hard-work-equals-success?r=1xoiww&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Yes.
I think we can know the same facts and still disagree, because knowledge is never experienced in isolation from the mind that holds it. Even when two people share the same information, their brains interpret that information through different emotional, biological, and experiential filters. What appears as a rational conclusion to one person might feel threatening or false to another, not because of ignorance, but because of difference in emotional architecture. Reason is not detached from the body—it is embodied, infused with fear, desire, and memory. So disagreement can persist not in spite of shared facts, but because those facts resonate differently within the living, feeling human mind.
I suppose I’d argue that even if we processed the facts identically and they had identical meaning it would still be possible to have different values.
If both parties hypothetically new the entire state of affairs down to the atom and could recite them back to each other perfectly and agree they shared the same model, they could still care about different things because of emotional preference.
The facts of strawberry and chocolate don’t change that I like strawberry.
I know all the facts about capital flight that happens with rent freeze and I don’t care. They want to say it’s because I don’t know the facts. Not true. It’s because of aesthetic preference and a difference in what matters to me versus them. This drive them nuts.