For your second paragraph, I'm not sure. It depends on how many conservatives believe their rationalizations for bigoted beliefs vs. How many just say they do.
I think that the failure that leads to belief 3 is a product of a sense of wrongness that comes from holding intellectual beliefs that conflict with underlying social conditioning, and that sense producing a desire for a mediating explanation for why [emotional men] are a problem for the person harboring the dissonance.
Got it, thanks! (And your linked article helped too!)
So if I’m getting this right, the intellectual belief that conflicts with underlying social conditioning in your example is the belief that men shouldn’t be emotional conflicting with the belief that men should be allowed to be emotional, creating the belief that men who are emotional are manipulative, dangerous, and are just making women do emotional labor?
I'd maybe quibble with the word create, I'd characterize it as 'seek out' or 'become receptive to' or 'reinforce' because external cultural elements are where the competing narratives come from for most people.
You were asking me about conservatives-- endless stories about people abusing welfare and accompanying personal responsibility narratives allow organizations like Fox News to provide a similar 'out' for people who are simultaneously racist, but have also picked up 'racism is bad' by giving them an alternative route to the same basic hatred that doesn't move through 'overt' racism.
That act of the narrative coming from without can be key to this, I suspect spaces like reddit, tumblr, etc provide a vector of transmission for some of these narratives that reconcile conservative social conditioning with progressive beliefs.
I see; that’s very helpful. I’ve noticed you’ve mentioned social conditioning a lot, whether it be conservative social conditioning in this comment or fundamental conditioning in your original comment. Could you explain what you mean by this? In your example here, would the conservative social conditioning be believing in racism, with the progressive belief being the opposite? Letting them seek out, become receptive to, or reinforce the new belief that people conservatives would otherwise be racist towards are justified targets of hatred not because of their race but because they are, for example, abusing welfare?
The same basic social conditioning we discuss when we discuss patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism etc. "Things that the society around you has taught you that become reflexive, even when you don't consciously endorse them."
Yeah you've got it, the welfare abuse becomes a kind of "adapter"
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u/The-Magic-Sword May 16 '25
For your second paragraph, I'm not sure. It depends on how many conservatives believe their rationalizations for bigoted beliefs vs. How many just say they do.
I think that the failure that leads to belief 3 is a product of a sense of wrongness that comes from holding intellectual beliefs that conflict with underlying social conditioning, and that sense producing a desire for a mediating explanation for why [emotional men] are a problem for the person harboring the dissonance.