Say Anything Blog

According to a new study which attributes the happiness to conservatives being able to “rationalize” things like inequality.

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person’s tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: “It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,” and “This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are.”

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one’s social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don’t justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University.

I think this just boils down to the different ways the left and the right look at the world.  People on the left tend to think of everyone as victims to one degree or another.  The right, on the other hand, tends to see people as individuals.  They citizens as acting, and being responsible for those actions, instead of being acted upon.

This means that, barring certain things such as disability, most people are poor are that way because of the choices they’ve made not because they’re victims.  And this is an important distinction.  After all, the left uses feelings of victimization as a means to get power.  They tell us that because we are victims we need the government to protect us, and thus the government needs to be expanded in terms of its power and size.

And the end game for that is the government being so large and so powerful that we have no freedom left.  To paraphrase someone else, the government that is large enough to give you everything is large enough to take everything away.