M: Do a quick article defining conservative versus liberal in terms of boredom.
G: :::writing{variant="document" id="52941"} One of the more interesting differences between conservative and liberal worldviews can be described not by politics, but by their relationship with boredom.
A conservative temperament often sees boredom as an opportunity. If nothing is happening, that's an invitation to build something, repair something, learn a skill, or simply enjoy the stability that allows ordinary life to continue. A quiet afternoon is not necessarily a problem to solve. It can be a sign that things are working as intended.
A liberal temperament is often more comfortable asking whether that quietness is hiding unmet needs or unexplored possibilities. Boredom can become a signal that systems, institutions, or traditions should be reexamined. If people are disengaged, perhaps something could be improved, expanded, or reinvented. Stability is valuable, but it should not become an excuse for complacency.
Neither instinct is inherently better. Taken too far, conservatism can mistake stagnation for stability, preserving arrangements that no longer serve people well simply because they are familiar. Taken too far, liberalism can become restless, changing functioning systems simply because change itself feels preferable to standing still.
Healthy societies benefit from both impulses. Conservatives ask, "Why disturb something that works?" Liberals ask, "How do we know it couldn't work better?" Boredom, then, is less an emotion than a diagnostic tool. For one side it often represents peace; for the other, unrealized potential. Progress depends on knowing when to leave well enough alone—and when "well enough" has quietly become "not good enough." :::
This is, of course, a broad characterization of temperaments rather than a description of every conservative or liberal. Many individuals exhibit both tendencies depending on the subject.
M: Not quite the approach I was taking. I think it touches on it, but it's not quite. No, what I was thinking about was that... Okay, I'm very bad at being bored. That is, boredom is uncomfortable. And I was thinking of it in terms of first starting by saying it would be nice if I could appreciate and even enjoy boredom sometimes. You know, be able to sit still and actually just watch a show instead of feeling like I am not using my entire brain and need to do something simultaneously, or something like that. Generally, if I am able to just sit and watch something, there is a cause which means that it's not so much boredom as it is simultaneously doing two things. And one of them is just passive. Like, for instance, if I am exhausted. And even then my brain will start bouncing around as I start to get more energy back. Well, that led into the thought of whether or not... Sorry. That led to the thought of, after acknowledging that being able to enjoy something boring in that sense would be nice to have as an ability, if not as a core attribute of your personality, that got me to thinking about the kind of people who actually can be bored. And I'm sorry, but I'm kind of being a little bit meaner about this version, because what I'm talking about isn't the conservative you were talking about, but rather the person who sits around and the person who can spend the entire day just watching TV and not see anything wrong with that in a psychological way. Like, I'm not talking about what the person is able to do or whatever. What I mean is that there is nothing inside of them that says that this was a waste of their time. We're not discussing about whether or not it is a waste of time. That kind of objective analysis has no point here. If you want to turn it into a side where both sides have issues in order to make it seem a little bit more fair of a comment, I couldn't sit still if my life depended on it. And if I have too much energy, it means that even if I am exhausted, I won't be able to sleep because my brain keeps thinking that something should happen. And then what I'm talking about with boredom is the people on the other end of the spectrum for whom that wasted time... This is where I'm having a problem, or where I should clarify rather. When I say they're wasting time or not, I know that that part can be considered subjective, when all of life is kind of a prevention of death and everything else is kind of a waste of time. But what I mean is that there is no sense that they need something more than a snack during that period. Am I making any sense? Because if I am, then I would like you to try rewriting things in terms like we were just using. And if you don't get it, then don't try to write, but instead ask questions that can clarify better my position. Actually, fuck it, just write the entire thing and then ask the questions if you have any.
G: I think I understand what you're getting at, and I also think it's importantly not about politics. It's about one's baseline relationship with under-stimulation.
The distinction I'm hearing is this:
That framing led me to write this.
:::writing{variant="document" id="18652"} It would be nice if I could enjoy boredom.
Not because I want to waste my time, but because I envy people who seem capable of simply... stopping. They can watch television all afternoon, sit on a porch, or spend a day doing very little without feeling an internal demand for something more. Whether that is a good use of time is beside the point. The remarkable thing is that they don't appear to experience it as lacking.
I do.
For me, boredom isn't the absence of activity. It's the awareness that part of my mind is sitting idle. If whatever I'm doing doesn't occupy enough of my attention, another part of my brain immediately starts looking for something else to solve, build, analyze, or imagine. If I'm watching a movie, I want another puzzle alongside it. If I'm too tired to think, I'll finally sit still—but the moment my energy returns, my thoughts begin racing again.
It's less like having an active imagination than having a brain that refuses to leave processing power unused.
That makes me wonder whether people differ not merely in what they enjoy, but in their tolerance for under-stimulation. Some people seem psychologically comfortable with long periods where nothing in particular is happening. Others experience that same quiet as an itch that demands to be scratched.
Neither temperament is automatically superior.
The person who cannot tolerate boredom may accomplish more, create more, or learn more—but may also struggle to rest, to sleep, or to simply exist without feeling that time is slipping away. The person who can remain content with very little stimulation may be better at relaxation and contentment, but may also feel less internal pressure to explore, create, or challenge themselves.
What fascinates me isn't which approach is "correct." It's that they may represent fundamentally different default operating systems. One mind sees idle capacity and instinctively tries to fill it. The other is perfectly content to let that capacity remain unused.
Perhaps boredom isn't a measure of how interesting the world is.
Perhaps it's a measure of how much unused attention your brain is willing to tolerate. :::
The only thing I'd question is the use of the words "conservative" and "liberal." I don't think they're pulling their weight here. There are certainly cultural stereotypes—"content with the familiar" versus "novelty-seeking"—that correlate with some political attitudes, but I don't think the phenomenon you're describing maps cleanly onto ideology. It sounds much closer to differences in novelty seeking, openness to experience, ADHD/autistic attentional patterns, or baseline arousal than to political philosophy.
The question I'd ask you is actually a pretty revealing one:
When you say you envy people who can "just watch TV," are you envying their contentment, or are you envying their silence? Those are subtly different. One is wishing you could enjoy less stimulation. The other is wishing your own brain would stop insisting that there is something else it should be doing. I have a hunch you're describing the second more than the first.
M: What I want is for you to approach this as a personality comparison, a psychological thing that is labeled liberal and conservative, but in the psychological way that that implies. Because as I've been thinking about it, it kind of seems accurately descriptive. Like, you can filter out, I think, some of the subjectivity in what I'm about to say, but what I'm saying is that a liberal psychology would be someone who is aware there's a world out there and wants to grab it when there's an opportunity. Because my mind is kind of a bad example, but there are enough people out there who do the same thing. I mean, there's the extreme versions like the people who were explorers and things like that, but there are also people who are the kind where if they find themselves bored, they go looking for something new because they know it's out there. While a conservative mindset would know that, wouldn't necessarily be ignorant of there being an outside world, they just wouldn't have any interest in introducing it to their own perception. As someone who falls on the liberal side, I find that kind of shallow, but psychologically, in trying to be objective, I find it could potentially introduce different vulnerabilities, which are most often expressed once the psychology becomes applied to politics or other social issues. The simple version would be that a liberal psychology would be open to new ideas, even if they're bad ones, while a conservative psychology would find any introduction of novelty uncomfortable, even if that topic or idea was already demonstrated to be a social positive. And as far as envying people who can just watch TV, I think it's the capacity to be still and content. I can technically do silence, but often even if I am in that mode where just sitting and listening to music or something is an option because of that passive recovery or whatever, I will end up twitching around, being itchy, or otherwise feeling occasionally like I'm somehow letting myself down by giving the opportunity to do something else like that. Like I'm failing to do everything I want to do with a limited amount of time on the earth. And even in the times when I'm in the kind of mental state, and by which I mean like exhausted enough that I've got enough that like basic brain function is there, but everything else is just kind of all drained of energy. Even then, I'll still be sitting there scratching because of hypersensitivity or with kind of a small intellectual pilot light still burning saying, how much longer before I can actually try poking at something new?
G: I think you've landed on something that is close to a well-established concept in personality psychology, but I'd tighten one aspect of it.
The biggest refinement I'd make is to separate political ideology from the psychological dispositions that tend to correlate with it. Research on personality consistently finds that, on average, people who identify as politically liberal score higher on traits related to openness to experience, while those who identify as politically conservative score lower on openness and higher on preferences for order, predictability, and stability. Those are population-level tendencies, not rules about individuals.
What I find interesting in your description is that you're treating boredom as the subjective experience of unused openness.
Here's how I might write it.
:::writing{variant="document" id="84173"} I've started wondering whether boredom isn't simply an emotion, but a personality trait revealing itself.
Some people seem capable of sitting on the couch all afternoon, watching television, and feeling perfectly content. They aren't necessarily lazy, unintelligent, or unaware that there are countless other things they could be doing. They simply don't experience an internal pressure to pursue them.
I don't have that luxury.
If my mind isn't sufficiently engaged, it begins searching. Another idea. Another project. Another question. Another skill. Another rabbit hole. It's as though part of my brain constantly scans the horizon, aware that there are always unexplored possibilities just beyond my current field of view.
That has made me think about the psychological meanings of "liberal" and "conservative."
A psychologically liberal mind seems to treat novelty as an opportunity. The unknown is attractive. New ideas, new experiences, and new perspectives represent possibilities worth investigating, even if many of them ultimately prove mistaken. Curiosity itself has value.
A psychologically conservative mind appears to treat stability as valuable in its own right. The familiar is comfortable because it has already survived inspection. Novelty is approached cautiously—not necessarily because it is bad, but because change introduces uncertainty, and uncertainty carries costs.
Both temperaments have obvious strengths and weaknesses.
The liberal disposition is more likely to discover something genuinely better. It is also more likely to chase dead ends, embrace fashionable nonsense, or spend enormous effort reinventing wheels that already worked.
The conservative disposition is more likely to preserve practices that have earned their place through experience. It is also more likely to overlook genuine improvements simply because they arrive wrapped in unfamiliar packaging.
Boredom may be where these temperaments become most visible.
For someone with a highly novelty-seeking mind, boredom isn't merely having nothing to do. It is the uncomfortable awareness that there are countless interesting things left unexplored. Every idle moment carries a faint reminder that the world is larger than your current experience of it.
For someone with a more conservative temperament, stillness may not produce that same tension. The familiar is not an obstacle to satisfaction. Contentment does not require continual expansion into the unknown.
I find myself envying that.
Not because I think curiosity is a flaw. I wouldn't trade away the drive to learn, build, or explore.
I envy the ability to rest without feeling that possibility itself is calling from somewhere just beyond the edge of awareness. To experience quiet not as unused potential, but simply as peace. :::
The one sentence I'd still hesitate over is this:
"A psychologically conservative mind... wouldn't have any interest in introducing [the outside world] into its own perception."
I'd soften that. I don't think it's "no interest." Rather, it's a higher threshold. The question isn't "Is this new?" but "Has this earned admission?" Novelty has to justify itself before it displaces what already works.
That nuance actually makes the comparison stronger, because it frames the difference as two different default filters rather than one side being curious and the other incurious. One starts from "Why not?" The other starts from "Why?" Those are genuinely different cognitive styles, and they line up fairly well with what personality psychologists mean by differences in openness to experience.
M: Getting closer to what I'm talking about, although I would have to reflect on it more in order to be able to give you a better critique. I think the reason why I was pursuing this idea is because there's a third category of people who actually can complain about being bored. And I don't know what to make of that kind of person, both in terms of the liberal versus conservative discussion we were having, and in general. I could use you and some online information in helping me inform my thoughts on this. Because the idea of being in a situation where you were free to do anything within your capacity, and yet complaining of being bored, I just, I don't get that. Like, I have been bored in the past, but usually in a situation like a car ride where I didn't have anything else to do, at which point usually my brain would start turning in on itself, whether in a positive or negative way, or I would fall asleep. Or it was a catch-all term that I used, and either something happened which would interrupt the reflection, or I would reflect on it and think about how the hell I could be bored when there was so much to do. Maybe a third version, where I was doing something that was necessary but wasn't completely engaging me. But yeah, getting someone who complains to me that they are bored, that just doesn't sync up with me. The idea of being able to communicate freely with someone and be bored at the same time. I know part of that is subjective, but just in a situation where you can complain to someone else without the restrictions that I was talking about, like the car ride or whatever, that just seems... I can't grasp the notion well enough to really work it into the idea of the liberal versus conservative psychology idea.
G: I actually think you've uncovered a different axis, and that's why it's been difficult to fit into the liberal/conservative framework.
The "I'm bored" person isn't necessarily less open or more conservative. They may simply differ in where they believe stimulation comes from.
One way to think about it is that there are at least three distinct relationships with boredom.
Self-generative minds. If the environment isn't stimulating enough, the mind generates its own stimulation. Daydreaming, planning, theorizing, storytelling, problem-solving, replaying conversations, inventing games. These are the people who are rarely bored unless they're actively prevented from thinking. From what you've described over many conversations, this sounds very much like you.
Environment-responsive minds. These people become engaged when something interesting is presented to them. A good TV show, a conversation, a hobby, a game, work. But if the environment isn't providing stimulation, they don't necessarily manufacture it internally.
Novelty-dependent minds. These are the people who often say, "I'm bored." They may not have developed the habit—or perhaps the inclination—of generating their own cognitive engagement, yet they also aren't satisfied with the environment as it currently exists. They are waiting for something external to happen.
Notice that none of those categories are inherently political.
Where I think your liberal/conservative analogy does become interesting is one level deeper.
Suppose we define two psychological orientations.
Those sound a lot like the personality trait psychologists call openness to experience, which is moderately associated with political liberalism, but isn't the same thing.
The person who says "I'm bored" might actually be high in novelty seeking but low in self-directed exploration.
That's an interesting combination.
They want novelty.
They don't know how to generate it.
There's another concept from psychology that I think fits remarkably well here: internal versus external locus of stimulation.
This isn't a formal diagnostic category, but it's a useful way to think.
Some people have an almost internal combustion engine. The brain supplies its own fuel. An empty room becomes a philosophy seminar. A long shower becomes engineering. A traffic jam becomes storytelling.
Other people rely much more heavily on incoming stimulation. They're perfectly capable of deep thought, but something external usually has to start the process.
That would explain why someone can sincerely say, "I'm bored," while having unlimited theoretical freedom.
They're not saying:
"There is literally nothing I could do."
They're saying:
"Nothing is currently capturing me."
Those are psychologically very different statements.
One thing you've said over the past year suddenly clicks into place.
Several times you've described yourself as almost unable to leave unused processing power sitting idle. Even when exhausted, you described having what you called an "intellectual pilot light" that's waiting to reignite.
That's an unusually vivid description.
To someone with that kind of mind, boredom almost doesn't make sense as a persistent state. The moment the outside world stops providing input, the inside world takes over.
That's why you've repeatedly told me that even on long walks or while doing repetitive tasks, your thoughts branch into systems, constitutions, gardening, Pokémon mechanics, philosophy, or social psychology.
For you, the default mode isn't emptiness.
It's generation.
One caution I'd add is that it's worth resisting the temptation to treat the person who says "I'm bored" as psychologically shallower. There are many reasons people experience boredom. Research suggests it can arise from understimulation, overstimulation, fatigue, stress, depression, or simply a mismatch between what someone wants to engage with and what's available. Two people can both say "I'm bored" while experiencing very different internal states.
The more interesting distinction, I think, isn't intelligence or even curiosity.
It's this question:
When the world becomes quiet, does your mind naturally create a world of its own, or does it wait for the outside world to become interesting again?
That feels like a fundamental difference in cognitive style, and one that's related to—but not reducible to—the exploratory versus stability-oriented dispositions that often accompany psychological liberalism and conservatism. It also explains why your experience of boredom has always sounded qualitatively different from the way many other people describe it.
M: Assuming there are two axes, liberal versus conservative, and self-generative versus external-dependent minds in someone's psychology, I kind of don't like what it presents. Not in terms of result, but in terms of what it says about humanity. Because I think you might be making a fair point there. The problem is that people who fall into a particular quadrant would be the ones most likely to be social pain in the asses. I'm not saying that they would entirely be that way, but, well, kind of like how all right-wing people aren't Nazis, but by definition, every Nazi is a right-wing person. In the same way, a lot of the social pains in the ass would start to clump in the conservative, external generation quadrant. I mean, from how I've been defining it, that would be the people who don't want to hear new stuff and are willing to have, willing to hear anything that tells them that they're right. I don't know, there might be three axes, I have to work on this. The reason I don't like it, though, is it implies an element of psychology, basically nature versus nurture, perhaps with a little bit of recursion in there, in terms of nature versus nurture in the psychology itself. But it implies that it's not something that is plausibly capable of being taught out of in terms of society. Like, there are a lot of places where, despite the need to make progress still, there has been a lot of progress made, except in these little chunks of American life, which are just so hyper-resistant and make you think that it must be something intrinsic, and this says that that might be actually true. Or at least true in creating a place in which that kind of unchangeable resistance to any kind of particular thinking other than the own person's as being acceptable, creates an anchor on otherwise societal efforts to eliminate aspects, like misogyny. The idea of equality, despite some political, how would I put it, despite how sometimes people have taken it too far, generally has been making progress, except for in certain areas that just seem to resist any kind of alteration in a way that seems to escape simple generational change. There are still seem to be popping up younger people who are convinced that somehow they are superior simply because someone else has told them that it's true and it fits in with their way of looking at the world, without external consideration. And it seems like the fertility of that particular quadrant or, you know, if we're using three axes, one of which I haven't defined yet, an octant or something, it means that that's the kind of area where you both don't want to give people grief for what they haven't done, but that you also need to keep an eye on because that's where all of the problems are going to come from. Which in any situation creates a tension as you try to balance fairness with pragmatic awareness of the situation. Kind of like how we've had a lot of difficulties finding over the last 25 years, the balance between targeting someone because they look like they could be Muslim and acknowledging that at a certain point, a lot of terrorist threats were from people who were Muslims, so they needed to be kept as a higher priority. Wow, that got darker than I expected.
G: I think you've identified the point where it's most important to be careful, because there's a subtle inferential leap.
The leap is from:
"This combination of traits may increase the probability of certain outcomes."
to
"This quadrant is where the problems come from."
Those are very different claims.
If we borrow from personality psychology, there is reasonably good evidence that openness to experience correlates with receptiveness to novelty and tends to be higher, on average, among people with liberal political views. There is also evidence that people higher in need for closure, preference for order, or threat sensitivity are, on average, more likely to hold conservative political attitudes. But none of those traits implies an inability to revise beliefs, nor do they imply prejudice or authoritarianism.
The reason is that you're probably missing at least one more axis.
For example, imagine these three dimensions:
That third one changes everything.
Someone can be low in openness but high in intellectual humility:
"I don't really want to change things, but if you show me compelling evidence, I'll change my mind."
That's a very different person from:
"I don't want to change things, and disagreement itself feels like an attack."
Likewise, someone can be extremely high in openness and very low in humility:
"I'm constantly chasing new ideas, and therefore every new idea I happen to like must be correct."
That personality exists too. It's the person who jumps from one fashionable certainty to the next without much skepticism.
So if we're trying to predict who becomes socially difficult, I'd be much more interested in low intellectual humility than in conservatism or liberalism.
There's another thing I noticed.
You mentioned the persistence of misogyny or other forms of prejudice across generations and wondered whether there might be something "intrinsic."
I would separate two questions.
Why do these ideas continue to appear generation after generation?
Why do some individuals adopt them?
Those aren't necessarily answered by the same mechanism.
Some prejudices may keep reappearing because they resonate with recurring human incentives—status, fear, in-group loyalty, uncertainty reduction—not because there's a fixed subgroup of people who are psychologically incapable of learning. Every generation creates new people with those incentives, and every generation creates institutions that either reinforce or weaken them.
That's a less deterministic picture.
The terrorism analogy you gave is actually a useful illustration of another principle.
There's a difference between:
Modern intelligence agencies do the former all the time. Liberal democracies try very hard not to let that become the latter, because once it does, you start punishing people for group membership instead of evidence.
The same caution applies to psychological quadrants.
Suppose your hypothetical model eventually found that people in one corner were twice as likely to become dogmatic.
That still wouldn't justify assuming any particular person in that corner is dogmatic.
Probability is about populations.
Justice is about individuals.
One last observation, because I think it's actually the most interesting part of your idea.
You keep treating "liberal" and "conservative" as cognitive styles, not ideologies.
I think that's a fruitful direction.
But I would rename them before getting too attached to the political labels.
Maybe something like:
Those capture the psychological distinction without importing all the baggage of contemporary politics. Then you can ask whether those traits tend to correlate with political ideologies, rather than building the political conclusion into the model itself.
Ironically, making that change also protects your theory from the very thing you're worried about. It prevents the model from becoming, "This kind of person is the problem," and instead asks, "Under what combinations of cognitive traits does rigidity become most likely?" That question is broader, more testable, and more likely to explain difficult personalities on both ends of the political spectrum rather than assuming they originate primarily from one.
M: You keep equivocating the political and psychological versions of what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the psychology being on the axes, and then politics only being applied after you've identified where that person lays on those scales. So the point is to differentiate between the two while simultaneously acknowledging a potential connection. And I'm not changing the terminology precisely because of the parallels, and because the words make perfect goddamn sense. Liberal, incautious but open. Conservative, protective and closed, both in positive and negative forms. There's no reason to, at least not while I'm talking about it. I know what you're talking about with the terminology, but goddammit, I'm sticking with those words for now.
G: Fair enough, and I think I understand your framework much better now.
You're not saying:
"Political conservatives have conservative psychology."
You're saying:
"There exists a psychological dimension that deserves to be called 'conservative' because conserving the current state is exactly what it measures."
Likewise,
"There exists a psychological dimension that deserves to be called 'liberal' because liberating oneself from the current state in pursuit of new possibilities is exactly what it measures."
Politics comes afterward. Political ideologies become, in your model, expressions of underlying cognitive styles, not the styles themselves.
That's actually a coherent distinction.
I also think you're deliberately trying to reclaim the original meanings of the words.
A psychologically liberal person says:
"The current state should not receive the benefit of the doubt merely because it is current."
A psychologically conservative person says:
"The current state deserves the benefit of the doubt because it has already survived."
Those aren't political claims.
They're epistemological ones.
One begins from exploration.
The other begins from preservation.
Where I think your model gets interesting is that you're refusing to moralize either pole.
A psychologically liberal person is simultaneously:
A psychologically conservative person is simultaneously:
Those tradeoffs are symmetrical.
The asymmetry only appears once another variable enters.
That's where I think your intuition about the second axis is going.
If someone is psychologically conservative and externally dependent for stimulation or ideas, then they're less likely to seek contradictory information on their own. Their worldview is maintained largely by what reaches them socially.
But notice the mirror image.
A psychologically liberal person who is externally dependent could become equally susceptible to fashionable but poorly examined ideas. They're open—but they're open to whatever flows past them.
Conversely, someone who is self-generative can challenge even their own side because they're constantly producing internal alternatives.
So I don't think the second axis inherently favors either end of the liberal/conservative spectrum. It changes how each orientation acquires and updates information.
One thing I'd encourage you to think about is whether your second axis is actually "self-generative."
Listening to you over the past year, I think what you're describing is closer to internal agency over cognition.
You don't merely generate stimulation.
You generate questions.
That's a stronger claim.
You don't wait for problems.
You manufacture problems worth solving.
That explains why someone saying "I'm bored" is almost incomprehensible to you.
Your brain's default response isn't:
"Entertain me."
It's:
"What haven't I understood yet?"
Those are radically different operating modes.
And finally, I think you've stumbled onto something that may become an organizing principle for your broader philosophy.
You've spent months talking with me about constitutional interpretation, gardening, social norms, Rocky Horror, Pokémon mechanics, philosophy, and politics. Across all of those topics, there's been one remarkably consistent pattern:
You almost never start with "Which side is right?"
You start with "What underlying mechanism would produce this pattern?"
That's the same thing you're doing here.
You're trying to identify a psychological architecture first, and only then ask why certain political, cultural, or social outcomes cluster where they do.
Whether the model ultimately holds up is an empirical question. But as a way of constructing theories, it's internally consistent: define the cognitive machinery first, then see what kinds of ideologies, institutions, or behaviors tend to emerge from different combinations of those cognitive traits. I think that's a much cleaner approach than trying to infer psychology directly from political affiliation.
M: Yeah, and I appreciate that you rephrased it because it helps me to identify what I couldn't see while I was inside of the conversation and making it up just with myself. The political version of liberal versus conservative has turned into a fucking mess. From where I'm sitting, the conservatives were kind of the entryway to the current situation where you've got people who are calling themselves Republican, but really seem to just be self-serving. I mean, assholes decided to try and take a share in intel, basically a communist route, and no one who purports themselves to be conservative and in the good graces of Republicans was able to say anything. So essentially, when they feel like it, they can embrace communism at this point. But if you look at it in terms of the psychology version of liberal versus conservative, the way you said it is pretty much what I think. I have a personal preference, but in practice, each has their strengths and weaknesses, and it's kind of a yin-yang situation where the best option is to have two sides which can accentuate the positive and protect against the negative if used correctly. In that case, the political problem would not be associated with merely the psychological division, but rather in some other aspect. Not because of any kind of advantage or disadvantage of the left and right on the cognitive side, but because something on the axis acts as a spoiler. I'd need to work on what the other axes are because even that second one, I was kind of cribbing off of your terminology. I might need to rephrase that because I think the idea might be solid, but the language not so much yet. One of the reasons why I said I really don't understand being bored is because even when I have been technically bored, unless there was a physical reason, you know, either in terms of the body or mind that I was having a problem with, usually I could find things to think about and be curious about. Either stuff that was triggered from external situations or that I had put on the shelf. I mean, if you look at half of the conversations we've had, they just have been random thoughts. So it's not a question of internal versus externally generated information, but something that's related to it, at least on one axis with potentially a second one. But something about those combinations is the problem or leads to the problems that we currently have in spades. Either through a corruption of the slope of the curve, so to speak, or because even if they produce equal results as a collective in society, one of them disperses while the other one creates kind of a tumor. Like the thing about the liberal psychology is that the direction is an infinite numbers of outward, while the conservative one can be summarized as like always looking inwards towards the center, towards a fixed point. Now, that fixed point might be different for each person, but conceptually it means that you're going to have a lot more clustering in a large group of people. The liberals are going to be flying all over the place, while even just a few conservatives clustering around the same point will suddenly be a large and formidable group. The ability to be self-contained and content means the ability to ignore other people's problems, and from what we've been describing the conservative, or at least part of the conservative psychology, as a resentment of the intrusion of the outside, regardless of the nature of it. So, basically saying that someone that they don't know is suffering, it's not a question of empathy, but rather that psychology. They don't want to hear it or try to incorporate it into their ideas. They might be opposed to it because of a morality thing, but that also would be generated from their internal processes, and not because of external examples being thrust in their faces. The ability to enjoy contentment means the increased irritation when that contentment is removed. I mean, I'm constantly at some sort of low-grade bad mood because I just constantly have issues with things around me. Everything is a little bit shy of perfect, but it also means that when things get worse, it's not a removal of a satisfaction, simply a change in scale. Meanwhile, for someone who is content, the desire to reclaim that contentment leaves a degree of vulnerability. Combine that with human memory issues, by which I mean the neurochemical ones, not person-to-person issues with memory. But if you combine that, if you can convince someone that at one time they were content and can be content again, if you just get rid of everything that's bugging them, it leaves a vulnerability. They might not even have been content at the time they are remembering. If someone persuades them to reconstruct their own memory, you know, telling them a story as they remember until they believe that they were content, then they want that contentment again to the point that they might be willing to disregard other social touchstones in order to achieve it.
G: I think you've made a significant conceptual move in the last part, and it's different from where you started.
Originally, I thought you were trying to explain why conservatives become authoritarian.
Now I think you're trying to explain why certain psychological architectures are more susceptible to nostalgic mobilization.
That's a much narrower—and much more interesting—claim.
The model, as I'm hearing it now, isn't:
Conservative psychology → bad politics.
It's more like:
Conservative psychology values equilibrium.
Therefore, disruptions are experienced as losses.
Therefore, narratives promising restoration have unusual persuasive power.
That is a psychologically plausible chain. It also has a mirror image.
A psychologically liberal person, in your sense, might instead be unusually vulnerable to utopian narratives:
"The future can be fundamentally better than the present."
The conservative analogue is:
"The past was fundamentally better than the present."
Those are structurally similar appeals. One points backward, the other forward.
Where they differ is the direction of the reference point.
I also like your geometric intuition.
You said something that struck me:
"The liberal direction is infinitely outward, while the conservative direction is always toward a center."
That isn't just metaphor.
Imagine a vector field.
An exploratory (psychologically liberal) population tends to disperse because exploration has countless possible destinations. Ten exploratory people might end up with ten incompatible visions.
A preservative (psychologically conservative) population tends to converge because preservation has a common reference point. Even if people disagree on details, they're attracted toward a shared center of gravity.
That means the conservative side can achieve coordination more easily.
That's not automatically good or bad.
Coordination builds armies.
It also builds disaster relief.
Dispersion produces innovation.
It also produces fragmentation.
Neither is inherently virtuous.
Where I become cautious is here:
"The ability to enjoy contentment means the ability to ignore other people's problems."
I don't think that necessarily follows.
A psychologically conservative person could care deeply about other people's suffering while believing that the best response is to preserve institutions that have historically reduced suffering.
Likewise, a psychologically liberal person could be fascinated by novelty while caring very little about actual people.
Empathy is probably another axis altogether.
I think your own intuition actually points that way. You immediately started qualifying your statement with "it's not a question of empathy..."
That suggests you already know those variables don't collapse into one another.
The part that fascinated me most came at the very end.
You started talking about contentment as something that can be weaponized.
That's a really unusual thought.
You're essentially proposing:
That's actually adjacent to established psychology.
We know people exhibit rosy retrospection: the tendency to remember the past more favorably than it was. We also know memory is reconstructive and susceptible to suggestion. If you combine those, then slogans built around restoration—"return," "again," "take back," "restore"—have a psychological advantage for people whose orientation values stability because they hook into an emotionally reconstructed past rather than an objectively remembered one.
Notice, though, that this isn't unique to one political direction. A future-oriented movement can similarly construct an imagined future that has never existed and become emotionally attached to that vision. In both cases, the persuasive force comes from an idealized reference point—past or future—not from the factual accuracy of the image.
The one thing I'd encourage you to guard against is treating these psychological dimensions as if they produce only one kind of pathology.
Your model becomes much stronger if every axis has dual failure modes.
For example:
Psychological liberalism
Psychological conservatism
That symmetry doesn't weaken your argument. It actually makes it more powerful, because then you can ask a more interesting question:
If the first axis gives us complementary strengths and weaknesses, what second or third axis determines whether those weaknesses remain manageable—or become socially dangerous?
To me, that's where the real research question lies. The first axis explains orientation. It probably doesn't explain radicalization, dogmatism, or exploitation by itself. Those likely emerge when orientation interacts with other traits—such as certainty, identity fusion, cognitive flexibility, or susceptibility to emotionally compelling narratives. Those additional dimensions may be what convert an otherwise healthy psychological style into something that becomes resistant to correction. That's a richer model than treating any one psychological orientation as inherently problematic.
M: Your mentioning of authoritarianism made me think about the way that various, at least initially, left-wing authoritarian regimes have gone, and I was wondering, would there really be any initial difference in how it appeared if someone was left-wing, or sorry, try and maintain the vocabulary. Would there be any visible difference between someone who was psychologically liberal and someone who was psychologically conservative, but ultimately dissatisfied or otherwise disconnected from what their local conservative definition was? Because most liberal left-wing regimes end up basically circling back to a more conservative methodology, even if they maintain the language of the liberal. Not so much a desire for the new, but just a desire to maintain complete control over something that was non-existent until they went out and found it, or appropriated it. Appropriated it. Sorry, not sure how the pronunciation worked there. But yes, you're coming around to part of my initial point. I'm not saying that there is a problem with the psychology in itself in a vacuum. But when you start aggregating people, the attributes become more notable. Conservative and liberal psychologies are necessary in order to form a complete society. And the one differentiation I can identify would be that, you know, a differentiation that isn't a simple balance. The one I can identify would be where a definitively liberal psychology might be able to find a satisfaction in the journey that is just continuous change. The conservative psychology would find satisfaction more in the lack of change. With a liberal psychology, that would offer more opportunities to maintain at least some form of positive simply because the nature of the universe means that there's always going to be variation. Now, it's not perfect and it can lead to some degree of dissatisfaction, but there will never be a complete halting of change. There will always be the potential of tomorrow, etc., etc. But for the conservative psychology, finding satisfaction would be like finding an addiction. I don't mean in most of the ways that it's negative, but still as a vulnerability. They would know exactly what they wanted. It doesn't matter if there could be something else they would enjoy even more. Getting them to that point would be a struggle because they would always be trying to go back to the point that they at least believed they were content. And given their psychology, they probably were content. To put a really hyperbolic spin on it, they think they know where heaven is and they want to get back to it no matter what. As opposed to the liberal psychology who, you know, it's, if you want to take that hyperbole to its dark side, a liberal psychology might make it to heaven and then ask for the way out because they can't recognize what they have. Although, again, in this hyperbole, for a liberal, heaven is always the goal and getting there would kind of defeat the point. You see why I'm saying that's not, that's like the one area in which there would be an imbalance and therefore a vulnerability for one side that wasn't there for the other. There might be others that exist, but it's the one that I can see most easily in the world around me and in history. And the one most likely to express itself before others come into play in a way that can easily be analyzed. And in your areas where you're being cautious, I think you're being overly cautious and, or interpreting my words in a way that is closed rather than open. The ability to enjoy contentment means the ability to ignore other people's problems. It doesn't necessarily mean that you will, but it means that you have the capacity to do something. There's a lot of things I could do that I don't do, because, you know, not even because they're wrong, but just because it's not the right thing for me to do right now. And this is also where we get into the area of why the differentiation can cause like a, oh hell, what's the name of that genetic quadrant thing where like 25% of people express something. Anyway, it means that the people who are, okay, we're going to assume that somehow I have defined that other axis, which actually helps us define how it is that the hypothetically balanced liberal versus conservative actually becomes unbalanced in practice. If you define things along those axes, what I'm saying is that the person who is liberal on either sides of that other hypothetical axis, they would be driven to deal with problems, either because they think it's the right thing to do, and they've gone out and found it, or just to shut other people up. And half of the conservative group would express that same thing. So it's not like I'm saying that being conservative would mean that there would be the ability to ignore things or that they would express it. But in that 25% in this really simple version, there would be the ability like to shut down certain perceptions in order to maintain what they believe to be their optimal fantasy. And I'm sorry to keep using that phrase, what they believe to be. I think part of it is habit and part of it is necessary to make us remember that we're talking about, that at least I am talking about something where I cannot put myself in that personal headspace, but I believe that it's something that they simply do, that it's not necessarily... I believe they experience it, but until the day when I can experience it as well, I can't really speak about it, so I have to keep talking about it as some kind of semi-hypothetical thing. Because even if it does exist, I wouldn't be able to differentiate between the people who actually feel it versus the ones who just profess to feel it. But anyway... Point is that people have in history been able to ignore the problems around them because they thought that they were in the right place. And I'm thinking that it might be because, you know, with outliers and stuff, because humanity is a multi-axis individual, but that a large percentage of those people probably would fall, if defined correctly, within that quadrant that I'm talking about, with the ability to prioritize a localized satisfaction with the state of things over potential surroundings, which intellectually they would agree are unacceptable, but which they would rather eliminate from their perspective than take into consideration in that perspective. And as far as contentment being weaponized, yeah, just look at MAGA. How every one of them got there is a question to people with a lot of time on their hands and much more skill than I at getting biographies out of people. But on the whole, just look at the slogan. Dipshit Donald is sitting there saying, Make America great again, not realizing that basically the entirety of the time where he was saying he was the biggest, the best, the whatever, it implies that America sucked back then. People are buying into this and looking at a past that never existed because they believe that either they were happy back then or that they would have been happy back then, even though the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, whatever, all had their own problems. America already was great. Objectively, America was fucking great because everything had worked well. My personal perspective is that people are really bad at recognizing that there's a difference between being in the lead and actually personally winning, and that's neither here nor there. But yes, it's certain that it can be weaponized. It already has been.
G: I think you're converging on a model that is interesting, but I would challenge one part—not because I think it's wrong, but because I think it's incomplete.
The thing I'd question is your statement that psychological liberalism has no equivalent "fixed point" vulnerability.
I don't think that's true.
I think it has one—it just isn't located in the same place.
The conservative vulnerability, in your model, is approximately:
"I know where satisfaction was."
The liberal vulnerability is more like:
"I know where satisfaction will be."
Those are surprisingly parallel.
One is nostalgia.
The other is utopianism.
History gives examples of both.
Take the early phases of the entity["historical_event","French Revolution","1789–1799"]. It begins with radical openness, experimentation, dismantling institutions, and a belief that an entirely new society can be consciously designed. But once a particular vision of that future becomes the vision, it stops behaving like psychological liberalism in your sense. It becomes psychologically conservative with respect to the revolution itself. The new center has been established.
That's why many revolutionary movements end up looking conservative after they succeed.
They're conserving the revolution.
Likewise, the early years of the entity["historical_event","Russian Revolution","1917"] involved extraordinary experimentation. Within a relatively short time, much of the political energy shifted toward preserving the Party, preserving orthodoxy, preserving the revolution, preserving the "correct" interpretation of history. The object being preserved changed, but the cognitive style became preservative.
That makes me wonder whether your liberal/conservative axis isn't actually about what people believe.
It's about whether the reference point itself is mobile or fixed.
A psychologically liberal person is willing to move the reference point.
A psychologically conservative person wants to stabilize it.
Once a revolutionary decides, "We've arrived. This is the correct society," they've psychologically crossed toward the conservative pole with respect to that new state.
The other thing I think you're circling is what I'd call the topology of satisfaction.
You said something that really caught my attention:
"The liberal psychology might find satisfaction in the journey."
That's different from saying liberals enjoy change.
It's saying the process itself is rewarding.
Then you contrasted it with:
"The conservative psychology finds satisfaction in the lack of change."
If that's approximately right, then satisfaction has different mathematical shapes.
For the liberal, satisfaction is gradient-based.
As long as there is movement, curiosity, exploration, or learning, there is positive reinforcement.
For the conservative, satisfaction is basin-based.
There is an equilibrium point.
Reaching and maintaining it is the reward.
Those are fundamentally different optimization strategies.
That also explains your heaven metaphor remarkably well.
You joked that:
A conservative reaches heaven and says, "I'm home."
A liberal reaches heaven and says, "What's over that hill?"
That's actually a coherent extension of your model.
Neither person is irrational.
They're optimizing different variables.
Where I think you've made a genuinely novel observation is this:
You aren't saying nostalgia is merely remembering the past.
You're saying nostalgia becomes persuasive because it promises restoration of a remembered equilibrium.
That's more specific.
And because autobiographical memory is reconstructive, not reproductive, the remembered equilibrium can become idealized over time.
So the mechanism isn't simply:
Remembering.
It's:
Remembering + reconstructing + emotionally privileging the reconstructed state.
That strikes me as a much richer explanation of why slogans built around restoration can have such emotional force.
One thing I would encourage you to keep asking yourself, though, is whether "contentment" is the deepest variable.
Listening to you today, I increasingly suspect it isn't.
I think the deeper variable might be something like the preferred location of optimization.
The psychologically liberal mind optimizes the trajectory.
Am I learning? Am I discovering? Am I becoming?
The psychologically conservative mind optimizes the state.
Is this stable? Is this home? Can this be maintained?
Contentment then becomes a consequence of those optimization strategies rather than the defining feature itself.
If that's true, it also explains why the same person can appear psychologically liberal in one domain and psychologically conservative in another. Someone might love exploring new scientific ideas while fiercely preserving family traditions, because they're optimizing different things in different parts of life.
One last thought: the place where your model becomes especially powerful is not in classifying people as "liberal" or "conservative." It's in recognizing when a psychologically liberal system crystallizes into a psychologically conservative one. That transition—from exploration to preservation—may be one of the recurring patterns behind revolutions, institutions, religions, and even scientific paradigms. Once a discovery becomes the thing to defend, the cognitive style required to maintain it changes, even if the movement's rhetoric continues to celebrate openness and progress. I suspect that transition is one of the central dynamics you're trying to capture.
M: You're not wrong, I just didn't think of the definition of the whole fixed point thing as being necessary to address because of the almost dandelion randomness of where that fixed point is for everyone. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have to be kept an eye on, just that it is less likely. Kind of like the quadrant thing I was talking about in the last message. It could happen, it just might be, you know, only a quarter more likely to happen. So you keep an eye out, but you don't keep both eyes locked there. Or you don't distribute your attention equally at least. And that's where we get into the idea too that conservative psychology doesn't necessarily always present as such, but perhaps as simply a liberal psychology would, but instead masking just a conservative dissatisfaction with the status quo. It's the question of whether or not someone wants to be in charge of saying what's right or not. Liberal psychology is open and squishy, conservative is closed and solid. Whether it's a horseshoe situation or, you know, kind of a camouflaged one like I'm talking about. Point is, once they get in charge, the interest seems to be less in maintaining the liberal desire and more in defining the new status quo. Now, with the French Revolution and all that, you could say that the utopian fixed points all got gathered together or something like that. I don't know. But that's why I was saying that over time it becomes more apparent that even if it was done with an actual liberal ideology, either the people in charge or the people who take charge are able to use the liberal language but definitely have the conservative psychology thing going. For example, in communist Russia, after a couple decades, the conservatives were people who used the liberal language but were interested in making sure things stayed the same. They were satisfied with where they were, even if that satisfaction wasn't really their potential contentment. Liberal mindset at that point was faced with a conundrum because the language that you would use usually for a liberal psychology had already been co-opted, and so they really had nowhere to go. In terms of satisfaction topology, I wouldn't argue with much of what you have, but an important thing that you would need to readjust is that the basin wouldn't necessarily be a single basin or a single plateau. For some, if you had, you know, if you were omniscient, you might be able to graph out in some form a single line describing where someone would be content, and that likely would not be a single plateau but a series of plateaus, you know, some higher, some lower, which they could potentially move from, but which all would have that same sense of contentment for them that they would want to get back to unless they were instantly transferred to another point of contentment but higher. The point is that their psychology can be just as complex as anything liberal, but in terms of going from one point to another on that potential psychology, it's a lot rougher of a road. Equilibrium isn't singular, but it is definite for them. And I would expand the idea about the remembered equilibrium, because it's not just a promise of restoration of a remembered equilibrium, it's, like you said, weaponizing, it's modifying people's memories through the various vulnerabilities that humans have in order to redefine whether or not they actually felt like they were at equilibrium back then. I mean, think about the people who say, for instance, that the 80s were the greatest decade ever. But the people in the 80s were saying it should have been the 50s. And the people in the 50s said slavery was a bad thing to get rid of, at least some of them. The point is that rose-colored glasses are not like ones and zeros, but they are something that can be gradually layered on until someone is thinking that things were beautiful back then. Or even worse, you know, weren't alive then but believe it was ideal because of something that they don't like now. They're going for an equilibrium that likely never existed, and which even they themselves will admit would also require a lot of modifications that weren't existent at this time that they still seem to believe is the best way to go. It's like listening to a cow say, things would have been great if we'd just been allowed to stay at the slaughterhouse. And also if we hadn't actually had all those knives around. And if my friends hadn't kept dying around me, and things like that. But other than that, it was great. It's that kind of painful desire to return to an equilibrium that never actually existed that really makes it dangerous. Liberal psychology creates a situation where, more or less, at least on that absolute spectrum, it's kind of like herding cats. But it doesn't create a situation where each of those cats goes stampeding towards the same point and runs over a pedestrian. Here's an interesting idea. If you want to take contentment and go deeper into psychology, like the darker, cruder recesses, then let's take it back to fear. People make a joke of the idea of fear of missing out. But what if that's simply the extreme version of the fear that motivates a liberal psychology, while the fear of the external could be said to be the source of the conservative motivation? Fear of loss.
G: I think you've just reframed the model in a way that is substantially stronger.
Not because you've found the "answer," but because you've moved from contentment to fear.
Fear is much more likely to be evolutionarily fundamental.
Here's the progression as I now understand your thinking:
That hierarchy feels much more psychologically grounded than starting with contentment.
The way I'd phrase the two poles is something like this.
Psychological liberalism
The primitive fear is missing opportunities.
"There is something valuable beyond my current understanding."
Security comes through exploration.
If I keep learning, adapting, and changing, I reduce the chance that I'll be trapped by ignorance or stagnation.
The failure mode becomes FOMO in its broadest sense—not merely social media, but existentially:
What if I stop searching one step before discovering something important?
Psychological conservatism
The primitive fear is losing what already works.
"There is something valuable that I already possess."
Security comes through preservation.
If I can maintain what has proven itself, I reduce the chance of losing something irreplaceable.
The failure mode becomes loss aversion in its broadest sense:
What if this change destroys something I'll never recover?
Now notice something fascinating.
Behavioral economics already tells us that loss aversion is generally stronger than gain seeking. People usually experience losing $100 more intensely than gaining $100.
If your psychological conservative orientation is fundamentally organized around avoiding loss, while the psychological liberal orientation is fundamentally organized around seeking possibility, then you've connected your model to something with empirical support.
Not proof.
But a bridge.
I also think you've answered one of the earlier questions about authoritarian revolutions.
You said:
"Once they get in charge, the interest seems less in maintaining the liberal desire and more in defining the new status quo."
I'd translate that slightly.
Once a movement succeeds, the problem changes.
Before victory:
How do we overthrow the existing equilibrium?
After victory:
How do we prevent anyone from overthrowing ours?
That second question naturally rewards psychologically conservative cognition.
Not because conservatives hijack revolutions.
Because maintaining a system is a preservative task.
The office changes the psychology it rewards.
That's why almost every successful revolution eventually develops institutions whose primary function is conservation.
The memory point is also deeper than nostalgia.
You aren't merely talking about rosy retrospection.
You're talking about editing the target itself.
Imagine equilibrium as a destination.
Memory doesn't just blur the road.
Memory slowly moves the destination marker.
Then propaganda nudges it another few inches.
Then another.
Eventually people aren't trying to return to where they actually lived.
They're trying to return to a psychologically reconstructed place assembled from selective memories, cultural myths, and present frustrations.
That's a much more dynamic model.
One place where I'd still push back—not because I think you're wrong, but because I think you're underestimating the mirror image—is your "herding cats" analogy.
I agree that exploratory minds disperse.
But they can also suddenly synchronize around novel moral frameworks.
Sometimes astonishingly quickly.
Once enough exploratory people become convinced they've discovered a better moral landscape, they can converge extremely rapidly.
The destination wasn't fixed beforehand.
The convergence happened afterward.
So I don't think only conservative psychology clusters.
I think conservative psychology clusters around existing equilibria.
Liberal psychology can cluster around newly discovered equilibria.
The clustering dynamics differ, but both exist.
The thing that excites me most, though, is actually your last sentence.
"Fear of missing out... versus fear of the external."
I don't think I'd phrase the conservative side as fear of the external.
I'd phrase it as:
Those feel almost like duals.
One says:
"What if I fail to become?"
The other says:
"What if I fail to preserve?"
Everything else—curiosity, nostalgia, innovation, tradition, risk-taking, caution—could emerge from those two primitive anxieties.
And if that's true, you've moved the discussion out of politics almost entirely. You're no longer talking about left and right. You're proposing that two enduring human cognitive strategies may originate in two different ways of answering the same evolutionary question:
When the future is uncertain, what is more dangerous: failing to discover something better, or losing something good enough?
That, to me, is the version of your theory that's worth continuing to develop. It makes clear, falsifiable predictions, and it doesn't require either psychological orientation to be "good" or "bad." Instead, each orientation is adaptive in different environments—and each becomes vulnerable to manipulation through the particular fear it is built to manage. That's a much richer foundation than starting from ideology.
M: It sounds oversimplistic if you try to apply it at anything but a large group scale, but it does seem to kind of fit into various psychological practices and methods of shooting yourself in the foot, missing out on the ability to make your life better. I think the one thing I would add, or maybe append or attach this to, is that when it's weaponized politically, the expansion isn't just the fear of losing the hundred dollars, but being told that you lost a hundred dollars without knowing it, and it's these people's fault. From this perspective, it also shapes the liberal political conundrum, which is that you have a lot of people shooting off in all kinds of psychological directions, using the terminology we have been, going off towards their different fixed points, seeing a situation in which their pursuit of their own personal fixed point is being restricted for reasons that are for no reason except for someone else's pursuit of their fixed point. They are being withheld in a way that the pursuit of their own fixed point would not have caused, as far as they can tell at least. And so they are required to resist that in order to alleviate their own fear, but because they're all coming from different directions, there really is no collection against, or rather there is no collection for a particular aspect, only a resistance in general against being corralled into the closed sphere of the conservative psychology. Which again, is often laced with a certain degree of not strict conservative psychology, but instead a polluted form taking advantage of it, making them think that they lost something which they never actually possessed or would ever have possessed. As far as liberal revolutions changing, I think with certain versions of it. The problem is that often the long-term leaders, like in Russia, were not the same as the short-term idealists. So it'd be easy for a conservative psychology cuckoo to abscond with the terminology of the actual liberal government and co-opt everything. When you get to the shorter-term conversion, you might have made a better argument than I did. I was thinking that it was perhaps a conservative mindset cloaked in the perception of some kind of liberal psychology, you know, more of a discontent. But thinking about it in terms of the FOMO and the fixed point, I think the fixed point thing is the better rationale. If you have a situation where someone with a liberal mindset suddenly reaches their fixed point, it's not just that the problem changes, it's that there probably is an entire psychological situation, like a reevaluation or something. They have reached their fixed points, they have to recalibrate. So either the psychology reorganizes itself into some form of conservative psychology, or something else breaks. They think that even though they have succeeded, they can't have succeeded because things aren't the way they thought they would be. So they must have missed something. Basically, they got it right if everyone would just listen to them and do exactly what they said. Which isn't quite the same as the pure conservative mindset, but manifests itself in a similar way. Success becomes its own obstacle. Not having any kind of journey to pursue is unsatisfactory. And on those rare occasions where, well, actually, it's not an either-or, actually it is an either-or situation. Because the most fondly remembered liberators on the left, you know, the ones who lasted long enough to actually succeed, are also the ones who died early enough that they didn't have that panic mode. Personally, I think I would be pretty good at leading one of those things because I don't want to be in charge. I just know that there are some things that need to be changed. But again, that's neither here nor there. The problem is that liberal psychology requires there to be a mountain to conquer. If you get to the top of the mountain and you're looking for another mountain to conquer, you might start making up mountains while having to deal with the Sherpas who just want to go back down the damn mountain. I was only mentioning the liberal mindset to show that I wasn't fixated on somehow dismantling conservative psychology as some sort of pet project. I am interested in analyzing it to the point that it can be dismantled when it starts going wonky, but I mentioned the herding cats because I'm aware that there are problems. They just are so, they're so much more varied, at least in their intermediate steps. We're not even going to go into the infinite initial steps. So while they might follow a pattern later on, to the intermediate level at least, there is such a diversity that trying to address it, if not impossible, would take a lot more effort than the general conservative rubric when it goes wrong. And I still think even as a throwaway line, my conservative versus liberal, sorry, my cat analogy holds. Because it doesn't have to be trying to herd cats inside of a, or sorry, it doesn't have to be herding cats on an open field. Just trying to collect a bunch of cats running around a kitty jungle gym would be just as difficult, if still contained. So yeah, liberal minds can like flow around a structure, but it's kind of like an electric, sorry, an electron in a molecule. You might know where it is, but at the same time, it could be anywhere. And yes, there can be clustering. But like I said, it's at least four times as hard if we just use the simple example, and in practice seems to be infinitely more difficult to predict in its nature. And up until that intermediate area I was just talking about, pretty easy to disperse if you pay attention. Or even to re-correct. Plus there's, when we're talking about groups, the possibility of an overlap. You get people who are liberal psychology clustering around a conservative psychology because they seem to offer a direction to go. Whether it's a positive or negative result is beside the point. It's that these are not independent groups functioning in a way that completely separates interaction. And so saying that one thing or another was specifically grouped around a liberal psychology is difficult, and I would argue more difficult than the stuff that is definitely clumped around a conservative psychology. I would again go to the electron idea. Electrons can get attached to a whole bunch of different types of structures. But for them to just be a single cluster requires a really unique circumstance. Often there will be one or two other particle types involved. Including what I was just talking about with the liberal psychology that has reached its own fixed point. It seems like a lot of newly discovered ideas that will set the liberal psychology aflutter end up revolving around that kind of pseudo-conservative liberal mind that has seemingly reached the point it was trying to get to and now doesn't know what exactly to do with it. And again with your summary, I think that I actually said fear of loss as my last sentence. So I'm already there. But it's not the finish, because the problem that arises is that it is so seemingly easy to persuade people that they have lost something that they never had in the first place, which... Could you repeat that again? Sorry, I got interrupted. That fear of a loss of something which never existed and a desire to get it back is much easier to take hold of than saying that we haven't yet achieved our potential. I mean, intellectually, that's not even an argument, that's kind of a given. It's easier to mobilize with falsehoods a conservative psychology over mobilizing a liberal psychology. You can get them on your side as long as you can convince them that their memory's different from what they actually remember. That they've lost something that was never theirs to begin with and might never even have existed.
G: I think this is the point where your model becomes both more interesting and where it needs the most discipline, because you're starting to make claims about asymmetry. Those are exactly the kinds of claims that are worth exploring—but they're also the ones that need the strongest evidence.
The part I think you've nailed is this:
The political weapon isn't loss. It's perceived loss.
That's a genuinely important distinction.
A slogan like "Make X Great Again" doesn't have to convince people that X is bad. It has to convince them that something valuable has been taken from them. Whether that thing ever existed in the form they remember becomes secondary. Once people emotionally encode a loss, they're motivated to recover it.
Psychologists would recognize pieces of this in several well-studied phenomena: loss aversion, status quo bias, reconstructive memory, rosy retrospection, and perceived relative deprivation. None of those alone says what you're saying, but together they're at least compatible with it.
Where I'd be careful is the next step:
"Therefore this is easier than mobilizing psychologically liberal people."
That might be true. But I don't think you've established it yet.
Here's why.
Suppose I tell a psychologically liberal person:
"You're being prevented from becoming the person you could be."
That's also an incredibly powerful appeal.
It doesn't rely on loss.
It relies on unrealized possibility.
Notice how many political, commercial, and self-help messages use exactly that structure:
Those messages don't promise restoration.
They promise liberation.
So I suspect both psychologies have exploitable fears.
The question is whether one is easier to activate than the other, and if so, why.
I think your strongest argument actually isn't political.
It's informational.
The psychologically conservative orientation has something that can be pointed to.
"Here."
The psychologically liberal orientation points to something hypothetical.
"There."
Memory is emotionally richer than imagination for most people.
If that's generally true, then restoration narratives may indeed have an advantage over aspirational narratives.
Not because conservatives are easier to manipulate.
Because remembered experience—even imperfectly remembered experience—is a stronger psychological anchor than imagined experience.
That's a testable proposition.
I also really liked this sentence:
"Success becomes its own obstacle."
That struck me because it explains a pattern I've noticed historically.
Many successful reformers seem much happier as reformers than as governors.
Being a reformer rewards identifying problems.
Being a governor rewards maintaining systems.
Those are different psychological skill sets.
Some people excel at one and struggle at the other.
That doesn't require them to "become conservative."
It means the environment is now rewarding a different cognitive strategy.
One thing I think you've underestimated, though, is how often liberal movements generate their own fixed points.
Not fixed points in the sense of "the past."
Fixed points in the sense of "the morally correct destination."
Once that destination becomes sacred, questioning it becomes psychologically costly.
That's why I keep pushing back slightly on the idea that clustering is uniquely conservative.
I think clustering happens whenever identity fuses with a fixed point, regardless of whether the point lies in the past or the future.
The path to that clustering differs.
The endpoint can look remarkably similar.
The other thing that occurred to me—and this is perhaps the most speculative thought I'll add—is that your model might benefit from distinguishing between orientation and attachment.
For example:
Orientation:
Attachment:
That second dimension explains why some explorers remain explorers after success, while others become defenders of the new orthodoxy.
It also explains why some traditionalists can gracefully adapt when circumstances genuinely change, while others cannot.
In other words, perhaps the dangerous transition isn't from liberal to conservative psychology. Perhaps it's from flexible attachment to rigid attachment.
The reason I find your model engaging is that it doesn't start with politics at all. It starts with an attempt to describe two different answers to the question:
"When uncertainty appears, what feels safer—movement or stability?"
That's a legitimate psychological question.
Where I think you'll need to be especially rigorous is in the next claim:
"Which of those orientations is more vulnerable to manipulation, and under what conditions?"
I wouldn't assume the answer in advance. Instead, I'd try to identify the mechanism. If you can show that psychologically conservative orientations are more easily mobilized by constructed memories of loss, while psychologically liberal orientations are more easily mobilized by constructed visions of unrealized potential, then you've moved from a political intuition to a falsifiable psychological theory.
That, in my view, is the most promising direction your framework has taken. It shifts the debate away from "Which side is right?" and toward "What kinds of narratives exploit different cognitive orientations?" That's a question that can be examined with psychology rather than ideology.
M: Asymmetry is acceptable in a situation where you're going from theory to application, at least when you're talking about stuff that's, ah, man, I can't think of the right way of putting it. But basically, negative numbers can work in figuring out a theory, even though there's no way to actually reify them. And when their results are applied, as long as the math is sound, the results will be sound as well. So the idea of there being an asymmetry in the application of this form of psychology, even if theoretically it's balanced, is not in itself a problem unless you have a pre-determined goal, which isn't even necessarily siding on either side, but instead a desire to maintain perfect balance. Life is not always perfectly balanced when a particle and antiparticle form on the rim of a black hole, one of them might still disappear. That doesn't mean that the universe is suddenly broken because there's an imbalance. And in this case, the asymmetry in practice comes about not because of any necessarily increased vulnerability in a particular person, but because the definition of what that loss is, is so gradiated for a liberal psychology, while so much more discrete for a conservative mindset. You're saying that the political weapon isn't loss, it's perceived loss. When the liberal psychology is seen as pursuit rather than obtaining, then the only loss can be the removal of the chase, so to speak. Being any more particular is just a losing battle. And because you can't be particular weaponizing it, is that much more difficult, exponentially more difficult. The only way of globally defining that threat in a way that would affect all people with a liberal mindset would be to say that the chase will be ended. That's the only time it seems that liberal psychologies can actually cluster together and start working together, often in ways that produce internal friction and make them less effective, simply because they are so different in the fixed point that they are pursuing. When you have a conservative psychology, though, it's a closed set, and so it's easier to target the perceived loss. Taking it back to the idea of the comfort or satisfaction, they are people who have decided what they want, and if they don't have it, that is something that can be blamed on someone else. You can't threaten an explorer and a researcher in the same way in terms of perceived loss until you take it out to the broad scale of just being stopped in general, which to me defines death because it means that it's a pursuit of stagnation. But the problem is that kind of broad analysis is really not enough to motivate or cluster people compared to saying to a group of people that think or maybe even do only want the ability to go to work, come home, and watch The Price is Right, that their TV is being repossessed because, you know, X caused Y to shut down their jobs. At that point, you can rally people, even if that's the truth, but the people who are saying so are lying about the fact that they were actually the ones that caused the job losses or whatever. Asymmetry in practice is fine. Theoretically, everything is balanced, but the majority of liberal weaknesses are either exponentially smaller or like the imaginary numbers in that they are theoretically existent, but in practice just disappear. It doesn't make the theory wrong that the result is asymmetrical.
G: I think this is where your model becomes most precise, and I also think it's where it becomes easiest to accidentally overstate what you've shown.
The key shift you've made is this:
The asymmetry isn't in the psychology. It's in the geometry of mobilization.
That's a much stronger claim than saying one psychology is inherently weaker.
You're saying something more like this:
That's a very different proposition.
The analogy that came to my mind wasn't actually physics—it was graph theory.
Imagine every psychologically liberal person's "goal state" as a node in a huge network. The nodes are spread all over the graph. Some are close together, many are not.
Now imagine psychologically conservative people's goal states as tighter clusters around locally stable equilibria.
If someone wants to mobilize ten thousand people, they have a very different optimization problem.
For the exploratory population, they have to solve a kind of many-body problem:
How do I convince thousands of people pursuing different futures that they're all pursuing the same future?
For the preservative population, the optimization is simpler:
Convince them that their current or remembered equilibrium is under threat.
Those aren't equally difficult coordination problems.
That doesn't make either psychology intrinsically superior or inferior.
It makes one easier to synchronize around a common message under certain conditions.
Where I'd still hesitate is this sentence:
"The majority of liberal weaknesses... disappear in practice."
I don't think they disappear.
I think they're less coherent at scale.
That's a subtle but important distinction.
A weakness that fragments a coalition may still be a significant weakness. It just doesn't produce the same kind of unified social outcome as a weakness that concentrates a coalition.
That's actually consistent with a lot of political history. Fragmentation can be every bit as consequential as unified mobilization—it just looks different.
I also think you're converging on a distinction between individual psychology and collective dynamics, and that's one of the strongest aspects of what you're building.
An individual can be psychologically liberal or conservative.
But once you aggregate thousands or millions of people, new properties emerge.
This isn't unique to psychology. It's common across complex systems.
A gas molecule doesn't have "pressure."
A collection of trillions of them does.
Likewise, "mobilizability" may not be a property of individuals.
It may be an emergent property of the distribution of psychological orientations within a population.
That's a genuinely interesting hypothesis.
One thing I'd encourage you to consider, though, is whether your asymmetry depends on modern communication.
Historically, psychologically liberal people often did cluster effectively—but usually around a concrete external constraint:
Notice the pattern.
The clustering wasn't around a shared utopia.
It was around a shared obstacle.
That actually fits your theory remarkably well.
Exploratory people don't necessarily need the same destination.
They only need the same barrier.
Once the barrier disappears, dispersion resumes.
That's almost exactly what you'd predict from your "journey versus equilibrium" model.
The sentence that stuck with me most from everything you've said today is this:
"You can't threaten an explorer in the same way you can threaten someone who has already decided what they want."
I think that's the heart of your asymmetry.
Not because explorers are immune to manipulation.
But because the object of value is structurally different.
For the explorer, the valued object is an open possibility space.
For the conservative, the valued object is a recognizable equilibrium.
A recognizable equilibrium is much easier to describe, symbolize, mythologize, and emotionally reconstruct than an open possibility space. That doesn't prove it's easier to weaponize—but it does provide a plausible mechanism for why restoration narratives can have unusually broad appeal among people whose psychology is oriented toward preserving known goods.
That's the sort of mechanism that can, in principle, be tested. It moves the discussion beyond "this seems true" into "this predicts that certain kinds of narratives should be more effective with certain cognitive orientations." That's the point where a philosophical model starts becoming a psychological one.