Over the last few weeks, I have been developing a theory as to the psychology of political affiliation, and today, I finally feel confident enough in it to commit it to blogspace. Please forgive me if this theory is a little wet behind the ears, it’s still a newborn.

For those of us with a keen interest in both psychology and politics, one of the eternally recurring questions is the simple question of the origin of political beliefs. What makes one person a liberal, and another a conservative? There are a lot of potential answers, and it is quite easy to fall into moralistic judgment and say “Well it’s easy. Some people are good, and others are evil. ” But serious thinkers and armchair psychologists cannot possibly be satisfied by such a simplistic reduction. What really makes one person lean to the left when another leans to the right?

I don’t claim to have a single definitive answer, but I think, in my ponderings, I may have unearthed a useful axis along which to examine the question.

It all comes down to which is more difficult to tolerate for the individual : uncertainty, or cognitive dissonance.

From this point of view, a liberal is someone who finds the internal conflict of cognitive dissonance to be far more unpleasant than any sense of ambiguity or doubt about the true nature of things. Hence, a liberal tolerates doubt but rigorously pursues the elimination of cognitive dissonance by trying to form a single, coherent, internally and externally consistent picture of the world and how it works.

A conservative, on the other hand, finds ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt to be far more painful and frightening than cognitive dissonance. Because of this, they are willing to tolerate a great deal of cognitive dissonance in order to create a world view free of the doubt and uncertainty and perplexing complexity that they cannot tolerate. Their world-view need not be particularly consistent or congruent either with itself or with objective reality, as long as it fulfills the deep need for certainty.

Liberal versus conservative, then, is really a battle between two thinking styles, or rather, two different cognitive priorities. Liberals maximize consistency and minimize dissonance. Conservatives, the opposite.

This view, I think, helps to shed some light on the age-old observation that people tend to be more liberal when they are younger and more conservative as they grow older.

When we are young, we are in the phase of our lives when we are still trying to figure out what this world is all about, what is really going on, and what it all means. Our minds retain the flexibility of youth as well as its vigor, and we have not made a great deal of commitments, either to ourselves or to the world. as to the nature of things or the ways of the world. Most importantly, we have, for the most part, not made any substantial investments of time, energy, or wealth based on our views, and therefore the pressure to cling to the philosophies in which we have invested is absent.

As we age, however, things change. The progress from single adult to spouse to parent leaves us with a great deal more in the immediate world to concentrate on, and the increased drain of day to day life on our faculties coupled with the inevitable decline in vigour and mental flexibility that comes with age, leaves little room in people’s minds for philosophical meanderings. When there is so much to do in the course of the day, you have to make up your mind about certain things and simply go with it, come what may, and over time this leads to both the aforementioned increased investment in one worldview or another, and a lack of patience with the sorts of ambiguities a more philosophically inclined mind embraces.

Eventually, the fog of age grows thick enough in the minds of the aging to create significant pressure to reduce and strengthen the world view even further. Previously acceptable levels of ambiguity become intolerable because the more confused and frightened people grow as their faculties dim, the stronger the need for absolute rigidity and certainty in the remaining things they can still understand.

Thus, over the course of their lives, a person moves from a child’s simple, black and white, largely unexamined world view to the troubling turbulence of their teen years, when the child that was wars with the adult that will be, into a certain equilibrium as a young adult, then into the middle years of declining energies and flexibility, into the long dark tunnel of old age, where the emotional need for certainty far outstrips any need for philosophical clarity and the mind retreats back into the simplistic black and white view it remembers from its innocent youth.

I make no claims as to this theory’s completeness or comprehensibility. I only offer it as another angle from which to examine the question, and hence derive a better picture of the whole.

OK, I’m going to try to address this topic again, and I will do my level best to stay calm about this subject and not lose my shit and fly way off the handle like I did last time.

One my my more persnickety and painful pet peeves has to do with people treat mathematics like it is some kind of obscure and arcane thing that they have no chance of possibly understanding, leaving them to make important life decisions based on gut feeling or similarly unreliable methods instead of using the far simpler and safer method of just doing the math.

Now, I am not some math loving Asperger’s patient who like numbers better than people and wishes everyone was more like him. I am not that particular flavour of nerd. I can take math or leave it. I got good marks in math in school, but not appreciably better than the rest of my courses. Math is just OK by me.

Nor am I talking about advanced algebra or calculus or some other blackboard-covering mind-denting level of the science of numbers, values, and relationships. I hit the wall at college level calculus like a lot of people did, and so anything I know, I learned in the regular school system. I am not, for a moment, saying that everyone should strive to be the next Stephen Hawking or Rene Descartes.

No, all I am talking about is the math you learned in elementary school. Add, subtract, multiply, divide. If you made it to junior high, you already know all this math. And thanks to the invention of the calculator, you don’t even have to actually do the math yourself. You just have to know what it means.

But a lot of people seem to treat math like a childhood disease : something you had to go through when you were a kid and are now incredibly glad they will never, ever, ever have to experience it again. (Sadly, a lot of people treat reading the same way, more’s the pity. )

And if math was truly an obscure and largely useless subject that had no bearing whatsoever on people’s day to day lives, that would be fine. History, for instance, is a subject which is very important to society as a whole (history is memory and to fail to learn from the mistakes of the past is to be doomed to repeat them), but in the context of the average person’s daily life, whether or not they remember the year in which the Diet of Worms occurred is not going to have much of an impact unless they are playing Trivial Pursuit. (It’s 1521, by the way. Thanks, Wikipedia!)

But math is considerably more important to day to day life, and for one tiny little reason : MONEY. The world of money is the world of numbers, and those who are not comfortable with dealing with the basics of the world of numbers (math, in other words) are naked and vulnerable when the wolves of superior numeracy who control the world of money with their math skills are looking for sheep to shear. Or worse.

In fact, the entire world is now in financial crisis, with millions suffering worldwide on every level of society, because a small group of extremely rich number nerds came up with a mathematical model so complicated and abstruse that they fooled a lot of other very rich people into buying the financial instruments based on these mathematical models under the sheer faith that these mathemagicians had someone invented a way to make financial risk disappear while maintaining a high return on investment. And by the time they realized their mistake, they had convinced the economy that this was real money, and when they eventually ran out of suckers to spend their real money on fake magic money, trillions of dollars disappeared from the world economy in a flash.

So we can’t pretend math is not important. It’s the heart and soul of money, especially in this day and age when our life savings are just digits on a computer screen. And yet so many people are intimidated by the world of numbers. Why is that?

Frankly, I don’t really know. It might have something to do with some people simply being temperamentally biased towards qualitative thinking over quantitative thinking, and hence the precise and definitive (but strictly limited) world of mathematics seems incomprehensible to them, even at such a basic level as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

And we know it’s not a matter of ability, because again, we all can do these things. We all learned basic math in elementary school. It’s not like we lack basic numeracy.

It’s more, I think, a matter of being comfortable with numbers. Of getting over the feeling that when you are dealing with numbers, you are in alien territory and want to get out as soon as possible because you are outside your comfort zone.

If you can stick with it, you will realize that numbers are extremely simple, so simple it’s almost ludicrous, and once you realize that, you will lose your fear and be able to push numbers around and use them like the simple tools they are.

If enough of us can do that, we can crack the code behind which all these financial world jackals do their dirty business, drag them out into the light, and hold them accountable for their crimes.

If not, we will all remain in the dark about what is really going on, and be at the mercy of the predator who stalk their prey in the darkness of public ignorance.