In America we’re Republicans and Democrats, but across cultures and throughout history there have been two main opposite forces in human political society: liberals and conservatives. Interestingly, there are meaningful differences in the brain structure of liberals and conservatives (though it’s not yet clear whether the mindset builds the brain or vice versa). For a long time know, it’s been proven that political leanings are partly heritable (lending credence to the idea that the brain structure you’re born with at least partially determines your ideology). Being born liberal or conservative, since the difference is so significant high help explain why it’s so difficult to change our mins along liberal and conservative lines.
Are there structural differences? It turns out that that the differences basically boil down to a differential weighting of basic ethical ideas. While conservatives assign roughly the same values across moral pillars such as fairness vs. cheating, care vs. harm and sanctity vs. degradation, liberals place a much lower value on sanctity, and a much higher value on fairness and care. For example, conservatives strongly value the sanctity of marriage, while liberals value the fairness of open marriage.
Our neural network structures diverge so starkly along party lines that it’s possible, in fact, to predict someone’s political leanings from an MRI. Viscerally disgusting (gruesome) images provoke strong reactions in conservatives, while not in liberals, for example. Liberals think more cortically and analytically and are thus more open to new ideas and experiences; conservatives prefer experiences and life choices that are familiar. Therefore, sadly, the antagonism between the sides is structurally unresolvable. Morality binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth, closing hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within the group.