Where political identities come from, in one cartoon
A Brazilian law student — Hugo Freitas — read The Righteous Mind and turned a section of chapter 12 into a cartoon. He takes the exact text and illustrates it to show how two siblings can grow up to become so different in their political views. Here are the first two panels; you can click here to go to his site to see the full story.
Please click here to go to his site to see the remaining 6 panels.
When Freitas wrote to me to show the the cartoon, the back story of the cartoon that he told me was as interesting as the cartoon itself. I invited him to publish that story here:
What inspired me to make this comic was my experience at law school at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, a place that has historically had a reputation for its political activism. Soon after arriving, I realized that the students there saw themselves as being divided into two tribes, acting as left and right in local politics.
One faction is called the tilelês, a word that originally carried a meaning similar to hippie. The other is called coxinhas, originally a São Paulo slang word that can be best translated as preppy.
As I read The Righteous Mind, I found that many passages sounded like a good description of what was going on when our two tribes quarreled over internal policy issues. At times the coxinhas would appeal to the Sanctity foundation (e.g. outsiders were coming into our premises to use drugs and this was morally polluting our college) or demand in-group loyalty and protective measures for our community (e.g. calls for implementing access turnstiles to keep outsiders out; this was bad for the outsiders, but good for the security of the in-group; it’s uncannily similar to the political issue of immigration) or demand respect for the Authority foundation (e.g. condemning students who made graffiti on walls to convey political messages, because they were disobeying the laws that forbid writing on walls).
In contrast, the tilelês would never rely on anything other than Care and Liberty as moral foundations. For example, they would say that the only reason people wanted to keep outsiders out was due to racism, as many of them were black (Care foundation), and they thought that ours was a public university and hence should be open for anyone to enter (a cosmopolitan view, in contrast to the parochialism of the other tribe). They would say that there was nothing wrong with anyone using drugs wherever (Liberty foundation). They would say that enforcing the prohibition against graffiti was an authoritarian act of silencing people’s expression (Liberty foundation again). And they would crack down on professors and members of the administration who made politically incorrect remarks, sometimes resorting to graffiti to denounce them (Care foundation, while actively rejecting the Authority foundation).
As I began to look into the literature about the psychological differences between conservatives and progressives, I was even more excited, because the theories also seemed to explain obvious behavioral differences between the tilelês and the coxinhas that had seemingly nothing to do with politics, such as their clothing style and entertainment choices. For example, their fashion preferences (coxinhas adopt a conventional look, tilelês like it outside the mainstream), their entertainment choices (coxinhas go to the most traditional and most expensive nightclubs, tilelês prefer more alternative venues) or their academic preferences (tilelês like propaedeutics such as Anthropology or Sociology, whereas coxinhas are more practical and tend to see no interest in such courses, as they won’t help them make money, which is what they’re in college for). All of this suggests that tilelês are higher in Openness to Experience, as the theory predicts.
While learning about all this was fascinating in itself, I also found that it could be put into practical use in perhaps helping heal the divide. Our division into moral tribes has broken friendships and even led to physical segregation: an informal collective agreement was made so that students pertaining to different tribes would enroll at separate classes. Professors have noticed the difference: they know which class will passively listen and which one will constantly interrupt them to question the implication of what they say for the issues faced by social minorities.
Can we all get along?
Thank you, Hugo! This is a great service to other readers, and to law students. American law schools are getting quite politicized as well (the tilelês generally have the upper hand). Educational institutions in many countries get more polarized, turning out a new generation of professionals who may have more trouble working across political divisions than did previous generations.
I really wanted to enjoy this and I am sure it captures something of your book JH. I get the hippy preppy thing but I just don’t see it as that useful. my sympathies are on the right but I’m nobody’s model student, and I hate chinos. I think there are predetermined political characteristics but I think it’s the broader categories that are more useful – valuing loyalty etc rather than some story about free love hippies and preppies who are scared of spiders. (though I don’t like spiders…)
It’s incredible that the preppies and hippies were able to split up like that. Usually neither party can fathom leaving the other group alone.
The evolutionary advantage of dopamine insensitivity that the hippies have is almost completely erased by birth control and abortion, yet the environmental cues for this trait are higher than ever. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future.
Fascinating findings of the Author are so well validated in the case illustration from Brazil. The genetically programmed pre-disposition between twins/siblings/individuals which gets reinforced by environmental factors is an undeniable reality of empirical life. Nature intended it to be so-viz. differentiated identities. We look different so why not behaviourally so. All ills of identity politics are therefore by creator’s design but we have aggravated it to a level of high conflict/self destructiveness. Modern intellectual taxonomies of this phenomenon , like here, rarely deal with why and how of it as well as some ancient wisdom. I refer to the Indian/vedic explanations inherent in the karmic doctrine and Triguna classification of predispositions which are seminal to this subject.
I’m interested in how the social game rules represented by the legal status quo ante of drug criminalization might be influencing the social friction between the tileles and the coxinhas- and what might happen if that status quo were to shift from the ante, so to speak.
It’s my impression that part of the appeal- and the status signaling behavior- of the “illegal drug culture” is related to the condition of the users challenging the legitimacy of the legal regime that criminalizes drug users. What consequences would result if that particular role-playing game were to disappear upon legalization, and drugs use were to be viewed without all of the connotations of the defiant (heroic, risk-taking) individual confronting the leviathan state? Would the tileles still “have the upper hand in the struggle”, as it were? How much of that social cachet depends on the role of rebellion against illegitimate authority? How much of the current conflict between the two sides is a function of the overarching role of the State, which has framed the conditions of the game by invoking the most severe powers at its disposal to demand conformity of personal behavior in the case of the use of some drugs, an intervention which implicitly exaggerates the importance of both abstinence and transgression? Could it be that the source of the conflicts and tensions between the two groups is a legal phantasm, mandating a social division between ‘protege elite’ conformists vs. ‘pariah elite’ non-conformists that otherwise would lose the pervading relevance that it presently possesses?
I’m a tilele. I want to like the coxinhas. I couldn’t care less about the coolness cachet of being an outlaw. It wearies me. My problem with the coxinhas isn’t that I think they’re unhip, or less hip than me. It’s that they might turn me in.
I want to come in from the cold.
Well, I was more similar to the child that grew up to become a conservative, yet I am a liberal minded anomaly (I’m nothing like the leftist in this comic though, I consider myself liberal but not leftist in the modern American sense, I hate the regressive leftists who side with my oppressors) in my highly conservative Muslim family. Goes to show how people are more complex than this.
It seems as though character is a missing component in this discussion. Character development requires a standard. In the final analysis, a life is the sum of every thought, action and achievement. Accountability is a cosmic prerogative. “Whole and complete” is the cosmic standard of perfection and a standard that can only be measured individually. Comparative judgements of human endeavor are faulty. The faults of mankind are not rightly measured by mankind because mankind are faulty.
What makes it all work is a cosmic charity that accepts our willingness to work within the “messiness” of human existence against a standard of perfection until we are “whole and complete”. Therefore, whether one is conservative or liberal is a meaningless intellectual side trip on the pathway of a meaningful existence. “There is a spirit in Man….” Our own effort to reach the cosmic character objective, whether conservative or liberal, no matter how difficult the path, we all come to the same conclusion after death. David summed it up best. “…weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
I agree with Al Kouya that people are more complex than the cartoon. I too was more similar to the “good” child who grew up to become a conservative, yet I became rebellious and adventurous in college and have become a progressive as an adult. I evolved and changed as I grew through several different life experiences. My values also evolved/changed in the process, as I have gone through successive “stages of consciousness.”
The concept of consciousness stages is a dimension that Jonathan Haidt has never discussed, at least in what I’ve read of his work. From my perspective, much of our current polarization issues are not just due to different genetic predispositions, but also due to problems within various stages of consciousness (of individuals and of culture) and clashes between people at different stages. From my experience, each individual person’s values evolve over time and the path of that evolution is strongly dependent on the person’s and their local society’s consciousness stage, their position in their culture, and their genetic predispositions. In dualistic cultures they are most likely a reaction (either positive or negative) to previously held values.
In my opinion, in the US, our culture and most of the liberals and libertarians in it are in what I call the Existential Youth stage. In that stage (as in all the other stages below it), each side believes they have all the answers and the other side is misguided. It isn’t until one enters what I call Integrating Adulthood that a person starts to realize that their perspective is limited and therefore values learning from others’ perspectives. I discuss stages of individual and cultural consciousness in the paper “We Are Not the Enemy”: http://stwj.systemswiki.org/?p=1684
I’m actually stunned by the comments – USA centric; religious kant; unwillingness to engage the topic in clear English. The evolutionary advantage is on both sides: too curious and you don’t survive, too frightened and you don’t survive. That’s the beauty of variation in a gene pool. The Foucault book in the progressive’s hands was cruel because the conscious mind of all humans is a constant tussle between reason and emotion (as demonstrated by the Capgras Delusion). ie Conservatives can believe in woo too. Or did I miss the Ayn Rand?
I’m curious whether or not you’ve ever considered the effects of sociopathy on human relations. I would tend to agree that most people are guided by some sense of morality formed by various traits (both genetically and environmentally conditioned), and that your moral calculus is a useful tool for understanding the differences between peoples’ moral Sensibilities.
However it seems to me, that the sociopaths seem to rise to pinnacles of power. The people who Lack morality, the Ruthless, and what Augustine called “libido dominandi”, or the will to power, drives much of human history. History seems to indicate that most rulers have a completely different moral calculus than the rest of us.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, in your cartoon, is there such a thing as a genetically predetermined “evil” child? It has always fascinated me how those who lack morality end up In positions of power. Why do so many rulers throughout history seem to have traits of ruthless avarice dominated by the will to power? Why do so many CEOs for instance possess sociopathic tendencies as evidenced by several studies?
Or put more simply, what do you have to say about the concept of “evil”?
*Groan*
I really wanted to like this. I really did.
What this is is a simplistic black/white rendering of human beings.
It is very very easy to tell that the person who created it is a young liberal.
Liberals are depicted as worldly, open, caring, and intellectually curious.
Conservatives are depicted as provincial, close-minded, somewhat selfish, and simple-minded.
I’m so tired of this crap.
If anything, this is an example of Dr. Haidt’s observation that liberals do not understand conservatives.
I tried to post earlier, but got an error message. I’ll be brief.
This cartoon is actually a good example of Dr. Haidt’s observation that liberals do not understand conservatives.
Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that he endorsed it given its simplistic, black/white view of humanity.
It is clear that the cartoon was produced by a young liberal.
Liberals are depicted as curious, open, caring, and intellectually curious.
Conservatives are depicted as parochial, closed off, somewhat selfish, and simple-minded.
As someone who leans conservatives but is immersed in work and social circles of liberals, I see this misapprehension constantly.
It is tiring. It is simplistic. And it is wrong.