Pat’s Polemics

It’s really simple: people who gravitate to the right are authoritarians. Cultural relativity undermines that.
Cultural relativity states that all societies face the same basic problems and solve them to their own satisfaction. For the authoritarian there has to be only one way to do, to think, to cook, to dress, to speak, to worship…… their way. Deviation, variety, difference all threaten their sense of identity. Thus they are the original identity movement.
People in Asia do without a single master god, people in the West have a master god, a supreme being, therefore the Asians are wrong and Westerners are right…. if you are a Western authoritarian and the opposite if you are an Eastern authoritarian.
Conservatives in Western society are always prattling on about Western values like a Catholic Cardinal, desperately clinging to authority to bolster their sense of security which is so easily threatened. In sum, that is my take on conservatives: they act out of fear and get defensive. There can be no relativism in their world; it is too threatening. That is why most people who embrace difference and variety seem insouciant: they aren’t really but only seem that way to the tight-assed conservative authoritarian.
Conservatives condemn everyone outside their circle, from an indigenous tribe in the Amazon to the people who live on the other side of the tracks in their own town. Fear, fear, fear.