Conservative parents don’t believe empathy and tolerance are important virtues to instill in their children (that’s a bit concerning, as I thought they were the party who always invoking Jesus…).

Liberals believe it is important to teach Children:

  • Curiosity
  • Empathy
  • Tolerance

Whereas Conservatives believe it’s important to teach:

  • Obedience
  • Faith

It’s right here where you see the divide being sown. Empathy—a high-level emotion—needs to be fostered and learned just like any high-level logic techniques. If the mother and/or father fails in doing this, it leads to long-term issues in behavioral development. Teachers have also widely called for bolstering teaching empathy:

How can a child be kind without being helpful or thoughtful? By being polite. It turns out that manners were very important to parents. When given a choice between having manners and having empathy and asked, “Which of these is more important for your child to be right now?” 58 percent chose manners compared with just 41 percent who chose empathy.

Kotler Clarke suggests that some parents may assume that teaching a child manners is a good way of building empathy. But, she says, “There’s really no great evidence around that. In fact, bullies are very good at having manners around adults.”

On this point, teachers broke with parents, overwhelmingly preferring empathy (63 percent) over manners (37 percent). And teachers can see the disconnect in their classrooms. Thirty-four percent say, of the children they teach, that all or most of their parents are raising kids to be empathetic and kind, while just 30 percent say all or most parents are raising children with values consistent with their teachers’.

Furthermore:

This is probably the source of why they think the female body rejects rape pregnancies, why they think snowballs on the Senate floor disproves climate change…

There is another interesting correlation, if not a causal-factor, in that those identifying as conservatives are likely to have elevated testosterone levels compared to their left-wing counterparts. Testosterone, the predominant male hormone is known to elevate rage and aggression while muting emotional sensitivities like empathy. On the surface, conservatives may cheer over this, but consider respect for a rabid wild animal / loose-cannon is not the same respect for someone posing intelligent arguments. This is why one frequently sees conservatives substituting aggression and intimidation for a lack of substantive reasoning – Example. (1 2 3 4 5)

Furthermore, there’s a connection with conservatism, and enlarged amygdala (fear, anger), along with reduced pattern-recognition and flexibility to change/adaptation (smaller anterior cingulate cortex compared to liberals).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/

Now imagine if you will that you are decades past your college years (IF you went to college at all) where you were once exposed to a variety of cultures, your preconceived beliefs challenged and you’re humbled by how little you do not know (so goes the adage, ‘the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know*’). Add to this that you are at your peak mental fitness—you pick things up quickly. You also have more time focused on “learning” and being “aware.” You are less afraid of change, albeit perhaps naive at times, but you almost look forward to change and progress.

In older years, your free-time dwindles, your priorities change. You can no longer spend as much time reading a book and focusing on current-events. Your time is spent on immediate concerns rather than the abstract and worldly, such as:

  • Likely raising a family
  • Focusing on your career/work/income
  • Your mental capacity likely has deteriorated since your early years
  • Your peers are all in the same boat, which then feeds back into itself

Now, instead of reading long-form journalist pieces, timely non-fictional books, researching academic journals—you’re limited to “bite-sized” pieces of news via talk radio (Rush) or TV (Fox) as you’re eating breakfast before work, then you’ve got the evening news and your social media feed. This is all you’ve got. Such a shallow understanding of what’s going on makes you malleable, more susceptible to “common-sense” rhetoric when all variables are not known to you.

Because of this, you become more shortsighted. You may be more stressed because you have a family to support, and so you become more selfish—making you hate “all the taxes” that are impacting your bottom-line. Instead of progress, you just want things to “stay the same,” and be “stable” because it’s harder to adapt in older years. No longer are you looking at the long-term game, but the immediate return.

I contest the correlation with age is not a result of wisdom, but a lack of time to understand issues at depth, or await the return on investment. Compounding this:

Peak Hours Worked By Age

Educational Activities by Age

Fluid intelligence degradation

““Chrystalized” intelligence, i.e., knowledge or experience accumulated over time, actually remains stable with age. On the other hand, “fluid” intelligence or abilities not based on experience or education tend to decline.”

In short, Occam’s Razor suggests that—surprise—education makes you more informed, and is not some liberal conspiracy. Perhaps we need to start considering the possibility that it’s not that education is biased with liberalism, but that liberalism is a result of being educated.

By the way, I say this as a former Republican conservative. But the good news is that they change! My family did! Peace, love, tolerance, curiosity—these aren’t exactly bad things. By the way, can you call me a bleeding heart hippie tree-hugger SJW? I wear that badge with honor.