CONSERVATISM -- DISGUST ON A SOCIAL SCALE

Conservative personalities are thought to have a greater propensity to be disgusted than liberal personalities do. One illustrative study in 2011 found that people who were more physiologically disgusted, a reaction that was measured by skin reactions, by a photo of a man eating a mouthful of worms were also more likely to self-identify as conservative. They were also more likely to have a negative response to what they see as too-radical social change – I've watched and experienced within myself this phenomenon many times in my life. I see it showing up right now in some reactions current social issues gay marriage.
"I think the best way of looking at this is conservatives are wired to be a little more easily disgusted and fearful," Stewart says. "They are a little bit more wired to defensiveness in their environment." This is particularly apparent for sexual issues—not just gay marriage but for topics like paedophilia and pornography as well.
But Stewart has also found that some liberal minds may also harbour implicit “revolted” associations. If your ego has been so inclined by its conditioning, pretty much anything that can be labelled “abhorrent”, “an abomination”, “detestable”, “disgusting”, “distasteful”, “loathsome”, “objectionable”, “odious”, “repugnant”, or “repulsive” with a noticeable degree of relish. I've heard, and seen these labels freely applied to neighbours who play their music too loud, struggling farmers who see farming wind or coalseam gas as a means to survive government policies that have let them down. I've been guilty of attaching some of these labels to politicians whose choices and decisions I take umbrage at.
The disgusted ego is disgusted (i.e. avidly happy) to embrace and target anyone and anything – from broccoli to Daesh – regardless of race, creed, colour, ethics, politics or religion.
It gets worse – the human ego being what it is, reactions such as disgust or pleasure can be transferred from one object to another by casual association. These associations are usually accidents of co-incidence, but they can be engineered.
In a recently published experiment, Stewart and his colleagues demonstrated that the presence of a distasteful element had some noticeable effect on the expression of social attitudes. Random samples of participants in the study were sorted into either an odour group (the researchers added a vomit-like smell to a room) or control groups (where no odour was injected). The participants were then asked about their feelings on an array of social and political issues. The results are clear: in the disgust (odourised) condition "participants exposed to the smell ... reported increased subjective disgust and more politically conservative attitudes concerning gay marriage, premarital sex, pornography, and Biblical truth." Interestingly, though, the disgusting odour had no impact on opinions on non-sexual political matters, such as tax cuts or immigration.
This kind of disgust-by-association was used famously by the 1930s Nazis in engineering mass public attitudes towards Jews. Newsreels of Jews were intercut with revolting images of butchery, rotting corpses and flyblown meat. And if you think that kind of propaganda is dead, watch the nightly news on TV. Just tonight I saw an item on violence surrounding Donald Trump's rallies intercut with library footage of mob violence at other functions. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of D.Trump; I'm asking you to be more aware of how your perceptions are being manipulated, not only in news items, but also in everything from commercials for deodorant to campaigns against violence to animals or other humans.
Now, to get back to Stewart's experiments on disgust, how can an odour change a person's political beliefs? It's best to think of it like this: The disgusting smell temporarily made the liberal minds more conservative, shifting the liberal attitudes to the right. In that more conservative state, the participants reacted more conservatively to unrelated tests.
I find this experiment interesting because I'm very curious whether the presence in the room of other people known to us can have an effect on how much disgust we'll reveal. Could our need to be liked or disliked by certain others change the behavioural form and intensity of the disgusted ego? Do we switch from satire to rant, depending on who's in the audience? I'm putting money on a “Yes” outcome. In fact, I strongly suspect that “political correctness” has come into vogue to save people from suffering the consequences of overtly expressed Disgust. Like most things human, it's a complex of the issue. "What we we're finding here is that the environment plays a huge role," Stewart says. Conservative, ain't he?
In terms of biology and psychology, is the disgust one feels toward something objectively gross—like vomit—the same disgust that people might feel toward say, refugees, Muslims, paedophiles or gay people? Is it the same emotion?
In terms of how you experience it biologically and psychologically? Yes. When we hook people up to psycho-physiological equipment, how they experience disgust in terms of activation of their sympathetic nervous system or what have you, it's very very similar.
How would you categorise, or how would you define, the link between conservatism and disgust?
I doubt there is a direct link from conservatism to disgust. I think it's a tie-up between disgust and attitudes. Most of the research points towards disgust as a reaction to one's attitudes on sex-related policies: gay marriage, abortions, premarital sex, sex education in schools, paedophilia — those sorts of things. It's my suspicion that Attitudes are used to influence where we classify people on the scale between "conservative." and “liberal”.
One of the things we do know is that disgust is a primitive, primary emotion. Its evolved purpose was to identify possible dangers to our survival and stop us from ingesting stuff that made our ancestors sick to death. Stuff that disgusts us, we avoid and that avoidance helps keep us healthy. But as part of the evolution of our parallel aspects of becoming human, that biological/emotional mechanism seemed to get adopted by default as we developed socially. Now, not unlike a lot of other primitive first-stage systems and strategies, what once ensured our survival in one context now threatens our survival in changed circumstances. There's nothing more dangerous to survival than an inability to adapt and change, and I'm pushed to recall anything less conducive to adaptability than Disgust. If something disgusts me, that's it. Any attempt to force me to override “my” disgust serves only to entrench it deeper.
We cannot yet be certain but one of the ways that this plays out is that people who have a strong disgusted ego tend to be in favour of tighter social and religious regulations of anything that might be construed as “individual freedom”.
Where does ideology come from?
Why are some people liberals, why are some people conservatives? And ultimately, why are some people so attached to an ideology they claim to be “theirs” that they believe in it so much they will go to extreme lengths to support what is essentially an abstract belief system. They'll engage in arguments and acts that violate their own normal hierarchy of values, up to and including violence, some of it sparking revulsion in others?
Answer: Ego is the prime product of the social and family soup we showed up in. It is a given of the condition of being human. Extreme ascetics may free themselves of its influences to a point where it seems to no longer exist at all. But such people are rarer than hen's teeth, and they are the first to admit that they still have one.
We constructed an ego from the environment, from our experience, and from the attitudes to us an our behaviour from those around us. Some of it was instructed into us; some of it we picked up by osmosis. If you come from a good family of liberals, you're raised in a particular culture, and surrounded and encouraged/discouraged by people with similar values and priorities. It's your surrounding environment. In other words, we come into the world as political, social, ethical, moral and spiritual slates with very little written on them, and we soak up our attitudes and ideology from what's dished out to us by our primary carers and, later, from our conscious, chosen experiences as we go through life. Later in our development we may take a choice to rebel and reject outright whatever we were brought up with and do whatever the opposite of that appears to us, but in either case we are still a direct function of our raising.
Disgust and Genetics?
Now, the burning question of the moment – could genes have anything to do with whether you are in favour of gay marriage, or burning negroes on crosses or not?
Well, we now know that our attitudes, choices, decisions and actions affect our DNA – immediately. It's become uncomfortably plain that we cannot change a part of anything without causing change in The Whole. There's a big, long causal chain—there has to be—between your genes and your stance on stuff that really matters to you.
At this point what we believe is not that you have a gene for being for or against gay marriage or anything like that. But what you have is your brain, your central nervous system and your peripheral nervous system and what I can best describe as your soular plexus. These are processing systems. Your genes, influenced to some degree by your attitudes and behaviours, build and rebuild those information processing systems and make them more sensitive to certain environmental stimuli and less responsive to other environmental stimuli and that, in turn affects your attitudes and behaviours. Everything comes full-cycle.
This Ego thing evolved to help us avoid pathogens (things that are harmful to us). Unfortunately, the same system works to “disgust” us with social, psychological and grownup things that we find a strong, un-reasonable. visceral aversion to. The feeling I get when I hear a politician openly lying is the same feeling I got when Mum gave me a cup of tea with a skin on it and bits of clotted cream floating on top. I gagged then, and I feel the same way now. That's how an untrained ego works. Some personal evolution and reprogramming is called for to interrupt the tick-tock robotic stimulus/reaction habits.
For a grub to become a butterfly, some things have to die. For humans, the self-importance inherent in every form of Ego is one of those expendables.
Finally, I hope you noticed that I haven't used the words “right” or “wrong” about Ego. It's something we have, and we could not be human without it. My guess is that part of this game is – not to get rid of it – but to transcend it. We can do that. Our ego is something WE made up; anything we invent, we can re-invent.
The more we reinvent ourselves, the easier it gets to let go of the old skins, and the better we become as a result.