A Proposed Functional Analysis of Conservatism

​Conservatives have generally not believed in the agencies congress established for the state to run. So they've installed administrative heads opposed to the mission - often industry lobbyists. But sometimes they love the tools of the state, such as the military, policing, or even agriculture
 
This is another big incoherency. That makes 1. Big government is bad, except when I want it. 2. People are responsible for their own choices, but society has lost its way and doesn't teach good old fashioned morals anymore. ... why are we doing this. It's all nonsense. It's chaff thrown up by

positional protection response. Here's my proposed functional analysis.
MO: desire for resources
> personal resource allocation is challenged (capital, status, safety, etc.)
> positional protection (escape behavior)
> disordered 'frames' are created to provide a false sense of relief. (It's common sense, unintended consequences, originalism, biblical literalism, around here we, fancy PhDs, boys will be boys, in my day, cultural Marxism, bleeding heart, liberal media, liberal campuses, limousine liberal, western values, Christian nation, just to start with terms)
> Fusion occurs in which thoughts and feelings attach to self-as content (who I am, what I do, etc.) aligned with a worldview cobbled together from a mélange of disordered escape responses (e.g. they provide escape in the form of reinforcement of engaging in behavior that removes the unpleasant stimuli. For example, when a conservative says "I don't see color, their verbal response is tied to a simple frame of really bad associative responding, but then interestingly summed up in a report of rule following: "Racists see color. Racists are bad people. If I don't see color then I am good person...
OK, this example fucked me up as I'm thinking it through. This is a really weird situation! I'm *proposing* a functional analysis and obviously can't take any measurements. So I have to be careful about conjecturing appropriately on private verbal behavior, much less  falling back on mentalistic functions. So the logic is obviously ridiculous. Maybe what they are trying to say is they have reached post-racial nirvana (unlike the rest of us) and race lost all stimulus control over them, such that any and all of the social narratives and associations passed down through history have been miraculously (?!) from their minds. Like I said, disordered thinking. But honestly, I think a part of you starts to feel dumber and it's literally embarrassing. So you feel a hidden shame. And then the social opprobrium. You kind of know you're a "bad" guy.
 
Your values always kind of align with the wrong side in hero stories. Even Jesus says most of the opposite stuff than what you believe. But that's part of the story - the victims journey! The endless attacks and hordes and assaults on you and your way of life.
To the extent that this disordered epistemic cocoon provides relief, following its rules will be reinforced, or maybe I should say engaging in its rituals and socializing around it will be.
 
So here we have this long stretched out proposed functional analysis of conservatism, from the minute detail of the individual to the institutions to the community. Is this unfair? What would happen if we did a functional analysis on liberalism? The main difference is clearly egalitarianism.
 
I also find it compelling that egalitarianism would move individuals to seek sources of knowledge beyond traditional authorities (religion, family, etc.), as humanism seems a basic human trait and we can all cooperate with other humans from any part of the globe, all things being equal.
And 'all things being equal' is precisely my point. This has been studied widely, but one only needs look the at the actual knowledge production centers of society - universities, journalism, the arts - to see the overwhelming dominance of liberalism.
This is no accident, these are 'liberal' institutions, meaning their purpose is in fact to explore and expand from traditional knowledge, to test and self-reflect, to take scientific relativism seriously. Conservatives make their contributions in each of their sectors, and occasionally provide something relevant. But the vast majority of it is apologetics and propaganda, with 'experts' often speaking outside their fields, or as extreme outliers. Given how many basic leftist (or what were - these things have a way of normalizing) premises have become accepted across just about every academic discipline. It is as if you had an entire movement of evolution-skeptics.
 
So liberals are at all of these institutions exploring all of this - actively seeking out, trying to understand inequality - especially as this framework creates a structure for *the privileged* to turn the tools on themselves and hold themselves to account. This is after all, the whole point of society: to ensure we are free. Ironically of course, as Skinner wrote a whole book about, no one is really free - it is the environment that makes us. And for us, the environment is society.
 
We make our millionaires and dishwashers. We make our bigotry and hierarchies. We make our conservatives.