Tuesday, May 3, 2022

The Conservative Hypocrisy Towards Authoritarianism

Conservatives are more open about their irrational belief in stereotypes than liberals even as they delude themselves into thinking they are somehow individualists.  At least liberals pretend to care about opposing social constructs like gender and racial stereotypes, even if they hypocritically appeal to them in some situations.  Moreover, at least liberals do not pretend like being a member of law enforcement automatically makes one a moral giant or anything more than a fool with government power.  Conservatives, while typically endorsing gender and racial stereotypes that reason refutes even without counterexamples from one's life, often revere police officers to the extent that even mentioning the fact that there is nothing epistemologically or morally authoritative about being a member of law enforcement will irritate them.

What makes this especially strange is that conservatives are very much against the kind of authoritarian ideas and structures that they seem to almost constantly fear will soon bring about a tyrannical, globalistic government.  For all their alleged suspicion of authority--which is often not even rationalistic epistemological skepticism of other people's intentions, but the blatant assumption that anyone they do not like who has power is outright malicious--conservative Christians generally love to assume that police officers, despite their proximity to an unbiblical prison system associated with rape, sexism, and racism, are somehow of the highest moral quality or so upright as a whole that their philosophical and moral errors can be overlooked.  Most people are irrationalistic, selfish, and hypocritical; why would most police officers be any different, even if some of them show these traits less frequently or in lesser doses?

It is extremely unlikely that most police officers have ever even started to truly contemplate any issue at all in a rationalistic manner, discovering necessary truths and avoiding assumptions.  When it comes to law enforcement, this would mean never thinking that political power, tradition, conscience, preference, and pragmatism do not prove that a law is just in the first place.  If they have not at least tried to get to the truth about law and morality, at best they are thinking and acting out of personal preference or other motivations irrelevant to truth, and at worst they are intentionally apathetic towards truth of any kind as they seek to impose their arbitrary wills or those of irrationalistic lawmakers on others.  This is the very sort of thing conservatives, who imagine themselves to be seekers of truth, like to pretend they oppose in other contexts.

The irrationality and hypocrisy of their situational authoritarianism aside, there is absolutely nothing about representing social constructs like inconsistent laws rooted in someone's conscience or group preference that is in any way intelligent or just.  If a law is valid, it was still almost invariably put into place for fallacious reasons that have everything to do with assumptions, mere perceptions, and pragmatism with some arbitrary goal or method in mind.  There would at a minimum be no inconsistencies at all in any laws or how they are enforced if American laws were just, but even consistency only excludes hypocrisy and contradictions; it does not mean a law corresponds to any moral obligation, the only thing that would make any human law necessary or just.  Even then, not every immoral thing would automatically deserve to be treated as a crime, and no just punishments for breaking the law would violate anyone's human rights.  There is far more to the philosophical truths about moral concepts than just "the law and police officers say this, so I should do it!"

The only authority that cannot be questioned or denied without inescapably relying on that very thing is reason; the only being whose nature grants it inherent moral authority (if it has a moral nature) is God, the uncaused cause.  All human authorities, from parents to governments and their agents, including police officers, only have philosophical authority if they are adhering to reason and justice.  To realize that all of these things are true at once, of course, takes rationalistic awareness, which in turn requires effort, both of which almost no one is willing to actually grapple with until life circumstances emotionally disturb them so much that they crave the truth and stability of reason.  Conservatives would have to forsake a default ideological attachment to tradition in all its forms if they ever were to embrace this--at which point they would no longer be conservatives.

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