I am really, really trying to figure out why people divide along right/left lines. What follows is an idea of mine (still taking shape)...
I think it may be linked, in a way, to ADD. There is a theory of Thom Hartmann's (which makes sense to me, having been diagnosed with ADD at 40) that people with so-called ADD are hard-wired with 'hunter' characteristics, meaning they are flexible and easily distracted, so that if an animal comes by, they can drop everything and chase it. They constantly scan their environment and are always active, alert and ready with a pump of adrenaline so that they can go after their prey (read:hyperactive). They have to be risk-takers to catch animals. They are loners, adventurous and easily bored. The other, non-ADD types are hardwired with 'farmer' characteristics, which requires a completely different type of mentality. A farmer has to be always conscious of time, schedule and routine; if they are not aware of the proper times for planting, for instance, their crops will not grow and therefore they will not survive.
Steadiness, patience and concentration are key for farmers. But if they had to live in a hunter's world, the characteristics that help them survive as farmers would doom them in the hunter's world. Their animal does not come at a specific time.
The theory is that Americans are more ADD than Europe because the kind of people who would leave the only world they knew to go someplace completely unknown for a chance of something better would be the ADD or 'hunter' types; therefore we as a nation have a larger percentage of people who exhibit those traits which are labeled ADD. However, our society is structured for 'farmers'. So you have the right-wing, or conservatives (this is a very broad generalization, with plenty of gradations) who are 'farmers'; they value teamwork, organization, conservation, hierarchy, authority, dependability and structure - all necessary traits for farmer survival. Then you have the left-wing, or liberals, who often fall into the 'hunter' category; they value independence, autonomy, individualism, exploration, innovation, creativity, alternate solutions instead of the 'status quo', hyperactivity and hyper-focus when locked in on something. These are necessary traits for hunter survival.
Now, obviously very few people are completely one way or the other; most people are a mixture of the two, but people do tend to preponderate towards one or the other. That's why really ADD people have a hard time functioning in this farmer society, starting with school and going on from there.
But I think that this is one of the roots of prejudice, and the reason we tend to divide up among party lines. For instance, I was talking to a conservative friend, a very intelligent guy, the other day, hoping to get some insight into his mental processes - why he and I, who have the same access to the same basic set of facts, see things so differently. We're both in agreement about basic values - personal responsibility, family, honesty and so forth. But what was interesting was when we began to dance around the subject of welfare. I mentioned that a friend of my husband's was disabled and on Social Security. He was immediately disparaging about her being 'on the dole'. Now, we both have valid points on this issue. There are people who take advantage of welfare. There are also people for whom there is no other option. Somewhere in between is the truth, but I go to the place of the people who are needy and deserving of help, and he goes to the place of the lazy free-loader. Both are true. But statistics (or as Mark Twain put it, 'lies, damned lies, and statistics') can be so easily manipulated that finding the real ratio of free-loaders to needy recipients is next to impossible.
I think we make these judgments based on our hard-wiring, and assemble the available data to fit our worldview. The right values financial and business freedom and sees it as paramount to society, as a farmer would need to in order to survive. And the left values individual and personal freedom and does not care for authority - these are traits a hunter needs in order to survive in his environment.
When it really comes down to it, it's all a 'belief system'. Every bit of 'news' and 'information' we get is something we have to take on faith, unless we can be everywhere at once, see everything first-hand, and correlate it all. So we have to make decisions about whose pronouncements we have faith in. It's not about believing in God at all, but believing what people say, and which people are saying it, and why they are saying it. And there is such a barrage of 'information' out there that one can take one's pick of anything that suits one's own particular mindset. Even science is taken on faith; that the work of the scientists that precede us is accurate. There is simply too much information floating around for an individual to process it all.
Now, I'm not saying that all liberals have ADD, or that all conservatives are plodding farmers. But I am positing that how we interpret the world may depend on the set of filters and wiring that are a part of our innate personality types. Liberals will say that Bill Clinton was responsible for the relative peace and prosperity of his presidency. A conservative will say that it was because of the Republican Congress in place at the time. It might be neither, and have nothing to do with anything political at all. But our individual filters will skew it one way or the other.
So I think prejudice itself stems from our reactions one way or the other based upon whether we are comfortable with hierarchy and structure, or find it oppressive and confining, and that just may be a result of two very different evolutionary survival mechanisms.
To carry this analogy a little further, there is the question of where religion fits into the paradigm. The authority of Nature for a farmer is absolute, with specific rules that do not change, and must be scrupulously observed by the farmer for his survival. To question or attempt to circumvent these rules may mean the loss of his crop, and subsequent starvation. Therefore the trait that enables a farmer to prosper is unquestioning obedience to a higher authority, in this case Nature. Doing the same thing in the same order every year ensures his continued survival. So it might follow that a person who leans to the farmer side of the spectrum is more comfortable with an organized religion, with a specific doctrine and rules, and a leadership hierarchy.
The authority of Nature for a hunter is a little different. Hunters cannot take the same action over and over again, or they will starve. A hunter has broad guidelines to follow for catching his food, but he is mostly left to his own devices. He can say that usually the caribou are around here at this time of year, but he can't stand in this certain place and know that the caribou will show up. And he may have to fight someone else for that caribou. So he may have quite a different conception of authority than a farmer. He can't say, "If I follow the rules, I will be fed." He has to be ready to change course at any time, and he may not see accepting authority as the key to survival.
This may account in part for the differences in a liberal and conservative approach to faith.
As the situation just gets worse and worse for our country and the world, it seems odd that so many people are putting their hands over their eyes and ears and are continuing to support George Bush despite the sinkhole we are falling into.
Something for all of us to think about:
Imagine how it must feel to have supported a person or a party who you truly believed to embody your most deeply-held beliefs and ideals, only to find that it was not true? To be betrayed by someone you put your full trust in is a harsh cut. But what makes it difficult to change your belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence is this:
"If I believed in this guy and I was mistaken, what does that mean about me? My judgment? Can I trust myself to know who is good or bad?"
This is a very fundamental (pardon the word) threat to the core of who you are, your ability to survive in the world. I can see that changing your mind is more than a matter of unwillingness to admit you were wrong. It is the crumbling of your worldview, the structure which supports your selfhood.
This may in part explain why conservatives don't seem to see anything wrong with what's going on in the Bush Administration. Finding out that what you put all your faith and trust in is completely wrong is too much for a lot of people to handle, especially those of the farmer mindset whose wiring tells them not to change; to stick with what they are doing, as would be necessary to ensure that their crops continue to grow. Because if you challenge that, everything that you believed about yourself and the world comes into question. The question is, "If I was wrong about this, what else am I wrong about? Am I right about anything?" It is a shattering of self, and most people are not prepared to go there.
The more I think about this, the more I see that it was a stroke of genius on Rove's - I mean, Bush's part to feed into the farmer mindset by emphasizing that he never changes - that no matter what, he 'stays the course' and all the rest of that rot. I can see now the subliminal brilliance of that message - all the crap about being a 'strong leader' and positioning himself as someone who never backs down, etc., etc.
There are some people able to make a 180 and change their complete worldview based upon the evidence in front of them. The ones that do impress me very much. I remember when Arianna Huffington was a conservative and starting to write columns, and I remember thinking, "God, you're so smart and thoughtful - can't you see that this is a load of crap?" And the next thing I knew, she was a liberal! Now, I don't always agree with her about everything, but I will never fail to be impressed with how she took an analytical look at the facts and changed her position accordingly. That takes cojones. It also takes cojones to go the other way, from liberal to conservative. Conservatism represents safety, responsibility and stablilty, none of which this Administration which purports to be conservative has given us - rather, the opposite.
The people who are hanging on to this contradictory and illogical view of Bush and Co are like people after a shipwreck clinging to a shard of wood, trying to stay afloat. What they are trying to do is to avoid drowning their concept of themselves.
I think the only way people like that will turn around is for enough conservative leaders to condemn the actions of the White House so they will feel like they have permission. Once it is the 'official' position of enough high-profile conservatives, I believe they will jump on board, but that's what it's going to take.