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as critics to the 4T they are divided between those who expect more from it and those who want to put a stop to it. The latter have been called conservatives
because of their fear of social change, the uncertainty and ambiguity that it brings with it, and even because of the impudent display they make in the midst of their own cognitive closure, that is, because they are not in a position to see or think differently from what they believed. which was the country.
Although it is an experiment on our visual attention, the conservatives
They remind me of that test that psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simmons did at Harvard more than a decade ago. It consists of asking volunteers to count the passes of a basketball team for one minute. As they happen, a person dressed as a gorilla walks by, stops, hits his chest and, after nine seconds, leaves the scene. Half of the volunteers never see the bouncer because their attention was consumed by counting the passes. The surprise when they transmit the video for the second time is monumental. Scientists write: People, when paying attention to a particular area or aspect, tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when they are prominent, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking.
. I think it would not be an exaggeration to apply this blindness of attention to the case of beliefs, to the way in which we represent our present path, not only through attention, but through memory and reasoning. What country did you live in?
, is a common reaction to those who see national problems now and not before.
But, more than the invisible gorilla, I am interested in passing the ball. The conservative mindset is not necessarily championed by self-interest as purely instrumental; that is to say, it is not supported only by those who have lost privileges. They are also imitated by those who had believed, for example, that commitment and will were behind upward mobility and now feel like unfair competition
the existence of social programs. No one has touched their economic situation, although the 4T has shown them that they are admired billionaires because of their relationships within the elite and not because of their talents and efforts. There are also the conservatives who believed that institutions were necessary in principle and that hierarchies were natural. The autonomous institutes, such as the INE or the IFAI, the academics of the university elite, the neoliberal experts, the corporate media continue to be surprised that they are questioned in a public way. The populace now dares to object without hesitation because of their titles, compound surnames, geographic, social, pigmentation, and gender hierarchies. A third belief is the one that demands forceful action against criminality and in the same way against any behavior that contravenes personal beliefs, such as beating two women who are kissing in a park. These three aspects –resistance to equality; approval of authorities regardless of whether they were corrupt, negligent, or downright criminal in the past; and the use of force – make us despair with those who support them without any instrumental reason, only by imitation of their superiors in the family or at work and the reassuring convention of the past.
What do those like me think?
is a question that is not questioned if the they are like me
it is an aspiration that could only be realized by sharing an idea. To think that equality is wrong, that hierarchies are natural and that the use of force is always justified, does not benefit the majority of those who defend these ideas, except for the belief that this way they will be more like us
. There is, then, an aspirational identity component to conservatism that has nothing to do with whether social change benefits or harms you. It is almost like the intolerance of ambiguity, studied from Theodor Adorno to Slavoj Zizek, that is, the perception that things are no longer as they used to be leads some to close themselves off to the new situation where nothing seems black or white to them. , clean or impure, promised or unfulfilled. This intolerance leads to the need to have an unjustified belief, which reality denies, to reduce anxiety and fear of the present. that is called cognitive closure
and it is at the bottom of the stereotypes, the biases that confuse the part with the whole, and the refusal to accept information that belies the way you saw the world. Going back to our invisible gorilla, it is as if, in the second projection of the video, someone says that it is doctored to make him feel bad and a part calls the offense because they have been deceived.
I am like those who think like me
it’s not the same as I will be like them if I think the same
, but it seems to be what drives a part not affected by the 4T change. It is a belief that there are people more valuable than others and that there is no problem in the unequal opportunities that each other receives, even if the one who holds it is one of those affected by that nature
of things The believer in the old regime is, of course, within his rights to have an opinion what he wants, but it is a bad belief, in the definition that Neil Levy makes: It is bad because it is unjustifiable based on the information available to the holder
. To say that everything is a mess
it should be heard only as a manifestation of anxiety and fear due to the change in the coordinates of social recognition. It would be like the other gorilla, the Typhoon that Gustav Klimt painted in the Beethoven Frieze: it is fearsome but we know that it lies under a mountain.
