vote for them.
“Of course, the general population has all these dispositions to different degrees. In any society, individuals learn that they have to cooperate to stay alive, and collectivists learn they have to be able to be independent sometimes. But the collectivist impulse ensures that people gather together with those who think alike, that’s the nature of collectivism. And those who need freedom stay away from them, disliking the mutual coercion the collectivists habitually use on each other. But the individualists, too, need the support of a collective. They tend to feel ‘There is no such thing as society,’ because they make relatively few concessions for the approval of their partners. They expect to have to fight for what they want. The collectivist impulse means that an individual who has it strongly virtually lives for the approval of other members of the collective. Both are survival strategies, and are seldom met in their pure forms, but the genes are there, and the memes to express them in any culture.
“In stable times, the collectivist impulse can lead to mass hysteria, with the preference for believing things not because they are true but because you want to, or because your friends all do. These are not stable times, and believing things just because you want to can easily get you killed in a hostile environment, so there has been a strong selection pressure to be realistic. So the liberal party is not yet as dominated by ideology as it has been in the past, or as it will be again. It’s much more complicated than that, but it contains the essentials. So, there are two groups because human beings drift away from weaker collectives to more powerful ones. Not that two is always the necessary count of parties. Highly individualist cultures often have more, but then the groups themselves form coalitions. And fracture when the conflicting memes become too painfully apparent. People tend to vote as their parents do, sometimes seeing it as a matter of tribal loyalties rather than self-interest. There are other dimensions than the collectivism-individualism one of course, but that axis is important.
“Generally, in our culture, conservatives want justice and liberals want mercy. Conservatives expect to live with risk, liberals want security. Conservatives see the society as a delicate organism, to be altered with care. Liberals see it as a machine to be rejigged at will. Conservatives seek to minimize the size of the State, yet, because they are inclined to a more realistic view of life, they are more likely than liberals to see threats, so they are more inclined to large military expenditure and all the State intrusiveness that goes with it. These are, broadly, the things liberals and conservatives want. Obviously, everybody wants all of them, but when they conflict as they usually do, this is the way people tend to split. I don’t pretend to understand it in any detail, it is a specialist subject. But parties can change, and do. I suppose I can tell you that during the war on Earth, before Dimity arrived with the hyperdrive, there were conservatives who seriously wanted to make peace—not in spite of the fact we were losing, mind you, but because of it. Every defeat and disaster led, as time went on, to more and more cries, growing louder and louder, to stop the space-war. They even had a slogan, ‘Come home, Earth,’ until Vrissriv-Admiral’s raid broke through the planetary defenses, levelled cities and spaceports and seized a couple of thousand slaves. Templemount had just taken over then. A pacifist delegation went to see him after that. He evidently decided that it was necessary to show he meant business and publically executed the lot of them. Of course, the fact that there was a kzin radio transceiver found in their party headquarters didn’t exactly help their case.”
“That sounds very odd thinking,” Vaemar objected. “Defeat is no reason to surrender. Not before all is plainly
“Of course, the general population has all these dispositions to different degrees. In any society, individuals learn that they have to cooperate to stay alive, and collectivists learn they have to be able to be independent sometimes. But the collectivist impulse ensures that people gather together with those who think alike, that’s the nature of collectivism. And those who need freedom stay away from them, disliking the mutual coercion the collectivists habitually use on each other. But the individualists, too, need the support of a collective. They tend to feel ‘There is no such thing as society,’ because they make relatively few concessions for the approval of their partners. They expect to have to fight for what they want. The collectivist impulse means that an individual who has it strongly virtually lives for the approval of other members of the collective. Both are survival strategies, and are seldom met in their pure forms, but the genes are there, and the memes to express them in any culture.
“In stable times, the collectivist impulse can lead to mass hysteria, with the preference for believing things not because they are true but because you want to, or because your friends all do. These are not stable times, and believing things just because you want to can easily get you killed in a hostile environment, so there has been a strong selection pressure to be realistic. So the liberal party is not yet as dominated by ideology as it has been in the past, or as it will be again. It’s much more complicated than that, but it contains the essentials. So, there are two groups because human beings drift away from weaker collectives to more powerful ones. Not that two is always the necessary count of parties. Highly individualist cultures often have more, but then the groups themselves form coalitions. And fracture when the conflicting memes become too painfully apparent. People tend to vote as their parents do, sometimes seeing it as a matter of tribal loyalties rather than self-interest. There are other dimensions than the collectivism-individualism one of course, but that axis is important.
“Generally, in our culture, conservatives want justice and liberals want mercy. Conservatives expect to live with risk, liberals want security. Conservatives see the society as a delicate organism, to be altered with care. Liberals see it as a machine to be rejigged at will. Conservatives seek to minimize the size of the State, yet, because they are inclined to a more realistic view of life, they are more likely than liberals to see threats, so they are more inclined to large military expenditure and all the State intrusiveness that goes with it. These are, broadly, the things liberals and conservatives want. Obviously, everybody wants all of them, but when they conflict as they usually do, this is the way people tend to split. I don’t pretend to understand it in any detail, it is a specialist subject. But parties can change, and do. I suppose I can tell you that during the war on Earth, before Dimity arrived with the hyperdrive, there were conservatives who seriously wanted to make peace—not in spite of the fact we were losing, mind you, but because of it. Every defeat and disaster led, as time went on, to more and more cries, growing louder and louder, to stop the space-war. They even had a slogan, ‘Come home, Earth,’ until Vrissriv-Admiral’s raid broke through the planetary defenses, levelled cities and spaceports and seized a couple of thousand slaves. Templemount had just taken over then. A pacifist delegation went to see him after that. He evidently decided that it was necessary to show he meant business and publically executed the lot of them. Of course, the fact that there was a kzin radio transceiver found in their party headquarters didn’t exactly help their case.”
“That sounds very odd thinking,” Vaemar objected. “Defeat is no reason to surrender. Not before all is plainly
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