The final battle line is between the Conservative belief in individualism vs the Liberal reliance on community. We must hasten to add that the Conservative notion of individualism must be carefully defined. The Conservative notion of individualism cannot in any way challenge the values of Established Institutions. Here, Establish Institutions trump values arrived at by the independent individual.
What the Conservative is referring to when emphasizing individualism is that each individual is solely responsible for their success and failure. It is the Conservative's use of the word "solely" that shows a major thinking error. Since the Conservative see the individual as being solely responsible despite the fact that we live in an interdependent society, Conservatives employ what Psychologists call "all or nothing thinking." What Psychologists notice about all or nothing thinking is that 1) it usually produces a distorted picture of reality; 2) it produces conclusions based on incomplete evidence because much evidence has been tossed out; 3) it results in overly concrete thinking; and 4), it is linked to mood disorders.
Despite the disturbed thinking that conservatives who reduce success and failure to individual responsibility only, the emphasis on the individual holds out a couple of carrots. One carrot is the significance one feels when one succeeds. The other carrot is being freed from any moral responsibility for helping those in need. If each person is solely responsible for one's success or failure, the successful person is free to keep more of their wealth to themselves.
At the beginning, I described Conservatives as priding themselves for being a vanguard for the values they associate with America's greatness. I used the word vanguard deliberately because it is translated into another word that does not carry pleasant associations. Jason Burke, in his book "Al-Qaeda: Casting A Shadow Of Terror," states that the concept of the word vanguard could be translated into the word "Al-Qaeda." Here, the word "Al-Qaeda" is being used to denote a function, not a group. But we might note that there are varying degrees of similarities between the group Al-Qaeda and the American Conservative. These similarities include adherence to culturally respective conservative values, radical thinking, oversimplistic view of the world, the belief that they are participating in the battle between good and evil, limited thinking, and a lack of concern for the collateral damage that adherence to their values cause.
This comparison is not to equate Al-Qaeda with the American Conservative. But where there are similarities between the two, it could not hurt the American Conservative to reflect on those similarities and ponder possible changes.
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