Is this the missing ‘out-of-box’ link to big boxes?

By Tom Loret | Twentynine Palms | Hi-Desert Star opinion page | Posted: Friday, April 6, 2012

An interest in anthropology drew my attention to a headline in the online conservative U.K. newspaper, Daily Mail, “Right-wingers are less intelligent than left-wingers, says study.”

The article referred to findings recently published by universities in which researchers asked why people support different political parties when facing the same social problems.

One study tested over 15,000 participants for innate intelligence at age 10, then again as 30-year-olds for political views. They concluded that lower childhood intelligence predicts prejudice as an adult, but that prejudice is not caused by low intelligence. It is caused by a lack of contact with the outside world and by adopting the bias of right-wing ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn.

The breakthrough that distinguished this new research was in the ability to correlate physiological and psychological markers with intelligence, racism, homophobia and political orientation.

For example, they learned that people with low intelligence experience higher degrees of physical and emotional stimulation from what they fear and dislike than from what they enjoy and find pleasing. Therefore, political parties that provide a platform of aggressive dislikes are likely to serve as gateways for the negative emotion required for right-wingers to feel connected and alive.

Scientific American published a clear demonstration of this phenomenon when it reviewed a University of Georgia study that tested groups of heterosexual men for anti-homosexual attitudes. They found that homophobia was most evident in self-described conservatives who were also the only group that showed arousal when presented with snippets of gay porn.

Locally, Wal-Mart adequately demonstrates this negative impulse at work.

They wage total war on American communities with urban decay; runaway sprawl; increased traffic and road wear; depressed wages; closure of retail and manufacturing with consequent unemployment and loss of tax base; usurpation of health and human resources; and leads the nation in water pollution from blacktop runoff.

Even worse, their parking lots are notorious for assaults, rapes, robberies, shootings, kidnapping and murder that all cost taxpayers billions in excess police and emergency services (http://walmartlies.com/crime.php).

At the same time, medicinal marijuana dispensaries remain outlawed and stymied by the same forces that green-light Wal-Mart. However, not only do dispensaries add revenue, but contrary to all hearsay, there are no statistics linking dispensaries with increased crime.

In addition, in states that have decriminalized marijuana, over all, traffic deaths have decreased by 9 percent and for those in their 20s, fatalities have decreased by 19 percent.

Here, the negative needs of authority forbid what actually helps and saves lives on grounds that apply strictly to the Walmart they endorse.

The Department of Defense considers rape in the military to be at epidemic proportions, and serves as another example. In 2010, they estimated 19,000 cases of which only 280 resulted in brig-time). Yet, we are in a War on Terror in which rape is considered a terrorist act, an act of war, and a violation of human and civil rights.

Here, the negative needs of authority feeds its self-serving nature with the force of denial, threats of retribution and the vicarious complicity of silence, all of which out-rank the impulse for justice, truth, or honor. Accordingly, I ask, “What if 10,000 Taliban raped 19,000 of our troops, 39 percent of which happen to be man-on-man?”

Researchers have classed this behavior along with autistic spectrum disorders such as narcissism and a slew of other socio- and psychopathologies. It is their hope that a better understanding of the biological basis of political views will help avoid conflict and achieve better solutions.