Why liberals are getting more and more aggressive. Methodological notes

  I wrote several posts on “liberals” and their comparison with “conservatives”. This theme is endless, of course. Here, I address the difference between liberal and conservative approaches from the methodological point of view. 

As a physicist, I have to be very conservative and follow the well-developed scientific methodology in research and publications. Basically, any scientific fact is an observation projected to the domain of all available knowledge (experimental and theoretical), which is verified and falsified by the broader scientific community. (It does not mean that there are no mistakes in the available knowledge and not all physical publications are confirmed later on.) This means, that one has to meet several requirements when studying nature: checking internal consistency of a theory or experiment, finding corroborating observations and facts; prediction, (conduction of new experiments), and testing currently unknown observations, testing the limits of applicability (falsifiability), discussion with colleagues to assess the shortcomings and new ideas. For a scientist, the cost of error in natural sciences is high and this forces them to be very conservative. The error is usually final, i.e. it will never be reestimated as a success, as well as the reputation. A conservative mind is similar to the process of scientific study in hard sciences – it changes by small steps well-supported by practice and theory (aka wisdom). The overall progress in hard sciences is very fast, however. This is the result of a famous saying – do everything fast, i.e. slow but without interruptions.     

My observation of liberal minds and their products, so often in humanitarian sciences and politics, results in a suggestion that they follow some procedures opposite to those adopted in the hard sciences. Literally, one just need to negate all requirement, which I listed above and obtain the working requirements for a liberal mind processing. In the USA, the evolution of liberal thinking reached its ultimate point: no justification is needed for any theory. Just opposite – any justifiable theory is rejected as wrong without broader discussions, which are strictly prohibited. The theoretical domain is represented by small islands of historical dreams. The generation of new ideas and thoughts is rather a stochastic process based on a random combination of liberal bricks. The rate at which new liberal ideas/thoughts are generated is so high that their half-life is counted now in weeks and days. This makes the overall evolution in humanities and the liberal paradigm to be a random walk, with progress and regress equally probable. Essentially, they do not move at all in the fastly growing technical world.

The absence of progress and permanent failure to match any of the requirements adopted in adult sciences and to prove any consistent statement make the adepts of liberal thinking highly disappointed. The currently observed strong growth in aggressiveness is the result of this epic failure. Liberals have only one method to convince people – violence. The USA is the first playground for liberal activists. Conservatives, beware of liberals!