Liberals vs Conservatives: Psychology's Modern Morality

video via Who is John Galt
This TED talk is from Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor and morality researcher at the University of Virginia. It is useful as a type of "out of the mind" view of human morality, and how human minds may be innately attracted to one pole or another, and how a mind might be primed toward one strange attractor or another.

Your blog host has traveled a path that has wound its way through conservative, liberal, libertarian, socialist, eastern philosophy of detachment, pacifist anarchist, and several other moral and quasi-moral perspectives on reality.

Freedom of beliefs and religion is paramount, as long as the religion focuses on the spiritual and does not delve into political or economic control too much.

A religion that attempts to enforce morality, politics, economics, and the rest of existence for everyone in the world, is not truly a religion, but is a totalitarian philosophy -- a system of enslavement of body and mind.

But a system of morality that is incapable of providing individuals and societies with the will to defend themselves against an onslaught of hostile outsiders, is useless or worse.

As to the middle ground, that is often determined by the stage of history that a society is passing through at the moment. Get back to me on that.