Many academics I see online are leftist whereas many laypeople I see online are right wing.
IMO:There are 3 type of “right wingers”:
- The sheeps (the majority about 90%) they are less educated, easy to manipulate & very reactionary.
- The shepherds (the minority about 1%) they are highly educated, come from generational wealth & want to defend & multiply their wealth by influenving the sheeps.
- The sheep dogs (about 9%) they are highly educated & very oportunistic. They don’t come from wealth and dream of wealth. Their only goal in life is to be shepherds one day. (Most likely they won’t achieve it maybe one will make it to be uaed a champion that it’s possible) but they will do everything to achieve it and thus work overtime for the shepherds & influence the sheeps as much aa poaaible.
So yeah, about 10% of the right wingers are educated. The majority still is less educazed and easy to manipulatw.
Believe it or not, there are well educated, intelligent and well intended people in the right wing. Not the majority, by any chance, but I’ve met these people. I’m not saying they’re right, but assuming the only possible causes for their beliefs are either ignorance or ill will/greed just feeds the polarization that’s currently destroying western civilization.
What is their answer to “people are hungry and die of starvation or not being able to afford needs, while others have more money than what’s possible to spend in hundreds of lifetimes of extreme luxury, what should be done about that?”? Because I can’t imagine an educated, well intentioned answer to it, either you’re too dumb to understand reality or you’re okay with people suffering and dying.
I don’t know what all of their answers are, but as a latin american I can offer you my perspective of hunger and starvation not being exclusive to the right wing and extreme luxury being something many left wing politicians will happily indulge in once elected, while their populace live in misery.
Many of them do believe in different forms of redistribution too. Right wing political stances do not equate to “give every last penny to the rich and private sector”. Political perspectives have nuance.
I’m also a latin american, I’m not saying corruption doesn’t exist on the left wing, or that they’re not assholes who will go crazy with power. Also I’m not saying voting right wing is always the wrong thing to do, for me authoritarian/democratic is much more important than left/right, so if my choices are authoritarian left vs democratic right, I’ll vote right.
But fundamentally when asked about inequality the right wing answer is always along the lines of “it is what it is” or “it will be solved very slowly over the next hundreds of years by not doing anything”, both of which are either ignorant or evil, and of you’re talking about an educated person one of those should be off the table.
I know a right wing guy who has a PhD, speaks 5 different languages and is an immigrant. He says that you can tell which immigrants are terrorists by just looking at them and everyone who looks like that should be arrested.
I know another right wing guy who has a PhD in Informatics and owns 20 houses in Amsterdam. He doesn’t see the problem. People can just move somewhere else.
Both of them don’t just have PhDs, they work as academics, one in Berlin the other in Amsterdam.
Go to any school of economics, comp sci faculty, school of business and dare i say biology and you’ll find a lot of em. They tend to be less vocal. Historians too.
In my experience Biology not as much, but maybe that differs by country.
Historians you say? What decade i wonder…
i’m not sure what you mean. of what generation?
Being an academic means being open minded because when researching something, the outcome may be different from what you expected. In such cases do you concede that your initial theory was wrong or do you stubbornly continue to believe that you were right and keep trying to prove yourself correct?
Current STEM researcher who also happened to have met a few academics on the right side of the political spectrum… I am very qualified to speak about this I hope. I’ll try to use as unbiased language as possible
First of all, you are correct. It is generally true that most academics are left-leaning (obligatory not all, but you get the point)
In general, higher education attainment is associated with being left-leaning: academia is known to have extreme levels of education attainment (many jobs require a PhD). On top of it, academic jobs reward intellectual curiosity, do not tend to pay super well, tend to heavily rely on governmental funding… all of these are traditionally more associated with the political left or left-leaning. Still, there very much are right-leaning academics, they just don’t tend to scream around a lot about it
There are notable exceptions however. Economics is quite famous for being politically balanced, although what economics treat as left/right-leaning might be a bit different from the general public. If I remember, business schools (yes there are business professors!) tend to be more right-leaning. This is a smaller field and a bit more anecdotal, but quite a few prominent meta-science researchers are right-wing nutjobs: the “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” guy and the NIH director Bhattacharya guy are both COVID deniers
There are also fringe scientists as some others have mentioned, but most people within their fields don’t consider fringe scientists as part of the academia so to speak
Damn, I am right leaning but I do not deny COVID. Interesting though. I also noticed that in Computer Science too, there are a lot of right wing people, especially these days being pro-AI is often a symbol of being right wing.
First of all: you’re good! I think there are lots of centrist and right-leaning people in academia who are doing just fine; especially in the US lots of world-class unis are in deeply conservative areas too. Most of academia don’t discuss politics that much at all as long as one cares about science. I’d wager the political leaning bias is more from a population bias rather than systematic discrimination of any sort
I could imagine AI researchers being more right-leaning yeah. The stats I got were from personal anecdote and research being done about this a short while back… there might have been an update in the AI age
There are fewer right-wingers in academia, and they tend to work at schools with right-wing orientations. Turns out reality has a liberal bias.
what do you mean when you say “reality has a liberal bias”? I have heard another person saying that too but I did not get that.
The reason that there are less ‘right wing’ people in academia is that academia usually involves research and understanding of the world and its systems and most ‘right wing’ opinions do not hold up to investigation. So, therefore, reality itself appears to have a liberal bias as opposed to admitting you’re wrong about anything.
That’s the root of it, basically.
For the record, I agree with the statement, for what it’s worth.
It means most things hardline conservatives are angry or paranoid about are misperceptions, not realities. For example, most people who are different from you aren’t out to get you.
There are plenty of right wing academics but they are a minority. It probably varies by field too. In the core sciences that minority is probably the smallest and is greater in the humanities. My professor was a right wing scientist and we often clashed on values. I felt sorry for him at times because it would be his point of view Vs the entire research group. He is fundamentally a good person that can hold illogical and contradictory opinions that felt like they were emotionally based.
Depends on what you call “academics”. If you mistake phrase shifter courses like “business administration”, “politics”, or “law” as academic, then yes.
Nah not that specifically. I meant like in social sciences and humanities (other fields are welcome but my main motive was these fields).
Social sciences and humanities are a classic leftist field. And MINT scientists are usually too smart to be right wingers.
what is MINT? I am in STEM but I adore the people in social sciences and humanities. Sadly, humanities is dying especially in my country. Barely anyone wants to read social sciences and humanities, as we are a developing country and also just want money
MINT Mathematics, Information science, Natural sciences, and Technology.
In academia you are trained to not accept any claim without adequate evidence. Look at left wing claims vs. right wing ones and show me one that has better evidence on the right.
“Academics” is huge…
Theres fewer and fewer, but some avenues of academics a person wouldnt be swayed left/right solely by their knowledge and subject matter expertise that makes them an academic.
Off the top of my head, only economists have a right wing slant. But that’s because the wealthy bought off the neoliberals to deregulate everything, and everyone agreed that the only people who knew about the economy, were the ones who said Regeanomics was a step in the right direction.
Everyone else was just called wrong and haven’t had a real chance to try on smaller scales that it works.
Mamdani is a great example of someone who just does the easy obvious thing, the difference is him and his administration are actually trying. Doing it in a city with the GDP of most countries, is huge because it’s an obvious example of it working.
economists are glorified soothsayers. No better than the astrologists that could kind of sort of tell you when it was a good idea to sow based on the stars of back in the day.
Yes they have some interesting frameworks, have discovered a few noteworthy causal mechanisms and hold some predictive power… but if you take the self-fulfilled prophecy factor into account (“the economy will behave this way because economics and therefore you should behave in this same way which causes…”) I’m not so sure it’s all that impressive.
They’re modern day clergy.
Yeah…
That’s what I’m saying.
Doctors were “modern day clergy” at one point, so we’re historians, biologists, scientists, astronomers and almost everything else.
And they can be again.
Or even better none of them can be.
Like, you understand that economies are real things that need managed, and those people should review what works and what doesn’t.
The current economists recommending shit that clearly don’t work, are a negative to society. If they were gone, there be no negative. But why the actual fuck would you stop there and instead train economists to focus on different metrics than a handful of capitalists high scores.
They could study and determine what would help the most people and ensure basic needs are met.
That’s what economists could be doing, and it would be worth way more than paying them to do it costs.
Sorry, I didn’t want to come across as confrontational. Was just ranting in agreement.
I understand your frustration regarding the application of the discipline, and couldn’t agree more.
The way I see it, and the reason I used the word “clergy” is because there are a few critical elements they have in common with priests and magi, more so than doctors, biologists and astronomers.
1.- They are the official thought-leaders of “what should be done” to reach our notion of “paradise” (in the past: heaven/afterlife; today: financial prosperity)
2.- They are extremely close to positions of political power and leadership of empires (like popes and archbishops back in the day)
3.- They study what society worships (in the past: god(s)/enlightenment/the good life; today: individual choice/wealth/money/power)
4.- They study esoteric mechanisms that are a black box to most (“magic”) and have a fuzzy understanding about them themselves.
I think economics is instrumental to the growth of empires and by emergent design does things that don’t help most people. Feeds them with everything they need to grow: (a means to get/make) slaves, lies and poison.
With the cheap labor they create through misery, the false promises they sustain through their theories and the monumental amount of poisonous goods and services they tell us we need to “stay productive”, the economy is working perfectly fine as far as the most powerful people are concerned.
Maybe it’s a stretch. idk. Just my thoughts. What do you think?
I heard from many right wing influencers that Mamdani has failed, many New Yorkers are leaving New York, he had to take loans. Is it all true?
I heard from many right wing influencers
Why?
Influencers are lying grifters who just want the ability to influence others. Right wingers oubly so.
Stop listening to them or people who believe them
ok but you did not answer my question.
If you don’t understand that me calling them lying grifters didn’t answer the question on if you should believe what they say…
ok
Probably people who are curious and want to learn how the universe really is, who climb to the highest levels of Perry’s scheme of cognition, who use Sagan’s baloney detection kit, rather than supernatural and unfalsifiable excuses, to understand the cosmos. It’s part of the scientific method and great to learn new things, not mistakes but data for next experiment, and big claims require big proof, like defending a thesis should require. We are all waves of one ocean made of stardust, observing the universe, conscious elements billions of years old. DNA that survived all the extinctions so far, on the one habitable planet, and nothing to rescue us, but human cooperation.
If you want faith, it must allow room for doubt and mystery, rather than twisted to demand certainty and remain in Perry’s low levels overall. They could study the neurochemical ways high-control groups hook people and keep them with unhealthy shame/blame/guilt, threat of exile, conditional belonging, solution for invented problem, punish/reward cycles, and maybe choose to escape. Good luck!
You’d have to be fucking stupid to be right wing and generally academically inclined individuals are not stupid, so…
There’s probably a small bunch that claim to be right wing because they have a lot of money and greed eclipses intelligence.
I personally think if you are rich and politically active, you are just going for power. You certainly don’t care if your position is true or false as long as it preserves your wealth and power or increase your wealth and power.
At Uni i sometimes wished for a rightwing person just to debate things. Everyone agreed on most issues,so there we’re rarely spicy debates.
For debate, I’d be willing to take a different position.
I do this sometimes on Lemmy. “I’m with you on Sony and disc games, but here are the arguments their lawyers would make about it…”
I get annoyed when someone posts a “side” I agree with, but uses a complete zero-thought, easily-defeated argument to defend it. A classic one is “If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.”
Where I live, it is very rare to see left wing person. One of my classmate is so we just keep on debating on literally everything (I am kinda center-right) and it is the most fun thing I do in my university.
In my urban development class, someone said that clearing junkies out of the subway stations was a form of gentrification, which got nods and finger snaps from the class. I said that was the dumbest thing i ever heard,which got some tuts from everyone. The point is, it would have been interesting to hear her debate that point, make some arguments in favour,and then counter those from different perspectives,but the range wasn’t there.
Depends on country and context.
Where I live the higher your education the more likely you are to vote right. It’s mostly about what income you have.
Well in my country, we only have right wing to vote. We do not have a left (except for a few small parties and some labor unions are ran by communists or socialists). Most of people will either vote what their parents used to vote, or will vote the person most popular on social media. Many people have stopped voting as it is just a sham to portray some sort of democracy otherwise our country is run by army establishment and they mostly follow what US has to say. Most of us save money just to move abroad either to US, UK, and other Western countries or to UAE(especially Dubai), Saudi Arabia, and other Arabian peninsula countries.
Oh, they’re there. Sadly.
