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April 5, 2025 - Davis Aurini
11:46
Kholberg and Political Polarization

Can Kholberg's theory of moral development tell us anything about the current political polarization?

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Yesterday I filmed a video talking about Kohlberg's theory of moral development.
And one of the things I mentioned in the video was about how Kohlberg noted that women seemed to have an easier time with the odd-numbered levels, while for men, it was the even-numbered levels they had the easier time with.
And today I was mulling that over, and I started thinking.
Yesterday I filmed a video about Kohlberg's theory of moral development.
And one of the things I mentioned in it was how Kohlberg noted that women had an easier time with the odd-numbered levels, while men had an easier time with the even-numbered levels.
And I was mulling that over today and thinking, does this have any implications for this political polarization that we're seeing all across the Western world right now that is so bad, it has the potential to rip our civilization in half?
I was thinking there might be something to this because the two political parties, the two political orientations, do seem to have a gendered component to them.
And so what if there's three levels, the three feminine levels make up the left, and the three masculine levels make up the right?
And so I was playing around with this concept, and it seems to make a lot of sense, so I thought I'd share it with you.
Now, just to quickly go over the levels again, and I like explaining them using video games, games, as an analogy.
Because ultimately, this whole human world that we inhabit is a synthetic matrix of games that we layer over top of material reality.
And so the three major groups would be simple games, role-playing games, and then game designers at the very top.
So the first two levels are number one, punishment, and number two, reward.
So if we think a really simple platforming video game, the person focused on punishment is going to be trying to get to the end of the level without dying.
While the person focusing on reward, level two, is going to be taking lots of crazy risks because if you get 100 coins, you get a second Mario.
At the middle stage, you get role-playing games.
And the basic role-playing game is everybody assumes a role and plays that role.
That would be good boy, good girl.
How do you be a good boy?
How do you be a good girl?
We're going to play house.
Above that, you get rules-based games, where it's not just that you're playing a role, but you're playing a thief character, and so you have the ability to pick locks, but you don't have the ability to use magic spells.
So it's very rules-based.
And at the top two bits, you've got social contract, which is if you're designing a game, it has to be fun.
You have to engage the players with it.
You have to make them want to play.
At the very top, highest moral principle.
Not just should be a fun game that people want to play, but it should mean something.
There should be some higher element involved.
So if we break these gameplaying roles down and compare them to stereotypes of people that you get on the political left and the political right.
So at the punishment level, the punishment level, that bad people need to be punished.
Well, that's where you see your black block antifa.
You know, that's where you see these people that are burning Teslas, that are assaulting people in the streets.
The apparently lawless behavior, the really angry, you broke the rules.
You need to be punished right now.
And by the way, we absolutely, there are people like that on the political right.
Okay, these are just dominant tropes that I see.
And the next level, achievement.
The achievement people, well, that'd be your Andrew Tates, right?
I'm going to figure out a way to speedrun the game.
I'm going to figure out a way to bend the rules so that I can get all the girls.
Your tech bros would be here as well.
It's like, oh, hey, I just discovered a new technology that could drive us all extinct.
Gonna pursue it.
Just seek that achievement.
Not think about anything more complex than that.
With the middle, we get good boy, good girl.
And on the political scene, quite frankly, that sounds a lot like the HOAs, the bureaucrats, the people that are constantly punishing you for not doing what you're saying.
You're not being a good boy.
You said a bad word.
Not allowed to do that.
Got to go to jail, mate.
That'd be the good boy, good girl.
Then we get up to law and order.
And now, isn't it funny that despite the fact that one of our biggest problems on the right is the utter lawlessness of the courts.
I mean, just look at what's happening in Britain for that.
And yet on the right, we still tend to be very law and order.
There's a lot of people that are back the blue.
And even if we move away from explicit law enforcement, we get the debate bros, right?
Like the guys up here, like I was just watching the Crucible debate destiny.
And so Destiny's down here at Good Boy, Good Girl, where it's like, no, we just got to be nice.
We've got to have an open society.
People can do whatever they want.
Don't you get it?
And he's saying, just answer the question.
Just answer the question.
Yes or no?
Answer the question.
Very logical, formal, rules-based, as opposed to like, we'll all just be nice-based.
Then above that, you get the Lockean social contract.
You get William Gladstone and his bobbies.
You get that slick-willy Democrat politician.
You get the original social contract.
You know, it's like society's there so that everybody gets a vote in democracy.
Then when you come all the way up to the top, you get the foundational moral principle.
You get the calling to religion.
You get the God Emperor Trump.
And I want to add something right here.
These are more complex ways of playing the game, of being a moral person, of thinking about moral questions.
It doesn't mean that any stage is right or wrong.
It means the more complex stage is the more complex stage.
Warhammer 40K has a literal manifestation of the will to power become God, who's the living dead emperor on his throne.
But it's not a nice society, is it?
So, this isn't to demonize any of one of the stages, just to draw an observation.
On the right, or sorry, on the left, you've got like the angry Untermensch criminal class burning down Teslas because Elon's a bad guy.
You've got the HOAs, the bureaucrats that are constantly enforcing that everybody needs to play nice.
And then at the very top, you've got that very wise, smooth-talking politician who, the Lockean liberal.
On the right, we've got the achievement at any ends, the pickup artists, the capitalists, the tech bros.
Then we've got the law and order people that everything needs to be logical, everything, we need to, you know, prosecute the law, need the cops in the military.
And then at the very top, we have that higher religious calling.
And so, if you think of these two groups of three people, they're all just slightly out of alignment.
That does actually seem like a pretty good illustration of the problem we're having.
And it relates to probably the foundational issue with our society right now: the discord between the sexes.
Fundamentally, our society has fallen in love with rebellion.
And it's always easier if you want to break apart, if you want to break something apart, you don't seek the more powerful party to break it apart.
You seek the weaker party.
So, if you want to break apart a marriage, you go and whisper in the woman's ear because the woman is supposed to be helping her husband.
And it's no husband can be a good husband with a wife that's always trying to find a way that he's a bad husband.
No leader can be a good leader if his followers are trying to undermine him.
Similarly, if you want to take away kids from a family, well, you don't go after the mother and father to get them to turn on the kids, you go after the kids to get them to turn on the parents.
This has happened in many communist countries, it's happening with our education system in our countries now.
It's a classic trope from 1984, because that guy knew what he was talking about.
So yeah, that's my little analysis of how Kohlberg's theory of moral development, the breakdown of relations between the sexes, and the political polarization that we're having.
Ultimately, what we need to be doing is trying to see things from others' perspective and trying to support our loved ones as opposed to undermine them and find fault in them all the time.
Sometimes I feel pretty despondent about our chances, but at the same time, other times I feel okay about them.
So, you know, tell me what you think of that little breakdown.
It's just kind of something that occurred to me.
Hope you find it useful.
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