What your emotions and morals have to do with your politics on natural health and constitutional liberty

Sunday, March 17, 2013 by: Michael A. Bedar, MA
Tags: morals, politics, liberty

(NaturalNews) Does the following describe you?

1. It confuses your friends that you hold a righteous (and well-justified) anger at the greed and destruction by corporations like Monsanto and Big Pharma for violating Mother Nature, and that, at the same time, you harbor strongly pro-individual freedom and Constitutional positions? ?
   
   
2. Because the mainstream political spectrum appears to not "get it" as far as the relationship between the morals of the natural world and the morals of the individual, are you unsure how to express where you fit in ideologically??
   
   
3. You have doubts you will ever find a political home that truly represents you and is large enough at the same time to win a majority of government seats?

To give an example, you wonder why can't (or aren't) more politically active people highly concerned about dishonest oil-spilling corporations, and fraudulent vaccination corporations...and just as much, the lying people in government that quietly sanction (and sometimes force) both of these.

Origins of Ideological Diversity

In the 1990's, I was seeking an advisor to help with research that I hoped would one day be published in a volume called "The Origins of Ideological Diversity." This publication would have explored the causes of political speciation (why viewpoints differ so much among similar people). I felt we needed to answer the question: how did so much diversity of political opinion come to exist, even for a human species which shares certain values like dignity, health, and nature?

None too soon, Jonathan Haidt, a Professor at NYU College of Business, appears to be rigorously studying what I never found an advisor for.

Why do I say, "None too soon?" There's a reason why is it important that we get clear on what in the human mind causes political fighting between people, many of whom might even want many of the same things. The reason is that in the last decade, the same decade in which Jonathan Haidt has been conducting studies on how political viewpoints form in the emotional mind, an exploding number of people have noticed the accelerating decimation of our actual (not just theoretical):

• Human health;
• Planetary ecosystems;
• And the existence of government of the people, by the people, and for the people whose duty is to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

However, a minority of people seems to perceive that the three above will go down the toilet all together, all too soon, unless they are defended all together. There's no real human health without human sovereignty, and there's no protecting human liberty or sovereignty by the government without a stable ecosystem. Individual sovereignty to grow consciously through our choices is interconnected with nature and health.

The main obstacle to achieving all three is that they are currently unlikely to be defended together by a majority of the people. Instead, in the mainstream media unlike on NaturalNews, those talking about human health and the ecosystem are too often not talking about preserving the sovereignty and liberty of the individual. Likewise, those talking about preserving the individual liberty and sovereignty are too often not explicitly talking about real health and ecology.

Approaching Problems with Political Psychological Literacy

Those who have the vision and political will to put an end to the evilness of unhinged corporations, reduce the domination of government over individual's lives, free natural health practitioners to serve the people, and stop the major ecological harms in order to allow for ecological regeneration, are currently in the minority. Sadly, many people see these goals as opposing one another, but this perception is unnecessary, and seeing their inter-relatedness may be a matter of understanding the mind.

It is possible that by becoming politically-psychologically literate in the moral and emotional foundations of political partisanship, as developed by Haidt and others, we will unlock the emotional and cognitive capacity of human beings to achieve all of these goals.

To be extremely clear, Dr. Haidt's work is just a beginning of what is needed for core human values of health, nature, and sovereignty to be reflected in the political decision-making process. In fact, his work itself may be skewed by researchers' ideological bias, a fact he would probably freely admit, based on an interview with him on March 10.

More Mysterious than the Mind

Many, including myself, believe a creator, a higher intelligence, or an invisible force is necessary to unite health, ecology, and rule by the People of a just government that protects human liberty. The importance of the supernatural most likely exceeds the importance of even the best studies on the moral and emotional foundations of political partisanship, in terms of accomplishing the solutions we need. However, we can see such elucidations of the human mind as one expression of the divine working on our behalf to give us tools toward the solutions.

Try Out the Tools, and Then Discuss

Among the tools that studies on the Moral Foundations of Political Partisanship give us is a fascinating and brief questionnaire that will help you find out about your morals, ethics, and values, and how they compare to both conservatives and liberals who have also taken the questionnaire. However, the real fun would begin when you come back to this article on NaturalNews. You would find out that you are "more like conservatives in this value," and "more like liberals in that value." It is possible that can find a pattern about what values and morals are most important to people with a NaturalNews bent, and then build up why those values are important to help strengthen us in creating the world we want. Perhaps you'll get as hooked on the questionnaires as I did and complete all of them.

What's more important than doing all these surveys, is doing whatever we can to bring large sections of the political spectrum into understanding, with their emotions and their morals, that they can do all of the following without feeling ideologically self-contradictory:

• We can caring about the nation's health, especially children's health - and yet reject the exponential enlargement of the child vaccination regimen
• We can restrict corporations from carrying out the manipulation of the genome and the death of the ecosystem and prevent Big Ag executives from being appointed to FDA positions - and we can still free individuals to opt out of government medical methods, grow front-and-backyard organic gardens, collect roof water, obtain effective organic food supplements, and birth their children naturally.

As more people come to know the part of the mind that gives us the emotional and moral foundations of our political viewpoints, more people can find it politically consistent to be pro-nature, pro-health, and pro-freedom simultaneously.

Sources used in this article:

http://www.righteousmind.com - Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
http://philosophytalk.org/shows/psychology-partisan-politics - The Psychology of Partisan Politics
http://www.yourmorals.org - where you can learn about your own morality, ethics, and/or values, while also contributing to scientific research on the way the "moral mind" works
http://www.moralfoundations.org - Why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes.

About the author:
Michael Bedar MA, BS, is a researcher, writer, and holistic wellness counselor. He is the associate producer with a founding role in the documentary, "Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days" and is the writer-director of "EcoParque." He now distributes approximately 50 film, ebook, and audio titles through YoelMedia.com. He manages a holistic health practice, facilitates local and online natural wellness and spiritual growth programs, and juices regularly. He helps people live in healthy homes, support their natural fertility, encourage their optimal nutrition, and come into their full presence. He is the Co-Director of Tree of Life - Bay Area, and he has an MA in Live-Food and Spiritual Nutrition from the Cousens School of Holistic Wellness. Bedar's BS from UCSD is an interdisciplinary concentration of Environmental Chemistry, Law and Society, and Design Anthropology.