Conservative Culture Rewards Mediocre People

Conservative culture rewards mediocre people.There is a psychological reason for that.Becoming exceptional takes years. It takes discipline. It takes failure after failure after failure and the willingness to keep going. It takes decades of studying, practicing, earning, and proving yourself before anyone hands you authority over anything.Becoming mediocre takes no effort at all. You just show up and stay exactly who you already are.But mediocre people want the rewards exceptional people earn. They want the respect. They want the authority. They want the status. They want people to listen to them and take them seriously. They want all of it. They just do not want to do the work it takes to deserve any of it.So they look for shortcuts.In 2004 psychologist W. Keith Campbell at the University of Georgia ran nine studies on people who believe they deserve special treatment without earning it. Campbell found that entitled individuals expect favorable outcomes regardless of actual effort or contribution. They do not believe the rules apply to them. They believe they deserve more than everyone else for doing the same work or less. They expect special treatment not because of anything they have accomplished but because of who they believe they are.Campbell called this psychological entitlement.Campbell also found that psychological entitlement is correlated negatively with two of the Big Five personality traits: agreeableness and emotional stability. Entitled people are more disagreeable, more emotionally volatile, and more likely to respond with hostility when they do not get what they believe they deserve. They are not just lazy. They are hostile about being called lazy. They do not just expect rewards they did not earn. They get angry when those rewards do not show up.That is conservative culture in a single research finding.Conservative culture has built an entire ecosystem of shortcuts that let mediocre people feel powerful without earning a single thing.Conspiracy theories are a shortcut to feeling special. A guy who watched three YouTube videos on his lunch break thinks he knows more about medicine than a doctor who spent twelve years in training. A woman who read a Facebook post thinks she understands immunology better than the scientists who spent their careers developing vaccines. They did not study anything. They did not earn any expertise. They found a shortcut that lets them feel smarter than the people who actually did the work, and they grabbed it with both hands.Law enforcement is a shortcut to power over people. Two months of training and you have physical authority over everyone around you. You carry a weapon. You give orders. People have to comply. In almost every other profession on earth, authority comes from years of demonstrated competence. In law enforcement, authority comes from a badge. That is why it attracts the kind of person who wants power but has no interest in earning it the way a surgeon, a lawyer, or an engineer earns it.MAGA is a shortcut to being your hateful self in public. Before Trump, these people had to keep their ugliest impulses behind closed doors. They could not say the things they wanted to say at work. They could not behave the way they wanted to behave in public. Trump removed that barrier. He showed them that you can be openly racist, openly cruel, openly hostile, and still hold the highest office in the country. MAGA did not create hateful people. MAGA gave hateful people a permission slip.Religion is a shortcut to moral authority over people. You do not need to demonstrate moral character. You do not need to prove that you are a good person through your actions. You just need to claim that God is on your side. Disagree with a religious person and you are not disagreeing with a person. You are disagreeing with God. And nobody argues with God. That is the most powerful shortcut of all, because it makes the person holding it immune to criticism. You cannot challenge someone who has placed an invisible deity between you and them.Every single one of these shortcuts does the same thing. It gives mediocre people a feeling they did not earn. The feeling of being special. The feeling of being powerful. The feeling of being right. The feeling of being morally superior. Without doing a single day of the actual work it takes to deserve any of those feelings.These people do not want mastery. They want the feeling mastery gives you. They do not want wisdom. They want certainty. They do not want respect. They want obedience. They do not want to become extraordinary. They want the rewards extraordinary people get while remaining exactly who they are. Without doing any of the work it takes to be extraordinary.Campbell’s research makes it clear why this pattern is so destructive. Entitled people do not just passively expect things they did not earn. They actively punish people who challenge that expectation. They respond to criticism with aggression. They respond to accountability with hostility. They respond to being told they are wrong with rage. Because deep down, they know they did not earn it. And that knowledge is the most threatening thing in the world to them.And the problem is that confident idiots now have bigger platforms than qualified experts. A podcaster with no credentials reaches more people in a week than a climate scientist reaches in a career. A conspiracy theorist on YouTube has more subscribers than a peer-reviewed journal has readers. The people who did the work are drowned out by the people who found the shortcut.They did not do the work. They never did the work. They found shortcuts that let them skip the work and still feel like they belong at the table with people who did.That is conservative culture. Shortcuts for people who never earned a single thing in their life. And they will fight to the death to make sure nobody takes those shortcuts away from them. Because without the shortcuts, they have nothing. No expertise. No authority. No moral standing. No identity.Just a mediocre person in a mediocre life who never did the work.And they know it.SourcesCampbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., Shelton, J., Exline, J. J., & Bushman, B. J. (2004). Psychological Entitlement: Interpersonal Consequences and Validation of a Self-Report Measure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 83(1), 29-45.Twenge, J. M. & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe