Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

The battle of nature vs. nurture, are we born who we are or are we a product of our environment, has pretty much been settled by Clinical Psychologists like Jordan Peterson: your genes determine who you are as a person, meaning you inherit the important ingredients like intelligence, conscientiousness and altruism. Intelligence most people understand even though it's politically incorrect to talk about, but that conscientiousness, the motivation to plan, act conservatively, and save, comes from your parents seems curious; and, altruism, putting others before yourself, is taught in many religions, but that you inherit those tendencies is also a rather new finding. Of course, it's only correlative, meaning the likelihood you will be like your parents is high but far from the same.

There is no mutual exclusivity between the three components of self: intelligence, conscientiousness and altruism; you can have any mixture of all three. Interestingly, whichever of conscientiousness or altruism dominates tends to predispose your politics: if you are more conscientious, you are a Republican, and if you are more altruistic, a Democrat. (This might help explain why so many children are the same political affiliation as their parents.) Altruistic people tend to be egalitarian which explains the appeal of Marxist equality doctrine; and conscientious people have much success in life which explains their Libertarian streak. Unfortunately, the two groups are often in direct conflict, and both sides think the other is misguided, venal or stupid. Conscientious people think altruists are self-righteous, elitist weaklings who want to control the lives of others, while altruists think conscientiousness people are selfish, heartless stooges, only concerned about things not people. In a Social Media environment, there seems to be no compromise between the two thought-patterns; we all want control after all, and our vision of the world to win out.