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From
Townhall...
5 Reasons Liberals
Aren’t As Happy as Conservatives
By John Hawkins
Did you know liberals aren’t as happy as conservatives? Of course, you
did. How could you not know it after listening to them incessantly
wail, gripe, whine, and complain about everything? But, let’s
bring....drumroll, please -- the science! First, here’s the Pew
Research comparison between Republicans and Democrats:
The survey, released this week, points out several disparities based on
lifestyle, beliefs and political persuasion:
* Republicans are happier than Democrats.
* People who worship frequently are happier than those who don’t.
* The rich are happier than the poor.
* Whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks.
* Married people are happier than the unmarried...
About 45 percent of Republicans said they were very happy, compared
with 30 percent of Democrats. Republicans have been happier in surveys
going back to 1972, the Pew study notes.
Here’s more from Arthur Brooks:
In 2004, people who said they were conservative or very conservative
were nearly twice as likely to say they were very happy as people who
called themselves liberal or very liberal (44 percent versus 25
percent). Conservatives were only half as likely to say they were not
too happy (9 versus 18 percent). Political conservatives were also far
less likely than liberals to express maladjustment to their adult
lives. For example, adults on the political right were only half as
likely as those on the left to say, “at times, I think I am no good at
all.” They were also less likely to say they were dissatisfied with
themselves, that they were inclined to feel like a failure, or to be
pessimistic about their futures. Further, a 2007 survey found that 58
percent of Republicans rated their mental health as “excellent,” versus
43 percent of political independents and just 38 percent of Democrats.
Want to be a miserable person? Be a liberal. Want to have a happy life?
Be a conservative. Why is that the case? There are a number of reasons
for it.
1) Conservatives believe in personal responsibility: One of the tragic
facts of life is that nobody cares as much about you as you do. That’s
why, if you want to have a good life and be a happy person, you’re
going to have to take care of it yourself. Conservatives get this.
Liberals? Not so much.
Liberals spend a lot of time playing the victim and trying to come up
with ways to get someone else to fix their lives. “Well, if the
government forced some rich guy to give me more of his money, then all
my problems would be solved! If our society could just make this
change, then we could all dance in the moonlight with faeries and
unicorns! If the government just added one more program, then we could
teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, hold it in our arms, and
keep it company!”
One of the biggest keys to happiness is accepting that if you want to
be happy, you need to take personal responsibility for everything in
your life so you can do something about it. On the other hand, you want
to be unhappy? Act like liberals and expect other people to show up and
fix your problems.
2) Conservatives are more religious than liberals: There’s a school of
thought, largely embraced by liberals, that says religion is an
archaic, largely arbitrary set of rules that do little more than keep
you from doing all the “fun stuff” in life. That view leads to not
taking your religious views very seriously at best and atheism or
agnosticism at worst.
On the other hand, here’s an alternate view, one that many
conservatives hold. Religion, particularly Christianity, isn’t
out-of-date or arbitrary at all. Moreover, religion doesn’t keep you
from doing all the “fun stuff” so much as it keeps you from committing
sins that may be fun for a season, but ultimately end in sorrow.
We’re right, they’re wrong and that’s another big reason why so many of
us are happy and so many of them are not.
3) Conservatives are more likely than liberals to get married: Despite
everything you hear about divorce and unhappy marriages, people who are
married are much more likely to be happy than those who are single:
In 2004, 42 percent of married Americans said they were very happy.
Only 23 percent of never-married people said this, as well as 20
percent of those who were widowed, 17 percent of divorced people, and
11 percent of those who were separated (but not divorced) from their
spouses. Married people were six times more likely to say they were
very happy than they were to say they were not too happy.
Conservatives tend to place a considerably higher value on marriage
than liberals do. To conservatives, marriage is the bedrock of society,
whereas to liberals, it’s not all that important. This is one of the
reasons we have huge battles over gay marriage. Conservatives think
it’s dangerous for society to tinker with such an important tradition
while liberals don’t think marriage is all that valuable. It’s also why
“conservatives are twice as likely to be married.”
Twice as likely? Why, it’s almost as if conservatives believe all that
stuff they’re saying about marriage being the “bedrock of our society.”
Too bad liberals don’t look at it the same way. They’d be happier
people.
4) Liberalism just doesn’t work very well in the real world: If you
spend your whole life advocating ideas that make people’s lives worse,
that fall apart at the first touch of reality, and that rely on a
government that’s inevitably slow, stupid, and ineffective, it’s not
going to be conducive to your happiness. Liberal policies are
candy-coated rat poison that may appear appealing at first, but
inevitably do a lot of damage to everyone impacted by them. That’s what
happens when you back political policies based on how they make you
feel about yourself.
Conservatives don’t have that problem. We support policies based on
what works. The better you understand the world and how it works, the
easier life is going to be for you. On the other hand, if you spend
your whole life trying to slam a square peg into a round hole, it’s not
likely to lead to contentment.
5) Liberalism has turned into an extraordinarily harsh, divisive, angry
ideology: As a political philosophy, liberalism is centered around
hatred and divisiveness. Liberals don’t promote their ideas so much as
they try to turn people against those who get in the way of their ideas.
Liberals lie to minorities and tell them that conservatives hate them,
they tell women that men hate them, they tell the poor they should hate
the rich. They try to pit the successful against the unsuccessful, the
workers against the corporations -- and they regularly talk about their
own country like it is one of the most godawful places on earth. That
means liberals are, at best, extraordinarily cynical people who’re
willing to manipulate people for political gain -- and at worst, it
means that they believe all this nonsense, which would make the world
seem to be a very unpleasant place indeed. If you spend your life
seething over a litany of grievances you’ve created from scratch in
your own head, then you’re probably going to be an Eeyore instead of
floating on Cloud 9.
Read the column at Townhall.com
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