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submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by Pierre121000@lemmy.ml to c/psychdphil@lemmy.ml

From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0, and more precisely https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5

Study 3a included a survey of 130 U.S. residents (64 liberals, 36 conservatives, 31 moderates), each of whom was given 100 “moral units”.
Participants were asked to distribute these units according to their capacity to empathize with and behave morally toward the categories featured in 16 concentric circles.

If you want to put these 100 units in the 16th circle then you wouldn't have any left to allocate to your family(, even if they'd be conceptually be included by selecting outer circles).
Here are the 16 circles, from close to increasingly distant :
(1) all of your immediate family,
(2) all of your extended family,
(3) all of your closest friends,
(4) all of your friends (including distant ones),
(5) all of your acquaintances,
(6) all people you have ever met,
(7) all people in your country,
(8) all people on your continent,
(9) all people on all continents,
(10) all mammals,
(11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds,
(12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae,
(13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms,
(14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees,
(15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks,
(16) all things in existence.


Like most of us, psychedelics made me realize/experience that we're all one.
Christianity also helped me(, among many other things,) to realize how much of a sinner i am, so my mindset should be to live a life entirely devoted to make up for my past sins, at least as much as i can.

Now our modern civilization has erected selfishness as a pillar, as logical, as a human nature that shouldn't be changed, with our hedonistic&materialist goals, and we will( continue to) bear the expected consequences. There's a cynical machiavelism behind most selfish/nationalist decisions, instead of an insistance on researching/discovering/spreading publicly the most moral solution we could find, after important efforts mobilizing a sincerely concerned nation.
There wouldn't be any need for constitutions or laws if everyone was christian, always preoccupied with 'the common good'/'being the most virtuous'/'all of Us/us instead of them', in all situations. Of course perfection is usually unattainable, but it doesn't mean that there's any other aim worth walking towards.

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[-] riskable@programming.dev 2 points 4 weeks ago

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." -John Muir

It's one of my favorite quotes. You'll typically see it paraphrased like this:

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."

When I first moved from Massachusetts (aka "the north") to Florida (aka "the south") I mentioned this quote to a friend I had recently made and he thought it was absurd. Turns out he was (and probably still is) very conservative.

That was about 20 years ago. Today, I realize just how "family-centric" (and local community-centric) conservatives are. It's why liberals/progressives view conservatives as, "not being able to empathize with anything past their noses."

It's also why conservatives can't envision a good society or social structure that doesn't involve churches. That's where they decide who and what matters outside of their family.

this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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