If the linked article isn't obvious to you, I believe you can make a huge jump in understanding the world we live in by taking some time to understand it. This chart is key:
First of all note the relative middle -- the less ideologically driven. Lobbyists, financial people, Real estate people, defense contractors, and absolute middle! Travel Agents.
Why? Obviously, these people need to deal with BOTH SIDES to get their jobs done, so to some degree they see both sides.
One the left we have lawyers, academia, government workers, media and psychiatrists / psychologists as opposed to physicians ... more centrist, but clearly on the right. Why? In the medical case, there is nothing much more REAL than life and death ... blood, guts, sickness, pain, are all very REAL, and they will likely happen to even YOU!
This chart makes it obvious that real is right, abstract is left. Dealing with the human mind/consciousness is very fluffy and abstract compared to physicians. Law is a completely human created abstraction, a set of rules reified by legal system of man, by man, and for itself like all other human systems ... "the house wins", and "the house" of western society is the lawyers. When you are a lawyer, professor, government worker, etc, you are doing for and to "them". YOU are special, YOU are in authority with power.
What is on the right? The real world ... reality, "stuff", people that build things and work with real bodies, buildings, materials, growing things. MDs, dentists, truckers, construction, mining, etc. Stuff that "bites back" ... you screw up, even a little, and the building falls, your business fails, the left wing folks regulate you out of existence, somebody gets electrocuted ... real stuff happens, maybe to YOU!
Now a lefty is going to tell me that "the smarter better educated people are on the left"! Maybe so ... likely more people with higher degrees are there, but degrees are not the same thing as "smart" in my book. I've met a lot of people with a lot of degrees who apparently wasted a lot of money to be more expensively wrong.
Over on the right you KNOW how brilliant your "brilliance" really was. The building stands, you find oil and can make a profit, you sell enough cars and service them to stay in business, the patient lives. Interestingly, notice how the medical specialists are farther right than just physicians in general. The specialists are more educated about a specific piece of reality -- the heart, the liver, the bones, etc ... they are less abstract even than the physician relative to those parts of reality, thus farther right.
Compare engineers with electrical contractors. For one thing, electrical contractors are real businessmen and of course engineers are more abstract and generally more educated. The more theory / abstract education you get, the more left you go -- especially because "education" today can be obtained without understanding anything about philosophy, theology and history -- studies that tend to make one feel a bit less hubris!
The whole article is a worthy read and it is not long.
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