What is Conservatism?

 

I don't think that conservatives are evil.  Thinking of conservatives as "the bad guys" is totally wrongheaded and ineffective as a strategy, because it misses the point.

I think that conservatism is something that happens to most people - probably to everyone, to one degree or another, especially as people get older, although different people become conservative in different ways.  As they age, people become more and more stuck in their ways.  It becomes more and more difficult to change your mind.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," as the saying goes.  People become more and more convinced that they are right, more dogmatic, more authoritarian, less and less open to new ideas.  It happens to everyone.  In a communist country, or a country that was formerly communist, old people become conservative communists; in a Muslim theocracy, old people become conservative Muslims, and so on.  The ideological filters through which people understand the world harden, until people are incapable of removing them or even imagining what it would be like to take them off, and try a different filter for a while.

This sounds like confidence, or pride, and there's probably some of that in there.  But I don't think that's the predominant emotional motivation behind conservatism, which I see as something closer to annoyance, or irritation.  One becomes convinced that one's own perspective is "common sense," the basic, fundamental intuitive basis for all of truth that all conscious people have in common.  One becomes incapable of imagining how it could be possible to access any kind of truth in any other way - because one is not experiencing other cultures which operate under different assumptions - or if one does, one only does so in a profoundly alienated way, with fundamental mistrust.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Capitalism is Ending

Image
  Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hardly matters;...
Read more

Against Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug

Image
  CURTIS YARVIN IS A POSTMODERNIST  "They Hate Us For Our Freedom"   Since 2007, there has been a tiny, marginal movement on the internet, or several overlapping movements, started by a person named Curtis Yarvin, better known by his assumed name, "Mencius Moldbug."  (I'll use that name; it's less obscure.)  Spreading out from Silicon Valley, where it first became trendy, the movement(s) have been known by various names.  Moldbug originally called his political philosophy "formalism" - at that time, he was advocating for the government being run in the style of a corporation - especially a Silicon Valley startup - with a powerful CEO.  But that never caught on, and he abandoned it in favor of "neo-cameralism."  But this turned out not to capture anyone's imagination either, and so other names appeared: the Dark Enlightenment, neo-monarchism, and most famous of all, the "NeoReactionary movement" - NRx for short.  Are all thes...
Read more

Lenin the Moralist

  "Unprincipled practical politics are the most impractical politics."  - V. I. Lenin  It will probably cause me to lose friends all across the political spectrum when I say that the problem with Lenin was that he was too moral.  Deal with it.  Moreover, modern-day soi-disant Leninists are even more moralistic than he was - and therefore, all the more romantic and delusional, and their analyses all the more pointless. I do not mean to imply that Lenin was not responsible for the deaths of many people - he was.  Nor am I saying that Lenin did not commit enough atrocities - that he was not violent enough, not ruthless enough, too timid to accomplish his goals, or anything of the like.  No, no, no.  My point is that Lenin's ideology diverted sharply from Marx's critique of political economy, and in part this was because he tried to reinterpret Marxism into a kind of moral campaign, when Marx had intended nothing of the kind - and, by the way, Lenin...
Read more