FUTURE NOIR The world is a beautiful place. The essence of Conservatism is joy a

FUTURE NOIR

The world is a beautiful place. The essence of Conservatism is joy at present happiness over future utopian perfection. The minute and subtle improvement of the existing art and artifice over the crass flatulence of dramatic public assaults on our senses. The self knowledge of contribution, over the attention seeking of public recognition. It is the politics of the private. The harmony of uncoordinated achievement, made possible by uncoordinated plans.

NYC is a declining, decaying memory of it’s Anglo Dutch past. It has become the mirror of the extended slum of Los Angeles, separated only by the architecture and order of it’s anglo heritage, and the interdependence between it’s financial sector and the war machine that is washington DC. The city’s gothic legacy is obscured by the implicit praise of temporal consumption and the consequential irrelevance of a mandate for production. It is a society only in that it is so perversely anti-social.

There is nothing beautiful about it. Nothing to be learned from it. It is the expression of consumer sedition. The brightly burning flurry of consumption by locusts. It’s a dead carcass being feasted upon by every passing scavenger, and attracting vermin by the scent of its decay.

The world has moved on. No civilization in history has survived urbanization.

Although we did not know why until recently. The formal institutions of economic calculation we call ‘property’ which require that we act, and the informal institutions of manners, ethics, morals which constrain us from acting, can no longer operate in concert. We have made significant progress in the development of our formal institutions, by implementing credit ratings – the equivalent of ‘reputation’. Credit is an institutional memory of our formal and informal adherence to the social contract.

But it is not enough. When combined with easy credit, consumption increases without corresponding increases in productivity. And from that one act, men become locusts, and the fecundity of the upper classes is consumed by the malthusian fertility of the lower classes.

And over time, only the most durable monuments of stone leave a record of our having existed at all.