Being a conservative simply means taking a gradual approach to social change and particularly with respect to the financial, family and military traditions that affect status and political power, which they are skeptical of. Conservatism means being skeptical that our visions of the future will come true, and looking at the world as what people ACTUALLY DO not what we WISH they would do. In that sense, conservatism is historically scientific even if linguistically archaic. Conversely, while liberalism is linguistically modern, it is utopian, idealistic, contra-observation, contra-history, and therefore anything but scientific. The differences between these two philosophies are vast and numerous, but the one that is most important, is the difference between the reliance abstractions from experience in conservatism, and the reliance on abstracting experiences in liberalism. This may seem a complex idea, but liberals try to extrapolate the daily experience into the extended order of human cooperation. THis is called ‘induction’. Conservatives synthesize the actual experience of aggregate human activity from history. This is called ‘deduction’. Induction is a process that we are not sure, despite the vast effort of philosophers, exists. In other words liberalism if faulty on scientific grounds. It is a religion.
This language problem has always been an issue for conservatives. Liberal dictums may sound scientifically sound if one induces from experience. Conservative (dictums) are sensible when one deduces from abstractions of history. And everyone must use these shortcuts, because too few of us possess the knowledge to make rational judgements and therefore must rely upon basic principles when making decisions. In fact, rational thought is applied to the vast minority of choices. Most decisions are made by habit. The rest according to shortcuts.
For the vast majority of people from either conservative or liberal, neither induction or deduction is a rational process of choice, but instead, a process of identifying analogistic sentiments: it’s the act of pattern recognition rather than reason. Pareto called this process of pattern recognition “residues and derivations”, others called them “Metaphysical Judgements” or “Sentiments”. Contemporary thinkers and public intellectuals call them “beliefs” or “biases”, or “science or religion”. And our language incorporates these different sentiments. Our arguments do as well. Our narratives, myths, popular fiction, entertainment, status aspirations do. But so do your political rhetoric, which, because reason would be a technique unavailable to the masses, rely entirely on a complex web of constantly warring sentiments wherein the citizenry seeks confirmation bias, rather than a simple argument consisting of reason, where the citizenry seeks both consensus and falsification of their biases. In other words, where people are skeptical – conservative and rational.
Utopianism is a technology that people use during periods of prosperity. Because we have been artificially prosperous due to the discovery and exploitation of a continent, we as a nation are notorious for predicting an optimistic future that cannot or has not occurred. The public dialog over the causes of our prosperity is often inaccurate and self-congratualtory rather than factual. We have transformed our culture of evangelical christianity into one of evangelical democratic secular humanism.
Conservatives are skeptics. They may speak in antiquated language, because antiquity is their source of their language. They may fail to articulate their position effectively in contemporary terms because of that language, but regardless of the source of their language, the content of their language is strategic, intelligible and rational. And it is not just a language, but a methodology that represents their strategy for social order. They ACT conservatively, think conservatively, and treat the world conservatively.
This conservative strategy and conservative activities are why conservatives are, in general, more prosperous – and frankly, happy. And the sacrifices that they make in order to be prosperous are material to them. They remember them. And therefore they resent those sacrifices being ’spent’ by others who do not make the same sacrifices.
Monetarists and capitalists are not conservatives. They may hide under conservatism. But they are not conservatives. The conservative class is a military, middle and craftsman class and it always has been and always will be. It is the ‘residue’ of the european fraternal order of soldiers at the bottom, and at the top, it’s a ‘residue’ of the middle class movement that revised and adopted civic republicanism during the enlightenment as a way of transferring power from the kings and church to the middle class. it is an alliance of the military and middle class.
Liberalism (socialism, communism) is a ‘residue’ of a union of the priestly cast and the peasantry. Academia is simply an outgrowth of the church. The peasantry has always allied with the church, and the church has always had power because of it’s support by the peasantry.
And that said, we do not have a separation of church and state. Our state religion is now democratic secular humanism. We are now a state-run-religion using the myth of division of church and state to oppress (or reform) religions so that we can have a state sponsored church.
That’s it. That’s the articulated conservative position.
The republican party collects conservative coalitions. The republican party is not a conservative party. conservatives join the republicans because they have no choice. They see the party as corrupt.
People are complex and only join parties because of limited choice mandated by our ‘winner takes all’ form of government, which fosters class warfare.
In fact, all political decisions exist on a spectrum or bell curve. There are a myriad of political decisions to be made. There are a myriad of people with different abilities to understand each political opinion. Each person is interested in a myriad of decisions. Parties are collections of people with opinions. Very skilled people tend to be highly unsatisfied with party choices. Very unskilled people tend to simply support their party of nearest interest. Parties therefore pick platforms that make enough people happy that they can get into power.
Arguing that conservatives want to keep things asa they are, is a silly argument. The objection is simply illogical. The question instead, is whether liberals propose a solution that conservatives can live with, and wether conservatives can propose a solution that liberals can live with.
The difference between social classes are differences in Time Preferences (between “consume” or “capitalize”, or gratification now versus gratification later). Longer (lower) time preferences are only possible if you have the ability to comprehend long term time preferences. This is another reason why social classes are organized by intelligence, and why a market economy tends to organize us into economic classes according to our application of intelligence to the satisfaction of OTHER PEOPLES WANTS, instead of our own. Time preference affects not only a dimension covering an individual’s perception of gratification. It’s a second dimension that describes whether his gratification now or later is served by providing solutions to himself or to others. This is the moral lesson of Adam Smith – that capitalism creates a virtuous cycle.
If we had listened to the liberals in the last century we would have ended up like either Russia or China. If we had listened to conservatives we would not have had our progressive social changes, but we would not have corrupted our financial system using Kenesnian inflation. It’s the competition of ideas that gives us the choice as a body politic.
It is the combination of LIBERAL OBJECTIVES and CONSERVATIVE METHODS that provides the means of achieving shared goals.
Lets say that again. Liberal objectives are moral desires. Conservatives methods are moral means. It requires both these tools to achieve moral ends. The problem is, conservative methods take time because they require the learning and adaptation of people to calculative processes. These processes have nothing to do with religion. Christianity is largely a religion of the poor. Protestantism is perhaps the most important religion for generating wealth in the west as it is a class religion. Secular humanism is a feminine religion just as Aryanism (expansionist civic republican tradition of the initiatic fraternal order of city-defending soldiers) is a masculine religion. We do not need all to believe one thing, share one goal, work according to the same rules. If we did, we’d break the principle of the division of knowledge, labor, time, and intelligence.
WHat people really want when they seek universal agreement is to concentrate labor, knowledge, time and intelligence on their goals at the expense of other people’s goals. Since people are unequal in their ability, in their class goals, in their cultural goals, in their age and experience, in their knowledge and in their intelligence, then we must divide up our actions into bits and pieces which we cooperate with each other to achieve.
Democracy as we have implemented it is a winner-take-all political order. It foments class warfare. It does not foment class cooperation.
We need a government that is a return to the division of labor and division of classes and time preferences.
Democracy is a failure as we have implemented it. Because we confuse the value of the transformation of power inherent in democracy with the universal aspiration of classes, cultures, ages, generations, and abilities.