A staggering truth of politics: few people can identify the central principle behind their political party.
The central principle of conservatism is consequentialism, or measuring our actions by their consequences. This places the focus on knowing reality before we study the individual.
We know what acts produce what results, so then we must choose our direction. There are no mysteries, only applications. Our “forward logic” is the idea that every result has a cause; if someone is poor, it is most likely the result of poor life decisions. As a result, it makes sense for us to pick the best results and act accordingly, in pursuit of the best of life, consisting of moral goodness, beauty and strength.
The central principle of liberalism on the other hand is a focus on the individual before reality. Each individual enforces this on others through equality, which is a principle by which whoever asks is entitled to the same rights as any other, and everyone else accommodates them.
This is a principle of putting the individual first, and reality second, and operates through a reversed logic that first assumes all people are equally competent and their ideas equally valid, and thus explains reality as a deficit in this equality.
One reason that few people boil these beliefs down to such essentials is that when you lay them out like this, it is clear that left and right belong on different ships heading in different directions.
Even more, it becomes clear that liberalism is an evangelical and proselytizing movement, where conservatism is the way a majority population passes knowledge on to its youngsters, and thus tends to be reactionary and disorganized, since it’s a laundry list of learning and not a single unified abstraction like liberalism. (As one marketer said, “Abstraction is cool,” mainly because it explains away the complexity of life in a few symbols.)
This leads us to a complex question, which is to wonder why rightists tend to support capitalism, while leftists seem to always agitate for socialized systems that distribute cost to the whole and use it to support the citizens.
As you may guess from the above, conservatives favor a reality-first principle which rewards those who are able to adapt. There are many reasons for this.
The first is practical: you want the best to rise to the top, and only the proven results to be retained. This concept is not radically different from Darwinian evolution or the scientific method.
The second reason is moral: those who do better should be rewarded and encouraged to do more good, both to incentivize them and to check the tendency of groups of people without accomplishments to gang up on those who are doing something useful.
However, conservatism can go too far in this direction. As with all group activities, successive generations from the source tend to imitate the successful methods of the past without understanding the goal. It is not so much that conservatives love capitalism, but that we recognize the need for a strong statement in favor of capitalism to keep back the opposite idea, which is socialism.
Socialism should be understood as a name that we give to a universal tendency, which is the idea that every person in a group should have an equal share in the yield, so that each person is happy and tranquility reigns. However, if we reward people equally, it ends up being a de facto subsidy for the under-accomplished because they get a reward for mere participation. The message of such a society is that excellence is irrelevant and doesn’t merit being rewarded.
On the other hand, for liberals the question of socialism is a moral one. Since liberalism is based in the individual, and considers the individual as the cause of all things in life, it cannot understand any reason why people would fight free handouts except some kind of personal dislike or intent to be cruel and/or stupid.
It portrays conservatives as greedy capitalists who love money and won’t give their excess wealth to the poor out of pure spite, and it believes that poverty, dysfunction and even national collapse are not caused by the poor life decisions of individuals, but by shadowy outsiders with a personal hatred of the people affected.
Again we run into a situation where conservatives and liberals are going in opposite directions. Conservatives believe in the consequentialist principle, which is that those who achieve good results should be given more power and wealth because they know how to use it. Liberals fear the ranking of individuals that occurs in a hierarchy, and don’t want to feel insufficient, so they insist on an end to testing ourselves with reality, which is achieved through equal acceptance.
Socialism exists in many forms. It is an eternal option, or one of those ideas that strikes all of us as we think about a particular question, but like many such eternal options it leads to bad places. Conservatives know these because they focus on results; liberals, who are more inclined to focus on individual feelings, don’t even consider it.
We can find the core principle of socialism — give equally to everyone so that the peace is kept — in social welfare programs, in entitlements, even in unions and school contests that reward the person who scores closest to the average result instead of the most exceptional. Whatever form it takes, socialism amounts to the same effect, which is a transfer of power from the exceptional to the mundane.
It is not surprising that the West has seen its fortunes plummet since the French Revolution. Yes, our technology has advanced, building on the work of our ancestors; everything else has been a series of lugubrious wars and social unrest events. When conservatives oppose socialism, it is this great averaging that they oppose, and it’s a more serious position than simply liking money or desiring greed.
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The question I like to ask the anti-Capitalists is who is the man with the most Capital?
Jesus Christ…
or,
Carlos Slim?
The Capitalist system is actually indestructible. Capital is, at its origin, “intangible credibility.” The anti-Capitalist seeks a world where man cannot earn increased credibility, i.e., intangible Capital. This intangible Capital can then be leveraged to gain and obtain tangible Capital. The anti-Capitalist desires to destroy this “capitalizing” at its foundation. His desire is to rid man of all credibility, i.e., rid man of his intangible Capital.
He will fail nonetheless.
Socialism is an attitude. It’s the idea that it’s more important to give everyone something, than to just reward those who do good things. I find it offensive because I think I need to be rewarded when I do well, and told clearly that I’m wrong when I don’t. Anything else is like bad parenting and leaves confused children behind.
Socialism takes life and reduces it to scurrying around inside a termite mound. This works well for termites. Not so well for humans.
That sounds true.
But how many termites do you know personally?
They might tell us a different story, in a language a lot like Mandarin…
I know quite a few termites.
Every fall, indeed right now, the air is full of them, clattering around on temporary dragonfly-wings, landing on any wooden surface and boring inside.
I spend a lot of time inspecting every piece of firewood before I burn it, checking for termites. We chat sometimes, about life, from our different perspectives, in a language a lot like Mandarin.
Equality. Thousands of years of antisemitism peaked with ww2 manslaughter. The jews had enough and consequently equality came to be. In america there’s also the blacks and the native americans. Equality is real, in that nature is always diverse. ‘Unequality’ is real in that some skills are more relevant to a given situation. Perhaps some are more evolved than others, but we’re not in any possition to judge. Otherwise we create antisemitism which creates equality.
Equality has nothing to do with socialism because socialism was before equality. Socialism is simply a subjective, feminine quality: To give for the sake of it.
Forward logic: Men do not understand their place in things. Forward logic has it’s place in businesses and sciences. In the ‘objective world’. But men have no place in governing this world. Governing means to care for it, tend to it. No reason is needed. It is a place for women, motherly figures. Men seize control. It is logical but…
The world can never be understood, it always changes and evolves. Men have a great role in society, with their forward logic, it is to manage businesses and projects. To work hard, produce and make money. Women have the role to spend this money! Women are supporters, more subjective, they give to everyone – fat, poor, lazy, ugly. Real men objectively accept this, they work because they like to and support the supporters.
You must have a politics which support people of all kinds.
American: America is founded upon the understanding of unison, US of A. If there’s no room for the people then that is simply a failure on your part. Nature is diverse, caring people will always be there, and they must be supported or they’ll turn uncaring instead.
Conservatism: Earth always supported everyone. It spends it’s resources, always. It is motherly, feminine, furthermore nature always changes, there is always new diversity.
Men always save resources and reach for new heights. That is conservative, but it has no place in governing. Conservatism exists as a political idea because men do not understand their place in things. All politics are manly.
Men have their place in businesses, in sciences. But no matter how much money you make, no matter how much knowledge you gather it is never possible to tell anyone how to live their lives. Governing must be womanly, caring and supportive of everyone. Women understand giving just for the sake of giving, men do not understand this. Mens role must be very small.
That which is relevant for the conservatist is that there is a blind-side to objectivity and building on what works aswell as it’s proper place in things. The responsible will look to how his party had a role in creating the problems we have today.
The french revolution is an historical anecdote. It simply means ‘suppressed people will revolt, controlling people make them bloody killers’. Let’s go back to the source, instead.
Humans have existed for two hundred thousand years. 15 000~ years ago, evolution happened, people grew crops and tamed beasts, food made populations grow. I consider this the most important node in time, in relevance to our problems of today. Traditions and system were born, our modern fatasses are a direct result of increase in well-fare and aggricultural revolution.
Passing knowledge on from one generation to the next is a slippery slope. Tradition is an undead abomination, it never dies and it makes it so that people do not think for themselves. Because of tradition, people do not take responsibility. They can be dutiful, but they remain stupid followers.
For instance, you say there is a central principle behind political parties. This is not true, there are only hordes of people following the shadows of long gone ideas. Central can belong only to individuals.
Darwinism: You do not understand evolution. It doesn’t need anyone to tell it who is and what is superior. That is not in accordance with evolution, that goes on on its own. This attitude is very left-brain. It compartmentalize – ‘this is good, this is not and I’m terribly and moralizingly angry that no one lives according to my rational’. Let the poor die out on their own. By the law of darwinism, let the homosexuals fuck each others butts to extinction. :) Why would we care about any of it?
Equality was a jihad long before the modern Jew, although it’s interesting to note that Judaism like other religions has had a gnarly vein of egalitarianism running through it. Luckily most Jews have seen through this.
Strangely, I’ve never had any concept of ‘equality’.
I simply don’t see it as real, in any sense, or reasonable to expect, or extend, either to myself or to anybody else.
Then again, I see everything and everyone as part of the same whole, and so who can say if any part is equal to any other?
The essence of it is more about variety than anything. Evolution always spread out, there is variety and change. This variation is beautiful, if all was the same living would be plain. All gray, but there are pretty colours to subjective reality.
Equality is a reaction to the very politics and left-brain thinking this site is about. Because it puts thoughts and ideas in the form of standards and ideals onto people. It puts religion onto people, probably this can never work. It belongs to ‘objective reality’, to thoughts, it has no place in living.
Rather living would be impossible without this beauty.
In theory everything could be the same, one gray blob, but for life to be that is impossible. There are no objective crows…or humans or anything else if it’s living.
I meant the crow part as an example, it turned into something quite humorous, it was not intended to be an insult – just to clarify.
The universal tendency is probably towards Social Democracy [*], since some analysts believe “the general thrust is not yet anti-capitalist” [**].
We may use the word “Socialism” as an alias for the Social Democracy, which is for re-distribution, welfare, equality, and so on. But not in the original sense with the distribution “to each according to his contribution”.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
** http://monthlyreview.org/2012/09/01/the-crisis
“Conservatives believe in the consequentialist principle, which is that those who achieve good results should be given more power and wealth because they know how to use it.”
it’s the parable of the Talents; the workers who are given 5 and 3 talents, double them and are given more, the one who buries his one talent, is stripped of his belongings for being a coward.
christianity was beyond left and right, until someone vulgarized it and made it a populist dogma, which at the same time clashes with antitheist, leftist ideologies
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