Amerika

Recently, as usual, it emerged that conservatives have no idea what conservatism is. They conserve traditions or something, but they have no idea why, and no expectation that it will succeed. This is why they are demoralized.

Some of this comes from a religion that idealizes passive martyrdom, for sure, but most of it comes from simply observing people. Place a group in a room and the badly-behaved will drive the good into a corner, then take over.

Just entropy, right? The universe grinds everything down. Just accept it and set up your own little castle and be happy there. Focus on your retirement plan, and your vacations. Fragment society a little further, be a civilization of one!

People give in to individualism — the philosophical definition: the individual before or above all else, especially the whole, which is what its opposite transcendentalism targets — this way. They give up hope and settle for a compensation, namely the small pleasures of desire.

The essence of the Right-wing however is a focus on order, which implicates the whole. To have order, you must have a transcendental appreciation of the whole, both good and bad. You have to accept “imperfection.” You know all of this is needed to keep the universe running.

Consequently, you also accept natural selection. You understand that “some are born to sweet delight, and some are born to the endless night.” You realize that poor people, unhealthy people, academics, journalists, and bureaucrats are weaklings who will try to destroy you.

The winners at natural selection will always be resented by the losers. The people who have found happiness in imperfection will always be resented by the sad and passive who are waiting for perfection to sweep in and raise them up like Jesus.

Even more, conservatives tend to accept that part of order is conflict. We do not see pacifism as good; we see it as cowardice that makes small problems grow big for others to face in the future. We know that ongoing conflict is how we get clarity on a lot of things.

Not surprisingly, conservatives favor academic freedom — part of independent thought — where liberals oppose it:

In surveys, people often express strong support for free inquiry in the abstract. But once academic freedom is tied to real-world trade-offs, such as offense, harm, reputation or political controversy, agreement tends to fracture.

Right-leaning respondents were consistently more supportive of academic freedom. They were more likely to oppose restrictions on offensive research and more likely to agree that academics should be protected even when their work provokes controversy. This pattern appeared not only in the UK, where universities are deeply entangled in culture-war debates, but also in Japan, where such disputes are less visible in public life.

Left-leaning respondents, by contrast, were more likely to emphasize accountability. They tended to support limits on research perceived as offensive or harmful, reflecting greater concern for social sensitivity and the potential impact of academic work on marginalized groups.

To the Right-winger, the “real-world trade-offs” are an inseparable part of reality. You do not get a perfect good option and a deliberately evil option; you get a few choices that are mixed bags but at least one will work for your needs.

Because there is no perfect symbol like equality — the goal of the Left — to which the Right aspires, it has no need for uniformity in messaging, nor does it see real world “inequality” as a harm. It is just part of the landscape and will never change.

This allows Right-wingers to believe that a healthy dialogue is more important than perfect messaging (at least until Christ or The Flag appear!). We see it as inevitable from the design of the universe that there will be conflict of ideas, and that most ideas will be gibberish anyway.

That shows us a better model than the collectivism-versus-individualism debate that the mainstream conservatives like to have:

These differences suggest that academic freedom is not a single, universally understood value. Instead, people interpret it through broader political worldviews. For some, it primarily means freedom from interference. For others, it is inseparable from social responsibility.

As part of understanding order, conservatives are focused on production of good more than suppression of “evils” by having a dogma. We fear interference because it allows the herd to pull down rising good things and replace them with more of its same neurosis.

That means that freedom from interference is not a goal, but a method. The goal is producing good as part of our part in the wider Order. We are less concerned with suppressing others. We view most unorganized thinkers as headed for self-destruction anyway, and want to let nature handle that problem.

In our experience, the worst outcome is having too much humanity because humans in groups inevitably tend toward a mental laziness that creates tyranny.

Humans do not succumb to entropy; humans are entropy if not guided by a transcendental realization. Forget “principles” — those are methods — we need a goal that fits existence, and that is adaptation to the natural order and maximizing our position within it.

If you doubt that humans are entropy, consider how much we are standardizing nature, and how this makes it fragile and ready for decay. We broke it down and now variations over time — like nicks on furniture or dents in a car — will finish it off.

If the Anthropocene describes a planet transformed by humans, the Homogenocene is one ecological consequence: fewer places with their own distinctive life.

Homogeneity is just one facet of the changes wrought on Earth’s tapestry of life by humans, a process that started in the last ice age when hunting was likely key to the disappearance of the mammoth, giant sloth and other large mammals. It continued over around 11,700 years of the recent Holocene epoch—the period following the last ice age—as forests were felled and savannahs cleared for agriculture and the growth of farms and cities.

Humans, who are obsessed by “equality” because it is a cornerstone of their social activity, impose equality on nature: because every person is entitled to a kill, they create tragedy of the commons where every human kills and soon the species is gone.

When humans get technology, they cover the ground in concrete and deprive animals of their species. Since every human deserves to live, there are soon almost infinite humans, and as their habitat declines, so do the animals and plants.

In this way, humans promote entropy through fragile sameness. This tells us that whatever is popular with the Crowd is probably dangerously wrong, although it will “seem” to succeed in the short term.

For this reason, conservatives value independence from the herd as more important than protecting the herd so that it can grow to unsustainable levels.

Even more, conservatives understand that people act in their self-interest alone, including that of group interests, therefore “truth” is unequal and varies wildly between groups.

This means that groups cannot coexist because they see different realities, but while the conservative solution is ethnic separation, the liberal solution is to produce a consensus/collective “truth” and enforce it with shame and suppression:

It is thus not surprising that questions of “political epistemology” have returned to the fore. On the individual level, we are right to worry about the epistemic impact of motivated reasoning, cognitive biases, and “political ignorance.” And at the systemic level, we are right to lament the rise of talk radio, cable news, social media, and the attention economy, along with the corresponding decline of local news, professional journalism, content standards, and so on. Trends in our political economy have indeed conspired with underlying human frailties to undermine the epistemic foundations of a stable and functioning democracy—even in its most minimal form.

Yet this diagnosis is also crucially incomplete, in ways that distort our search for solutions. When we understand the problem in epistemic terms, we naturally seek epistemic answers: better fact-checking, more deliberation, better education, greater media balance. We aim to develop the “civic” and “epistemic virtues” of unbiased, fair-minded citizens. And indeed, such projects are surely worth pursuing. The epistemic failures they aim to address have deeper roots in our political psychology, however—and overcoming them requires grappling with those roots more directly.

In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.

Every group acts only in its own interests alone. This is why diversity is destined to fail. But even more, the divergence between groups — races, cultures, castes, ethnic groups, religions — means that the only successful nations are mono-ethnic and hierarchical.

The conservative view of academic freedom recognizes that we are not all going to agree, and it is better to have groups splinter off and go their own way than to produce an artificial average by forcing everyone to think the same things.

Political correctness, woke, the censorship-industrial complex, and struggle sessions are all examples of Control or the attempt to limit what methods we can discuss in order to shape our thinking and regulate our emotional states.

Naturally, these politically correct agendas require mandatory speech because by limiting what we can discuss, it takes certain methods off the table like realism, and therefore, leaves us talking about only which variety of Leftism is least destructive.

As with most great mistakes, it justifies itself in terms of “reducing harms,” but forgets what conservatives realize, which is that producing the good is more important than trying to raise up those who cannot achieve it.

Leftism is winding down in disaster because much as it did in the Soviet Union, it committed civilizational suicide in the West. Now is a good time to think about the advantages of production over repression, because the latter has failed.

Tags: academic freedom, autonomy, collectivism, free speech, free speech for the dumb, independence, individualism, interference