Dictionary of Micro Rants: Conservatism

Conservatism: a paradigm of shamefulness.

Conservatism is a cynical rallying cry against what liberals have wrought, when powerful conservatives pretend to favour premodern traditions while relishing the modern way of imposing the eternal dominance hierarchy. However, when preached by the poor, social conservatives, conservatism’s a preference for premodern myths that please, at least, compared to the modern ones that evoke horror and angst. Either way, conservatism is the sheerest chutzpah, the most appalling concatenation of noises by those with the least capacity for shame. Theoretically, a retrograde mindset is a check on the excesses of modern liberalism, but in practice the conservative either approves of the modern form of social engineering, worshipping the apex predators who emerge triumphant from the social Darwinian struggle, or else actually espouses a preposterous premodern worldview (Christianity, Islam, etc), as though she arrived from a time machine, skipping over the European Age of Reason. Conservatives pretend to cherish ancient wisdom, but they embrace either the stealth oligarchy, which deploys modern methods of social control, or else ancient theistic drivel.

The United States was founded by deistic hyper-rationalists who wanted to build a New World, free from Old World religious tyrannies. Today, the U.S. is perhaps the most conservative and thus the most confused modern Western society, reveling in the military power and wealth that flow from technoscience and from individualistic institutions (democracy and capitalism), while paying lip service to old time, authoritarian religion. “Freedom” and “liberty” are American shibboleths, but Americans have managed to make liberalism taboo. Liberalism, says the American conservative, is socialism, a form of tyranny in which the individual serves the State. But a stealth oligarchy can also be officially individualistic, as in the U.S since its founding. American conservatism is thus a colossal distraction, a carnival of follies that prevents many Americans from appreciating where they actually stand as victims of scientistic, self-destructive modernism.