For the past millennium, being conservative-minded — valuing realism over human notions — has been a losing proposition.
Even more, it feels like supporting the idea of the good itself is also a path to constantly being disappointed. It has even become a cultural icon: we refer to people who rationalize losing as “being philosophical about it” and acknowledge the trope of the conservative, fists tightly clutched around whatever truth they were trying to save, going down with the ship. Or the lonely intellectual retreating from society.
Evil always wins, or at least mediocrity. Everything always gets worse and when a chance to fix it comes along, someone snaps up that opportunity, seizes the attention and redirects it to something profitable. No wonder people are exhausted. Modernity is hell to which we are sentenced to live out our terms as Cassandras howling into the wind.
Rightists have lost any expectation of winning and so, naturally, they do not win. Instead they make prosperous homes for their families, retreat into work and religion, but can be counted on to come out of the woodwork any time that their nation-state needs saving. They have entered into an unhealthy symbiotic codependency with the Left. This shatters them inside and makes them unstable.
The Left, of course, will insist on something like “the arc of history” or another fiction that supports their founding myth. In the Leftist view, nature is bad and egalitarianism is good, so any movement away from natural order and toward an order based on egalitarianism, in which human preference is more important than its results when applied, is good. To them, decay is good and so they insist on celebrating it.
But on more practical terms, it becomes clear that the Right has failed because it is unprepared to deal with the new reality of civilization during times of decay. All of its failings come back to that misunderstanding. Let us look at three key areas where the Right simply cannot grasp the task before it:
1. Entryism and Assimilation
Bruce Charlton gives us the clearest picture of how the Right inevitably gives way to the Left:
Because even when a genuinely non-Left (i.e. religious) group speaks in the public sphere, that aspect is filtered; such that what appears has moved the debate onto the core secular Left ground of ‘utilitarianism’ – the calculus of human pleasure or suffering in this mortal life.
…Therefore all supposed ‘victories’ of the ‘Right’ are merely reinforcing the deep-Left agenda.
The point here is that if you get faked out into using the language of your opposition, you will program yourself with their assumptions, and will then re-interpret your own political outlook as if it were a variant of theirs. At that point, you defeat yourself not by losing but by winning, and only later finding out that you carried the virus of the enemy with you.
In its most virulent form, this process can be seen through conservatives who endorse equality in any form. Conservatism does not support individualism, equality, freedom, liberty, feminism or anti-racism; it is an entirely different thought process than Leftism, based in recognizing an order bigger than the individual human rather than wanting the whims and wishful thinking of that individual to take precedence over reality.
The only way to understand the Left is to understand the Right, which is based in the idea of order, form, principle and purpose in unity with the world instead of as a human counterpoint to it:
The view of politics which the average person has come to possess, delineates things primarily according to economic policies – with communists and socialists on ‘the Left’; and laissez-faire capitalists or economic liberals on ‘the Right.’ This would leave the true – historical – Right out of it altogether, or leave it with a false position vaguely off the centre. Some modern Rightists helpfully compound this problem by terming themselves ‘Third Position’, and claiming to be ‘neither Left nor Right.’
A far more accurate way of understanding the above would be to put The True Right on one side (representing as it does; hierarchy, spirituality, organic unity…) and position both communism and laissez-faire capitalism on the other side as two different forms of the Left (valuing: equality, materialism, individualism – socialism is still essentially individualism; it is the banding together of individual egos for mutual benefit. Laissez-faire capitalism / economic liberalism literally arose out of the historical Left against the Right.)
This is what is being referred to by the schizoid nature of the Left. The Left arises out of an inversion of the Right, but it has at its disposal many different means of negating the ideals of the Right. These often appear to be the complete opposite of one another. Consequently many of the ideological oppositions of our time are in reality different versions of the Left squaring off against one another.
For those wanting to understand the Right, which most Rightists do not, it is worth looking into some writings on conservative theory and application.
The goal of the Right is to have an order based around the best that life has to offer, instead of what the Leftists want, which is an exclusively human order. The Right recognizes the importance of history, customs, heritage, beliefs, values, future, hierarchy, social order, organization, culture, philosophy, nature and other qualitative intangibles. The Left recognizes on the tangible, which is the individual and those it socializes with that make it feel more important than the natural world around it.
Whenever the Right gets sidetracked to intermediates — patriotism, equality, liberty, freedom, diversity — that may be important on their own but are not a whole plan for achieving the goal of the Right, it becomes weak. Each of these things is inherently Leftist because they are the assumptions that trigger an egalitarian viewpoint. If you accept that our goal is freedom, your next thought will be that then we need to abolish all things that stand in the way of freedom, including heritage and values. Next thought: culture must die, and wealth must be redistributed, so that everyone has “freedom.”
Rightists continually fail on this front because they get trolled into doing the footwork of the Left. “Well, we both agree that we want freedom, right?” says the Leftist. “Well, then, the best way to have freedom is to make everyone equal.” The conservative, outgunned because he never thinks along these lines, agrees, and only figures out that he was conned twenty years later.
2. It is Not Enough to be Correct.
Many a Rightist has consoled himself, after watching the herd boot away another chance to do good and rush headlong into the embrace of evil which dangled tantalizing illusions before their noses, with the idea, “Oh well, I’m right anyway and they’re just big poopyheads out there for not getting it.”
However, being right is not enough; you have to be both right in the correct context, and then put your plans into action instead of (like 99% of conservatives) staying home and working on your own stuff.
First let us examine a statement by a cynical writer. He knows what his audience wants to hear. He tells them that they are victims, and that someone else has ruined their future, so the obvious conclusion is to go smash down that Other. Like most good writers who are bad thinkers, he is doing it for the popularity points and not because he believes he is right.
His statement is correct in isolation, but off-the-mark when interpreted in the context of the broader question to which it points:
Of course one might ask why blacks would have any interest in most of what has been taught in American schools. Europeans trace their intellectual lineage from the invention of writing in Sumeria in the mid-Fourth Millennium BC through Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, their literary heritage from the Gilgamesh Epic through Tolkien. Blacks had no connection with this and did none of these things. It isn’t of their culture.
Cities have been the heart of the intellectual and artistic in all civilizations, as for example Athens, Rome, Florence, Vienna, New York. By contrast, blacks have destroyed city after American city after American city. Trenton, Camden, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Flint, St. Louis, New Orleans, Milwaukee. At one time in all of these one could live, walk at will, send one’s children to the schools. Now, no. Violence, crime, racial attacks, and illiteracy drive the civilized to remote suburbs. This is not my culture and I see no reason to apologize for it.
Massive popularity blast. White people are tired of being told how bad they are because they oppressed Africans. At the same time, Africans seem to be present in a whole lot of cases where pointless violent crimes occurred. On top of that, white America has felt that it was held hostage to black America during race riots, Ferguson effects and constant payouts for affirmative action and civil rights guilt.
White America wants to hear about how black people are not good, and how they should probably be sent far away, because they are a threat and have humiliated white America.
At the same time, this misses the broader point. No two ethnic groups can live in the same nation without absorbing one another. That means no more white Americans, only white-Asian hybrids, assuming you sent the Africans away of course. And what will the future of that nation be? It will not recapture the past.
Of course, that writer has already taken the first step because he has a Mexican wife. For him, diversity is not a problem; Africans are. However, as history shows us, it is diversity itself that is a problem even among groups from within the same race, as in Northern Ireland. So he is both correct, and not correct, because he offers a false solution.
Even if he were to upgrade his solution, the question then becomes, what are you going to do about it? As one writer opines, the Right is not ready for action:
Righties who like to build churches will build a church and worship in it. Lefties who like to build churches will build a church, write a book telling people how to build churches, go out and convince people church-building is the thing to do, run workshops on how to finance, build, and register churches, and then they’ll offer to arrange church guest speakers who’ll come preach the Lefty line.
Righties like hierarchy, so often think of the Lefties as taking marching orders from George Soros or whoever in a very hierarchical fashion. Not so much. A lot of left-wing organization is very decentralized, and they negotiate with other lefty groups as to exactly how they’ll do things and time things to not hurt each others’ work, so the labor movement’s march is not derailed by black-bloc window-smashing.
While this article has some dodgy data in it — the problem with the Confederates, for example, was resource and industry shortage, not disorganization — the truth of it is this: Leftists are fanatics and they are committed 24-7 to making things happen. Conservatives are not individualists, nor are they group-directed like the Left, but this makes them weak.
Conservatives engage in the perpetual fiction that, because if each person did the right thing, civilization would work out better, they will do the right thing in their personal lives and hope everyone else does the same. This is why people call the conservatives “the stupid party,” because there is no other word for this than stupid.
People do not do what they are not forced to do. Conservatives do not want to be forced to do anything, and because they have already accepted certain forces as sunk costs, do not notice that they are already being forced to do most of what they do. And so, doing “the right thing” at home amounts to nothing.
The Left understands force. They realize that unless people are scared to do otherwise than join the protests and work like fiends to make it all happen, they will sit at home and commit petty crimes. When the Left wins, it has no problem wielding totalitarian threats of violence, public shaming, destroying of lives and friendships, and even mobilizing the masses into a human wave that takes 50% casualties and has the machine guns mounted at the rear of the army, not the front like armies that are actually fighting for something.
Conservatives are broken in their outlook. They know that they live under a Leftist myth, equality, and with a Leftist system of government, democracy, at some level. They have shattered their own consistency of thought in order to accept defeat and declare it victory, and since they have accepted that they cannot control the future of their society, they naturally give up on everything except themselves.
Leftists are individualists, but they sacrifice greatly for the ability to be individualistic. What do conservatives sacrifice for, except wasting their time at jobs, paying taxes and dying for democracy in foreign wars? Conservatives are more competent than the Left but never put it into action because people volunteer, do what is convenient, and then go home, leaving the task to fail.
I have seen it time and again. Every now and then you get an issue that fires up conservatives. But nothing makes them as fanatical as ideology makes Leftists, and for this reason conservatives lose because they are not committed enough nor disciplined enough. While the Left organizes to take over cities, the Right are out there lifting weighs, filing taxes, buying stocks and mowing their lawns.
This is why it is not enough to be right. You have to address the actual issue and come up with a working plan, not just an emotional judgment. And then, you have to put it into action not as a hobby but as a full-time obsession. If you are not willing to do that, you are just posing at being a conservative because it makes you feel good to blame someone else for your life failures.
3. We need an agenda outside of modernity.
Modernity began with The Enlightement™ and has steadily won victory after victory since that time. It is the religion of progress, or making humanity more powerful even when this is a bad idea, and of the individual. It will not end until every tree is dead and converted into a fast food joint so the sons of housemaids can be rich men for a generation.
The only way to escape modernity is to reverse the changes made to our philosophy with The Enlightenment,™ which means discarding ideas like equality, democracy and diversity. Until we get rid of the ideas themselves, we will lead ourselves back into repeating them because our fundamental assumptions will be the same as they are now.
It also helps to recognize what Leftists are: a spectrum from Anarchist through Communist, believing in the same ideology of equality, who differ only in degree. That is important: all Leftists are the same, just with varying degrees of boldness. The “normal” Democrat, given enough power, is a Communist; the teenage anarchist, facing challenges in his Utopia, will also go to full Communism.
Their ideas — which they insist are radically different, deep, complex and difficult — are in fact all variations of the same idea, egalitarianism. This philosophy insists that all people must be included in society and that society must thus dedicate itself to them and their whims and desires, instead of having a social order, values and purpose of its own.
Leftism is a mental virus which produces fanatics. To the bored, neurotic or failed person Leftism gives a sense of meaning to life and an excuse for all that has gone wrong. It is addictive, and creates a pathology in these people because it only makes them feel good for a short while, requiring them to engage in more of it to feel good again.
Leftists and conservatives desire different types of societies and are incompatible with one another. Leftists are concerned with equality; conservatives like order and context. This fits with the idea of conservation, or keeping what works, instead of a focus on human desires.
Until we escape the Leftist mentality, we will forever repeat the last two centuries of Western history. Even if we create a pro-white dictatorship, it will still be formed of the basic idea of modernity, which is accepting everyone and turning them into a mass to use to impose ideas externally onto others. Maybe they accept fewer people, but the idea remains the same.
People type their fingers bloody wondering how all of this happened. The answer is simple: it was entropy brought on by our success. A society that succeeds suddenly loses its purpose, which previously was to succeed. Now it must answer the existential questions, such as what it can do to make life meaningful and good. That is heady territory, fit for philosophers perhaps but not democracies.
Expanding on that, human masses are entropy and they always follow evil, unless they give power to someone intelligent and generous who will work against the flow of nature, which is an inertia that leads to breakdown. Nature destroys everything except that which actively resists by reaching toward a positive future distinct to itself.
Humans are evil because they are aware only of themselves. Many grow out of this as part of the maturation process, but others — probably about 40% of our people at this point — do not, and so they become de facto low grade sociopaths who act for their own whims at the expense of everyone else and the mission they share in common, which is having a civilization which thrives.
Conservatives recognize this evil in humanity which is why they emphasize context, reality, order, hierarchy, values, principles and purpose over what people wish were true or want to be accepted just because they want to do it. This is why conservatism is so compatible with religion: to both, the primary question is avoiding evil by establishing a good order/organization instead.
Unfortunately conservatives suffer from a lack of unity. They are too individualistic, mainly because they see the herd conformity of the Left and attempt to rebel against it by going the opposite direction, not recognizing that the Leftist collective is powered by individualists who want to mandate their own inclusion despite whatever unproductive or degenerate behavior they engage in.
Instead of reacting, conservatives could analyze Leftism itself and understand its psychology. At that point they would see that the only defense is not retreating into individualism, but reforming the line and counter-attacking by pointing out that Leftism is wholly illegitimate, its practitioners are sociopaths, and its end result is deceit and destruction. Every time.
When conservatives overcome their infection with individualism, they will see the importance of order and become fanatical like Leftists. That day will also bring ultra-intolerance, meaning that anyone who wants any form of equality will become suddenly not welcome.
As liberal democracy winds down and craters, and the ruling Leftist parties on two continents steer their countries into polymorphic disaster, the light on the horizon appears. This light is the end of the dark era of Enlightenment,™ and a return to raw realism and a search for meaning in the world instead of navel-gazing within our social selves.
Tags: conservatism, conservatives, individualism, leftism, liberal democracy