What is a conservative?

What are they “conserving”? Does anyone know, really?

I do.

Conservatism is sublimated religious mentality in that it takes the existential structure of the religious thought-form and partially dissolves it upward into “free” psychological excess; the nature of the religious thought-form is one of preemptive closure and judgement as ruthlessly self-defensive will: the religious psyche is a psyche at all times under attack, its affective tone is defined as the pitch between fear-powerlessness and reactive-pouty outrage; and last, when this tone naturally finds those extant social bonds and arrangements that resonate to its particular brand of anarcho-libertarian fight or flight myopia, these found forms serve as receiving vessels for the originary psychological excess of the partly-dismantled religious will, the ego of a self whose logic has been stripped out of time, and this fragmented self quite naturally “fills in” its gaps with whatever exteriorities are laying around and tone-match its own particular brand of confused and unfocused, cognitively dissonant disaffection.

The conservative is “conserving” the path of least resistance to what he comes to consider to be his most coherent self. A truly metaphysical will being no longer possible and thwarted by capitalism, conservatives re-align to the new dominant power-center in order to suck scraps from the decaying bones of the old, collapsing religious order.

Nietzsche knew that God was dead. No one knows this fact more immanently and painfully than the conservative, whose life is spent in a desperate quest to find a new God and gods to fill the empty halls of a mind on which too much reality had been forced. Philosophy and conservatism are antithetical terms; all philosophy and free-thinking is naturally anti-atavistic and essentially progressive in nature, enjoying its own resurgent and creative capabilities, unable ever to live by the maxims of fear, uncertainty or a restless pouty and quite subjectively necessarily small-minded disaffection.

The conservative is just the inability to co-exist with others.

Edit to OP: I like many conservatives personally, please no one take offense. And please provide corrections to where I got something wrong or how the idea can be improved upon/made more accurate.

Edit 2: No I am not defending Hillary Clinton.

Why?

Not the meaning of what you wrote, but the motivation to stick to this sort of philosophy, and communicate it to others? Marxologists do similar things, all very impressive mumbo-jumbo, yet ultimately nothing.

Conservatives don’t hardly ever hinge on God is Alive or God is Dead, this is only a concern for people like you. It isn’t even in the spectrum of their thinking unless they are confronting the insistence of this promise from a Nietzschean, like in the movie “God Is Not Dead”.

Perhaps most conservatives the world around just stick to norms, with what they feel has been proven to be beneficial and work as the common denominator, and vary wildly from place to place otherwise in terms of actual beliefs.

Look at Uccisore, vs me. I view him as a liberal of sorts, as I’m a paleoconservative- I stick to a mode of philosophy that got started during the era of the founding fathers. I could care less about the evangelical movement, or Ted Cruz, or many of his arguments. My conservative aspects are a return to the open yet learned and responsible thinking of that era. His is a offshoot. The limitations of the God is Dead rhetoric never enters into my thinking unless I’m specifically confronting it… and on this site, I don’t usually bother other than to point out the a thirst ice this at if contradictions many so called anthiests or “nihilists” have. It is more of a annoying nuance I snigger at than something that motivates me.

And in fact, I don’t think it motivates anyone, other than Kevin Sorbo, and that’s only because he came into philosophy through confronting Nietzsche on a Sci-fi tv show over years. God is only dead for idiots and the weak of mind… those easily impressed with badly written books. No reason at all he should be deader or alive now that 5000 years ago, merely because a Nietzschean must insist on this being the case to use as a dues ex machine to propell even more flawed arguments. It is a poor argument if your waning in faith, yet one likely to succeed with some, but largely rotten and pointless to the rest, and nothing at all inevitable about society accepting it’s premise and conclusions. It is deeply dependent on academics repeating it, furthering it. The moment they cease, it too is dead. When the start scoffing at it,is when it falls into decline… as it is here.

Many here come from educational backgrounds that insist on atheistic outlooks as reasonable. Yet many will openly scoff at Nietzsche. Nothing is inevitable, we are neither on a trajectory or a overman or final man, world isn’t being overtaken by “Nihilism” which doesn’t even exist, there is no will in the sense of Will to Power, and men do not evolve and become smarter through constant warfare… I was in the triangle of death in Iraq, I saw the end result if over a thousand years of fighting on the front lines between the Sunni and the shia, separated village by village, locked in eternal combat. No great minds rose from that. No superbeings. Merely mutations that resulted and birth defects, widespread midgetism, disease was rampant, people died over nothing, and local tribal nobles sacrificed their relatives to the highest bidder for chump change.

The philosophy is inherently flawed. The focus isn’t on Nietzscheans studying Christians anymore to find out what is wrong… Nietzsche told his doctor he fucked two prostitutes, caught Syphylus twice, wasn’t genetic (unless fucking whores is genetic) but on the world of philosophy studying Nietzscheans to find out what is wrong with them and their grotesque fixations. And they are truly grotesque, I have a thread that was hidden by a shitheaded moderator called “The Truth About The Nietzscheans” that catalogues these traits in several big name Nietzscheans, people who are the most famous for embracing that philosophy.

What does Conservatism vs Liberalism have to do with that spectrum? Nothing… it can’t fit other than to caution away from notorious failures… and every Nietzschean is a failure… and it isn’t because all history is tragic, but because they suck as individuals. My evidence for that is in that thread. God being dead or alive, napping or jump roping wasn’t involved in the consideration.

Here is the thread, won’t show up on any search engine due to the unethical wrongheadedness of a certain moderator, wish I posted it here in this section actually.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=185802&hilit=The+truth+about+the+nietzscheans

To understand a conservative, you need to understand their
starting point which is god… You don’t see an atheist conservative
for a reason. With the belief in god in place, you can now fill in
the blanks… The conservative believes in a hierarchy, from highest to
lowest. A conservative always, ALWAYS, believes themselves to be
on the higher order of the hierarchy and people they disagree with
to be on the lower order of the hierarchy. This is why a conservative
doesn’t believe in equality. There cannot be equality when there is
an hierarchy. Conservatives believes in tradition. They don’t believe man’s
reason is value enough to replace tradition. So what this means,
simple enough, The French revolution was hated by conservatives because
people tried to replace tradition with man made idea’s… Reason
cannot ever replace tradition. This is why conservatives despise
reason. They rank reason lower than tradition (recall everything is based
on the hierarchy) The favorite time period of the conservative is not
surprisingly, the medieval period. It has everything the conservative is
looking for, tradition, a hierarchy, lack of reason/thought, everyone knew their place.
Values were held in place for centuries. Conservatives believe in the old testament,
not in the new. A stern god who had no time for nonsense. Conservatives
believe in black and white, not shades of gray. Nuance and subtlety are for
sissy liberals. This idea of toughness in a man is a conservative idea. Conservatives
big attack on liberals has always been how the liberal has no core values and
the conservative does have basic core values. this has been the conservative attack
on liberals for 40 years. The liberal doesn’t stand for anything and the conservative does
stand for something, like family values. But the conservative cannot actually
define what family values are, but they are big believers in them…
The conservative believes in America first and in American exceptionalism,
but the problem lies in why? and what is American exceptionalism?
Recall the hierarchy… America first, god first. for the conservative, they
are one and the same…
for conservatives, thinking and reason is far less important than
feeling and emotions. thinking and reason can be used to displace
god and hierarchy and so reason/ thinking are discouraged.

Kropotkin

Dan~ has destroyed this post.

I’m only concerned with the meaning. I use “impressive mumbo-jumbo” because this is a philosophy conversation and because complex and highly specific language is called for if we are to speak well about complex and highly specified things. It’s why I don’t get dragged down into ego battles of red herrings and fallacies, I’m only interested in the truth behind these issues. And I fully admit that my views do not 100% represent the truth, but they are nonetheless aimed 100% at that truth. If you don’t agree with what I’m saying, don’t call me a charlatan interested in my own ego and in impressing people, just help me refine my ideas.

Yes that is true, most conservatives and Christians (I realize those two terms are not equatable) never think about if God is dead or alive. But the point is that modernity, then liberal capitalism, then postmodernity have all come to a position now where religious thinking doesn’t sync with the ethos and logic of the world today. There is a very clear reason why western civilization took the form of secular governance and law despite a majority of its citizens still being religious people.

Yes and I am neither an atheist nor a nihilist so happily we can dispense with those irrelevancies here.

I like your view that conservatives stick to norms of what works. I think this is a central part of conservatism, this idea of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. There is certainly wisdom in this.

I see conservatism and liberalism as two psychological-cognitive trends of method, and I think every person has at least some of both trends in them. Usually one trend’s logic tends to dominate over the other, and people think of themselves as either more conservative or more liberal as a result of that. I choose to analyze conservatism first because it’s what I have the most intimate experience with and understand the best; my later analysis of “what is liberalism?” will come naturally out of this present investigation. And once both analyses are out there it will be possible to do a serious compare/contrast and really dig deep into structures.

I agree about war, on the ground and at the purely human level this idea that war breeds exception and uplift and supreme status in the human existentia-subjectivity or in a moral sense is just silly. Peace is necessary for those positive uplifts in human being, but sometimes war is necessary for peace. And if you look at a larger purview you see that historically war does bring uplift in values, because war always proceeds from some kind of error and repressed flaw being lived out and worked through, like a built-up pressure being released. In order to see this we need to take the highest possible view of history and the human species in order to try and see its relationships to truths; every war you can think of comes from some kind of logics error and flaw/illusion/madness that is present in the human species. Sometimes the war leads to a correction, sometimes it doesn’t, usually there are only partial and unconscious corrections because the problem was only partially and unconsciously understood in the first place.

Yes often Nietzscheans are failures in life, because the standards for “success” in life are often banal, uninteresting and irrational, such as turning yourself into a corporate suit mindlessly following orders, or becoming a debt-slave in order to get higher education, or needing to value being tough and strong and possessing guns because the logic is still one of essentially being a beast in the animalistic wild of survival of the fittest. All of that is just fucking stupid. Being able to defend yourself isn’t stupid, but living in an animalistic world with others who are stuck in survival mode all the time is a sad legacy for a supposedly rational self-conscious species to be leaving to its future generations.

I’m not defending Nietzscheans and I disagree with Nietzsche on certain things. The point of “God is dead” was to force Christians to confront an uncomfortable truth about the society around them: this society, modern and now “postmodern”, is fundamentally non-religious in a certain important sense, in the sense that automatic atavistic defense of tradition and anti-rationalism are now understood to be serious limitations on the human consciousness. You can boil it down like this: believing in things for which there is no reason or justification (e.g. the Bible) is stupid, even stupider to pretend like you don’t have a total lack of reasons and justification for the beliefs and then assert those beliefs against others who quite reasonably question their validity. And the other essential point is that in so far as individuals are created by broader social-cultural conditions, and they are in a large way, even religious people today are somewhat “non-religious” simply by necessity of the kind of world they live in. Nietzsche was iconoclastic and aggressive to a fault, but he also needed to be. It got these ideas cemented in the shared history of thought.

And in the sense of what religion really means, everyone is also somewhat inherently “religious”, even atheists.

If you project upward into thought at a larger level you can see how this religious mindset is skewed between present and past as a kind of Venn diagram, whereas the “atheist”/liberalist view is skewed between present and future in its own Venn diagram. Both views are needed, they work together to keep humanity centered both in its past and in its future. But aligning oneself only to either such view means ignoring the other side of the equation.

Again, we all have some “conservatism” in us because we all are somewhat oriented to the past, existentially and psychologically-ontologically speaking. And to the extent we are also somewhat pushing away from that and wanting to move toward the future, possibility, creation and change we are all to an extent “progressive”. Mostly these trends exert unconscious influence upon people, and the ego needs to determine a black and white polarity between them to maintain low cognitive dissonance and remain reasonably functional, so we pick one side or the other to identify ourselves with. This naturally makes an enemy out of the other side, leading to necessary denials and defense mechanisms.

Maybe if you’re going to define conservatism, you should ask, quote or cite conservatives.

Failing that, these sorts of things are just a handful of progressives jerking each other off in word form.

I discuss philosophy of religion and do a lot of thinking about God and such, but I consider it pretty wholly separate from political theory. Leftists can say god-stuff too after all, and often do. While it’s true that a conservative will tend to have some stance towards religion IF they are religious, it’s certainly not the case that religion compels or is required for conservatism.

the subject headline itself is just another “divide and rule trap”

Sure, go ahead and give us your definition. Would be nice if you actually bothered to contribute something rather than just bitch and moan.

Here’s a depiction of a conservative and two progressive American Indians, or Native Americans as they call them in the tongue of the progressives.

The modern political landscape in the America of today is different though. Conservatives are not preserving much anymore.
The left has been much more successful at using the totalitarian possibilities of modern technologies and institutions.
That and the ‘conservative’ establishment is at large not conservative.

Usually it is progressive people and not conservatives who want to help preserve native traditions. And it isn’t irrational to stop calling then “Indians”, since they aren’t from India…

In so far as conservatives value tradition AND that tradition is a good and useful one, conservatism is good. The questions becomes two-fold: what traditions are being valued and why, and what potential changes and alternate forms and modes of existence and society are being thwarted by that value of tradition? Naturally we would try to answer both sets of questions and then compare/contrast the answers according to a commonly agreed upon values standard. Do most conservatives seek to do that? Not that Ive seen.

Even if their traditions-defense is valuable because those are good traditions, it’s an unconscious gesture on their part, as apt to end up defending irrationalities and detrimental traditions as useful ones.

I think some of them value the tradition of oppressing labor and skewing laws to favor the rich.

Unless they are ‘irrational’ or ‘detrimental’…
One can find and formulate rational arguments, reasons, for calling them (Red) Indians or native Americans or Pocahontas.
And of course the progressives of today want to preserve the Disney Pocahontas version of the Indians, the posted caricature is eerily apt after all.
First of all they have a sanitised view of indigenous people and secondly, for the most part, it’s about their own social status signalling and their hatred for native American people. And I’m using native American here in the original sense of the word, namely for the European-Americans who wanted to distinguish themselves from a fresh wave of European immigrants, from Ireland and so forth. So their hatred for the natives of the American nation(s).

As for ‘rational’ and ‘detrimental’ - Everything can be deconstructed, every social convention can be attacked with ‘rational arguments’.
The contemporary political discourse is about disenfranchising Europeans from their own nations. This is presented to various different groups in different ways. For example, a typical liberal is taught that with the help of progressive ideas the world will become a ‘better’ place (better according to his estimations and sensibilities). It actually won’t, not even better to his own sensibilities but that doesn’t matter because ‘rationality’ has become about selling people what they want to be true, finding reasons for them to make them believe in your cause, your objectives.
Conservatives are sold different reasons for different things which they would like to be true. They have on average different priorities than a liberal.

Now as for the psychology of a conservative, Jonathan Haidt gave a basic TED talk about it -

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc[/youtube]

Progressive people I’ve known work directly with Native tribes and members trying to get better conditions for them. It isn’t all a Disney fantasy, there are real people trying to help. And helping people or trying to improve things in society isn’t a pipe dream. We only have positive conditions in our society today because people fought for these things in the past.

And we should be referring to people or cultures by their real name, when possible. “Natives” here means people who are native to the North American continent where the first Europeans landed. Europeans are not native here.

In terms of rationality we need to distinguish what kind of rationality we’re dealing with. Deconstruction is a useful tool to expose depths and preempt doxa, but like any tool it needs a standard in terms of which it is applied. Runaway limitless deconstruction is like a hammer that is always trying to hammer itself into pieces.

The lens of capitalist rationality needs to be seen in addition to other kinds of rationality such as philosophical rationality or human existentially-centered rationality (I argue that philosophical and human-centered existential rationalities are in fact one and the same thing, if you look at the fundaments). It’s a common element of capitalist logic that any “progressive” non-capitalist idea or social policy is demonized and called unrealistic, simply because the logic of capital overcodes otherwise human relations and people end up seeing each other and themselves as merely vessels for work, wage-labor, and adhering to the given system. There is also commodity fetishism which affects both liberals and conservatives, connected to this idea. The union of left progressivism with capitalism is called neoliberalism, which is an abandonment of Left values and isn’t really progressive in a true sense, but pretends to be; the union of conservatism with capitalism is called neoconservatism, which again isn’t really conservatism at all.

The world had become a better place due to progressive ideas, which are basically just original Enlightenment, secular rational values of western civilization. The US Constitution is a document based on these progressive values, including rational values of equality, law and freedom. Magna Carta, Charter of the Forest, the Declaration of Independence, state democratic constitutions, these are all representing an evolution in thinking toward more progressive (universalized, rational, non-capitalistic) values.

Nice video, although I’m not ready to agree that liberal and conservative are based on a common psychological system of five moral centers. Openness to experience is a good way to look at liberal vs. conservative, except that one needs to identify what kinds of experiences one is talking about. Conservatives are often open to different kind of experiences that liberals are not open to, and vice versa.

We need to be getting down to the level of common values and common existential structure. Shared psychology is a good place to start I guess, at least for non-philosophers.

Lol yeah right. Ucc is basically a talking head that’s only programmed to read talk radio propaganda.

It’s a sad but unfortunately quite common affliction.

He literally never says anything that isn’t dripping with all those cliches they parrot on those radical talk radio shows. And he doesn’t even deny that. He’s somehow proud of himself for being so closed minded and adhering so strictly to such a narrow point of view. I thought for a long time that he was just playing a role here for shits and giggles but I think it’s really what he believes and it’s really how he thinks.

You can bet that if a cop shoots an unarmed black kid, he’ll end up arguing that somehow it was the kid’s fault. If a poor person can’t afford housing, it’ll be their fault. There’s no such thing as institutional racism. Government should be smaller, but we need more police. You name it. It’s just what he does.

Cop gets shot, it’s the work of a savage killer who doesn’t respect the rule of law and who deserves to be executed. Cop shoots unarmed citizen, he’s just a regular guy doing the best he can at a hard job and he needs to look out for his own safety because of all the thugs out there killing cops. Too bad the innocent guy died but if the politicians can collude to get the charges dismissed then the cop is “proven innocent”.

And he really wont defend himself against any of this. He’ll come in just like he did in this thread, and throw out a smart ass comment, and then go back to converse with people who agree with him. Occasionally he’ll appear to be having a rational discussion with someone about his views, but if you look close it’ll be some moron that he knows he can slap around rhetorically. After a bit of that he’ll start insulting them or telling them he’s not talking to them anymore and give the old, “you’re not worth my time” or “you’re just a troll” line. It’s all on record here. He’s been that way forever.