September 3, 2025

Photograph of a Parochial School

Wednesday:
My views on conservatism – September 3, 2025

Conservatism, as the word implies, means to conserve, or rather it means that one seeks to conserve something, often the status quo, such in the case of politics, but also when it comes to other aspects of life. Verily, when you really get down to it, it's actually quite impossible to separate politics from life: indeed life is politics and all decisions in life are an act of politics. I am of course a proponent of anti-politics, or really post-politics, but even I recognize that it's not quite possible to never be political, and what I mean by post-political is not to never be political or rather not to never engage in politics: post-political simply means moving beyond or really past the 20th century junction of mass politics, where the medium of change was and continues to be the mobilization of opinion, often derived not from good reason or even ideological principles, but from the emotional hysteria of the populist horde. Of course, the populist horde being the mass of people governed by the revolutionary elite, or rather by their manipulation. So how does conservatism, with a small c, fit in under this rubric? Well, as I just stated: conservatives, that is the proponents of this ideology or really anti-ideology as I will explain further later, seek not to change or upend the status quo, nor do they seek a return to the status-quo anté, that is how the world was or used to be constituted in the past: true conservatives seek, if any, gradual change, and while that gradual change occurs they seek to preserve as many of the political institutions that exist as possible; in a sense the conservative seeks to integrate the status quo or the contemporary paradigm into the new emerging paradigm or really the future, instead of simply upending the current order, something radicals and so-called progressive forces seeks to do. So what is a conservative, or really what actions or what ideas can be thought of as conservative? Well, if we again go by the word or the etymology of the word, many things are conservative and indeed the conservative outlook is very likely the default position of most humans: to believe in and adhere to ideology requires energy, it requires effort, but to be conservative requires no effort, and that's also why I and many others like to describe conservatism as an anti-ideology. There are no common "conservative" principles beyond seeking to merely conserve the status-quo: a conservative in one context, perhaps one country, is very unlikely to be conservative in another context, perhaps another country. Take the western conservative, is he likely to be conservative in Afghanistan or red China? I think not, because context matters when you are conservative. Even within the imperial core the positions of conservatives vary quite dramatically from country to country: a conservative in the American context would surely feel out of place among conservatives from the French context. Again, the principles that conservatives have in common are that they seek to conserve the status-quo of their particular society: indeed conservatives do not share any grand notions of humanity or ideology with other conservatives; what they share is their fundamental skepticism and pessimism towards change, particularly rapid change. So, conservatism is really a very parochial outlook: it's not universal, it's not grand in ambition, and it's certainly not ideological, it's just the default human relationship to ideology and really the power of change. It doesn't take much to be or to become a conservative; I can almost assure you that you were born that way. I quite like the world parochial because it's synonymous with narrow-minded and conservatism—at any rate parochial is synonymous with conservative secondarily—and while I think that narrow-mindedness could be construed as a conservative quality, I don't think that it's quite right to call conservatism narrow-minded or limited in scope, it's rather that conservatism deals with the immediate reality of the world as it is constituted now, at the present moment: see, conservatism isn't preoccupied with some vague notion of the future, the ideological future, or some utopia when the ideology has acquired its final form and when humanity is finally liberated from problems, no conservatism is preoccupied with the human condition, and as such conservatism makes no attempts to be universal or all-encompassing. For the conservative, the true conservative, human nature is essentially the same across all time and dimensions and for him (the conservative) change or progress, as it's fancy to call it these days, is not a product of the most fancy ideas or the universal nature of man, progress is the product of the ideas that actually work in the real world, the right ideas, that actually brings man material improvement without also upsetting the celestial and the societal order.

    So what actions or beliefs in general could be considered conservative? Well, again since conservative is highly context dependent I would first have to define some belief or action within a certain context. Take the example of a man that seeks to preserve nature, that is he doesn't want the forces of modernization to upset the delicate balance of nature as a whole or some defined habitat of that nature: well that would generally be a conservative position, since that man seeks to preserve or really conserve the current order. I liked that example because it was a somewhat apolitical form of conservatism, since many men of progressive persuasion with great care tend to the environment and nature in general. Another example of conservatism within a more political context could be to obstruct or stand in the way of change, and this is typical of many right-wing forces, particularly within the imperial core. I do just want to note that I make a distinction between reactionary and conservative: reactionary is not conservative because the reactionary forces do not anymore seek to preserve the contemporary paradigm than the radical or progressive forces do, and in that way the forces of the reaction are no more against change than the radical forces, with the caveat that the forces of the reaction do not seek the same change as the radical forces. I do also want to note that even if you may not think of yourself as a conservative I think you should really reconsider: do you believe in democracy, do you believe in the preservation of the rule of law, do you believe in the universal nature of man? If you believe at least one or more of these things, you're at least somewhat mildly conservative. See, to be progressive in a context where the status-quo is to be progressive is also indeed to be conservative. At the end of the day I think it's quite appropriate on one hand to think of conservatism as a perpetually losing position, but on the other hand to think of conservatism as something glaringly obvious and true: most ideas are wrong because they are stupid and only very few ideas tend to survive with an intact society, and where stupid ideas have survived they have very often completely upended that particular society or societal order and invariably turned it into a complete dumpster fire. It is true that to destroy something requires very little effort, but to construct something is very hard indeed, and that is the essentially conservative insight.

Painting of Karl Marx –
unknown date

    Yes, to be conservative is to be default or to be normal in the sense that you approach the world from a natural and normal perspective, untouched and uncontaminated by stupid, grand, fancy, and universal notions that often turn out to be completely impractical in the real world, yet people never learn and they never cease to tell themselves and others how great it would be to not be essentially normal and human. If you are going to be a proponent of the humanist axiom for instance or some other ideology, within the humanist axiom or not, you do have to try really hard and you do have to put a lot of effort in. A normal human was created to be skeptical and circumspect about the world and to get away from that you need either one of two things: either you were brought up with all sorts of fancy ideological notions, or you've actually yourself put in the effort to truly believe in whatever ideological and political nonsense it is that you believe. I do not identify as conservative, I again identify as post-political, however conservatism is the only ideology, or really anti-ideology, that I truly respect. I also want to add that conservatism is something essentially anti-totalitarian, since conservatism accounts for the many faults of the character of man; conservatism isn't absolutist.

    As usual, I call on all far-seeing men to embrace sexual and moral purity – embrace celibacy.

Reginald Drax – September 3, 2025.