Why I'm not conservative

Photograph of a Crucifix at sunset
By Aaron Burden

Why I'm not a conservative |
Wednesday – December 3, 2025

As I stated in my post from September 3, about the subject of conservatism, with a small c that is: "...I think it's quite appropriate on one hand to think of conservatism as a perpetually losing position ...", and by that I mean that if you seek to uphold and defend the status quo, the contemporary social order, you are never going to win, because the world keeps changing around you and around your society, which then forces society in the end to change, and this is mostly due to the fact that we live in a world that stands on material underpinnings: society keeps transforming into something new all the time. I think that the caricature of the conservative man is the old and bitter man without strength and without vigor, because you see he has aged out of his own past, yet he keeps clinging on to those memories of days gone by: indeed it's not possibly to be conservative for a very long time without becoming reactionary. What conservative would defend the current social order but a very young conservative, perhaps not a conservative at all? You can't win if you seek to oppose rapid change or really change of any kind, but what you can become is one of them, one of the revolutionary elites, and far too often this seems to be the fate of most supposedly conservative people. But yes, it is perfectly natural and normal to be conservative; indeed it's the default human experience to be skeptical of idealism and foolish naïveté. But I don't mind being a loser in and of itself; I mind what being a loser does to me, and I regret to recognize myself in that image of the old bitter man. There is also the fact and the circumstance that far too many people that claim to be conservative are no such thing, and I refuse to be associated with these people: typically these will be people that range from market liberals to lightly reactionary people that seek to return to the fairly recent social order of the previous half-century. At any rate, I do not wish to be associated with these people, people who also often tend to be very dense in their reactionary views, for they rely on populism and hysteria. No, I regard these people as nothing but perpetual losers and certainly not sincere in their conservatism: after all, how do you preserve the contemporary social order if you seek the return of the previous social order? Who is this archetypal conservative then? Well, that's actually a surprisingly easy question to answer: he, the conservative, is all among us all the time, because he is a reflection of most people. Yes, it is very much conservative to be current and to be in line with the social order. In many ways liberal men are far more conservative then reactionary men, and besides conservatism is highly contextual. What I do like about conservatism though, is its genuine and sincere skepticism of fantastical ideas and really its ability to see right through all the fancy and all the empty platitudes of the dogma of the ideological future. Yes, it is indeed true that modern man have replaced God with ideology, and to that extent I believe conservatism to serve a good purpose in the modern world: conservatism provides clarity and it makes reality apparent, but with the caveat that the conservative reality is very much shaped by the particular and the contemporary. Indeed, to be conservative is to be modern: ideologues on the other hand are post-modern or extra modern, and for them the word common sense is surely an enemy.

    In shorter fashion: I am not conservative because I do not believe in or seek to defend the contemporary social order, because I know that we are living under the Kali Yuga, and for me there is nothing about the contemporary world worth defending, and even if I did believe that some aspect of the contemporary world was worth defending, I know that the world is ever changing and that moral decline and societal degeneration is a sign of our times: this is something much larger than myself and in the end serves to balance the scales of the celestial order. How would I be true to myself, to my God, to my faith, and indeed to humanity if I was to defend the depraved and the diseased? I'd like to provide an analogy, but before I do so I must also make it clear that there are no completely congruent analogues to what I'm attempting to describe. Sometimes you do yourself a greater favor by avoiding and refusing to eat, because that process, fasting, can and will clean out your body. Again, this was not a completely congruent analogy, but essentially I believe that bad things sometimes happen for good reasons, but this is of course not always the case, but then again I am not able to explain the divine providence of the creator, but it seems clear even in the material domain that cleaning out your body from the modern world is a good thing in the long run, even if you'll suffer in the short term. Conservatism is essentially the default human experience because humans did for the most part live in a very slowly evolving world, but of course in this rapidly evolving and materially transforming world, conservatism breaks apart, it has to.

    I also want to make it clear again that while I'm not conservative, I hold no other political positions or ideologies, since I no longer engage or immerse myself with the material domain: it may be that some people are sincerely conservative or even ideological, but for the most part ideology serves the material aim: people invent ideologies to justify certain material outcomes; it is not, generally, the other way around. Yes, some naïve and young people may with great effort convince themselves of ideology, but in the end, ideology serves material interests, and that's why I stay clear from them and politics in general.

Reginald Drax – December 3, 2025.