Liberals are generally correct and conservatives are generally wrong. On issues like socialism (consult Denmark for examples of success), drug legalization (half the country uses marijuana and it's less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes), gay rights (at just 3% of the population who cares what they do, what impact will it have on anyone else?), abortion (most aborted children would've had terrible lives and been a menace to society anyway, plus the population of the Earth is way too high), atheism (Religion is superstition from thousands of years ago when everyone was far more primitive morally and intellectually than they are today), environmentalism (we only have this one Earth, if we ruin it there's no second chance), etc, liberals are right and conservatives are wrong.
But this isn't because liberals have the correct philosophy. They just happen to be right through no merit of their own. Likewise, it isn't because conservatives have the wrong philosophy that they're wrong, they're just deeply fearful people who always go overboard over every little thing.
It's been scientifically proven that conservatives are paranoid. In every study we find them to be more afraid, more risk-averse, less willing to take chances on new things, etc. No matter how the study is designed, the result is conservatives are afraid of everything. I've noticed this in conservative political writing as well. They never talk about how things could go right. It is a continuous worry list of how things could go wrong. Worse, most conservatives, the 'collapse chorus,' have already decided that everything will go wrong and it's already too late. They genuinely believe this century will be the end of the world, and that only suffering and death await the next generation. This is a product of out of control fear, this is the signature definer of conservatives.
Conservatives say the debt will bury us. They say socialism will create so many parasites it will be like Atlas trying to hold the whole world on his lone productive shoulders. If taxes go up, the economy will collapse and everyone will quit work. If you raise the minimum wage, the economy will collapse and no one will be able to find a job. If a child sees a 'wardrobe malfunction' on TV or hears a 'fleeting expletive' they'll be corrupted for life into delinquents. If people stop obeying God they'll immediately turn into serial killers. If gays are allowed to marry than all marriage will end overnight. If drugs are legalized then everyone would take drugs, and we would enter a post-apocalyptic era of Mad Max. Iran is about to get a nuke and kill us all. The first time we'll realize Iraq was a threat is when they make New York City into a mushroom cloud. No matter how many conversations you have with a conservative, their answer to every suggestion, every little change to the status quo, is that 'if you did that there would be chaos, it would totally destroy everything.' If you suggest raising taxes 1% on the rich they'll say it would destroy the economy forever.
A lot of this may be grandstanding. Just a show of rhetorical force that they're not willing to compromise on anything. But generally, conservatives really believe every single doomsday scenario. They're afraid of everything, and wish everything would just come to a halt and never change again, because they never want to be in any uncharted realm. This mindset worked fine for the thousands of years of our history where nothing changed between the generations, but nowadays, with constant technological innovation, it's a very detrimental mindset to society. There's a perfect law code for every situation, but that perfect law code is not perfect for all situations. For instance, in the past, stealing bread may have actually led to someone else starving to death, and so a death penalty makes perfect sense. In the wild west, stealing someone's horse was a death penalty, because a man without a horse in the west was so utterly stranded it was as good as killing him. Nowadays, if you steal some bread, or a horse, or, say, $40,000 a year in government benefits via medicaid, social security, section 8 housing, food stamps, and God knows what, you only cause a minor inconvenience to someone like Bill Gates who has to work an additional minute to pay your share. As a result, a death sentence on these people makes no sense anymore, the situation just isn't the same, even though the 'crime' was in fact far worse than in the past.
It's ludicrous to believe that a constitution written in 1787 could possibly be the best law code for a country in 2013. The amendment process is far too cumbersome to actually modify the Constitution, and was deliberately made to be that way so that nothing could ever change. At this point in time, almost every law in the country is unconstitutional, and everyone just looks the other way because no one wants to actually live by those laws anymore. The same is true of the Bible. No one bothers to follow practically anything it says anymore, and most Christians don't even read it, because it's so hopelessly out of date. Nevertheless, conservatives cling to these ancient relics and refuse to let any updates to our lives through, no matter how obviously wrong they are. The only explanation is they're afraid. They already have everything they want in life, so any change is just a threat to their current well being, so they'd rather nothing ever changed again.
But fundamentally, conservatives have the right idea. In one word, it is civilization. Conservatives see that throughout history and time, most of the world has been barbaric. Most people have lived terrible lives. As Thomas Hobbes said, the natural world was 'nasty, brutish and short.' If you read any history, even of 'civilized cultures' like China or medieval Europe or ancient Greece, you'll find a list of horrors that are so mind-numbing, so inhumane, so awful, that it makes you question the very nature of humanity. (It reminds me of The Brothers Karamazov, where a brother discussed the brutality of turks tossing babies onto bayonets for fun, and how a God in such a world was such an absurd impossibility.) For the first time in world history, we've finally carved out a tiny corner of happiness for ourselves and our children. We have world peace, when before 30% of men died in neverending wars. We have defeated disease, which generally killed more children than let live. We have defeated famine, which was so common and devastating that most peasants never made it through life, and entire cities, even entire empires like the Incas would simply vanish off the map. Our politicians no longer have the right to rape, rob, and ruin us at their whim. Our trials are generally fair, and innocent people go through life without ever getting in trouble with the law. These are all a series of miracles. And these aren't the only ones:
We all have running, clean water. Half of life used to be fetching water, and yet now the water comes to us. It's drinkable, you can cook with it, and you can even bathe with it. A luxury most people in history never had. Our sewage takes itself away without ever causing us any trouble, whereas throughout most of history it would stay to stink up the town and spread disease.
Instead of manure-monsters like bison or horses, we have clean cars that briskly send us hundreds of miles effortlessly across the land. Even better than our almost magical transportation devices (which combined allow us to go anywhere, meet anyone, and buy or sell goods from anywhere across the world) is the internet, which travels at the speed of light to deliver most everything in life (as most of life is information, and information can be digitized), connecting us all into a miraculous hive mind.
Electricity gives us light, air conditioning, microwaves, stoves, refrigerators, water heaters, heaters, anything a human could ever want. A single barrel of oil can power enormous, practically omnipotent machines like bulldozers, jackhammers, chainsaws, tractors, etc, which has removed all manual labor from the world.
As people's living conditions improved, they also started treating each other better, which is only natural. (Who isn't grumpy when they're in pain?) Domestic violence, which used to be the norm towards women and children, is now a rarity. Women who used to have to live as despised servants, because all economic opportunities and educational opportunities were cut off from them, and who normally died in childbirth because doctors had no idea what they were doing, can now live just as fulfilling lives as men, doing what they want, when they want, how they want. Working conditions have improved and the lower classes all have access to quality health care. Religious strife has waned, as has ethnic strife, class warfare, nationalism, and racism. People just aren't even interested in fighting each other anymore. Perhaps there's just so much good entertainment in this world, from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and sex all the way up to shopping malls, music and television, that we're all too busy to hate each other anymore. The principle cause of sorrow isn't disease or famine, it's other people mistreating us. Whether they bully us physically or just call us names, it's an unbearable level of pain, and what makes it worse, is it tends to never let up and never end your whole life long. Once people have decided you're worthless, they'll abuse you forever, and as such even if each individual mistreatment is no big deal, it adds up to a chinese water torture of unbearable suffering. But with technology solving the problems of famine, disease, poverty, and boredom, we've also slowly solved the problems of greed, pride, and sadism, (all of which were attached to material deprivation) as well. It's a double-whammy of multiplied good fortune.
However, the nature of technology is that it requires an extremely fine-tuned, and thus an extremely frail infrastructure to continue functioning. A single heavy snowfall can plunge a city into darkness and cold, undoing the work of centuries and imperiling millions of lives. We are, uniquely, the first humans to live civilized lives, in a state of civilization. We depend on technology and on each other to even live -- hardly anyone can support themselves anymore if something ever went wrong. If civilization were ever to collapse, if we were to ever lose this precious way of life we've so miraculously gained, the suffering would be unthinkable. In the past the wickedness of man was at least constrained by his impotence. But now, with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the population boom to 7 billion people across the world, any disaster is magnified to a whole new scale.
Conservatives are right to fear the collapse of civilization. They are right to put the preservation of civilization as our highest and foremost goal in life. They are right to assign infinite utility points to preserving the infrastructure and societal norms that in turn preserve our way of life. And on the other hand, liberals are wrong to assign any other value as being higher than this infinitely precious gem. Philosophically, liberals keep talking about fairness, equality, justice, freedom, tolerance, diversity, or any other good sounding buzz word, but they never talk about civilization. The concept never even enters their head. They presume civilization isn't something crafted by men, but just exists like the air we breathe and the water fish swim in. As such, they presume that civilization could never collapse, that nothing could ever go wrong, and no matter what they do no harm can ever come from it. They would rather, just for the sake of feeling good, destroy civilization than let a horned toad go extinct or abuse someone's 'freedom to choose.'
Generally, this misplacement of values is harmless. Even if they seek freedom or justice, normally this doesn't end with the collapse of civilization. And since conservatives are paranoid, they cry wolf so many times, that liberals have long since stopped listening to their warnings centuries ago. Recall when Edmund Burke was declaiming against the French Revolution and saying democracy would lead to the end of the world? Well now Britain is a democracy and it seems to be doing fine.
But there are some mistakes that truly do lead to the collapse of civilization. One of them is handing power over to blacks. Case in point: Detroit, New Orleans, Jamaica, Haiti, the entire continent of Africa, St. Louis, Camden, on and on and on. Civilization cannot be sustained if blacks are put at its head. They are too incompetent, too criminal, and too corrupt to maintain the rule of law, a working economy, decent social manners and customs, and a sufficient intelligent, educated base that can keep our technological infrastructure running. It doesn't matter if some blacks can satisfy these basic requirements, because handing power to 'blacks' inevitably means that the lowest common denominator has the most influence on society and overwhelms the contributions of everyone else with their wanton destruction. Liberals are wrong, dead wrong, on their desire to give blacks equality, to allow the unrestricted population growth of black Africans, to allow unrestricted immigration from black Africa to anywhere else with said unrestricted births, and to continuously bend over backwards to accommodate absolutely unacceptable black behavior -- whether it's criminals, people who speak too loudly in public spaces, kids who disrupt schools and bully other children, or whiners who continuously blame everyone else and everything else for their own self-caused woes. Rhodesia was once the bread basket of Africa. It was a peaceful, prosperous country that didn't look far different from 1950's America. Once blacks took power, it became one of the most violent, impoverished, dismal places on Earth. So long as blacks are controlled by other people, like they were in the South or during Apartheid, they can function as somewhat-normal-people and civilization can continue in a somewhat-normal-vein. But the moment they are given power and control others instead, there is nothing but horrors. They are worse than the atomic bomb, they are the true, incurable black plague.
Another civilization killer is Islam. This religion has caused more harm than any other belief system in history. The moment Islam takes over, all free thought ends, and stagnation begins. The religion forbids apostasy and forbids heresy, all on the pain of death. No one can be or do anything but what was mandated by a child-rapist, mass murdering bandit said they should be or do in 600 AD. When the Ottoman empire took over half of Europe, it meant that entire half of Europe simply fell into darkness. When Persia fell to Islam, it ceased being the rival to Rome and became a nothing that nobody cared about in the middle of nowhere. Pakistan is the same as India in every way except it's Muslim whereas India isn't, and so it is the center of terrorism, twice as poor, and continuously politically unstable. The track record of Islam is so bad that there's no need to experiment with the religion any further. There is no possible interpretation of Islam that allows a country to thrive. There is no possible moderation of Islam that could make a good people or a forward-looking, innovative, technological civilization. Though Islam has 1/5 of the world's inhabitants, it has no contributions to world history except death and pain. They've done nothing but attack us, take us slaves, and ram planes into our skyscrapers. They have no famous musicians, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists or mathematicians. They're just a black hole that is consuming the light of the world and giving nothing back.
And a third civilization killer is the breakup of the nuclear family. Liberals disdain an institution that is older than mankind itself. Even while we were hominids chipping rocks around the world, we were families. We evolved to live in families, we can only reproduce as families, and we're only happy as families. If liberals get their way and undermine the family, people will become so dysfunctional individually that the entire structure will collapse around us. Civilization depends on the individual being a net benefit to their neighbors. Furthermore, life itself depends on us actually having children and rearing them. There is no way around these two needs. If people are incapable of meeting either requirement, what future does humanity have? And how can people meet these needs without families? Single mothers are a net taxpayer cost, not a benefit. Their children are net menaces to society, not additions. And single non-mothers, old maids as they were used to be called, are absolutely no use to anyone. Mental illness has reached an all-time high, huge numbers of people are clinically depressed, birth rates are in terminal decline, etc, etc. This is not a sustainable future, and to make matters worse, liberals have only just begun their undermining of the family. If we ever get to their dream world where women need men like fish need a bicycle, the scale of suffering will be far beyond what we're seeing today from their halfway successful efforts.
Ironically, this means that even if liberals are 99% right and conservatives are only 1% right, it is better to be a conservative than a liberal. If conservatives get their way, they may cause a lot of discomfort to the poor or minorities, but they would definitely never destroy civilization. On the other hand, if liberals get their way, they may provide a myriad of wonderful benefits, but all of them will be moot once they've ruined civilization. Being correct isn't nearly as important as valuing the right thing. A hopelessly stupid and misinformed person is still more noble and lovable if he admires the right person or thing than a man of infinite capacity and knowledge focused on furthering the forces of darkness. Liberals value compassion, which leads them to give infinite permissiveness towards mortal threats like blacks, Islam and feminism. Conservatives value civilization, which gives them infinite vigilance against any threats that might approach our shores, and stops any new development before it goes too far. Sometimes paranoia can be a good thing.
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