Thanksgiving: a time for self-assessment
On Thanksgiving, the thoughts of decent people turn to our blessings. We look inward and evaluate our attitudes toward life.
Most of us come up wanting in that evaluation. We spend too much time obsessing about problems at work, about people who grate on us, about the petty annoyances that make us stumble from day to day.
We spend too little time appreciating the beauties present even in the most trying circumstances, the natural friendliness of other decent people, the power and resilience of decent people who struggle against societal injustice.
Decent America looks at itself critically because it values gratitude and love. Decent Americans wish that we could live up to demands of gratitude and love consistently and intently each and every day.
Fear, self-delusion, and “conservatism”
No doubt some people who consider themselves “conservatives” imagine that they also are grateful and loving. Unfortunately, this is a delusion.
“Conservatives” cannot actually be grateful and loving because their lives revolve around fear. The most motivating factor in the “conservative” soul is fear of loss. Different types of “conservatives” arise from the different things they most fear losing: the “economic conservative” fears losing money more than anything else; the “religious conservative” fears losing their religion (actually an impossibility!) more than anything else; the “cowboy conservative” fears losing their complete independence (a delusion in the first place) more than anything else; and so on.
Fear is the most debilitating emotion. It distorts the image of reality, inducing the illusion that threats are everywhere. Among its most baleful effects is the impression that change itself is a threat.
And this is where “conservatism” conflicts with the real world. Change is just part of reality. While a certain amount of persistence is necessary for anything at all to exist, real life contains far more change than persistence.
That is why the most successful people in all walks of life are those who learn to align themselves with change. Chapter 76 of the Tao Te Ching captures this sentiment perfectly.
newborn – we are tender and weak
in death – we are rigid and stiff
living plants are supple and yielding
dead branches are dry and brittle
so the hard and unyielding belong to death
and the soft and pliant belong to life
an inflexible army does not triumph
an unbending tree breaks in the wind
thus the rigid and inflexible will surely fail
while the soft and flowing will prevail
Fear makes this stance impossible. It sees in every change a threat to take something away. Consequently, fearful people become selfish and aggressive, the very opposite of grateful and loving.
This is the reason why “conservatism” is almost always wrong. Seeing the world through fearfully selfish and aggressive eyes, “conservatives” cannot be welcoming, generous, and cooperative.
Of course, they use all sorts of self-defensive pretences to convince themselves and others that they are not fearfully selfish and aggressive. The “optimistic conservative” disguise perfected by Reagan is one of them. The “compassionate conservative” meme invented by George W. Bush’s spin-meisters was another.
Such poses fall flat because “conservatives” don’t actually behave optimistically or compassionately. That contradiction allows everyone who does not need the disguises for self-defense to see right through them.
If you really look at the presences, you see that anything truly positive about them is borrowed from liberalism. Everything that is fearful, selfish, and aggressive falls right in line with the essential fearfulness of “conservatism.” And so long as the essence of '“conservatism” sees threats everywhere—which is an error about reality—“conservatives” will be wrong about nearly everything.
To be fair, “conservatism” occasionally turns out to be right. That happens when there actually is a threat. It would be fatuous to face an actual threat and treat it like it were not a threat.
(There are in fact very few real threats in life. Indeed, there is a philosophical perspective that allows a few people to rise above all threats. But that involves overcoming death itself—which is not an inner goal that most of us seem able to attain.)
So “conservatives” are wrong most of the time because they see threats where there are none. And conversely, they don’t see threats that actually exist when those threats benefit their selfishness and aggressiveness.
The fact that there are so many such people among us is the greatest threat to the survival of humanity. This is an actual threat, because if these people continue to control the world, the earth will cease to support human life.
Eliminating “conservatism” for the sake of human growth
The solution to the problem of too many fearful “conservatives” is to make their attitudes and actions unacceptable in decent society.
When I say this in public, the response is usually, “This country is nearly half ‘conservative.’ Fat chance.”
In response, I run down a list of societal trigger issues, all of which were opposed vehemently by “conservatives.” For instance:
Smoking
Seat belts
Civil rights
Abortion
Helmets for motorcyclists
Same-sex marriage
Changing public feeling on these issues always followed the same steps. First came activism, which “conservatives” derided or attacked. Next came government action, which “conservatives” painted as tyrannical abuses of “freedom.” Finally, most people accepted the change, realizing it really was for the better.
When the final stage is reached, people begin to regard resistant “conservatives” as odd, out-of-touch, even anti-social. As a consequence, most “conservatives” shut up about their prejudices.
But sometimes “conservatives” keep on resisting the majority will. When they do that, the majority sometimes just disregards them, lets them mouth off, and ignores them.
History teaches that this can be a mistake. The decent majority let “conservatives” whine and moan about abortion for nearly fifty years. During that time, it appeared as though “conservatives” were spinning their wheels.
But in fact, they were putting into place a far-reaching conspiracy to take over the judiciary, the one branch of government that could reverse the will of the majority by “interpreting” the law. End result: the Dobbs decision restoring the states’ ability to outlaw abortion.
This shows that the majority cannot afford to ignore “conservatives” just because they are out of touch, in the vast minority, and not achieving what they want. Their fears will not allow them to let their prejudices go. If the majority’s will leaves them feeling like they have lost something, they will scheme and plot and sabotage and commit crimes if it helps them impose their minority wishes on others.
The solution to the “conservatives” problem is to continue overturning their prejudices by activism that achieves government action that in turn relegates regressive attitudes to minority status.
And then, once “conservatives” are down, we must never stop criticizing and shunning their unpopular minority attitudes until the attitudes either disappear altogether or a least come to be regarded as so shameful that no one will admit to having them.
This takes time, but it works. Slowly society moves toward justice by expanding its notions of fairness and by relegating the selfish and aggressive attitudes of “conservatives” to the benighted past.
Their fear, the driving forge in their lives, makes them unsuited to live in the future—which is headed toward cooperation more than competition, generosity more than selfishness, creativity more than stockpiling, and responsibilities more than rights.
Let all of us in Decent America redouble our efforts to remove the fearfully selfish and aggressive from public office, to pass laws their thwart their reactionary impulses, and to create a world in which “conservatism” can no longer fetter the human spirit.