"Conservatism" has disqualified itself
What decent America must do to control this antisocial pathology
I have devoted much of my writing to demonstrating that “conservatism” is a long con. I have shown that everything “conservatives” say about their “beliefs” and “convictions” is deception, intended to hide from others and even from themselves their bad will and antisocial selfishness. I repeatedly warn that decent Americans will be wiped out by the fascist right unless they rouse themselves, at long last, to swamp Republicans at the polls and take them out of government for a good long time.
I appreciate that my audience—all of you loyal and enthusiastic readers—is just as convinced of the “conservative” threat as I am and just as aware of the life-and-death stakes that surround each and every election. If decent America does not flood to the polls and rebuke the Republican party for its insurrectionist anti-Americanism soon, elections will no longer be able to do the job, since Republicans are trying their damnedest to make the polls register only Republican votes or, failing that, to give Republicans the power to overturn any election results that don’t favor them.
The rational approach to revealing “conservative” bad will and deceptiveness, however, seems only to appeal to those who are intelligent enough already to see through the clouds of selfish fog pumped out constantly by the right-wing agitprop machine. That’s you, dear reader.
Here is a famous quotation from David Hume on the topic.
Disputes are multiplied, as if every thing was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if every thing was certain. Amidst all this bustle ’tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army. (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Introduction.)
Hume seems to have overlooked one thing. Apparently, you don’t need either reason or eloquence to gain proselytes. You only need the ability to inspire hatred. “Conservatives” for the most part don’t have an ear for reason or eloquence, but they respond like Mexican jumping beans to the slightest sound of hatred cast toward someone they despise.
This is hardly surprising. As I’ve been writing for years now, the soul of the “conservative” is consumed by fear. Rather than go inward to examine their fears, decide whether they are well-founded, and correct the ill-founded ones (which are nearly all of them), “conservatives” prefer to lunge outward where they think the danger is. The irritable mental gestures that are triggered by their numerous fears are various, incoherent, nasty, and often hateful. But fear, if you are susceptible to it, seems to justify any viciousness, up to and including violence.
Decent Americans always knew that throwing out insults, blaming others for all one’s problems, hating on everyone who triggers some atavistic fear, and heedlessly spewing invective would lead to violence. “Free speech” cannot mean the right to say whatever you want, no matter how vile, how incendiary, how bigoted, how debased. But the only way to police such speech is for decent people to shun the perpetrators and exclude them from roles of responsibility. Then, if they choose to rant, they are seen as the fringy lunatics they are.
Speech stirs up action. If you scream, “FIRE, FIRE!” in a theater you will trigger a stampede, whether you are maliciously lying or having a delusional episode or correctly warning about an actual danger.
If you are malicious about it, you obviously deserve punishment for your antisocial behavior. If you are correct about it, you deserve praise.
But if you are delusional, the question of whether to punish you is more difficult.
On the one hand, you actually thought there was danger, although it turned out to be imaginary. We don’t usually punish people for making mistakes—especially if they haven’t done similar things before.
On the other hand, if you are persistently delusional, if you have been told of your delusional state for decades, if you have produced consistently damaging social consequences by acting out your delusions and forcing them on others, and if you refuse to undertake any corrective measures for your aberrant perceptions and behaviors, then society is fully justified in punishing you. Your recalcitrance makes your behavior culpable.
(This obviously does not apply to completely mad people. They are such a danger to themselves and those around them that society locks them away—not to punish them, but to keep them and everyone else safe.)
Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics that many are inclined to excuse the bad behavior of a drunk person. Aristotle thinks the opposite. A drunk person's bad behavior is compounded by the fact that he made the choice to get drunk in the first place. That is, he gave in to a vice that made the bad behavior more probable. A sudden lashing out prompted by an insult is a failure of self-control. A sudden lashing out by a drunk person is an action made easier by the choice to drink something that is highly likely to erase self-control. The angry drunk person is not less responsible. He is more responsible for having made the choice to impede his self-control in the first place.
(Again, as in all ethical matters, there are qualifications that could be made. If the drunkenness is the result of an addiction, there are questions about how much choice the person had in drinking and how responsible he really is for the first failure of self-control.)
Aristotle’s point applies to “conservatives.” They are deluded about nearly everything because of their susceptibility to fear. They continually allow their fears to control their actions, spewing out false accusations, taking vengeance on others for self-created victimizations, demanding that others do what they want, taking power wherever and however they can to force others to do what they want.
They leave wreckage wherever they manage to get their way. They deny it, double down on it, and leave more wreckage—scorched earth (literally), broken spirits, dead bodies, financial ruin, and societal chaos. They do this year after year.
Despite decades of evidence pointing clearly to their inner, fearful delusions as the source of all this misery, they remain recalcitrant. No, not just that. They keep getting worse.
I say Aristotle is right. They are not less responsible because they are deluded. They are more responsible for giving in to their delusions in the first place.
There has been a lot of talk about the movie A Beautiful Mind for the past few days because of Trump’s allegedly obsessive behavior in keeping classified documents as memorabilia. (This is a benign explanation, and therefore probably untrue given Trump’s inveterate malignity.)
In that movie, John Nash—a highly intelligent man—comes up with a perfectly rational solution to his problem of mistaking delusions for realities. He trains himself, when he sees events or people that are triggering him to act intemperately, to ask others whether they see what he sees. He figured out a way, with the help of others, to work around his internal problem.
Since “conservatives” will not do that, will not even let themselves suspect that they have an internal problem, the rest of us have to suffer while they constantly lash out at imaginary threats.
I think that their recalcitrance puts them outside the camp of people we can forgive for their delusions. They have to be restrained.
And the way to do that without bloodshed, the way given to us by the Framers, is to exclude them from participation in society at the ballot box. By kicking them to the curb politically, we can get them to curb their delusional attacks on society. By teaching them that they cannot get what they want by hitting the rest of us over the head time and time again, they will, like children, learn to restrain themselves.
It will take time. They have been getting away with bad behavior for so long that they have internalized the feeling that there are no serious consequences for it. Indeed, the opposite. Like horribly spoiled children, they believe they get what they want by behaving badly.
Decent America needs to be prepared to ostracize them for years—decades if necessary. It will be hard, in the same way it is hard for good parents to restrain their children from behaving badly. One feels that one is being unfair, too harsh.
But “conservatives” are not children, even though they act like children. They have chosen the path they are on. They need to be punished for as long as it takes for them to actually get the lesson, not just pretend to get it in order to start conning the rest of us again.
“Conservatism” is a con. It needs to be punished politically until “conservatives” learn that decent America won’t tolerate being conned anymore. They need to be punished politically until they learn to check with the rest of us when their delusional fears goad them to act badly.
Only then will they be harmless enough to take part again in the nation’s deliberations.
Couldn't agree more, Frederick. If we just manage to eke out another standoff in the next election, I don't think America will make it. I'm hoping for a great awakening before then.
Thanks for reading and writing!
Magic. Yes, the black kind!
Thanks, Tommy