Conservativism is not an ideology, it is a disease of the mind, a failure to see beyond your own experiences. The conservative wants to preserrve the aspects of the status quo that directly benefits themselves, and vehemently demand a chance to anything that doesn’t. For as long as there have been conservatives, they have had shifting priorities to suit the in-group.
That’s why they don’t stop to think about how others are affected. Others are outside the in-group, and are therefore bad. Anything bad that happens to them is permitted, possibly with some rare regret, but the only priority is the self.
That’s why the conservative demonizes education as elitism, expertise as arrogance. It is why the conservative looks for scapegoats and outsiders, and why they seem unable to perfeive their own hypocrisy. There is no hypocrisy for a conservative, because the value does not exist outside the self. So whatever the self wants is good when the self wants it, and anything else is bad. If the conservative wants to subjugate women and punish them for sex, they will prohibit abortions for all. If the conservative wants an abortion the very next day, they will seek it out and lament how difficult it was for them. They will not change their opinion, anymore than a ship adrift in the wind changes its heading.
A rational person might have blind spots where they don’t realize their beliefs are harmful. A conservative person will see the harm and decide that it is good, because that is the path that they want and everything else is an obstacle.
Conservativism is not an ideology, it is a disease of the mind, a failure to see beyond your own experiences. The conservative wants to preserrve the aspects of the status quo that directly benefits themselves, and vehemently demand a chance to anything that doesn’t. For as long as there have been conservatives, they have had shifting priorities to suit the in-group.
That’s why they don’t stop to think about how others are affected. Others are outside the in-group, and are therefore bad. Anything bad that happens to them is permitted, possibly with some rare regret, but the only priority is the self.
That’s why the conservative demonizes education as elitism, expertise as arrogance. It is why the conservative looks for scapegoats and outsiders, and why they seem unable to perfeive their own hypocrisy. There is no hypocrisy for a conservative, because the value does not exist outside the self. So whatever the self wants is good when the self wants it, and anything else is bad. If the conservative wants to subjugate women and punish them for sex, they will prohibit abortions for all. If the conservative wants an abortion the very next day, they will seek it out and lament how difficult it was for them. They will not change their opinion, anymore than a ship adrift in the wind changes its heading.
A rational person might have blind spots where they don’t realize their beliefs are harmful. A conservative person will see the harm and decide that it is good, because that is the path that they want and everything else is an obstacle.