History

THE HISTORY OF CONSERVATISM USING MACHIAVELLIAN CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS

CONSERVATISM

Conservatism is both a ‘sentiment’ and a political philosophy.

I. POPULATIONS: THE PROBLEM OF POLITICS AND SOCIAL ORDER

(UNDONE)

(div of labor, population, coordination)  rise of population, cities and farming

The Evolution Of Coordination

1) The Direct Knowledge Society (Headmen and Chieftains – Wisdom)
2) The Authoritarian Society (Priests and Kings – Dictates and Commands – Laws)
3) The Mixed Society (Physiocrats and Theocrats – Taxes, Tithes and Laws)
3) The Republican Society (Politicians and Public Intellectuals – Argument, Reason, Consent, Regulation and Legislation)
4) The Credit Society (Money and Credit)
5) The Calculative Society (Credit, Calculation, Loans, Productivity and Priorities)

II. THE CONSERVATIVE SENTIMENT

(AND THE WESTERN MILITARY AND COMMERCIAL SOCIAL SYSTEM)

As a sentiment, conservatism consists of  a set of unarticulated biases whereby conservatives are skeptical of willful and intentional institutional changes, in favor of meritocratically earned changes.

The Conservative Political Biases (Preferences)

1. Conservatism is a meritocratic bias, which prefers that all changes to social institutions should evolve meritocratically in order to create the strongest, most competitive, most stable, society.
2. Conservatism is an epistemic bias,  That the primary purpose of institutions is to protect us from the error of human hubris: the fragility of human reason. The danger of the popular fashion. The danger of the impulsive mob.
3. Conservatism is an anthropological bias, whereby conservatives perceive that people are unequal in their contribution to society because of their age, or strength or health, or knowledge or intelligence, or character, or will, or cultural preferences. That people are historically consistent in their behavior and do not change, and will not change, and that any observed change is simply an illusion of our limited temporal perceptions, when observations are nothing more than the repetition of long generational cycles.  Therefore hierarchy is the means by which meritous action for the common good  determines one’s place. Even if that place was assisted by ones ancestors it must be lost by failure of merit, not political intercession (envy).
4. Conservatism is a risk mitigation bias, wherein conservatives perceive that economic relationships, social institutions, political institutions, social networks, morals, ethics, manners, are inherently fragile, and must change only as merit dictates, by evolutionary rather than legal or procedural means.
5. Conservatism is a meritocratic social accounting scheme, wherein those people who have conducted themselves with discipline, and conformity pay the ongoing and cumulative costs of forgoing opportunities with every act of discipline and forgone opportunity, as well as pay the costs of discipline needed to profit from their labors in the form of taxes, to create the social and economic institutions from which all similar contributors can benefit if they also behave as meritocratically. Conservatives acknowledge this system of costs and resent those who ‘steal’ from the community ‘pool’ that they with their labors paid into. the existing political system is considered the ‘rules of the game’ and circumventing the rules is an attempt to ‘cheat’ those who succeeded in it, by not paying the high costs of conformity paid by the existing winners of the game.
6. Conservatism is a long term bias wherein these conservative sentiments have been responsible for the stability of all long-running governments, and the prosperity that comes from sustaining those long run governments.

The Conservative Militaristic Biases

1. (undone)

Additional Western Conservative Biases

Western Conservatism also contains biases that are particular to western civilization because of its military tradition

1. The Fraternity Bias. (Or Shareholder bias.) This is bias is often misrepresented as individualism, when it is individual accountability in exchange for membership in the fraternity of peers. Members of the fraternity of peers will not relinquish their status, position, or rights, to any arbitrary authority.  And they trade whatever rights they wish to as voluntary contributions to the fraternity.  The western ‘shareholder’ model of commerce is an extension or evolution of the fraternal order of market-making soldiers.
   
2. Meritous Accumulation Of Elites Bias (Or Enfranchisement bias).  For most of western history, Generalship was the path to civic leadership. Military Service or generalship was the path to peerage.
3. The Action Bias: Deeds Not Words : Commercial And Military Merit

These set of biases are particular to western civilization, and give western civilization its unique character.

The Conservative Strategy : Group Persistence by Capital Accumulation

(UNDONE)

THE ORIGINS OF THE CONSERVATIVE SENTIMENT

The Fraternal Order Of City Building Soldiers

Western civilization is DIFFERENT from other civilizations primarily because its nobility possessed this SET of biases.  This set of biases was a consequence of the western militaristic social order. That order developed when the wheel, bronze and horses allowed the development of a raiding, then conquering, military culture, that because it required advanced technologies also required trade and markets. That military culture required that a man’s weaponry and horses were self funded, and the tactics employed required that individuals followed plans, but acted independently. Since strength required numbers, enfranchisement in the military order was, and a policy of expanding the army was advantageous.  This strategy allowed smaller but more disciplined and flexible western military forces at the edge of bronze civilization to resist the totalitarian slave armies of the older bronze cultures, and prevent them from expansion into european territories.  Furthermore, the fact that peerage was earned, and that ranks were dynamic and meritocratic, meant that argument and persuasion were as valuable as were assets and skill. This led to the development of reason, which led to the development of the republican form of government. Which led to the development of science, and western philosophy.  Because of the development of reason, strict hierarchy was unnecessary.  Unlike the Babylonian and Egyptian river deltas, which depended upon slave labor, and hierarchical order for organized cultivation.  (( This is an overly simplified narrative for the purpose of inclusion here, but has been elaborated by others which I reference elsewhere. ))

Western Conservatism then, is a residue of western militarism, which allowed it to compete successfully against older and more wealthy cultures by virtue of its battle tactics.  All cultures contain militaristic residues.  Chinese, Hindu, and Babylonian, Arabic, Atalic …. all these cultures are different because of the battle tactics employed by their ancestors, which in turn was largely a function of geography and resources.

Warriors Become Market Builders – Cities Are Markets

(UNDONE)

The Shareholder Model Of Society

(undone)

Militarism As Market Expansion And Market Defense

III.  CONSERVATISM AS A PHILOSOPHY

Conservatism Is The Logical And Necessary Political Philosophy of Hereditary Rulership

(UNDONE)

Because of inter-temporal preferences

THe whole of western literature is the discussion of rebellion: freedom.

A Political Philosophy Is Only Necessary As An Opposition Philosophy

(UNDONE)

The Origins Of Classical Liberalism As Political Philosophy: “What Do We Do Now”

The Origins Of Conservatism As Political Philosophy: “Oops”

The English Revolution – “We went far enough.”

THe French Revolution – “We went too far.”

Conservatism As Political Philosophy Is A Post-Industrial Revolution Philosophy
(UNDONE)

THE LIMITS OF CONSERVATIVE PHILOSOPHY

A Philosophy Is A System Of Thought That Can Be Articulated Rationally And Causally

(UNDONE)

The Conservative Rhetorical Weakness

Conservatism is a poorly articulated or unarticulated set of biases. Because conservatism is poorly articulated, conservatives are poor at defending their position compared to the highly developed system of moral statements iteratively developed over the centuries by opponents. Opponents see conservatism as resistant to change, rather than cautious of change committed with hubris. Opponents see conservatism as jealous of status, rather than rightfully resentful of the theft of their material contributions to social institutions. Opponents see conservatism as entitlement, rather than the result of accumulated meritous actions of families, that should only be displaced by more meritous conduct, not political circumvention of their achievements. Some conservatives only comprehend regression as a means of fixing the day’s challenges, and this is because they do not possess an articulated system of reason by which to propose alternate solutions.

Conservatives Pursue The Past Because They Have No Alternative Solution : They Have No Solution Because They Cannot Articulate Their Methodology

Conservatism Does Not Aim At Ends, But Means Of Achieving Ends

Conservatism is not a philosophy that argues for any particular end — it is a philosophy that argues for a means of achieving any end. ( Socialism Is a philosophy that argues FOR particular ends ) The purpose of that conservative method is to reduce the risk, and the likelihood of the error of human hubris, by accounting for realistic expectations of humans in a population given the record of human behavior. ¹

Natural Science is open to revision, it is perishable, so is social science. But we do not have a social sience. We use the scientific method, weakly, without a theory of social science.

Our model of government is based upon debate and competition of interests.

The government has always been bounded by money. Gold in particular.

Fiat money breaks this limitation on the state’s judgment. It makes government unscientific.

Fiat money is incompatible with the existing culture of competition. Without a gold standard it’s impossible.

many theorists would have us fix the problem by returning to the gold standard.

But fiat money makes it possible to govern a civilization by credit, and for citizens to insure one another. And this is an innovation in human political development.

The problem then, is to create accountability, or ‘calculability’ in the absence of the external limits placed on a government by the gold standard.

And our government must be restructured to rely upon calculably rather than external limitations of a natural currency.

When process and its outcomes are ‘calculable’ they are ‘predicable’.

Natural Law vs Political Science

Natural law, like evolution, is a term that is poorly understood.  In scientific terms, Natural Law would be stated as a set of principles that describe human behaviors that are immutable (people aren’t going to change).  And therefore policies should not seek to contradict human behavior.

Unfortunately, while humans have immutable behaviors, it is also possible to create institutions that reward people for circumventing natural behaviors.  For example, extra-tribal murder, rape and theft are not necessarily ‘bads’ in primitive hunter gatherer societies. They are beneficial goods for both the actor and the tribe.  But under the moral structure of the city-farm culture, we have made all of these into ‘bads’ with a very high degree of success.

Conservatives are behavioral skeptics that believe people will not act virtuously (for long) in any environment, especially one of anonymity, so that social change must be implemented through institutions that provide a better outcome under the new policies than before they were implemented.

Property for exmaple, is a very expensive institution to create.  Excess production, in the protestant model, is difficult.  Markets are difficult to establish and protect.  All of these institutions have become norms, becaues the incentive to participate is far greater than the incentive to exit the system.  But it was very expensive and time consuming to create that system.

Truth telling may be the hardest institution to create, not only because objective truth is somewhat hard for some people to discern, but because it is not in their interest to tell the truth when they can get away with lying.

(UNDONE: summary : science overlaps with natural law, but science is simply science : people do not change – scientific arguments ar simply that, scientific, and contrary arguments are errors that confuse the ABILITY for people to TEMPORARILY contradict a tendency, with the practical reality that they UNIVERSALLY abandon those temporary contradictions over time. – variations on prisoner’s dilemma.)

A number of properties of humans seem entirely immutable, and affect the political order:

1) IQ Variation

IQ’s determine the ability of individuals to grasp abstractions, and the rate at which one can apply abstractions in time.  In general “IQ’s above 135 invent ideas, IQs above 122 invent machines, IQ’s above 105 repair machines, and IQ’s below 105 use machines.”   While education can increase the productive capacity of everyone, the difference between individuals remains constant. The value that each person can contribute to society by virtue of his productive efforts is different.  More importantly, the form of social order available to people of different IQ distributions appears to be limited by that of the mean of the group’s IQ.

Furthermore, men are more widely distributed than are women, who are more concentrated in the middle, especially as we age. Men tend to specialize at the edges of the curve, and do so increasingly as women enter the work force under industrial capitalism. This means that some larger number of women must ‘settle’ than had to in past social structures, and men must pursue increasingly risky forms of status seeking in order to compete for mates.

2) Status Seeking (Imitation) (Envy)

People seek status for the following reasons, none of which appears to be alterable.

a) Mating Selection. Particularly because women are hypergamic  (They marry upward, and they will compete against higher odds for a limited number of top men before settling).

b) Opportunity Expansion : status increases opportunities. So the type of status system societies adopt is self reinforcing.

c) Epistemic Necessity : people must imitate someone, and therefore imitate those with greater status.  So the type of status system societies choose is self-reinforcing.

d) Sensitivity To Status Distance (Equality and Hierarchy Elasticity)

(UNDONE)

3) Acquisitiveness (experiential and material)

People are acquisitive. Partly for status reasons. Partly for entertainment reasons.  If their acquisitiveness is suppressed, they develop black markets, or revert to hazardous forms of entertainment.  They will conform to a social order easily if acquisitiveness is satisfied.  It is important to note that the mind must stay busy one way or another, in order for a human (or any mammal) to stay healthy. Acquisitiveness is not a bad trait.  And anti-acquisitive sentiments are those that fail to understand the division of labor.

4) Gaming and Conforming: People will seek to advance status and inventory at lowest cost by  ’gaming’ the system, or conforming to the system, depending upon which method is most available to them.  In fact, the very act of bringing a competitive product to market is an effort to ‘game’ the market.  The market uses acquisitiveness, status seeking, and gaming, as incentives.

5) Division Of Labor And Knowledge :

A division of knowledge and labor creates increased productivity, which decreases prices, and encourages new products with additional features at higher prices to come to market.  The greater the division of labor the greater the production. The geater the ‘innovative content’ of products, the higher the prices.

6) Alliances. People Form Groups To Compete Against Other Groups.

7) Iron Law Of Oligarchy.  Groups Require Leaders, And Leaders Seek To Retain Power

Conservatism Seeks To Create A System For Saving And Seizing Opportunities Not Executing Plans

(UNDONE)

The Human Accounting System We Call Memory²

Property, in the form of  Body, Time, Mind, Choices, Actions (Effort, Affections), And Products Of Actions in Craft and Trade, is the human accounting system. It is an analog system, not ditigal by nature.  The development of numbers made it digital and in doing so extended our abiltity to percieve the world through the abstraction of numbers and prices.

Human accounting is innate. It is expressed as felt emotions in response to circumstances. It is pre-cognitive.  We evolved with it. We are born with it. (And we are born with the desire to, and skill to, game it.)

Human memory is limited.  Without abstract tools like numbers and narratives, symbols and writing, we cannot perceive the complexity of the world, and commit it to memory sufficiently to make comparisons, judgements and forecasts.

Numbers exist, despite their abstract nature, because people act like they exist, and we institutionalize their existence in the form of counting, prices, and formulae.  Gods exist because people act like they exist and we institutionalize their existence through ritual and myth. History exists – even conflicting versions of it,  because people act like it exists, and we institutionalize its existence through storytelling and ritual we call education.

But most importantly, Property exists, because people ACT like it exists, and we institutionalize its existence, and we expand its existence by increasing the regulations that we place on market activities. Property is incommensurable without numbers (prices) which give it a relative value to others, rather than an intrinsic value to one’s self.

But property is the human accounting system. Numbers and prices are the tools of extended cooperation – activities between individuals. Internally, we use property. We can feel it even if some of us do not know how to use numbers to improve it.

The Importance of Sentiments In Decision Making

The Cumulative Effect Of Tie Breaking Decisions

Tie Breakers As Funding Group Sentiments

Summary

Fundamentally, conservatism is cautious of risks that would undermine the stability and group competitiveness by replacing meritous conduct that accumulates in social institutional capital with common consumptive hubris.

In its most simple terms, Conservatism can be expressed as a bias toward ‘Saving’. Not resistance. But Saving.

Conservatism is a philosophy of long term group persistence through capital accumulation. It is entirely rational. It can be rationally articulated.

THE SENTIMENT OF FREEDOM

Freedom (like justice) is a word used freely and commonly, by people who sense that they comprehend it but cannot articulate it.

Positive Freedom is having access to the resources to achieve your potential.

Negative Freedom  Freedom From Interference

Juridical Defense : the right of opposition

Practical Freedom

• Personal Freedom (Life, Mind and Property)
• Political Freedom (choosing your leaders)
• National Freedom (Forming a coalition for controlling market activity within a geography)

INSTITUTIONAL COSTS (HABITS)

ADMINISTRATIVE COSTS

PRACTICAL INVESTMENTS

Defense (Male)

Transportation

Education

Basic Research

PRACTICAL INSURANCE

Resolution Of Disputes

Unemployment Insurance

Protection (police, fire, emergency)

Health Care

PRACTICAL REDISTRIBUTION

Childcare (Female)

Welfare (Female)

1. For example, conservatives are against pornography. However, it appears from the data, that the widespread of pornography on the internet does not increase sex crimes but decreases them dramatically, because there is an ‘outlet’ for human sexual frustration. [↩]
2. I am able to describe this process in greater detail, but that is a complex argument for another paper. [↩]

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