This is a good question. I like good, intelligent questions like these.
We’ve been buried under Pompeii-like mountains of pumice and ash that have hardened into a monolith. We can’t dig ourselves out without blowing up the many layers of rock-solid sediment that accumulated. Once the top layer of ossified cold lava is blown up and hauled away, we can start carefully to extract the remnants of our civilization that are buried underneath.
For me, civilization means that I can go out with my child on a Sunday morning, and we are completely safe and comfortable wandering around, the streets are clean, the playgrounds are free, open, clean and have no druggies or homeless loitering about. Everybody is polite and sweet to each other. Nobody breaks driving rules. People say compliments to strangers just because they feel good about life. There’s no garbage lying around, no cigarette butts, or dog excrement. We go to a nature preserve or one of the several artificial lakes in the vicinity where happy kids are playing baseball and climbing the playground equipment. Even children are polite, kind and generous to each other. In addition, I want there to be no festivals dedicated to sexual perversions in the park. I don’t want to explain to my kid what a “policule” is because my property taxes were used to inflict BDSM booths on us where we go to feed ducks. I want the local public library not to have its entire showcase dedicated to books like “I Am Jazz” and “Black Girl Hair Is Magical.”
I want good, civilized life to be available not in vanishing enclaves but everywhere. In Grey Mirror, Yarvin quotes some descriptions of what Cleveland was like 100 years ago. It wasn’t whatever it is now. Cleveland and most major cities in the US have experienced a massive decline. If we seek stability right now, it means we remain ensconced in the reality where oases of civilization are being devoured by chaos and barbarity. That is our baseline, our normality. That’s what we’ve been taught to accept as normal.
I was recently stuck in a huge traffic jam as I was leaving St Louis. My GPS was getting overheated trying to show me a completely clear and open exit. I’m sure that all the rest of the drivers had their GPS redirecting them to that very clear exit. But we all sat there for over 90 minutes, staring straight ahead and refusing to take it. Because it leads to East St Louis. We all recite anti-racist mantras at work, and not a single one of us would willingly drive through East St Louis under any circumstances. East St Louis has been a mess for at least 60 years. We need to go back much further than that to undo the terrible damage that’s been done in these decades. This will take an enormous effort because we’ve all been marinated in decades of stories about how we inhabit the best possible reality that is getting better every day. We didn’t go off course last year. We’ve been dismantling the Western good life for a long time. We don’t even have words to talk about East St Louis or the fentanyl dessert around my pretty little enclave because those words have been beaten out of several generations of people.
We need to go fast and hard in a completely different direction. I honestly don’t see any other way.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes, what my wife called her little bit of paradise has changed and not for the positive. A dozen new houses down the hill and nineteen above, no sooner built but new plans for two more groups of five duplexes. We try, still talking at the mailbox and waving as people pass, but the sense of community is fading.
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St. Louis a century ago was a prosperous city, but it was not the pretty picture you’re painting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_St._Louis_massacre
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Sounds pretty bad. Especially given that today we have this massacre happen in East St Louis not once but all the time. It’s the most crime-ridden place in the nation. So I wonder how come it’s still that bad after all the wonderful progress we are supposed to have made.
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Er, Clarissa, your well-written post didn’t answer any of your reader’s specific questions about Trump.
Dreidel
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I’ll put it bluntly, then: I don’t care about Trump’s personal beliefs because I’m not a groupie. But yes, we absolutely need explosive change and complete disruption because we’ve gone way too far in a direction that’s leading us off a cliff.
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I think it’s a little naive to think after this “digging” you’re going to find what you wanted, and not something entirely different; potentially completely different from what you were originally looking for.
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Possibly, yes, even probably. But what’s the alternative? If even a realist novel from 1961 sounds like science fiction, and we can’t talk about that aloud because it’s racist, then what should be done?
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Thanks for answering Clarissa.
One thing that struck me is there seems to be an inherent contradiction between conservatism and the idea that we need disruptive change to fix society. It almost seems that at that point the word “conservatism” loses its meaning entirely.
One thing of note as well, many of the people leading this movement, Trump and company included, they were not conservatives until fairly recently. People like Elon Musk were strongly in the liberal and democratic camp up until recently. I mean, we’re talking just a few years ago.
Accelerationism, dark enlightenment, Yarvin, etc. these were all progressive ideas up until recently. The foundations of accelerationism and the study of cybernetics was started by hippie progressive types to arrive at a form of society that has nothing to do with conservative society.
What I’m getting at is whatever we are looking to achieve with this “disruptive change” may not be conservative at all because the foundations are inherently anti-conservative.
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The problem with taking “conservatism” literally is that nobody wants to conserve the idiocy we’re stuck with right now. The version of conservatism that says “let’s don’t change anything” is only functional when you live with a society/government/culture that functions well. We’re not there. Conserving this is a losing strategy. So while we are stuck with a nonsensical label, ‘conservative’, modern conservatives are actually radicals: we really do want to blow it all up and start over at some very different point.
I’m not sure it’s possible, but the more you squeeze people, the more they’re willing to try it.
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It’s exactly like telling archaeologists that they aren’t preserving the remnants of old civilizations while they dig and turn around huge masses of dirt. One needs to do that before getting to the artefacts. We are trying to unearth our artifacts and figure out what they were because we haven’t been allowed even to know.
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I think it’s a little naive to think after this “digging” you’re going to find what you wanted, and not something entirely different; potentially completely different from what you were originally looking for.
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It’s also a miskake, though, to fall into the well-oiled Religion of Progress trap, where any time you say “some things used to be better” the answer is: “Oh, you just want to go back to the bad old days when xyz was normal”.
It is possible to look back and say: you know what, we want an economy *with* economic security for the working class, *without* racial segregation. We don’t actually have to sacrifice medical progress, in order to go “back” toward a medical-care model where we aren’t suffocated by middlemen.
We’ve all been poisoned with this odd tendency to think of any kind of “well, let’s go back to that thing that worked before” as blaspheming against Progress. All Regress is evil/bad/wrong, and any attempt to reach “back” to something, even if it was more functional, somehow automatically means you must want to throw away all the actual progress in every domain… why? I think that connection is both a lie, and also deliberate, to short-circuit people rejecting any aspect of the new! improved! reality!
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methylethyl
LOL, I remember New! Improved! TIDE with a free hand towel inside the box, where the towel was cheaper than the displaced soap ;-D
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Clarissa
The real question is what current and historic beliefs are we prepared to examine, and perhaps far more importantly, re-examine? Fundamental ideological understandings: for example, several that we two have basically agreed to disagree; the origins of Western communism and its sister feminism. But given the current major effect of both on Western Civilization, clearly the rotting corpses of both should be disinterred and subjected to objective forensic historic study…and yes, I am talking about measuring again ;-D
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“problem with taking “conservatism” literally is that nobody wants to conserve the idiocy we’re stuck with right now”
I don’t think the labels ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ mean much anymore….
My proposals for capturing the difference are very non-catchy (someone else can come up with better names).
First we need to accept that change is inevitable in every society. A society that doesn’t change is dead.
But… what differs are things like speed of change, attitudes toward change.
So…. I think the real difference is between
Ordered incrementalists – want change to occur slowly, in small steps, with the possibility of rolling back changes that don’t work.
Chaotic entropists – embrace any and all change the more rapid the better. While the rationale is about freedom and self-discovery… in an environment of constant radical change the self… disappears. Self-expression requires order and stability to manifest.
So… That’s what I think.
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Many changes are neither controlled nor planned: a sudden change like the development of hormonal contraception; or the horrific losses of people in war, where after WW1~25% of young British women had no marriage prospects, will Ukraine or Russia feel a similar impact?
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Russia is importing millions of Central Asians to fulfill Putin’s dream of removing ethnic Russians from the country’s territory. So no need to worry about the Russian women’s marriage prospects. Population replacement is ever green.
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“Many changes are neither controlled nor planned”
And many are controlled and planned. And even those that are neither do not need to be simply embraced and/or surrendered to. But so many people at present have no… mechanism? criteria? for evaluating changes or their responses to them.
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OK, where can I read what your team is planning to build instead of what we have now and you want dismantled?
Let’s say the goal is to do something about East St-Louis and the like… And we are doing it not in incremental fashion, but quickly. Let’s say we are not going to bomb it, but some combination of sticks including rapid reduction of food stamps, housing subsidies and medicare / medicaid is used… what next? Part of the population dying out due to gang wars (internal), being shot by the police in the attempts to rob neighboring areas, drug overdoses, as well as good old malnutrition and lack of medical care? Part moving out and … replacing illegal immigrants in low-paying jobs? So that low cost of food is preserved?
What’s the plan beyond “we want it to be like in the 60ies”? The 60-ies were a very special time. Many industrialized nations have not yet fully recovered after WWII (or were not properly industrialized yet, like China). The US economy represented much larger share of the global economy than it is now…
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You seem to suggest that conservatives are the ones who want to inflict all these calamities on East St Louis. But they have all been inflicted already, and not by us. Look at Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, New York, any city with a significant black population. All these cities have Dem leadership, and look at the results. What’s the plan other than more of the same, more gangs, drugs, population replacement, and statues to George Floyd?
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OK, let’s remove everything that can be interpreted as leading questions or sarcasm from my previous post. What is the plan? Not just the final goal (I did notice a long list of desired outcomes in your post), but how are you going to get there?
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This will take everybody, or at least many people, understanding that this is not the way. We have allowed ourselves to become a raging maw of desire and we are devouring everything that used to make a good life. I don’t advocate for any government measures to prevent people from putting up booths advertising BDSM in a children’s park. For the entirety of human history, it took no specific edict to prevent that. We should all decide that we are fed up and we are not doing that anymore. The librarian could go around the kids’ section today, put away all the ideological crap and place books about bunnies or planets or Pinocchio. I don’t want her to be forced to do it, or fired, or the library defunded. I want her to understand that she’s doing something shameful by defacing a public space with garbage. It didn’t take us such a long time to get to the place where we collectively slobber over “the sex worker community”, gape at TV shows featuring mutilated children, and put up statues to a guy who pointed a gun at a pregnant woman’s belly. We got here very fast, and this means we can get out of here. But we need to deprogram our brains from the idolatry of “freedom” and “choice.” We should re-learn the word “immoral.” We should stop accepting victim status as an excuse for terrible behavior. We should stop shoving devices into kids’ hands and drugs into their faces. Again, this takes self-control, discipline, slowing down, learning not to be such raging Iwannas.
I struggle with the curse of Iwanna all the time, too. Nobody is immune. This will be hard for everybody.
As for government action, it would help if the concept of citizenship became meaningful again, the borders were closed, and serious oversight introduced into the pharma industry. It would also be fantastic if some degree of oversight were introduced into the food industry, but I know it’s a pipe dream. Also, I’d like the government to stop funding ideological projects of any kind. It’s not too much to ask but I’m not hopeful we’ll get any of it.
I was thinking that maybe the COVID lockdowns would shake us out of this hedonistic torpor but they only made things worse. I saw a man defecating in the Old Port in Montreal in the middle of the day. And people just accepted that it’s fine when even a few years ago it was impossible. Something needs to shake them hard to see what they’ve done to a formerly paradise-like city.
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Thank you!
I actually agree with many things.
Re pharma and food industry… Agree, but these two industries are not special. Any industry can become predatory if allowed. It is the feature of the system, not a bug.
Also, I would suspect that if people suddenly became psychologically healthier, it would have very negative impact on the economy. The whole branches of economy exist only to satisfy some not very healthy needs. Conversely, especially at the current level of automation, healthy needs can be satisfied by the small percentage of the population actually doing some useful work. And the degree of automation will only increase, with AI taking over many white collar jobs (including government jobs, which I think is the endgame of DOGE).
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If people became psychologically healthier, some parts of the economy would die but others would spring up in their place. Somebody, for instance, would need to build the parks, playgrounds, tennis courts, hiking paths, etc for a society they decided go outdoors more.
And I don’t think it’s psychological health as much as the nature of the understanding of what makes life good. We need to go from pleasure-seeking to duty-bound understanding of self because the former is messing with people’s heads really badly. This isn’t something that people should struggle with individually or with a therapist. We all collectively have gone way too far in the hedonistic direction.
I’m not a classical Marxist, though. I don’t believe that economic factors are at the bottom of everything. The economy doesn’t decide everything for us. We don’t have to be neoliberal if we don’t want to.
The problem is, we still really want to.
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—And I don’t think it’s psychological health as much as the nature of the understanding of what makes life good.
To me the latter is included into the psychological health. And my definition of psychological health is not something that absolutely requires working with the psychologist.
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Then we have no disagreement at all in this area. 🙂
I also want to add that the main philosophical difference I encountered in conservative and progressive circles has to do with coercion. Conservatives, at least the ones I talk to, don’t want to improve other people. I want progressives to be completely free to believe what they do and hold their workshops and express their beliefs. All I want is not to be forced to participate. I want to agree to disagree without being called names. That’s why, as you’ve seen, I’m completely opposed to the federal government persecuting student protesters. I think they are dumb dicks and their cause is ridiculous. But I support their right to do it. Of course, if they litter or break toilets, they should pay for it but that should be true for everybody.
Sadly, there’s not a liberal in existence that can tolerate us peacefully gathering to protest or discuss our causes and beliefs. Even our silence is wounding to them and they try to force us out of it.
Of course, if the situation arises where we are forced to meet every other Tuesday for 3 months to be excoriated for the characteristics we didn’t choose by MAGAs, I will be just as opposed to that as I am to the current arrangement.
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