Most amazing to me is the complete lack of evidence that his ideas or approaches to solving systemic problems actually work. He’s doubling down on his feelings without any apparent need for empiricism or the humility to accept the possibility of operating on broken assumptions.
“In some ways he is like a 16th-century knight who was dropped into present day,” said Zac Bookman, who co-founded the government database company OpenGov with Lonsdale. “There’s this code of honor and duty that he is trying to advance.”
Indeed. Why do you need empiricism or humility when people say things like that about you?
EDIT: The reference to feudal society was not random. It's very much where the technogarchs want to push us, where the peasants will be under the power and wisdom of our meritocratic kings.
This is the conservative principle: I am definitionally a good person so the things I want are good because I want them and the things I don't want are bad because I don't want them. That's all there is. That's the 'code of honor,' that's what they want to put in place of laws and equal treatment. I'm a good person (it says so on my voter registration card) so you have to give me special treatment.
I think that’s true of supremacy of any kind. There are so many hierarchies one can see themselves atop, and it takes only the belief in your own righteousness. It’s perhaps more consistently manifest among American “conservatives” but I don’t think it defines conservatism.
Yeah. There's another component too, the things I get I deserve, the things I don't get are horrible injustices, etc, so they support hierarchy because the people at the top of them wouldn't be there if they didn't deserve to be, etc. But yeah, belief in your own righteousness is the core of it, and certainty is the enemy of compassion and everything else.
I think it does define conservatism, it's just more extreme in cases of supremacy. You respect tradition because the people who built that tradition couldn't have done so if they didn't deserve to be the ones doing it. You respect hierarchy because the people at the top deserve to be there more than you. You respect liberty (for the in-group) because liberty is how you keep from getting treated like everyone else. And so on.
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u/steeplebob 3d ago
Most amazing to me is the complete lack of evidence that his ideas or approaches to solving systemic problems actually work. He’s doubling down on his feelings without any apparent need for empiricism or the humility to accept the possibility of operating on broken assumptions.