If you have at least a mild inclination toward conservatism, you’ve probably encountered someone calling you an extremist in recent years. Or someone told you that you are becoming radicalized. Such a thing makes a normal person think. I have really changed my mind so much, is something really wrong with me?
A good test is to open an older book that you identified with 20 years ago and think about whether I perceive its content fundamentally differently. If you are more conservative by nature, you probably won’t be surprised to find that you are more or less consistent in your opinion. That’s what conservatism is all about; to be conservative means to be quite rigid in one’s attitudes. Let what was be preserved.
(Just by the way and to clarify positions: I don’t consider myself a conservative or a political liberal, let alone a “higher level” progressive; I see myself as neutral in that regard.)
So why does much of the world see conservatives as so “derailed”? This is actually because society is moving and conservative minded people are not moving with it because they are distrustful of the way society is going. It is the effect of a moving train, when a politically liberal passenger goes somewhere, looks at others through the window of the compartment and feels that he is standing still and the world outside the window is moving.
Progressivism is the engine that drives the world forward throughout history, and that’s okay. Conservatism acts as a safety brake, the job of which is to brake the engine so that the changes taking place are not made too hastily. This reduces the cost of potential errors that occur during the flow of history. It tries to ensure that the speed at which we are moving is still safe, so that it is possible to maneuver around obstacles and in the event of a dead end, it is possible to turn back.
Thus, conservatism and progressivism work antagonistically, but in mutual balance. Both approaches have their place in a healthy society. If the spine is to be straight and healthy, it is necessary to exercise the abdomen and the back.
However, today’s world is riding on the wave of militant and intolerant progressivism. He flies so fast that he himself does not realize to what extreme he has already moved. It is becoming more and more absurd, unstable and therefore more dangerous. This naturally forces conservatives to be more vocal in their criticism, but the positions they defend are still the same as they were twenty or thirty years ago. Only what was normal then is extreme today. Opinions that were legitimate then are forbidden today. However, if a person is sitting in a compartment and not on the platform, he perceives the events around him completely differently.
A friend told me that when the revolution was taking place in our country in 1989, he was still in kindergarten and perceived the events around him with the mind of a six-year-old child. One of the few things he remembers from that time is that a friend told him:
“Now Havel is president and everything will change.”
My friend asked, “What all?”
“We have freedom.”
My friend: “Freedom?”
“Freedom, like you can say the president is a jerk and the cops won’t lock you up for it.”
My friend started laughing and yelling, “The president is an idiot! The president is a jerk!’
If any adult heard it at the time, they must have felt how childishly silly it was, but also authentic. It was a cry of freedom and the right to stupidity. People were grateful that they could now be authentic and not be afraid to express what was really inside them. Many adults wanted to shout a more important message to the world then, and they finally could.
My parents’ generation really wanted to be free back then. For today’s young generation, freedom is more of a burden because it goes hand in hand with responsibility, and responsibility spoils the fun. That’s why they don’t protest when freedoms are cut. They like to delegate responsibility as far away from themselves as possible – to their parents, to the state, or even better, straight to Brussels.
We are thus experiencing a time full of paradoxes. The biggest state censor goes to discuss with people “without censorship”, a former communist intelligence officer goes to light candles on Národní třída on November 17, the biggest pacifists and opponents of the arms industry incite the crowd to war, and the minister of education reforms education so that children don’t have to learn anything. It is the raw embodiment of Orwell’s novel 1984: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength!”
Mainstream media paints the world in black and white, search engines and social networks carefully sort information into right and wrong, and the biggest threat to democracy is the democratic voter.
Today, in Germany or Scotland, you can easily be summoned for questioning by the police, for example, just because you refuse to address someone according to the gender to which the given being applies (Harry Potter author JK Rowling, for example, knows about this). However, we must like it, because it comes from the west, and the west is the right one after all.
Anyone who does not want to sit on this high-speed train and speed on is suspect and must be shamed, because he is moving to the extreme. This progressive train is flying to the west and the east is on its heels, so whoever stays standing will soon be east, whoever doesn’t go to Brussels definitely wants to go to Moscow, whoever doesn’t go with Fiala, wants to go with Babis, whoever doesn’t want to pay in euros, wants certainly pay in rubles, and whoever doesn’t want the Green Deal wants the apocalypse. This is part of today’s government propaganda. Babiš’s government started it, the current coalition of five perfected it (which, unfortunately, is probably the only thing it really succeeded in doing).
Presidential elections were recently held in Slovakia. And I protested in front of my friends against the interpretation of the results (by a number of not so much Slovak voters, but rather Czech observers) saying: “It amazes me how many people accept the opinion that Slovakia is moving towards Russia.” It’s complete stupidity. What do they expect Pellegrini to send Putin an invitation letter now or what?” I immediately caught it: “So according to you we are all idiots!” I do not intend to defend Pellegrini in the slightest, but this is not about him at all. I was interested in the shift in thinking. Because everything is heated, everything is also personal. This is another dangerous effect of indoctrination. A person objects to an opinion, and it is immediately interpreted as a limitation towards persons, the community, the collective, the herd. Either you choose Losna or Mazňák. You are either a Spartan or a Slavist. You are either with us, comrade, or you are against us.
It sounds about the same to a progressive, but to a conservative there is a vast difference between calling an opinion stupid or calling a person a moron. Even a smart person can have stupid opinions. I would even say that almost everyone has a stupid opinion about something. Opinions are up for discussion and subject to revision. The entire Enlightenment was about questioning things, and the Enlightenment took our thinking out of the Middle Ages. It’s amazing how convinced progressives are of their forward course, they don’t realize that they’re actually going backwards in mindset. By trying to stifle criticism with censorship, they defacto deify the advocated opinion, just as the medieval church did. Indeed, human knowledge is entirely constructed from erroneous consensuses that have been constantly re-evaluated.
Just look at any technical standards. Only rarely is the last revision more than 20 years old, and hopefully it will be in 20 years, because if science becomes a religion, it’s not going anywhere.
Immanuel Kant once said that enlightenment is a person’s stepping out of self-inflicted wrongdoing. He saw this lack of self-righteousness as a self-inflicted inability to use our own reason without being guided by someone else. He urged people to have the courage to use their own reason. I think that it is the courage to use one’s own reason that people lack today.
People think they think, but in reality they are taking opinions from the media. It happens so slowly that they are not even aware of it. Just as you don’t see aging in yourself when you look in the mirror every day, you also don’t see that if a lie is repeated long enough, you will accept it as the consensus. That is why today we can hear from people that democracy has survived, that the Czech koruna is bad and is behind today’s economic problems, that the voice of each individual should perhaps not have the same weight (preparation for the introduction of the Chinese credit system), or that it is not right , when everyone can say and write what they think (legitimization of censorship).
How to live in such a world and not go crazy? Return to the beginning. Open an old book and read. Today, one can find more truth in the books of old centuries than on Wikipedia, which is continuously corrected by the vassals of the Ministry of Truth. That’s the only way you’ll know whether you’re sitting in a compartment or on the platform.
Tags: TIME Indoctrination Proceeds Invisible Dog
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