Ambrose Bierce in the Devil’s Dictionary: “Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”
The High Priest of people who like to call themselves Conservatives is a man by the name of Russell Kirk. In 1953 he published a book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. This book not only serves as the Bible for the modern Conservative movement, it is also a manual which outlines how the strong Father must exert his authority over the unruly masses under his watchful eye. The masses are ignorant of the wisdom the Father possesses. He has this natural wisdom because of his exalted position as the head of the family – a position ordained by the Master, i.e. God – and he has a divine responsibility to make sure that his masses of ignorant and unruly children follow his dictums, ideas which have been handed down through history and are aligned with the power structure of male over female and Father over the rest of the family. The family, for Conservatives, is the society we live in and the Father is the ruler over that society.
Conservative ideas are hierarchical in nature and must be enforced with strength. That might even call for violence from time to time in order to purge society of the unbeliever and teach the recalcitrant a lesson they will never forget. In idiomatic form it equates to: Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Kirk handed down 6 basic commandments for the followers of the Conservative Faith. Let’s have a look at what they are and what these commandments actually mean when stripped of their eloquent camouflage.
N.B.: Although there have been and may well be in the future, some females who fit into the Conservative mold, e.g. Margaret Thatcher, it is the male who is touted as the one who should be and should remain dominant if the system is to remain stable and in place for the longest time possible, i.e. Eternity.
Now let’s play some strip poker and see what the Conservative Mind looks like when it’s naked!
- Transcendent Order
First, the Conservative generally believes that there exists a transcendent moral order, and the ways of society ought to conform to this moral order. In other words, God is at work here. His “natural law” is the enduring moral authority. This moral order is codified in the Good Book.
Take off your hat buddy!
This sounds quite pleasant to your ears if you are a Deist and True Believer in the words written in one of the books that serve a religion. The Christian version of “moral order” is essentially written in the various “books” of the Old Testament. The Bible is full of contradictions as regards the “moral order.” Anyone who has spent time reading the document knows this.
Despite these contradictions, what is “moral” has gone through various interesting transformations since Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. The gods and goddesses of the pre-Christian empire were notorious for their licentiousness, their vengefulness and their fickle dispensation of fortune, both good and bad. Christianity brought along with it the Jewish God of the Old Testament, the only God, a dispenser of furious vengeance, an intolerant Master who demands absolute obedience to his will, even going so far as to order his subject Abraham to kill his son as an act of submission.
This is the Father model that Conservatives love. The absolute monarch, ordained by God to rule over his subjects. If the divine will of the Master is not submitted to without question, wrath and punishment is sure to come. And it has come often enough since Constantine’s time, especially when Rome insisted on converting the conquered to the new state religion. Non-compliance was rewarded with a quick trip to Hades for the pagans. For recalcitrant converts who didn’t want to be under the yoke of the new masters, Hell was their reward.
What about Jesus? What we know about Jesus from the research done by Michael Hudson and others, is that he was a reformer who wanted to get rid of perpetual debt slavery and bring back the Jewish tradition of the Jubilee Year, the year in which all debt was forgiven and all seized property was returned to its former owners. In other words, a complete reset. A restart. A chance for people to get it right this time and not fall into debt that destroyed them and their family.
Constantine and the “fathers of the church” erased that aspect of Jesus and changed the word “debt” into the word “sin” so that owners of debt and property would not be forced to return anything and debt slavery could continue unhindered. Jesus was transformed from a reformer working for the liberation of the common man from earthly slavery into a divine being liberating mankind from the burden of sin, which is there from birth, thus following orders given by the almighty Father and dying in order to free us all from our sins instead of our debts.
Suddenly, with the adoption of the doctrine of “original sin” you were guilty for just being born. Leverage for the people in charge of the state religion, leverage for the people in charge of the state. “Sinners” had no standing and could be punished any way the authoritarian leader, the divinely ordained “Father,” saw fit. The fact that those in power were (and still are) the greatest sinners and just as licentious and fickle as the gods of the pagans made no difference, because by a simple confession to a man who took the oath of omertà, all could be forgiven.
- Variety
Conservatives believe egalitarianism belongs to radical systems that destroy long-established social institutions and modes of life. They are convinced of the need for social classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true form of equality is equality at the Last Judgement.
Take off that tailored shirt!
God – the Christian God – never leaves the Conservative Mind. Embedded in the skull along with the Last Judgement is the simple, geometrically sound and efficient pyramid, with the all-seeing eye of the Master at the top. The wealthy and wise leaders, the merchants and the military are up there, and the base consists of the masses who toil under the watchful eye of the Master(s) who sit (divinely ordained) at the pinnacle.
The Roman version of Christianity seems to have always been rather corrupt. Popes had mistresses and illegitimate children, powerful families got their brothers and cousins installed in the highest offices of the church, greed was endemic, and so, eventually, reformers like Luther and Calvin, became whistleblowers. Aristocrats from the northern parts of Europe realized they could use this schism to break away from the control hitherto exerted by the southern oligarchs. Max Weber put pen to paper and came up with what he termed “The Protestant Ethic.” He said that Protestants were successful and loved by God because they attached value to hard work, thrift, and efficiency. Calvin said that success in worldly endeavors meant that God loves you and you are headed for eternal salvation.
Conservatives believe there are natural distinctions among men, leading to inequalities of condition. The only equality is equality before God and the courts (which conveniently follow the laws written up by the rich and powerful); anything more leads to “servitude and boredom.” Therefore, inequality is necessary to uphold the status of the rich (the successful blessed by the Lord) and ensure the domination of the poor – sinners unrepentant and not worth saving because, since they are not successful, must therefore be lazy and/or stupid.
- Freedom and property are linked.
Without private property, the state is unstoppable. Redistribution of wealth, by taxes or other means, is not economic progress. Men need property to secure their rights, discharge their duties, and limit government.
Take off that wife-beater and show us your muscular chest!
Money talks. The landed gentry who fashioned the Constitution of the United States made sure that money would continue to talk by making it impossible for the voting public to elect the leader of the nation directly. Men (most always men) appointed by the rulers of individual states – electors – are to be sent to congress to deliver the results of the vote in their particular state. These electors are, however, allowed to not follow the will of the voters in their state and can give their vote to a candidate their state had not preferred. It hasn’t happened often, but it has happened. The candidate for President in 2020, who actually lost the battle for electors in the states, attempted to send faux electors to congress in order to manipulate the system in his favor. He also attempted to force the ceremonial tallier of the preferences expressed by the electors to nullify those preferences and declare the loser a winner.
- Social Continuity
Conservatives uphold the principle of social continuity, a community of souls. Change may not be a good thing, and though it is sometimes necessary, it must be gradual and discriminatory, never “unfixing old interests at once.” Revolution is a cure that kills.
Unhook that Gucci belt and drop those Dolce & Gabbana pants!
If you have a community of souls, then there must be someone in charge who looks after those souls. Nikolay Gogol showed us how that concept could be successfully manipulated in order to ensure that the masters remained the masters and that clever men could become masters by using the ambiguity inherent in the system to cash in.
Let’s just leave God in the background for a moment because now we are dealing with earthly things, despite the souls.
Redistribution of wealth is akin to revolution. To give anything of value to the unwashed unsuccessful rabble, as the original Jesus attempted to do, is anathema to the Conservative Mind. Edmund Burke, a member of Kirk’s Pantheon of Conservative Thinkers1, was appalled and frightened by the French Revolution. After many years of climbing the ladder of the social system in Britain, he had finally arrived at being able to pal around with well-known thinkers and at the same time be of service to important aristocrats and anything that threatened his newly attained rank in life was horrifying. In France the new revolution was truly a “cure that kills.”
Burke reasoned: If a king is a divinely appointed head of state and the aristocratic system that supports it, peopled by the rich and successful, is made up of the chosen, the saved, then any attempt to take away the basis for their power – their wealth – must be stopped at any cost. Well, that meant of course at the cost of the lives of those trying to enable redistribution, before the blade of the guillotine meets the heads of the elite.
In England during Burke’s time – Kirk’s Conservative Garden of Eden – debtors were imprisoned and thieves were hanged. Later, when it became convenient to empty the country of these reprobates, they were all shipped to penal colonies to work as indentured servants, i.e. slaves, for the elite colonial masters who were exploiting the new territories by stealing natural resources and murdering the indigenous.
Taxes are evil – on the other hand, this evil of taxation is not applicable if taxes burden the unsuccessful and redistribute wealth upward. Government must be limited – limited to the exploitation of the underclasses by the elite. Only thus will the state run efficiently, with the successful at the helm. Ergo, debt slavery is fine, and even actual slavery is fine, as long as no Spartacus appears on the scene and tries to change “the natural order.”
- Prescription
Things are the way they are for a good reason. Past generations passed on these customs and conventions, and so why should these things change. Customs and traditions serve as a check on anarchy. People who advocate change for the sake of change only lust for power. Power has been in the hands of the Fathers who rule with divine authority and that should not change. “The individual is foolish, but the species is wise,” Burke declared.
Are you wearing cashmere boxers? With your initials in gold thread? Strip!
Translation: “That’s the way we’ve always done it, so why should we change now.” Strangely enough, this slogan has become the slogan for doom when applied to a business entity. Every consultant firm in the modern world will tell you that if you don’t change how you do business, you will fail. Innovation is the mother of success.
OK says the Conservative Mind. As long as The Father controls the business and the tradition of the hierarchy can be maintained, then the technical aspects of how the business functions can be modified. And when innovation is born, then it can be born from a mother, but only because the seed was planted by an all-powerful Father. Of course this type of change is only acceptable if quarterly profit continues to rise and the workers don’t get uppity.
But never apply this dictum to society. Society should not change at all if humanly possible. Any change in the fabric of the social system must be slow and always benefit the structure that is in place: the Masters and Priests, Merchants and Military, and keep down at the bottom women and the slaving unwashed and ignorant Subjugated Masses.
Money goes up, shit comes down.
- Imperfection
No perfect social order can ever be created because people are imperfect. To aim for utopia is to end in disaster. If the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are forgotten, then the anarchic impulses in man break loose. All that we can reasonably expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering continue to lurk.
A chastity belt? Seriously?
Imperfection of course resonates nicely with the concept of original sin. Original sin can be washed away by baptism into the faith when you are a baby, but according to modern evangelical Christians, a second, maybe even a third or fourth baptism is necessary in order to be “born again” into the Kingdom of Christ, the figure who has been adopted (and adapted) by these groups and transubstantiated into a Warrior King fighting at the head of the Christian Army of God against unbelievers – non-Christians – and those who do not kowtow to the authority of the ordained ruler, who must be rich, white, and the king of the nation, ordained by God and the elite, the successful ones who know how to lead.
The evil, maladjustment and suffering that continues to lurk in an imperfect social order, the social order that the Conservative Mind fixates on, are only evil if they upset the class system that is in place, are only maladjustments if women and people of color and human beings with diverse sexual proclivities seek equality, and suffering is for these people alone. Suffering lurks as a possibility for the elite because recalcitrant rebellious members of society are plotting to diminish the wealth and power of the successful captains of industry and the hereditary dispensers of political power and wisdom. And this type of suffering must be avoided.
Bring me the bolt cutters.
All of Kirk’s Conservative Commandments have one underlying factor: God. The God of Protestant Christianity mostly. There are plenty of Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians and Fundamentalists from many other religions who adhere to The Strict Father Principle. Opus Dei and the Taliban for instance. But it is the material success of Protestantism in its various forms, mostly evangelical these days in the USA, and its permanent grip on government and the corporate world that determines the direction politicians are guided toward in the modern political environment.
The Conservative Mind is a closed mind. Milton Rokeach explained the difference between an open mind and a closed mind in his book The Open and Closed Mind, written in 1956. It has become the core source for investigations into how dogmatism effects the the brain, how truth and bias work, and what the consequences of authoritarianism can be, as well as numerous other studies into how the brain sorts information.
Capitalism has one important and over-riding dictum embedded in the heart of every single corporation: The corporation exists to “maximize profit for its shareholders.” One might add Malcolm X’s phrase: By any means necessary. When the 6 Conservative Commandments and the profit dictum are combined, the consequence is a rigid, authoritarian, faith-based, closed-minded system. In this Social Darwinist, brutalist, anti-humanistic system there is no room for the non-believer and the rebel. Either you conform or you are eliminated, one way or another. Inevitably, after the Conservative can no longer maintain control through manipulating the “electoral” system to his ends, he will dispense with the velvet glove and expose his iron fist.
It’s no wonder that the country which describes itself as the beacon of democracy always supports as many dictatorships as possible in Africa, Asia, and South America. Authoritarian systems are rigid and unchanging and therefore can be counted on to provide the service needed in order to keep the pyramidal structure intact and ensure governance by the elite, under God of course.
And so now (2024) we arrive at the point where dictatorship by the divinely chosen Christian leader of the United States is going to step up on the world stage and announce the new Crusades of Christianity, to be enforced by violence if the current financial domination no longer holds sway.
The authoritarian Father model that dominates the Conservative Mind leads inevitably to a coercive system that is closed within its dogmatic and fundamentalist cocoon.
With no sense of irony at all, Conservatives refer to this absolute bondage to authority and rigid tradition as Freedom.
- John Adams, the Romantics such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Southern Conservatives Randolph and Calhoun, Liberal Conservatives Macaulay, Cooper, and Tocqueville, Conservatives with imagination: Disraeli and Newman and Critical Conservatives: Babbitt, More, and Santayana. We can add William F. Buckley and his generation of right-wingers to the list as well.
︎