by Robert Grisham on May 24, 2014

A recent trend pushes conservatives to abandon their social conservative beliefs. It comes from both inside and beyond the conservative movement and contains a hidden agenda to reduce conservatism to an economic position alone. In this vision of conservatism, the less you support taxation and public services and the more you approve of free market capitalism, the more “conservative” you are.

In this theoretical framework of conservative belief, socially conservative beliefs â€“- that some people donâ€™t belong in every place, and that some behaviors are not okay regardless of economic impact -â€“ suffer a loss of value and place. The only consideration remains whether the people in question can continue working jobs and buying products. This standard serves as a justification for acceptance of all social activity even when it outright violates conservative values:

â€œSending women home would reduce our GDP by 50%. Why do you HATE AMERICA?â€

“Homosexuals are 3% of the population. Do you want to LOSE those JOBS?”

“Close the border? We need those people for our INDUSTRY!”

This reduces conservatives to a caricature of the dominating parent. Don’t think about anything but money: get a good job, work all the time, have money and then do whatever you want right now. Future? History? Who cares? Why would you care if your society is an immoral wasteland, just get yourself gated house. Why would you care who breeds with whom, as long as they work in the same economy that benefits you?

Any self-professed conservative will through experience come to understand: conservative belief is about more than money and that â€™s why social conservative beliefs became part of conservatism long ago for reasons weâ€™ve obviously forgotten.

Conservatives began as those trying to â€œconserveâ€ traditional societies against the onslaught of Enlightenment thought. Traditional societies arose from the folk ways, biological tendencies and accumulated culture and knowledge of groups that had remained stable and functional for thousands of years.

Conservative belief is a reaction against a dangerously proliferating desire for people to be allowed to deviate from societyâ€™s tried and true course in favor of whatever they want, no matter how impractical, selfish or openly incompatible with their society it is.

Here at Amerika.org, we describe that phenomenon as liberalism, leftism or Crowdism. We often rightly compare it to cancer.

The predictable response is to cry out, â€œThen what is societyâ€™s purpose and why is it so important that people must comply with it?â€

The fact that so many people donâ€™t know the purpose of society is the root of all problems we face.

Itâ€™s how I can easily diagnose that society isnâ€™t â€œfailingâ€ but has ALREADY failed. The Circle of Life in a functional society is as follows:

You are born. Poor little bugger that you are, youâ€™re helpless and donâ€™t know anything, and canâ€™t even feed yourself. Luckily for you, your biological creators â€“ mom and dad â€“ are there to save the day. Not only do they feed you and take care of your biological needs, but they teach you everything they know about how to survive in the world and do well in society. They socialize you, introduce you to the skill set that will sustain you in life and provide you a safe haven to refine those skills. You go out and make your contributions and learn more about how life works. Thanks to the stability of society, you probably still have a lot of the friends you grew up with. Youâ€™ve gotten to see how different behaviors and choices play out over a period of decades, and a lot of life lessons have come to you. As an adult however, you get to go out and make some adult professional/labor contribution to society. Thanks again to that pesky stability, â€œsocietyâ€ is comprised largely of people you know and should have some relationship with â€“ people you knew as a child growing up, people you grew up with or their relatives. Even if you donâ€™t directly know them that way, somebody you know will. Itâ€™s one giant extended family. Because of that, there is no real need to go find somewhere to â€œbelong,â€ because you belong where you already are. If nothing else you belong with your parents, so you in your youth can afford to take some calculated risks as to how you want to contribute to the lives of others around you and secure some kind of material provisions to start a family of your own. You find a woman who you can happily raise a family with. Now youâ€™ve formed a stable environment of your own. You can take for granted that your spouse will be there and support you, and because of that you can build a deeper relationship than you ever could with any six month fling of today. People who settle for a lifetime can build cathedrals, nomads only have time for tents. Thatâ€™s what marriage is like; settling down to build something grand. The fruits of the best relationship of your life will include your own biological progeny. To them you get to impart all that your parents taught you, and your wife may impart all that her parents taught her, and together you can teach them everything that you both have personally learned in life. Your kids will have a better shot at a fulfilling life and favorable interaction with society than you had. In the twilight of your old age, you can enjoy the company of your children; people who you taught since infancy and cheered for as they vindicated your knowledge either through obedience or disobedience, or who learned things you never couldâ€™ve imagined about how life works so that they can pass it on to you and their own children. Order and knowledge accumulate over the generations. This is obvious in a technological sense: Grok figured out that you can just eat MOST of a plant and let it grow back instead of eating it to the ground and finding another, his descendants figured out you could plant seeds to get MORE of that plant, their descendants figured out that you could cover the soil in animal dung and food waste for a more robust harvest. This is less obvious in a social sense. What ought we to do in a given situation? What will turn out best? How should we treat each other? What is the most sensible way to find a mate? How should we handle noncontributors and troublemakers in society? How can we build enduring friendships? What should we even eat? What are some good ways to blow off steam or celebrate something or spend our free time that donâ€™t harm our personal integrity or the stability of this society which the generations have created by group effort? These accumulate over the generations to create â€œculture,â€ the accumulated wisdom and style of the ages, that thing which the â€˜Stuff White People Likeâ€™ brand of pasty oppressors love to embrace only at the superficial level of putting an African pot on a shelf in their bathroom. â€œI am a culture, not a costume?â€ How about â€œI am a culture, not a design element?â€

People underestimate the importance of doing things as you like to do them. This is part of culture too: it shaped what you like, and you are now shaping it. This feedback loop incorporates both pragmatism and artistic elements into knowledge of how to perform the tasks relevant to our survival. This lives on long after running from predators and telling stories around camp fires ceased to be the default state of existence.

Thatâ€™s what a culture is, the accumulated knowledge and folkways of thousands of families over very long periods. It is perhaps our most valuable tool as humans, because it can teach us how to associate with each other, how to perform the tasks relevant to our survival, and what major mistakes society should avoid.

Culture becomes a kind of social historical memory. A holiday reminds us why something was good for us, while a lingering bias against something traces back to negative feelings towards some thing, group or intra-group behavior that legitimately threatened the stability of the whole way of life. The Japanese donâ€™t hate selfishness and waste for no reason, are you arrogant enough to try to teach them that mottainai is â€œjust a social construct?â€

We must understand that the purpose of civilization is to produce progressively better culture, and this is what social conservatives want to â€œconserve.â€

So what of the â€œhot buttonâ€ issues that people give social conservatism such a harsh time over?

Homosexuality â€œHomosexuals can work a career just fine, so whatâ€™s the problem? It doesnâ€™t affect you anyways!â€ …except that it does affect me. Legitimizing homosexuality sends the signal that sex is not for family, but sex is for a fetish of personal pleasure. How much would you like it if your pancreatic cells decided they wanted to abandon their duties to try to become something â€œnew?â€ How much would you like it if they proliferated and encouraged other cells around your body to make the same transition? How can a person hate and fear one thought form as applied to their body but support it with money and affirmations of power as applied to the society that gives them life? â€œBut what about the ones who marry a woman and then have a family and only pursue homosex after the kids are raised?â€ Yes, cheat on your spouse, teach your kids that the family is unstable and that they should not trust it. That will be good for the wellbeing of future generations and the social customs that sustain them. â€œWomensâ€™ rightsâ€ Womensâ€™ rights is a misleading title. Really it is “lack of accountability for women.” Thus the definition is stretched to include abortion, adoption, the right to be a single mother and still act â€œsingleâ€ without stigma (i.e. hookups and partying like a whore), the right to try to juggle a normal career with family even when you donâ€™t need to, and basically any other copout to get out of being a real mother that you could possibly dream up. If you still think at this point that a 50 hour work week leaves enough time for a mother to give her kids proper attention or that paying strangers to educate your kids is equivalent to being raised by their real mother and being taught all the intricacies of generational knowledge, you are mentally defective and I hate you for it. I grew up on the receiving end of these silly beliefs and I can say with authority of experience that growing up without real parents is tantamount to child abuse, and a lot of kids I grew up with could tell you the same. If you believe silly social science theories over our experience then you must be stopped for the good of society. I donâ€™t want to see women sexually harassed, I certainly donâ€™t want to see them objectified, and if they do work I think they should get paid for their work and not their gender, but the rest of â€œwomensâ€™ rightsâ€ issues just demand the right to create and then immediately destroy families. â€œBut what about adoption?â€ Break the chain of generational knowledge? Iâ€™m gonna go with â€œno.â€ If somebodyâ€™s parents die adoption is a great thing and Iâ€™d never knock anybody having that kind of generosity and compassion, but if you are in a position to be a real parent and you use adoption to opt out of it then you should pretty much die. Abortion Much like homosexuality, abortion is an attempt to separate sex from family. This makes relationships about pleasure, not collaboration toward the end of having families. The result is sexually shellshocked zombies wandering around, zinging between sexual overdose and brutal loneliness, dysfunctional and neurotic to the end. “I’m not ready for kids, I’m going to planned parenthood.” Great, so you freeload off of all of the education and stability your parents provided for you and turn around to waste it on hedonism â€“ or, as is becoming more popular, not having kids to save money. Gotta have that television, donâ€™t you? Inclusion for ethnic minorities and cultural outsiders Considering that societyâ€™s purpose as we now know is to create generational knowledge to refine a certain way of living and doing things into the best version of itself possible, how does importing and legitimizing a bunch of people with conflicting beliefs and practices help that come about? If Iâ€™m writing a song in F# minor, will it suddenly become better if just one of six instruments is now playing in a totally different key? No, it would sound like hell because thatâ€™s a stupid idea. People intuitively understand this when they look at anything but social patterns, which are highly stigmatized and route their thinking away from value judgments. This is actually a pretty good analogy because society is architectonic; all of its pieces work together in synchronicity to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts with no part being more or less important. Even if you swap out one part for another that seems better on paper, unless it works with the remaining parts as well or better than what it replaced then the whole thing is screwed. If you buy the fanciest head gasket on earth but it doesn’t fit your engine, what good does it do you? People don’t realize that in society we’re supposed to be building something like an engine, and as a result their “plan” is to assemble the world’s best incompatible engine parts in a heap, call it the best engine in the world and then lynch anybody who points out that it doesn’t run. Sobriety Did you grow up in a small town, project, Indian reservation or trailer park where everybody was drunk and on drugs? No? Then I donâ€™t want to hear it. People who choose intoxication are not functional. People who flee waking reality with chemically induced fantasy and mood manipulation are not healthy members of society, and if they can act the role itâ€™s only because their little careers and friendships are on chemical life support. Nothing about the family system I described above is at all compatible with a behavior that transforms real humans into brain damaged, lascivious irresponsible whores. Promiscuity How would you feel if you found out Mommy was a whore who took 50 dicks before your father? Even the Mensâ€™ Rights Activist types who scream from the rooftops that â€œall women are whoresâ€ are always silent when you counter with â€œbut what about your mom?â€ (Itâ€™s beside the point that itâ€™s ludicrous that they should spend so much time trying to â€œpick upâ€ women if they think all women are cheap, expendable and morally dubious.) What about men? Are promiscuous men a problem? Of course. How would you feel if Dad screwed dozens of dumb sluts from bars before settling on your mother? How would you like knowing you might have random half brothers somewhere that you never knew about? How would you feel knowing your parentsâ€™ union to create you was not even special, and that it was just the random chance outcome of a few mammals acting on instinct and sharing secretions? Would it not be so much better to know that your parents lived pure lives, married and then had you intentionally so that they could take care of you, raise you and teach you? Would you not be so much more grateful towards them? Would such a life not be so much more beautiful than knowing your origin was just a hairâ€™s breadth better than being crapped out into a public toilet and left for dead?

The reasons for social conservatism are integral to a definition of who we are. Do we want to be a rising society that makes great culture, learning, wisdom and art, or another one of the burnt-out husks of once-great civilizations that are known for their corruption, filth, chaotic rutting, criminality and disorder? It’s almost like a check box question:

Social order?

[ ] Yes (but there will be Rules)

[ ] No (but you can do anything you want)

The choice for both individuals and society is exceedingly simple:

If you want to live in a Tolkien fantasy world or in something similar to one of those â€œexoticâ€ cultures you praise for being so much more orderly, cooperative and intuitive than your own, choose complete sobriety, complete premarital chastity, complete fidelity in heterosexual marriage and complete dedication to both the family you create and the family you come from. This is culture because it’s both what has always led to the highest truth and beauty in life, and derived from a sense of transcendent joy. If life can be beautiful, and if you can feel unity with the cosmos and forces of creation that made you, it is natural to seek beauty, familiarity and constantly-rising goodness.

If you want to live in a carbon copy of the seediest parts of Tijuana, choose anything different from that. You will then have cast yourself into the darkness of third world status, not just in results, but in your soul. You will have given up on both practicality and beauty, and traded your chance for a life rising above the disorder for the relatively paltry and cheap thrills of promiscuity, intoxication, selfishness and — of course — finance.

Tags: abortion, fiscal conservatism, homosexuality, promiscuity, sobriety, social conservatism, wormen's rights

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