We have all been duped. Perhaps we have been deceiving ourselves this whole time, but now we must face a hard truth. Anyone who has ever identified as a Liberal or as a Conservative may particularly find this news upsetting, but it must be said before it is too late to repair our communities from a woeful and needless division.

The short explanation is this: the words conservative and liberal are not nouns, they are adjectives. The groups and the value systems ascribed to these names are not what you think. To understand the pitfalls of this simple misconception we need to examine these adjectives and what they are describing.

Behavior, conservative or liberal, is something observed in relation to scarcity. When a resource is abundant it is commonly taken for granted and used liberally. When that same resource is in scarce supply it is naturally conserved. It is practically the norm that one grows more conservative in life as they become more situated. I find honey farming to be a perfect example of how age and scarcity affect behavior.

If say, you want to collect honey, you will have to wait a year before a new beehive has enough to share. Once that year has passed you will have two opportunities to harvest your honey in subsequent years, once in the late-Spring and again in mid-Summer. A new recreational beekeeper may not fully realize what this means. They might lavish honey on all their meals and find their supply scant before mid-Summer. Upon their second harvest, they conserve their honey for a single meal each day. Even still, being generous with their portions, our intrepid beekeeper will eventually run out of honey altogether before the next spring harvest. Most assuredly, they become more conservative with their honey the next year. Eventually, with more time and experience, they might come to look down on immature young beekeepers as being typically liberal with their honey.

This real-world example illustrates how these adjectives are used, but honestly, I’m not going to pretend these words, Conservative and Liberal aren’t also used as nouns. They are, as we all know, shorthand nomenclature for social values and the people who preach them. So yes, contrary to my initial proposition, they can be nouns. But, when ascribed to values, these nouns are remarkably similar to their adjective counterparts. They describe behavior in the presence of scarcity.

Values represent a society’s survival strategy. They help us navigate how we collectively deal with scarcity. How do we as a community strategize our proverbial honey management? Is it the fault of liberals eating all their honey at once that makes someone and their family poor to begin with? Does conserving honey in excess constitute hoarding a resource derived from flowers that belong to everyone? In other words, we are asking, what is the fundamental nature of the universe, is there or is there not enough proverbial honey for everyone?

On an individual level, answering this question is something of a lifelong pursuit for each of us. We will all face moments when we have less of a resource than those around us. We will all have moments when we have more access to some other kind of resource. Who will you become when you have more resources than the rest of your community? How will you behave in the face of scarcity? Don’t answer too quickly, the rest of your life is still ahead of you, and the answer will be found in your behavior.

Answering this question on a societal level is a bit harder. Criticizing someone else’s values is typically a short road to hypocrisy. We must tread lightly when asking others to assess their values. I hope I have managed to tread lightly enough that those who identify as conservative and read this can acknowledge what kind of world they are conserving for. I hope any readers who call themselves liberal are ready to recognize what liberty requires. We need to be honest with ourselves. We are all both conservative and liberal, yet together we can be so much more.