House of Eratosthenes

The older people get, the more they see conservatism is the right way to go. Liberals protest that’s because old people find comfort in old things and are afraid to try anything new. The truth is, when something new works, that’s an exception and it’s rare. As a general rule, if it worked we’d already be doing it. And it’s the older people who can see it because this is a pattern of averages, and it takes time to see it. You have to watch a few plans put into practice, notice across the years what succeeds and what doesn’t.

Now obviously, if we accepted “new things are no good” as policy to be implemented and enforced across the board, in all contexts, without any exceptions asked for or granted, it would be counterproductive. But guess what? We don’t. Nobody advocates for such a thing. A conservative is not an unreasoning, strident extremist lobbying for the patent office to be shut down because everything worth inventing has been invented. Rather, a conservative asks questions. He refuses to grant the new thing the benefit of the doubt.

It is the liberal who is the strident, unreasoning extremist. “A new thing! Let’s get behind it!”

Anyone who says no, is their enemy.

Anyone who asks inconvenient questions about it, is the enemy.

Anyone who notices the wrong thing about it, is the enemy.

Anyone who politely inquires about the prospect of a sandbox test, a limited scope of implementation, contingency plans in case it doesn’t work, rollbacks…in fact, anyone who merely hesitates to say yes. Is the enemy. Because liberalism is not an ideology at all. It’s a cult.

The conservative merely asks the questions everyone should be asking: If this is such a great idea, how did we get to this point where we haven’t already been doing it? There may very well be a good answer. Like any responsible adult, the conservative wants to know what it is. Maybe the idea is so good we should have been doing it a long time ago, and we need to look at our traditions and our processes. But someone should be asking the question.

And then there are Prof. Sowell’s: Compared to what? At what cost? What hard evidence do you have?

Liberals have successfully sold the idea to the public that they have a lock on “nuanced” thinking and “open-mindedness.” It isn’t so. They’re the ones who refuse to ask the questions above, along with any other. They don’t question the direction of their travel, just like a bullet doesn’t question its trajectory — they just keep on going until something makes it impossible to go any further. And then, like the bullet, they deliver a high magnitude of kinetic energy that destroys things. But they don’t critically think or question, that’s a myth, one of the most successful and stealthy myths ever plied upon the American people.

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Ask the QuestionsSaturday, June 3rd, 2023

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Saturday, June 3rd, 2023