One of the essential tools of political philosophy, I believe, is the technique of modeling how someone else would react if you traded positions with them. I.e.: imagine you do to me what I was about to do to you.
Let me encourage you to do something odd.
Have you ever shoveled out a manure pile? I have. Here’s what it feels like: under the shit, there’s more shit. And under that shit, guess what’s there? If you guessed “more shit” you’re right. Even the dirt under a manure pile becomes so infused that it’s hard to tell where the manure pile stops and the planetary core begins.
Sometimes, history coalesces down to a vector – a sort of spontaneous push where a bunch of things all come together and civilization seems to be going in the same direction. That’s mostly an effect of my imagination, I fear, because when we look closer at what’s going on (or what has happened in the recent past) it decompiles into a swirl of messy social pushes in all kinds of directions that make no sense at all.
Here’s a candidate rule: any time you see an organization trying to enforce its own system of justice and discipline it is because:
Imagine that you go to play roulette in a casino, and the house wins unusually frequently. For example, every time. So you go the the caisse and say, “have you noticed that…?”
I’m going to have to jump through a few hoops to vote, because I have an unexpected trip to Boston the same day, so I need to fit getting into the polling-spot before I make a 3+hr high-speed run to the airport.
Government (you can especially see this, nowadays, in the US) does not act as a unit. It’s too big to generally agree on all of the disparate agendas it contains at any given time. It’s not that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it’s more like that the left foot and the right foot keep stepping on each other, deliberately.
What is a “conservative”, anyway? If you search around, you’ll find a variety of definitions, most of which seem to be incoherent ideological laundry lists.
When we’re arguing against religion, I suppose it’s tempting to try to identify a religion that is not a violent pack of lies, so we can point to other religions (that are) and tell them, “be more like those guys.”