There's a theory that circulates on 4chan and on the edges of "rationalist" blogs that having a conservative society that puts everyone in their place improves mental health by making most people feel like they have a place. Probably the least radical place this has been expressed is on Scott Aaronson's quantum computing blog, where he argues that some of the troubles he had in his youth would have been averted by the strict social traditions of the jewish shtetl. (That's why he named his blog "Shtetl Optimized.")
There's literally hippy communes that operate this way. You don't need to be conservative to see the benefit of everyone having a place in society.
This sounds a lot like public work programs like the Green New Deal is proposing, lots of high-paying opportunities for skilled labor and training to become a skilled laborer. There's lot of able people wasting their potential in call centers and retail jobs. Everyone wants manufacturing back in America but no one wants to pay for the costs of educating a new generation of tradesmen.
>There's literally hippy communes that operate this way. You don't need to be conservative to see the benefit of everyone having a place in society.
Although I recognize that most political words are used as euphemisms for Republicans and Democrat, by the dictionary definition of the word conservative, those hippy communes are pretty conservative. Imagine trying to get them to watch reality TV and eat Big Macs!
Conservatism has consistently been on the wrong side of every social issue in history, so I feel safe calling this 'theory' out as nothing more than teenage angst at a world they feel has left them behind.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle for quite a long time. We've asked you repeatedly to stop, but you've repeatedly continued. You've broken the site guidelines in many other ways too. All of this would justify banning you, but I don't think you're doing it on purpose, so I'm not going to ban you right now. Would you please take the spirit of this site more to heart, though, and stop doing these things? Because we'll have no choice but to ban you unless you do.
> Conservatism has consistently been on the wrong side of every social issue in history
Given that Progressivism was very much on the side of things like Soviet Russia, Maoist China and Pol Pot's Cambodia, as well as all sorts of "fun" stuff like racist eugenics in the U.S., I'll gladly take the "consistent" losses of conservatism over the know-it-all attitude of progressives, thanks you very much.
Ideological flamewar will get you banned here. We had to ask you not to do this just recently. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please stop doing this.
> All you've done here is show me that you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Well, apparently you aren't familiar with the fact that progressives used to be very much in favor of eugenics (in the early 20th-c.), that progressive/leftist intellectuals and academics did support the Soviet system, that Maoist China was a huge influence on radical youth movements of the 1970s and 1980s that largely define what we think of as "progressive" today, that Pol Pot literally was introduced to extreme leftist politics by those same radical movements in the Paris of his day, etc. etc.
"Conservatives and traditionalists fight against social change and have to suck it up eventually" - is that supposed to be a problem? It's literally the definition of what conservatism is all about! Sure, some of them might have opposed abolitionism and universal suffrage, for a time (Though many didn't, least of all in a practical sense. Even Carlyle, as rabid as he was from a "modern" POV, understood that slavery was very much on its way out). But so what - conservatives also fought Mao and Pol Pot, and in this latter sense they were far more important!
Stricter norms and racial homogeneity don't seem to have prevented high suicide rates in countries like Korea or Japan. At any rate, it's awfully easy to diagnose broad cultural problems as the result of one's personal bugbears.
