Great article. So many sub-topics that I would like to comment on. But maybe I need to just address a couple of key points.
I too believe that conservatism is a failed ideology. About a year ago, I was participating in another internet forum. While there were a lot of lefties and righties pecking at each other, there were a few people with profound perspectives and could civilly present them. But I really didn’t see conservatives being able to defend their views very well.
In the 1982 book, THE TURNING POINT, Dr. Fritof Capra explains how so many scientific and humanistic models to explain our world to us have been cast aside and replaced by better models. For example, Aristotle’s “earth, water, wind, and fire” succumbed to alchemy, then the Thomson model, then the Rutherford model, then the Bohr model, then to even higher levels to explain the atomic nature of matter. We would never go back to a former model — even though that former model led the way to a better model.
Despite Dr. Capra’s numerous examples of models being cast aside, he still leaves western democracy intact. We are working with humanistic institutions that really have not evolved very much since they were founded two or three centuries ago. We have bought into the “fact” that western democracy is the highest form of social organization humanity can ever invent.
And I say this a lot of personal observation behind me. Twenty-three years ago, I started putting my rather novel ideas on paper about a new kind of democracy: one without political parties or election campaigns, yet still very democratic. I am on my fifth attempt to introduce this idea to the world, and Medium is a part of this fifth plan. But from what I am seeing of Medium readers, they too are of the same mindset of Dr. Capra: we can’t do better than western democracy, so let’s not bother taking about replacing it.
And this is how conservatism, that political philosophy that seems so inept these days, will prevail. If we don’t challenge ourselves that our political institutions need to adapt to the times, the current system will lead to a conservative society.
My book is a three-hour read. And it is a free read from my website. From my website stats, I maybe got two readers from Medium to read most of it in the past year. I think that says a lot about how bad we have been inculcated in our belief of the superiority of western democracy.
This link is to the new TDG website. A reader should be able to get through the book OK, but other links might be broken.
