This is part 4 in a series of articles outlining the reasons for choosing
the name of my political party the Imperial British Conservative Party. If
you haven't already, read Part 1.
YOU CAN’T STOP PROGRESS
Those elites who monopolize power, money and status will determine
which point of view is taken as “gospel”. It is obvious to anyone not
blinded by greed and envy that at present in democratic societies, bankers
and business men rule through puppet politicians in the name of “The
People”.
Earlier, God’s consent had been guaranteed by the Church’s monopoly of
writing and education and backed up by their puppets, the land owning
warrior-aristocracy. Today the people’s consent is guaranteed through a
combination of state monopolies of all levels of education and commercial
monopolies of mass communication and is backed up by their puppets in
the secular state’s monopoly of administration and coercion.
This would account for the completely irrational situation where the
absolute value of economic determinism is still unquestioned in high places
even though no other absolute values have survived the critiques of
relativity theorists.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF PROGRESS
The pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other. Under rule by the
Christian Church the spiritual world was all important. Salvation was far
more important than physical health, hygiene, romantic love, freedom of
movement etc. Little or no interest was taken in studying the physical
world since religious intellectuals were obsessed with redemption from sin
and with increasing human and agricultural fertility.
Today the industrial democracies have little or no interest in spiritual
matters and even the remnants of the mainstream churches have become
little more than humanistic social workers far more interested in the
distribution of material goods than damnation and salvation.
THE DESERVING POOR BECOME LOSERS AND VICTIMS
Poverty, once pursued as a help towards the virtuous life, is now seen by
them as the cause of crime and much effort is wasted throwing money at
the poor. The poor are thereby deprived of the traditional chance to be
virtuous and feel self respect despite their humble economic status. Having
been deprived by the doctrine of economic determinism of any possibility
of being good, they have nothing going for them at all. They are reduced to
begging for handouts or forming terrorist armies.
VIRTUE REPLACED BY SOCIAL JUSTICE
There is no such thing as virtue in the modern state, only social justice.
Truthfulness and honesty, courage and self denial, love and kindness are
increasingly regarded as handicaps in the rat-race and the scramble for
power, and are increasingly associated with stupidity.
THE NEW ROLE MODELS
The decadent and shallow lives of rock musicians, sportsmen and women,
fashion models and film stars, fill the mass media which previously, in the
form of paintings, mosaics, stained-glass windows and frescos, held up the
lives of kings and queens, saints and prophets as the ideal. I am not
claiming that the lives of such people were as pure and holy as portrayed
but their function was to emphasize the importance of virtue.
WHAT IS “THE ENVIRONMENT”
Those people and organizations who use the word “environment” to refer
to the material environment only, and exclude the vital psychological,
social and cultural components of the environment, are crass materialists
and any solution they offer is likely to make things worse.
Many people have vested interests in maintaining the present civilization
which rewards people in commerce (and the secular intellectuals who
support the ideology of economic determinism) with power, money and
status. It is an interesting exercise to consider those groups who have lost
power, money and/or status as the result of the ideology of economic
determinism. They are the most likely to lead any movement for change.
ARISTOCRATS AND PEASANTS UNITE
The landed gentry lost almost all of their power and status in the industrial
revolution. The importance of their extended families and life-long
responsibility for the welfare of their tenants, who have lived on their land
for generations, are at odds with payment based solely on hours of work
and the belief that the state should provide for everyone’s welfare and
retirement.
Their engrained ‘stewardship’ attitude to the land as something that should
be passed on to their descendants, not as private property that can be sold
to the highest bidder, gives them an identity which is completely at odds
with the ideology of the market place.
“THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY”
In the marketplace everything becomes a commodity and all workers
become wage slaves who can be fired without compunction. Since the
poor, who have no material possessions to provide them with materialistic
status, depend on the state for the bread on their plates, they are bound to
feel resentful about their vulnerability.
This resentment leads to outbreaks of fanatical envy given a moral disguise
in the form of political action from socialist and fascist nationalism to
religious fundamentalism. Their leaders are often not themselves
under-privileged, but simply hungry for power.
RADICAL CONSERVATISM
Contradictory as it may seem, true conservatism is the most radical form of
politics in the world today. True radicals speak out and upset the ruling
elites and since all of these are today economic determinists anyone who
even raises the idea of adopting policies involving other values and
different ruling elites is likely to be ridiculed or demonised in the media,
deprived of any employment which might provide opportunities for
communicating such a viewpoint and in extreme cases treated as insane.
Ibsen’s play “Enemy of the People” and Orwell’s novel “1984”, show
some of the pressures put upon real radicals and the treatment of dissidents
in socialist states shows the extremes to which governments will go in this
century which has been much more intolerant than the Spanish Inquisition
at its worst.
AN OPEN HIERARCHY OF CONSERVATIVE VALUES
People “full of passionate intensity” hate all hierarchies, except their own
(whose existence they conveniently deny). No social life, indeed no life at
all, is possible without hierarchical organization. It is the very fabric of the
universe.
There are of course good or bad social hierarchies depending on how open
they are and the characters of those who exercise power at the top.
NEW CRITERIA FOR HIERARCHIES
I am recommending that the present meritocratic hierarchy based on
achievement as measured by secular government or commercial agencies
be replaced by a hierarchy based on three principles combined. These are
practical ability ( a record of previous success), virtue (meaning in
particular a record of honesty, kindness and consideration for others) and
charm (charisma of a non-serious kind since serious charisma is usually
based on fear and may lead to acts of great cruelty for some hypothetical
greater good).
Position in various social hierarchies always brings honour and respect and
people with these three abilities would be less likely to betray that respect
than those people selected by the present system.
SUMMARY
I have probably tried to cover too much ground in this article but I will
sum up in the hope that the development of the ideas follows a logical
sequence.
Firstly I compared a conservative philosophy of life with the present world
obsession with economic determinism. I pointed out that most of the green
parties are made up of economic determinists of the socialist variety whose
obsession with power is even more destructive than the greed associated
with the capitalists they both hate and imitate.
Then I looked back to the transition from earlier stable agricultural
economies, which were ruled by spiritual elites, to the ruling elites of the
industrial world who, as a consequence of their obsessional concern with
the purely material values of health and wealth, have destabilized all
institutions including the most basic of all, the human family.
The consequent growth of personal stress and social violence is only part
of the price paid for such an obsession with physical health and wealth,
moreover the material environment is unable to take the strain imposed
upon it and ecological catastrophes are fast approaching.
CONCLUSION
The urgent task facing any political organization concerned with more than
power or money is the revaluation of all values. To turn away from
individualistic alienation and obsession with physical health and material
wealth and towards mental health and relocation in playful and colourful
hierarchies of honour and cultural meaning.
Seeing the universe as an hierarchically ordered “great chain of being” is
the only way to prevent the “flattening” effect produced by the scientific
world view which can only comprehend the tangible and material. In the
early 1970s, with help from colleagues, I created a ‘postmodern’
cosmology designed to fulfill this function as a preliminary step to
founding the Imperial British Conservative Party. Who else has given so
much thought to laying the foundations of a truly radical and truly
conservative political Party?
