The error of the conservative.

Civilization is not advancing into a utopia. Differences are being smoothed out, and a people is being leveled into a sameness that cannot answer for itself. That is what technology is for. Not the gadget. The pressure toward one scale, one mobility, and one appetite.

Theodore Kaczynski wrote the hard version of it. The loss of traditional values, and of local autonomy, is an unavoidable result of technological progress. He was a murderer, and the sentence is still true. A system that runs on scale cannot afford a household that owes it nothing, or a town that answers first to its own people.

The conservative says the fault is immorality, or the fault is big government. Both are real. Neither is the root. A people can be lectured about vice, and the system that trains the vice can be left running. A people can shrink an office, and the same office can grow back, because the work of the system still needs it.

We have been inside that system for so many generations that a world beyond it is hard to picture. The moral argument and the political argument are mostly about how to run the system more efficiently. They are not about whether to leave it. Efficiency is the only adult question the two teams are allowed to ask.

Liberal against conservative, red against blue, is a substitute for power. It convinces a person that he has some. Give a man the feeling that his vote is a rebellion, and he will not have to rebel. Promise him a future of comforts with no end, and the thought of refusing the comfort does not arise. The resistance is answered before it becomes an idea.

The teams are necessary to the system. A fight that never leaves the system is not a threat to it. It is how the system spends a person’s evening.

The people serve one god, and its name is Progress. It is a jealous god. It wants the particular thing gone: a people, a rite, a vow, a town that still knows its own name. What is divine in the world is in the way of the expansion, so it is smoothed until only the expansion is left to worship.

Jacques Ellul said technique had come loose from the machine. It is the demand for the most efficient means, whatever the means are aimed at. We live the demand as a decline, and we call the decline an advance. The word and the fact no longer match, and the word is winning.

A man has to feel that he chose. Ellul’s line is the correction. He can decide only in favor of the technique that gives the maximum efficiency. That is not a choice. The menu is written by the thing he thinks he is steering.

Kaczynski’s name for the rest of the menu is the surrogate activity. Work that feels like a life, and does not touch the system. Scientific work. Athletic achievement. Humanitarian work. Artistic and literary creation. The corporate ladder. Money and goods past the point where they feed anyone. Social activism on a question that does not bear on the activist’s own house, as when a white activist spends his years on the rights of a people not his own, and never on the street where his children sleep.

The activity is real. The sweat is real. The system is untouched.

There is a man online who thinks the surrogate activity is power. He calls it retaking the institutions, and he does it with pictures. He posts into a feed sorted by the same efficiency he thinks he is fighting. Yesterday’s subject had no weight. Today it is the only way. Tomorrow it will be replaced, and the count of replies will be taken for a victory.

He will tell you that political change comes from the post. He will not meet. The man who says meet, in a room, with names, is called a federal agent and pushed out of the conversation. The prohibition arrives before the plan does.

He writes about the death of beauty, the thinning of his ways, a century he misses, the erasure of his people. Then he stops at noticing. Noticing is treated as the victory. To do the thing would be bad form. Action is closed before it can be thought. He is not to move.

That is a paralysis, and it is praised as discipline. The older man is not cleaner. He prefers to blame the generation before him. The more likely chain is the surrogate itself: a life of almost-acts, until a real future cannot be pictured. The conservative of sixty is as lost in his own decline as the man with the pictures. He has only had longer to call it responsibility.

Kaczynski again. A man with an unusually strong drive for status can climb that ladder his whole life and never get bored of the game.

The conservative’s identity is often that climb. Get into the institution. Rise in it. The institution is not a traditional people, and it is not an older form of his own. It is a hierarchy built to fit him, so that he will carry his slavery and call the carrying an office.

The generation that took the ladder has locked its children into a machine that spends them. Saturn eats his children. A mother hands a child to a fire and calls the fire a future. The picture is old because the act is old. Only the name of the god has been updated.

Modern man does not believe he is worshiping. He has no account of his service. The service is carried out with great efficiency. It is not even hidden in the way a secret is hidden. It is lived exactly, and it does not exist inside the story he tells about his life.

That is the error. Not that the conservative loves the wrong party. That he spends his loyalty on a system which requires his loyalty to be spent, and which will smooth away the house, the town, and the particular people the moment they cost it anything. Immorality and the offices of government are downstream of that. Argue them all you like. You are still inside.

Live Historic is not a third team. It is a desk that asks one question of a story, and a press that puts the question on paper, where a feed cannot rearrange it. The way out is not a better post. It is a household that can refuse, and a town that still meets.