One of my dogs, Grace, can only jump up onto our bed if she’s trying to go over it, to get to something on the other side. When her goal is to end up on the bed, she can’t seem to figure out how to make that happen. Which always makes me think of one of Zeno’s famous paradoxes.
According to Zeno, you can’t ever reach a destination, because first you have to travel half the distance; then you have to travel half the remaining distance; and again, and again, always going halfway from where you are to where you want to be.
The paradox can be resolved mathematically by using the concept of limits, but there’s a simpler way to deal with it, which is just this: To get to where you actually want to be, make your first step an attempt to go twice as far. Then going half of that distance takes all the way to your to your goal.
I think one of the reasons that progressives continue to make progress, while conservatives continue lose ground, is that progressives are always asking for twice what they want, while conservatives normally ask for what they want, or what they think they can get, which is often just no change from the status quo.
An example would be gun control. Progressives will ask for anything they can dream up — bans, taxes, capacity limits, registration, storage requirements, universal background checks, mandatory liability insurance, micro-stamping, and so on. What’s halfway to that? Something like a Red Flag Law.
Conservatives, on the other hand, will ask for things to basically remain as they are. But in politics, as in Wonderland, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. So halfway to where you are is somewhere behind you. And what’s there? Something like a Red Flag Law.
What conservatives should be asking for are things like the repeal of NFA34, the repeal of GCA68, the elimination of BATFE, and a whole lot more.
And they should be asking for those things even though they don’t expect to get them, and even if they don’t really want them. Because what’s halfway to an agenda like that? A much freer country.
Part of the problem is built right into the names ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’. If you call yourself progressive, that creates an expectation — what hypnotherapists would call a ‘waking hypnotic suggestion’ — that you’re going to try to make progress towards some goal. If you call yourself ‘conservative’, that creates an expectation that you’re going to try to keep things from changing — something experience has shown to be a losing strategy.
So I think conservatives would do better to find a label that more accurately reflects what they actually want, and want to be. As I sift through the list of what I think of as ‘conservative values’, the one that strikes me as most universal, the one that underlies all the others, is accepting personal responsibility.
So instead of conservative, how about adult?
