Giving a speech in front of a room filled with people who no doubt think of themselves as conservatives, Liz Truss talked primarily about low taxes, personal responsibility, the “freedom to choose” — and just “freedom” more broadly. She also said that she would govern as a conservative, which instead makes one wonder: is governing as a conservative really all about freedom?
For fear of being accused a “squish” who relentlessly attacks Tory leaders while defending Sir Keir Starmer at every given opportunity, I ought to say that I really like Liz Truss; she understands that the free economy is the best vehicle for delivering economic growth and lifting people out of poverty, and that is certainly important. Important too are many of the traditional liberties which we all enjoy in Britain: the right to speak one’s mind freely, to worship in the manner one prefers and to enter into contracts without excessive state interference. However, does this mean that conservatism is all about freedom and not concerned with any other values at all?
My answer — and, indeed, the answer which conservatives used to give before our movement took on the heavily libertarian tone it now projects — is no. It is liberalism, not conservatism, which sees individual liberty as the end goal of politics; it is liberalism which starts from the position that individuals are by nature free and equal and that the role of the state is to protect that natural freedom and equality.
Conservatives start from an entirely different place. Per Aristotle, they recognise that man is a social and political animal. They look at the world and see that individuals are not born free: they are duty-bound to the families, communities and nations in which they find themselves in but never consciously choose. A child, for example, can never declare himself free of his parents; if he were to neglect his parents in their old age, shouting something or other about his natural freedom, he would rightly be seen as a moral monster. Nor can a person declare himself free of his nation, at least not on a whim. It is possible to emigrate, of course, as I have done — but it is not an option to spontaneously and arbitrarily assert your freedom from any allegiance to your country during a wartime draft.
It is also not the case that individuals are born “equal”; one can never, for instance, be equal to one’s parents, even if one enjoys a warm and friendly relationship with them — because the natural hierarchy between a child and a parent, which stems from the knowledge that the child would not exist if not for the parent, can never dissipate.
Conservatives believe that these natural loyalties and hierarchies are beneficial to human beings and conducive to their flourishing; without them, human beings would wander aimlessly through life, always reaching out for the key to happiness but never quite finding it. For this reason, it is authority, law and tradition that are at the heart of conservatism — not freedom — because, without direction, there is bound to be chaos in the public sphere; without tradition, a disorder in the private sphere; and, crucially, without authority, neither law nor tradition can be preserved.
This is not to say that conservatives do not value freedom. They are dearly fond of the ordered, civilised liberty which arises amidst the stability and security provided by law and tradition. What they reject is the Rousseauian notion that “man is born free but everywhere is in chains” due to the oppressive nature of our inherited social and political institutions, recognising instead that it is these very institutions that provide us with liberty which can actually be of use to us. What good, after all, is a notional “natural” liberty if your community is filled with criminals, hooligans and louts who make it impossible for you to go about your everyday activities in peace and with a smile? And, indeed, is it really an improvement to be liberated from the constraints of your traditional religious inheritance only to end up a slave to your own appetites, depedent on pornography and “light” drugs, as so many young men currently are? I rather think not.
I hope, therefore, that Liz Truss will focus not just on protecting freedom but on defending the institutions — from the Church to limited parliamentary government — which have shaped it, because that is what conservatism is truly all about.
You Might also like
-
Why We Shouldn’t Abandon Politics
Until a few weeks ago, I was thoroughly resigned to the fact that I would not be voting for the first time in my adult life.
This wasn’t a flippant or particularly natural decision for me. A fan of unfashionable causes from a young age, I had always bought into our democratic political system and believed that despite its faults, ours was preferable to the large majority of those around the world.
I’d argue with my sixth form college history teacher, a chain-smoking trade union crustacean, that the Cuban revolution was not a good thing actually. At university, I set up the local youth chapter of UKIP and was one of approximately three students who even signalled that they would vote for Brexit.
As one can imagine, this made me very popular amongst the kombucha-brewing techno-listening charity shop fashionistas who I stubbornly brushed shoulders with by insisting on frequenting their hipster coffee shop, where once a ‘trans’ person told me I should “stop reading the fascist Spectator”.
My earliest political instinct, that our foreign policy did not serve our interests and was based on lies (an instinct that has only grown stronger) was also, I thought, sufficiently represented in our media and political system. I voted, I got excited about elections, watched the BBC and took politics seriously.
Everything changed in early 2020. Watching the entire ‘free world’ engage in highly coordinated state propaganda, erect detainment camps, lock people in their homes for months at a time, and by hook and by crook inject the vast majority of the population with a substance they weren’t allowed to scrutinise in polite society because ‘The Experts’ told them to, changed how I look at politics forever.
I was always aware of the military-industrial complex and its influence, and of that of the financial system. What I have since learnt is that these forces of evil are joined by many other interest groups: Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Food and the billionaire-foundation complex.
The mask-wearing millions even turned my anger towards them, the public as a whole, which was a very different feeling for a ‘power-to-the-people’, ‘silent-majority’ populist as I had up until then been. What morons, I thought.
How did I ever trust in the collective wisdom, the ‘common sense’ of the public, who had en masse accepted the (even then) clearly moronic behaviour of ‘stay-at-home’ rules and wearing chemical-laden Chinese face-nappies on while alone and outside?
When the Russians entered Ukraine in early 2022, this feeling was compounded. The Covid era had caught everyone off guard, but Ukraine was something I had seen coming for a decade.
In 2014, the year when the Russia-Ukraine war actually started, I had just started university studying, of all things, International Relations and Russian language. I had a large number of Russian and Ukrainian friends. I spent my summers volunteering at educational camps not far from the Ukrainian border. After graduating, I moved to Moscow and started working in TV.
This is my way of saying that I had followed the events since 2014 in detail, with interest, and understood the positions of both sides, the actors involved and like Nigel Farage, had a very strong feeling that this was a disaster in the making. Yet this was a position made paramount to treason. Putin was Hitler, and that was it.
Back living in London and working in UK media after riding out the worst of the pandemic in Istanbul, I had become fully cynical about politics.
How could our parochial, insular and frivolous party politics ever be a solution to the powerful global forces that had transformed the world within just a couple of years? How had I believed that the political fight I had been fighting actually had any chance of taking Britain away from corrupt globalist forces and ‘taking back control’ for the people? Brexit now appeared to be window dressing.
In fact, I had come to believe that I had been seriously deceived. Years of energy were given, and the country was seriously divided, and for what? To have more mass immigration and more economic decline under more Conservative government, with biomedical tyranny and continental war to boot?
In that time, I began to believe in the devil, which was then a stepping stone to believing in God. The world, it appeared, was the devil’s realm. The compounding increase in far-liberal and ultra-progressive ideologies, and the resulting destruction of the family and social degradation, made this clearer.
I concluded that the best way to fight in a world run by the devil, was not through politics, but through free will and faith, walking towards God through this darkness. I still hold that to be absolutely true.
Yet something has happened over literally a matter of weeks that has reignited my interest in politics, and it is more than the return of Nigel Farage, although that has been the catalyst.
The prospect of total Tory collapse was first enticing only out of pure spite.
I had been critical of Farage, one of my political heroes, for what I viewed as terrible positions taken by him and his party during the Covid era, and a perceived silence on our disastrous foreign policy, after years of being outspoken and having the right idea.
Though my disappointment in and disillusionment with politics did indeed make me cynical, nothing made me more cynical than working in British media.
After working with interesting, heterodox international and expat journalists abroad, I discovered that back home it’s staffed largely by mediocrities, as fickle and, frankly, basic as any KMPG graduate or marketing intern.
Outside of the narcissism of small differences, wholly adopted from newspaper op-eds and ‘journo Twitter’ in cyclical bouts of opinion bottom-feeding, they are often not the well-read intelligentsia that they present themselves to be.
Yet the depiction given by many in sceptic quarters, that narratives are tightly controlled by explicit political directives handed out from above, a view I have been sympathetic to in the recent past, does not seem to hold water.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact that there are a small handful of news wires which provide thousands of newspapers and news channels with the same stories, they decide to put out in the way they want, is far from ideal and does have the ability to influence the news cycle.
Yet on the day-to-day, factory-floor level, the reality is that the media, and politics, is largely made up of people who are subject to the very same waves of information warfare, perception manipulation and social acceptability that the general public and all of us are to an extent.
If it is indeed the case, as I now believe, that the enemy is not only far weaker than it has led us to believe, but has never been weaker than it is now, we do not only have the possibility the shift the Overton window through politics, which the media have no way of hiding from, but that we have a duty to be happy warriors and believe that it is possible to effect change.
For those still rightly enraged about the collective amnesia over Covid era mandates and who therefore see Reform as invalidated by not choosing to campaign on that, the reality is that its leadership now hold the correct view of the lockdowns and the jabs, even with the benefit of hindsight.
This won’t satisfy everyone, and I am completely sympathetic to that, but as Bismarck famously said, politics is the art of the possible, and what is possible at the moment is to mobilise around our current problems. Immigration is the obvious issue that will galvanise serious support against the uniparty – and our demographics are our ultimate destiny.
The rise of Reform to neck-and-neck polling position with the Tories is indeed an impressive feat. In fact, the campaign of the Conservatives in this election, which suspiciously feels like it is being directly run by the Labour Party for their own benefit, has got many wondering if this is not an orchestrated handing over of the baton.
In late March, Barack Obama, the man rumoured to be de facto running the Biden administration and campaign, dropped in to see Prime Minister Sunak, for reasons undisclosed.
In the following weeks there was talk by Andrew Bridgen MP that Sunak had been ‘told by the generals’ that we would officially declare we were at war against Russia in the summer ahead of a major escalation. The PM, it is alleged, responded that he did not want to be a wartime leader and a couple of weeks later had abruptly called an election.
All of this, alongside Rishi’s announcement in the rain, which bloggers have called a ‘humiliation ritual’, has led some theorists to believe the Tories are basically throwing the election. Reform, so the theory goes, is ‘controlled opposition’ designed to contain the Tory exodus.
There might be elements of truth to what I have just outlined but my personal experiences with Reform’s leaders do not lead me to that final conclusion. Farage and his team are genuinely running an anti-establishment revolt.
Not only is he running on the same issues which have only gotten worse since Brexit, our broken economy and the rapid demographic transformation of the country, but there is plenty of red-meat for sceptics; railing against the Tories for ‘taking away our freedoms’, hitting out against the World Health Organisation and the World Economic Forum, fighting against debanking, a cashless society and Net Zero lunacy. It’s not a bad platform.
The Andrew Breitbart doctrine is that ‘politics is downstream from culture’. It might then seem obvious that culture is therefore downstream from media, but as I have outlined, that is in fact not the case.
Our media is downstream from both politics and culture. Farage is very successfully using will to power to shift the Overton window and provoke the media into discussions they would ordinarily not have.
Whether you trust him to stick to these positions when push comes to shove almost doesn’t matter as much as his proven ability to act as a battering ram against our established political elite. In any case, he has been consistent on everything and on the Covid saga he has now come to the right place, which is more than can be said for others.
It has been Farage’s positioning on Ukraine, however, that has clinched it for me.
Despite the potential to alienate much of Tory Boomer-England who display their Ukraine flags with the same zeal that Corbynista students do with their trans-Palestinian-EU ones, Farage has stuck to his long-held position that this horrendous conflict was a long time coming.
The establishment, smelling blood, sought to use this to neutralise him, but he hit back harder and spent days making speeches outlining the failed wars of the uniparty, the lies they were based on and their horrific consequences. Labour in Iraq, the Tories in Libya and Syria and yes, Ukraine. “Foreign policy matters!” he’s been telling energetic crowds.
The power of taboos is a force more potent and yet more vulnerable than we imagine. A few hundred thousand of us silently crossing boxes in polling booths do have the power to change the parameters of acceptable discussion by the fallout it can cause for years to come. We should not scoff at that.
At a time like this, when all signs are that the most dangerous and corrupt elements of the collective West are itching for a global conflict, the man who proudly bellows to large crowds that “We only go to war as a very, very last extreme; I will campaign for peace wherever it is possible”, has my vote.
As it says in Psalm 146, Trust in God, Creator and Redeemer:
“Do not place your trust in princes, in mortal men who have no power to save.”
– Psalm 146:3I won’t, but I will not abandon politics as a way of shifting the dial to expand public consciousness and as a way to take us off potential paths of ruin. Not yet.
Post Views: 226 -
Foucault was right, actually; Everything is a prison
Generally, in our circles, Foucault is mostly mocked for his personal life and called one of ‘those French intellectuals that ruined it all’. However, if we were to actually investigate his claims, we’ll realise that he is quite close to the Moldbugian thought, except he never connected the dots.
I’m here to introduce an opinion that may shock you. Foucault was right, actually. And I’m going to explain why.
For those, who don’t know much about his theories, we can pretty much boil it down to the following:
1. Everything is a prison
2. There is no escape from the prison
3. The institutions are your enemy
4. The system creates ‘docile bodies’ that are not able to rebel against the power structures
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault comes out with the theory of The Carceral, he brings up the example of the Mettray school which was known for its “cloister, prison, school, regiment” function. He uses his example to develop an argument about institutions being the main tool for surveillance and punishment.
What struck me when reading Foucault was the close resemblance of his thought to the Moldbugian concept of ‘The Cathedral’. As claimed by the man himself:
“The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.” – Mencius Moldbug, Gray Mirror blog, 21/01/2021, ‘A Brief Explanation of The Cathedral’
Foucault claims that universities are the main vehicles of power. There’s a never-ending cycle of power found within the university halls – a student is punished by the teacher, and the teacher is punished by the institution. A teacher is just a function of the power structures ruling over them.
When we then look at Giroux and his essay on Zombie Politics, (who completely misunderstands the political climate of the modern era but let’s forget that for a moment) – ‘zombies’ (here meaning politicians) have an “ever-increasing presence in the highest reaches of government and at the forefront of mainstream media”, which makes us think of the Chomskian concept of media manufacturing consent – there is a clear connection of the governmental powers using media and academia exerting power onto its subjects – they gatekeep access to higher levels of society if it doesn’t comply with their agenda. They are the ones wielding the power as they choose who will get high up in the ranks of control or not.
As such, when we’ll take Foucault focusing on academia being at the core of the power structures, Chomsky with manufacturing consent by the media, and Giroux linking it to the governmental controls, we basically have the Cathedral.
Foucault, although labelled as a left-wing thinker, which is perhaps more prominent in his other writing, never claims to have a solution to this problem. He just states the issues with the power structures and where they come from – and here, he is inherently correct.
The problem is that the status quo is currently left-wing. These power structures mobilise against right-wing thought – we have academia which is oversaturated by left-wing thinkers, mainstream media which doesn’t dare stray from the status quo and the ‘conservative government’ which is neoliberal masquerading as conservatives.
Foucault and others unwittingly pointed out the issue, but they never connected the dots.
So how do we deal with the world where the power structures surround us? There is no way out. Foucault claims that power structures use surveillance to catch any outliers, punish them by gathering knowledge against them and by using educative/punishing methods, render them docile and bring them back into the world, brainwashed, repackaged and back within the power structures they wanted to oppose.
And we see it these days – anyone who tries to dissent from the ‘current thing’ is immediately shut down, de-platformed, removed, their bank accounts closed, and freedoms curbed until they have no choice but to conform again.
Foucault may have not expected this to happen in this form, yet the issue remains. The increasing surveillance in the modern era is a cause of concern, too. One cannot function without technology, but this same technology cripples and watches us. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool.
Another interesting point from Foucault was that it is the labels that the institutions give to the ill that cause the diseases. Considering that we live in an era where mental illness and gender dysmorphia becomes trendy, the labels are easy blankets to use to justify behaviours that would have been otherwise abhorrent.
Foucault offers a lot of useful insight. He describes the power-wielders as “technicians of behaviour, engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality”, sounds familiar? Currently, every current thing is manufactured, the individuality is only allowed if it fits the regime. The freedom of political thought is a thing of the past.
‘Orthopaedists of individuality’, orthopaedic suggests improving something that needs correcting – individuality is treated as a deformity that’s an unpleasant problem that needs correcting.
It is blatantly obvious that academia and journalism are overwhelmingly filled with left-wing thinkers and government structures are trying to appease the left-wing voters who are largely demographically middle-class, so the societal left-wing shift is apparent, this being facilitated by the large corporations. This noveau bourgeoisie class has got full cultural hegemony over the dominant cultural and political thought.
This successfully gatekeeps from the right-wing thought ever arising or being put under serious scrutiny, since it isn’t acknowledged in the first place.
With the rise and increase of surveillance and more legislation being put through by the government continually attempting to bow to the on-the-fence voters, the ever-increasing monitoring of free speech renders it no longer free.
This continuous surveillance and forced self-correcting of speech proceeds to create docile bodies – it incapacitates and removes any form of political discussion and fuels the actual Schmittian friend-enemy distinction. The government structures alongside academia and mainstream media create an unbreakable mode of power that devours and forces its subjects to yield.
Foucault may be a less popular guy on our side of politics, but he brings in a lot of important insight that can help us understand the power structures at hand. Everything is a prison. A man made, neoliberal hell of a prison.
Enjoying The Mallard? Consider subscribing to our monthly magazine.
Post Views: 932 -
On Truth and Democracy
O Tempora, O Mores (L., “Oh the times, Oh the customs”), is an apothegm attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC), a Roman statesman, attorney, philosopher, and scholar. In his First Oration against Catiline (63 BC) that he delivered in the Roman Senate, Cicero deplored the sorry condition of the Roman Republic, and particularly the Roman citizen, Catiline, who had conspired to foment an insurrection, intended to overthrow the Roman government and Cicero himself, who was at that time serving as the Head-of-State.
The perspectives expressed by Cicero could be ascribed to the sorry state of the virulent political climate and the dysfunctional political parties in our society, which have become dystopian and farcical for the following reasons.
First, it and they have devolved into cults of personality (cult, L., cultus, “worship,” “homage,” “devoted attention to a person or thing”) populated by sycophants (Gk., sycophantes, L., sycophanta, “informer,” “slanderer,” “servile flatterer,” “show the fig” [a vulgar gesture]).
Second, fueled by the toxicity of an unbridled social media, the raison d’etre (Fr., “reason for being”) of many politicians has become self-aggrandizement and power, to the determinant of public service and the commonwealth.
Third, rather than deliberate the substance of issues, they rant, demonize their critics, and employ every fallacy of argumentation in their rhetoric, most frequently argumentum ad hominem (L., “argument against the person”).
Fourth, more willingly than seeking common ground and common cause, they resort to demagoguery, contentiousness, mendacity, litigiousness, and extremism.
Fifth, they are barren of any discretion, decorum, propriety, civility, and self-control.
And sixth, their hypocrisy is unbounded, as they deny any allegations against them and divest themselves of any responsibility or accountability, by assuming a posture of victimization, devoid of any semblance of shame, guilt, remorse, or contrition (“I have done nothing wrong;” “I am innocent;” “It’s politically motivated;” “It’s a witch hunt”).
Collectively, it and they could be described metaphorically as a “ship of fools.”
Das Narrenschiff
Sebastian Brandt (circa 1457-1521) was of Germanic heritage and earned a doctoral degree in canon and civil law from the University of Basel. He served as Imperial Counselor, Judge, and Chancellor under the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (1459 – 1519). His most famous monograph, written as a humanist and satirist, was entitled Das Narrenschiff (Gr., “ship of fools”) (1494). Allegorically, it railed against the hypocrisies, weaknesses, political intrigues, and vices that were manifest during his lifetime. The author wrote that the ship was laden with and steered by fools. It wandered the ocean aimlessly, but by happenstance sailed to Narragonia, where they encountered Grobian, the patron saint of vulgar and coarse people.
To paraphrase the motif of the allegory, the author described the shipmates and crew as deranged, demented, frivolous, and oblivious; who were floating with the prevailing winds; and who were unhinged, unanchored, and unmoored. The author argued that they were in desperate need of statesmanship and leadership, to restore the ordinance and rule of reason and the ordinance and rule of law, grounded in truth, virtue, excellence, sound judgment, ethicality, and morality. The allegory is remarkably descriptive and prescient of the contemporaneous political climate and the political parties in our society.
The Past is Prologue
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), an English playwright, poet, and actor extraordinaire, in his tragicomedy The Tempest (1610-1611) wrote:
“Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come,
In yours and my discharge.”
Dialogue between Antonio and Sebastian; Act 2, scene 1, lines 253-4One interpretation of that dialogue is that what had previously happened set the stage for what will follow, and will be the stuff of which our greatness or our fallenness will be made and measured. A cynical interpretation of that dialogue is that we will remain mired in the improprieties, imperfections, misinformation, and disinformation of the past. That notwithstanding, despite the dysfunction, farce, and fantasy that pervades the current political climate and the political parties in our society, both can be mitigated by a courageous, resolute, and willful intent. Consider, in that regard, the Four-Way Test.
The Four-Way Test
The Four-Way Test of the Things We Think. Say, or Do, is an ethical and moral code for personal and professional conduct and relationships. It was composed in 1932 by Mr. Herbert J. Taylor (1893-1978), a business executive and civic leader. It was adopted by Rotary International in 1943, as a standard and a code of conduct by which all communication and interpersonal behavior should be measured and judged.
When we hear or read an assertion in whatever venue, includingsocial media, it must always be analyzed rationally, logically, and skeptically, to discern its validity. The Four-Way Test is applicable in that regard:
- Is it the Truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build good will and better relationships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Common sense, prudence, and temperance dictate that if the assertion violates any of those tenets, that it is invalid; that it must be rejected; and that it must not be repeated, disseminated, or propagated.
Certainly, it may be advisable to research any assertion via other sources to confirm or refute its validity. Certainly, each of us enjoys freedom of speech/opinion, freedom of conscience, and liberty of choice. Nevertheless, those freedoms and choices imply a responsibility and an obligation to ensure that the assertions and our responses to them are truthful and valid. The intent of such an analysis is to preserve the integrity, honesty, veracity, wellness, health, and safety, of ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and our commonwealth.
Audent cognoscere veritatem (L., dare to know the truth”).
It is incumbent upon each of us to apply due diligence upon public officials and proper vetting of their assertions. We must critically inquire of and critically analyze the credibility of those individuals and the validity of their assertions. Our allegiance to and support of them must be rational, justifiable, and meritorious (L., meritorious, “deserving of reward,” “worthy of praise or honor”), and not irrational, vacuous, and meretricious (L., meretricious, “pertaining to a harlot,”). Fellow citizens, ubi sumus itiones? (L., “where are we going?”). Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), attorney-at-law, statesman, and the Sixteenth President of the United States of America, at the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield, Illinois, in 1858, paraphrased a citation from Holy Scripture — a house [nation] divided against itself cannot stand. Liberty, freedom, and democracy require a united, virtuous, informed, and engaged citizenry. With resolution and diligence, such citizens could dramatically transform the political climate and the political parties in our society by acceptance and application of the Four-Way Test.
By way of summary, the following quotation is very apropos:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted upon its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Preface, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Post Views: 549