Two Types of Conservatism, writes Kissinger

the irrational unconscious vs. the rational conscious

Here I am, reading Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored. And just as he’s finished writing about the final peace after the Battle of Waterloo he mentions the minimal reparations imposed upon France that were paid off in three years. In other words, no punitive peace after the 20 year Napoleonic wars.

But then we come to an interesting take on two types of conservatism: Burke and Metternich.

The difference between these two conservative positions is fundamental. To Burke the ultimate standard of social obligation was history; to Metternich it was reason. To Burke history was the expression of the ethos of a people; to Metternich it was a “force” to be dealt with, more important than most social forces, but of no greater moral validity. (p.193)

Translated into my language, this is the difference between the idea of self-construction with a combination of instinct and tradition and social relationships as a manifestation of the unconscious mind, and political constuction using reason as a manifestation of the conscious mind.

Now, I think that the critical difference between the unconscious and the conscious mind is that the unconscious mind is working upon all kinds of things at once whereas the conscious mind can only do one job at a time.

See also the price system that can do millions of things at one time whereas government bureaucracy can only do one thing at a time.

So, I would say that Buckley conservatism is more aligned with a rational analysis of society while Trump MAGAism is more of an unconscious feeling.

And yet, we tend to think of the market economy as a soulless mechanism of solitary individuals that replaced the organic community of the pre-industrial ages. Is it?

For instance, we could say that the soulless individualism of the modern world is not a consequence of capitalism but a consequence of the destruction of the old world of mutual-aid societies and fraternal organizations by the government bulldozer of the welfare state.

I don’t know. But I think that we need to pay much more attention to the fact that we humans are 97.2 percent self-reproducing body and self-ordering unconscious mind and that the scope for rational scientific top-down direction is very small, and subject to catastrophic error.