What is it that distinguishes people on the Left and
people on the Right? We now have two party politics again. But what is the
choice between these two parties fundamentally about? The answer can be
summarised in the following way. Conservatism is about what is.
Liberalism/Socialism is about what ought to be. For this reason Conservatives
seek to protect what is, while the Left seeks to overturn it. Conservatives
think that the fundamental structures of society that have developed over
centuries should be respected and that progress should be gradual. The Left is
dissatisfied with how society is at present and wishes always to change it
radically, decisively and immediately. The basis for Conservatism is respect
for human nature as it is. We have the society that we have because of human
nature and the faults in society are due to the faults of human nature. The
Left on the other hand is dissatisfied with human nature and seeks to reform
it. Only in this way can it radically change a society that is grounded in
human nature.
It is fundamental to human nature that we are
unequal. In any primitive society you will find hierarchy. Likewise if you took one thousand modern human beings and
put them on an isolated island, left them and came back after a hundred years
you would find inequality. Some people are more intelligent, stronger, more
ruthless or have more charismatic personalities than others. Some people are
fit and healthy, beautiful and popular, others are not. Some people have skills
that are uncommon and which are necessary for society others have much less to
offer. Society is fundamentally unequal because people are unequal. The Right
accepts this as a fact and tries to work with human nature. The Left is dissatisfied
with the inequality of human nature and seeks to create a better society by
means of creating a better human being.
The motto of the French Revolution, liberté égalité
fraternité [liberty, equality, fraternity] involves in fact only two things not
three. Equality and fraternity are obviously the same thing. It’s the same idea
as found in Schiller’s “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” [All people become
brothers]. At present my brother or my sister is someone in my family. I prefer
this person to someone who is not in my family. But heaven on Earth or
Schiller’s Elysium happens when everyone in society is equally my brother and I
cease to make the distinction between family and anyone else in society.
The problem for the French and for every other
revolutionary movement is that people do not want to become brothers. We wish
to retain our hierarchical structure whereby I have talents, gifts or qualities
that make me more successful than you. A handsome man who has his pick of
pretty women, does not wish to become equal with those who don’t. If my skill
at fishing means that I can catch one hundred fish why should I give most of
them to the person who has no skill at fishing or who is lazy and who catches none?
It is for this reason that the motto of the French Revolution involves a
contradiction. It is only possible to achieve equality/fraternity through
compulsion. But what is compulsion other than loss of liberty?
It is not accidental that the French Revolution or
the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Revolution led to terror. It is a
feature. The attempt to eradicate inequality and create a utopian brotherhood
of man will always involve those who are more talented, stronger and
intelligent being forced to share with those who are less talented, weaker and
unintelligent. Some may choose to share, but the majority will not. It is human
nature to seek advantage for yourself and your family. Human nature as it is
will never lead to utopia. The Left therefore has to force us to be free and
force us to be equal.
This means that we are faced with an either/or
situation. Either freedom or equality you cannot have both. If we believe in
allowing people to live as they please with as little interference as possible
from government we will have maximum inequality, but we will also have maximum
freedom. I can then earn what I am able
and spend it as I please. Other people
are inevitably going to do either better than me or worse than me.
In order to create perfect equality the Government
is going to have to interfere greatly in the lives of ordinary people. Those
who are successful are going to have a large proportion of their income taken
away and given to those who are less successful. But both those who are willing
and those who are unwilling will have to give up the fruits of their success
otherwise equality cannot be achieved.
Perfect equality can only be achieved by a perfect
loss of liberty. But even those who don’t want to go the whole way and achieve
a socialist brotherhood of man must accept that what they are doing involves
people losing their freedom. If people are completely free and left alone they
will naturally form a hierarchy based on talent. But the Left, dissatisfied
with human nature, will try to mitigate this. Even if the Left doesn’t want to
create perfect equality it still wants to create imperfect equality, i.e. more
equality than would otherwise arise. But this can only be achieved by loss of
freedom. My freedom to earn what I please and spend as I please, must be
curtailed because I am forced to share what I would otherwise keep. Even an
imperfect level of equality can only arise by forcing me to act differently to
the way I would naturally choose. The attempt to create a society that is
contrary to human nature, i.e. a more equal society, can only be done by
creating a society that is less free. Every step on the way to equality is a
step away from freedom.
In a democracy the poor may vote to take money from
the rich in order to make their situation more equal with that of the rich. The
rich may be outvoted and laws created that force the rich to give a large
proportion of their money to the poor. This may be described as fair. But it
obviously involves compulsion. What if the rich decide to take their wealth and
their talents elsewhere? If enough of the rich do this then clearly the Left’s
utopian project to change human nature will fail because it requires the
contribution of the talented. The Left’s
response to people trying to take their money elsewhere is usually to prevent
either the people or the money leaving. The Iron curtain was not an accident,
rather it was the condition for the possibility of eradicating inequality. You can only make people equal by forcing
them to stay.
There is a sliding scale between freedom and
equality. Peak equality requires complete loss of freedom. Here we have
revolutionary forms of communism. But those ideas of the Left such as social
democracy or democratic socialism also require loss of freedom. They don’t
require as much loss as communism, but this is only because they don’t achieve
as much equality as communism does.
The Left argues that what is important is equality.
There is in the West a fetish about equality. Whenever something is found to be
unequal it is condemned. How dare some newsreaders earn more than other
newsreaders? How dare some people have the right to do something that others do
not? Equality is such now that “men” must be allowed to have children and
choice must neither be limited by reality nor by nature. Everyone can be what
he or she wants himself or herself to be and words must mean what I choose that
they mean. The lame walk, the blind see, a man can marry a man and then give
birth. All of these miracles are because all must bow down to the god/goddess
equality.
The folly is that the Conservative Party far from
defending the essence of Conservatism has been striving to do the Left’s job
for it. The Conservative view ought to be simply that inequality is a function
of human existence. A man cannot marry a man for the simple reason that he is a
man. A man cannot give birth because he is not a woman. This is what these
words means. This is the human nature that is the bedrock on which we build the
foundation of our society. Alternatively we overthrow our society by
overthrowing the meaning of ordinary words. “Man”, “Woman”, “marry” are words
with clear meanings that reflect a clear reality. A man cannot become a woman
any more than he can become a Martian or a dog. We may pretend that this man is
a woman, but in reality the word we are looking for is “Eunuch”. The demand for
equality, the demand to be able to do what our nature forbids, does not change
the reality, but it may distort it. It may mean that we lose sight of what is
real, because we end up lacking the words to describe it.
This is how the Left seeks to reform human nature. A
Conservative who goes along with this or seeks to lend a hand is quite simply not a Conservative. He is in the
wrong party and should leave.
Some people are paid more because they are more
popular, more talented, or more beautiful. The only way to change this is if
people become less free. Conservatives should become the champions of freedom
and point out that the fundamental idea of Labour and any other left-wing party
is to take away our freedom to be as we please. Instead absurdly the
Conservative Party seeks to imitate the ideas of the Left rather than champion
the ideas of the Right. Given a choice most people prefer to be free. Most
people prefer freedom to equality. It is for this reason that the Left requires
walls to maintain its equality.
Freedom is an attractive idea. All human beings
naturally want to be free to live as they please and to be as successful as
their talents allow. This is the essence of being an individual rather than
part of a socialist collective. Equality can only be achieved at the expense of
my individuality being dissolved into the brotherhood. This is called levelling
whereby what distinguishes me is erased because it creates difference. But
difference is what makes me the individual that I am. Equality in striving to
minimise difference ends up minimising me. It is for this reason that Left in
the end always ceases to care about the individual and the freedom of each
individual. This is not accidental. It is rather a feature of all Left-wing
thinking. It is the mentality of the hive rather than the mentality of the
freedom loving individual. There is nothing attractive for individuals in being
forced to become worker drones.
