Here’s a musing for my own purposes, as a way to better clarify my thinking. Perhaps some others might find it useful or amusing.
My conservative friends think I'm a liberal, my liberal friends think I’m kind of conservative. For the most part, I’m more comfortable with my liberal friends because they are more unabashedly accepting of who they are while, too often, my conservative friends don’t recognize their hypocrisies & contradictions. I tend to be very curious & I readily question things. With some frequency, I query people on why they hold a particular position or belief & sometimes that makes them uncomfortable & gets me labeled as “other.” I find that people often do not like to have their assumptions questioned. It tends to make them uncomfortable as they are rarely willing to admit that they have made an assumption in the first place.
When I was a young man, I was clueless like most young men. I did do well on some tests & got invited to a seminar at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. It was the mid 70s & at I least knew enough to recognize that I didn’t do well with authority. So the Academy wasn’t a good choice but I got to see the neat toys that engineers get to play with so I headed in that direction. Ultimately, I realized that I wanted to understand the ways things worked & got a BS in & started a PhD program for physics. I was erroneous in my assumption that a PhD in physics was actually going to learn me the nature of reality so I dropped out & delved deeper into martial arts, mysticism & Eastern philosophy. However, some of what I learned in physics stuck with me in a significant way & lead to my fundamental conservatism.
You see, it starts with the basic rules of the universe/nature. Nature does not waste. You see it everywhere you look if you bother to pay attention. All things get recycled in time. All forces & quantities are conserved. It’s really quite simple. It seems to me that we are better served when we work WITH the world (nature) around us rather than try to either fight it or undermine it.
For me, this means recycling waste when practical. It means reducing waste & reusing products as I’m able. I’m far from perfect about it but it is a value towards which I strive, not a dictum used for punishment. In my mind, being conservative means that you CONSERVE things, you don’t waste them. This is where I cross over to seeming more liberal than some. One of the most wasteful aspects in our society is the significant disregard we hold for the wasted human potential that occurs among the lives among which we live.
I am also extremely selfish & hedonistic. I used to think that altruism existed but I am no longer quite sure. I recognize that I desire to live in a certain type of environment & among certain types of people. Therefore, I act in ways that support people behaving in ways that I better enjoy. I typically find that the most effective way to teach is by example. So I try to live the life that emulates the type of lives I prefer to live around. I try to be generous because I want to live around generous people. I try to be compassionate because I wont to live around compassionate people. Circumstance may arise where I willingly sacrifice my life for the life of a stranger because I want to live in a world where this is how people behave.
I very much believe in God but I don’t think it is God as many so-called conservatives see God, even though I can derive my beliefs from the words of Jesus Christ (I suggest deep contemplation of John 14:12). I can also derive my vision of God from my understanding of physics. I believe that there is an energy field from which the energy fields of gravity & electromagnetism arise. I believe that this, most fundamental, energy field can manifest in a more obvious way in highly complex assemblages where it appears as that quality which we label consciousness. I see it in humans but also in other complex creatures such as elephants, dolphins, whales, trees…..
I postulate that at some point, this field of consciousness became self aware. Lacking any reference points (no universe yet), it created the universe out of a desire for self knowledge. The initial point had near zero information, the universe was created to accumulate information regarding the nature of “God” (perhaps source is a better term?). Humans are merely one of the more recent manifestations. So, in addition to valuing a minimizing of waste, I also believe that we are all fragments (if you will) of “source” & ultimately we will return to “source.” As such, living a life where we recognize each other as coming from the same “source” & ultimately returning there, I think that it makes the transitions easier & will result in living a healthier life.
This perspective also supports my philosophy of not wanting to waste, either things or people. The modern day leadership of the GOP certainly seems to adhere to a very different & much less conservative & more wasteful philosophy. As a result of this analysis, I claim to be a true conservative & the current leadership of the GOP is advocating for a very false version of conservatism.