The real meaning of conservative

The real meaning of conservative

It’s very hard to sell electric cars and also endless war in the middle east and call yourself conservative. To spend the most on health care per person and not have anything to show for it. To have one of the most expensive educations in the world and also one of the most ignorant populations.

It is not conservative to spend over $80 billion on corrections and over $180 billion when factoring in courts, judicial systems, and family burden.

Conservative is living like it is 200,000 years ago

200,000 to 300,000 years ago humans were top tier hunter gatherers whose wits and technology mattered every day in the struggle to survive.

Before laying down fresh grass sheaves, inhabitants raked clean white ash from their wood-burning hearths. This ash obstructs the breathing of ticks. Hearths were positioned immediately adjacent to the front edges of the grass beds (evidenced by burn marks restricted to the bedding margins), providing radiant warmth throughout the night. When grass mats eventually became fouled, the inhabitants set fire to the old bedding generating a fresh, sterile ash base.

So conservatively we make American housing a struggle also:

The typical U.S. household now earns roughly $22,200 less than the $109,796 annual income required to afford a median-priced home. [1, 2]

Historically, home prices hovered around 3 times the median annual household income. Today, the U.S. home price-to-income ratio sits at 5.08 nationally.

Though whether we consciously made the choices that caused the housing struggle is unclear.

Between 1990 and 2015, over 5,000 U.S. high schools completely eliminated shop, automotive, welding, or electrical programs. [1] Because high schoolers were rarely exposed to trade tracks, enrollment in vocational programs plummeted from 33% in 1980 to just 8% by 2013

A 2025–2026 contraction in foreign-born craft labor

Escalating tariffs on critical building inputs

Competition from artificial intelligence (AI) data center construction for electrical professionals and grid capacity

Too much emphasis on single family homes

America conservatively tethers health care and everything else to work.

In the U.S., the financial payoff for reaching the top decile is massive, while the penalty for falling into the bottom half of the economy is severe. So rational actors will tolerate toxic management just to avoid slipping down a rung.

The United States ranks as the most economically unequal nation among major high-income and G7 countries, and near the top globally depending on whether income or wealth is measured.

On population early Homo sapiens were stable.

Between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago, the overall Homo sapiens census population across Africa was not experiencing sustained net growth.

America is projected to approach a stable population even with immigration.

Without immigration the US is not experiencing sustained net growth. Plus Americans have an on again off again relation with immigration and so did early Homo sapiens:

Roughly every 21,000 years, shifts in Earth’s axial precession altered the African monsoon. During wet phases, green corridors opened across the Sahara and East Africa. When the monsoon failed, those corridors collapsed into hyper-arid deserts, wiping out bands that had expanded into marginal territories.

Early Homo sapiens were headed toward severe climate change:

Americans are also headed toward severe climate change:

Major continental U.S. cities are projected to see significant temperature and seasonal shifts by 2050 under current high-emission pathways, with global warming thresholds like 1.5°C and 2°C approaching over the next few decades.

A prolonged fight with malaria is worse than 3 years of COVID, but both Americans and early Homo sapiens suffer from disease.

Why conservative cosplay is hard

Modern life has made individual accomplishment impossible. Unlike early Homo sapiens any one person can be removed from the workforce without consequence. American capitalism obfuscates this fact:

Traditional capitalism provides high-visibility scorecards: titles, equity, bonuses, and rapid promotion tracks.

The problem is that modernity itself is at odds with individual status:

• Sunken costs are dramatically higher than in previous eras
• Corporations are deliberately built so that no single person owns an end-to-end result
• Ever more complex systems require more than one person to run and the remaining less complex work is automated

Supposedly America is stuck on “rugged individualism”, but the term was coined as a 1928 political slogan and the frontier was a massive federal project involving the military and government subsidized railroads, dams, and canals.

In reality humans never survived individually.

Long-Distance Trade & Mobility
Obsidian sourced from 15 to 60 miles away — far beyond daily foraging range. Implies inter-group social networks; if migrations failed in one valley, bands had reciprocal rights to forage in neighboring territories.

And early humans were not dominated by the physically strongest:

As anthropologist Christopher Boehm established, once a group can coordinate and use ranged weapons, a physical bully can be easily coalition-killed or ostracized by peers. High status could no longer be seized by force — it had to be granted by peers based on skill (hunting, toolmaking, tracking, or conflict mediation).

Hunting, toolmaking, tracking, and conflict mediation cannot be faked but almost every modern individual “skill” can and is. Yes there are a select few like athlete, writer, mathematician, artist, musician, chef, designer, etc. that maybe, maybe can be measured like those early H. sapiens skills, but everything else is fraud.

What is and is not conservative

Cruelty is not conservative. The cradle of humanity 300,000 to 200,000 years ago couldn’t afford cruelty and survive.

The push back for ending cruelty is that without fraud everyone is equal:

However everyone rewarded the same is, as far as we can tell, mostly what humans 200,000 years ago had:

• the same tools
• the same graves
• group identity (as displayed in art)
• no harems (at least that show up as paternal bottlenecks)

Humans who are struggling to survive cannot afford massive inequality.

Universal Basic Income and leisure for citizens of a mature empire has been implemented before:

In 123 BCE, the tribune Gaius Gracchus passed the Lex Sempronia Frumentaria, requiring the state to sell grain to citizens at a subsidized, fixed price to prevent famine and undercut predatory grain speculators. In 58 BCE, the tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher made the allocation entirely free.

The dole was not universal welfare for everyone in the empire, nor was it open to all residents of Rome. It was strictly restricted to free, male Roman citizens registered on the urban census rolls. By the time of Augustus, recipient numbers were capped at approximately 200,000 citizens (the plebs frumentaria).

By the 2nd century CE, public holidays and festival days (dies festi) accounted for more than 135 to 175 days of the Roman year. On these days, public business ceased, and state-funded games — chariot races (ludi circenses), theatrical plays (ludi scaenici), wild beast hunts (venationes), and gladiatorial games (munera) — filled the hours from morning until dusk.

Spending resources on pyramids or leisure rocket ships is not conservative. Conservative projects have a link to survival like H. sapiens Qesem cave from 300,000 years ago.

Excavators uncovered a massive central hearth 6.5 feet in diameter. This immense size indicates it served a relatively large group of people.

Specialized stone blades and precise cutting tools used for slicing meat were found directly adjacent to the fire. Heavier scrapers and butchering tools were discovered further away, indicating that these early hominins systematically designated distinct “rooms” or zones for domestic activities.

Obsessing over fine technical details is conservative as Neanderthals did with Schöningen wooden spears 300,000 years ago.

Nine complete spruce and pine javelins plus double-pointed throwing sticks preserved in lakeside mud. Crafted with an offset center of gravity in the front third of the shaft — matching modern Olympic javelins for aerodynamic flight.

Art and religion are perhaps conservative:

Twin Rivers, Zambia (~300,000–200,000 years ago): Excavations here yielded over 170 pieces of hematite and specularite (which produces a glittering, metallic dark-red powder) alongside grindstones. Hominins traveled significant distances to source specific shades of red and glittery pigments over local alternatives.

Olorgesailie, Kenya (~320,000–295,000 years ago): Early Middle Stone Age hominins transported bright red and black manganese pigments from kilometers away and ground them down.

Ritual vs. Utility: While ochre has practical uses — such as insect repellent, sunblock, or an ingredient in hafting adhesives for stone tools — anthropologists point out that utilitarian tasks do not require sourcing specific glittering specularite or bright blood-red hues when dull brown iron oxide works identically as glue. Many evolutionary anthropologists (like Camilla Power and Ian Watts) argue this marks the birth of body painting for collective rituals, establishing group identity and sacred taboos.

Or maybe it was their version of racism:

Evolutionary psychologists (such as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides) have demonstrated that the human brain did not evolve a dedicated module to detect “race.” Instead, it evolved to detect coalitions and alliances. In the Pleistocene, the person most likely to kill you or share food with you looked almost identical to you physically, because they lived in the next valley over. Therefore, the markers that triggered intense suspicion or hostility were behavioral and cultural: dialect/language, vocal sounds, body paint (red ochre use dates back ~300,000 years), scarification, and tool-making styles.

Deliberately rejecting technology required to save back breaking labor is not conservative. Which is why 97% of the Amish use motorized washing machines and 100% use horses or better for plowing.

All of America is Amish

If we think of Amish as rejecting certain technologies to live a particular lifestyle, then all of the US does the same thing:

• Remote working — roughly 22% of the entire workforce as of early 2026, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. This is down from 42% during the pandemic and so is clearly a choice and not a necessity.
• Decision making without meetings — even when remote working is employed companies frequently insist on unnecessary live meetings
• Automated tax filing — In dozens of countries, the government citizens simply review a digital form and click “approve.”
• Port automation — In the United States, ports consistently rank among the least tech-integrated in the developed world.
• Prefabricated homes — building homes and apartment units on an indoor assembly line (modular or prefab construction) drastically reduces labor costs, material waste, and weather delays. While countries like Sweden and Japan build a massive share of their housing in factories, U.S. construction productivity has remained stagnant or declined for half a century.
• Old fashioned real estate sales — manual title searches, mandatory title insurance (an industry that barely exists outside the U.S. because most countries use state-guaranteed land registries), physical wet-ink signatures in many jurisdictions, in-person notaries, and 5% to 6% broker commissions protected by MLS gatekeeping.
• Paper in the office — the average American office worker still prints 10,000 sheets of paper per year (about 34 sheets a day), costing businesses roughly $800 per employee annually in paper, toner, and printer maintenance.
• FedAccounts — the Federal Reserve could easily give every citizen and business a checking account directly with the central bank, earning the exact federal funds rate.
• Public FedNow — Countries like Brazil (Pix) and India (UPI) built central bank-mandated, real-time public payment rails. A customer scans a QR code or taps a phone, and money moves instantly from their account to the merchant’s account 24/7/365 with zero or near-zero fees. The Federal Reserve finally launched FedNow in 2023, banks ensured it was built as a back-end interbank rail — not a consumer-facing app.
• Atomic ledger updates — The ACH network relies on 1970s-era batch file processing (NACHA files) because banks make billions on the float — holding your money in transit for 48 hours and earning overnight interest on it before delivering it.
• Equities clearing — basically atomic ledger updates for stock markets
• Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac direct to consumer mortgages — banks just resell to these agencies anyway and the IRS already has all of your info
• On-demand clothing — Roughly 30% of all clothing manufactured globally (around 30 to 45 billion garments a year) is never sold. America could use technology like unspun and avoid that waste, retail stores, and have custom fit clothes.
• Medical billing automation — The U.S. employs roughly 10 administrators for every 1 physician. In many countries a doctor enters a diagnosis code and the claim clears automatically.
• Automated prescriptions — In the US a human must physically or virtually meet with the patient for 7 minutes to rubber-stamp a refill or read a lab result that is purely binary.
• Pharmacy dispensing — can be replaced by robots and mail-order fulfillment warehouses
• RFID over barcodes — instead of scanning bar codes everything could have an RFID for pennies more
• Education administrators — in U.S. universities, non-teaching administrative staff now outnumber faculty by 2-to-1. Some roles could be automated and others serve no purpose.
• AI in the classroom — American classrooms are not far off from Amish religious services in terms of unwillingness to let students self learn
• Legal work automation — State Bar Associations (which are run by lawyers) aggressively prosecute software companies under “Unauthorized Practice of Law” laws if a piece of software gives specific legal output without a human lawyer collecting a toll. Furthermore, ABA Rule 5.4 explicitly bans non-lawyers (like tech companies or outside investors) from owning or investing in law firms, specifically to prevent tech companies from disrupting legal services.
• Automated eye prescriptions — “which is clearer one or two?” has some small advantages over looking at an autorefractor hot-air balloon or barn. However smartphone-based refractive tech could test at home if it wasn’t banned for prescription use in the US.

But it’s not just a rejection of technology, there is also a willingness to invent bullshit jobs.

Can conservatism be patched?

There is no longer anyway for America to live “naturally” IE under conditions that bred Homo sapiens 300,000 to 200,000 years ago (or maybe much longer we don’t know for sure).

However the instinct to want to live like early humans, but also have technology is understandable — liking having your cake and eating it to.

The Hutterites: Living primarily in the Great Plains of the US and Western Canada, Hutterites make the exact opposite trade-off from the Amish regarding technology versus economics. They practice strict Christian communism (all property, land, and income are held in common within a colony of 60 to 150 people, and everyone eats in a central dining hall). However, to support the colony, they embrace cutting-edge industrial technology, operating massive farms with GPS-guided combines and automated manufacturing facilities. They restrict consumer and media technology — banning television, radio, and unfiltered internet — to prevent individualism from eroding communal life.

Ignoring the Christian part and maybe worrying less about unfiltered internet does the Hutterite colony of 60 to 150 people, and everyone eats in a central dining hall work as a conservative patch? Note the size of a Hutterite colony is the famous Dunbar’s number.

Some groups in a corporations have a very Hutterite feel to them — excluding management. However Americans switch jobs internally or externally every 3 or 4 years and so these groups don’t have the staying power of ones that typically changed once.

Between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, an early Homo sapiens typically traveled 50 to 150 kilometers (30 to 95 miles) from their birthplace to find a mate, with outer social networks stretching up to 200+ kilometers (125 miles) during periods of environmental stress.

Here AI, having read the above, argues patching is not practical:

Why can’t we just form 150-person, high-tech guilds, eat in a central dining hall, automate away the bullshit jobs, and live like early Homo sapiens with fiber-optic internet?

Because of two things: exit velocity and the internet.

When an early human traveled 30 to 95 miles to find a mate and join a new band, it was a permanent, high-stakes transition. You couldn’t ghost your tribe every 36 months for a 15% title bump in the next valley. Because you were stuck with those 150 people for life, reciprocity wasn’t a lifestyle aesthetic — it was survival. If you hoarded meat or faked your competence, Christopher Boehm’s coalition-enforcement kicked in. In modern corporate “colonies,” if you get caught faking competence or poisoning the culture, you just update your LinkedIn and vest your stock options elsewhere. High turnover makes genuine egalitarianism impossible because nobody stays long enough to pay off their social debts.

Worse, you actually can’t ignore the Hutterite ban on unfiltered internet. The Hutterites didn’t ban media just out of prudishness; they banned it because you cannot maintain a 150-person egalitarian society when every member is doomscrolling the status scorecards of 8 billion strangers. Our brains evolved to be the best tracker, storyteller, or toolmaker in the room. The moment you introduce unfiltered internet, local peer respect is replaced by global algorithmic clout — and you are right back to faking skills and worshiping leisure rockets.

But AI’s answer just raises another question — was life even 300,000 to 200,000 years ago really conservative?

Humans waited 170,000 years to develop long distance kinship networks based on trading beads? 170,000 years to hunt with a snare? AI has many hand waving reasons for the great delay called the “sapient paradox”:

The people at Pinnacle Point used bow-and-arrow microliths for a few thousand years, and then the technology disappeared from the archaeological record for 10,000 years, replaced by simple, clunky flake tools again.

For the first 200,000 years of our existence, if a band of 35 people had two master bow-makers and both of them died, the bow went extinct in that region.

Brain Shape Evolution: While 300,000-year-old skulls had the same volume as ours (~1,350 cc), they were elongated like a football. The modern globular (round) braincase — driven by the expansion of the parietal lobes (visuospatial integration, tool simulation) and the cerebellum (working memory, fine motor sequencing, syntax) — didn’t finish evolving until 100,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago, human skulls show a progressive reduction in brow ridges and facial projection — the classic biological markers of falling baseline testosterone and reduced reactive aggression. Humans literally had to become less hair-trigger violent toward strangers before inter-group networks could function.

Subdivided Continent: For the first 150,000 years, Africa was a fractured patchwork of semi-isolated groups that only periodically connected when the climate was wet. The genetic lineage that leads to modern humans didn’t begin diverging into the main African branches until ~200,000–150,000 years ago.

All of those reasons are just guess work so we can add one more — there is no sapient paradox and Americans still live the same delayed progress way.