Categories: uncategorized
Date: 06 September 2007 11:21:35
I realized I was a conservative.
If I'd had to put a capital C in that sentence then I think I really would have to kill myself but even as it is it was quite an unsettling realization. But I do really seem to like the status quo, or at least I seem to put in a lot of effort to defend it. That in itself is really quite bizarre - I clearly have a number of aims which I am actively pursuing and yet completely unaware of. Certainly if you'd asked me whether I liked preserving the status quo then, until those months ago, I would have said no. And yet that it is exactly what I seem to be doing, even to the point of bending facts or distorting my opinions in order to achieve this. As far as I can understand myself (which is really not much, not much at all) it's not that I like the status quo per se (although Ma Kelly's greasy spoon will probably always have a place in my heart) but that being positive about how things are at the moment is closely linked with being content, and that is something which I am a great fan of. I know that revolutions (both of the good sort, like Wilberforce, and the bad sort, like Pol Pot) are borne of discontentment and dissatisfaction with how things are, but my impression is that far more mental damage on an individual level is caused by discontentment than is alleviated by the revolutions arising out of such discontentment.
No, actually, that's over-simplified. It would be better to say that we should be content on the small scale and discontented on the big scale. It would be bad news for us to be content with the situation in Darfur or Iraq, or with the damage we're doing to the climate system. But on the more personal things it's better to be content - being discontented about my job, for example, is more likely to lead to my having a nervous breakdown than to any positive outcome.