The main ingredients of conservatism are greed, hatred and ignorance. Coincidentally these are also the things the Buddha identified as the sources of all human suffering.
“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.”
― Socrates
Greed and hatred weren’t that much of a problem for Socrates apparently, but they both agree that ignorance is fucking bad. And the Greeks had two words for it (at least), separating a lack of ability from a refusal to understand.
“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”
The main ingredients of conservatism are greed, hatred and ignorance. Coincidentally these are also the things the Buddha identified as the sources of all human suffering.
“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” ― Socrates
Greed and hatred weren’t that much of a problem for Socrates apparently, but they both agree that ignorance is fucking bad. And the Greeks had two words for it (at least), separating a lack of ability from a refusal to understand.
https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/
“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”