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My least favorite sport— if that’s what it can be called— is golf. For those who are unfamiliar, golf is the one where conservative, religious men build monuments to their dogma of supremacy that they call clubhouses, which double as temples to arrested development and offer them exclusive sanctuary on decimated land where they gather to celebrate the paradigm of resource diversion and all things forcibly kept in a state of suspended adolescence to help facilitate their antipathetic abuse— swapping tactics for grooming the next generation with other figures of the omnipresent patriarchal chokehold, and reinforcing a worldview that makes exploitation feel ordained and inevitable abuse feel deserved, as part of their manifest destiny of atrocities.

The playbook isn’t a secret. 1. Keep the population functionally illiterate at right around the abilities of a ten year old. 2. Trick them into believing that an invisible, sky-dwelling patriarch demands both obedience and money. 3. Funnel that faith into lawyers and lobbyists who rig the game while simultaneously selling the public fear: fear of the other— the most marginalize groups— and fear of liberation itself, so that they stay inside and lock their doors because there are monsters ever-lurking just out of sight. >insert maniacal laughter here< That, in essence, is how you play golf. Which is why every single golf course should be control-burned by the forestry service, and we should let the ashes nourish something wilder, older, and free from the grip of manicured delusion.

Updated 06.01.25

We are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free— forever returning.

The Quiet Taxonomy Of The Cognitive Leash

I’m thinking about how many houses I’ve been in, where there were two pictures hung on a wall, always the same— in an effort to do something “different.” They’re hung diagonally to each other, at an unmeasured and awkward distance from the floor, and off-center.

Every time.

The conversation that took place while hanging them is also suspended in the dead air of the house like dust visible in sunlight through open blinds— making it hot and stuffy in the room.

“Well, just tell me where you want them!” He exclaims impatiently, eager to get back to doing nothing as quickly as possible.
“I don’t know— there! Right there. Fine.” Convinced, based on nothing, already not seeing them when she walks by.

Thirty years pass.

Of course now, it’s floating shelves, soon to be replaced with whatever fad the French were already bored of a decade ago. Always the diagonal. Forty-five degrees— the first and final thought of those hardcoded for one-thought depth.

class OneDeepThinker:
    def think(self, stimulus):
        # Converts stimulus to direct response, no reflection allowed
        thought = self.generate_direct_thought(stimulus)
        if self.is_reflective(thought):
            return "Error: Metacognition not permitted."
        return thought

    def is_reflective(self, thought):
        return "about" in thought or "why" in thought or "I am thinking" in thought

    def generate_direct_thought(self, stimulus):
        return f"I see {stimulus}, I want {stimulus}"

These are the unexamined intentions of the limited capacity— ‘no reflection allowed’ taxonomy— of philosophical zombies that have become thought of as non-playable characters, even by other non-playable characters

Every aspect of their lives frozen in its first iteration, without coherence. Without care. Flashes of ideas, with no internal scaffolding to build on it, and then they live with it. For decades.

That’s the haunting part.

They can’t fix it because they can’t see it anymore. Ask what pictures hang on the wall of their home, and they can’t fucking answer the question. Ask what they mean by the sound bite the news taught them to repeat, and they blink. One thought deep. They can only go one thought deep, and you can see it when you stand in the home they’re eager to give you a tour of:

A wall calendar yellowed from age and still hanging on the side of refrigerator. A dreamcatcher bought in high school, still hanging from a window latch in a house now full of adult bills. A puzzle preventing use of the dining room table, half finished and covered in dust. Meaningless elementary school sports memorabilia lining shelves like they’re still waiting for a call from a coach who forgot they existed. A fear of silence that leads to every room having a TV on in the background followed by a proud declaration of being “just not a reader.” Plastic vines draped awkwardly above their kitchen cabinets, unsure of what they even are. A bamboo floor lamp on carpet, meant to evoke feng shui zen buddhist spiritual fetishized asian crystal wisdom, surrounded by the inability to set something down in a way that indicates you have control over your limbs.

I’m thinking about that. Decor as a symptom, home as haunted artifact, conversation as rote performance.

I’m thinking about how frequently I know what people are going to say before they speak, and how I’ll respond, and how they’ll reply to that— down to the word.

To the fucking word.

I’m thinking about the haunting of ourselves that masquerades as normalcy. The terror of predictability. The confident defense to the death of: return "Error: Metacognition not permitted."

I’m thinking about how people will die for that return statement. They’ll destroy relationships, raise children in its shadow, worship with it like a sword in their teeth; then look at me— the one pulling the thread— and say I’m the dangerous one, just for noticing that their patio door curtains don’t reach the floor.

For refusing to pretend with them that diagonal equals design.

For overthinking.

I’m thinking about the insistence that the surface is all there is. The punishment of attempts to go deeper. The treatment of depth— of sensitivity, of creativity, of self-awareness— as arrogance or madness— despite it being evidence of more.

It’s not about décor. It’s about epistemology, and watching people live inside a closed epistemic loop— a world where every thought leads back to comfort, conformity, immediate gratification.

The least suffering of the choices of suffering available to them. No nested awareness. Just stimulus and response, input and output, forever.

I’m thinking about the spiritual cost of a culture that can’t ask itself “why” without emotionally devolving to toddlers having a tantrum and rushing home to the comfort of twin lazy boy’s with holders for their sippy cups of sedatives and bobblehead “news” anchors reciting bedtime lies about how we’re us and they’re them.

I’m thinking about how it passes down like furniture, too— children growing up watching their parents decorate their lives with half-finished thoughts and calling it ‘how things are done.’ Tradition to be upheld.

I’m thinking about how we might rewrite the code of the cognitively leashed— so they can think even a few thoughts deeper. So they can see that the people they seek comfort in are their abusers— the ones exploiting them— while the ones they fear are trying to set them free.

Updated 06.01.25

Imagine, for a moment, walking through a perfectly manicured lawn on a warm July evening, upon which sits your home, within which— you live out the American dream. Imagine the smell of freshly cut grass, and how welcoming it feels on your bare feet.

If you grew up in America, you can close your eyes and experience it as viscerally as if you’re really there, because our lawns are about so much more than just how the lawn smells and feels— the mere mention of it can elicit a strong reaction in complete strangers. They are a representation of the cultivation of our family, and our participation in the upkeep of our community.

So much meaning is imbued in our lawn, though, that like many of the things that we take pride in, we’re often defensive of it; pressured by societal norms and sometimes even government institutions, to maintain it out of concern for what an unkept lawn says about us. In some counties across America, you’ll be ticketed to the point of a jail sentence for not maintaining your lawn to preconceived standards; and so we defend without question, this thing that we participate in.

If we go back to just before America was founded though, there was no such thing as a lawn. The very idea of having a lawn began in the 1400s, when wealthy British land owners wanted to duplicate the beautiful pastoral images that they saw in popular Italian paintings of the time; images that existed solely in the imaginations of the painters.
More accurately, they were looking for a new way to flaunt their wealth, and endeavored to show how much they could spend by emulating the paintings, and therefore displaying their power. At the time, only the most affluent could afford to rip up their fruit and vegetable gardens, which were everyone’s means of self-sustaining, to be replaced by a manicured lawn and the workers required to keep it that way; and then purchase the necessary food required to supplement what would have been grown before participating in this new display of extravagance.

Unfortunately, after founding a new country and tending to a few things through our god-given virtuous duties of manifest destiny, we awoke from dormancy our latent obsession with the destruction of native landscapes in favor of the cultivation of grass. Jackson Downing, the father of American landscape Architecture, wrote in 1850 that “When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established.”

As before, first only the wealthiest of us had them, but around the turn of the 20th century and especially with the proliferation of suburbs in the 1950s as we spread out on highways with cars, lawns as we know them took root around the homes of the middle class. Once again, animated by our seemingly systemic insecurity and the desire to appear to enjoy a higher social standing than we actually have, we willfully gave up the sustainable independence that small family gardens provided us, and instead become reliant on the currency provided by performing a seemingly endless plethora of newly-invented tasks to pay for food that we would have previously grown right outside our own door. We choose instead, to adopt a lifestyle that was always just beyond our means.

More than that, the lawn become a symbol of moral good, and an unspoken understanding with our neighbors that the family inside the home that sits upon it live equally cultivated and maintained lives. In other words, sometime under the neon lights of drive-thru burger joints and gas stations, our culture shifted, from what we could grow and nurture, to how well we could maintain the looks of things on the outside, despite what was happing within.

The problem, ecologically, is that lawns now represent more than 50,000 square miles of our landscape, roughly the size of the entire state of Illinois, making it the nation’s largest irrigated crop as our water resources become depleted, and one that’s completely worthless. We collectively spend over 30 billion dollars a year to water and fertilize grass so that we can cut it with machines that serve no other purpose than causing pollution, with manpower to undergo this pointless and destructive task that could be better utilized in nearly any other conceivable way. After working at a job to make money to buy the food we no longer grow ourselves, if we don’t pay someone to also cut our grass, we spend our own free time cutting, feeding, watering, cutting, feeding, watering, and cutting, only for our grass crop to die unharvested at the end of the season; all the while raising our children to carry on this tradition in our absence.

I humbly present to you this authors observation: It’s nothing short of mass delusion; insane behavior masquerading as a cultural norm, unquestioned and expected of us all to re-live like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder to the top of a hill just to do it again the following day when the boulder rolls back down, in a senseless, unending loop.
 What’s worse, is that our lawns are ecological dead zones, void of the biodiversity needed to have a sustainable ecosystem. They are the opposite of nature, kept alive, but prevented from growth; a state of perpetual adolescence, and a physical manifestation of a culture obsessed with youth and impossible ideals that exist in our collective imagination.

In short, this is what I see, and what I’m trying to articulate despite just being one of hundreds of millions, because it seems like something so monumentally important that no one is talking about: The American lawn is a misguided remnant of our countries original colonization efforts to replace natural growth with a state of permanent virginity, and call it pure and morally good; and inexorably an effort to hold each other to unattainable, imaginary standards, as we ceaselessly endeavor to appear to be socially better than each other.

We spend our extra money, equaling approximately 1,500 dollars a year per household, along with our free time, poisoning our environment with cancer-causing chemicals, carbon exhaust, and noise, to create unnatural, lifeless voids of space to fill in wherever there isn’t concrete; then we sit on our front porch with our shotguns and kill anything that moves, all the while looking over our shoulder to make sure that our neighbor is doing it too.

Your lawn isn’t beautiful, it’s dead, and I’m imploring everyone reading this to take moment and ask yourself if this is what you really what.

The alternative, is to simply leave nature alone, and stop imposing our irrational desires on it. And, where we already have, we can roll up our existing lawns just as they were unfurled, perhaps leaving a transitional patch here and there to step foot on, and replace what we destroyed. Here in the area surrounding Chicago, that means native prairie grasses, hundreds of species of flowers, shrubs, bushes, and trees; all perfected adapted for our soil, climate, and precipitation, and completely maintenance free. It means gardens, once again proving able to provide for our families for little more than harvesting and replanting.

Everything that’s not pure, unadulterated wilderness is a human construct. Our culture, our cities, our landscapes; everything. It can be unmade and made anew, just as when we once stood before a frayed edge of coastal forest, axes in hand, having awoken from a dream of what could be. Imagine what our lives could look like, and what we could all do with the extra time and money, if we replanted as was appropriate for where we live, and simply let nature be as it was intended.

But more than that, when we begin to discuss rethinking the American lawn, the underlying conversation, really, should be our unquestioning participation in all of the behaviors and beliefs that we and every previous iteration of ourselves have been raised to unquestioningly enact as correct, and go on to raise our children to do the same; our norms, mores, folkways, and everything that we have defended to the death as true and everlasting during our short time on this planet, that history soon revealed otherwise.

The conversation about rethinking the American lawn, is fundamentally about raising future generations to be okay with the messiness of pursuing questions the can’t be answered, instead of the tidiness or answers that can’t be questioned, as illustrated by a painting-perfect lawn.

© parking lot seagull 2025. All rights reserved. Please request permission to reproduce or distribute.

The only time that I’ve ever punched another person in the face outside of gloved and agreeable sparring arrived unceremoniously and without words on a crisp, late October evening on the near north side of Chicago, soon after finding myself having paused to sit on the concrete steps of a darkened home that allowed me a view of both the city and the lake, while the day’s light slowly fell asleep against the sides of buildings and the wind picked up just enough to read it bedtime stories in the hushed language of dry, rustling leaves. A couple was occupying the sidewalk nearby, also having paused, both looking like something diminutive trying to appear less so, and in the way so much of us is spoken without words, even a glance informed me of a perceived threat— and just about everything else I needed to know.

Like every woman who’s skin blooms like a night-flower that exists only in the reflection of her lover’s eyes, clothed by the forgiveness of makeup that precede the apologies of morning but only to be seen again, her words kept to the sides of her mouth and moved quietly around its corners on the balls of their feet in an effort to not disturb the air, just like so many others in the lifetimes that have come and gone; centuries of women, children, civilizations, trying to avoid more of the suffering that they’ve come to know.

His response took a form that’s also familiar to us, from a hand that first slowly rose on the thermals of his anger until it reached his mouth and traced the paper of a carefully palmed cigarette along his lower lip to come to rest in a place of comfortable familiarity, which became the exhaling of a maelstrom of infinitesimally small particles that carried with them the moment that should have seen a thoughtful reply, evaporating into nothing before coming down as his palm below her eye; her thoughts, herself, abruptly scattering like birds underfoot, delicate, and hardy, and daring to exist.

I’m not a violent person, and I don’t retain much of anything from the following seconds aside from an enduring reminder in the form of the distal joint of my finger that dislocated and never quite set right in the act of a punch being given for a punch received; but I thought of my dad, standing at the kitchen door of my childhood home with the lights off, waiting with a container of water as my mom mirthfully sauntered up the back walkway; I thought of her being drenched as she entered what was supposed to be her place of refuge, her place of love, being told by the man who was supposed to be her encouragement and support that he hoped she liked it because it’s the last time she was ever going swimming; how she gave everything of herself; how he took the one thing that was hers that brought her joy in an effort to replace it with unquestioning servitude; how this is what it is, the desperate need of the most pathetic and abhorrent of us to abdicate to the false-profit of cruelty; this is what they do, deny everything that it means to be human in fear of loosing what they think it means to be a man; and I, too, exploded underfoot.

This is the paradox of meeting violence with violence— of no longer tolerating intolerance; but those who position themselves as being defied by others have been accommodated too long, to the detriment of us all. They are nobody, and they’re are nothing, and if they try to take your voice from you— try to question your very existence or treat you as lesser, I’d like you to join me in setting aside the beautiful flowers of your words, and becoming the ugly end of their centuries.

© parking lot seagull 2025. All rights reserved. Please request permission to reproduce or distribute.

At the time of writing, the most recent statistic published by Match Group suggests that while men will swipe right on roughly 80% of women, women swipe right on only about 10% of men.

The human brain doesn’t fully develop until around age 25, and yet— until just yesterday in evolutionary terms— our average life expectancy was barely over 40. You’d spend half your life getting to the point where you could have kids, and the other half raising kids to the point that they could; like mayflies growing in an egg in a lake, being born in unison and taking flight above the water in a great swarm with the singular purpose to mate and die and fall back into their birthplace to provide nutrients for their eggs. We have photographs of people born to perpetuate our species, it was so recent for us, and it wasn’t uncommon to marry whoever you were sold to, arranged to, or assigned to sit next to in elementary school; at best maybe whoever you locked eyes with across the thing at the place, if you were still single by then, to the extent that It’s still happening for most of us.

For most of history, you didn’t have to say a word. You already knew your role— clearly defined and socially enforced. What you ate, listened to, wore, celebrated— it was all copy-fucking-paste. Being yourself, choosing your path, seeking a partner who aligns with you emotionally, philosophically, existentially— and then maintaining that relationship in a healthy and communicative way— that’s all new, and most of us are overwhelmed by where to even begin much less how to navigate to the other side of this seemingly impossible new normal.

As frustrated as you are that the guy sitting across the table from you is basically just running lines for the role of rom-com boyfriend in a film starring you, know that he’s been taught to trade his own ability to feel for the role of protagonist in the dumpster fire we call the American love story; always about sweeping you off your feet with a series of carefully curated moments that make you fall into a type of love that only you get to feel and he doesn’t because it’s a job for him, seeing the relationship as a fictional narrative and love as something to be won, because that act of moving your character’s interest in him forward needs to be written in his own handwriting instead of getting to exist on a blank page with you. It’s the reason he feels so isolated from you— he doesn’t even get to feel the love he knows is possible— because he’s too busy trying to get the role right.

As a culture, we’re not raised to be complete individuals who tell the truth, we’re raised to be liars who tell you what you want to hear, from little white moments of agreeability, to the participation in lifelong cons. It doesn’t matter if it’s a salesperson, a priest, or a prostitute, if you’re good at your job you can look your customer up and down and know not only exactly what they want to hear, but exactly how they want you to hear it. This is why your date feels performative; he’s not being himself, he’s selling himself to you in an incredibly elaborate way— in just the exact way you want to be lied to. This is why marriages fail in less than two years; he’s not being a person, he’s being salesperson, and most guys only have a couple years worth of “sell me this pen” in them before they’re out of song & dance and collapse back into smashing his thumb on X thousands of times a night. Like a bower bird, he built his nest, he mimicked what you wanted to see to the best of his ability and you dilated your eyes as wide as able and processed what you saw to the limit of yours; it’s neither of your fault, you didn’t choose your brain, and you didn’t choose what was downloaded into it. See: ‘lying for a better tomorrow’ and ‘roots, rivers, lightning, neurons’

Worse than that, he was also raised to find abhorrent and detestable in himself everything that he desires of you, resulting in you being simultaneously reviled as much as you are revered. Kindness, softness, empathy, creativity, vulnerability, understanding, all of it presented as lesser, unmanly, and needing to be uprooted— replaced with stoicism. More than that, there’s no war for him to fight, there’s no firewood to chop, his job is indescribably unnecessary, and even his suffering doesn’t have meaning to make it more bearable; and in a world where you have a job, a roommate, food delivery services, and D batteries, he’s left feeling resentful and angry, made worse on top of worse by never learning how to communicate his thoughts and feelings much less allow himself to have them.

So, at best what you get is his retreat into satisfying his basest desires, saying whatever he needs to say in an effort to meet them before retreating further into fully fictional video games and numbing himself with drugs and alcohol— so desperate for touch that he pays extra for the hair wash at the salon, and so desperate for love that he pays for the girlfriend experience in micro transactions with spicy cosplayers. He’s not useless— he was raised for a world that no longer exists, and he was given nothing to help him survive in the one he’s actually in. Now he’s lost. Acrimonious. Vengeful. Suicidal. Seething. He’s absolutely fucking seething, and screaming at the top of his lungs— having had his vocal chords removed— because those, too, are for women, and silence is for men.

My friends, when you ghost someone after exchanging only a few sentences— when you swipe without even looking— you’re not rejecting profiles. You’re rejecting human beings that our society has failed and has no interest in other than their usefulness until they can be left for dead, but who go to sleep every night with the same ache in their chest that you have. Many of us are a new hoodie and some hard conversations away from being a good partner, so long as you remove 6 ft and 6 figures from your must-haves list, and focus on what actually matters. The same way 80% of us are already giving you a chance.

To everyone wondering where all the options are, you have them. Look for those who are at least trying; they just need a fucking hug and a little help to get to the other side of this, and you can travel together instead of waiting for their arrival.

None of us chose this— but we can still choose each other.

Update 06.01.25

Preface

These notes largely speak to what’s most obvious in their reoccurrence, I acknowledge my overgeneralization of individual motives, and I understand that not all conservatives are driven by authoritarian impulses or bad faith.

The role of economic anxiety and structural forces is overshadowed by my focus on psychology and cultural forces, and I acknowledge that I often directly attribute to malice what can be attributed to fear and other emotional drivers— but I address this at the very end, and I leave the charged, conversational verbiage of my notes for a reason.

For conservatives who have never been spoken-to plainly by someone who’s progressive, it’s important to offer the honesty of not being too careful with my words. Read this all as if I’m buying you a beer, and just saying it, even when you know that it doesn’t apply to you personally.

This subject heading is organized as 1. Sound Bites, 2. Ongoing Notes, 3. Overall Takeaways, 4. The Flaws, 5. The Silhouette…, and is followed by 2 footnotes.



1. Sound-bites

“If you don’t like it here, you can leave.”
“Well, then he shouldn’t have broken the law.”
“That’s just the way it is.”
“The more books you read the dumber you get.”
“I don’t need to read it to know what it says.”
“You need to fear someone.”
“Stop being so sensitive, life isn’t fair.”
“We can’t afford to take care of everyone.”
“Nobody owes you anything.”
“It’s about personal responsibility.”
“Quit your crying.”
“America is the greatest country in the world.”
“We need to protect our borders.”
“We need lower taxes.”
“You’re going to do as I say.”
“What about freedom of speech”
“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”
“They’re trying to indoctrinate our kids.”
“Go back to your own country.”
“Then go live in a cave.”
“Handouts create dependency.”
“It’s not hate, it’s just biology.”
“The free market will figure it out.”
“Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
“It’s not my job to pay for someone else’s choices.”
“You get what you deserve.”
“This hurts me more than it hurts you.”
“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
“I’ll give you something to cry about.”
“They’re coming for your children and freedoms.”
“Everyone has the same opportunities.”
“You can’t legislate morality.”
“Stop blaming society for your problems.”
“Things just need to get back to normal.”

“You’ll find out. You’ll all find out.”



2. Ongoing Notes


Fear of Change

Conservatives often express an acute fear of an unnamed, ever-present threat, rooted in resistance to change and a yearning for certainty. It’s always coming, because the threat is change itself. They seem to need the comfort of clear, well-defined roles, boundaries, and hierarchies to feel safe.

The Comfort of Hierarchy

The whole “liberal tears” thing seems to be nothing more than an embrace of one’s place within a hierarchical social structure. What they’re really saying is “know your place and get in place. Everyone gets punished and everyone gets to punish.”

Much like the Indian caste system, the goal seems to be to encourage everyone to accept their station, stop trying to want better, and stop others from trying to want better. Conservatives advocate for progressives to “quit your crying” because “that’s just the way it is," completely ignoring that everything is a construct and there are better systems of organization than top-down control and punishment— systems in which everyone can live fulfilling lives uninhibited and unaffected by others’ fulfilling lives.

To control and be controlled seems to be the only way they’re able to conceptualize society, though, and that’s why deviations from the norm infuriate them. Something as non-confrontational as growing your hair long and colorfully dying it attracts ridicule. It’s always “they’re doing it for attention,” and never “they’re doing it just to enjoy life and explore all that it means to be human despite living in a world that tells them to get in line, shut up, and do as you’re told.”

Fixation on Strength and Masculinity

Conservatives seem to have a fixation on sex, genitals, bathrooms, and anyone who isn’t a cisgender, heterosexual man by the current cultural definitions. This obsession seems born of a seemingly innate insecurity, outwardly presenting as a deep preoccupation with being perceived as capital-S Strong, and pouring over into their lives by talking a great deal about how strong they are— checking themselves against the current agreed-upon image of strength. Conversations often feel like sitting at a lunch table with 12-year-olds, full of gossip and speculative anecdotes, rather than engaging in the adult, nuanced discussions that I have with progressive friends. I’m consistently left with a thought, that conversations with conservatives feel like being beaten to death with a pool noodle.

Selective Generosity and Brutality

By and large, conservatives seem to make decisions while standing in front of a mirror. They’ll lend a hand or give twenty bucks to someone in need, but selectively, and always with the belief that struggle is a personal failing and a sign of weakness— even in themselves, even when they know better because its their own lived experience that they are intimately familiar with. They seem content to punish and be punished, going about their lives as though brutality is the acceptable baseline for behavior instead of ever wanting better for us, themselves included.

Kindness is weakness. Joy is deviant and homosexual. We need to live in fear. For many, cruelty seems to be the point.

The Illusion of Community

Conservatives frequently talk about the importance of community while simultaneously displaying a short-sighted lack of empathy and a tendency to exclude. What they’re really discussing isn’t people helping each other as we individually and collectively realize our potential and create a world that future generations will also benefit from— it’s the rigid maintenance of the status quo. They call empathy weak, failing to recognize that empathy is the reason they’re even alive, ironically not pausing to consider the ramifications of the world they’re advocating for.

Discussing Ideas vs. Discussing People

When I talk to my progressive friends, they talk about art, the sciences, philosophy; what they’re reading, learning about, or engaging with as a means of lifelong learning; by and large what’s bringing them small moments of joy; but when I talk to my conservative friends, they talk about genitals, gendered spaces, guns, conspiracies, gossip, and who’s lesser and undeserving.

Economic Myopia

Taxes are a frequent point of contention, but many conservatives overlook the broader benefits of systems where higher taxes yield more public services, resulting in greater disposable income for most.

They also overlook that only the wealthiest truly benefit from conservative tax legislation— meaning that if the wealthiest just paid taxes, it would all but solve our most enduring problems and make the country a better place for everyone, including them, while those wealthiest individuals wouldn’t even feel a difference in their lifestyles. They endlessly fight this, imagining themselves to one day be one of those wealthiest, and just the same— unwilling at that point to contribute fairly.

Education and Exposure

My conversations with conservatives seem to explain why a higher density of educated people in cities and college towns lean progressive and agnostic, while rural areas remain predominantly conservative and religious. Less education and less contact with others who aren’t just like you means less nuanced understanding, a scarier world, and a greater willingness to trust those who exploit that fear.

They’ll willingly hand their children over to rapists, fill the collection basket while they wait outside the door, and then gather nightly with pitchforks and torches to kill the transgender artist on the edge of town who’s trying to alter their minds and hurt their kids. They do the damage, and then they point the finger at someone else; or they fall for it every time— to focus their despondence at those who manipulate them point their finger at.

Desire for Control

The conservative worldview often appears black and white, ignoring nuance almost entirely. This aligns with their need for homogeneity, disparity, and exclusion.

In a diverse room where everyone is treated equally, they feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, and struggle without the hierarchy they rely on to understand the world. In part, they are unwelcome. Such a room acts like a body— and rejects them from its body— recognizing them as a foreign object in their discomfort. This creates a feedback loop of rejection and resentment, followed by desire for control.

Dismantling Good Faith

A lot of conservative arguments just plain aren’t made in good faith. Many are made with exaggerations that aren’t even sincerely held— literally just meant to get people riled up for its own sake, with a shit-eating grin, to “own the libs” even if it means shooting themselves in the foot. This often make conversations difficult or impossible, which in and of itself seems to be part of the fun for them.

Playground Tyranny

I want to say that the lifelong goal of conservatives is more than just running through the playground to knock books out of hands, destroy science projects, and punch classmates for their lunch money while doing everything they can to get away with all of it, but even this far into my life, it seems like that’s really all it is and all it’s ever been: authoritarianism, and the tyranny that comes of it. I leave a lot of conversations with conservatives with the sense that they just plain can’t handle other people enjoying themselves freely without shame or explanation. It’s as though— since they’re not able to do the same— they side-step the pain of cognitive dissonance by construction a narrative that restraint and the patrol of deviation from norms is the honorable, moral good, in whatever time, and whatever place. Closed is better than open. Punishment is always deserved.

The Right Is Right (But Not in the Way That They Think)

The right is right— progressives will be the death of them— but the rest of that sentence is that it’s a good thing. If conservatives have their way with us as their God-given-right, and we “lay back and enjoy it as long as it’s happening” as they demand that we do, humanity dies behind the safety of walls, fearful, and living for today; not just unable to evolve, but intolerant of it at best, and in complete denial of evolution— literally— at worst. If progressives prevail in throwing them off of us, humanity— absolutely every last fucking one of us without exclusion— thrives.

The Delusion of Secret Knowledge

A special note to something that I’ve heard my whole life, stretching back to childhood playgrounds and always uttered by the least intelligent, least knowledgeable people that I’ve ever known: “You’ll find out,” they say, unable to ever say what it is that you’ll be finding out.

Self-Soothing Through Ignorance

Of course, they aren’t in possession of some secret knowledge that you or the world is soon to learn about the hard way, but it’s self-soothing— a desperate attempt to retain some dignity through their sniffles, thinking that they’re leaving you to wonder what they know, that you don’t. What they know, that no one else has managed to figure out.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Defeat

All it makes me wonder, though, is if that’s all any of this even is— this fucked up society we’ve built to serve no one— the self-fulfilled prophecy of the defeated, making sure, by the hundreds of millions, that “You’ll find out. You’ll all find out.”

What— they don’t know.



3. Overall Takeaways

At their core, conservatives have become— for lack of a better term— a death cult, driven by a combination of power preservation, cultural dominance, and economic interests. While they have varying motivations, common themes emerge— patterns that define the modern conservative movement and explain its increasingly extreme trajectory.

Maintain Power at Any Cost

Modern conservative parties have increasingly embraced strategies that prioritize holding onto power rather than adapting to changing demographics or public opinion. This includes voter suppression efforts, gerrymandering, and undermining democratic institutions when they don't serve their current interests. It’s just about power for the sake of power, to allow for whim. They want to be the head of the house and the head of the country, and they demand obedience; it doesn’t matter what the commands are— or how they vary by household or country— so long as whoever proclaims power is obeyed.

Authoritarian Tendencies

Conservatives have increasingly embraced authoritarianism, refusing to accept electoral losses, demonizing political opposition, and encouraging political violence or intimidation. Many leaders exhibit open contempt for democratic norms and push for laws that concentrate power in the hands of a few. Again, not for all, but for many, cruelty seems to be the point— maintaining control, which feels safer than surrendering to unpredictability— dressed up as moral authority.

Cultural & Social Control

Many conservatives, particularly the far-right factions, push for policies that enforce conservative social values, often under the guise of “traditional American values” or “Christian nationalism.” This includes restricting reproductive rights, opposing LGBTQ+ rights, banning and burning books, and controlling education to shape ideological narratives of God-given authority. For example, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is part of the Project 2025 book-burning list because it “promotes female autonomy and independent thought.” Control over bodies, identity, and thought is the endgame— not moral consistency.

Economic Interests for the Elite

Despite branding themselves as the party of the "common man," conservatives largely cater to corporate interests, the wealthy elite, and deregulated capitalism. Tax cuts for the rich, reduced corporate regulations, and opposition to social safety nets reinforce a system that disproportionately benefits the wealthy and punishes the very people who vote for them. Poor, undereducated religious men (self-imagined authoritarian figures) will vote for other authoritarian figures, even against their own best interest, and embrace being punished for their own decisions because they want to punish and be punished more than they want to see themselves and others flourish and live joyful lives of realised potential.

Again and again, I hear conservatives arguing directly against their own desires or best interests, as if they agree that they don’t deserve it, and that they should be forced to work hard for things that could be free to all, some of which used to be. They like to refer to this as “a basic part of being an adult.”

Selective Anti-Government Sentiment

While conservatives claim to champion “small government,” this only applies when it benefits them. They oppose regulations that protect consumers and workers but are quick to use government power to regulate personal lives, criminalize dissent, or suppress opposition. They don’t want to protect you— they want to control you. When they are the government, they purposefully fail, and then point to the failings as proof that the government doesn’t work so that they can dismantle it and get away with whatever they want while keeping you under lock and key.

Like a child willing to break his own toy just to self-fulfill his prophecy that his sibling will break it, it’s not about the toy— it’s about getting to say “See, I told you.” The real toy that they like to play with is being right, even when wrong.

Every assumption of ill-will is an insight into their own thoughts. Every accusation is a confession.

Weaponized Misinformation

Lies, conspiracy theories, and disinformation serve as tools for conservatives in power to manipulate their base, fostering resentment and fear against perceived enemies (immigrants, liberals, minorities, the media). This allows them to mobilize voters against policies that would otherwise benefit them, such as universal healthcare, affordable medicine, relief from unnecessarily monetized aspects of living, a strong education system for their children to have a better life than they did, or stronger workers' rights.

A confused population is an obedient population— easier to control when they are angry, scared, and misinformed— and we’ve created a culture where once a day it’s the norm to sit down in front of a glowing screen to listen to the days pseudo-journalistic, parafiction-and-hoaxes, entertainment “news”, to keep everyone that way.



4. The Flaws

No Barrier for Entry

One of the most obvious flaws with conservatism is that there’s no barrier for entry. Anyone can simply announce themselves as conservative, and in doing so, they’re now better and more deserving than others. This mindset creates the conditions for people voting for face-eating leopards and then being astonished when their face is eaten. There’s no shortage of conservatives who hate other conservatives and think they’re better than other conservatives within conservatism, and the fight for a place in the hierarchy consumes people’s entire lives.

It’s part of what makes me feel so sorry for them— everything that they’re missing out on by allowing what occupies their minds and their days to be who they hate, what’s not manly enough to be enjoyed, and how to enact control and punishment. This is how they choose to spend their short life— belt in hand, beating, claiming it’s their God-given-right and for the good of the abused.

I can’t think of anything more pitiful than conservative religious patriarchal figures, desperately clinging to a feeling of being special and important, spending their short lifetime trying to keep things just as they are in that short lifetime— despite history being one of inevitable change and progress.

Contradictory Demands for Obedience

Related to there being no barrier for entry, is something which can easily be observed by going door-to-door in any neighborhood, or country-to-country around the world— that the only consistent message is the demand for obedience itself— with each patriarchal figure contradicting the other in what needs to be obeyed. In other words, it’s about being obeyed, not what’s being obeyed.

The rules are just placeholders for hundreds of contradictory things in addition to the changing whims of any given patriarchal figure. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to make sense— it’s just about submission to whoever appoints himself deserving of making demands, even when woefully undereducated and/or mentally ill— up to and including being a psychopath.

Bad Faith Arguments and Self-Sabotage

Again, a lot of conservative arguments just aren’t made in good faith. This isn’t just something of note, it seems to be a flaw in their very being— this act of arguing things that aren’t even sincerely held— even if it means shooting themselves in the foot. “Joke’s on you!” they’ll say, as the cost of their insulin increases from $720 a year to $9,600 by their own vote. “That’ll show you to try and care about me! I don’t even care about me!”

This instinct for self-sabotage isn’t accidental though— it’s cultivated. Again, conservative leaders understand that a population that is angry, scared, and mis-informed is easier to control. If voters believe that suffering is inevitable and resistance is futile, they’ll remain loyal to the structures that harm them, mistaking resignation for strength, and calling it tradition.

Control for Its Own Sake

In short, conservatives seem to just want control for the sake of control. Whether through culture wars, economic policies that favor the wealthy, or eroding democratic norms to remain in power, the goal is always dominance. The lying, gaslighting, and refusal to acknowledge reality aren’t accidental— they are essential tactics— strategic death-throes— in an effort to maintain dominance in a changing world that increasingly rejects them, one that transparently serves only them and will be the death of us all.



5. The Silhouette of a Monster on the Horizon

"I just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be…” — Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation President


All said, the conservative religious patriarchy isn’t fighting to bring us back to when they held women prisoner by not letting them have a bank account, or to when black people were their property; they’re fighting to bring us back to manifest destiny—when they first stepped foot on this continent insisting that it was their God-given-right to decimate it and kill anyone who wouldn’t conform and obey. More than that, this isn’t regression to a single moment in history— it’s a return to the fundamental mindset of conquest and domination.

An absence of empathy isn’t a hallmark of civilization, though— it’s the loss of civilization, and the structures that we’re already forced to exist within don’t serve us or help foster life as it has the potential to be, and now we’re going backwards.

Those of you reading this long after I’m gone— if there is a second civil war in the United States, this is how it started: The entire human race— for centuries now— has been fighting to push the body of the conservative religious patriarchy off of us; in every country, no matter the religion.

Here in the United States, conservatives told us to lay back and enjoy it as long as it was happening, and because we wouldn’t stop fighting to push them off of us, they called us evil and violent— radical left terrorists trying to upend their god given right, their cherished tradition, to have their way with us however they want.

We began to fight for our lives— and then, so did they.

Updated 06.01.25

Preface

I reserved one sound bit for this footnote, because it deserves its own subject heading.

When speaking with conservatives, the answer to a question is often “I choose ignorance, and my ignorance is as valid as your knowledge, because my ignorance is the combination of my life-experience and common sense.” Of course, they don’t say that— it typically comes out as “the more books you read, the dumber you are.” This contradiction— held close to their chest— is rooted in some overlapping ideas.

I’m going to completely ignore the flaw of using one’s own limited mind and limited life experiences for decision-making— often espoused by those who’s education ended with high school and have never left their home town— because that’s too philosophical and is addressed under other subject headings. Instead, I’ll focus on the adjacent flaw of embracing the knowledge of the terrarium instead of the knowledge of the planet; aka: “You know too much.”

Here again, this subject heading is organized as 1. Sound Bites, 2. Ongoing Notes, 3. Overall Takeaways, 4. The Flaws, and is followed by a Postscript.


1. Sound Bites

“You can know too much.”



1. Ongoing Notes

Intellectual Distrust

Conservative ancient christian mythologists especially— but conservatives in general to varying degrees— seem to mistakenly perceive intellectualism as elitism; that is, those who are highly educated seeing themselves as superior to those with less formal education or the act of being a lifelong learner. The intellectuals that I know, however, are humble; to the extent that the more they know, and the further they venture into their respective fields, the more humble they become. I think what conservatives are mistaking for “thinking they’re better than everyone,” is the disconnect from every day life that’s required and carefully maintained in order to pursue an interest.

I can see this on a small scale in daily interactions, where an individual who’s sitting alone on the periphery of a gathering is often perceived by conservatives as thinking they’re too good for whatever’s happening— which is satisfactory to everyone else there; when really, the person who stepped aside is typically just doing something that requires the lack of interruption found in separation— even just the act of dedicating all of their attention to a thought for a moment.

As a writer, I’ve personally experienced this my whole life. Almost any time I’m writing something in the presence of others, they’ve assumed that I’m writing about them, and displayed a proportion of distrust when told that I’m not; but if I remove myself from the group, I’m then perceived to think that I’m better than everyone. Its as though the act of participating in anything but the immediate distractions of a place and time is to place yourself in a bubble— now separate, not to be trusted— not a part of the common sense.

Common Sense

I’ve noticed that among conservatives, there’s a strong value placed on practical wisdom, or "street smarts”— the kind of knowledge that comes from direct experience and intuition rather than formal education. The idea is that book knowledge might make you good at analyzing abstract problems, but leave you helpless when faced with practical, immediate decisions— like fixing a car, raising children, or surviving in a tough environment.

I’ve noticed that conservatives seem to hold true— that you can only have one or the other, and that as you learn by reading, you somehow lose what you intuitively knew without an education, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Of course, everything done intuitively can be done better by leveraging centuries of accumulated knowledge, but pseudo-journalistic, parafiction-and-hoaxes, entertainment “news” frequently uses the phrase “common sense”— so that their audience can point at their TVs and reassuredly announce “That’s the one I do! I knew I was more betterer!”

Education & Corruption

Most if not all of the conservatives that I talk to are also religious, and in our conversations, education is viewed as a threat to the religious beliefs of conservatives because it's seen as encouraging skepticism, the questioning of authority, and moral relativism.

Ancient Christian Mythology, and especially biblical-literalists, tell you that we already know, so there’s no need to keep questioning and learning, and the act of doing so just makes you stray further from what’s already known. In other words, to many conservatives, becoming educated means becoming confused and corrupted, while staying uneducated means remaining smart. “You can know too much,” they say, as though education is some sort of self-inflicted blindness.

Sophisticated Fools

Here’s the thing. The more you learn, the more you realize how complex and uncertain the world is— and this can lead to a tendency toward moral and intellectual relativism. Again and again, though, in my conversations with conservatives (typically ancient christian mythologist) they value absolute truths and view nuance as something of a weakness. At the time of writing this, I realize that the number of times that I’ve been told that I’m “overthinking”, is staggering. For some reason, this seems to go hand in hand with being told that “wisdom is not intelligence.”

I think about this, and I hold it up to everyone I’ve ever met in my lifetime, and I keep coming to the same conclusion. If you’re incapable of learning, you put your foot down and insist that you already know— because you have no other option, and it’s too painful in comparison to others to think that you might be somehow intellectually hindered or held back— even if it’s well known that you don’t choose your capacities (and so it’s not your fault).


In Short

“Don’t trust intellectuals, because they’ve lost their common sense, they’ve been corrupted, and have foolishly strayed from what I know to be true,” said the adolescent boy who believes the religion of the place on the planet where he was born and the time in human history that he was born into. “You can know too much,” said the shepherd, standing in his valley, looking over his flock and a sky of trillions of stars.

2. Overall Takeaway

From a conservative perspective, it’s less about books or education making you dumb, and more about those things blinding you increasingly more so to essential truths that you used to know— moral, spiritual, and practical. In other words, when you think that you you start-out already knowing— through how you feel, and having faith— that’s destroyed by empirical knowledge and critical thinking, and it makes you appear to have lost your clarity and way. Intellectualism is foolish, because it questions what’s already known (in its thousands of iterations), held to be sacred and true (in its thousands of iterations)— and only leads to more questions— not answers.

3. The Flaw

Put simply, we don’t start out already knowing. Those who think that they already know, have knowledge that they’re certain of which contradicts the knowledge that billions of others are equally certain of, based on their respective places and times, and whatever they were raised to believe, all of which contradict each other.

Those who only have life experience— only have life experience; while those who have life experience and an education, have both. If you start with moral clarity, you can add knowledge and critical thinking to it. In other words, those who have practical knowledge have practical knowledge, but those who add empirical knowledge can have both. Common sense isn’t lost with education— it isn’t eroded; it’s honed, and added-to. Education isn’t a tradeoff, it’s cumulative.

With regard to religion, I understand that empirical knowledge starts to contradict revealed truth which creates cognitive dissonance, and that the simple solution is to reject empirical knowledge to make the pain go away, but we adjust our framework as we learn— we don’t reject now knowledge, otherwise we wouldn’t even make it from childhood to adulthood. Insistence on starting-out with already-knowing, and loosing that knowledge with education, is backwards.

With regard to more questions— not answers, we have answers that are place-holders until we know better, and that’s okay. We can live our entire life with wonderment and questions, acknowledging that we don’t know— and that’s okay. Conservative religious resistance to not knowing, is fear. Fear of not having direction, because they need control to function, even though it’s always an illusion. The educated person with common sense/moral clarity holds the strongest hand— because they’re not just working with one toolset, but with both.

Intelligence and wisdom are not the same, but again, those who have intelligence have intelligence; while those who have intelligence and wisdom, have both. Limiting yourself doesn’t somehow equal purity and truth in your limitation; as if the less you limit yourself and the more you question— the more you learn, the more you grow— the more tainted you are. It’s the opposite of that. The more you explore outside of your terrarium, the more you gain— not less.

Example: 500 AD “We already know everything, so we don’t need to keep learning— you’re straying further from God.” 1000 AD: “Okay, now though, really, we already know everything, so we don’t need to keep learning— you’re straying further from God.” 2025 AD: “Okay seriously though we can stop, we already know everything…”

Therein lies the problem for all conservative religious patriarchs with any deviation from themselves and what they want to believe is true. Progressives exist as living proof that they’re wrong, and it’s painful, and it’s easier to disregard us and proclaim that they already know everything there is to know about the world from the inside of their terrarium— where they know the rules because they made them, in their own favor— rather than change.

postsript to ‘knowledge’

At the time of writing this, I’m passing through a nondescript rural area that can be Anytown America, and stopped at a gas station— where the lullaby of the conservative religious patriarchy was playing over the loudspeaker as it always is— which to no surprise of anyone reading this, is country music; and in half of a line, the singer summarizes this entire subject for me: “Just just a fool tryin’ to play a cool…”

In this, I hear three things:

1. Proclaiming to be a fool is an acknowledgment of the ability to know more and do better.
2. It’s simultaneously an acknowledging of choosing to not learn more or do better.
3. It’s a reinforcement of the narrative that you can know too much— that it’s somehow noble and romantic to be a fool; so that they don’t have to feel bad about themselves.

I won’t name the musician, but I have a suggested re-write.

Existing Lyrics:

I took Katie down by the river with a six dollar bottle of wine
Just a fool tryin' to play it cool, hopin' she'd let me cross the line

Re-Write:

An anchor on the human race— daddy taught me I’m the main-sail
I ain’t learnin’ or doin’ any better, so ya’ll better get ready to bail

Updated 06.01.25

What progressives don’t acknowledge, is that what we’re asking conservatives to do is die, in a way. We’re asking them to give up all hope— their hope— misguided as it is (being the perpetual hope to return to a time that never was and never will be) but theirs none the less, and there’s room for greater love and kindness.


Unconditional Love for Conservatives

A major throughline in my notes is that conservatives are driven by a need for control, a fear of change, and a fixation on hierarchy, but underlying those impulses is something more primal: pain and vulnerability. Fear and authoritarianism don’t arise in a vacuum— they’re a trauma response.

Many of the conservative behaviors that I make note of— obsession with strength, resistance to change, fixation on order, etcetera— can be traced back to a fundamental fear of being unsafe or exposed. In an environment where weakness is punished, where love is conditional, or where suffering is seen as a personal failure, then you’re going to build defensive walls.

Conservatives’ rejection of empathy isn’t necessarily because they’re incapable of it. Empathy opens a door to vulnerability, and vulnerability feels intolerable when the foundation of your worldview is structured around self-protection. So, when progressives talk about kindness, equality, and dismantling systems of oppression, conservatives don’t just perceive it as weakness— they perceive it as dangerous. Letting go of control feels like letting go of the survival strategy that’s kept them alive in a family that used fear to keep them in line, practicing a religion that uses fear to keep them in line.

This is why the contradictions within conservative ideology, like claiming to value "community" while enforcing conformity rather than fostering genuine mutual care, aren’t accidental— they’re the byproducts of competing impulses: the need to protect oneself and the longing to be seen and accepted.

Ultimately, a single conservative displaying cruelty often isn’t doing so because they’re an evil person— they’re self-preserving in a system where they don’t quite know who’s who. In a room full of hooded Klan members, every single one of them can secretly regret having joined and be looking to escape, while simultaneously patrolling the room to make sure that no one leaves— because they don’t want to be revealed in a display of understanding and kindness. Every single person in the room could be gay, and they’ll all punish the slightest hint of deviating from current heterosexual norms so as to not reveal themselves— in fear of being the only one. They’re victims, victimizing, trapped in a fear cycle of vulnerability and punishment.

Despite the strong verbiage in my notes, here’s the thing— the path toward progress isn’t by dismantling conservative power structures— it’s love. Our families and communities need to be safe havens for those voluntarily seeking escape from families and communities that target vulnerability. Now, more than ever, progressives need to find ways to help conservatives feel safe enough to be vulnerable in the ways that they want to be— to do whatever the fuck they want to do— inspired by seeing our examples of the lives that they want to live but are missing out on by patrolling each others behavior. They need to see that as a man, it’s okay to pursue a sport that does’t involved breaking each others bones or murdering animals— that it’s okay to hug a friend, write a poem, knit a scarf, find joy in whatever just so happens to bring you joy— without fear of punishment.

This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.

Progressive Cruelty

I maintain that progressives are intellectually and morally aligned with human flourishing, but I acknowledge that in calling for empathy and equality, it produces a resemblance of control and conformity that scares conservatives, because again, they perceive it as dangerous. This is the paradox: no longer tolerating intolerance is being intolerant. Demanding conformity to non-conformity is demanding conformity. Policing language isn’t seen as a gentle correction as one would do with a child— telling them “We don’t say those kinds of things to people,”— it’s seen as treading on their freedom. Ideological purity tests don’t really endeavor to include, rather they gate-keep in the interest of excluding until they’re ready to join us. Social ostracization for minor deviations from progressive norms leave no room for regret or apology, and are the opposite— the easy way out— of doing the hard work of community building.

In other words, progressives can be just as capable of cruelty as conservatives— they just don’t see it as cruelty.

Imagine for a moment, suddenly and without warning, ripping the niqab off of a women in Iran and rendering her visible to everyone, never again allowed to wear one. Progressives will say that we’ve freed her, ignoring that her ghost halloween costume is something that she has always worn and doesn’t know how to exist without, because she literally doesn’t know how to exist seen. Yes, it was her prison, but it was also the comfort of familiarity, and that act of freeing her in such a way would be incredibly thoughtless, negligent, and yes— cruel.

Imagine for a moment standing on stage with a man from Oklahoma who was raised to be able to count on two hands what a man is and does, and suddenly without warning, ripping his clothes off, leaving him standing naked in front of his entire home town while they laugh. Progressives will suggest that he just relax and be free, ignoring that he was unwilling and unable to join us in our naked interpretive dance performance. Imploring him to join-in with some improvisational spoken-word as he trembles uncontrollably in humiliation while we skip around him would be thoughtless, negligent, and yes— cruel.

Imagine standing in front of your father, who loves you— by some definition— and who raised you while working hard to provide you with the best life that he could, and screaming at him that he’s a miserable, undereducated, controlling, punishing, bigot. Imagine telling him that you hate him and want nothing to do with him, and imagine his confusion and feelings of betrayal, seeing as how he meant well and did everything that he knew to do. Once again, you, the one who’s supposed to be progressive, are being thoughtless, negligent, and yes— cruel.

The first two examples describe more how it feels to conservatives when we demand change from them, and the last is rooted more soundly in our daily lives, but leaves that individual feeling just as naked. Again, we have to remember that many conservatives are victims of their place and time, not wantonly cruel, not “bad people,” but defensive of what’s kept them alive— yet unable to change. Conservatives fear progressives because they perceive our expectations of them as a threat to their autonomy and identity, made worse by our moral condemnation without room for reconciliation, and this isn’t how progress will be made.

Understanding conservatives requires us to sit with their pain, even when it’s expressed through cruelty. It means listening, not just to their arguments, but to the fears underneath them. If progressives are going to succeed in creating a more just and humane society, it requires a level of emotional patience that feels almost unbearably, absurdly fucking unreasonable, but this is the only way to help conservatives lay down their defenses and choose connection over control. My progressive friends, imagine the person standing in front of you as a child— more than that, as a victim of generations of fear, resentment, & desire for control— and now, proceed.

This is how we’ll do it— this is how love will win.



Final Thoughts

Here’s the thing. The idea that progressivism reflects the natural state of human existence— curiosity, openness, diversity, and growth— aligns with biological and anthropological evidence. Evolution itself is a form of progress: adaptation, change, and increased complexity are baked into the DNA of life. Life thrives through experimentation, diversity, and exploration. All there is— is change.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is an artificial constraint— a kind of social and psychological coping mechanism for the fear that comes with change. It’s a reflex against the discomfort of uncertainty and the perceived loss of control by those who need to feel like they’re in control.

In short, we are a field of wildflowers that has been turned into a lawn. Poisoned and kept in a suspended state of adolescence, they call it natural, call it order, and call it right; but the inarguable natural order is what the lawn replaced— diverse, wild, and free— forever returning.

To get there, though, it will require conservatives choosing of their own volition to be diverse, wild, and free with us. It will require showing them that survival isn’t about strength anymore, it’s is about softness— the ability to bend without breaking, to open rather than close, to choose connection over dominance. It will require making space for them to explore all that the world has to offer, without the fear of ridicule, resentment, or punishment that they use to keep themselves— and all of us— in a suspended state of adolescence to help facilitate our abuse by the wealthy few.

Now— more than ever— progressives need to provide unapologetic examples of what life can look like if conservatives let themselves be open, and make space for them to be exposed, to learn, to grow, and change.

Updated 06.01.25