- Compare the old, the ancient, and the new. Notice that the modern world is designed in a way that disrupts the ways of the old and the ancient; obliterates them. How people sleep, eat, congregate, communicate, move is dictated by the physical environment we’ve built. Raze a village to build a highway and you create modernity. Conservatism, basically, says that this is wrong. I imagine that we all should be conservatives in this sense. We should mourn the broken link with the deep human past.
- If fascism was traditionally an alliance between industrial power, military, and government, then the new fascism is an alliance between tech, intelligence networks like the CIA, and government. Hard fascism versus soft fascism. Hard totalitarianism versus soft. So what you call yourself politically matters far less than how aware you are of how modern power not only works, but is evolving.
- The big corporation you work for is not making the world a better place. You have every right to work for that company and make a buck — but don’t pretend. You have no right to pretend. Greed has no political soul.
- The nation is a fairly new invention, perhaps a few hundred years old, and it is, I think, already passing away. What will replace the nation, what is replacing it, is an alliance between the surveillance state and the surveillance corporation; the computer engineer is the engineer of the new passive, invisible, casualty-less totalitarianism; a re-engineer of the spirit. Google, Facebook, Apple — and many others — all have their own slogans, their own corporate philosophies, but in reality, their mission is the exactly the same: to monitor and control human behavior.
- The future will require new political philosophies because the substance of human nature will be substantially different; the equation is changing, will change. All the accumulated data — all the surveillance data — is being fed back into the system (us), which will inevitably produce radical (and frightening) transformation. How you adapt to this transformation will be your politics.
- Political philosophy gets more realistic the further back you go. Add A and you lose B; lose B and you gain C; gain C and you will hope for D. And so on. Before Marx, there was a sense of the precarious nature of things, no matter how you configured the equation — after Marx, after the 19th century in general, non-Utopian political thinking became scarce. A world with no alternative to Utopian thinking, on the right or left, is a world without hope.
- There is no conservatism without the preservation of nature; anything less is sham conservatism.
- The meritocracy is the new landed aristocracy. Going to Harvard is essentially the equivalent to growing up with a coat of arms. It is not unreasonable to demonstrate that liberalism creates the same (kinds) of inequalities as the old regimes it replaced.
