REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2024

Fear has taken hold of many conservative thinkers. Fiscal conservatives fear ever tightening restrictions on the accumulation of individual and corporate wealth. Social conservatives fear a developing social landscape barren of moral foundation. Foreign policy conservatives fear the dilution of an ethnocentric way of thinking that imagines white fundamentalist Christians at the top and center of "all the Lord's Creation". Is there no way to help these people shake loose of their fears without tempting total nervous breakdown or reactionary violence?

On the previous page Craft, I discussed the relationship of discipline to identity and comfort. Certainly comfort would be the antidote to fear for these people. But how can their comfort be achieved without totally hamstringing all the rest of us?

I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek Next Generation wherein an equally intractable character was appeased by creating a totally believable artificial universe for him to inhabit miniaturized within a paper weight. Amusing, but not an entirely practical solution for today's intractable conservatives.

The truth is the concerns of conservatives wouldn't be so hard to take if their proposals didn't bind up the rest of us so with their consequences of increased poverty, rape and destruction of the environment, and promotion of ignorance and intolerance over curiosity and innovation. In a way, their preoccupation with setting up impediments for the rest of us might be put to good use crafting effective controls over the dynamisms of the developing and currently stumbled and languishing world economy.

Were their thinking to be shifted as described in the previous page Fluid vs. Mechanical from a preoccupation with rigid structures and relationships to one sensitive to the dynamics of the naturally fluid nature of the world economy, then conservatives might find not only comfort but fulfillment and earned appreciation helping to control the droughts and sloshings the rest of us currently experience.