The good, bad, and ugly of the conservative mindset according to Nietzsche

Conservatives conserve. Their worldview rests on the tragic truth that change brings more risk than benefits. Maverick German thinker Nietzsche has great insights on how the conservative mind works, why its necessary, and when it becomes an obstacle to a vital future. Dig in👇

For Nietzsche, conservatives are the caretakers of "the trivial, circumscribed, and decaying" elements of the world. These small things add up to the very "conditions" due to which existence, as he knows it, is possible. He does the boring maintenance that keeps life going.

The conservative's soul migrates into the ecosystem he's conserving: "The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its rules and regulations, like an illuminated diary of his youth - in all this he finds again himself, his joy, his folly."

Nietzsche lists the "talents & virtues" of conservatives: "An ability to feel his way back and sense how things were, to detect traces almost extinguished, to read the past quickly and correctly no matter how intricate its palimpsest may be." A heightened sensitivity to what was.

A nation always faces the danger of its best people "roving abroad in search of something more worth having." For Nietzsche, the conservative mindset pushes back against such brain drain by making people "contented with their own homeland and its customs."

Nietzsche writes the conservative problem is the temptation to reject the new just because it's the new, though it may clearly be an improvement: "Everything new and evolving, is rejected and persecuted." New possibility erased by an overbearing reverence for "antiquity."

Nietzsche: "When the historical sense no longer conserves life but mummifies it, then the tree gradually dies unnaturally from the top downwards to the roots - and in the end the roots themselves usually perish too." A tree mustn't only spread deeper but outward too.

The world degenerates when it's fixated on the past and "no longer animated by the fresh life of the present." Worshipping history's episodes and figures only because they're historical turns into "scholarliness" that "rotates in egoistic self-satisfaction around its own axis."

These ideas are from Nietzsche's profound 1874 essay:

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.

For more brilliant insights from this old essay, check out my collection: Nietzsche on History