Evil Triumps Because Good is Disorganised

[jamesq]

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke

Intergroup squabbling is a very noisy way of doing nothing.

In the fight between the the liberal and conservative movements I've found that conservatives tend to be better organized. I've speculated that this is because conservative are better at rousing their side with rhetoric and following orders.

Liberals conversely, tend to question authority, which I think is why you don't see an all-encompassing liberal movement. Instead, you see GBLT groups and legalize-marijuana groups and pro-labour groups and pro-choice groups (etc) but they don't necessarily get along with each other.

Of course, being in a pro-X group means you probably think X is very important and therefore pushing topic-Y will seem like a waste of time. That's another part of the problem.

As an analogy, think of World War II and what it would be like if the allied groups couldn't agree on which country to liberate first. Europe would be controlled by fascists, and German girls wouldn't be nearly so fun to hang around with.

(There are exceptions of course, for about a generation the Liberal party governed in Canada because the various conservative factions could not get along. Ah sweet nostalgia.)

What brought this on? While reading through dark_christian today, I found this train wreck of a thread. Did we really need better then half the comments to be a semantical argument over whether evil is equivalent to willfully ignorant and intellectually dishonest reactionary? Can't you people see you're on the same side. Cheese and crackers!

Comments

[bungle-lord.livejournal.com]

Another version of what you said:

Conservative means to keep things the same.
Liberal means to change something.
(Oh, and Reactionary means to change things back to the way they were.)

The thing about changing something is that different people want to change different things. And possibly in different ways.

The weird thing I find about this whole conservative versus liberal dichotomy is that most people are conservative about some things while wanting to change others. Yes I know there are people who want to change everything and those who want nothing to change. But most people fall somewhere in the middle. So how does one become labeled one way or another beyond liking one colour over another is beyond me.

On another hand, I am thinking that the conservative or liberal labels just signifies which political sect you identify with and does not actually refer to political beliefs. And like religious sects, one can be quite passionate about those who do not belong.

[jamesq]

You're speaking of the traditional definition of conservative. Think Neocons instead.