John C. Wright's Journal

Conservativism is based on the axiom that Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx and even Darwin are wrong about the human condition: Men do not evolve, not in any way that matters.

We are are not about to evolve out of the need for categories of good and evil, or the need for the confessional booth, the marriage bed, the judges’s bench, or the hangmen scaffold, or any of the other instruments of our fallen nature requires lest the social order fail. The modern substitutes, such as the analyst’ couch, the laboratory bench, or the peoples’ gulag, allegedly able to take their place, have proved bloodier than what they replace. Nay, they are bloodier even than the barbarism an utter absence of social order would produce.

Barbarians may pray to false gods, but that is better than none. Wotan may demand a sacrificial victim to be hung upside on the sacred ash tree with his throat slit, but the rune-laws on his great spear Gungnir decree that adulterers and oath-breaker are punished in Nastrond. Socialists have killed far, far more people than Aztecs. Yet even Aztecs did not slay their own children in the womb in the name of convenience or female supremacy.  They did it to cow their slaves and enemies, and also to make the sun rise and the rain fall.

In the great scale of being, it seems the bloodthirstiest savages in history rate above some of our contemporaries.

Here are some of my thoughts about Thanksgiving. I am liberally plagiarizing myself from other articles I have written in the past on the topic, so if you see a paragraph you saw before elsewhere, that is why:

Thanksgiving is nearly a perfect holiday, since by rights it combines the awesome and uplifting act of humiliating oneself to God in thanks for the bounties and blessings poured onto this nation by Providence, with the tradition of gathering the family and clan together in a feast of sumptuous proportions, a feast meant to remind us of the wealth the hard work of our fathers created for us, and to remind us of the hard-won liberty and wise laws protecting our rights to enjoy that wealth and worship that God.

Thanksgiving sums up the three greatest blessings of America.

Our political system is a voluntary mutual compact of limited and equal government enshrining individual rights; our economic system is a free market protecting individual property; and our religious heritage is one of the liberty of the individual conscience, a principle found in only faith in the world.

The 3 Cs of America are Constitutionalism, Capitalism, and Christianity. At Thanksgiving, we give thanks for all three at once.

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