Тег: Conservatism

Why the sated is no comrade to the hungry, and technology is driven by those whose asses are on fire

Do you know what a cozy chair at Stanford, a patent for 20 years ahead, and a lifetime grant from the NSF have in common? Exactly—the desire to change nothing. Why bother? The bread is already buttered, topped with caviar, the competition has been squeezed out by copyright laws and NDAs, and any new idea is a risk that your beautiful, multi-year body of work might become obsolete even before it hits the pages of Nature. Therefore, when yet another overfed professor curls his lip at a new technology, it’s not “weighted scientific skepticism,” but simply the instinct to preserve a comfortable spot.

A case that should be tattooed on the forehead of every skeptic: EUV lithography. In the mid-1980s, Japanese engineer Hiroo Kinoshita from NTT became the first in the world to produce an image using extreme ultraviolet light and reported it at a meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics in 1986. The reaction from the room? To quote Kinoshita himself: “The audience was extremely skeptical. However, my faith did not change.” During the same period at Bell Labs, Aubert Wood and Bill Sylfvast tried to push the same idea in the US—and received an “extremely negative reaction” from reviewers: they claimed that even if every component were assembled, the system would be so complex that its uptime would be “negligibly small.” Now look at 2026. Every chip in your smartphone, every graphics card, every AI accelerator—all of it is made on machines that use the exact same EUV lithography that the mainstreamers laughed at. What would have happened if Kinoshita had listened to his “esteemed colleagues” and gone to teach optics to freshmen?

Now let’s move to the Ukrainian trenches. Remember how back in 2020, serious men from military academies chuckled at the idea of FPV drones? “Toys for children,” “unserious weapons,” “real war is tanks and artillery.” Military science is generally one of the most conservative swamps on the planet—careers there are built over decades, and you certainly don’t get patted on the back for “unserious ideas.” But in 2022, when the AFU faced a question of physical survival, it suddenly turned out that a dirt-cheap FPV drone with a shaped-charge warhead could take out a million-dollar tank. And the conservative soldiers, for whom all this was “not according to regulation” just yesterday, turned enthusiast home-builds into an entire branch of service in a year and a half. Because the alternative was to die. And death is an excellent motivator to cast aside corporate pride and take what works.

The pattern is simple: technology is not pushed forward by those who are “doing fine.” Technology is pushed forward by those who have a choice between “accepting the new” and “dying” (metaphorically or literally). So let’s list some categories of people who are truly desperate:

– Startuppers with no money. They have nothing to lose but their over-commits. That’s why garage teams, not IBM’s R&D departments, give birth to the things that change industries.
– Fighting armies of the weaker side. Ukraine with drones, Mujahideen with Stingers, Finns with Molotov cocktails. The stronger side always has the temptation to “crush with mass,” while the weaker side only has their brains.
– Scientists from the “wrong” countries and institutes. When you can’t get an NSF grant simply because you aren’t from the “right” laboratory, you are forced to make a breakthrough just to be noticed at all. Half of the Nobels in the last 30 years went to people who were first dismissed by the mainstream.
– Patients with incurable diseases. The most desperate drivers of biohacking and DIY medicine. They literally have nothing to lose, so they are the first to test gene therapy from a garage.
– Victims of domestic violence in third-world countries. When you have no option to turn to the police or social services against an abusive father, the covert addition of drugs to food to enhance a violence inhibitor no longer seems like some kind of psychosis.

The conclusion? If you want to see the future—look at those who have no choice. They are the true engine of progress. And the “esteemed experts” will catch up in about 15 years—once the technology can be used to defend another dissertation and they can quietly live until retirement.

P.S. Hiroo Kinoshita, by the way, lived to see it. And let’s hope that he sometimes smiles cunningly while reading ASML’s annual reports.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Does Faktum care about your feelings? Tell it to the conservatives!

You’ve probably heard conservatives trot out the same mantra: “We are the party of logic and reason, while liberals are snowflakes living on emotions.” It sounds so pretty, like a slogan on a t-shirt. But then came this study published in PLOS One in January 2026, and let’s just say it slightly spoils their jam. Scientists decided to check how people actually seek evidence before forming an opinion. Not how they twist facts when they’ve already made up their minds, but exactly the process of seeking truth.

What was the essence of the experiment? They took 583 people and gave them a task: assess the effectiveness of the cash bail reform. The situation is classic: there are 100 cities with reform and 200 without. The task – to understand if crime rates have decreased. Participants were given a “data bank.” You could look at dry statistics (where crime increased, where it decreased, compare groups) or read the opinions of “experts” and party bosses (from Democrats to Republicans and NRA).

And that’s when things got interesting. It turned out that liberals (and people with high cognitive reflection) behaved like tedious accountants. They dove into the statistics, gathered a complete picture: they compared cities “with reform” and “without,” looked at growth and decline. That is, they used a scientific approach: need a control group, need a sample, need all 4 pieces of the puzzle.

What were conservatives doing in the meantime? They more often relied on “intuition” and what are called “categorical proofs.” Simply put, they plucked out one fact. For example: “In City X, they implemented reform, and crime increased! Aha, you’ve been caught!” The fact that in a neighboring city without reform it grew even stronger bothered them little. Context? Control group? That’s for boffers! But worse still – conservatives were much more eager to see what “authorities” thought about it (i.e., their favorite party or organization).

Why should this bother us, libertarians? Because it’s a diagnosis. We often laugh at left-liberals for their economic illiteracy (and rightly so), but right-wing conservatives suffer from a different disease – intellectual laziness, blind faith in authorities and a penchant for the boss’s shoes. Instead of calculating figures themselves, a conservative asks: “What does Trump/The Republican Party/The Pope think about it?” This, naturally, is not individualism, but collectivism, simply colored in another shade.

Firstly, their thinking is based on intuition instead of data. “I just have a gut feeling about this being bad.” A gut feeling is a terrible advisor when it comes to complex social policy. If you make decisions based on one bright example, ignoring overall statistics, then you’re an easy target for populists. Secondly, they suffer from a lack of willingness to think. The study showed a direct correlation: the lower your ability at analytical thinking (cognitive reflection), the higher the probability that you will simply confirm your prejudices with the first convenient fact.

The result: those who shout the loudest about “reality” and “facts” are often actually relying on feelings and opinions of authorities. Liberals may be wrong in their moral conclusions or propose monstrous methods for solving problems (take and divide), but, as this study shows, at the stage of collecting data they at least try to look at the whole table.

For us libertarians, this is a good lesson. It’s not enough just to hate the state. You need to work with information better than opponents do. If your method of analysis is “to look at one scary headline and listen to your favorite blogger,” then you are definitely not a fighter for freedom—you’re just an NPC (non-player character) with a different skin, and it doesn’t matter what color it is, it won’t change anything.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Doctor Semmelweis: Freedom of Thought Against Conservative Dogmas

Imagine a doctor who literally demands that his colleagues wash their hands—and becomes an outcast for it. It sounds anecdotal, but this is exactly what happened to the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis in the mid-19th century.

Vienna, 1840s: in one maternity ward, male doctors stubbornly follow the tradition of going straight from an autopsy to delivering babies without any hygiene. Meanwhile, there is a nearby midwives’ ward where this does not happen. The result shocked Semmelweis: the mortality rate of women in the first case reached 18%, while with the midwives, it was about 2%. The difference was like that between hell and heaven, and the young doctor wondered why.

Puzzled, Semmelweis began his investigation and went through every version, from overcrowded wards to even the position of the moon—until a tragic incident led him to the answer. One of the doctors cut himself with a scalpel during an autopsy and soon died from the same symptoms as puerperal fever. Eureka! Semmelweis realized that an invisible killer was being carried on the doctors’ hands from corpses directly to the mothers. The solution was dauntingly simple: wash hands and instruments with chlorinated water. By today’s standards, this is a banality, but back then, it was a revolution of clean hands.

Now imagine: Semmelweis stands at the head of the ward with a basin of chlorinated lime, demanding that the respected doctors scrub death off their fingers. One would think his colleagues should carry him on their (clean!) hands for saving hundreds of lives. After all, mortality plummeted to the level of the midwives’ ward. But instead of awards and honors, the innovator was met with ridicule and anger. The medical luminaries of the time took the idea as a personal insult: it implied that their own hands were killing patients. Pride and dogma prevailed over logic. Instead of admitting a mistake, the hospital administration preferred to fire the uncompromising doctor and stick to the familiar theory of miasmas—invisible “vapors” supposedly causing the fever. Simply put, Semmelweis’s colleagues rejected his discovery out of fear of the new, and the doctor’s free-thinking was considered dangerous audacity.

The story of Semmelweis is a clear example of how conservative thinking and fear of fresh ideas hinder progress. There is even a concept called the “Semmelweis reflex”—the automatic rejection of new knowledge simply because it contradicts established norms. In the case of the doctor from Vienna, this reflex cost many lives. His tragic fate (he ended his days in an asylum for the insane, never seeing recognition) shows the price society pays for stubborn dogmas.

Unfortunately, such fear of the new is not a relic of the past. Even today, dogmas and bureaucracy often stand like a concrete wall in the path of innovation. Examples are not hard to find: the denial that Helicobacter pylori bacteria cause stomach ulcers rather than stress and spicy food; the denial of the greater safety of NPPs compared to other power generation technologies; the denial of the benefits of psilocybin in treating PTSD and depression; the denial of a patient’s right to try experimental treatment.

Stories like the one that happened to Semmelweis show that progress is born from the freedom to think differently. New ideas often look frightening or heretical to those accustomed to old paradigms. Of course, skepticism is a healthy quality, but blinded dogmatism is dangerous. It can make rational people reject facts that are literally right in front of them (in Semmelweis’s case, literally on unwashed hands). Every new hypothesis deserves a fair test, not immediate execution just because it contradicts textbooks.

Remembering Doctor Semmelweis, one should ask: is there someone like that truth-teller among us today, whose ideas are ahead of their time but are drowning in the swamp of bureaucracy and prejudice? History teaches us to be bolder and to open the door to the new, even if it means facing rejection. After all, it is the freedom to seek truth and challenge dogmas that ultimately drives humanity forward.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Those who do not make it in time will be late

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Violence is a major problem leading to many negative externalities (including catastrophic ones), as well as to the maintenance of a violent hierarchy of dominance in society (which only further exacerbates the externalities of violence). That is why the fight against violence will soon become one of the leading directions in the development of society. And whoever solves the problem of violence will have a chance to significantly elevate the reputation and popularity of their cultural and economic agenda.

There are those who do not consider violence a major problem, and if this violence takes the form of state coercive force or serves the achievement of certain goals in general, then in their opinion, it becomes a beneficial and useful tool. Such a position is typically characteristic of conservatives, although it is not limited to them, and concerns in principle all supporters of violence as a tool for achieving goals, including those who support the existence of a monopolistic state power. Often, even classical liberals and supporters of a free market economy have nothing against the use of force.

But no matter how much they deny the negative aspects of violence, it would be foolish not to understand what would happen if someone else took on the task of eradicating it. Suppose that the supporters of such an idea, instead of cooperating with conservatives or marketeers who see no point in it, go to a hypothetical Bill Gates and manage to convince him they are right. By financing this initiative and ultimately eradicating violence, he would gain giant moral support from society, since for most people, violence is the greatest evil. Being a left-liberal and having acquired enormous authority, it would be enough for him to simply voice his opinion for people to listen. If he says that gay people cannot be refused the right to bake cakes, or that business must be socially responsible and donate a significant part of its income for the benefit of society, then it will happen, because the majority will be ready to follow the direction of such an authority.

Many certainly do not like such a scenario, but it is entirely possible. And if someone does not want this scenario to become a reality, they should support the idea of fighting violence by all possible means. The problem of violence will be solved in any case, either with the help of a hypothetical conservative, or without their participation. But in the second case, their socio-economic agenda will lose a significant part of its support in favor of the views of those who participate in solving the problem of violence. So I advise you to hurry in this matter and start promoting the ideas of non-violence now, regardless of who holds what views.

Authoritarian Conservatism and Cognitive Abilities

Voluntarist, Bitarch

A rather interesting study was conducted by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri from Brock University regarding the explanation of adherence to prejudices and support for authoritarian-conservative ideology based on a person’s cognitive abilities. This work analyzed two large representative datasets from the United Kingdom: the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS). Both datasets contain data on the cognitive abilities of the participants, as well as their attitudes toward racism and social conservatism. Cognitive abilities were assessed using standardized measures when NCDS participants were 11 years old and BCS participants were 10 years old; attitudes toward social conservatism and racism were assessed at ages 33 and 30, respectively. In total, 15,874 people participated in these studies.

As a result of forming statistical models, it was found that a lower level of general intelligence in childhood predicts a greater tendency toward racist prejudices in adulthood and, furthermore, adherence to social conservatism largely mediates this effect. This model is particularly convincing because in both the NCDS and BCS, the measurement of childhood intelligence preceded the assessment of adult prejudices by at least two decades. Moreover, all predictive effects were independent of socioeconomic status and education.

A secondary analysis was also conducted based on a dataset from a 2010 American study by Kayler, in which 254 students participated. It was confirmed that a low level of abstract thinking predicts anti-homosexual prejudices. This relationship is partially mediated by both support for right-wing authoritarianism and a low level of intergroup contact. The results of this analysis align with the results of the analysis of the NCDS and BCS datasets: the hypothesis about the influence of cognitive abilities on adherence to prejudices was confirmed by sample data from another country. This means that the tendency toward prejudice and authoritarian conservatism can be confidently explained by a person’s low cognitive abilities.

Another study was conducted by Satoshi Kanazawa from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He uses the “savannah principle,” according to which human behavior, remaining to some extent adapted to the ancestral environment of early Homo in the savannah, can lead to problems in a modern (industrial or post-industrial) environment. In a 2010 article, Kanazawa proposed the savannah-IQ interaction hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that smarter people are more likely to acquire and maintain evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less smart people. He used data from a national longitudinal study of adolescent health. A sample of 15,197 adolescents from 80 high schools and 52 middle schools in the USA was taken (their first survey was conducted in 1994-1995, the last in 2001-2002). Data from the General Social Surveys (GSS) were also taken as a sample of adult US citizens, with 1,500 people for each annual survey and 3,000 for each biennial survey. The results of the study confirmed that people with higher IQs are more likely to be liberals than conservatives.

Incidentally, some might object that this study is merely a fabrication by a liberal scientist; however, Satoshi Kanazawa was once even suspended from writing articles for claims regarding the difference in intelligence levels between different races, and the London School of Economics banned him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed publications for 12 months, so he can hardly be accused of being linked to the current social-liberal movements of the West.

Conservator, you reap what you sow!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Very foolish is the conservative who implements their dreams of ethnic purity and a traditional order of life through state violence in a mandatory manner toward the entire society. But a progressivist who uses this same method to promote a multicultural and LGBT agenda will be equally foolish. This is because, regardless of which ideas are promoted by this method, one must constantly use and maintain the instruments of violence in a state of “combat readiness.”

But power is never eternal. There is no method to leave power in the hands of one interest group forever, simply because different groups always exist within society. And when one of these groups gains enough strength and popularity to remove the previous group from power, the previous interests are removed along with them.

To make this clearer, let’s ask a question as an example, considering the current state of affairs in the Western world. European and American conservatives are extremely dissatisfied that their children are forced to study multiculturalism in schools and are taught tolerance toward LGBT. Sometimes it even goes as far as conservative parents having their children taken away by social services if they decide to shield them from such education. They are also dissatisfied that their funds are taken through taxation to provide aid and additional privileges to minorities and immigrants.

But who is to blame for this? The progressivists? Perhaps, as they are using the tools of force. But the conservatives themselves are also to blame. This is because they supported and nurtured the instrument of violence. And why be surprised that this instrument simply passed into the hands of other interest groups over time? What should conservatives be surprised about after they had previously killed, imprisoned, or forcibly treated those very same LGBT representatives, and then their children began to be mandatorily taught tolerance toward values of this kind? If conservatives had gotten rid of the instrument of violence, not used it to pursue their goals, then no one would have been able to to impose their orders upon them. Yes, the proponents of multiculturalism and LGBT representatives, whom they hate so strongly, would still exist. But they would not be able to force them how to live.

The moral of this story can be expressed by a single parable: you reap what you sow! If you sow violence, you yourself will become its victim; it is inevitable. Never count on the instrument of violence being yours and only yours. It is better not to facilitate the development of such an instrument—then no one will be able to use it against you.

Is Libertarianism a Utopia? Yes, just like the idea of the personal computer.

Bitark’s Column

Not a day goes by without me coming across phrases like “ancap is a utopia,” “a fantasy world,” or “pink ponies.” Those who write this (usually authoritarian-right conservatives and traditionalists) apparently assume that by doing so, they are protecting stability. In reality, they are only ensuring that inevitable changes occur according to the harshest possible scenario for themselves.

Let’s look at history. What was said about the idea of a federal republic and the separation of powers in the early 18th century? It’s a utopia, a federal republic is impossible, and how dare you insult the king! What about the unacceptability of slavery and serfdom in the early 19th century? It is the nature of things; you are utopians! And what about women’s suffrage in the mid-19th century? It’s a utopia; where would a woman get a political position? She will vote however her husband tells her. Was it different with the rights of Black people and LGBTQ individuals in the 1950s? Have you eaten too many mushrooms, seeing a fantasy world with rainbows?! You don’t see it—people of different colors—so why on earth would a Black person be served in a whites-only bar?

Every time a new social ideology emerged, conservatives refused to recognize it until the very end. Society would reach a breaking point where enduring the status quo was no longer possible, after which necessary reforms were implemented haphazardly, by force, across the entire country at once. This inevitably caused excesses, enormous casualties and suffering, economic damage, and led to the creation of privileges for the previously oppressed group (now, conservatives in first-world countries complain that they are persecuted for criticizing LGBTQ people, but this is merely a natural response to their own previous lawlessness; the ashes of Alan Turing echo in the hearts of queer activists). In the end, conservatives each time received what they hate most—radical change, chaos, and repression. Yet they could have had peaceful development…

How does this relate to libertarianism? Currently, many libertarians would be quite satisfied with the non-interference of protectors in local self-government. People would willingly occupy unclaimed lands, experiment there with social orders that suited them specifically, and would not immediately aim for the capitals. This is a very moderate agenda that should cause no direct inconvenience to anyone. Various practices of social organization in these territories could be evolutionarily refined and gradually reach large cities in a mature form, without causing upheavals.

But no, these vigilantes stay alert, suppressing any independent initiative—from non-traditional sexual practices and immoral music to informal businesses and self-organizing communities—and they will eventually wait until they are beaten in the streets, until the state collapses with a default on social obligations, GDP drops several times over, impoverishment occurs, and gangster “roofs” appear, which, as Laxi Catal predicts, will become the prototype of the ECU. There is a well-known joke that Nicholas II should be posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin for his heroic efforts in bringing society to a revolutionary situation. Now, conservatives, as they did a century ago, are making the same mistake that cost the country tens of millions of lives, starting with their own.