Familial attachment is often portrayed as transcendental—a love for others which transcends our selfishness and ennobles our species. This view is mistaken, and I will explain why.

First, let us note: The problem with selfishness is that it gives ourselves a special status at the expense of others. Family life does not find fault with this on a fundamental level. It simply takes this special status and also applies it to the others whom we are attached to. Familial attachment doesn’t have a problem with some humans having a special status at the expense of others (it in fact encourages this special distinction); it just brings more people into this circle and enhances this distinction between people who matter and those who don’t.

This dynamic becomes especially clear for people who do not have a family. You begin to realise that most people, if they could, would recreate the era of medieval dynasties with mansions and large heritable estates, i.e. an aristocracy, but with themselves on the throne. That very social structure whose overthrow is practically synonymous with the modern world is what people want for their own family and children. The average person would happily treat the bulk of humanity like a pile of ballast to stand on top of, e.g. they would employ servants, nannies, chauffeurs, personal chefs, all in the service of providing their family with a pleasant material circumstance.

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The basic view of conservatism is, among other things, realism regarding human nature, a scepticism regarding human perfectibility and a denial of utopianism. It seeks to work within the limits of humanity and find a practical way forward within these constraints.

However, the vast majority of people cannot be considered “conservative” in this sense, because they are not the anthropological observers of humanity, but rather that very humanity being commented on. They are the limits being discussed. And moreover, these very limitations are not perceived by the people who instantiate them as limitations. They themselves do not see their petty egoism and complete disinterest in humanity’s collective fate as a problem in the first place or as a constraint upon political action.

Therefore, there is this subtle antagonism between a conservative thinker and an average member of the public. In the face of this contradiction, a conservative thinker is faced with two options: either he can withdraw into Schopenhauerian cynicism, or he can happily pretend to himself that the masses actually contain the wisdom which are in fact only the wisdom of his observations. In other words, he can choose to believe that conservative wisdom is itself somehow embodied in the masses rather than it being the distant observer who sees the masses for what they are. In this way, he can preserve a degree of worldly optimism and joyfully swim in the mud. He pretends to himself that the masses have a basic sense of humanity’s limitations and of the impossibility of utopia. In reality, however, the masses themselves see nothing wrong with humanity, happily join in its excesses and partake in its flaws, and are themselves are in search of utopia (albeit a utopia which takes the form of crude material abundance and physical health and not of enlightenment perfectibility and spiritual self-overcoming).

Moreover, by turning the masses into this kind of Spinozian deity, he then starts to idealise every other embarrassing and idiotic trait of our species, and forms a kind of alliance with stupidity. See, for example, the bell curve meme, where it is alleged extremely unintelligent people see the world correctly alongside the very intelligent people. (As a quick aside, this phenomenon also explains the intellectual revival of things like physiognomy among some right-wing intellectuals, as well as an exaggerated fondness for ideas like “killing an entire village for the woman I love”. They indulge this primitivism to the point of absurdity. Although this particular brand of excess doesn’t apply quite so much to populism, which is the main phenomenon I am addressing in this essay.)

This basic error in conservatism has become unignorable in recent times. Populist demagogues have been engaged in this odd dynamic where they are simultaneously following the crowd while also pretending to be a leader of it. The crowd comes up with absurd conspiracy theories, believes utopia is just around the corner and that this is only being stopped by cynical elites who hate humanity. The demagogue feeds this output back into the crowd and, by saying it better and with more reach, pretends to be the leader of this headless monster. I don’t need to give specific examples here; spend five minutes on Twitter/X and it is obvious what phenomenon I am describing.

The results are clear to see. Right-wing populism is, to a remarkable degree, regressing into medieval superstition and pure imbecility. A person who is both intelligent and authentic cannot partake in it.

Wyndham Lewis makes a similar point when he reflects on the success of Charlie Chaplin, namely that his stupidity and naivety suits itself well to mass consumption. There’s a kind of cheap pleasure in watching helpless things fumble their way through the world.

There is a certain warmth and love which accompanies this appreciation of cute things, and this is what misleads us into thinking that it is a purely noble sentiment behind our enjoyment of cuteness. But it reaches an excess when it sees cuteness as a thing to preserve in and of itself, rather than a condition which should be transcended. This is why mothers often long for their children to be small and cute again.

This is also why parents over-indulge children with fantasies and story-telling. They enjoy seeing the absurdity of a mini-human believing in Santa for example. They dress the child up in humiliating costumes and even sometimes debilitate the child with too many layers. It’s as if they want to hold the child in place and never see it grow up into a man.

This perversity is most obvious when we look at what humans have done to wolves through selective breeding. We have turned serious, autonomous beings into utterly dependent little teddy bears who would die without our care. One of the most popular categories of entertainment is watching dogs do silly things. The comments on such videos then consist of adults indulging in self-stupefying baby-talk. This type of video is so popular that it has actually resulted in wide-scale animal cruelty, because people engineer situations for the camera where a helpless animal is in need of rescuing.

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• Bodily existence/flesh is a problem

• Life is a struggle

• Voluntary suffering and s…

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Given that idle luxury is not possible for everyone (hard work has to be done by someone), it is dishonest to present this as the goal for all of human society. There has to be a basic justification for why the labouring classes are holding up the elite. The bottom portion of society has to be able to look at what they’re holding upon their backs and say, “My labour is justified. The thing I am holding on my back is worth the effort.”

Our society lacks such a justification. Therefore, it has to conceal from the masses the true extent of indulgence and luxury among the elite. The rich need no instruction when it comes to this, as they themselves have an instinct for it. The wealthy, out of pure instinct, conceal their sexual escapades and idle sources of income from the public. In fact, the secrecy, the contrast, the exclusiveness of wealth is part of the perverse pleasure of being rich (which is why, phenomenologically, being rich has a somewhat morbid air surrounding it). All things considered, it is a surprisingly well-concealed secret, with only occasional high-profile scandals leaking out into the press. This secret is maintained so that society at large is unaware of the essentially hedonistic incentive structure which motivates it. Some semblance of idealism has to be maintained for social order. Without it, cynicism among the lower classes—which is always high even at the best of times—would reach a breaking point, and we would devolve into civil strife.

When push comes to shove and this system actually has to apologise for itself, the following concession will be made: “OK there is something unfair about all this, but wild, untamed selfishness is also the impetus behind economic and technological innovation in general. Maybe some people are having a better time than others, but in the end we’re all becoming more comfortable and wealthy.”

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Given this endless capacity, it is not immediately clear why reincarnation should be necessary. Reincarnation implies an economy of souls, which seems inconsistent with the infinite profligacy just described. Consciousness itself costs nothing, in the sense that there is not a finite supply of it in the universe; it is only the objects into which it is reduced that undergo finitude and partake in an economy of sorts.

The human being’s development from the moment of embryonic conception is a newly differentiated locus, a new quantitative addition: an n+1 to the world. It is a new globe of consciousness, and it is being filled with increasing content, experiencing more and more as it endures through these changes as one stationary domain of awareness.

As far as we can tell, the moment of conception is a material accident. And according to my metaphysic, it is quite possible that this newly objectified consciousness spawned entirely ex nihilo—although strictly speaking, this is not truly out of nothing, but out of that non-entitised, inexhaustible origin just mentioned: the infinite source of being which is capable of endless multiplication.

Under this view, it seems to be just sheer blind luck as to whether you end up as a human, or an animal or inanimate matter, for there is always just a blank slate being filled with content over time, and this would make it wholly contingent as to whether it becomes a human or a mouse.

Contrast this with the idea of reincarnation, where the question of who/what you become is a pre-destined manifestation. Reincarnation would apparently entail a kind of proto-human essence floating without a body after its bodily death, which would then immediately transplant into the next viable seed of rebirth—or in any case, just a causal chain from one lifetime to the next.

There is at least something to be said for reincarnation, because it abides by a principle I have mentioned before: the scale-invariance of analogies. The analogy in this case is the cyclical nature of our own life, where we go from thing to thing, phase to phase, person to person, and on each occasion feeling like this is a new and exceptional venture we are embarked on. We do each new thing to death—that is, to the point of boredom or exhaustion—and, having thus arrived at this conclusion, we then move on to the next, seemingly new and different thing, believing all the while that each next thing really is new, even though it turns out to be part of the same cycle.

While we are in the grip of (apparent) novelty, we do not see this cycle at work; it takes a resumption of the original starting point—the completion of a full wavelength—to see that this was indeed a repetition. This same fixation on our current and seemingly new life might also be the reason we cannot see we are in the midst of a cycle of reincarnation. It might also take the resumption of the original state to see that it was indeed just a cycle.

The consummation of even a trivial desire like eating food is also a kind of exhausted finality, followed by a brief period of forgetful satiation, and then a gradual return to the desire—indeed a sort of slow, accumulating remembering of the desired object, not happy for that desired mental state to fade too far out of consciousness. The partial forgetting of the thing we desire is the very reason why our subsequent return to it feels novel, exceptional and therefore a renewed exhilaration. When, instead of forgetful satiety, we keep it in our grasp beyond its natural expiry, then our desire for it becomes numb. Thus, its very absence from consciousness is what makes us long for it again. The absence is what makes the heart grow fonder.

To overcome this cyclical quality is the project of wisdom more generally, and it aligns closely with the main goal of Buddhism. Overcoming the repetition of our mistakes, our addictions, the finitude of our pleasures, our mindlessly repeating habits, and so on, is a core feature of our life. After being scolded by our own errors, we become more wary of the world, more distant from it, less trusting of it, more mindful of what it has in store for us, i.e. how best to not repeat the previous error which caused us pain and problems. Our attachment to our own body (which itself can be described as a kind of ’substance addiction’) might indeed be just another, albeit transcendent, version of this same process: of overcoming the mistake of materiality, desire, finitude, dependency on the world.

Perhaps when we die, there is likewise this same type of exhausted completion: a sense of having had enough, only to be followed by a forgetful complacency and a gradually returning curiosity—a selective memory of the highs of life and, with it, a weakening of that previously accurate conviction that these brief highs were not worth all the attendant pain. This is how the addict keeps returning to the object of his addiction, and it may also be the manner in which we reincarnate. I would add that if one examines one’s own fear of death, one really does find this attachment to our life has the character of addiction—“No I’m not ready to leave! One more chance!”

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Another thing worth noting is that, from the first-person in-itself perspective, any given location in the universe is the centre of the universe (in a literal geometric sense), and its own existence is the largest conceivable domain. In what way, for example, could my consciousness be spatially larger than someone else’s? It’s a maximally large circle of experience no matter who or what it is. The domain of experience itself is without spatial dimension.

From the first-person perspective, we are always the centre of the universe (hence any measurement of cosmic background radiation in the universe shows the observer at the centre of the observable universe). Every other location experiences it this way too. There is a radical principle of equivalence in terms of locatedness, similar in spirit to Galilean invariance and Einstein’s equivalence principle.

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