Belvedere posted on ideology and experience as impulses and motivators of collectivist and conservative frames of reference.  I commented:

I think Bob’s point(s) is subtle and potent. He is not saying conservatives have no ideas or ideals. He is saying conservatives revere the eternal verities because their validity and utility are guaranteed by long experience as the happiest doctrines (morality, knowledge confirmed and agreed by deep experience) for living. Conservatives do not hatch ideational structures from dreams or impulses, as if in clean rooms, bereft of direct experience in the world, and then march forth into the world to concretize those structures by imposition and regardless of what the world thinks of them or how the world reacts to them.

Conservatives react to the world and act therein, in constant dialectic/dialogue, wherein exists moral living. Moreover, conservatives feel the pull of the transcendent in all events. Criminals only act in the world, having already decided as the prius of activity that they know what the world should look like and can make it so and so will. Criminals are ideologues with ideologies. They pre-design a template for life, while away from life, then labor to stuff life into their template. They are never happy because life is never compliant to their template. That is ideology by ideologues. Moreover, and conveniently, they fancy themselves a morality-and ideology-free zone.

Bob is right. There is no conservative ideology. Conservatives have the sources of authority he mentions. Because these accord with the structure of being, they are sufficient to overcome the pretensions of ideologues when they are summoned and deployed against those ideologues’ ravings. An appeal to life, to existence, and its embedded eternal verities is sufficient to the task and term ahead. And not in words only.

Conservatives refine truth out of life by throwing ideas and experience into the crucible of activity in history and observing developments. What remains in the crucible is true, moral, dependable wealth. Criminals enter life with a prefab, a-historical ideational structure of their own devising and throw that at life to control it. Truth does not interest them. Caliphists do likewise, and that, as many have noted, explains the Criminal-Caliphist alliance, which is impermanent because both are totalist.

I concur with Bob’s point(s) here and consider them salient. Calm is needed, to enhance vision and intensify action.

Update 1: Nick Skildum: A Veteran in College: The Problem With Identity Theories

Update 2: Glenn Beaton: Will the Dem left dox the pilot of that Reaper drone?

My comment:

It is ideology.  More than hatred, fear, anger, etc., it is ideology.  The biblical term for that weakness is idolatry, taking something that is not ultimate as ultimate.  A person who is a genuine vehicle of power can be recognized by the characteristics of truth, kindness, love, patience, forbearance, and gratefulness.  Wherever these reside, ideology, like ego, cannot go; it has no place.  Elijah on Carmel facing the Priests of Baal is an image increasingly impressing itself on my mind as a fruitful template for grasping what is going on in our sometimes seemingly chaotic country.

Update 3: Jonathan Chadwick: Ancient Israelites burned cannabis to ‘stimulate ecstasy’ as part of ‘cultic ceremonies’, remnants at 2,700-year-old Jewish shrine reveal

AMDG