Conservatism is the least brave thing you can be, because at its core it is an ideology built around clinging to the status quo and fearing change. It is not about courage or conviction, but about comfort. To be conservative is to say, "I do not want the world to change, even if the world needs to." It is to mistake familiarity for stability and to confuse tradition with truth. There is nothing bold about wanting things to stay the same in a world that demands growth, compassion, and progress to survive. The real bravery lies in questioning what we have been told, in breaking cycles of harm, and in daring to imagine that something better is possible.
It is also the laziest ideology, because it asks nothing of the believer beyond obedience. It takes no effort to say "things were better before" or "we should go back." It takes no creativity, no empathy, and no intellectual honesty to defend systems that already hold power over others. Conservatism thrives on repetition, on inherited opinions, on slogans that were written decades before the speaker was even born. To be conservative is to live someone else's idea of how the world should work, rather than to think for yourself about how it could.
When you peel back all the rhetoric about tradition, faith, or patriotism, conservatism is little more than a refusal to grow up. It is a child's grip on the familiar toy, insisting that no one else touch it and that no new games be played. Progressivism, on the other hand, is the adult understanding that life changes whether you like it or not, and that maturity means facing that reality with grace, compassion, and imagination. The future will come either way. The only real question is whether you will help build it or spend your life pretending the past was perfect.
As John Stuart Mill once put it, "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." Mill's point was not just an insult but a diagnosis. It is far easier to be ruled by fear and habit than by reason and curiosity. To challenge the way things are demands effort. To simply defend them demands only loyalty. Progress is the work of active minds, while reaction is the instinct of idle ones.
Friedrich Nietzsche warned against this moral stagnation, writing that "he who cannot command himself will obey." Conservatism thrives on this obedience, a surrender to authority dressed up as moral virtue. It teaches people to obey tradition, obey hierarchy, obey the myth of "how it has always been." Nietzsche's point was that true strength comes from creating new values, not clinging to old ones. The conservative mind fears chaos, but in doing so, it also fears creation itself.
Even Socrates, long before the term "conservative" existed, understood the danger of unexamined tradition. "The unexamined life is not worth living," he said, and yet the conservative project depends entirely on leaving life unexamined. It resists the uncomfortable questions that might expose injustice or demand self-reflection. Philosophy, art, and science all advance because someone dared to ask, "Why do we do it this way?" Conservatism, by contrast, ends that sentence early: "We do it this way."
And Jean-Paul Sartre said it best: "Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you." To be conservative is to deny that freedom, to choose the comfort of repetition over the burden of responsibility. To be progressive is to take what has been done, face it honestly, and decide to do better. One path builds a future. The other embalms the past and calls it tradition.
