While I still maintain that conservatism, rather than being a true political philosophy,, is merely a set of id impulses (that is, it is focussed on the self) has it occurred to anyone else that postmodernism may have implications for politics? We learn from both Lyotard and Heisenberg that the truth is essentially unknowable; that cause and effect itself essentially depend on belief. Indeed, I suspect they too are symbolic constructs by which we make sense of the world. When all is said and done, we can never say absolutely whether one thing causes another.

Yet, being a sensible liberal, I believe, as social animals, humans exist in relation to one another. We are all part of a nexus which controls our actions. This is probably best illustrated when it comes to crime: liberalism states that, if someone commits a crime, it isn’t because they are ‘bad’ or evil, but the social sphere has driven them to a state that they need to commit crime.

Yet here we have a contradiction. If cause and effect are symbolic constructs, then we do indeed have free will. We might as well say criminals are evil because we cannot trace the spheres that lead him to the crime. I hope this makes sense. If the absolute truth is unknowable, then we exist in chaos; we are all free agents, and the symbolic sphere is irrelevant, just as conservatism says.

Oh bugger!