I think of conservatism (political meaning) to be Conservation (save the whales), but for humans and their institutions. I think it is part of an algorithm whi

I think of conservatism (political meaning) to be Conservation (save the whales), but for humans and their institutions. I think it is part of an algorithm which (when it works) prevents deadlock. Whenever the (left/right) stakeholders have a balance of power at a stable equilibrium, upsetting the system just leads to a waste of energy, what I called 'trashing'. It's similar to feature creep or faux innovation. The cost of shooting down net negative moves over and over could sap the strength of the whole system because there is an opportunity cost to ignoring the few possible net positive moves. So without conservatism, paradoxically, there is no progress. It does have failure modes though. Peter Thiel points out one of them, which is that in order to produce net positive moves the economy must be healthy (you cannot horsetrade in a zero sum game). The other failure is that you can get caught in a local minimum. I believe one or both of these modes are taking over at present.