For the third installment of this series on paleoliberal (i.e. true conservative) philosophy, I will combine two of Kirk’s 10 principles and, as they are intimately linked, address them concurrently. They speak of the same societal evils that, in contemporary America, are being given full voice from those who would reject three millennia of human history. Here speaks Kirk:

"Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

"Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: "the ceremony of innocence is drowned." The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell."

The connection between the two principles are obvious to most. Who cannot see the connection between the innate realities of inequity (in nature and in man) and the futility of the efforts of man to impose perfection - in this sense, equality? In the first, Kirk asserts the natural necessity for variety. Diversity - in the sense of people, their "status", their wealth, their individuality - is the lifeblood of a healthy society. Darwin, first, and Herbert Spencer, later, had it right: life is a struggle. While nature follows a more pirmitive, purely unforgiving "survival of the fittest", human benevolence and theological mandates entice our species to carry the weak and the infirm upon our backs which is altogether fitting and proper. I do not deny anyone’s right to follow their conscience in such matters of charity and brotherly love. But, for those born with all their faculties and a strong back, the hard truth remains: Without striving there is nothing above death-in-life. In the absence of striving (the liberal would call this "want"), the human spirit withers and atrophies.

For what is striving but a passion to achieve, obtain, claim or discover that which is perceived as lacking in one’s life? It is what drives man forward, coerces and prods him to greatness - or, at the very least, things he never thought himself capable of achieving outside his dreams. Take that away from man - the individual as well as the collective society - and boredom, loss of self-esteem and, eventually, revolt will follow.

Man was born to want, covet, explore, test, experiment and seek that which is most desirable to each individual. To deny this is folly and to fall back to the "sweetness and light" of Matthew Arnold and the thoroughly misguided romantic philosophers. To believe that the inner fire of man that burns with white-hot flame in all but the sloven and the "entitled" can be extinguished and replaced with unbounded brotherly love is a tale told by an idiot, full of vacuous hyperbole, signifying nothing. Without the torch of individuality and the spark of competition, man is no more than an automaton, a drone, an imagination-less clock-puncher and the society he inhabits becomes stagnant and, then, extinct. Our society stands before that precipice.

Those who would equilibrate man, as a carpenter at his level, does the spirit of man no service. For, through his machinations, he seeks only to assuage his own misplaced sense of guilt in the name of lifting up all humankind to whatever artificial economic and social strata he has concocted. Not so ironically, it is typically those who have amassed financial excesses in their own lives that cry so arduously for uplift. This is singularly true of those who have achieved their fortune through caprice or blind luck - e.g. the Hollywood gliterrati whose only claims to talent is a fetching face or comely shape, the quick-rich digital mavens of the computer industry and the celebrities of the music (using the term in its loosest sense) industry. These lucky few (steeped in incurable romanticism and irreparably disconnected from the realities of the world) use their fame to speak out against the economic stratification of society. It is telling that few (if any) offer up their own fortunes to directly ameliorate the plight of the "have nots" and prefer to have the citizen on the street (those, in fact, who work for their daily bread) do the heavy financial lifting. These hypocrites know little to nothing of life in the streets and industries of America but take it as their life-purpose (since they have little else to fill that enormous black hole, save their vanity) to mend the plight of all "who have so little". The multimillionaires see nothing disjointed about an unmarried, unemployed woman having 14 children through the implanting of fertilized ovum into her prodigious uterus; the average working American finds very much wrong with the concept.

As Kirk notes, man is not perfectible. Poverty is not a 21^st Century problem. The destitute and the hungry have been with mankind throughout its history. The paleoliberal is well aware that we are all cast out into a sea of woes and are subject to all its currents, ebbs and tides. And, when all is said and done, we pilot our own little ships into safe harbors or onto craggy rocks, subsistence or impartial, brutal want. This is self-evident. There are public remedies that can help but there is no substitute for personal industry and human dignity. But why bother getting a job or retraining for another industry when "help" is only a government form or two away? Marx called "religion the opiate of the masses"; in our times, easily-accessible government handouts have become our own benumbing drug.

But there is a sinister trade-off. Those who look to government to solve personal shortfalls are merely offering up their most precious gift - liberty - to the false god, Leviathan. And that, gentle readers, is a Faustian bargain, at best. For, as every right thinking American should be aware, when personal liberty is ceded to government, even for thirty pieces of silver, we all suffer. Like an insatiable vacuum, our sacrifice feeds the unremitting bloating of the federal bureaucracy which. as we all are aware, can do nothing cost-effectively. And the belief in that ultimate oxymoron, "government assistance", drags us ever closer to despotism. When the squalid City on the Potomac already is the single-source of income for over a quarter of the population (if one counts SSI, disability, welfare, the hoards of government paper-pushers, the military-industrial complex, et cetera), we are already a socialist polity. If plans proceed apace, and health care, banking and the automotive industries seek the warm, protective blanket of government, we will have sealed our fate.

To reemphasize from Kirk: "To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: "the ceremony of innocence is drowned." [Emphasis mine]

To conclude with these sage words would be sufficient. But, I add this: The siren call of expanding government to provide a utopia is powerful, well-orchestrated and alluring. Resistance to its song is the harder, less-traveled path. But to chose any other road is to stand before the Abyss and the beast astride it. And that is a peril that awaits all who are ready to scuttle what has worked for centuries for the new and the innovative.

And, in the words of Kirk, is our "terrestrial hell" in embryo.