Wilhoit's Law and Human Nature

I keep coming back to Wilhoit’s Law quite often, but there’s something that has always bothered me about it.

Wilhoit states that conservatism is the “only political system that exists”, and that anticonservatism is the only real alternative. And while anticonservatism has never existed, we clearly try to implement it: that’s what all the religions and political ideas like communism are trying to get to.

While I do agree with Wilhoit’s spectrum (I find it more informative than the usual left-right spectrum we see in political discourse), I can’t help but ask why: why is Conservatism the default? And why do we keep trying (and failing) to reach Anticonservatism?

There needs to be something about human nature that makes us choose Conservatism by default; yet at the same time, something about human nature must also drive us to Anti-Conservatism.

I believe the answer may be simple: we are social creatures, it is part of our evolution, which drives us to Anti-Conservatism; we tend not to like it when other people suffer. But at the same time we are physical creatures at the end of the day. We can only see what we see, hear what we hear, think what we think. This makes it hard for us to give empathy to people who have a different Value System (which will be the case for any group far away enough from you) than ours; we can’t think like them, we don’t value the same things.

That latter part is where Conservatism comes from: I want my family, my friends, my town to benefit from everything, and for the people I don’t understand, some system that can keep them in check, using violence if necessary. Aka, the law.

If I can see myself breaking a minor law for a good reason, a reason I, of course, believe to be good, then I can understand someone else doing the same. But if I have zero understanding of why the person would do it, even though clearly that person believed the reason to be justified (as everyone always thinks they’re justified), then I’d be less understanding and would want them punished. From there, which group gets punished and which one gets understanding is based on who has more political power.