&gt; It&#x27;s &quot;conservative&quot; to take as an assumption a prediction from your &quot;theory&quot;?<p>It&#x27;s not a &quot;theory&quot; any more than the the big bang is a &quot;theory&quot;. It is the result of decades (nay, centuries) of research, and I don&#x27;t see why you&#x27;d scoff at it so smugly (and ignorantly). Second, of course it is conservative. As I explained to someone else here, I am not expecting individuals to change their behavior without coordination. Nash equilibria can&#x27;t be escaped that way anyway. The responsibility is on society. A society that acts to ensure things stay as they are is carrying out a conservative agenda.<p>I don&#x27;t think I understand your question, though. Working to keep things as they are is a conservative ideology. Periods of relative stability are a historical fact. Those periods have been no doubt assisted by conservative ideology (although ideology is far from being the <i>only</i> social force), which is nothing new either. Where do you see the contradiction? People, with their opinions and needs and fears and desires and hysteria and ideology and actions and follies are the ones making the system. They are the observers, object and subjects of the system&#x27;s behavior all at the same time. In a dynamical system with feedback you could be predicting a result, making it, and directing it based on your agenda at the same time. There&#x27;s perfect coherence here. Look at election polls; they are somewhat similar: they both predict the result and make it, and there&#x27;s a lot of political agenda involved (or see my examples of some dynamical systems here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10874683" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10874683</a>).<p><i>How</i> people behave and how they <i>should</i> behave are two perhaps equally interesting but completely different questions. If it is your opinion that people <i>should</i> behave in a way that simply mirrors <i>how</i> other people behave, then yes, your answer to the second question is &quot;according to conservative ideology&quot;. If you think that my opinion is that on occasion people <i>should</i> behave in a way that isn&#x27;t in accordance with their immediate, narrow material self-interest, then you&#x27;d be correct. If, however, you think that I think that people often behave this way, then you&#x27;d be wrong.<p>Finally, it&#x27;s not &quot;conservative&quot; but conservative, just as you are not a &quot;conservative&quot; but a conservative.