According to the latest research by Dr. Axle Phrenologue at the Institute of Cosmic Irregularities, in his paper, "Original Plagiarism", copied from Dr. E.W. Wylfan (see this), history exists because people are so predictable. Since humans prefer to do the same things in the same way in an endlessly repeating cycle, it's inevitable that things tend to happen with tedious regularity. Only the very few who observe these cycles are aware they even exist. Since most people are completely oblivious to history, they continue believing that their generation is unique, that their thoughts and beliefs are original. That too is predictable.

Human history is predictable because individual human beings are. We humans are profoundly conservative by nature; we don't like to take chances. If something has worked before, we will do it again. We will minimize risk until we have nothing left to lose. Only then will we try something new. This fundamental conservatism explains why human development has taken so many generations to get to the level of technological mastery we now take for granted.

The raw materials necessary for this age existed long before humankind. The oil, metals, and building materials have always been available but were only barely exploited until recently. Hundreds of generations were resigned to merely surviving and very rarely made any substantial improvements to their world. This present technological age could have existed thousands of years sooner but no one seemed interested. All those thousands of years people accepted what they inherited from their ancestors with little improvement and hardly any innovation. Mankind has been intellectually stagnant for most of its existence.

Yet now, in this age, we tell ourselves how advanced we are, how much more developed we are and pretend that we're somehow smarter than all those people who went before. The world we experience now is not the product of individual intelligence but rather a collective intelligence. A single idea from a single individual propagates to the entire species so the chances of improvements to that idea greatly increase. Where once ideas required the imprimatur of an established authority for its validity, ideas now depend on consensus. If enough people accept an idea, it becomes True. We are no more intelligent than any earlier generation, we've just shifted the emphasis.

We are also no less conservative. We are just as dependant on a stable and predictable world as any other generation, we still require everything to be comprehensible, to make sense. The changes we experience now are technological so no great intellectual adjustment is really required; we just take the world we're given and adapt, like we've always done. The numerous sciences pose interesting conceptual problems for us to grapple with but those questions aren't fundamental to our immediate survival. We can manage very comfortably in complete ignorance of physics or chemistry, biology or geology. Most of us do.

When we consider that all of human history is really an endless repetition of an ultra-conservative avoidance of novelty, it makes any claim of liberalism suspect. Most of the world's population even now, in this enlightened age, remains conservative. Most people still recoil from change even when the likely benefits are obvious. We don't gamble with our substance but with our excess. We invest (risk) our capital with money left over after we've paid our bills and eaten and are warm and safe. That's what capital is after all. It's only when we have no security and we feel like everything is already lost that we'll take a chance. Like the great migrations of the past, people have to be driven from their established routine by a hostile environment; they will never move or change or progress without some outside compulsion. Even when conditions are depressingly oppressive as in Medieval Europe, people don't seek change, they seek peace. Peace is usually synonymous with stability and stability and is the essence of conservatism.

Liberalism can only exist where there is already stability and prosperity. It's a luxury, an indicator of peace, but it's also an aberration. There have been very few opportunities for liberalism to flourish. Liberalism requires security and prosperity making it a kind of addendum to our innate conservatism. In fact, liberalism proves the success of the underlying conservatism of the general society on which it is based. Liberalism can only thrive in a society that has well established rules that are effectively enforced, the rules that conservatism insists on. Conservatism is the default, normal state of society, liberalism is an adornment to that society, something nice to have but not necessary. History seems to prefer conservatism, allowing only an occasional moment of liberal expression now and then.

This becomes obvious in times of chaos and uncertainty, when famine and disease threaten or the barbarians are at the gate, when the indifferent forces of nature erase our complacency. No one has time to ponder the rightness of their actions, justice is forgotten, peace and prosperity evaporate. Liberalism becomes not only impossible but absurd. These are the conditions that most people have lived with most of the time throughout most of history. It's this kind of uncertainty that makes us conservative and cautious. We may claim liberalism intellectually, but our personal lives are always fundamentally conservative.