It works just fine for the very wealthy who would never be caught dead using the same underfunded services that the commoners rely on.
But they don’t understand that if they weren’t such selfish assholes, they’d have it better as well, because society evolves.
That’s why there were centuries of kings who lived as lavishly as they could, while society went nowhere and people shat in the streets. They still lived in shitty castles without running water.
They just lack imagination so much and are so afraid of losing status. Dumb fucks.
The main ingredients of conservatism are greed, hatred and ignorance. Coincidentally these are also the things the Buddha identified as the sources of all human suffering.
“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” ― Socrates
Greed and hatred weren’t that much of a problem for Socrates apparently, but they both agree that ignorance is fucking bad. And the Greeks had two words for it (at least), separating a lack of ability from a refusal to understand.
https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/
“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”