The World Needs Me

Yes, the world needs curmudgeons:

Rather, the curmudgeon is a pessimist, whose grumpy outlook is born of long experience, and of the realisation (sic) that what good there is in the world has been hard-won and is perpetually vulnerable to the hare-brained schemes of dreamers, utopians, and idiots of every stripe...

The curmudgeon (hence his or her unpopularity) really, honestly, doesn’t give two shits whether or not people like him: he’s too old for all that malarky and his knees hurt. He is not in the market for “virtue-signalling” or “energising his base”. And he doesn’t imagine he can change the world: he simply hopes to apply some brakes to the handcart in which it is going to hell...

Enthusiasts — “dawnists”, as the novelist and biographer Hugh Kingsmill called them — are the ones you want to watch out for. They’re the ones who do the damage, and you can find them on Left and Right alike, with their Five-Year Plans, their Cultural Revolutions, their Thousand-Year Reichs, their Ages of Aquarius. The curmudgeon, rather, takes the line in Melville’s short story “Bartleby, The Scrivener”: “I would prefer not to.”  (aside--which of those 4 are on the right?  I count none.)

This is not to say that we need only curmudgeons in our ranks.  A society composed entirely of curmudgeons would not advance or evolve at all. 

I'm not from Missouri but I epitomize their state motto:  Show me.  That sounds like the very basis of conservatism!