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Verbify your identity: move from labels (nouns) to lived commitments (verbs). Ask: what do you actually do, protect, build, allow, restrict, risk, trade, and refuse?

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Why this exists

Left/right labels often function as lagging indicators; they compress multiple axes (institutional trust, economics, culture, identity, nation/global, etc.) into one word. This page is a prompt bank to replace the label with verbs.

Related spine: Identities at Work

Conservative → What do you conserve?

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Use these as interview questions for self or others. Prefer examples and tradeoffs over abstractions.

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Prompts (choose a few)

• What do you want to conserve (a practice, an institution, a norm, a story, a boundary, a way of life)?
• What makes that thing conservable rather than disposable? What evidence would change your mind?
• What do you think is fragile (and therefore needs protection)? What do you think is resilient enough to tolerate change?
• What do you believe is legitimate authority (family, faith, constitution, market, science, tradition, local community, a leader, something else)?
• Which institutions do you treat as already corrupted? What would “restoration” look like in concrete steps?
• What kinds of change do you see as repair vs revolution?
• What are you willing to trade off to conserve what matters (efficiency, equality, freedom, comfort, purity, growth, stability)?
• What do you refuse to conserve even if it’s “traditional” (and why)?

Pushback / refinement prompts

• Are you conserving today’s institutions — or a deeper order you think institutions have betrayed?
• If you say “tear it down,” what exactly do you intend to rebuild (and who decides)?