For this change is not a change from one positive position to another, but a change from order and truth to disorder and negation.
The liberal-conservative division, we might observe in passing, is not of itself directly involved in a private interest conflict nor even in struggle between ruling groups.
Rather it is rooted in a difference of response to the threat of social disintegration.
The division is not between those who wish to preserve what they have and those who want change.
Rather it is a division established by two absolutely different ways of thought with regard to man's life in society.
These ways are absolutely irreconcilable because they offer two different recipes for man's redemption from chaos.

The civilizational crisis, the third type of change raises the question "what are we to do"?
On the most primitive level.
For the answer cannot be derived from any socially cohesive element in the disrupting community.
There is no socially existential answer to the question.
For the truth formerly experienced by the community no longer has existential status in the community, nor does any answer elaborated by philosophers or theoriticians.
In this phase of change, no idea has social acceptance and so none has ontological status in the community.
An interregnum ensues in which not men but ideas compete for existence.

If we examine the three types of change from the point of view of their internal structure we find an additional profound difference between the third and the first two, one that accounts for the notable difference between the responses they evoke.
The first two types of change occur within the inward and immanent structure of the society.
The first involves a simple shift of interests in the society.
The second involves something deeper, but its characteristic form focuses on a shift in policy for the community, not in the truth on which the community rests.
Thus in both types attention is focused on the community itself, and its phenomenological life.
The third type, however, wrenches attention from the life of action and interests in the community and focuses it on the ground of being on which the community depends for its existence.
Voegelin has analyzed this experience in the case of the stable, healthy community.
There the community, faced with the need to formulate policy on the level of absolute justice, can find the answer to its problem in the absolute truth which it holds as partially experienced.
This, however, cannot be done by a community whose very experience of truth is confused and incoherent: it has no absolute standard, and consequently cannot distinguish the absolute from the contingent.
It has lost its ground of being and floats in a mist of appearances.
Relativism and equality are its characteristic diseases.
Precisely at the moment when it has lost its vision the mind of the community turns out from itself in a search for the ontological standard whereby it can measure itself.
For paradigmatic history "breaks" rather than unfolds precisely when the movement is from order to disorder, and not from one order to a new order.
The liberal-conservative split, to define it further, derives from a basic difference concerning the existential status of standard sought and about the spiritual experience that leads to its identification.

When disruptive change has penetrated to the third level of social order, the process of disruption rapidly reaches a point of no return.
Indeed, it is probable that this point is reached the moment the third level of change begins.
At that point we reach the "closed" historical situation: the situation in which man is no longer free to return to a status quo ante.
At that point men become aware of the mystery of history called variously "fate", or "destiny", or "providence", and feel themselves caught helplessly in the writhing of a disrupted society.
The reasons for this experience are rooted in the metaphysical characteristics of such a change.

Of all forms of being, society, or community, has the greatest element of determinability.
Its ontological status is itself most tenuous because apart from individual men, who are its "matter", tradition, the "form" of society exists only as a shared perception of truth.
The ontological status of society thus is constituted by the psychological status of society's members.
The content of that psychological status determines, ultimately, the content of civilization.
Those social, civilizational factors not rooted in the human spirit of the group, ultimately cease to exist.
Civilization itself -- tradition -- falls out of existence when the human spirit itself becomes confused.
Civilization is what man has made of himself.
Its massive contours are rooted in the simple need of man, since he is always incomplete, to complete himself.

It is not enough for man to be an ontological esse.
He needs existential completion, he needs, that is, to move in the direction of completion.
And the direction of that movement is determined by his perception of the truth about himself.
He must, consequently, exist as a self-perceived substantive, developing agent, or he does not exist as man.
Thus, it is no mystical intuition, but an analyzable conception to say that man and his tradition can "fall out of existence".
This happens at the moment man loses the perception of moral substance in himself, of a nature that, in Maritain's words, is perceived as a "locus of intelligible necessities".
An existentialist is a man who perceives himself only as "esse", as existence without substance.

Thus human perception and human volition is the immanent cause of all social change and this most truly when the change reaches the civilizational level.
Thus with regard to the loss of tradition, in the change from order to disorder the metaphysics of change works itself out as a disruption of the individual soul, a change in which man continues as an objective ontological existent, but no longer as a man.

Further, change is a form of motion, it occurs as the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency and has not yet reached the terminus of the change.
With regard to the change we are examining, the question is, at what point does the change become irreversible?
A number of considerations suggest that this occurs early in the process.
Change involves the displacement of form.
This means that the inception of change itself can begin only when the factors conducive to change have already become more powerful than those anchoring the existent form in being.
If the existent form is to be retained new factors that reinforce it must be introduced into the situation.
In the case of social decay, form is displaced simply by the process of dissolution with no form at the terminus of the process.
Now in the mere fact of the beginning of such displacement we have prima-facie evidence of the ontological weakness of the fading form.
And when we consider the tenuous hold tradition has on existence, any weakening of that hold constitutes a crisis of existence.
The retention of a tradition confronted with such a crisis necessitates the introduction of new spiritual forces into the situation.
However, the crisis occurs precisely as a weakening of spiritual forces.
It would seem, therefore, that in a civilizational crisis man cannot save himself.
The emergence of the crisis itself would seem to constitute a warranty for the victory of disorder.
And it would seem that history is a witness to this truth.

As a further characterization of the liberal conservative split we may observe that it involves differences in the formula for escaping inevitabilities in history.
These differences, in turn, derive from prior differences concerning the friendly or hostile character of change.

Unanalyzed responses
anxiety and deep insecurity are the characteristic responses evoked by the crisis in tradition.
To experience them, it is not necessary for a people to be actively aware of what is happening to it.
The process of erosion need only undermine the tradition and a series of consequences begin unfolding within the individual, while in institutions a quiet but deep transformation of processes occurs.
Within the individual the reaction has been called various names, all, however, pointing to the same basic experience.
Weil identifies it as being "rootless", Guardini as being "placeless", Riesman as being "lonely".
Others call it "alienation", and mean by that no simple economic experience (as Marx does) but a deep spiritual sense of dislocation.
Within institutions there is a marked decline of the process of persuasion and the substitution of a force-fear process which masquerades as the earlier one of persuasion.
We note the use of rhetoric as a weapon, the manipulation of the masses by propaganda, the "mobilization" of effort and resources.

Within this context of spontaneous and unanalyzed responses to the experience of civilizational crisis, two basic organizations of response are observable: reaction and ideological progressivism.
These responses are explicable in terms of characteristics inherent in the crisis.
Both are predictably destined to fail.

The response of reaction is dominated by a concern for what is vanishing.
Its essence lies in its attempt to recover previous order through the repression of disruptive forces.
To this end political authority is called upon to exercise its negative and coercive powers.
The implicit assumption of this response is that history is reversible.
Seemingly, order is perceived as a kind of subsistent entity now covered by adventitious accretions.
The problem is to remove the accretions and thereby uncover the order that was always there.
Such a response, of course, misses the point that in crisis order is going out of existence.
Moreover its posture of stubborn but simple resistance is doomed to failure because of the metaphysical weakness of the existent form of order, once the activation of change has reached visible proportions.
The most reaction can achieve is stasis, and a stasis that can be maintained only by the expenditure of an effort which ultimately exhausts itself.

Despite the hopelessness of the response, it is explicable in terms of the crisis of tradition itself.
Since a civilizational crisis involves also a crisis in private interests and in the ruling class, reaction is normally found among those who feel themselves to be among the ruling class.
Their great error is to mingle the responses typical of each of the three types of change.
Since civilizational change is the most difficult to perceive and analyze, it seldom is given adequate attention.
And the anxiety it generates is misinterpreted as anxiety over private interest and threatened social status.

The basic truth in the reactionary response is to be found in its realistic assumption of the primacy of the real over the ideational.
But this truth is distorted by its extreme application: the assumption of the separate existence of tradition.
The reactionary misses the point that tradition exists ontologically only in the form of psychological-intellectual relations.
Reactionary theories, for this reason, usually assume some form of organismic theory.
In its defensive formulations, the theory will attack conscious change on the grounds of the independent existence of the community.
In its dynamic form, it visualizes the community as the embodiment of an ontological force -- the race, for instance, which unfolds in history.
In both cases the individual tends to be treated as an instrument of the organic reality.

When the reactionary response is thus bolstered by an intellectual defense, the characteristics of that defense are explicable only in terms of the basic attitudes of unanalyzed reaction.
Reaction is rooted in a perception of tradition as a whole.
It is a total situation that is defended: the "good old days".
There is no selectivity;
even the questionable features of the past are defended.
The point is that the reactionary, for whatever motive, perceives himself to have been part or a partner of something that extended beyond himself, something which, consequently, he was not able to accept or reject on the basis of subjective preference.
The reactionary is confused about the existential status of a decaying tradition, but he does perceive the unity tradition had when it was healthy.