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Traditions start as innovations, then become traditions.
The problem here is the claim that one is not innovating when one RETVRNS.
This specific terminology smuggles its own view of the object. The conservative view, as opposed to the reactionary view.
An alternative understanding, from, say, Julius Evola, is that traditions are perennial truths embedded in the structure of reality, which eternally return. And the point is not being lindy because nothing ever lasts, but to claim the boons of alignment with some transcendental understanding of the universe.
In that sense, innovation can be traditional, and conservatism be anti-traditional, insofar as the behavior can or cannot be embedded in a larger mythic structure. 70 years of materialism did not make the Soviet Union into a traditional institution, however many dedushkas you can find that fondly remember it.
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One is not innovating when one adopts another's innovation either, though.
It's a distinction of Sense versus Reference. The California hippie who travels the world in search of spiritual wisdom and winds up adopting (say) Tibetan Buddhism is not doing the same thing as the Tibetan layman who practices Buddhism because that's just what their people do.
Which is all well and good, since Buddhism has a core that is (purportedly) true regardless of how one arrives at it. But the irony of "trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition, something of the form: "This society has lost its way because there are too many individualists, people who think they know better than they did in the good old days. Therefore it falls to me, the lone heroic seeker, to forsake mainstream society and devote my life to poring through the ancient tomes (the more ancient the better) in search of the one true ideology." This is the same mindset as that of the wandering hippie, a mindset which (I claim) is more persistent and fundamental to one's character than any particular ideology which one may adopt.
I think this is uncharitable. I you look at the examples of tradlarping today, you see people who are specifically unsatisfied with some aspects of modernity (such as the destruction of marriage) and are trying to bring it back by manifesting living in a 50s magazine ad for vaccum cleaners.
It's cargo culting a lot more than it is blindly worshiping the dead.
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