I think of conservatism as behaving kind of like an immune system. People who are conservative tend to be overly concerned with things like purity and group cohesion, and react negatively to anything unfamiliar unless you hold their hand and show them it’s ok. Sometimes this is a good thing for a society at large -helps maintain vigilance against external threats- but other times you get full-blown immune disorders, where the immune system can no longer distinguish an appropriate response from an excessive one, or a dangerous agent from a benign one, or starts to attack its own body.