The whole world seems to be at a standstill, awaiting a coronavirus vaccine. Only when a vaccine is available, we are told, can we risk opening up the borders again and resuming normal life. But there are many good reasons to be skeptical about the impeding coronavirus vaccines. I won’t be taking one – and in this essay I explain why not.
The mainstream media has presented a misleading picture of how easy it is to produce a coronavirus vaccine. The story we’ve been sold is that we just have to wait a few months longer, then it will be ready and all will be good. Apparently, “COVID-19 vaccine development has been expedited via unprecedented collaboration in the multinational pharmaceutical industry and between governments.”
By September last year, a variety of different potential vaccines were supposedly in advanced stages of development. At some point – soon – doctors everywhere will be telling people that they have an effective and safe coronavirus vaccine, and they’ll be expecting people to believe them, as they expect people to believe everything else they say.
And I won’t be believing them and I won’t be taking a coronavirus vaccine.
Why?
Because they still don’t know that cannabis is medicinal. If they still don’t know that cannabis is medicinal, where there is mountains of evidence suggesting this, and has been for decades, then how can I trust them to inform me accurately about a coronavirus vaccine?
In 1996, doctors in California, being aware already then that cannabis was medicinal, organised to have it made legal. They arranged to have a referendum on the subject and made sure that the voters were correctly educated. Since then, recognising the science, 16 countries and 39 other American jurisdictions have legalised medicinal cannabis.
Despite these advances, doctors here in New Zealand have resolutely stayed ignorant. They know nothing about medicinal cannabis, not even the difference between CBD and THC. All cannabis use causes mental illness, they bleat, as if it were still 1970. The most recent quarter-century of scientific advancement can just fuck off.
So when doctors start telling me about a coronavirus vaccine, and how they’re sure it’s safe and effective, I’m just going to laugh. Their approach to medicinal cannabis has shown me that they’re more interested in political realities than scientific ones. Twelve years of asking New Zealand doctors about medicinal cannabis has been utterly fruitless.
If doctors want people to trust them about a vaccine that has been known for a few months, they have to start telling the truth about a medicine that has been known about for thousands of years. If they’re not capable of doing that, I’m going to stay well away from any vaccines they might offer me.
The West is proud of its egalitarian heritage. We derive a sense of moral superiority from being a culture in which even the lowest classes can, through hard work, determination and applied will, reach the highest positions. The example of Abraham Lincoln, born into poverty in a frontier log cabin, is archetypal. But class relations in Clown World are very different to those in the 19th century.
In Clown World, we’ve effectively gone back to feudal times.
It’s so hard to buy a house today that, if you aren’t born into money, you will need to be in the top segment of income earners to do it. In both America and Britain, the house price to income ratio is at highs not seen since the aftermath of World War II. In the case of Britain, things are so extreme that you’d have to go back to the Victorian Era to find a time when it was harder for the average person to own their home.
This has led to large proportions of entire generations becoming resigned to paying rent in perpetuity. Some have even labelled the lower classes Generation Rent. Class relations in Clown World are marked by the great distance between the landowning class and the renting class. Many landowners in Clown World make more profit from capital gains on property than they could working for a wage.
This state of class separation is maintained by a concerted effort on the part of the Establishment to destroy class consciousness, the only thing that could really threaten it. The mainstream media pushes any and all alternatives to class consciousness: race consciousness, gender consciousness, age cohort consciousness, any possible corporate brand consciousness. Anything but class consciousness.
These efforts keep class relations much less antagonistic than would otherwise be the case. There are no workers’ marches in Clown World, because the working class is divided along multiple lines of fracture. These lines of fracture prevent the solidarity that would be necessary for collective action.
These divisions are maintained by the control that the ruling class has over the apparatus of propaganda. This control allows them to set the agenda in every Western country, and this agenda is inevitably fighting racism, fighting sexism, fighting ageism – and never fighting classism.
Class relations in Clown World, then, are characterised by the relentless efforts of the ruling class to keep the lower classes divided and conquered. The masses are bedazzled by the 24/7 circus of flickering images coming through the television. They are demoralised by the relentless bombardment of bigotry accusations. They are disorientated by the contradictions coming from the government.
The net result of these efforts to keep poor people down is greater inequality, and less social mobility, than ever.
Inequality is now at historic levels. The American Gini Index sits at 41.4, meaning that America is even less equal than kleptocracies like Haiti, Iran and Turkmenistan. Even China and Russia – bywords in some circles for autocratic shitholes – have lower Gini Indexes than America.
It’s similar with homeownership. The homeownership rates in supposed poverty-stricken dumps like India and Mexico is higher than in supposed lands of opportunity like America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet the Western mainstream media bleats incessantly about how wonderful everything is and how we’ve never had it so good.
In Clown World, wealth equals the ability to suck productivity out of other people by controlling their labour. The commodification of some people means fat profits for others. The poorer a population is, the more readily they can be extorted out of rents. The class system in Clown World, then, is much like a food chain: energy is passed upwards.
Inequality has reached such levels that a person can be significantly wealthier than average and still be a long way from the upper economic strata. The result of this is a widespread absence of sympathy for those in the lower strata. They are so far below that they might as well be animals. In Clown World, your opinion only matters if you’re wealthy enough to buy media time.
The 2020 American Presidential Election was fought between the billionaire Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a man who had already spent 47 years in the upper levels of American governance. The previous election was fought between Trump and Hillary Clinton, who had also spent decades in the upper levels of American governance. The one before that involved Mitt Romney, whose net worth was $250 million, and Barack Obama, the descendant of slave owners.
An Abraham Lincoln is unthinkable today. Someone born into poverty in today’s America is born so far behind that even becoming a homeowner would be a herculean effort. That they might become President is just laughable. Today, the ownership class has a complete lock on positions of power.
Naturally, a situation like this is ripe for revolution.
Democracy is about the easy satisfaction of desires. When those desires can no longer easily be satisfied, dissatisfaction quickly turns into a will to cause chaos. The widespread rioting of 2020 is a foretaste of the inevitable suffering of the next decade. As it becomes harder and harder to meet desires for decent housing and decent pay, people’s willingness to riot will increase.
The real risk of Clown World is that class relations become so bad that a majority of people want to overthrow the system. That could lead to them putting all their energies in behind a tyrannical demagogue. A leader who promised to get revenge on those hoarding property could summon a hurricane of rage behind them.
For class relations to improve, the masses have to have hope again. This doesn’t mean hope of becoming multibillionaires, just hope of meaningfully improving the station into which they were born. It means that they suffer less drudgery and poverty as they get older, and not more. If economic forces or policies push the masses away from hope, they push them into the clutches of fear and hate.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
Altruism is the mortar holding together every community of social beings. In the biological past, groups of social beings that learned to be altruistic outcompeted those who were more selfish. This led to the range of pro-social behaviours that we see on display in the world today. But there’s an upper limit to how much altruism is appropriate. Too much of it, and it becomes pathological.
Pathological altruism arises when a population forgets how dangerous the world naturally is. It’s most common in populations where the crime rate has stayed low for an extended period of time. In populations like this, people can mistakenly come to believe that low rates of predatory behaviour are normal, and therefore precautions do not need to be taken.
In Clown World, pathological altruism manifests as kindess and tolerance towards people who show no inclination to reciprocate it. It can be seen everywhere people attempt to stop abuse by showering love on the abusers. It’s a phenomenon closely related to both narcissistic masochism and virtue signalling.
A kind but non-pathological person will withdraw their kindness once they see that it isn’t respected. A pathological altruist, by contrast, will keep making sacrifices for others even when those others clearly demonstrate that they aren’t grateful. This is a pathology because helping the ungrateful will quickly end up destroying the helper.
Once upon a time, a woman was picking up firewood. She came upon a poisonous snake frozen in the snow. She took the snake home and nursed it back to health. One day the snake bit her on the cheek. As she lay dying, she asked the snake, “Why have you done this to me?” And the snake answered, “Look, bitch, you knew I was a snake.”
Some of the altruism being shown in Clown World today is much like the altruism of the woman in the above parable. It’s a reckless, quasi-suicidal mentality that is similar to that of the Dodo birds of Mauritius approaching the Portuguese sailors. Unfortunately, in Clown World, this pathological altruism affects many people, and the rest of us are in danger of being dragged down with them.
There is already ample evidence that allowing certain folk groups (in particular Muslims and Africans) into one’s country will lead to a decrease in the average person’s quality of life.
Yet, despite the ample and undeniable evidence that mass immigration of these groups leads to suffering, anyone who points this out is liable to have people turn on them like a pack of wild dogs. Clown World altruism is so pathological that anyone who questions its application is marked as a sadist. It’s become so absurd that those who question the value of the mass immigration of Muslims and Africans are now blamed for the consequences of it.
In Clown World, pathological altruism is not only displayed towards outsiders at the expense of oneself and one’s own kin. It can also be displayed towards moral reprobates at the expense of oneself and one’s own kin.
As demonstrated in the later chapter ‘Justice in Clown World‘, pathological altruism can arise in the courtroom, where it gives light penalties to unrepentant criminals who will predictably continue offending. Pathological altruism is to blame every time a judge gives a psychopath a sentence that will see them back out on the streets in short order.
Usually such moves are explained as kindness. However, this kind of altruism is pathological, because it increases the amount of suffering in the world by enabling patterns of abuse. When an unrepentant abuser finds someone who enables their behaviour, it can continue to extreme lengths. Being kind to abusers makes no more sense than the lamb being kind to the wolves.
This is not to argue that altruism itself is bad. Genuine kindness is very much the gold to the silver, iron and clay of all other sentiments. However, gold is soft, and as such it can be easily defeated. If kindness is applied without discrimination, it leads to more suffering than if kindness was reserved for the right targets.
Pathological altruism is different to the ruling class showing altruism to outsiders at the expense of the lower classes. The ruling class never invites refugees into their own neighbourhoods; they might invite them into the country, but inevitably dump them in working-class neighbourhoods. This isn’t pathological, because, by doing so, they manage to keep their class enemies divided and conquered.
The ruling class preys on existing pathological altruism, especially in the middle class, to manufacture consent for measures that harm the masses. The mass importation of cheap labour is the primary way this is done.
Pathological altruism is highly prevalent in Clown World because people have had it so easy for many decades. When people are wealthy, they treat each other more kindly. So when people are wealthy for a long time, it means they are kind for a long time. This leads to people thinking that kindness is normal, and that all humans are inherently kind if just given a chance.
This child-like naivety is pathological in adults. In its most extreme form it can lead to cases like the Norwegian politician Karsten Hauken, who felt guilt when the Somali immigrant who had raped him was deported. Having altruistic sentiments towards someone who raped you is deeply sick, practically suicidal. Yet in Clown World, such sentiments are common.
The presence of pathological altruism ensures that mass Third World immigration will keep happening, despite that a majority of Europeans want to stop further immigration from Muslim countries completely – only 20% of those surveyed wanted it to continue. Even famously pro-refugee Sweden wants to take in fewer refugees. But as long as the ruling class can get a vocal minority to scream about racism every time someone suggests border control, the cheap labour will keep flooding in.
Pathological altruism won’t go away until Clown World collapses and Westerners suffer for an extended period of time. That will teach us, like the generations that preceded the Boomers, to be more correctly discriminating with our compassion.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
Clown World is a mess for many reasons: physical, emotional, economic, political, spiritual. Some of the reasons are philosophical. These philosophical reasons relate to popular delusions that have arisen as a result of faulty logic. One of the most harmful of those delusions is solipsism.
Solipsism is the belief that the only consciousness that exists is one’s own. To the solipsist, the material world may or may not be real, but other people are not conscious. All other humans are what is called a philosophical zombie – a non-conscious being.
There is soft solipsism, which is the belief that the existence or otherwise of other consciousnesses is unknowable. There is also hard solipsism, which is the belief that it is known for certain that other consciousnesses don’t exist.
Solipsism is a major philosophical issue, for reasons that become apparent when one thinks through the implications.
Developmental psychologists believe that infants are born solipsistic, and this explains why they are so selfish. Most of them, however, grow up to assume that other people are conscious. This assumption is made by way of analogy. I have a body, and I am conscious. Other people have bodies, therefore they must be conscious too.
When most people reach what Jean Piaget called the formal operational stage, at the start of adolescence, they gain the ability to start thinking in abstract terms. When they do, they often question previous assumptions. If they do this, they soon realise that they don’t actually have any hard proof, whatsoever, that other people are conscious.
The realisation that consciousness has never been detected or measured by any scientific instrument leads to the realisation that no-one really knows if other people are conscious. One’s own consciousness might be entirely alone in this universe, surrounded only by shadows. This is arguably the most terrifying existential thought of all time.
Some people respond to this thought by becoming a variant of solipsist, i.e. someone who believes that they might be the only consciousness in the world. These people believe that other bodies might exist, but those bodies are not conscious and so there is no-one who experiences the suffering or joy of that body.
Others adopt a strange kind of balance position. Other bodies exist, and those bodies may or not be conscious, and so there may or may not be anyone who experiences the suffering or joy of that body. Therefore, that suffering doesn’t need to be taken as seriously as one’s own, because one knows for certain that one’s own suffering is experienced.
The degree to which a person discounts the suffering of other people is the degree to which they are a danger to those others. These beliefs – that one might be the only consciousness in the world, or that only one’s own consciousness is valuable – lie behind all kinds of atrocities and crimes.
If one thinks about it logically, a person’s level of empathy is related to whether or not they think other people are conscious. If other people aren’t conscious, or if their consciousness is of a lower quality, then there’s no reason to take their suffering into account when making decisions. Any measure that decreases the suffering of conscious beings while increasing the suffering of non-conscious beings is permissible.
This logic underpins exploitation of all kinds, from that of animals to that of people considered subhuman. The idea that animals/women/black people aren’t conscious (usually expressed as the idea that they don’t have souls) has underpinned exploitation since the beginning of civilisation. Today, exploitation continues under the logic that, although animals/women/black people may be conscious, the quality of that consciousness is significantly lower.
A psychopath acts as if theirs was the only consciousness that existed. This leads them to act as if other people’s suffering doesn’t matter. As a result, they take decisions that are characteristically psychopathic, such as causing great suffering to other people for marginal benefit to themselves. All exploitation is quasi-psychopathic in nature, and solipsism encourages this exploitation by justifying it.
Solipsism, then, is a major social issue. An increase in solipsism will lead to people making more selfish decisions, which will in turn lead to an increase in suffering. Social decline and solipsism follow each other. If everyone was a solipsist, this world would be hellish, because no-one would ever take other people’s suffering into account. It would be purely dog-eat-dog.
In a normal, healthy state of reality, living beings can sense the consciousness of others. This leads them to behave in ways that minimise the suffering of those others. In Clown World, people are so self-obsessed that they might as well be solipsists. Materialism and spiritual decay have led us to a state where many people are indifferent or oblivious to the suffering of other people. The result of this apathy is Clown World.
There are two ways to solve the problem of other minds.
The first is faith. This is the way that most people overcome solipsistic dilemmas. One simply has faith that other people are conscious. With sufficient faith, questions about whether the brain generates consciousness don’t need to be asked. The risk is that faith wavers, which can lead to ‘solipsistic crises’ where the existence of other consciousnesses is doubted.
The second is gnosis. This way is extremely difficult, and very few have done it. Gnosis involves knowing that other consciousnesses exist. To realise this requires stepping outside the bounds of ordinary consciousness and having a mystic revelation. The risk here is that one can stray too far from normal society. It’s difficult to live the mystic truths and not be considered insane by the masses.
The advantage of the gnosis method is that it leads to a life that’s in tune with the Tao. The person who has achieved theognosis knows that God self-expresses as the multitude of different beings that inhabit this world (and more). As such, the enlightened consciousness regards all other beings as expressions of God, their suffering equally meaningful as one’s own.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
