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The Five Types Of Power

Traditionally, power theory divides power into hard and soft forms, as proposed by Joseph Nye in 1991. The hard form relates to the common use of the word power, which means capacity for force. The soft form relates to more subtle forms of power, which aren’t about force as commonly understood, but rather influence.

The distinction has come into prominence in geopolitical discourse, e.g. when the hard power of America is contrasted with the soft power of Britain. But many of those into alchemy would prefer a more sophisticated breakdown of the potential power spectum. So this essay attempts just that.

In this essay, the “potential power spectrum” consists of the five highest stages of the Mithraic Ladder: iron, copper, silver, mercury and gold. Tin and lead are not considered because they are too passive to count as powerful, and are better considered part of that which power acts upon.

“Hard power” in the sense proposed by Nye covers what an alchemist would describe as the realm of iron. This is, in actuality, the least subtle form of power. In a geopolitical sense it refers to military power. In an alchemical sense it refers to gross physical force and violence. The realm of iron is the realm of the hard edge of the blade. Everything people understand by martial arts or war falls under the realm of iron and hard power.

Nye’s conception of hard power also covers economic power. This includes actions such as trade sanctions or tariffs. Such a power is like a medium power inbetween hard and soft. It’s analogous, in an alchemical sense, to copper. As my friend Fro once said: “money makes people move”. Buying and selling people, whether permanently or by the hour, is the realm of copper magic.

Copper is the metal of basic currency, which is itself the power of arranging force. A trade sanction is to a country much like a strangehold is to an individual. The use of debt to trap people also falls under copper magic – usurers can be considered copper magicians, perhaps the most powerful and dangerous ones of all.

The essential aspect of hard power is that it can be used to force people to do what you want them to do. Soft power, by contrast, is used to make people want to do what you want them to do.

“Soft power” in Nye’s meaning relates to silver, mercury and gold magic in the alchemical sense. These are not about forcing people into doing things, but influencing them into doing things. Sometimes that involves trickery, deception, enchantment, persuasion, bedazzlement or charm. In every case, it’s more subtle than hard power.

Silver magic is how the ruling class maintains its position as the ruling class. To a major extent, this silver magic is just public relations: how one brings allies to the negotiating table. As such, there’s a lot of psychology to it. The art of oratory, in which a politician convinces people to follow them through speech, is silver magic in action. So is organising a propaganda campaign through the mainstream media.

Softer than soft power exists in the form of willpower. This is so subtle a power that it’s hard to measure. The closest mainstream psychology comes to it is the concept of ego depletion. This is the name given to the phenomenon where a person finds it harder to achieve certain tasks if they have already exerted self-control on a previous task.

There are various ways to keep one’s willpower high. The foremost is to keep morale high through positive self-talk and the avoidance of blackpills. Another way is to avoid distractions, whether somatic or sensory. The most important is practice: anyone with truly high levels of willpower will have built up those powers through many years of practice.

This mercury magic can be just as much a form of military power as iron magic. B. H. Liddell-Hart once wrote “In war, the chief incalculable is the human will,” explaining how a larger force can lose to a much smaller one if it loses the will to fight (see the capture of Belgrade in 1941). Many Americans claim that their guns keep them free from tyranny, but outsiders readily point out that the American Government has committed countless crimes against their own people over the past century, without anyone taking up arms against them. Absent the will to use them, all weapons are useless.

The softest power of all is spiritual power. This is represented by the realm of gold and is very similar to moral authority. This is the power of having one’s will aligned with the will of the divine. If a person or group of people have such a will, it is impossible to righteously oppose them. They have what the Confucianists call ‘The Mandate of Heaven’.

India possibly has the strongest levels of gold power of any country today, on account of that many consider the religions from there to be good ones. Then again, possibly it doesn’t, on account of that its people have a reputation for dishonesty in many circles. Who holds the most gold power can be very hard to determine. It’s also ethereal: America lost a great deal of gold power with their invasion of Iraq, and those who supported refugee resettlement to the West lost much in the wake of the Muslim child rape gangs.

Moral authority is the softest of all powers because anyone can claim to have it. But viewed from another perspective, it’s also the strongest because it can be used without rest. The big drawback with physical weapons is that you can’t actually use them the vast majority of the time. Spiritual weapons can be employed on a permanent basis.

These five types of power constitute an alchemical breakdown of the various ways that people can subjugate others to their will. In short, Joseph Nye’s concept of hard power covers the realms of iron and copper, and his concept of soft power covers the realms of silver, mercury and gold.

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Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
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Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
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The Third Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Third Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of degeneracy. The Third Rejection is the contention that excessive peace leads to degeneracy.

There’s a lot to be said for peace. In particular, peace feels great when you’ve just been through war. The reason why the Establishment Centre comes to power in the first place is because the peace they’re offering feels so good. Many people start to go crazy after the Establishment Right and Establishment Left have trashed everything in their efforts to get an advantage over the other. In their desperation, these people often take the first plausible offer of peace.

The human animal, however, didn’t evolve for peace. We evolved in a cut-throat environment where ‘Kill or be killed’ was the only universal law.

Without a moderate amount of tension, the human animal starts getting bored. And then, much like with dogs, it starts getting destructive. This will for destruction, for destruction’s sake, goes against all vital, healthy and natural instincts. Nevertheless, it appears to be the inevitable result of an excess of peace. In rejecting this degeneracy, alternative centrism takes the side of the instincts that promote the creation and maintenance of life.

Sometimes degeneracy manifests as physical destruction. This nihilistic propensity for violence can be seen in gangs and football hooligans. It’s also seen in the indifference to one’s own physical health exhibited by alcoholics, smokers and uncontrolled eaters. Many pill-poppers fall in this category as well. All of these behaviours, as well as deliberately making oneself more ugly, are ultimately the result of degeneracy.

More often, however, degeneracy manifests as spiritual destruction. This is especially true in the modern world. Because soulless nihilistic materialism is so common nowadays, most people assume that it’s natural and normal. In reality, it’s anything but. So most people suffer an awful existential emptiness and longing for purpose, seldom understanding that both things are the result of degeneracy and are far from natural.

One of the best things about peace is that it finally gives people a chance to overcome trauma. Because most people are traumatised (at least to some degree), most people desire peace. This peace makes a low-stress lifestyle possible, which in turn promotes the ability to heal from traumatic stress disorders. The positive nature of this process is why the Third Acceptance is so acceptable.

There is a negative aspect to this process though, and it’s what inspires the Third Rejection.

Most people intuitively understand that if a person is left to overcome trauma forever, to the exclusion of anything else, they will degenerate. Once a person decides to take it easy, they often take it so easy that they lose discipline. They become lazy, fat and resentful. After thousands of instances of taking it easy on themselves, they have found themselves degenerating.

The same is true of societies. These follow the same life cycle as everything else natural (as depicted by the Quadrijitu of Elementalism). Once a society decides to take it easy, it loses discipline too. The decline of the Roman Republic really set in after the Third Punic War, many historians believe, because the Romans became degenerate without an outside enemy keeping them sharp.

The habit of avoiding conflict for peace can become more than a habit. As William James may have warned us, it can become a character, and then a destiny. That destiny is less likely to be eternal peace and more likely to be chaos or stagnation (if not annihilation).

If a man is too peaceful, he doesn’t do anything about the evil around him. In today’s England, the excessively peaceful nature of the average citizen can be seen in their tolerance for Muslim child rape gangs. Some 19,000 children get raped by these gangs every year, an atrocity that could be expected to stir immense anger among most populations in history. But very little anger is evident. There is some grumbling and there are some disapproving social media posts, but there are no protests against the rape gangs, much less revenge attacks. Some of the rapists from the Rotherham gang are already out of prison and again walking the streets they once terrorised. People just accept it.

In fact, British politicians go as far as to play down the importance of these rapes. MP Lucy Powell stated that people expressing concern about the Muslim rape gang epidemic are making a “dog-whistle” to racists and Nazis. Apparently, objecting to children getting pack-raped by foreigners who hate them is a step on the slippery slope to gas chambers. The needs of the white working class who make up the majority of the victims are long forgotten.

History fans will recognise an echo between the children being exploited under the gaze of an indifferent ruling class in England in the 2020s, and the children being exploited under the gaze of an indifferent ruling class in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. The anger of the people was, in both cases, ignored by their ruling class, so it festered. That anger is what gives rise to the Alternative Right.

In Britain at time of writing, the alternative nationalist Reform UK has become the highest-polling party. Most of their voters are angry about mass immigration, in particular that of Muslims or Africans. These latter two groups generally have vastly negative influences on the areas they move to, and people want justice for having been called racists when pointing this out over the years.

It’s apparent that existing Western society is highly degenerate, and that this degeneracy has led to colossal resentment, and that this resentment is powering a resurgence of the Alternative Right. This is a process expounded in detail in my previous work Clown World Chronicles. It’s enough to say here that degeneracy leads to the rise of the Alternative Right through the Third Rejection.

With regard to the Establishment, its primary difficulty is simple: as soon as the Establishment Centre makes peace, the Establishment starts degenerating, ceding power and influence to the alternative positions. It’s almost as if the Establishment Right and Establishment Left become soft and flabby as soon as they stop fighting each other. Maybe they lose purpose without an enemy.

This is why the Alternative Right is deeply involved with active clubs (which are intended to overcome physical degeneracy) and with occultism (which is intended to overcome spiritual degeneracy). On the flipside, this is also why they can be deeply involved with control freakery, wowserism and authoritarianism, which is much of the reason for the Fourth Rejection.

In summary, degeneracy is the natural end result of Establishment politics and is what ultimately leads to the rise of the alternative positions, whether those positions are for or against it. The first to reject degeneracy is the Alternative Right, which is why this is known as the Fourth Position in alternative centrist philosophy.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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Some Important Dates In Elementalism

07 FEB – Summer Thermistice

21 MAR – Autumn Equinox

25 APR – Anzac Day

07 MAY – Autumn Equitherm

21 JUN – Winter Solstice

07 AUG – Winter Thermistice

30 AUG – Ernest Rutherford Day

21 SEP – Spring Equinox

12 OCT – First Day of Battle of Passchendaele

07 NOV – Spring Equitherm

17 DEC – Simo Hayha Day

21 DEC – Summer Solstice

Understanding The Psychology Of Gang Members

A lot of energy is currently being directed into solving the gang problem. I grew up in a family full of gang members, so I have some idea. My father was one, my uncle was one, and my brother and one cousin grew up to be one. I went on to get a master’s degree in psychology, so have some special insight into the workings of gang member psychology. This essay shares some of my relevant observations.

The first point worth noting is that the mainstream narrative around the psychology of gang members is grossly inaccurate. This is because the mainstream narrative has been determined and advanced by middle-class people with no experience of gang culture.

Thus, there any many common misconceptions. In reality, people don’t join gangs for economic reasons. If they did, then wealthy America would have far fewer gangs than India and China, when the reverse is actually true. Neither do they join gangs because of colonisation. If they did, there would be no such things as white gangs. Nor would there be Tongan gang members, as Tongans were never colonised. Neither do they join gangs because of a lack of educational opportunities. The narrative that poverty, colonisation or lack of opportunities causes gang membership is pure Marxism.

In truth, people generally join gangs because they are horribly anti-social, and in joining a gang find a community of like-minded people. The vast majority of anti-social mentality comes, in turn, from two major causes: one material, one spiritual.

The material cause is really physiological: abuse and neglect resulting from shit parenting. Shit parents hit their kids, swear at them, lose their tempers in unpredictable ways, and fail to meet their children’s emotional needs. Shit parents fight with each other, do hard drugs, get institutionalised, break up with each other and refuse to get their own mental illnesses treated. All of this leads to immense stress in their children during their most crucial developmental years.

This stress leads to severe delays in emotional development. Brain structures exposed to massive traumatic stress in early childhood can mis- or underdevelop in a wide variety of ways. This leads to behaviours commonly seen in gang members, such as getting upset easily, which is often a consequence of a phenomenon known as limbic hijack. The brain is wired to react to threats to one’s person, and other considerations (such as long-term consequences or consideration for other people) are deprioritised.

The end result is selfishness. A person who is suffering naturally puts themselves first, so a person who is habitually suffering learns to habitually put themselves first. For someone who has consistently done so throughout their formative years, selfishness becomes character. People who have suffered a lot as children tend to put themselves first as adults even when inappropriate to do so – as if they were still children. Understanding this lingering trauma-based childishness is key to understanding the psychology of gang members.

The vast majority of gang members have suffered an upbringing characterised by severe abuse and neglect, whether physical or psychological. This is why the first thing that has to be understood about gang members is that they are, emotionally speaking, literally children still. If you would take the mind of a three-year old child and put it in the body of a 110kg male who everyone else was scared of, it would behave with similar levels of impulsivity, selfishness and aggression to the typical gang member.

A recent X post by Steve Stewart-Williams showed that toddlers are the most violent age group of all, and that people gradually become less violent as they age out of toddler mentality and grow into adults. Anyone whose emotional development is stunted, e.g. by traumatic abuse and neglect, won’t grow out of this toddler phase as fast, if at all. Some of those end up as manchildren with tattoos and bad attitudes.

It’s at this point where a reader might object that the vast majority of abused children do not go on to become anti-social or gang members. This is absolutely correct. The second factor, the spiritual factor, must be in play as well.

The spiritual cause of anti-social behaviour is even more complex than the material. Ultimately it’s a matter of thinking that evil is good and good is evil. This requires a complete spiritual warping, something that usually only happens in evil circumstances.

The main spiritual aspect is mimicry. Growing up trash like I did, I observed the high esteem afforded to adults in gangs. Other family members acted like older people who were in gangs, whether family or friends, were the coolest thing that it was possible to be. Men who had reputations for being particularly aggressive or cruel were afforded the most respect of all. In an anti-social environment like this, normal and healthy moral values are twisted and warped beyond recognition.

In anti-social families like mine – of which there are thousands in New Zealand alone – decent people are treated with contempt. As with pre-civilisational savages, kindness is seen as a weakness. Respect comes from having done time in prison, or having earned a reputation as a fighter. Children in such environments naturally mimic the displayed values of their elders, and come to value aggression and cruelty themselves. In doing so they start to climb the reverse dominance hierarchy of the anti-social. In this reverse dominance hierarchy, feelings are weakness, and turning them off and going down the psychopathy spectrum, a.k.a. “hardening up”, is an act of heroism.

A normal person would be ashamed to behave with the mindless, impulsive aggression that the typical gang member does. Gang members don’t think of their actions as childish, though, but rather classy, rebellious, cool or heroic – much the same way children rationalise abusing people. Do you remember hitting a younger sibling to “teach them a lesson”? If so, you have a good idea.

In a gang environment, however, all the common values are inverted. Reckless stupidity becomes bravery. Mindless sadism becomes dominance. Shallow preening and posturing becomes class. Perhaps worst of all, a soulless moral nihilism becomes dispassionate reason. It’s a total slave morality, but with a bestial veneer. A moral revolt of those not even fit to be slaves.

Perhaps the crucial spiritual aspect is a refusal to believe in any spiritual consequences for selfish actions. Of all the gang members I have met, I have never met one who believed in karma, and if I ever did I would assume that this person was on the way out of the gang scene. The universal logic seems to be that if you can escape legal consequences, then you escape consequences.

In summary, it’s the combination of bad material and bad spiritual influences that creates the anti-social mindset that leads to people joining gangs.

Just getting abused doesn’t make a gang member. Many people who get heavily abused as children become depressed rather than sadistic. Many swear off the idea of violence altogether and become the most peaceful people of all. A heavily abused child is many times more likely to become sadistic than a non-abused one, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Just being evil doesn’t make a gang member either. Plenty of evil people go into politics, religion or marketing instead of becoming gang members. Many would argue they cause much more suffering thereby. Gang members are rare: there are around 10,000 in New Zealand, which is only 1 in every 500 people. If the rate of evil in the general population is 5%, then gang members make up at most 1 in every 25 evil people.

The combination of physical and psychological damage is key. An abused child who has learned that gang members are exemplary has no real chance at life. It’s very likely they become a gang member too (there are multiple men in my family in this category). The only real solution – given that gang members are allowed to breed – is philosophy.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!