Author: vjmp

VJMP Reads: David Seymour’s Own Your Future I

A Liberal Vision for New Zealand in 2017

Today, VJMP Reads has a look at Own Your Future, by ACT Party Leader David Seymour. This is a 192-page book of essays published by the ACT Party along the lines of previous ACT Party efforts such as Closing the Gaps and I’ve Been Thinking.

Previous VJM Publishing publications, such as Dan McGlashan’s Understanding New Zealand, tells us some basic facts about the ACT-voting demographic. Although few in number (a mere 13,075 in 2017), they were the wealthiest voter base of any party, as well as the most likely to be born overseas and one of the best educated (along with the Greens). Asians like them the most, white people the next most, and Maoris the least.

We have also seen that people who donate to the ACT Party get the worst return on their investment, with the party gaining 22 votes per $1,000 spent on the 2017 campaign. This compares to 388 votes per $1,000 for Labour, 452 for National and 4,761 for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party (even the vanity project that was The Opportunities Party managed 62 votes per $1,000 spent).

So who are ACT, in the words of their own leader?

The Introduction runs to sixteen pages, and is worth studying on its own. It starts off by telling the story of the struggles of a wealthy couple to subdivide their land. Hilariously, by the third page there’s already a reference to how, under communism, “people starved by the million”, so it’s already a fair bet at this early stage that the book will be full of far-right-wing American-style libertarianism.

On page 12, Seymour states that he grew up “not rich”, and also states that the first time he realised that the Government might not have our best interests at heart was at age sixteen. Seymour was born in 1983, which would make him around 8 years old at the time of Ruth Richardson’s infamous 1991 Budget, which ripped the heart out of the New Zealand poor. Had it not occurred to him in the aftermath of the social destruction wrought by this that the Government is not on the people’s side, then it can fairly be said that he was unusually privileged, if not actually sheltered.

In fact, the truly sheltered nature of Seymour’s life comes through in lines that would be comic genius in any other context. How else to read “Auckland Grammar is a particularly barbaric place for some kids. I vividly remember one kid getting a tennis ball to the head, it bounced lightly but its power was symbolic”?

Like most men of his time, Seymour is a materialist. He is proud to have supported liberalising the abortion laws. ACT wanted to introduce laws that would make New Zealand a better place, in Seymour’s estimation, hence his support for them. This is stated very matter-of-factly, with no explanation as to why he thought that ACT in particular were best suited to make New Zealand a better place.

Inevitably, Seymour has a go here at the eternal ACT bugbear, the Resource Management Act. He writes that the poorest fifth of New Zealanders spend almost half of their income on housing today, compared to only a quarter of their income 26 years ago. All of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of the RMA, which has strangled the rate of house building. “That’s why people are living in cars and garages.”

The obvious rejoinder to this claim is to point out that New Zealand has the highest rate of immigration of any OECD country. Seymour anticipates this, and writes of the immigration question that opinion is divided between “National’s naivete vs. the racism of New Zealand First.” Like many middle-class white people, Seymour appears to be unaware that New Zealand First’s strongest supporters are Maoris.

Seymour generally doesn’t seem bothered by anti-Maori racism, as shown by his rant about “million after million for various Maori centric projects and separatist legislation”. Racism is, perhaps, only real to Seymour when it prevents wealthy foreigners from immigrating here (after all, as noted above, Maoris don’t vote for the ACT Party).

Going by the introduction, this book seems like the closest thing to a neoliberalist manifesto New Zealand has seen recently. What Seymour appears to be about, fittingly for someone who represents foreign wealth, is freedom for money. He’s not interested in freedom for people. Freedom for people comes incidentally, in so far as those people have money.

One gets the impression that if Seymour could stuff the entire South Island into a giant machine that sorted it out into its constituent minerals for the sake of most efficiently selling it all off to foreign speculators, he would be happy to do so. This book, therefore, promises to be a journey into the mind of an absolutely fanatical die-hard neoliberal.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

An Anarcho-Homicidalist Explains the Last 50 years of Workplace Relations

The social contract is held in place by a fine balance. Perhaps most famously expressed as the 13th-century ultimatum given by English barons to the despotic King John that led to the Magna Carta, it can summarised as: treat us well or we’ll chop your head off. This is to say that, the king has the right to be the king, but if he becomes tyrannical then the rest of us reserve the right to overthrow him.

This social contract is not unique to humans – it’s a natural feature of life for all social animals, perhaps most apparent in observing the political machinations of male chimpanzees. The alpha male chimpanzee might get his pick of the females, and he might even get to preoccupy more than one female at any one time, but if he gets too greedy, and tries to monopolise all of them, then the betas will band together from a solidarity borne of mutual frustration and tear him to pieces.

After all, no matter how strong the alpha is, it’s extremely difficult to beat two other healthy, fit males if those two males have sufficient solidarity to work together as a unit. Over the recent ten or so million years, our ancestors evolved to adapt to this brutal calculus. This instinct manifests as a rudimentary sense of justice, which provokes righteous anger if it is violated, such as by a greedy or tyrannical alpha that doesn’t share.

We have inherited similar sentiments from our common ancestor with the other apes, and they have expressed themselves as the multifarious political machinations that humans have contrived over the millennia. The ultimate intent behind all of this manoeuvering is the genetic imperative to get the maximum amount of pussy, which is essentially a question of getting the maximum amount of resources, this being primarily what attracts the females of sexually reproducing species.

Key to understanding anarcho-homicidalism is understanding the eternal truth of this equation.

The amount of pay that a worker gets in 2018 A.D. is the result of a negotiation. The negotiation reflects the amount of relative leverage that the worker has compared to the employer. For the most part, this is a question of the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. For thousands of years, it was understood that if the employer class offered the workers a deal that was so poor that they could not maintain their own basic dignity, as King John had done, this was effectively an attempt to enslave, and in such a case the workers would have the right to kill that enslaver.

This changed about 50 years ago, with the 1968 Revolution. Ever since that tumultuous year, which marked that the Great Pendulum had definitely swung back from the right that caused World War II to the left, Westerners have been conditioned to be nice. All of the problems of the Great Wars, we were told, stemmed from human nastiness. Now we have to be nice, nice, nice – all the time!

At the same time that the human masses were decoupled from their natural instincts to sometimes be nasty in defence of their basic interests, wages decoupled from productivity (as can be clearly seen from the graph at the top of this essay). Every member of the ruling class, in particular economists and politicians, will tell you that this is a coincidence. But the anarcho-homicidalist knows that it is no coincidence.

Basically, we’ve become so domesticated that not only have we lost the desire to kill our enslavers, which was the one thing holding our half of the bargain in place, but we’ve forgotten that it’s even a legitimate option. Because we’re no longer willing to kill, we’ve lost all of our negotiating leverage. In the age of nice, employers can simply play the working masses off against each other in a race to the bottom, knowing full well that there’s no tipping point at which they will feel too humiliated and revolt.

As a natural consequence, wages have plummeted.

Worst of all, we’re getting nicer and nicer, as most of us are now so powerfully conditioned against violence by a merciless school system that we resemble Alex from A Clockwork Orange after his exposure to the Ludovico technique. The very thought of rebellion is terrifying to a population no longer allowed to write ‘faggot’ on FaceBook, and where protesting the wrong religion will get you beaten to death in prison. One can therefore expect that our negotiating position will continue to weaken.

This is where the philosophy of anarcho-homicidalism becomes necessary: to restore the lost half of the negotiating equation. Those who consider themselves fit to rule need to learn, once again, to fear those who they presume to command. Because, no matter what your ruler says, it’s always, always, always permissible to kill someone trying to enslave you.

Anyone who is incapable of understanding this is already a slave!

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This essay is an excerpt from The Anarcho-Homicidalist Manifesto, written by Viktor Hellman and due for release by VJM Publishing in the autumn of 2019.

Writing Generalised Anxiety Disorder

Everyone knows what it feels like to be anxious. The clammy hands, the tightness in the gut, the dizziness, the sudden need to urinate. Where anxiety becomes a psychiatric problem is when this anxiety gets out of control, causing suffering and an inability to get through everyday life. This article looks at how to write engaging and believable characters who suffer from Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

One cluster of problems that people with GAD tend to have relates to restlessness and irritability. They think too much about what might go wrong. A number of small problems can then have the tendency to build up and to provoke an outburst over something small. Often a person with GAD will hit their limit and explode, to the astonishment of others around them who didn’t appreciate the underlying anxiety.

Other characters might see the usual signs of anxiety, only writ large. They might notice the signs of despair in the face – tight lips or a pallid look. The character with GAD might tap their feet a lot, fidget or stammer. Other characters might be able to detect and increase in the tension level of the room when someone with GAD is present.

The author might prefer to be more subtle, however. A character with GAD might to prone to explosive anger or hysteria, but the other characters might not be able to perceive the anxiety that underlies the fractiousness. They might also be prone to mind blanks from the anxiety. The other characters might only perceive the surface expression of the GAD, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion.

For instance, people with GAD tend to smoke a lot of tobacco. If the protagonist of your story has GAD, it might be that they’re reaching for the cigarette packet every time the telephone rings. If the protagonist of your story encounters someone with GAD, it may be that the constant presence of tobacco smoke or smell causes them them to realise that that character has an anxiety disorder.

Insomnia is another common sign. If the protagonist of your story is an insomniac because of GAD, this might be something close to a living hell; a nightly torment that they are forced to endure. Other characters will be able to pick it in their face as well – they will look tired, with puffy eyes and a downcast look. They will look every bit like someone for who life is difficult.

People with GAD, like many people with mental disorders, have a tendency to suffer low self-esteem. As with many other conditions, it’s not easy to tell where the border between the mental disorder and personal weakness is. A character with GAD might frequently be asking themselves if they’re a coward, or if they’re really cut out for the challenges of life. Naturally such an attitude will eat away at their self-confidence.

Intertwined with this is the reality that people with GAD will often not be treated too well by other people. For one thing, anxiety tends to be contagious. If another person is anxious it’s hard to properly relax around them because of the chance that they might blow their top any moment. For another thing, anxiety tends to make people selfish, because the focus is on the desires of the self and not the needs of others. This selfishness tends to be reciprocated.

GAD can cause some of the same thought-loops and obsessional thinking as other psychiatric conditions. With generalised anxiety it’s easy to become anxious about being anxious, especially once one has become conditioned by unpleasant physical side-effects of worry. A character with the condition might feel highly anxious every time they feel a slight gut disturbance or chest pain, fearing that death has finally come.

Although there’s a shared component of extreme anxiety, GAD is distinct from phobias. Phobias (as discussed at length here) are fears of specific things that are hard to escape. GAD is also distinct from social anxiety. People with social anxiety tend to only feel anxious in anticipation of the risk of social judgment, whereas people with GAD tend to be anxious all the time.

GAD is also distinct from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but several patterns of thinking overlap between the two. In particular, people with GAD are prone to worrying about things like whether or not they left the stove on when they left the house. Because anxiety is always present in such people, and because the risk of burning down one’s house is (reasonably) something that many people are cautious of, people with GAD are frequently triggered into panic by such common concerns.

The best thing about GAD from an author’s point of view is that virtually all of the readership will be able to identify with it. Almost everyone knows what it’s like to feel unpleasantly high levels of anxiety, so GAD will also be reasonably easy to identify with. Probably they also are aware of how unpleasant it is to be around highly anxious people, so they can identify with that also.

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This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.