Why Mainstream Conservatives Support Homosexuality But Not Cannabis Law Reform

Forty years ago, mainstream conservatives believed that both cannabis and homosexuality ought to be criminalised. Today, they still believe that cannabis use should be illegal – but they celebrate homosexuality, as shown by their attendance at the various pride parades. What is the reason for supporting the status quo on one moral issue, but making a complete flip on another? This article explains.

What it comes down to is a war on consciousness.

Homosexuality might be a threat to a certain kind of moral order, one based around the family and raising children. But it isn’t a threat to capitalism. In fact, the logic of nihilistic consumption is common to both homosexuals and capitalists. Both tend to live for today and for the pleasures of today, with little thought to posterity or to their legacy.

American marketers believe the “pink dollar” – the total consumption of LGBTQ people – to be worth over one trillion dollars per year in the United States. Yahoo Finance states: “there is a correlation between the growth of the pink economy and the increase in demand for luxury products and premium services, since it is estimated that this community spends 15% more than heterosexuals.”

This is the reason for the right-wing about-face on homosexuality over recent decades. By encouraging homosexuality, the conservatives encourage people onto a path of hedonistic, spendthrift materialism. Today’s conservatives no longer care about conserving anything, they only care about money. So for them, the ideal citizen is someone who just spends, spends and spends.

Cannabis is a different matter.

Cannabis has been used for thousands of years as a spiritual sacrament. As with other spiritual sacraments (such as psilocybin), cannabis inspires people to do things that our corporate overlords don’t like. Such as recycle, minimalise consumption and even drop out of capitalist society completely to devote one’s life to higher pursuits.

Unlike homosexuality, then, spirituality is a direct threat to the capitalist paradigm. Spirituality induces people to find pleasure in everyday things, such as the rise and fall of the Sun, the glow of the Moon, the caress of the wind. It causes people to assign merit to the good, not to those with the most expensive car or shoes.

Spirituality also causes people to take extreme long-term viewpoints. Because it inclines people to think about reincarnation and karma, it also inclines people to think about their wider family, clan, nation, race and species, and justice for those groups. This kind of thinking comes into direct conflict with the capitalist imperative to atomise every individual into a consumerist silo.

The National party’s biggest concern is keeping people on the employment-rent treadmill, whereupon they can be plundered for maximum profits. To this end, they want people taking the most short-term possible view. They want people obsessed with the crudest, most bestial pleasures. Understanding this, one can also understand how Judith Collins can march in a pride parade while campaigning to have cannabis users locked up.

In esoteric terms, the situation can (as so often) be best understood with an appeal to the Mithraic Ladder.

The mentality, and the spiritual frequency, of homosexuality is something that belongs to the lowest levels of the Mithraic Ladder. The energy of Saturn, or of lead, is an energy not concerned with reproduction. Saturn consumed his offspring, and, in the same way, homosexuals do not create a next generation. Homosexuality is the frequency of death, where pleasure is raised higher than life itself.

People on those low levels are not thinking about a revolution of philosopher-kings. As such, cocks going up arses are not, in any sense, a threat to the Government or to conservatism. In fact, in so far as it serves as a distraction from the development of the political consciousness necessary to challenge the ruling class, sodomy is a benefit to the Government and to conservatism.

The same phenomenon can be seen on /pol/, where the catalog is regularly flooded with porn and sex threads, distracting from the development of political consciousness. This is the result of a deliberate effort to destroy a space in which free political thought takes place.

The spiritual frequency of cannabis use, by contrast, is about higher vistas. Cannabis users tend to think about things like justice, God and their own karmic debts. This naturally leads them to think about political questions. A person whose mind is fixed on the eternal is the ultimate threat to tyrannical rulers. Such a person, like the Terminator, cannot be distracted by mere pleasures and they’re much harder to intimidate into submission.

Mainstream conservatives, in summary, support homosexuality and not cannabis law reform because homosexuality has the ultimate effect of upholding the status quo, whereas cannabis use does not.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World about a society in which no-one participated in intellectual pursuits, but were obsessed with sex. This culture was of great benefit to the rulers of that world, who thereby went unchallenged. Huxley was aware in the 1930s of that venal, money-grubbing tendency among conservatives. In our time, that tendency has fully bloomed.

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The Case For Rejecting The Consensus

Here, I would like to suggest some reasons why someone might be justified in questioning their tacit, unswerving allegiance to the consensus.

Firstly, did you realise you were in an ongoing agreement? Because you may not have realised this, and you may not have already decided to say ‘no’ and walk away. What would that take? Simply that. Your refusal to continually go into agreement to that which no longer serves you – in your outer life, as well as your inner life. One produces a reflection of the other.

We have wars started by greedy idiots, bloodthirsty zealots and control-hungry ideological fundamentalists. We are brought to question whether we might abstractly agree or disagree that a given group of people could justifiably be blown to pieces, as though this were somehow our call. Your agreement or disagreement here doesn’t matter in order to qualify as insanity; what matters is that you are demanded to be on beck and call to participate in the insanity served up to you by a mentally diseased consensus.

The consensus wants to force your hand into playing the game to power the illusion that you were the one choosing it. Your choice to bear witness to all of this is your agreement to it. This happens in the same way a hostage might be forced to dictate the methods of his own torture – as though being invited to weigh your opinion on this narrative represents some kind of fairness, or democracy of mind.

We have political systems which are presented on the presumption of self-evidential necessity. You may choose this stream of madness, or the other – but you must choose. Remember that you tacitly agreed to this system, because you were born into it? At least, this is the narrative, as fragile as it is. Even the most benignant and equitable of these are a travesty – you are presented with an ultimate option of choosing one terrible option over another, as though there was no alternative.

This is in the service of democracy, the abstract notion that what is best for you lies in the appearance of having the ‘freedom’ to choose what is best for your region or your nation, when all of the information you are being fed derives from a source with an agenda to exert influence and control. Everything that was ever claimed to go to work on your behalf was an empty promise, a sham.

We are the inheritors of a scientific materialism, which against all true scientific spirit, presumes to dictate the total conditions of the universe at the level of human meaning. Specifically, that there is no possibility of individual or collective human participation in divinity, because we are all simply evolutionary automatons.

Science is far from objective or disinterested – there is a wider agenda to uphold. Detraction from the mainstream narrative is punished through control of funding and decisions about how much influence you will continue to exert in academia. This is how public talks can justifiably be banned without red faces.

The new paradigm of the evil is named ‘pseudoscience’, although it has born different names as were suitable to the era or context, such as ‘witchcraft’, ‘atheism’, ‘socialism’ – essentially though, all it consists in is ‘the other’. It is the elephant in the room no one wants to discuss because it would undermine the authority of the institution in question.

All that this ‘other’ is ever reminding you of is the simple fact that you can’t ever know for certainty what you think you know – that is all it is, and yet this represents the vital human umbilical connection into the wider spiritual universe.

Our various cultural institutions’ insistence on the rigidity and finality of the knowledge they produce is leading us to squander our multidimensional heritage, our imagination, our shared godhood. What appears to be the groundlessness of epistemic uncertainty is far too subversive to those who pretend to this authority. So, the label ‘pseudoscience ‘is the new brush you will be tarred with if you dare detract from this reactive and emotionally fragile scientific consensus.

These are churches, if you haven’t noticed – there are priests, altars and rules to be followed. Dissent is not appreciated, and while we may no longer burn people at the stake physically, the same consequences can now be effected ruthlessly via social media. Technology has ironically permitted the expansion of ostracism to the digital realms, which are the foreshore of our mental meeting grounds as human collectives.

To adhere to a mindset whereby the majority of people in your culture will turn their backs on a person and say ‘we don’t acknowledge this person anymore’ is not only merely unhealthy, it indicates a collective personality disorder. Refusing to acknowledge a person whom the mainstream collective disapproves of is one of the tallest, broadest and brightest of red flags. It happens in small groups such as family groups and office environments, and it happens in nations – as above, so below. And yet, we retain the freedom to decide as the inheritors of the totality of human culture as to whether such behaviour is worthy to be kept.

The catch is, anything we sleep on is kept automatically. All it takes for the majority to continue to harbour such systemic insanity is to pretend that we don’t suffer from it, thereby immunising it from scrutiny. Staying asleep then becomes akin to alcohol as the ’cause of’ and ‘solution to’ all of life’s various social ills.

We have a culture in which religious institutions are offered as fictitious oases from an insane materialism, only to discover that you are being thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire. The desire to save your soul and claim you for the eternal turns out to be yet another tentacle operating on the behalf of control and delusion, though flown under the banner of spirituality. The grandiose fantasies of the worldly ego are here offered in the spiritual realm, success, being chosen, included, and living forever as the personal self you know and love. The monotheistic religions reflect all the ego’s madness and self-importance back to it in an imaginary monarchy, which consists in a personal being at the top who variously approves, disapproves, judges, or becomes pleased or angry with you as the mood takes him. Your virtue and worth will be decided by how close you can get to the feet of the king at the expense of others through your various deeds, devotions and cringing prostrations. This is all for your group, the blessed and chosen, while those who have chosen incorrectly, believed wrongly, or failed to meet the standard within your group will be expelled like refuse through a cosmic garbage-chute.

The false promise propping up all of these religious institutions is this one delusional creed: unity through separation. Be better than the others, be better than the other groups. Then you will earn favour, then you will be united, so you had better make sure you beat down all the others. In other words, the spirit realm, as contextualised by the consensus ideocracy, is that if you are well-behaved, then you will be rewarded, but if you are poorly behaved or you have believed incorrectly, you will be punished.

You are either in line, or out of line.

Can you see how the cultural influence from the consensus reveals itself in the projection of the religious? It promises you the favour of an authority who is responsive to your own animal needs, wants and desires, and unresponsive of those whom you deem unworthy or inferior. Could there be a more tantalising ego-trip on offer for the disturbed human animal?

We have a media which enjoys success on the basis of how accurately the content resembles juicy gossip. We are offered these hints of what those individuals who are implied to be far more important than us are doing with their lives such as celebrities, including those we imagine to have sufficient fame and money to have earned freedom and happiness. The more important a person is deemed to be, the less significant the news about them need be in order to warrant publication.

For example, it is more important whether members of royalty are having a minor spat or social disagreement about wearing a certain hat in public than any question of whether you have any personal freedom or satisfaction in your life, from birth to death. Most of what we call ‘news’ is presented as a drama triangle in which you are framed as the victim, in the hope of inflaming your censure toward those framed as the perpetrators.

When slaves were kept, it was a common practice to lure them with the possibility that one day they might be freed by their own efforts. This ensured that they kept up the good work and didn’t lapse into despondency which might eventually collapse into such dense suffering as to spark an inner or outer revolution.

If you want to see how it is the consensus would prefer you to keep acting and thinking, take a look at how they medicate you with empty promises of your eventual success and freedom. These empty promises are on offer at every street corner, in every wing of human society. They are all clamouring for your investment of attention.

Does this sound like a balanced, sane society? Does this sound like a valuable investment of your ongoing input as a free being? What would it take to simply say ‘no’, and walk away from all of this idiocy once and for all – even if this only happened within your own most private inner sanctum?

Perhaps Aristotle was correct in his analysis of man as a political animal, and that humankind will always be bound by social conventions and the need for society in general. The big question however is: are you human? If not, what are you? Because if you are not what you think you are, what makes us think it is sensible to reduce our deepest needs to humankind’s needs, to the needs of the animal?

What are the requirements of the soul, what are the values of the true self? Maybe there are none, perhaps consciousness is just a temporary phantom. But how would you ever know unless you first cleared the table before you of all of the clutter?

There may not be very much time left to decide, as the human animal is now engineering intelligences capable of outsmarting itself. Consider the simplicity of the parlour tricks that have led man down the garden path over ages past. What is to come will likely consist in even more powerful demonstrations of illusion and persuasion.

What better time than now to inquire into the truth of who you are?

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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The Basics Of The Alchemy Of Character Development

Westerners are used to thinking in material terms, and we take the same approach to writing fiction. We tend to think our of characters as primarily material beings, who are challenged by emotions that are themselves evolutionary adaptations to survival challenges. As such, the life of a fictional character is mostly about the neurotransmitters that flow through their brain.

The fundamental viewpoint promoted by this book, instead, is that of viewing one’s characters as primarily frequencies – namely, the frequency of their consciousness. The higher a character’s frequency of consciousness, the lighter their soul, and vice-versa.

In this book, it will be explained, a character’s frequency of consciousness is the most important thing about them. It is the driving force that impels them to take action. It is the fundamental explanatory force that makes sense of the character’s station of birth, his basic motivations, intentions and aspirations.

Herein it is assumed that the reader understands the truth of the phrase ‘turn lead into gold’: namely that this phrase does not refer to physical lead and physical gold, but rather to the transmution of the soul, from spiritual lead to spiritual gold. The true alchemist is not interested in mere material wealth, but in much subtler forms of wealth. This includes the treasures of the world beyond as well as the more sublime emotions here on Earth.

To make a truly interesting story, the main character’s frequency of consciousness has to change. This tends to make for a gratifying reader experience, as long as the reader can identify with that main character. By the end of a good story, the reader ought to have an appreciation for the development that protagonist has undergone to make them what they now are.

In the most typical character arc, a low frequency of consciousness is transmuted into a higher one. This is the typical heroic character arc beloved of stories going all the way back to The Epic Of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh begins his story as a low-frequency hedonist, and ends it as a high-frequency man of his people.

Countless tales follow this same pattern. The protagonist begins the story as a more-or-less normal person, and, through various trials and tribulations, they become something special – stronger, smarter, wiser, better than before. It’s what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey and it’s been known about since the oral traditions that predated literature.

This character arc is very common, however, so skillful authors like to throw some twists into the story. Sometimes the protagonist has to lose to make the story interesting. As such, the development of a character’s frequency throughout the course of a story doesn’t usually follow a linear upwards progression.

The basics of the alchemy of character development, as described in this book, are the basics of telling an interesting story. It’s all about alchemy – and hence this book is all about alchemy too. The logic is that the Hero’s Journey is primarily an alchemical journey, and that the joy the reader gets from a story primarily comes from the alchemy of character development, and the ups and downs of that development over the course of that story.

There are three main parts to this book.

The first explains the Mithraic Ladder, and its seven steps. The Mithraic Ladder is the axis along which alchemical development occurs. The bottommost step is lead, and the alchemist ascends through tin, iron, copper, silver and mercury to reach the top step, which is gold.

The second explains how a character can move up from one step to the one above. This is keeping in accordance with the principle that people like to read about main characters who overcome challenges and transform themselves while doing so.

The third explains how a character can move down from one step to the one below. This is in keeping with the principle that stories of linear progression are not very interesting, and so readers prefer stories in which the protagonist suffers setbacks, withdrawing temporarily so that they can rise again (or even descend further, in the case of tragedies).

The totality of this book is about how a writer can understand the Hero’s Journey from an alchemical perspective.

This is an excerpt from Vince McLeod’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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The Maths On The UBI Argument

This week’s release of the Sora text-to-video engine has reignited a recent debate. It seems to most well-informed observers that artifical intelligence is going to make a large number of occupations obsolete in a short number of years. This has got people talking about a universal basic income again. So VJM Publishing does the maths.

Let’s say our putative UBI is $385 per week, across 52 weeks, making it just over $20,000 per year. $20,000 times 4 million eligible Kiwis equals $80 billion per year. Where to find that?

There’s one really obvious source of finding half of that money: the existing benefit system. According to budget.govt.nz, existing benefit expenses are some $40 billion per year. A UBI would mean that there was no longer any need to maintain the existing welfare system.

This would also mean that WINZ itself could be completely scrapped. The welfare bureaucracy would no longer have any reason to exist once a UBI was in place. That would save another $3 billion (also as per budget.govt.nz above).

Many will be astonished to hear that WINZ spends about three billion a year just administering benefits. But that is the price of not having a universal income. With no universal income, welfare benefits have to be gatekept to the “truly worthy”. This means at least one WINZ office, usually with dozens of staff, in every major built-up area in the country, to deter the supposed hordes of bludgers.

That’s $43 billion of the $80 billion.

A second area of savings comes from church tax. Although figures for New Zealand are unclear, it’s estimated that Australia is missing out on some AUD10,000,000,000 per annum from not having church taxes. Given that Australia is over five times larger than New Zealand, that suggests that we could bring in at least $2 billion from a church tax.

The only reason why churches are already untaxed in Australia and New Zealand is thanks to an antiquated pre-colonial British law written under the then-common delusion that the Christian religion adds value to society. Now that Christians are a minority in New Zealand, and in the wake of mass Christian opposition to the cannabis referendum, it’s neither necessary nor possible to continue with this delusion.

A $2 billion annual church tax would bring us to $45 billion.

A third area of savings comes from a Georgist-style tax on ground rents. The New Zealand Property Investor’s Federation believes that the total size of the “rental economy” is about $15 billion. That’s fifteen billion dollars earned through sheer extortion, a parasitic form of income-gathering that causes innumerable harms to wider society – and which is otherwise untaxed.

A Georgist-style 80% tax on ground rents would therefore bring in some $12 billion. Perhaps this can be adjusted down to $10 billion on the basis that some of the rental economy consists not only of simple ground rents, but also rent on improvements, which remains untouched by a land tax under Georgist philosophy.

That brings us to $55 billion.

Empty or otherwise landbanked properties comprise a fourth area of savings. According to the Empty Houses Report, there are some 95,000 empty homes in New Zealand. Some of these are being kept empty because of landbanking, some as holiday homes, some as second homes, some as vacant rentals. In any case, if the ground rents of these empty homes were, on average, $500 per week, and if these ground rents were taxed at 80% as per the Georgist principles above, that would bring in another $2 billion, taking our total to $57 billion.

Note that these land taxes entirely avoid taxes on family homes.

New Zealand is one of the only countries in the OECD to not have a capital gains tax, which is a fifth area of savings. The overall effect of this is to stratify society, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. The reasons for New Zealand not already having a capital gains tax are complicated, but they can be summarised as greed making the country a worse place to live.

According to the Tax Working Group, a capital gains tax in New Zealand would bring in some $6 billion per annum ten years after introduction. The vast majority of this money would otherwise be getting hoarded by the people who need it the least. Thus, with a capital gains tax we have accounted for $63 billion of the necessary $80 billion.

Then the rest of the cost of an UBI will be naturally clawed back by the tax system. If the median wage in New Zealand is $31.61 an hour, and if the average worker works 1,369 hours per annum, then the average already-employed person is bringing in some $43,274 per annum already.

Someone receiving $43,274 will pay $6,073 in PAYE, but someone receiving $63,274 will pay $12,002, almost $6,000 per annum more. So if a $20,000 UBI would raise the average worker’s income to $63,274, roughly $6,000 of that would immediately be taxed back. Multiply this by four million workers and you have an extra $24 billion in PAYE.

That would actually take us over the $80 billion by some margin, to $87 billion or so. For maximum efficiency, we might like to introduce a $20,000 tax-free threshold at this point – the logic being that if it costs $20,000 per annum to survive, taxing anyone making less than this is pointless, because it will have to come back to them in the form of government services anyway.

This would cost slightly over $10 billion, i.e. roughly $2,500 in foregone PAYE for each of the four million employed people.

The remaining shortfall can be accounted for by GST intake on increased spending. If the average person spends $5,000 extra per annum on account of their UBI, then some $750 of that will be recouped by the Government in the form of GST. Multiplied by four million workers makes for an extra $3 billion.

In summary, a $90 billion demand for a UBI plus a $20,000 tax-free threshold can be met by scrapping WINZ and the entire welfare system ($43 billion), a church tax ($2 billion), a land tax on the ground rents of rental property ($10 billion), a land tax on empty homes ($2 billion), a capital gains tax ($6 billion), naturally increased PAYE ($24 billion) and naturally increased GST ($3 billion). The numbers for a UBI in New Zealand add up.

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