psychology – Page 114

Why Immigration Is a Weapon Of The Parasitic Rich

The parasitic class has many different strategies for destroying the mutual trust among the people – and opening the borders achieves several of them at once

Many were surprised, and many were not, by the news that the New Zealand Bus Drivers Union was opposing the request of Ritchies to import 110 indentured servants in the form of “migrant bus drivers”. Those who were surprised were those who thought that the union, being comprised ostensibly of leftists, ought to support bringing third-world people in to compete with the indigenous working class, because leftists are supposed to be all about solidarity for poor brown people.

Those who were not surprised were those who understand how reality works. The reality is that Ritchies put in such a low bid for the bus drivers’ contract that they couldn’t fill the positions with Kiwi staff, because the supply of people willing to work at wages that they can’t live off is almost nil. There is now an established precedent, however, for Kiwi employers who can’t find enough local suckers to subsidise their parasitic lifestyles: immigration.

Much like American employers with illegal Mexicans, Kiwi employers have cottoned on to the fact that maximising profitability is a function of minimising wages, and that minimising wages is a function of the leverage the employer has in the negotiation, and that this leverage is vastly increased if the worker is illegally in the country or wholly dependent on the whims of the employer for future work.

Not only does immigration give the local ruling class great power by populating the land with people dependent on them, but it also strengthens their economic position by destroying the leverage that local workers have in employment negotiations. This destruction of leverage is achieved by destroying the amount of trust that people have for each other, because solidarity is necessary to resist the depredations of the parasitic class and solidarity is primarily a matter of trust.

Game theory* tells us about the factors necessary for the evolution of trust.

The first is repeated interaction. People rarely trust others if they believe that they will never meet that other again, and for good reason: it makes sense from a game theory perspective to be more likely to exploit a person who you will never see again, for the reason that they will not be able to take revenge.

The greater the flow of people, the less repeated interaction there is. At one extreme end, there is very little solidarity in an airport terminal, for the reason that the vast majority of interactions here will not be repeated. At the other extreme, there is immense solidarity among members of a pioneer family deep in the Canadian wilderness, for the reason that virtually all interactions will be repeated.

The second important factor is the capacity for social interactions to be non-zero-sum games. In other words, trust only develops when social interactions result in clear mutual benefit. If either side feels like they lost out from the exchange, trust will dissipate.

Many people will make the claim here that immigration grows the overall size of the pie, for the reason that each new immigrant, even if they take up a job, creates at least one job’s worth of demand for other goods and services. This argument is often touted as a counter to the “Lump of Labour Fallacy” and, to that end, it has merit. But this argument ignores the impact of social status on a person’s well-being.

Social status is a zero-sum game in the sense that the higher one person is up the dominance hierarchy, the lower someone else must be. Low social status is extremely stressful – perhaps it wouldn’t have to be experienced as such in an ideal world, but we don’t live in one. In our world, a native person having to accept a lower social status than an immigrant is regularly experienced as a humiliation, for the reason that the native feels pushed out, as if by a cuckoo hatchling.

In a social environment where immigration means that the natives have to accept lower positions (such as an unemployment benefit in lieu of a living wage, as in the case of the indigenous bus drivers in the opening paragraph), there will naturally and understandably be resistance from those natives. This means that forcing it on those natives, against their will, will inevitably have the effect of causing those natives to hate the immigrants instead of trusting them.

The third important factor for the development of trust is to have low levels of miscommunication. As everyone who has spent any time on the Internet knows, clarity and precision are the cornerstones of communication, and when you have hordes of jabbering retards you end up having arguments and fights.

The greater the diversity, the greater the levels of miscommunication. This is because you have more languages and dialects to contend with, and any given person has an upper limit as to how many of these various forms of communication they can master. Exceeding this limit – which is guaranteed to happen if diversity keeps increasing – will cause miscommunication to happen.

Increasing the rates of immigration has the effect of bringing a diverse range of different forms of communication into everyday life, which increases the likelihood of someone misunderstanding someone else. So the greater the levels of immigration, the greater the levels of miscommunication and therefore the lower the levels of trust.

Who benefits from all this destruction of trust? The cheaters. The very same parasite class who entreats the Government to let them import indentured servants instead of paying a fair wage to local workers who are looking for employment. They benefit immensely from the destruction of trust, because an environment of distrust makes the people less able to organise to resist the hoarding of wealth, and this shifts the balance of power in favour of the wealthy.

The greatest trick the rich ever pulled on the poor was to convince them to open the net of solidarity so wide that no-one in it has anything in common with each other any more. The circle of trust has been cast so wide that it has fallen apart, and the traditional ways of re-forming bonds of trust have been destroyed or are severely discouraged.

This makes about as much sense as opening your pantry for the neighbourhood rats and mice to come and take their fill, on the grounds that rodents are disadvantaged compared to humans and therefore solidarity with other humans is a form of supremacism.

* For an outstandingly brilliant demonstration of the basic principles of game theory as it pertains to trust, see http://ncase.me/trust/

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Why Are The English So Poor At Sport?

Sometimes it hurts to be English – especially when playing against Southern Hemisphere sports teams

It could never be said of the English that they are poor sports, but they are poor at sport. Almost astonishingly so. For a nation of 50 million, their historical sporting achievements are dismal: one Soccer World Cup, one Rugby World Cup and a small hatful of Olympic medals are all they have gathered thus far. This article looks at why England is so poor at sport despite massive population and economic advantages over most of their opponents.

There may not be any sport more English than Test match cricket. Not only did England invent the predecessor – first class cricket – but they were also the first to start playing the highest level of the game internationally, with Tests against Australia and South Africa. They’ve been at it the longest, and they have more money behind it than anyone else.

Despite that, their Test cricket record isn’t the greatest. They just got a hiding in their most recent Test – losing by an innings – to New Zealand, a nation with less than a tenth of the population and economic resources. Not only did England lose, but they were bowled out for 58 in their first innings – an outcome that can be rightly described as a humiliation.

Nor was this a fluke – New Zealand are ranked higher than England in Tests, as are Australia, South Africa and India. This outcome is as unlikely as America inventing basketball yet being ranked lower than, say, Argentina.

England doesn’t do any good at rugby union either, despite having invented that also. Although they have been hyped for months by the media as the No. 1 challengers to Steve Hansen’s All Blacks, the English side crashed to 5th place in this year’s Six Nations, a result almost as bad as their group stage exit in the 2015 Rugby World Cup. They are regularly destroyed by teams like New Zealand and Ireland, and this year copped a hiding from Scotland, despite that these nations are but one-tenth of England’s size.

At this point, an Englishman might contend that both cricket and rugby union were relatively niche sports in England and that the major sporting preoccupation was and is, by far, soccer. Australia’s favourite sport is cricket and New Zealand’s is rugby, so those sports attract their best athletes – it’s not surprising they win. England’s best athletes play soccer.

The obvious problem here is that the English don’t do any good at soccer. Despite winning the World Cup in 1966, they haven’t come close since. Nations of similar size and economic power, such as France, Germany and Italy, put English achievements on the soccer field to shame. England hasn’t won a Soccer World Cup in half a century; Germany has won three, Italy two and even Argentina has managed a couple of wins in this time.

England’s best result, in their favourite sport, at any point in the past 50 years was a 4th place finish in 1990. So given the size and power of England, their lack of sporting success demands an explanation.

In essence there are two major reasons why English sporting prowess is so feeble: one eugenic, one spiritual.

The eugenic reason is a question of history. The British Empire was the largest that the world had ever seen, at one point covering one quarter of the world’s land area. Considering that Britain itself is just a small speck off the European coast, it meant that there were enormous new frontiers of land that needed men to work them.

These frontiers needed a certain kind of man. The land was untamed; it needed muscle to clear it and to build the new settlements and roads. Roads had to be dug from hillsides, forests had to be cut down by hand. There were frequent military threats from angry natives, and these needed to met by men with the strength and will to defend a plot of land with violence. Big, strong, tough men.

Over the course of a few centuries, the English divested themselves of their most physically impressive genes, as the carriers of them, being naturally more adventurous, tended to move to the colonies, leaving the sickly, lethargic and weak behind. This means that the modern English population bears all the hallmarks of centuries of dysgenic selection in favour of physical weakness.

The spiritual reason might also be a question of history. For whatever reason, English people no longer have the will to assert themselves. It may be guilt arising from having built a gigantic colonial empire in which many native peoples were brutally oppressed, or it could be residual trauma from many years of horrific warfare over the past century.

In either case, the English people have been so brutalised by their ruling classes over the past millenium that the populace essentially lives in a state of permanent abuse-generated submission, in contrast to the free and easy Aussies and Kiwis. Muslim rape gangs prey on English girls without fear, knowing that the locals are too cowed to do anything about it.

These historical processes have led to a spiritual vacuum, crippling the English from within. It may be that this absence of spirituality has led to English sports teams lacking the will the assert themselves on the sports field.

Verticalisation and Horizontalisation

Dividing the political spectrum into two poles depending on a person’s attitude to sociobiological dominance hierarchies can be more instructive than left and right

There are many competing theories of political spectrums. The best known is left-right, but libertarian-authoritarian and traditionalist-progressivist are two popular others. This essay contends that the most instructive way to look at the basic political division is to split it into what we call verticalists and horizontalists, based on crude biopolitical sentiments.

These terms refer not to a person’s ideal distribution of resources or land, or to the status quo or change, but to a person’s preferred form of social dominance hierarchy. In this sense, verticalists correspond to what has traditionally been called a “masculine” kind of politics while horizontalists correspond to what has traditionally been called “feminine”.

Verticalists also overlap heavily with what has hitherto been considered the right, and horizontalists with the left, but it isn’t as simple as this.

The basic belief of a horizontalist is that the dominance hierarchy ought to be flattened, or at least that the ideal dominance hierarchy is a relatively egalitarian one. This entails that no-one can exalt themselves too far above the others or above the average. The basic belief of a verticalist is that it is morally permissible for an individual to acquire many, many times more wealth or power than the average person.

Horizontalists are therefore much like mainstream leftists when they contend that CEOs should not be allowed to earn 500 times more than the most lowly-paid workers at their company, or when they express a dislike of feudal monarchy. Their core sentiment seems to be a belief that people should not be allowed to wield power over others, and that to do so is obscene.

Verticalists don’t feel the same sense of injustice that horizontalists do at the thought of a dominance hierarchy in which some positions carry much, much more power or prestige than others. They are much more comfortable with the thought of a person having exclusive control over an area, such as a fascist dictatorship.

There are essentially two types of verticalists.

The first are those who think that they themselves are the natural inheritors of the top of the dominance hierarchy. These people are the natural alphas. Usually they are distinguished from the others by being exceptionally vigorous, strong or intelligent. Sometimes their distinction is a matter of will.

The second are those who want to serve the first group, in the hope that some of the spoils of war fall to them. These are the natural betas. If one observes the natural dominance hierarchies that occur in chimpanzee troops, it is clear that this alpha-beta vertical distinction is a naturally occurring phenomenon in social creatures.

Horizontalism draws its power out of a discontentment with this primitive way of things. Some people naturally have a moral objection to others wielding great amounts of power. Horizontalists tend to think that such a thing is obscene, and that “the people” (i.e. the betas) need to work together to avoid being exploited out of their fair share of the proceeds of their labour.

Horizontalisation probably came about when some early primate realised that the alpha male of their tribe was preventing them from accessing reproductive opportunities by means of extreme jealousy and possessive violence over the tribe’s females, and that if our early primate teamed up with a like-minded they could collectively eliminate the alpha male and thus gain access to those females.

Over time, this created a selection pressure in favour of those males who reacted angrily to other males asserting dominance and control over large amounts of resources. In other words, there was a selective pressure in favour of those who believed in horizontalism.

There are also two types of horizontalists. The first are those who do not themselves think they are the natural inheritors of the top of the dominance hierarchy. These people are similar to the beta males who become verticalists, only they have chosen another strategy. Instead of trying to work with and for the alphas, they aim to supplant them and become the new alphas themselves.

The second are those who promote horizontalisation for idealistic reasons, despite being in the upper half of the dominance hierarchy themselves. These people are often very intelligent and have taken a particularly long-term view, because a long-term view will naturally suggest that one should focus on co-operation rather than competition. These people are the natural nation-builders and philosopher-kings, and are extremely rare.

A verticalist generally has no problem stating that one thing is more valuable than another. For example, they might be comfortable saying that Person A is a great man and that Person B is a piece of shit. A horizontalist, on the other hand, is disinclined to show great respect to Person A and is also disinclined to show great disrespect to Person B. In this sense the verticalists are more masculine and the horizontalists more feminine.

Verticalism differs from the popular conception of right wing in several ways. A verticalist has no problem with a person smoking cannabis, for example, because that doesn’t impact the individual verticalist’s ability to get ahead. Whether or not cannabis is legal doesn’t make it harder or easier for a verticalist to get ahead from their own effort, so they won’t support it for the sake of mere tradition like a conservative, or for the sake of destroying poor and non-white people like a right-winger.

Also, verticalists don’t tend to be either racist or misogynistic. A verticalist doesn’t have a problem with respecting a black man or a woman as long as those people are capable of distinguishing themselves from the plebs by their own merit. In this manner, there is an overlap between verticalism and Luciferianism.

Conversely, horizontalism differs from the popular conception of left wing in that it doesn’t need to posit a new ruling class in the form of any kind of global authority. A horizontalist feels absolutely no need to crate a global hierarchy in which an entity like the United Nations wielded great power over the peoples of the Earth. Horizontalists are fairly anarchistic in that sense.

Furthermore, a horizontalist would likely oppose mass immigration from poorer countries, for the reason that this tends to form an underclass of people who aren’t really a part of the nation, and an overclass of wealthy landowners who benefit handsomely from the cheap labour and increased demand for housing. Horizontalists might therefore have more in common with national socialists than with regular socialists or Marxists.

Alchemically, all of these positions relate to the four masculine elements. The basic verticalist dichotomy can be said to reflect the basic feminine-masculine distinction between clay and iron, between the passive, receptive yin and the active, outgoing yang. The horizontalists are themselves split into the false egalitarians of the silver and the true philosopher-kings of gold who intend to lead humanity out of the brutality of biological dominance hierarchies.

VJMP Reads: Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger IV

This reading continues on from here.

The tenth essay in Ride The Tiger is called ‘Invulnerability – Apollo and Dionysus’. Here Evola further describes his conception of an aristocrat of the soul as someone who feels very deeply and who is very moved by things. The modern man (the man of clay, essentially), only feels very shallow emotions, and quickly moves from one such shallow impression to the next.

In this essay, Evola touches on the truly aristocratic topic of deliberately exposing oneself to great trials and tribulations, for the sake of learning one’s true nature. Alchemists will recognise this mentality as the one necessary to burn away everything but the gold so as to learn to distinguish Spirit from Nature. The purifying fire is that which burns away body and mind and leaves one with one’s true nature – it is necessary because it burns away everything shallow, leaving only actions which arise from the depths.

A person who has done this may find themselves gifted with a “transcendent confidence” that is characteristic of the aristocrat of the soul. This is important because in purifying oneself down to the gold one also strips away all of the conditioned belief in life’s meaning. To proceed past this stage, the alchemist must find within themselves the will to assert a meaning to life independent of any outside source. Then one is invulnerable.

To open oneself without falling apart is not easy in an age of dissolution. Here Evola takes care to point out that it’s very easy to fall at the second hurdle. Just because mainstream religion is bullshit doesn’t mean that we should abandon it for wild paganism and barbarianism. There is more.

The eleventh essay is called ‘Acting Without Desire – The Causal Law’. Once a person discovers their true nature, they should also learn the ability to act without desire. This entails taking the correct action at any given time instead of becoming distracted by profit or loss, or by what other people might think of you. Doing what needs to be done.

This needs to be qualified, however. There are naturalistic desires, that arise from the biology of the human animal. These are generally to be avoided. There are also, however, heroic desires, that arise from something greater than the merely physical, from something transcendent. These may be acted upon.

An aristocratic person, then, thinks not in terms of sin but in terms of error. The concept of sin is impossible because God has long been repudiated; all that remains is adherence to standards that one sets from within as an expression of one’s true nature.

One ought to act with a mind to what is effectively a law of karma, in that actions have consequences, regardless of whether those actions conform to any conception of good or evil. Those consequences are real and should be regarded as such. This is fine because the real man of gold doesn’t just live, but rather manifests himself and his true nature in the world.

This is the end of the second part of the book. The next part is called ‘The Dead End of Existentialism’, and the first essay here is the book’s twelfth: ‘Being and Inauthentic Existence’. This deals with the two types of existentialism (as Evola sees it): the philosophical, academic tradition and the practical tradition exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Evola dismisses existentialism almost entirely, for the reason that the existentialist philosophers are too much a product of their times, and because they are not themselves interested in the world beyond. The existentialists are very materialistic and this disqualifies existentialism from being a philosophy that an aristocrat might be concerned with.

Despite this, existentialism can be credited with some things. For one, the idea that “existence precedes essence” serves to keep the existentialist in touch with the metaphysical and transcendent. It also helps to highlight the dual nature of the aristocratic soul, which, as described earlier, is much deeper than that of the pleb.