The Politics Of The 21st Century Have To Be Grounded In Known Psychological Science

Politics has been, since the beginning, a seat-of-the-pants enterprise. Although the West has produced Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli and others, the modern Western leader reads nothing of these men, preferring to just make everything up as they go along. But in the age of advanced science, it’s possible to have a political philosophy grounded in empirical observation.

More specifically, it has to be grounded in known psychological science. Modern psychological science gives us insights into human nature that were completely unavailable to philosophers in times past. Aristotle knew nothing of sociobiology. A sociobiologist standing on Aristotle’s shoulders could give us a vision of our own nature that was broader and deeper than ever before.

A failure to understand human nature is the common theme running through all failed political ideologies.

Communism failed because its architects failed to understand that people are always at least a little bit selfish, and cannot simply be conditioned to behave otherwise by propaganda. A system set up on the basis that people are perfectly altruistic will inevitably collapse into corruption and widespread distrust when rhetoric doesn’t match reality.

Capitalism is failing because its architects failed to understand that people would rather drop out of the system than get worked to death paying for rents and taxes. A system set up on the basis that workers can be employed for 50 hour weeks without the ability to own homes, yet will still have the motivation to work, also doesn’t match reality.

Historically, political philosophy has not been grounded on an accurate view of human nature, because there was no formalised science of understanding human nature. Machiavelli might have been correct when he said that human nature doesn’t change from time to place, but not enough people listen to Machiavelli.

Today’s psychological science, however, can predict human behaviour with frightening accuracy. The Amazon, Google and FaceBook algorithms can predict your next purchase before you even think about it. They can tell you who you’re going to vote for before you’ve even decided. It’s a thousand times more advanced than the knowledge Karl Marx would have had access to.

A modern political philosophy must be grounded in what we now know about human nature. This means: grounded in a psychological science that has a particular emphasis on man’s origin as a naked ape (hat tip to Desmond Morris).

Fundamentally, such an approach understands that the human animal evolved social structures as part of the battle for resources that all animals must engage in. It has to be made explicit that political questions are usually just questions of resource distribution, the same questions that man-ape chieftains would have wrestled with even before civilisation. Unfair resource distribution stirs up very deep, primal instincts that can rapidly become destructive. Therefore it’s important to get politics right.

It has to be taken seriously, and that means scientifically.

The curious thing is that a properly scientific approach appears to favour neither the left nor the right.

Developmental psychology tells us that hitting children, and most other forms of corporal punishment, have extremely bad outcomes for those children. There are strong correlations between getting hit as a child and ending up with antisocial personality disorders or suicidal depression. Hitting kids is right up there with fucking them as one of the worst things you can do. Therefore it ought not to be legal.

Developmental psychology also suggests that societies would benefit from making life less financially stressful for mothers of newborns. In America, where it’s sink or swim, mothers of newborns are often put under extreme financial stress. This leads to much higher rates of child abuse and neglect in comparison to, say, the Scandinavian countries, where mothers of newborns receive adequate financial aid. The end result is more mentally damaged people. So a slight tax increase, with the money invested into early child care, is likely to pay for itself many times over.

Such findings might favour leftist policies, but other findings don’t.

Psychometrics tell us that intelligence is about 80% genetic, and therefore education can only raise it to a limited degree. So importing people from countries where the average IQ is 85, and expecting their kids to turn out the same as ours just because we put them in the same schools, is a recipe for national suicide.

Western immigration politics since World War II has been based on the assumption that all human groups are genetically the same, therefore can be exchanged for each other like so many replaceable parts. Psychometrics has given us a blackpill that we need to swallow: many populations with average IQs under 100 are never going to adjust to modern Western life. We have to stop importing them.

Evolutionary psychology says that multiculturalism is bound to fail because people stop co-operating once they no longer have meaningful bonds of kinship with their surrounding population. So large, multicultural cities like New York, Los Angeles or London could have been predicted to have ended up soulless free-for-alls, as they did.

Evolutionary psychology also tells us that individuals within the same family can vary greatly in IQ thanks to genetic recombination. Even if a group of parents all had IQs of 100, some 2% of their offspring would have IQs above 130, and a similar number would have IQs below 70. Their children might have a mean IQ of 100, but individuals will vary a lot from this average.

This natural variation in individual intelligence means that we cannot have, for instance, families in which every member was expected to become a doctor. Neither can we have racial exclusions such that members of certain races were banned from, or restricted to, certain professions. Such arrangements would be monstrously inefficient given natural variation in intelligence.

Ethology shows us that many different animals use drugs to get high, therefore a War on Drugs is unnatural. Altering the contents of consciousness through the use of psychoactives seems to be as natural as anything else is, perhaps reflecting the Elementalist belief that the world was dreamed up to entertain the gods in the first place. Banning the use of drugs, then, is as futile as banning sex. People will do it anyway.

Grounding a new vision of politics in psychological science could solve many problems. First and foremost it would solve the problems arising from basing a political philosophy on an inaccurate conception of human nature.

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Jordan Peterson’s Unthinkable Corollary

One of the topics that Jordan Peterson most enjoys lecturing us about is how we would have all been Nazis if we had lived in 1930s Germany. Peterson once said “I teach my students that had they been in Nazi Germany during the 1930s they would have been Nazis.” But there’s a corollary to Peterson’s logic – one that he himself dare not consider.

Peterson is an exceptionally knowledgeable psychologist and there’s little inaccurate about what he said. It’s true that human beings are social animals. As Edward Bernays wrote almost a century ago, people don’t tend to form their opinions by thinking about them, but rather by mindlessly aping authority figures.

Humans are not only social animals, we’re also herd animals. Like other herd animals, consensus is valued higher than truth. The consensus-setters are those who rule. In a state of Nature, that’s the strongest alpha male. In the modern West, it’s the invisible goverment that regiments the opinions of the masses through media control.

Media control allows the ruling class to shape the prevailing social narratives. Then, as per human nature, anyone going against any of those narratives is shunned, ridiculed and ostracised. Then the rest fall in line. In practice, it doesn’t actually matter what those narratives are. The vast majority of people will go along with any common narrative, no matter how ridiculous.

It’s an egoic delusion, Peterson loves to remind us, to think that we would have been immune to the propaganda of the 1930s, had we lived then. We are not immune to propaganda. Neither are we immune to social pressure. As such, we would have goose-stepped along with the rest of them.

Peterson is right to labour the point that the vast majority of 1930s Germans were not political philosophers, but rather just ordinary people, getting dragged along by the social currents of their time. Just like us! But then Peterson, happy to have delivered his sermon, ends it there.

The only problem with Peterson’s line of thought is that it doesn’t go far enough. There is a corollary to Peterson’s argument, one that Peterson dares not think about.

Namely: if the NSDAP had won the war, then according to Peterson’s own logic, we’d all be sitting here praising them today. If the NSDAP, and not Anglo-American capitalists, had won World War II, it would be the NSDAP setting the official moral agenda. They would control all of the world’s media. Thus, they would comprise the invisible government that shaped the world’s opinions.

If the NSDAP had won World War II and wiped the Jews out, then according to Peterson’s own logic, he himself would be telling people right now how that was the right thing to do. He himself would be lecturing people about how Nazi morality was self-evidently true as per the Will of God, and that the swastika represented order in contrast to the chaos of Marxism and Bolshevism.

Peterson might even be telling us that Hitler was the second coming of Rabbi Yeshua, the proof being that both Hitler and Rabbi Yeshua were opposed by the Jewish establishment of their time. If he did, he would be acting entirely consistently with his own admonition that, if modern people were transported back to 1930s Germany, they would be Nazis.

For him to deny this would be for him to contradict himself. It would mean that he had fallen prey to the same egoic delusion that he has been lecturing others about. In fact, psychological science tells us that had the Nazis won World War II, we would all be Nazis today. And just as globalist logic is self-evident to us today, so would Nazi logic be self-evident to us had they won.

In the same way that anyone wanting to become an academic today must deny the science of race and IQ so as to appease the globalist victors of World War II, anyone wanting to become an academic in the Nazi victory timeline would not be allowed to deny it. They would have to be a eugenicist, whether they liked it or not.

Most people, upon hearing this argument, will deny it stenuously (our morals in 2023, of course, don’t come from an invisible government but from pure reason). Hence it is described as an unthinkable corollary.

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Notes From The Second Intifada

I lived in Europe during the Second Intifada, which took place from 2000-2005. Although the Intifada did not take place in Europe it nonetheless had a major effect. This was partly because of the large numbers of Palestinian refugees in Sweden, where I lived. It was also because of the deep interest in foreign affairs that my then-acquaintances possessed.

Being a double outsider – someone who was not only outside the Israel-Palestine conflict but also outside Europe – I had an unusual vantage point. Few people in Sweden were familiar with New Zealanders, and so people were more open with me than they would have been with most other nationalities. This meant that people told me all sorts of things they would normally have kept secret.

Not having ever been to the Middle East, I didn’t have any direct knowledge of the conflict. Therefore, it was impossible for me to take a side in it. But I was able to glean direct knowledge of the psychology of the participants through meeting so many of them in Europe.

What Westerners usually don’t understand is that Muslims believe, with absolute certainty, that their religion is destined to rule over the entire world one day. They believe this like Westerners believe that the Sun will one day swallow the Earth, or in the Heat Death of the Universe, i.e. it’s essentially never questioned.

The difference is that Muslims also believe that this conquest is a moral imperative that outweighs all others. Any action taken to further the Islamic conquest of the world is morally acceptable. Any action taken to hinder the Islamic conquest of the world is morally unacceptable. All other moral beliefs are secondary.

Therefore, all Muslims supported all actions against the “Zionist entity”. Any amount of murder, rape or mutilation was acceptable as long as it was directed against that enemy. No act of cruelty against that enemy was even a crime. For the Muslims in Europe, news that some Israelis had been killed was like for a New Zealander to hear that the All Blacks had won. It represented a triumph in the great battle.

None of this is to say that the Israelis are any better.

The Israelis have entirely internalised Rabbi Yaacov Perrin’s notion that “A million Arab lives are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” For them, only other Jews have value. Everyone else is at best a tool, at worst an enemy. Understanding this extreme hostility to outsiders is necessary to understand the Palestine-Israel issue.

In 2001, when I first came to Europe, the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre was still fresh in the minds of many. People knew how the massacre was celebrated in Israel. Thus, any talk of the Israelis being blameless was nonsense. In contrast to the Anglo world, where Jews are considered morally perfect, in Europe they’re generally considered imperialist invaders.

This extreme xenophobia on the part of the Jews means their behaviour is almost identical to that of their enemy, despite the Jews’ higher IQs. Just as with the Muslims, the Jews completely ignore any atrocities committed by their own side. The killing of any Palestinians is forgotten before the bodies are even cold. Also just as with the Muslims, the Jews expect you to take their side and will hate your guts if you don’t.

Jews believe they are the teachers of mankind. The concept of tikkun olam means that they consider humanity a wretched mass of brainless animals until perfected by Jewish domination. Again as with the Muslims, and their beliefs in their own superiority, this idea is never questioned. If you, as an outsider, disagree with it, you are either stupid or evil.

To not be a Jewish supremacist is to be a Nazi. In the Jewish mind there are only those two categories. Either you worship Jews as divine and perfect educators of the sinful human race, or you’re a Nazi that demands their total destruction. Yet again as with the Muslims, there is no middle ground. George W Bush’s dictum that “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” applies to both sides.

Having observed such attitudes, I knew by the end of 2003 that there is zero hope of any peaceful settlement between the two sides. One will eventually wipe the other out. Any talk of peace merely delays this inevitability.

Many Westerners have been surprised by all of the pro-Palestine/Hamas protests in recent weeks. Evidently there exists a widespread delusion that the Islamic refugees the West has let in over the past 20 years must feel an obligation to integrate, and to leave the petty squabbles of their homelands behind. In reality, they (like the Israelis) are doing everything they can to drag the entire rest of the world into the conflict. Both sides are masters of propaganda, and shamelessly pump it into the collective consciousness.

In summary, the Second Intifada taught me that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a problem that can never be peacefully solved. Both sides are full of hate to a degree that is incomprehensible to any normal Westerner. Neither side has enough basic humanity to even desire peace, let alone achieve it. And consequently they will kill each other until only one side is left.

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The Seven Alchemical Ages Of Man

In the same way that the Mithraic Ladder consists of seven steps, so too can the life of a human being. From an alchemical perspective, the human life can be divided into seven distinct stages, each with its own metal and patron gods. These seven ages of man constitute a life ideally lived.

The first age, from zero to 12, is analogous to lead. At this level, base survival is the most important concern of all. Children aged between zero and 12 have to learn not to fall off cliffs, not to run out in front of traffic, not to provoke dangerous animals/people, not to eat poison or to stick a fork in an electrical socket.

This is the realm of Saturn. Being in the realm of Saturn, things are very serious. There is no room for levity when you’re trying to teach a child not to get hit by a bus. Historically speaking, most people died in the first 12 years of life, mostly from childhood diseases. Thus there is a connection between Saturn and the Grim Reaper.

From 12 to 24, the relevant alchemical metal is tin. This is the realm of Jupiter, where joy is the natural state. This second alchemical age is achieved by anyone who survives the age of Saturn, i.e. the age of basic physical survival. No longer being concerned with death or dying, teenagers become primarily concerned with overcoming boredom.

All play and all games occur under the auspices of Jupiter, whose jovial nature embodies the frequency of recreation. Tin is brighter than lead; this represents the overcoming of the saturnine seriousness of the first age and the transmutation of dullness into brightness.

The years 24 to 36 are spent under the auspices of Mars, the god of iron. These years are when a man masters fighting and martial prowess. The peak fighting ability of most men will be during this age. Usually a man learns how to fight as an individual at the beginning of the age of iron. By the end of the age of iron, he could lead a century of men into battle.

Iron can carry a sharper edge than any other metal, hence it represents the basic masculine action of dividing. For millennia, an iron sword was the very emblem of strength and virility. Successful transmutation of tin into iron means that a man learns how to impose order upon the material world. Being able to impose order, he is now a warrior.

Venus rules the years from 36 to 48. Here the relevant metal is copper, representing romance and lovemaking. Having proven himself on the battlefield, here the alchemist has to prove himself with the trophy of battle: a woman. Hence the peak sexual market value of a man who has lived well is between these two ages (the less well one lives, the earlier one peaks).

Copper is both softer and more colourful than iron. This represents the age when man realises there is more to life than battle. Here he must soften because he must engage with his children instead of foes on a battlefield. So he softens, becomes funnier and less serious. Transmutation of iron to copper is about the change from warrior to family man.

From the years 48 to 60 man labours under Athena, the goddess of civic participation. Having raised his children so that they have successfully survived the gauntlet of lead in the first alchemical age, a man moves beyond his family and moves into a position of social power. Silver is more brilliant than copper, representing man’s broadening of focus from family to society.

Plato wrote in Republic that a man is ready for a political life at age 50. By the fifth alchemical age a man should have exhibited enough mastery over his life so far that other people want to be like him. He is not yet capable of radiating divinity but, under the auspices of silver, he can reflect it (as does the Moon). As such he can play a role bringing people together.

Between 60 and 72 a man is in the realm of mercury. Mercury is also the name of the god of the sixth alchemical age. Silver is transmuted to mercury by a process of quickening, in other words, through the entry of the divine into the material world. This is a minor form of illumination compared to the seventh age, but it’s powerful enough to have major effects.

This is the age of greatest temporal power. At the completion of the age of mercury a man might be an emperor with control over all the known world. Compared to a man of silver, a man of mercury has more gravitas and inspires more awe. Some might even consider him a demigod.

From age 72 to age 84 – or until the end of life – a man is in the realm of gold. Here he ought to fashion himself after Apollo, who represents perfection and illumination. In this age a man ought to learn how to radiate divine truth. Learning to do this is the secret of transmuting mercury into gold.

Ideally, a man reaching this stage would retire from all material concerns and focus entirely on readying himself for death. Temporal power has little appeal to those in God’s waiting room. Those who can grow old and die with grace and dignity can be said to have apotheosised, as Socrates did. Dying with the highest possible frequency brings the best chance of taking one’s place among the gods after death.

The example given in this article is idealistic. The actual life of any given alchemist will not progress this smoothly. Aspects of all seven ages are present in every age, and so a person can work the frequency of any stage at any time.

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