Observant Anzacs have noticed something very suspicious in recent years. Both the Australian and the New Zealand Governments have embarked on a push towards “co-governance”. This is a poorly-defined concept that manifests in boondoggles like the Aboriginal Voice to Parliament in Australia and Three Waters in New Zealand. This article explains what’s going on.
Like most inexplicably popular political narratives, the narrative that we need co-governance is pushed by globalist forces. Their ownership of the apparatus of propaganda enables them to get everyone talking about whatever issues those globalist forces desire. What they want is people talking about identity politics, and what they don’t want is people talking about class.
So the narrative doing the rounds in Anzac political circles at the moment is that there is an urgent need for some kind of “reconciliation” between the filthy, thieving white invaders and the peaceful, innocent brown and black natives. Without this reconciliation, we can only expect more violence and social discord.
This narrative is also being pushed in North America, proving its globalist origins. In Japan and Korea also, the globalist forces that try to make white Westerners ashamed of their ancestors are pushing the same narratives. Making people hate their ancestors, and by extension their families and nations, is a core strategy of subversion. People who hate their ancestors won’t fight to defend their families and nations.
Predictably, the globalist class pushes two truly shitty subnarratives and demands that we plebs choose between them when, in reality, for us to make any choice is to lose. This is their modus operandi, as seen previously in the “Christianity vs. Atheism” false dilemma (previously described as The Clown World Fork), the “men vs. women” false dilemma and the “Communism vs. Capitalism” false dilemma.
The two subnarratives we get are “Anti-white vs. racist”. Either you hate white people, or you’re a racist. In practice, this means that if you’re white and you don’t agree with your own disenfranchisement, you’re a racist. Moreover, if you’re brown and don’t agree with the disenfranchisement of whites, you’re a race traitor.
Pushing these subnarratives all but guarantees that the population fights with itself and ignores their globalist oppressors. Every parent knows that if you unfairly favour one child they will inevitably end up fighting with the others who resent them. The same logic applies to nations. Help one subgroup at the expense of others, and those others will attack the subgroup that was helped, while the nation-wreckers sit back and laugh.
The purpose of the push to co-governance is not only to weaken white people (although this is a goal that is thereby achieved) but also to pit them against Maori and Aboriginal people. As with children, all it takes is for Anzac governments to give money and privilege to Maoris and Aborigines that they don’t give to equally poor white people, and the end result will be the people fighting themselves.
Job done.
Revealing the fact that co-governance is not intended to help white people, they are browbeaten into accepting it by having ‘racist!’ screamed at them. If co-governance was beneficial to the nation, it wouldn’t need abuse to sell it – it would sell itself through simple logic. The fact that people get called racist for not agreeing to it is proof that it’s not in their interests.
The subdivision of whites into middle-class oppressors, who are thrust into the spotlight, and a working class, who are forgotten, is a bonus for the globalists. The white middle class understand the privilege of their position, and so fight for the status quo. The working class, the only one capable of producing men of true revolutionary sentiment, are completely disenfranchised and marginalised.
What the globalists are ultimately trying to engineer is a situation where the average working-class white Anzac and the average working-class Maori or Aborigine can look at each other in the street and see an enemy. The more animosity that exists between the constituent elements of the Anzac working class, the less animosity goes upwards to the rulers of that working class.
Divide and conquer – it’s a strategy as old as time.
The absolute last thing they want is a situation where working-class Maoris stand up and say that Maoris and whites need to team up against a corrupt government, as an 83-year old one recently did at Waitangi (before getting dragged away). Anyone who claims that the government is the mutual enemy of the working class is decried as a conspiracy theorist or stochastic terrorist.
Paying reparations on a racial basis will inevitably privilege middle-class Maoris and Aborigines above working-class whites, leading to discord and internal strife. True justice would involve, as VJM Publishing has argued before, that reparations be paid to the working class on the basis that they were the working class. The globalists don’t want that, though – they want us at each other’s throats, which is why they’re pushing the co-governance narrative.
The New Zealand First Party were polling poorly in the lead-up to the 2020 General Election, and they did not recover on the night. Their 75,020 votes comprised 2.6% of the party vote, not enough to win representation in Parliament. With that, Winston Peters disappeared, perhaps for the last time.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
European
0.27
Maori
0.32
Pacific Islander
-0.18
Asian
-0.55
The most important thing to note about New Zealand First is that it is (or, at least, pretends to be) a nationalist party. As such, it appeals to demographic groups in proportion to how Kiwi those groups are. So the more loyalty a person has to overseas interests, the less likely they are to vote New Zealand First.
Almost all Maori voters were born in New Zealand, which is why the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to a particular race was the most strongly positive in the case of Maoris (0.32). The next most positive correlation was with Europeans (0.27), and the strongest negative correlation was with Asians (-0.55).
This closely mirrors the depth of the roots that each of those groups has in New Zealand. It’s fair to say that, the deeper one’s roots, the deeper the nationalist sentiments, and so the more likely one is to vote New Zealand First.
Variable
% of electors NZ-born
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
0.55
Voting ALCP in 2020
0.69
Voting Advance NZ in 2020
0.72
Voting Labour in 2020
-0.05
Voting National in 2020
-0.24
Voting Greens in 2020
-0.24
Voting ACT in 2020
-0.01
Voting TEA Party in 2020
-0.75
Underlying New Zealand First’s nationalist credentials are a high proportion of NZ-born voters. No party got both more votes than New Zealand First and a higher proportion of New Zealand-born voters in 2020.
The only parties to get a higher proportion of New Zealand-born voters were the ALCP and the Advance NZ parties, who, like New Zealand First, are heavily supported by disenfranchised people. The globalist parties, like National, Greens and the TEA Party, were the opposite to New Zealand First by this measure.
Some might be surprised that the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being born in New Zealand was not higher. After all, very few foreigners vote for nationalist parties anywhere. The explanation is that New Zealand First voters tend to be disadvantaged, which means they are often forced to live alongside cheap labour imports and refugees, who almost never vote for nationalists.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
No qualifications
0.51
Level 1 certificate
0.59
Level 2 certificate
0.49
Level 3 certificate
-0.13
Level 4 certificate
0.62
Level 5 diploma
0.37
Level 6 diploma
-0.00
Bachelor’s degree
-0.55
Honours degree
-0.46
Master’s degree
-0.50
Doctorate
-0.34
New Zealand First voters in 2020 tended to be poorly educated. There was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having any of the university degrees. These correlations were much weaker than in 2017, when all four correlations (between voting New Zealand First and having a degree) were around -0.70.
The strongest support for New Zealand First came from older people with School Certificate (Level 1 certificate) and younger people who have completed a polytechnic course (Level 4 certificate). This tells us that nationalist sentiments were more common among working class voters.
This set of correlations can best be explained by the fact that a large proportion of New Zealand First voters are rural and Maori, two groups that tend to be less educated than others.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Working as a manager
0.10
Working as a professional
-0.41
Working as a technician or trades worker
0.28
Working as a community or personal services worker
0.31
Working as a clerical or administrative worker
-0.27
Working as a sales worker
-0.32
Working as a machinery operator or driver
0.17
Working as a labourer
0.36
Variable
Voting New Zealand First 2020
Working in agriculture, forestry or fishing
0.44
Working in mining
0.18
Working in manufacturing
0.09
Working in electricity, gas, water and waste services
0.33
Working in construction
0.29
Working in wholesale trade
-0.39
Working in retail trade
0.07
Working in accommodation and food services
-0.16
Working in transport, postal and warehousing
-0.03
Working in information media and telecommunications
-0.45
Working in financial and insurance services
-0.50
Working in rental, hiring and real estate services
-0.15
Working in professional, scientific and technical services
-0.50
Working in administrative and support services
-0.25
Working in public administration and safety
0.00
Working in education and training
0.02
Working in healthcare and social assistance
0.34
Working in arts and recreation services
-0.15
Working in other services
0.31
There was a significant positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and working as a technician or trades worker (0.28), as a labourer (0.36), or working in agriculture, forestry or fishing (0.44), electricity, gas, water and waste services (0.33) or construction (0.29). In other words, there was significant New Zealand First support among typical working-class people.
This can be easily explained with reference to the fact that working-class Kiwis are the big losers from mass immigration, which drives down their wages and drives up their rent. As such, working-class Kiwis are much more likely to support nationalist – and thereby anti-immigration – sentiments than middle-class ones.
There were significant negative correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and working as a professional (-0.41) or working in professional, scientific and technical services (-0.50). This reflects the fact that nationalism often doesn’t appeal to the highly educated, who see it as potentially restricting their freedom to travel and to ply their trade in new places.
It’s necessary to note, however, that a high proportion of people working in professional industries are foreign-born. It might be that middle-class Kiwis are just as likely as working-class ones to be nationalists, but because the overwhelming majority of immigrants are middle-class and not nationalists (at least not Kiwi nationalists), middle-class people, taken as a whole, are not nationalists.
Contrary to the perception that New Zealand First voters are all selfish bigots, there were significant positive correlations between voting for them in 2020 and working as a community or personal services worker (0.31) or working in healthcare and social assistance (0.34). Selfish people don’t tend to choose occupations or industries where helping other people is the focus.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
No children
-0.52
One child
-0.34
Two children
0.14
Three children
0.55
Four children
0.60
Five children
0.45
Six or more children
0.32
Being nationalists, it follows that New Zealand First supporters like to breed. The correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and family size was strongest with those who have four children (0.60). There were also significant positive correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having three children (0.55), five children (0.45) or six or more children (0.32).
On the other hand, there was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having no children (-0.52) or only one child (-0.34).
These correlations can best be explained by reference to the fact that New Zealand First voters tend to be rural, Maori and poorly-educated, which are three factors suggesting a higher-than-usual birthrate. Moreover, the sort of person who moves to a big city and does not have children is almost invariably attracted by globalist ideals.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Is married
0.02
Is divorced/separated/widowed
0.64
Has never married
-0.23
One of the harder-to-explain correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and another demographic variable is that with being divorced/separated/widowed, which was 0.64. It’s not immediately apparent why nationalists who have large families would so often be divorced or separated.
The most plausible reason is that New Zealand First has been highly demonised in the mainstream media and in popular consciousness, and therefore attracts an unusually high proportion of disagreeable people, the agreeable ones having fallen in behind the mainstream parties. As there is a correlation between being disagreeable and getting divorced, disagreeableness could explain the high divorce rates of New Zealand First voters in 2020.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Lives in an urban electorate
-0.43
Lives on North Island
0.10
Is male
-0.00
New Zealand First had strong rural support in 2020. A correlation of -0.43 between living in an urban electorate and voting New Zealand First in 2020 was as strong as the correlation between living in an urban electorate and voting NZ Outdoors Party in 2020, and was exceeded only by voting Advance NZ in 2020 (-0.56).
The slight North Island bias of New Zealand First voters was not significant, and probably reflected Winston Peters’ personal support in his home electorate, rather than an actual North Island bias. It is probably not the influence of a higher proportion of Maori voters on the North Island, because there is a higher proportion of Pacific Island and Asian voters on the North Island as well.
New Zealand First voters tend to be sterotyped as angry men, but the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being male was -0.00, i.e. non-existent. Popular consciousness refuses to accept the extent to which nationalism and anti-globalism are supported by women. The voters of actual far-right parties, such as ACT and New Conservative, had a pro-male bias in 2020, whereas New Zealand First voters did not.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Receiving NZ Super or Veteran’s pension
0.47
Receiving Jobseeker Support
0.34
Receiving Sole Parent Support
0.24
Receiving Supported Living Payment
0.25
Receiving Student Allowance
-0.31
New Zealand First voters are often characterised as angry pensioners who can’t handle change. This perception fits nicely with the stereotype of nationalists as elderly bigots. There might be some truth in this, but it’s misleading.
For one thing, the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being on a pension was 0.47, which is significant but not particularly strong. The correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being on other benefits were also significant: with being on Jobseeker Support it was 0.34, and with being on Sole Parent Support it was 0.24. Very few people on Sole Parent Support are elderly.
For another, the correlation between being on a pension and voting ACT in 2020 was 0.72, with voting New Conservative it was 0.65 and with voting National in 2020 it was 0.64. So the elderly bigot segment of the population would apparently much rather vote for right-wing parties led by whites than for a centrist party led by a Maori.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Aged 20-24
-0.44
Aged 25-29
-0.47
Aged 30-34
-0.50
Aged 35-39
-0.57
Aged 40-44
-0.40
Aged 45-49
-0.09
Aged 50-54
0.18
Aged 55-59
0.44
Aged 60-64
0.44
Aged 65-69
0.45
Aged 70-74
0.43
Aged 75-79
0.39
Aged 80-84
0.31
Aged 85+
0.19
New Zealand First voters are, true to stereotype, significantly older than average. There was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group under 45 years of age, and there was a significant positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group between 55 and 84.
These correlations are, however, not as strong as those between voting for other parties.
The strongest positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group was with those aged 65-69. The correlation in this instance was 0.45. But the correlation between being in this age group and voting ACT in 2020 was much stronger, at 0.77. The correlations between being in this age group and voting National in 2020 (0.67) or voting New Conservative in 2020 (0.61) were also stronger.
In fact, the correlations between being in any age group above 45 years of age and voting National in 2020 were stronger than any of the correlations between being in those age groups and voting New Zealand First in 2020. So New Zealand First’s reputation as a pensioner’s party is mostly unfounded. The reality is that pensioners tend to be wealthy, on account of having much longer than average to accumulate wealth, and wealthy people prefer National to New Zealand First.
Variable
Voting New Zealand First 2020
No religion
0.18
Being a Buddhist
-0.55
Being a Christian
-0.09
Being a Hindu
-0.41
Being a Muslim
-0.43
Being a Jew
-0.37
Following Maori religions
0.36
Following Spiritualism or New Age religions
0.35
Further proof that New Zealand First voters are not from the political establishment comes from the correlations between voting for them in 2020 and religion.
Highly telling is the negative (if not significant) correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being a Christian. This was -0.09. Given how many Christians are in positions of power in New Zealand, the fact that few of them vote New Zealand First reveals the extent to which New Zealand First is an anti-Establishment party.
The most strongly negative correlations between being religious and voting New Zealand First in 2020 were with being a Buddhist (-0.55), being a Muslim (-0.43), being a Hindu (-0.41) and being a Jew (-0.37). This can be easily explained by reference to the fact that people in these four groups tend to be immigrants, and therefore do not possess nationalist sentiments.
The most strongly positive correlations between being religious and voting New Zealand First in 2020 were with the Maori religions (0.36) and with Spiritualism and New Age beliefs (0.35). The former can be easily explained by the heavy Maori support for New Zealand First. The latter can be explained by the fact that many New Zealand First voters feel like outcasts in a globalist system, and people who follow Spiritualism and New Age beliefs are also usually outside the mainstream.
In summary, New Zealand First voters are a cross-section of salt-of-the-Earth working-class Kiwis. They like to have children, don’t like to live in big cities and don’t care much about higher education. Most of them belong to similar demographics as Labour voters, but are put off by Labour’s pandering to globalist interests.
The stereotypes about them carry a grain of truth, in that New Zealand First voters tend to be older than average, but are grossly misleading in the main. For one thing, Maoris vote New Zealand First more than white people do; for another, New Zealand First voters are much more likely to be family people than crotchety old bigots.
The best hope for New Zealand First in the 2023 General Election is possibly that disaffection with Labour’s Maori Caucus sees many Maori voters switch to New Zealand First. Labour gets far more Maori votes (by absolute measure) than either The Maori Party or New Zealand First, and if New Zealand First can pick up most of those Maori voters who have abandoned Labour since 2020 they could get over 5% in the 2023 General Election.
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This article is an excerpt from the upcoming 3rd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing. Understanding New Zealand is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people.
As another year in Clown World ends, many are casting their mind forwards to the future. VJM Publishing has taken it upon ourselves to bring the light of edification to the Anglosphere masses, in opposition to the great stupifying force that is the mainstream media. To that end, we offer some ideas on what might happen in 2023.
The general prediction is that basically everything will get worse, save for a few things. And those few things will be subtle and not appreciated by all.
The area that we can be most confident will decline is the economy. Everyone is predicting a recession for 2023. Recession appears inevitable to most people, given that interest rates have risen sharply across the world in 2022, and that most countries and individuals were heavily burdened with debt before the rise. Maximum debt plus maximum interest rates equals maximum bankruptcies and maximum pain.
On top of the macroeconomic trends, we can also expect high consumer inflation next year. Electricity and food prices have risen sharply in Europe in 2022, and we can expect this to continue into 2023 now that Emmanuel Macron has signalled “The end of the age of abundance.” We won’t see Weimar conditions next year, but we will edge towards them.
Most ominous are the signs of the world continuing to split into the three territories predicted by Orwell in 1984. The Ukraine war has already divided the world into a Oceania (Western) bloc versus a Eurasian bloc. All that remains is for China to fall out with Russia, and to carve a sphere of influence for themselves, and to call it Eastasia.
The mainstream media of 2023 will continue to create the impression that megadeath in nuclear hellfire is imminent. In reality, the true threats to our well-being will be increasingly precarious housing, medical care (especially mental health care) and employment. In other words, the adverse microeconomic trends of recent decades will continue.
Life quality will also decline when it comes to surveillance technology, in particular facial recognition technology. Predictably, this tech will be marketed to us as necessary to keep us safe, but in reality will be used to monitor and harass dissidents. Artificial intelligence will also play an increasing role in identifying wrongthinkers.
The economic maladies will contribute to an ongoing collapse in social cohesion. In urban areas all over the Anglosphere, the atmosphere will become more desperate and nasty. Main street shoppers will find themselves subject to more aggressive panhandling, and public drug use and sexual displays will become more common.
2023 will bring us more and more videos of people beating the shit out of each other in public. The collective IQ will continue to decline from the degeneration of social media, combined with decades of dysgenic breeding. Pointing out that society resembles Idiocracy will become a cliche. Reading books will become a core part of the counterculture.
Television, in contrast to books, will become extremely unfashionable, the preserve of Boomers on their way out. Boomers themselves will become openly hated. Whether justified or not (and it mostly is), Boomers will start taking the blame for every aspect of Clown World.
Trust will reach all-time lows. Already, at the end of 2022, there is almost zero trust for politicians and journalists. This will spread to other professions traditionally considered trustworthy, such as professors and doctors. The ability of mainstream media to manufacture trust in authority figures will decline. This will lead to rapidly increasing support for the alternative media.
Social isolation will become more common, especially among young men. Escapism in the form of screen time will increase (where it’s still possible). Social media will continue to replace other forms of socialisation, and it will become increasingly toxic. Smart people will deliberately remove themselves from FaceBook, Twitter and Reddit.
Despite all this doom and gloom, there are a few good reasons to be optimistic. The Fifth Hermetic Principle, a.k.a. The Law of Rhythm, tells us that even as most things get bad, pressure rises on certain other things to become good. Although we can expect things to get worse in physical and emotional realms, the forecast is that improvements will come in spiritual areas.
Increasing acceptance of traditional spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and psilocybin suggests that a new spiritual age is dawning. We predict a revival of the prisca theologia, the perennial philosophy of which there is a multitude of religious expressions. Small groups of dedicated spiritual seekers will form, away from the oversight of the nihilistic masses.
These small groups will explore incredible, far-reaching new realities. Eventually they will start to join together in order to influence the human race as a whole, away from the darkness of ignorance and towards the light of theognosis. The observed effect of this action, however, will remain subtle throughout 2023.
In summary, most things will get worse for most people, but there is still plenty of good energy coming our way.
Such a great portion of our human lives involves paid work. There is an important sense in which we have been convinced that the ultimate goal of work is to pay off our debts, only to then retire. There is value in challenging the assumptions beneath this kind of myth, because so much of our lives are invested in what is at stake. Unless we come to a very clear understanding of what it is that we feel and what the outcomes are of our participation in this life, we will never arrive at any kind of satisfactory point, nor will we have divined any beneficial understanding of our place in the world.
Firstly, we have inherited a cultural premise that tells us that ultimate well-being can be postponed to the future. This is a very large assumption with far-reaching implications.
Your learned capacity to be happy in the future is a clear reflection of how you have learned to be happy now. Obviously, when the future seems to have arrived, that will also be ‘now’, so your appreciation of your present environment must be managed skilfully.
Have you ever come across people who are retired who cannot stop for one moment? The garden, the housework, the motorhome. These people are continuing the education of a lifetime of work, which is an ethic of keeping busy. People will object: ‘What is wrong if this is what they want?’, but do we really know what we want? Do we know what is best for us, and where we may have misunderstood?
For example, there is hidden assumption that many people have accepted which is that a lifetime of work is also a lifetime involved with suffering, therefore retirement from working life will also equate to retirement from a lifetime of suffering. Just how true is this assumption? It is true that much work, being the expenditure of effort under often physically or mentally stressful conditions, can promote much in the way of personal suffering.
What a lot of people fail to see is that leaving daily work behind is allowing the departure of only one source of suffering, it is not a salvation from suffering as a whole. In fact, the point at which we are accepted to have earned the right to withdraw from a lifetime of work is also the same point at which our mind as well as our physical body is beginning to deteriorate, marking the onset of all kinds of potential physical and medical challenges.
Suffering still follows at our heels from other sources, most notably the illness and death of friends, peers and loved ones who are also subject to the ravages of time. In this respect, retirement enjoys the benefit of a kind of afterlife mythology, in which all of our pain and effort on a daily basis will one day be ultimately vindicated and returned in full measure.
This raises an alarming question: just how much daily tolerance of misery does this mythology support? How many of us are laboring under the illusion that all of our effort is guiding us toward somewhere ultimate where we will have eternal peace and we can finally kick up our heels?
I share a couple of examples of this from my own life which I believe touch upon something relevant here.
I have a friend whose father is in his seventies, and despite remaining reasonably physically fit, he still works himself to the bone every day of his life. He is still in full time employment, despite that fact that he has been given the nod of approval that he could leave his work if he wanted to. Now, you might say ‘If he is doing what he wants to, why not?’ And I would naturally agree, except that all he ever seems to talk about is how much of a welcome change it is going to be when he finally retires.
This poses an odd kind of paradox in which he is on the cusp of retirement, and really past his culturally accepted retirement age, but the actual notion of stopping work seems to terrify him. His insistence on the myth of retirement has been well noted – he has waxed eloquent about the benefits of not having to get up in the morning, to not have to do anything, to have the freedom to kick back with a beer in his hand and watch TV (incidentally, this mythology is also recounted in minor form in the notion of the weekend, almost like a mythic foretaste of Valhalla).
The sad irony is, these are things he has not given himself the permission to enjoy. He may literally never arrive at the point at which he is comfortable with letting go of the ethic of early rising and hard work before he dies. To have lived this way for over seventy years, with no substantial appreciation for being able to allow himself to get a real break, is quite a confounding and yet exceptionally ubiquitous social phenomenon.
We could surmise it comes down to a person’s character and their ethos of being a hard worker, which unsurprisingly is a highly respected social value in any country. It could also be that like the rest of us, he has been successfully indoctrinated into a program of lifelong drudgery, being strung along by an imaginary dangling carrot.
Another example I will give was when I was working out of town one day, an older man came up to me struggling to walk with a stick and specifically wanted to tell me his story. We were the only two people around for at least a kilometer, and he specifically made the effort to approach me from a distance of about three hundred meters.
He told me that he was a keen hunter and fisherman, and that shortly after retiring, he had experienced a stroke which meant that there was no aspect of his retirement he felt he could enjoy. He told me that he worked his whole life, expecting to be able to retire and do what he wanted, except now he felt he had been cheated out of it.
While I don’t believe there is nothing he could have left of value in his life, the fact remains that we do place an inordinate amount of good faith in the application of effort over decades of our lives hoping to have something tangible to show at the end of the process. How does this contribute to us putting off our lives now, and how are we foregoing our responsibility to live wisely and skilfully today?
Are we collectively so enamoured by the prospect of the future holding some form of salvation, either material or spiritual, that we can justify subjecting ourselves to misery today? What would we do differently today, what changes would we be willing to allow in our lives if we discovered the possibility that our imagined future with its ease, relaxation and distance from suffering would never eventuate?
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.