Many people believe that slavery ended in the 1860s in America, in the 1820s in the British Empire, and it hasn’t existed since then. In reality, slavery just changed forms. It became more subtle.
In truth, our rulers don’t need to put chains on our bodies, because they already have chains on our minds. In the 21st Century, people are made into slaves not through beatings but through relentless, all-pervasive media propaganda, psychological brutalisation in schools, unforgiving work schedules and an irrational, capricious government. This mental beatdown creates slave mentality, of which various signs are evident.
The first and most obvious sign that a person is spiritually a slave is being against freedom. If they don’t understand what motivated the American Revolutionaries, they are very likely to possess powerful slave sentiments. Note that this doesn’t mean free people necessarily support degeneracy: the degenerate is as much a slave to their biological impulses as anyone is a slave to anything.
Freedom as a philosophical concept is rejected by all spiritual slaves. They simply don’t understand the pleasure that comes from exercising free will. Ever the yin element, they prefer to be directed.
A slave mentality is often present in cases where a person doesn’t understand the important freedom issues of the day. Those who vote against cannabis freedom in the various referendums want the government to tell them what they’re allowed or not allowed to do, which is pure slave mentality. Someone without a slave mindset will naturally try to maximise their agency. Thus they support freedom as a general principle.
A second sign of a slave mindset is a tendency to lick upwards and kick downwards. The tendency to fawn towards one’s social superiors and abuse one’s social inferiors is extreme in many Third World cultures, and Western travellers immediately notice.
The tendency exists in Western countries too (but to a lesser extent) as it reflects an aspect of human nature: when enough fear is put into a person they become vicious. This viciousness is the reason for the abuse of the weak. In contrast to the truly belligerent, however, those with slave mindset do not challenge the strong.
A third sign is respecting violence more than intelligence. In a normal, healthy society, people think further than their immediate environment. Those who are the best at that naturally gain esteem and rise in the social hierarchy, where they are given power to make some decisions on behalf of the collective. This is natural because the survival of the tribe is best served by giving the most power to those who have the deepest understanding of reality.
In slave morality, normal morality is inverted. Long-term thinkers are resented, and short-term, impulsive thinkers are prized. Anyone who thinks long-term is assumed to be weak, nerdish, sickly of mind. Thoughtfulness is hesitance is weakness. Being “tough” is more important than being wise or intelligent. Thus, the most thuggish and aggressive are at the top. The slave doesn’t see such people as thuggish, of course, but rather cool, fun, spontaneous, powerful etc.
A fourth sign is perhaps the most subtle, but also the most characteristic: resentment. As Nietzsche understood, slaves feel immense resentment at the strength and beauty of free people. A person deep into a slave mindset will feel resentful at life itself. If a person resents the role that Fate seems to have placed them in, and makes life harder for others thereby, they are a certainty to possess a slave mindset.
A perpetual bad mood is a clear sign that a person knows they’re a slave and can’t get over it. If a person is constantly surly, disagreeable, sullen – chances are very high you’re dealing with a slave mindset.
A fifth, and probably the most telling sign, is that a person has given up. There is a great word in Swedish called ‘uppgivenhet’, which means ‘resignation’ in English, but which literally means ‘given-upness’. A person’s level of slave mentality correlates highly with their level of uppgivenhet.
Much like the dog that has been shocked so many times that it lacks the will to take an obvious escape offered to it, a person who has given up will do nothing to better their situation even when presented with opportunity. Those who, when given freedom, spend it watching television, mindlessly scrolling, gossiping or boozing are slaves by any other name.
It’s best to avoid people who demonstrate these five signs of a slave mindset. They won’t lead you into physical bondage but even worse: psychological enslavement.
I have endured a lot of suicidal ideation in my life. As I have written and spoken about at length previously, I have a traumatic stress disorder that has damaged my nervous system. This has led to constant hyperarousal of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is deeply unpleasant to experience. Symptoms of this include nausea, insomnia, anxiety and depression. This has involved a lot of vomiting, a lot of migraines, and a lot of deep breathing until the pain has passed. Although I strive always to say Yes to life, and although I have never made a suicide attempt, I am very tired and will be relieved when this life is over.
This essay has been inspired by the passing of Shane Christie, former Tasman Makos captain, who was well-known in Nelson. I now know a handful of people who have died by suicide, and many others who have made a genuine attempt to die. Many VJMP readers will know at least one suicide victim. The New Zealand nation suffers some 600 suicides every year. Despite our familiarity with the subject, it’s not well understood.
The first thing that people ought to know about suicide is that it’s done because people want the suffering to end.
I was about 13 the first time I felt true suicidal ideation. I had been having a bad time as a result of my mother getting institutionalised for an acute psychotic episode (again). This was the first time it occurred to me that death would solve my problems (I did not believe in reincarnation at this time). I was walking through town, and I realised that I could permanently liberate myself from physical suffering by throwing myself under a truck.
Since then, I have always suffered suicidal ideation to some degree or other, although much less in recent years. It was worst at particular times. 2003, when I realised the West was committing suicide; 2006, when my marriage fell apart; 2013/14, when my grandparents were dying. At these times, the thought of anything in the future evoked the deepest dread. The future itself seemed to be an infinitude of misery, inescapable, an ocean in which I had already drowned and sunk to the bottom. Often I would walk across a bridge and wonder if it could really be so painful to dive head-first onto the road below.
These are typical thoughts for a person tempted by suicide.
I have kept going for mostly two reasons – one, I received unconditional love from my grandparents, which created a large part of me, deep inside, that thought the world was maybe a sort of okay place, despite the bountiful misery elsewhere; two, I was lucky enough to be born really smart and I wanted to see where this could lead. It seemed like an egregious waste to throw that away. In recent years there has been a third reason: the Elementalist imperative to live in a manner that entertains the gods, which involves overcoming suicidal ideation.
People who have more-or-less decent lives usually don’t appreciate how unwelcoming life is for those at the bottom of society. If you were abused as a child, you learn that the world would be better off without your presence. If you were abandoned by one or both parents (and over 20% of New Zealand children grow up without a father in the home), you learn as a child that the world doesn’t want you. Add on top of this the confusion that comes from sexual abuse (this didn’t happen to me, but it happens to many), and it’s understandable why so many make the decision to exit.
I actually hope to die by suicide, which might sound strange. But this is only because I would like to go out on my own terms, mentally prepared. The way Hunter S Thompson did it – just as the decline into old age began – strikes me as ideal (this is still at least 25 years away). Dying in such a manner would not necessarily be a tragedy.
In my religion, Elementalism, there are tragic and understandable suicides. An understandable suicide is when there was, rationally considered, no quality of life remaining. A typical example is an elderly person with terminal cancer. Only sadists would demand that such a person carry on when they don’t want to.
A tragic suicide is when there was significant quality of life remaining. Many tragic suicides are when people surrendered to a bout of depression. These are cases when a person might have gone on to live a decent life, but succumbed in the moment to what should have been a temporary impulse. These cases are truly tragic because of all the lost opportunity they represent.
It’s important to me to reduce the amount of tragic suicides. I support this in my personal life by keeping a friendly ear open for depressed friends and family. I support this in my civic life by advocating for investment in mental health care, particularly for treating depression. Many people don’t realise that a large proportion of suicides are effectively depression deaths. It’s also not well known that depression is usually treatable to a major extent.
The biggest problem with depression is that, when you have it, you don’t think rationally. You become deluded. It’s entirely possible, when depressed, to think that everyone hates you and wants the worst for you. In reality, even if you have a lot of enemies, you don’t have that many. But when depressed, you can feel hate oozing out of every face you see. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re not wanted on Earth.
Another big problem with depression is that if you ask your doctor about it they will throw you on antidepressants and tell you to get back to work. These antidepressants probably won’t be very effective and will probably come with awful side effects. The doctor won’t do the most helpful thing, which is explain to you what depression is and why you have it. So you will have to learn about it from somewhere else.
What I plan to do is to keep informing people about the reality of depression in particular and of mental illness in general. I feel like my own life has been saved thanks to being able to access useful and accurate information about the condition. I feel great joy at the thought I could save another life by popularising such information.
Everyone with any sense can feel that society is breaking down. The general atmosphere is much less pleasant than it was ten, even five years ago: more anger, depression, madness. Less laughter is heard. All the economic news is bad, and people no longer speak of the future as a friend, but as an enemy collecting a debt.
There is precedent for understanding what is happening: broken families.
There are many broken families in our society. These families are broken societies in microcosm. It’s common for parents in broken families to be negligent or abusive, even to have abandoned their own children. This is closely analogous to how governments work in broken societies. What the New Zealand Government did to its own people with Ruthanasia differs only in scale from what a parent does when it abandons its family, and Ruthanasia was only the worst of many examples of governmental neglect. More are to come.
Broken families produce low-trust people. Trust is essentially a person’s estimation of the probability of encountering honourable behaviour. Neglecting one’s children is a highly dishonourable act, a total failure to be an adult. A child so neglected will very likely grow up to be a low-trust adult. They will seldom punish dishonourable conduct, having normalised it, and they will seldom reward honourable conduct, believing it to be an aberration.
Broken societies are full of low-trust people. They expect the worst from others. As such, they’re not willing to give any “benefit of the doubt”. This makes them generally unpleasant to be around. But, like broken families, they aren’t natural. They only exist when an authority figure refuses to do their job properly. This is why low-trust societies are full of rebels and revolutionaries. As Western society becomes lower and lower trust, we can expect more dissidents of all kinds, especially violent ones. As low-trust neighbourhoods produce gang members, low-trust societies produce revolutionaries and tyrants.
A high-trust environment is honour based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of honourable conduct. People’s reputations for past honourable conduct determine the extent to which they are respected. Sophocles once said “Better to fail with honour than succeed by fraud”. In high-trust environments, a person can expect to lose but still be respected.
A low-trust environment is fear based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of malice. Only people malicious enough to do harm are respected; everyone else is exploited. In a low-trust environment, exploiting people is seen as intelligent. A caring person is just a target. Kind people are stupid, because if they were smart they would have perceived that they were operating in a low-trust environment. Low-trust people don’t view the kind as the freemasonry of society (which they are in high-trust environments). They view the kind as wolves would view a lamb.
For instance, people in Thailand have different attitudes to theft to people in Singapore. In Thailand, if you leave your property unguarded, the assumption is that you’re too stupid to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. The logic is similar in gang environments: if you’re too weak to defend your property through fighting for it, them you’re too weak to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. This kind of logic will become more common in the future.
In a low-trust environment, you exploit people up until the point where they push back. The low-trust presumption is that they would do they same to you if they could.
In a low-trust environment, you expect people to be lying. Speech is not assumed to be factual: people are assumed to be “talking shit” unless proven otherwise.
Low-trust thinking and short-term thinking overlap a great deal. As such, a high time preference is another psychological weakness we will have to contend with in the future. People in low-trust families don’t make rational long-term decisions. Neither do governments in low-trust societies. Probably Western governments will torch their economies in coming decades to keep Boomers in comfort. What comes after then will be a truly low-trust environment.
Coping with low-trust environments is primarily about lowering expectations. Lose the expectation of honourable conduct. Lose the expectation that your property rights will be respected. This means to become more cynical, paranoid and suspicious, which is a shame. But it’s a reasonable reaction to the way society is going. High-trust people are going to get destroyed.
Also important in the transition to a low-trust environment is learning to control oneself (to some extent this is downstream of lowering expectations). Living in a low-trust environment is stressful. One’s threat detection mechanisms are often running at full power. Adapting to a low-trust environment means suppressing emotion, both in range and intensity. Unfortunately this means that many people will become sadistic, even psychopathic. But many will have to choose between honour or survival in coming years.
Because low-trust environments are fear based, overcoming one’s fear of death will gain you respect. Thus, a genuinely spiritual attitude will gain you respect. People in low-trust environments have only contempt for the superficially spiritual. But if a person’s spirituality enables them to endure physical deprivations, stresses, threats and intimidation, they will do much better in low-trust environments than non-spiritual people.
Sometimes on X, as in real life, a discussion arises about Ashkenazi Jewish IQ. Such discussions usually involve claims (such as the one made by Grok above) that Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is superior to that of whites, which explains their observed over-representation in positions of power such as academia and politics. These claims are hotly disputed. As a psychological scientist, I thought I’d investigate, so that you don’t have to.
The 2005 Cochran paper referenced by Grok can be found here. In the section titled ‘The Psychometric Evidence about Ashkenazi IQ’, it states: “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ [of] 112-115. This has been seen in many studies (Backman, 1972; Levinson, 1959; Romanoff, 1976).”
However, these claims, as well as the other claims from this section, cannot be verified.
Backman’s study can be found here. The most important table from it is reproduced below.
This table suggests that Jewish intelligence is higher than that of whites in verbal knowledge (VKN) and mathematical ability (MAT). If intelligence was limited to these two submeasures (ignoring e.g. English language and visual reasoning abilities), and normalised to a white IQ of 100, Jews would score ((57.1/51.9)*100) = 110 for verbal knowledge and ((58.6/52.1)*100) = 113 for mathematical knowledge, around 112 overall.
This has been taken as hard evidence of superior Jewish IQ by Cochran and by Grok and others.
However, if we look at the ‘Sex’ group, we also see great differences between men and women. Normalised to a female IQ of 100, men score ((53.7/48.3)*100) = 112 in verbal knowledge and an incredible ((63.9/44.6)*100) = 144 for mathematical ability. Taken together, this suggests an IQ of 128 or so for men compared to 100 for women.
Such a suggestion is transparently ridiculous. Yet, it comes from the exact same dataset as the supposed hard evidence of superior Jewish intelligence.
If I would be an academic, and claim that men had superior IQs to women based on this dataset, and that this superior IQ explained male over-representation in academia and politics, I would be fired instantly. I would be cancelled, hounded to oblivion and destroyed. Yet, it’s acceptable to make the exact same claim about a superior Jewish IQ from the exact same dataset. Grok will even it repeat it unquestioningly.
Moreover, it’s apparent from reading the methodology of the study that the sampling is suspect. The initial study of 400,000 students might have been representative, but this particular study only looked at the 2,925 students who responded to a follow-up study five years after graduation. It’s not clear that this subsample is representative of the actual racial populations.
Levinson’s 1959 study from the Journal of Clinical Psychology is not available online and could only be found if I have access to a university library. Romanoff’s study is part of a thesis that can only be found on microfiche at the National University of Israel.
So of the three ancient references given by Cochran, two are unavailable, and the third contains massive methodological flaws.
A 2o04 paper by Richard Lynn is also referenced. It can be found here.
Lynn’s paper mostly examines verbal intelligence. He does not skirt around this point; it is stated openly in the table in the discussion section (reproduced below).
He notes, as per Backman, that Jews score differently on various submeasures of intelligence. Although they might score higher than whites on verbal intelligence, they are known to have significantly lower scores on some other measures. This can be seen in Table 2 from Backman’s study, where whites scored 51.8 on a measure of visual reasoning and Jews only 46.0.
Taking one submeasure on which Jews do well, and generalising it to assume that Jews do well on all submeasures, is a classic composition fallacy. If I would say that Jews have lower IQs than whites because they scored only ((46.0/51.8)*100) = 89 on a submeasure of visual reasoning, which I had generalised to Jewish IQ in general, I would get laughed out of academia, if not cancelled for life on anti-semitism accusations. Yet people who do make this exact same composition fallacy, only in favour of Jews, are quoted by Grok as world psychology experts.
Moreover, Lynn’s paper states “These figures are well below previous estimates of Jewish verbal ability.” This tells us that, even by the one of the few measures Jews do excel at, a normalised score of 107-115 is an exaggeration. He notes that this Backman study is the only one with a proper national representational sample, meaning that it has the highest quality data of all the studies on this subject. The other studies showing Jewish superiority do not have enough representation or a big enough sample size to be valid.
Lynn concludes that “Probably all that can be concluded with a fair degree of confidence at present is that Jews have high crystallized intelligence (verbal ability) of which the vocabulary test used in the present study is a good measure and that on this ability their IQ in relation to gentile whites is approximately 107.5.” Crystallised intelligence is another way of saying ‘learned intelligence’ and is primarily a matter of education, which Jews are well-known for taking seriously, and is something very different to natural intelligence.
The Cochran paper then goes on to cite The Jew In London, a study from 1900, as evidence for this supposed superior IQ (not accessible).
Also linked here is a 1928 paper from the Eugenics Review. This paper is also cited by Cochran as evidence of Jewish mental superiority. But the same paper states that Jews are between 100% and 300% more likely than whites to suffer mental disease. As with the Backman study, some extremely selective reporting of the results has taken place, such that pro-Jewish results are emphasised, and anti-Jewish results are de-emphasised. Moreover, this study was funded by the Jewish Health Organisation, an obvious conflict of interest.
The Eugenics Review study is methodologically flawed on a number of counts. For one, the intelligence test questions are obviously loaded in favour of learned intelligence and not natural intelligence. For another, we know from the Wilson Effect that the heritability of intelligence increases with age, from 0.2 at age five to 0.8 at age 20. It follows from this that intelligence tests given to younger children, such as the eight to thirteen-year olds in the Eugenics Review study, reflect the environment the child was raised in more than their natural, biological intelligence. Indeed, the paper alludes to this, stating “It is often alleged that, though Jewish children are precocious, they do not fulfil their early promise.”
Perhaps most damningly, the paper concludes that the evidence within is too flimsy to draw any conclusions outside of its sample of Jewish emigre children in London. A 21st Century observer would point out that immigrants to the West from e.g. India and Nigeria are known to be much smarter than the racial averages of their home nations, owing to a powerful selective process, and that the same process would likely have selected for higher intelligence among Jewish immigrants to London 100 years ago, making the Eugenics Review study unreliable.
That is all the evidence presented in the paper linked by Grok for supposedly superior Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence. It’s extremely weak.
There seems to have been a high degree of conflation, deliberate or otherwise, between verbal and mathematical intelligence on the one hand, and general intelligence on the other. This conflation is not made for visual reasoning intelligence, in which Jews do poorly. So high levels of Jewish success in literature and mathematics are taken as evidence of high Jewish IQ, but low levels of Jewish success in engineering and architecture are not taken as evidence of low Jewish IQ. This selective reasoning seems to reflect a massive pro-Jewish bias on the part of intelligence researchers. This bias appears to have influenced Grok.
Ashkenazi Jews have been selected over time for aptitude in specifically urban occupations, hence why (in comparison to whites) they are great at reading and talking, and poor at visual reasoning. They have not been selected for all-round intellectual superiority. Great Jewish engineers and architects are extremely rare: one would expect the exact opposite if Jews were all-round intellectually superior to whites.
Thus, Ashkenazi Jews cannot be said to be smarter than whites in general. Certain subfacets of Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence might be higher than those of whites, but certain other subfacets are lower, so claims of overall Ashkenazi Jewish IQs of 108-115 are complete rubbish.
The conclusion of this author is that Ashkenazi Jewish over-representation in positions of power is because of Christians. Christians believe that God blesses those who bless Israel (Genesis 12:3), where ‘Israel’ is taken to mean Jewish interests in general, and that “if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings” (Romans 15:27). As a result, they work to promote Jews into high positions of power in academia, politics, business and other areas, reasoning that by serving the Jews in this manner, God will bless them.
Support for this assertion comes from the words of Charles Murray, a Christian researcher, who claims that the reason for supposed higher Jewish IQ is “The Jews are God’s chosen people”. This statement summarises the pitiful state of research into the subject of race and IQ in 2025. James Watson can have his reputation destroyed for suggesting that whites are smarter than blacks for biological reasons, but researchers who make the exact same claim about Jews being smarter than whites, only on far, far, far weaker evidence than Watson has, are cited as authorities.
I argue that the perception of Jews as intellectually superior comes from their central role in the Abrahamic religions, and not from any actual advantage in biological intelligence. Because of this central religious role, they are worshipped by Christians looking to curry favour with the God of Abraham. This worship leads to them being promoted by Christians into positions of power, influence and wealth. This promotion by Christians, and not superior IQ, explains massive Jewish over-representation in such positions. The reason why the Ashkenazis are the prime beneficiaries of this process, and not other subpopulations of Jews, is because the Ashkenazis live around the most credulous and gullible Christians, i.e. American ones.
