Writing Characters of Lead

A character of lead is one who is yet to be affected by the energy of your story. They might be a peasant, or the son of a blacksmith, or the daughter of any random family. In principle, such a character could be practically anything as long as they are not in any way enlightened.

Lead is a metaphor for the base condition of man. In this sense, the lead represents the lowest possible spiritual level. A character at this level is yet to hear the call to adventure, and has no concept of it. They will not believe in God, or in anything spiritual (although they might claim to). They will be a human being in their natural, material state.

Going back to the metaphor of light, a character of lead could be considered entirely unilluminated. There is no higher order in them; their daily lives are characterised by fear. Lead is sometimes represented by the planet Saturn, this being the furthest from the light of the Sun. As such, it is sometimes represented by an old man with a wooden leg and a scythe, all three components suggesting death.

A character of lead has no higher calling, or even any idea of what that would feel like. They have no great battle to win, whether external or internal. Their lives tend to be a string of battles against whichever adversary appears in the moment. This is usually whoever is preventing them from gratifying whichever impulse is currently gripping them.

Three of the most salient features of lead are that it is soft, dark and dense.

Characters of lead are soft because they are passive. This softness is not physical but spiritual. Lead is extremely easy to bend, and this is also true of characters of lead. Men and women of lead are not the ones that will stand up and lead a rebellion against a tyrannical king. Instead, they yield.

This softness doesn’t prevent passive aggression. Characters of lead are capable of all kinds of passive aggression, but they lack a conception of honour. Therefore, they are not hard enough for direct assaults, and must slink about in the shadows looking for the backstab.

Characters of lead are dark in the sense that they are of the soil and live close to it. It’s likely that such a character will be dressed in blacks and browns, perhaps of sackcloth. Their facial expressions are commonly “leaden-faced”, and their manner of walking can be described as “leaden-footed”.

In many cases, the emotions of characters of lead will also be dark. Because of the absence of spiritual enlightenment, characters of lead take offence easily and hold bitter grudges for a long time. Sometimes their low frequency will make them stand out in a room of people. They regularly appear sinister to characters of higher frequencies.

Lead is also dense. This reflects the way that characters of lead are often described as not very intelligent. A character of lead is one that has extreme difficulty learning from adversity or changing their behaviour to avoid future suffering, at least in the long term.

On a metaphorical level, this density means that they are not easily affected by light. A character of lead might find themselves in the presence of a highly spiritual individual and not appreciate it. Spiritual insight is to characters of lead as pearls before swine.

Characters of lead might be noteworthy for an advanced sense of smell. Being of lead, they tend to be very close to nature, and to the soil. This can give them certain advantages. Whereas the more refined characters might be precious on occasion, the characters of lead are perfectly happy wallowing in the mud.

A character of lead can be motivated by anything, usually whatever instinct happens to flow through their veins at any moment. Typically this is fear – having no spiritual sense, the character of lead has no reason to be brave about anything. A fear of death is perhaps the most salient feature of their mentality.

Despite being passive, a character of lead can provide an impetus to your story. Their fear of death may cause them to take a cowardly action that sets off a chain of reactions. Someone else may have entrusted them with the responsibility of standing firm, only to have them yield.

Characters of lead tend to be young, because lead represents the earliest stage in development. A callow youth who is yet to learn any major life lessons, and as such does not respect his betters, is archetypal. A middle-aged character of lead might be pitifully immature, having failed to learn from their mistakes. An elderly character of lead might be on death’s door, life’s spirit leaving them.

Characters of lead tend to cause a lot of strife. Although they don’t have the outright fondness for violence that marks out characters of iron, their lack of spiritual refinement makes them unforgiving. As such, they are prone to petty feuds and grievances. The tendency is for them to leave destruction in their wake.

Because characters of lead don’t tend to have any spiritual sense at all, it’s very rare for them to think about life after death, or even further ahead than the next winter. If another character tries to speak to them about spiritual subjects, they’ll probably get a shrug. They don’t share the contempt for the spiritual possessed by the characters of iron and silver – they’re simply indifferent.

Piss and fart jokes, on the other hand, are greatly amusing to characters of lead. In fact, the more crass and vulgar the better, because that will more vigorously stick it to the snotty characters of silver and mercury. Toilet humour is the perfect accompaniment to characters of lead.

It’s common for characters of lead to serve as thieves or rogues. This is because they have very little in the way of moral compunctions – at least not when it comes to other people’s suffering. When it comes to their own suffering, on the other hand, they can be just as precious as anyone else.

In summary, characters of lead occupy the bottom rung of spiritual development. As such, they represent humans in their unrefined state. Characters of lead are not necessarily evil, although they are certainly capable of evil acts. This level is often where the protagonist of your story will start, and will only transform once the magic of your story begins.

This is an excerpt from The Alchemy of Character Development by Viktor Hellman, the sixth book in the Writing With Psychology series.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Fear Porn In An Age Of Superstition And Ignorance

By DIE SIENER

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say; when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” – C. G. Jung, Aion (Collected Works 9ii)

As humanity enters a new decade, the sum of our collective fear, superstitions and ignorance has manifested into the smallest of nature’s creatures. A simple virus, just a fraction of a micrometre in length, a small chain of biochemical coding, has triggered the near-collapse of the most complex political, moral and economic system man has ever constructed.

The continuing effects of Corona-chan on our fragile world have been most enlightening. The sheer amount of fear this virus has sparked is sure to leave a deep and lasting impression on humanity. The consciousness of man, his whole paradigm of existence, is eternally changed.

Where could this lead? Let us explore some of the aspects of this transformative event with the aid of the hermit’s lamp.

A virus is a genuine oddity in nature; it exists in the twilight zone, somewhere between the concepts of alive and dead. A virus is incapable of self-replication and does not feed or produce its own metabolic energy. Even though it lacks impetus, within its complex chains of chemical information lies hidden structure and function.

Consider that a virus functions on the principles of attraction. Receptors on the virus’ outer membrane act as a key which fits into the corresponding lock of a target cell’s outer membrane. Once the key finds a lock that matches its specific pattern, the virus enters the cell by chemical subterfuge. Once inside the cell, the information hidden within the virus structure goes about certain practical functions through chemical processes most profound.

This sophisticated chemical program runs within set parameters; it first seizes specific operational components within the cell and then proceeds to replicate itself all while deploying an elaborate chemical camouflage to hide its activities. This process continues until a particular chemical trigger is released.

Now multiplied thousands of times, the virus violently explodes out of the cell and in the process destroys it. The process repeats in this way until the host dies or its native functions find a way to destroy all the infected cells. Once the organism has “learnt” how to identify and kill infected cells, re-infection of the host by the same virus does not typically reoccur.

Now, let us cast these observations into the mirror and reflect on how analogous a virus is to a meme. As with a virus, a meme encapsulates information within a structure that serves a particular function. Furthermore, as with a virus, a meme spreads by way of unlocking the consciousness through mimicry. Inside the mind, it goes about copying itself and then once it reaches a critical mass, explodes out of the host and into the memetic environment.

A most profound revelation can now be found when considering that this methodology, by which a virus or meme propagates, can also be its cause. Using the hermit’s lamp, we see the macrocosm reflected in the microcosm. As such, we can see how the forces which birthed Corona-chan are the very same spiritual forces representing humanity’s pent up anxieties.

Keeping these concepts in mind, let us consider the effects of fear on destiny, and what part ignorance and superstition play in the obfuscation of our destiny.

When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear – Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

Some of the ruling elites – best exemplified by Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg – seek to subdue humanity to a twisted vision of a technocratic and totalitarian future. For the sake of us all, they urge, we need to expand the cages of our captivity and become even more connected in the never-ending pursuit of building a globe-spanning, human-machine.

In their dreams, the individual will become subjugated to the hive mind through technology. The ruling class of technocrats will direct the masses from their lofty heights for the common good. Transhumanism becomes the ultimate goal of humanity, especially the elites, in an attempt to alleviate our collective fear. Look to movies such as The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell or Transcendence as metaphysical critiques of this idea.

Some politicians eagerly support such an outcome and use the Corona-chan induced fear as a trigger to activate mass enforcement of such a memeplex. It is a forgone conclusion, they tell the masses. We will become progressively more integrated, progressively more “unified” as time progresses, it is only a matter of time, resisting this movement is counterproductive and short-sighted. They use fear to herd humanity into this consensus, but our divine soul reacts against this by producing a strong force of repulsion. This repulsion creates a feedback loop, empowering Corona-chan further.

The creeping technocracy illustrates one possible aspect of fear and how our spiritual subjugation to its memes can lead to an undesirable future. There are, however, an infinite number of these memeplexes fighting for dominance. They are all, by necessity, going nowhere – they are all primarily based on fear.

Let us now consider superstition. The MSM is today’s church, our moral leaders, the ones who tell us right from wrong and instruct as in all things ethical. Confronted with the Corona-chan meme, the MSM went into a fear porn inspired gala of superstitious claptrap of the “we are all going to die” variety. It is cringeworthy, to be honest.

For the first few weeks, when the virus was spreading around China, everything was all fine and dandy. Their sermons continued along the usual lines of “checking that racism”, “hugging your local Asian” or “go to Chinatown to eat stir fry, bigot.”

Their usual admonishments of globalist utopianism were not to last once it became clear that the virus indeed posed a real threat to the system on which they feed. The editors faltered a bit but managed to realign their moral compass in short order. They quickly directed their underlings to spew out sermon after sermon of tabloid grade fear porn. Superstition mixed with fear is to be the new drug with which they will subjugate the masses.

Now, yes, the ruling elites and high priests of the MSM are not the only ones to blame. In a world where materialism has become all-encompassing, humanity as a whole has become ignorant of their real purpose. Lost in Maya, the phenomenal world, and dragged down into ignorance by the fears and superstitions of their lower nature, the human race has become lost.

This existential crisis is probably the underlying anxiety from which the Corona-chan meme manifested.

The origins of Corona-chan may be a mystery to some, but others firmly believe that it is the manifestation of these three forces that birthed her into this world. It is now up to us, ordinary people, to decide which way this will go. Will fear, superstition and ignorance overpower humanity completely? Or is there another way forward?

If, as there is ample reason to suspect, the modern Freemasonic Order was profoundly influenced by, if it is not an actual outgrowth of, Francis Bacon’s secret society, its symbolism is undoubtedly permeated with Bacon’s two great ideas: universal education and universal democracy. The deadly enemies of universal education are ignorance, superstition, and fear, by which the human soul is held in bondage to the lowest part of its own constitution. The arrant enemies of universal democracy have ever been the crown, the tiara, and the torch. – Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

This short passage regarding Francis Bacon’s desire is most illuminating in the context of the discussion above. The uninitiated often ask, “What is our purpose?”, but to the initiated, it seems so obvious. The initiate, through Gnosis, knows that which alleviates all fears, sets aside all superstitions and vanquishes all ignorance. It is through this middle path, this hidden path and centrist philosophy that we can balance the spheres and remain focused on the great work.

Now more than ever, humanity needs to band together against those that want to subjugate our Spirit. We need to stand firm – there is another way, and it is yearning to be manifested.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Midwit’?

Films and history books warn us of the dangers of evil geniuses coming to power. Skillful orators like Hitler, we are told, are able to trick masses of people into following them, with dire consequences. But the lone evil genius is not as big a danger as a horde of mediocre people. Understanding the midwit phenomenon is crucial to understanding Clown World.

A ‘midwit’ is someone of middling intelligence. They are higher than lackwits, halfwits and fuckwits, but are lower than any genuine wit. They’re not dull, just not bright. Although this sounds very ordinary, the sheer mass of humanity at the very centre of the bell curve creates its own phenomena that we have to be wary of.

Psychologists have observed a curious phenomenon that is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This is when a person with a low level of ability or knowledge heavily overrates themselves. It’s a specific example of an area of Psychology known as illusory superiority.

A person is most liable to fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect when they know a little bit about a subject. This is because a person who doesn’t know the boundaries of a field of knowledge will not know the limitations of their own knowledge either. The tendency in such cases is to discount the volume of the knowledge not known.

When someone uses the term ‘midwit’ they are referring to this kind of person. They don’t mean a person of merely average intelligence, but rather a person who is utterly incapable of recognising their own intellectual shortcomings. The midwit secretly thinks he might be the smartest person who ever lived. This is because his understanding of his limitations is minimal.

Central to midwit psychology is their tendency to go along with the herd. Midwits can’t actually see ahead, much less beyond, but they like to give the impression they can. They only way they can continue to give this impression is by expending great energy determining what actually smart people think.

The problem here is that midwits can’t generally tell the difference between people smarter than them and crazy people. This leads to three characteristic midwit errors.

The first is dismissing people smarter than them as crazy.

Midwits don’t have the academic acumen to read scientific journals, much less conduct scientific literature reviews. As such, they are dependent on the word of experts in order to understand anything. Of course, if a person doesn’t have any expertise themselves then they have to rate those who do on trust, and that is a crapshoot at the best of times.

Any genuine scientific or cultural advance will, at first, only be understood or appreciated by the genuine experts and geniuses in the field. From them, it filters out to the merely brilliant, then to the bright and then finally to everyone else. So any really interesting scientific advance will only be appreciated by a minority – until it stops being interesting.

Because the midwit follows the herd, the midwit will always dismiss the genius as crazy on account of his low number of followers. When the genius becomes recognised by the masses, the midwit will follow along, up until the point where the genius becomes unfashionable. Then the midwit will drift into the next intellectual trend.

The second characteristic midwit error is following a crazy person out of the belief that that person is smart.

The archetypal example of this is the Manson Family. Charlie Manson was certainly capable of sounding smart, but his was more of a carnival storyteller’s glibness than the wisdom of a sage. He could take people for an enjoyable ride and show them some incredible places, but at the end of it they were left with regret.

Manson was certainly capable of expressing advanced spiritual insights. After all, if you hang around the psychedelic drug scene long enough you will come to hear some profound insights into the nature of reality from genuine shamanic adventurers. All he had to do was parrot them accurately enough and a couple of dozen Southern California midwits decided that he was a guru.

Because midwits are mediocre, they’re especially prone to mistake convoluted insanity for profundity. Consequently, there are all kinds of lunatics who have followings on account of that their babblings have become fashionable. Most of these lunatics are mainstream media figures – television celebrities are to the midwit what the gods were to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

These errors are magnified by the sheer number of midwits out there. Because there are so many of them, most midwits are used to the experience of encountering others who agree with them. This leads to the third, and most characteristic error of the midwit: groupthink.

Because the midwit knows that they are not distinguished in any fashion, being entirely mediocre, they come to prize the bare average above the exceptional. From this they develop a tendency to ignore anything vaguely controversial. If the herd thinks it, that’s good enough for the midwit. As the midwit is right on the centre of the bell curve, their opinions are the most common. Therefore, they conclude, they must be correct.

Related to this, midwits are especially fond of labelling any explanation they cannot understand a ‘conspiracy theory’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they fall for all sorts of conspiracy theories themselves, especially ones that get popular in the midwit’s circle, or which may have been pushed in the mainstream media.

The traditional solution to the midwit problem was beating them into submission with a Bible. In recent years, control has shifted to a combination of psychological abuse (at school) and pacification (through the mainstream media). The contentment of the midwit is the dam protecting Clown World from the waters of change. If it goes, we fall into chaos.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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They Want To Cause Suffering To People They Hate

The latest cannabis referendum poll suggests that 54% of New Zealanders will vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum on September 19. According to the poll, there are significant differences in levels of support for the referendum between supporters of the various parties. Some people have found this hard to explain. For their benefit, this essay elucidates.

Paul Manning, Chief Executive of Helius Therapeutics, asked the question “What do they want?” in response to the news that many elderly and conservative voters plan to vote against the cannabis referendum. He points out that these people understand that cannabis is widely available and that cannabis prohibition is not working. So why do they support it?

The reason why most elderly and conservative voters intend to vote ‘No’ is because they hate the sort of person who uses cannabis and they want to cause them suffering. This might sound uncharitable, or even cynical, but it has to be understood that most elderly and conservative Kiwis are twisted creatures of hate.

For their entire lives, this generation of New Zealanders has been exposed to propaganda inducing them to hate cannabis users. Ever since the 1930s, when Reefer Madness came out, popular culture has normalised the idea that cannabis users are depraved, anti-social maniacs. This propaganda has had the intended effect on the elderly of the West, who mostly swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

This anti-cannabis propaganda stems from two main sources, both of which hate cannabis for its ability to induce free thinking.

The first is the Church, who have always hated freethinkers because freethinkers question religious dogma. For centuries, the Church has relied on the acquiescence of its subjects in order to brainwash them. Freethinkers were the enemy because they threatened this acquiescence, and thereby Church control – this is why the Church has always persecuted them, going back to the murder of Hypatia and beyond.

The second is the Government, which wants a compliant population of submissive worker drones. Their ideal citizen is one with an IQ of 90, who goes to work everyday and produces widgets or basic services without ever complaining. As far as the Government is concerned, they are running a tax farm, and their chief concern is to milk the livestock as profitably as possible. The last thing that want is someone rocking the boat with free thought.

The elderly have internalised almost a century of this propaganda. As such, they genuinely believe that cannabis users are dangerous radicals who threaten to destroy the foundations of society itself, and who therefore deserve all the abuse they get. This hatred, in their minds, justifies cannabis prohibition.

In America, it was admitted that the purpose of the War on Drugs was to smash people they hated. John Ehrlichman, aide to Richard Nixon during the latter’s presidency, admitted that the purpose of the War on Drugs was to target anti-war hippies and black people. In an interview with Harper Magazine, Ehrlichman is quoted as saying:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Although it hasn’t been admitted, the same calculus applies in New Zealand.

There are almost no blacks in New Zealand, but elderly and conservative New Zealanders hate Maoris just as much as their American counterparts hate blacks. Elderly and conservative New Zealanders also hate hippies, who they associate with Communism and with the free and honest sex lives they wish they had had.

It’s well known that Maoris are strong supporters of cannabis law reform – the correlation between being Maori and voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 was a whopping 0.91. The reason for this immensely strong support is because Maoris are adversely affected by cannabis prohibition to a much greater degree than other New Zealanders.

However, this disproportionate harm is considered a good thing by many elderly and conservative New Zealanders. They see Maoris as the enemy anyway – a thieving, bludging, ungrateful, violent enemy – so if cannabis prohibition harms them, that’s a good thing.

These elderly and conservative New Zealanders also hate other cannabis using demographics, such as young people, artists, hippies and freethinkers. Elderly and conservative New Zealanders do plenty of drugs, but their drugs are sedatives, alcohol and opiates. Cannabis prohibition doesn’t target them.

This hate is why arguments appealing to the suffering caused by cannabis prohibition often have no effect. Most elderly or conservative voters think “Cannabis users are suffering? Good! Smash them, crush them, destroy them. Ruin their lives with a criminal conviction. Imprison them so their kids can’t see them. They are the enemy and should be obliterated!”

The psychiatric damage caused to cannabis users by arresting and imprisoning them is considered a bonus by these people. Appealing to the cruelty of it makes as much sense, to elderly and conservative voters, as appealing to the cruelty of shooting the enemy soldiers on the other side of the battlefield. Of course it’s cruel, that’s the point.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to the presence of this malicious streak in New Zealand’s elderly and conservative voters. Hatred is a deep emotion – usually too deep to be influenced by reason. The sight of intelligent young people like Chloe Swarbrick speaking eloquently merely aggravates the elderly and conservative, and further entrenches their prejudice.

At the end of the day, young Kiwis and Maoris can take solace in the fact that the old bastards who hate them are dying off. No amount of hate can stop the aging process, and the old bigots will lose their ability to influence the law once Time puts them in the ground. Absent measures such as forcing the elderly to surrender their voting rights in exchange for a pension, that will have to do.

Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for ending cannabis prohibition.

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