psychology – Page 72

The Cult Logic Behind Modern SJW Culture

A 1981 entry in the Harvard Mental Health Letter describes the basics of cult psychology. Describing cults as “ideological fundamentalism”, the letter by Dr. Robert J Lifton lays out the characteristic qualities of cult psychology and cult formation. As this essay will examine, there are many parallels between cult psychology and the psychology of modern Social Justice Warrior culture.

According to the Lifton paper, “milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, a cult of confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence” are the typical ways that cults seek to control the thoughts of their acolytes. An investigation into the nature of the SJW culture shows that it tries to achieve exactly the same thing.

The desire for milieu control involves “the control of all communication within a given environment”. This is commonly referred to as ‘brainwashing’ because it features the targets being soaked in cult propaganda. Cult members must be exposed to lectures, seminars, news reports, websites and Internet forums that all say the same thing. This milieu control makes it possible to normalise any idea, no matter how crazy.

Modern SJW culture achieves this through Internet echo chambers. Websites such as Reddit commonly ban anyone who thinks differently, which creates communities of people who continually reinforce each other’s prejudices by parroting back to them everything they say – an echo chamber.

This is also achieved through the common cult tactic of excommunication. People who deviate too far from the SJW orthodoxy are shunned, their reputations smeared and their social support networks deliberately destroyed. This creates a fear of wrongthink among cult members. This fear of wrongthink prevents them from disrupting the milieu with novel thoughts.

Many SJWs are astonished to meet a person who believes, for example, in the genetic basis of intelligence. Despite the fact that the science clearly demonstrates that intelligence is mostly hereditary (i.e. genetic), the milieu control of SJW culture means that few of them have ever been exposed to the actual science. Consequently, they respond to people who talk about the science with mockery and abuse.

The demands for purity can be seen in the never-ending escalation of virtue signalling. Inside SJW culture is a constant struggle for social status, where the most pure of heart is thought to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Indeed, the great conceit is that the top of the SJW hierarchy is also the most virtuous, and not the one who most successfully lowered the social status of their competitors by shaming them into submission for wrongthink.

Because the Nazis were nationalists, purity of thought requires that SJWs be globalists. Consequently, any kind of national loyalty must be completely rejected. Open borders must be embraced, because any nationalist sentiment is impure. The strongest bonds of loyalty, in SJW culture, are with those as different to you as possible. This is as true of race and religion as it is of nation.

SJW culture has gone so far in its demands for ideological purity that they even attack people who say it’s okay to be white. Even expressing a will for the continued existence of white people is equated with supremacism and a desire to exterminate other races. This bizarre logic inevitably leads to a purity spiral, and this inevitably leads to cult members becoming unhinged from reality entirely.

Part of this drive for purity is emphasis on confession. This is the origin of the commonly expressed sentiment that “we’re all a little bit racist.” The purpose of saying this is to instigate a moral self-flagellation session. One confesses to harbouring lingering racist sentiments (or other wrongthink) as a kind of public ritual humiliation. These ritual humiliations serve to strengthen the bonds of solidarity among people who have been through them.

The irony, of course, is that the only other people who think like this are other people in the SJW cult. The demands for purity are so stringent that only those with plentiful leisure time to devote to understanding the ins and outs of the etiquette can ever meet the standard. This has led to the absurd outcome of SJWs who virtue signal all day hanging out only with other white and middle-class people.

SJW culture also has its own sacred science. This sacred science has a number of cherished truths that cannot be questioned (lest one get shamed into silence). These cherished truths often run entirely contrary to the established science, because they are determined by expedience, not by truth (here it is meant expedience to globohomo values).

Actual science, which states clearly that intelligence is mostly hereditary and therefore genetic, is rejected. The sacred science of SJW culture dictates that evolution stops as the neck. The great variety of physical environments, although they have clearly led to a great variety of physical expressions, have not led to a commensurate variety of psychological expressions. All human subgroups are precisely identical in every behavioural measure.

Likewise, the sacred science of SJW culture dictates that the mass importation of cheap labour has no impact on the wages of the native working class. Despite the fact that a high schooler could tell you that increasing the supply of cheap labour will reduce the price of said labour – in other words, it will destroy working-class wages and the ability of working-class people to have families – SJWs are happy to support it.

This suicidal masochism is perhaps the defining feature of the cult mentality that possesses the average Social Justice Warrior. In any case, it’s clear from looking at the logic that underlies religious cults that the entirety of SJW culture follows it. Not only do they practice milieu control and possess an obsession with purity, but they also have their own sacred science distinct from mainstream science.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 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 2017 is also available.

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The Truth May Incite Racial Hatred

Otago University professor James Flynn has had a book about free speech, In Defence of Free Speech, scheduled for and then pulled from publication by British publisher Emerald Press. A representative for Emerald Press wrote to Flynn and said the book “could be seen to incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law.” This essay examines whether or not the truth itself incites racial hatred, and if so what we can do about it.

Professor Flynn is by no means a racist. There are many former students of his willing to attest to his sparkling intelligence and deeply thoughtful nature. He has never been accused of treating another person with disrespect on account of their race, and has never even been accused of making a racist remark. Measured in terms of hate for other races, Flynn is an entirely decent person.

Professor Flynn is, however, a scientist. This means that he is passionately committed to discovering the truth, and to helping the truth shine through from among all the misconceptions and lies. Being good at science means being able to tease out strands of truth from the tapestry of confusion that forms the background of our lives. A really good scientist will be able to do this even in the face of social pressure pushing them to lie.

Something known to all scientists is that there are no two identical things in Nature. There are no two identical mountains, no identical trees, no identical snowflakes. No two identical dogs, no identical cats, no identical people. This is true at all levels of nature, from stars down to ants, and is even true across the dimensions of space and time.

The fact that there are no two identical things in Nature is so deeply understood by real scientists that they even understand the laws that explain how this has come to pass. Gause’s Law, or the competitive exclusion principle, describes how no two identical things can exist in ecology because they would compete for the same niche and thereby destroy one another.

All of this means that the idea that all races must have the same IQ can be dismissed right off the bat. There is no reason to think that all races must have the same IQ any more than there is to think that all families or professions must have the same IQ. The way that intelligence is measured doesn’t matter in this regard.

This logic deeply upsets the many who passionately believe in racial equality. Those who cling tightly to the belief that all races are precisely equal in all non-physical characteristics tend to become enraged at the assertion of scientific evidence that suggests otherwise. Their position is known as equalitarianism, and the assertion that all races are the same in all intellectual and behavioural measures is known as the equalitarian dogma.

Social justice warriors have pushed for decades the idea that questioning the equalitarian dogma is the same thing as spreading racial hatred. This lazy, self-righteous line of thinking claims that the only reason a person would want to talk about racial differences is if they were a racist trying to sow discord between peoples, or to exclude or exterminate some disfavoured races. This tactic is, in reality, an example of the broader authoritarian strategy of silencing all opposition by whatever means necessary.

A 1994 article in the journal Intelligence by IQ researcher Philippe Rushton describes the same thing that happened to Flynn last month happening to Rushton 25 years ago – and to Hans Eysenck 20 years before that. Already in 1994 it was possible to state, of the documented difference in average racial IQ, that “Today the evidence has increased so much that it is almost certain that only evolutionary (and thereby genetic) theories can explain it.” But evidence does not appease the mob.

The abuse that Rushton documents in the linked article is eerily reminiscent of that facing scientists today. Eysenck was physically attacked in 1973 by activists marching under the slogan “Fascists Have No Right To Speak.” In 2019, Jordan Peterson comes in for similar treatment for similar reasons (a phenomenon this newspaper has previously described as Peterson Derangement Syndrome).

The Emerald Press decision might be ideosyncratic, but it also reflects the prevailing attitude among those who control the apparatus of propaganda. The world’s ruling class is implacably committed to the doctrine of globalism, for a variety of reasons. Globalism is a lot easier to accept if a person already assumes equalitarianism, because such an assumption implies that borders are arbitrary and people interchangeable. Therefore, assertions of other doctrines are suppressed.

The difficulty is that the science itself demolishes equalitarianism.

Books like IQ and Global Inequality, published in 2006, conclusively demonstrate that the average IQ of a population is the primary factor that determines that population’s standard of living. The fact that IQ predicts future wealth and earnings is one of the best documented phenomena in all of psychology, both at the individual and the group level. The higher the IQ, the wealthier is all but a law.

This suggests that allowing people from low-IQ countries to immigrate to the West is a recipe for lowering the standard of living that the West currently enjoys. Because intelligence is mostly hereditary, low-IQ immigrants will have low-IQ children, who will then grow up to make low-IQ decisions, thus impoverishing and lowering the living standards of those around them.

Unfortunately, this entirely reasonable position is equated, by the globalists who control the apparatus of propaganda, with the position that all races need to be segregated from one another, or worse. This deliberate conflation means that it’s all but impossible to discuss the science of race and intelligence without being accused of being a Nazi, supporting Nazis, furthering Nazism, or dogwhistling to Nazis.

All of this means that we are presented with a dilemma. We either speak honestly about the science of race and intelligence, which means that we expose ourselves to being attacked by hysterical mobs of virtue-signallers shrieking about Nazis, or we don’t speak honestly about the science of race and intelligence, which means that the superstitious fools who think with emotions and their authoritarian puppetmasters win the day.

Perhaps the best move, as has been discussed here previously, is to pull back to the secret societies who meet behind closed doors for the purposes of being able to discuss taboo subjects, safely away from hysterical moralisers. This is supposed to be what the universities are for, but now that the university culture has been corrupted by the mass entry of plebs it may be necessary to reform it under new conditions.

It’s either that or hope that the sands of public opinion shift to supporting free speech and free inquiry.

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New Zealand First Supporters Preferred National in 2017, But Not in 2014

A study reported in the mainstream media this week suggested that New Zealand First voters would have preferred that Winston Peters had gone with the National Party after the 2017 General Election. There has been much wailing and regret since the 2017 election, and the composition of the Sixth Labour Government is responsible for a great proportion of it. Numbers man Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, has the stats.

At the top level, the statistics do suggest that a slim majority of New Zealand First voters preferred National after the last General Election. The correlation between voting National in 2017 and voting New Zealand First in 2017 was 0.04, whereas the correlation between voting Labour in 2017 and voting New Zealand First in 2017 was -0.15.

These are very weak correlations – neither of them are considered statistically significant. The National one is positive and the Labour one negative, which does indeed tell us that the overlap between New Zealand First voters and National voters was larger in 2017 than the overlap between New Zealand First voters and Labour voters.

This does make Peters’s decision to go with Labour instead of National somewhat surprising. One explanation for it may be that Peters was judging his voters based on what they were in 2014.

In the 2014 election, the demographics of the New Zealand First voters were different. The correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2014 and voting National in 2014 was -0.34, and between voting New Zealand First in 2014 and voting Labour in 2014 it was 0.11. This correlation with National voters is statistically significant, which means the two groups are significantly different to each other.

So although it might be true that a majority of New Zealand First voters in 2017 would have preferred that Peters went with National, a majority of New Zealand First voters in 2014 would have preferred that Peters went with Labour, had he come to hold the balance of power then.

The reason for the change is the considerable number of Maori voters who switched from New Zealand First to Labour between 2014 and 2017. In 2014, the correlation between voting New Zealand First and being Maori was strong, at 0.66. New Zealand First lost the confidence of many of these voters during the next three years, and by 2017 the correlation between voting New Zealand First and being Maori had fallen to 0.38.

Because the correlation with being Maori and voting Labour is also strong (0.42 in 2014 and 0.58 in 2017), it can be seen that the shared Maori connection may have been enough to tilt New Zealand First’s loyalties towards the Labour Party.

A second point is that New Zealand First are nationalists, and concomitantly have a high proportion of people born in New Zealand among their voters. The correlation between being born in New Zealand and voting New Zealand First in 2014 was 0.69, and in 2017 0.54.

This high proportion of New Zealand-born voters makes New Zealand First very different to National. The low-tax, low-solidarity model of the National Party appeals strongly to those born overseas, and this is reflected in their voters.

The correlation between being born in New Zealand and voting National in 2017 was -0.41, which reveals the depth of globalist sentiments among National voters. The correlation between being born in New Zealand and voting Labour was 0.22 in 2017, on the border of statistical significance, but much closer to New Zealand First than to National.

New Zealand First, therefore, shares two very strong qualities with Labour that they do not share with National – a high proportion of Maori support and a high proportion of New Zealand-born support. These qualities may have been instrumental in making Peters’s decision.

So although it may be true that New Zealand First voters in 2017 would have preferred Bill English as Prime Minister, there are solid strategic reasons for Peters to have made the choice he did (whether he came to regret it afterwards must be the subject of a different analysis).

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).

The Apparatus of Propaganda

There are many different ways of gaining power in the modern world: military, technology, politics, religion, media, among others. Some of these reins of power are held by people with malicious or narcissistic intent, and some are held by those who wish to end the suffering of all sentient beings. VJM Publishing is an attempt to gain control of the apparatus of propaganda for the good guys.

There’s good reason why people say “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Big muscles and powerful weapons are all but useless without a mind to guide them. Control the mind, control the body, as the silver magicians have been saying for thousands of years.

The powerful men of our time are not great warriors who can split skulls with single axe blows. The powerful men of our time are the psychologists who use the apparatus of propaganda to massage public opinion into accepting or rejecting whatever it is the psychologists desire (or, in any case, the powerful men hire these psychologists).

Control of the apparatus of propaganda means control of the very thoughts that course through the minds of the citizenry.

With sufficient control, you can get people to believe that war is peace, or that slavery is freedom – or that diversity is strength. You can get them to desire any product or political solution, even if such desires directly harm them. To control the apparatus of propaganda is to get the entire populace marching to the beat of your drum.

This brings with it multiple problems.

The most obvious today is the fact that the mainstream media is almost entirely owned by foreign banking and finance interests. Many people operate under the assumption that the mainstream media is owned by entities within the nation, and are therefore beholden by common national interests to a certain level of solidarity. This is not so.

Our mainstream media is owned by people who are indifferent to the suffering of the New Zealand nation, who they see as little more than a five million-strong herd of livestock. These people are concerned only with the profit that can be wrought from advertising sales, and from the propaganda value that control of the media confers.

These foreign banking and finance interests direct their employees in the mainstream media to manipulate public opinion, often in ways that do not benefit the public. They do this by propagandising in favour of issues that have the potential to increase the profits of those banking and finance interests. In practice, this amounts to propagandising in favour of issues that increase mortgage borrowing, which means anything that increases demand for housing.

This propagandising seeks to normalise ideals like opening borders to mass immigration, or children leaving home permanently at age 18, or ticking up overseas holidays on the mortgage, or getting divorced on a whim, or the idea of having multiple guest rooms or carports because normalising any of those things will cause mortgage spending to increase and therefore bank profits to increase.

This is also why the mainstream media relentlessly runs stories that encourage people to mindlessly consume – because the more indebted people are, the more mortgage profits are made. If they can get everyone wanting a bigger house or a flasher car, then at least some of those people will get mortgages to finance these wants, and that means greater banking profits.

Very often, the will of those banking and finance interests goes against the will of the people who are on the receiving end of the media. In such cases, the mainstream media has to shape the opinion of the public without that public’s knowledge or consent. The psychologists who operate the apparatus of propaganda know how to do this – the major unknown variable is the will of their owners.

The amount of damage that the apparatus of propaganda can do, if in the wrong hands, can be seen by the example of the Bonnier Group in Sweden.

Through maintaining control of most of Sweden’s apparatus of propaganda over several decades, the Bonnier family was able to induce the Swedish people to support immigration policies that were suicidal for Sweden, but which supported the Bonnier family’s ideological desire for open borders and cultural Marxism.

The Bonnier family instructed the Swedish mainstream media to normalise the mass immigration of Muslims and Africans, and they duly did so. Despite that the idea was never supported by a majority of the population, control of the apparatus of propaganda was able to create the impression that it was, and other influential figures such as politicians followed along out of fear of becoming unfashionable.

Control of the apparatus of propaganda enables the ruling class to threaten other people with ostracisation if they don’t go along with the values being normalised by the propaganda. This is a great power, because it plays on very deep and primal human fears. This enables the propagandists to have a powerful influence on people’s behaviour and speech, whether those people are conscious of it or not.

If the Western World is to survive the challenges of the 21st century, the apparatus of propaganda has to be reclaimed from global finance and banking interests, and from their ideological fellow travellers. Once the apparatus of propaganda is back in the hands of the people, and being used for the benefit of the people exclusively, it will naturally return to being an instrument that informs rather than one that confuses and misleads.

We at VJM Publishing, the Asylum at the Top of the Mountain, are propagandists for alt-centrism, and this we are without shame, believing it to be the Will of God. Our allies such as Anarkiwi, while they may disagree with us on a great many things, share a fundamental desire to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, and a fundamental belief that this can best be achieved by correctly informing people with the truth.

Alchemically speaking, the apparatus of propaganda can be represented by gold. The silver represents the mind, and this may be what guides the muscles, but the mind is itself guided by the will, and hence that which controls the will is the highest of all. Control of the apparatus of propaganda confers some degree of control over the will of the populace, which is where it gets its awesome power.

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