psychology – Page 79

The Conceit of Silver

Alchemically speaking, there are two great conceits – one lesser and one greater. The lesser one is known as the Conceit of Iron, and relates to the arrogance that comes with physical dominance. The greater one, generally speaking, comes with intellectual dominance, and is closely related to the concept of hubris. This essay will examine what is known as the Conceit of Silver.

Silver is the first of the two precious metals, and one arrives in the realm of silver once iron is sufficiently brightened. As one progresses up the alchemical scale, thought moves from the simple bipartite distinction of strong/weak to the new distinction of smart/dumb. As such, there are now two distinct kinds of weak: the dumb-strong, and the dumb-weak.

The Conceit of Silver is not the same thing as simply thinking one is smarter than everyone else, although it is related. If one is intelligent enough to dominate both attractive women and muscular men, it’s very easy to become arrogant. Possessing unusual intelligence can feel like a superpower, because it makes it much easier to create change in accordance with one’s will.

The problem is that silver, by itself, cannot make moral decisions. Intelligence is a great thing, but without wisdom it can only ever be directed towards fulfilling egoic desires. Without the capacity to feel empathy for other sentient beings, an individual cannot act to end the suffering of them. Such a person is unenlightened.

Without at least some of the element of gold, a person acting in the realm of silver will act to accumulate resources or to raise their social standing, not to reduce the suffering of other sentient beings. Much of the moral grandstanding that people of silver engage in claims to achieve the latter, while really achieving the former. It isn’t always clear how much of this is conscious and how much is unconscious.

The Conceit of Silver is, in short, the belief that higher intelligence, education or social standing makes one a moral authority.

This happens in two major ways: by thinking one is gold when one is silver, or by denying the existence of gold altogether. This is a very easy mistake to make if one is of the silver, because if one is aware of such, then it follows as a general rule that most of the rest of the world is baser. Generally speaking, others are dumber, and their desires short-sighted. But this rule does not always hold.

The classic example of the Conceit of Silver is when a person achieves a high position through scheming, inheritance or politics, and then assumes that they must possess a commensurate moral superiority. At its worst, this conceit can lead a person into thinking that their individual egoic desires are the same as the Will of God. Such a person can be extremely dangerous if in power.

The Conceit of Silver is that it assumes itself to be divine. Individuals prone to this conceit are apt to say things like “Intelligence makes humans unique from the rest of the animal kingdom,” inspired by their failure to appreciate the perspectives of others. This will usually reinforce a belief that intelligence confers moral authority, or, even worse, a belief that education or birth station confers moral authority.

In fact, there’s an argument that the only reason why intelligence evolved so prodigiously in the human animal is because our social structure allowed for an unprecedented degree of scheming, lying, backstabbing, cheating and all kinds of general skullduggery. From this perspective, intelligence could even be seen as a moral negative, a sign that one clings to material power.

Finding an example of the Conceit of Silver is easy. All it takes is to go to a university and to find a person who believes that they might be smarter than everyone else there. At any university, there will be plenty of them. In the absence of a university it’s only necessary to find a place where intellectuals gather, or even a professional association.

Almost invariably, when a person becomes intelligent enough, they start to assume that they are a moral authority of some kind. They start to conflate their understanding of how systems are with how systems should be. People who do this are not always wrong – understanding a system often does lead to an understanding of how that system could be optimised to minimise the suffering it causes. But that isn’t necessarily so.

It isn’t easy for an intelligent person to agree that their brainpower is not particularly valuable in comparison to wisdom. The majority of intelligent people make a living out of their brainpower by way of learning a valuable profession. It’s therefore very hard for them to set all of this silver aside, and to admit that possession of it doesn’t make someone a morally superior person.

It takes a mercurial sort of personality to admit that one’s intelligence, however vast, is not sufficient to conclude that one is fundamentally more valuable. That, despite being smarter, one might be of less value than a person of iron or clay if the right circumstances arose, or if one had the wrong moral direction. This element of mercury is necessary for the alchemist to successfully transition from silver to gold.

The truth is that gold is the most malleable of all metals, and that gives it one paradoxical quality: it doesn’t resist when claims to leadership are made by men of silver. Because silver is harder than gold, it’s usually possible for those of silver to force those of gold out of leadership positions by way of intimidation or verbal and social aggression.In today’s degraded age, this has taken place all over the world.

The universities, the religious and spiritual movements and the political movements have all been taken over by materialists pushing some irrational political ideology or other. The element of gold has been pushed to the peripheries, making it possible to ask whether we live in the Kali Yuga. The Conceit of Silver is everywhere.

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.

21st Century Masculinity

To say that the world is suffering a crisis of masculinity is an understatement. The kind of man who Doug Stanhope once described as a “half-faggot” is now a majority. Our old models of what it means to be masculine have to be updated for the fact that we live in a high-technology age of physical comfort. This essay will explore the need for a masculinity appropriate for a new century.

Masculinity has always been represented by the straight line, or number 1, and is opposed to the feminine that is represented by the circle or the number 0. This is why the masculine has always been represented by the Sun (whose rays strike us as straight lines and which impose order) and the feminine by the Earth (upon whose watery surface no straight lines naturally exist).

In the purest esoteric sense, masculinity is the ability to impose order upon chaos. This means the ability to impose straight lines and rules upon the natural world, which is, in its raw state, made up of curves and which only acknowledges laws of iron. The masculine is that force which clears jungles and plants wheat fields, and which builds stone walls around the home city and temples in mountain caves.

When the masculine instinct goes too far, it imposes such a strict order upon the world that life is strangled out of existence. This sort of environment can be found in the equatorial deserts, which is why these areas have produced so many cruel and hypermasculine ideologies. When it doesn’t go far enough, there are no limits to how life carelessly spawns. This sort of environment can be found in the deep seas.

Back in the old days, the most masculine was the man who went out and explored. He was the Viking who got into a longboat and came back with silver and slave women. He was the navigator who led those rowing the great canoes across Polynesia to an island even further than those already known. He was the king who brought the rule of law to neighbouring barbarian tribes.

This masculinity may have reached its apogee in the centuries leading up to 1969, as it led men to conquer the world, then each other, then space. But then, man ran out of space. In the 21st century, there is no longer any physical space to explore. We have been to the ends of the Earth, we have been to the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches, we have been to the Moon.

Even more crucially, we have imposed order not only in a horizontal sense but also a vertical one. We now live in an extreme of comfort, where the vast majority of us can count on living to be elderly if we don’t do anything stupid. Each of us can access a more sumptuous range of food at the local supermarket than anything Queen Victoria could have dreamed of, and our options for entertainment are even vaster.

All of these things are, however, only physical phenomena.

The masculinity of the 21st century will be fundamentally the same as the masculinities of previous ages. The core of it will still be the ability to impose order upon chaos. But it won’t be the physical world that we impose order upon – that doesn’t need any more order imposed upon it. The terrain that needs to be set to order is the forgotten metaphysical.

We’ve spent so long focusing on mastery of the physical world that other, more subtle, disciplines have been lost. This hyperfocus on physical dominance has caused us to lose our orientation in the metaphysical planes. We’ve drifted so far from our spiritual groundings that most of us no longer believe in God. The prevailing metaphysics is purely material; the Earth existed, then we evolved upon it, and so here we are.

We are our bodies, and nothing else – when the body dies, then we are dead. This belief is taken for granted by the majority of people nowadays.

The majority of people don’t understand that this materialism is a primitive superstition that has only arisen because our metaphysical order has collapsed. It isn’t accurate, and not only is it not accurate, it’s a laughably crude and ignorant simplification. The worst of all is that it is a superstition that has driven millions of good people into a state of existential despair, on account of the belief that their inevitable physical death renders all actions meaningless.

Therefore, the future involves spirituality.

That these new spiritual vistas are dangerous ones can be seen from the attitudes that many have towards spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and the other psychedelics. The majority of people are terrified of the effects of psychedelics, much as they were once terrified of the beasts and savages that lay across the sea. But this is precisely why such vistas will be the target of 21st century masculinity.

In the new century, those who channel masculine energy into the world will be the same brave and adventurous individuals that they always were. The difference is that the vistas they explore and map out will not be physical, but will be the terrain of the mind and the soul. The 21st century masculinity will involve less Mars and more Hermes; the 21st century man will be a warrior of the soul first and foremost.

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Does Not Make People Violent

As ridiculous as it may sound to many, the public opinion of cannabis and its effects have been informed by images like the murder scene from Reefer Madness. In the minds of a large section of the voting-age population, using cannabis leads directly to a desire to murder other people just for the thrill of it, or at least to an meth or alcohol-like aggression. This article looks at the truth.

Anyone who has been part of a cannabis-using scene knows that the supposed link between cannabis and violence is bullshit. It’s simple enough to just contrast the results of cannabis cafes in Amsterdam, or cannabis festivals, with bars and pubs just about anywhere else. Cannabis, by itself, makes people mellow in the vast majority of cases.

The myth that cannabis makes people violent was proven false as far back as 1977. A review published that year in the Psychological Bulletin stated that “The consensus is that marihuana does not precipitate violence in the majority of those using it sporadically or chronically.” All of the further research since then backs up this point.

Interestingly, that article cites the importance of set and setting, which is something that any responsible person would emphasise if they wanted to reduce harms (more on this below).

The presence of a scientific consensus that there is no causal link between cannabis use and violence doesn’t stop prohibitionists from cherry-picking data and research to create the impression that such a link exists. After all, there are correlations between all kinds of things, but (as any honest scientist knows) these correlations are often best explained by underlying third factors.

There is certainly a correlation between violence and cannabis, as there is between violence and everything on the black market. This is inevitable, because anything on the black market is all but guaranteed to be sold by someone who won’t go to the Police if they are ripped off, stood over or killed. Cases like the example of Marlborough man Colin Farrell, who was robbed of his cannabis plants in a home invasion, only happen because of prohibition.

It’s true of everything that if only criminals use it, it will have an association with crime. It’s also true that if something is illegal, then only criminals will use it. Therefore, anything that’s illegal will have an association with crime. This, by itself, explains most of the link between cannabis and violence.

Another reason why an association exists between cannabis and violence is that some people use cannabis as part of a pattern of polydrug usage during nihilistic benders. There are a lot of meth benders that end up with a person smoking cannabis to try and calm themselves down and get to sleep, only to find it not quite working, at which point something really out of order often happens. The same is true of alcohol benders.

This is why the headlines proclaiming things like “Cannabis Crash Tragedy Kills Five” inevitably lead into an article that describes how the driver was also drunk, and/or on meth and/or on prescription sleeping pills. The mainstream media is happy to play up the cannabis angle to these stories, partly because drink driving fatalities are not news and partly because it pleases the alcohol manufacturers who spend millions advertising in that same media.

Logical thinking tells us that, just because a person smoked cannabis and became violent later doesn’t mean that the cannabis caused the violence. This is an example of the informal logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, or “after this, therefore because of this.” This is because people who smoke cannabis and become violent have usually been drinking alcohol or doing methamphetamine at the same time, or haven’t slept for days.

Logical thinking would ask: “Where are the cases of murders and violent crimes being committed by people who were only on cannabis and nothing else?”

Of course, there are few or none – even making an Internet search for examples comes up with little. This is because the people who are using cannabis without also using alcohol or methamphetamine are almost always just quietly using it at home, to relax, in a similar manner to how many responsible people drink alcohol daily.

Much like alcohol, the emphasis ought to go on educating people about the real effects of the substance. Absurd lies like the Reefer Madness story have to be consigned to history, where they belong alongside witch hunts, virgin sacrifices and the persecution of left-handers as embarrassing examples of human superstition, cowardice and stupidity.

The truth about things like set and setting have to be explained to people, so that they can make intelligent decisions about their cannabis use instead of relying on abstinence-based fearmongering (this is true of alcohol as well as cannabis). Part of this involves only using cannabis in situations where they are safe and where they don’t have to be responsible for anything, and preferably around people they like and who won’t harass them when they are high.

Any correctly informed person who is concerned about violence would support the legalisation of cannabis, because it would replace known violence-causing drugs (in particular alcohol and methamphetamine) with something that causes less violence. In reality, the connection between cannabis and violence is so weak that, far from being an argument for its prohibition, it’s an argument to legalise it.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

The Best Way to Raise Wages Is to Strengthen The Negotiating Position of The Working Class

Low wages are blamed by many for the various social ills befalling the nations of the West. If only wages were higher, a lot of problems with housing, education and healthcare would be solved. Although this is true on the face of it, little thought goes into what actually leads to high wages. This essay explains.

A popular belief, particularly among young leftists, is that the wage being paid reflects the employer’s goodwill. This is true to a minor extent (it reflects the degree of solidarity that the employer has with their employees), but in practice the size of a wage reflects little else than the respective negotiating strengths of the employer and the employee.

These people don’t understand that a person’s wage is the result of a negotiation process, and that this process is determined by economic principles. In particular, the wage reflects what the employer and employee each have for a Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) – the alternative that would arise if negotiations failed and both parties walked away from the table.

If the employer’s BATNA is to lose production and fail to fill orders because they are short-staffed, that employer’s negotiating position is weak. Likewise, if the employee’s BATNA is to get a well-paid job somewhere else, that employee’s negotiation position is strong.

Conversely, if the employer’s BATNA is to get the Immigration Minister to import cheap labour from the Third World and to hire them instead of a local, then that employer’s negotiating position is strong. Likewise, if the employee’s BATNA is that his family back in the Third World starves, that employee’s negotiating position is weak.

So it can be seen that a person’s wage is chiefly a function of the demand for that person’s labour and the supply of competing labour. All other factors being equal, the greater the demand for that person’s labour, the higher the wage, and the greater the supply of competing labour, the lower the wage.

If one wishes to raise wages, then, the only thing that will reliably work is to restrict the supply of the labour competing for those wages.

The capital owners of the West have always striven to minimise their labour expenses. The most effective way to do this is through slavery, because then the capital owners get labour (effectively) for free. The American cotton and sugar plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries were profitable because slavery minimised their labour expenses, and the closer a modern company can get to free labour, the better.

In the 21st century, the way to keep wages low is to import cheap labour from overseas. This has the massive benefit of allowing the capital owner to undercut the native working class, and to pay a fraction of their wage to the new imports instead. If the cheap labour is from a poor country, they will often be happy to live 20 to a house so that they can send some of their wages home in remittances.

Many modern enterprises in the West are only profitable because of importing cheap labour, but allowing this is a form of corruption that harms the working class. In a natural capitalist system, companies that can’t pay a living wage to their employees go out of business because they can’t find staff. Under the system we have, those companies import cheap labour and their previous staff go on the dole.

Despairingly, many leftists now think it is “racist” to oppose open borders, on the grounds that it’s mean to tell non-white people they can’t live in the West. These leftists are indifferent to the argument that opening the borders to cheap labour is against the class interests of the working poor. In fact, they often verbally abuse those working-class people for agitating for their own class interests, while the capital owners laugh all the way to the bank.

There is only one reliable way to increase the wages of labour. This way is to improve the negotiating position of the working classes. The negotiating position of the working classes can only be increased in two ways: by increasing the demand for labour, and by decreasing the supply of labour.

Only if the best alternative to a negotiated high wage is another high wage will the employer pay one. If the worker asks for a living wage and cheap labour is available, the employer will go with the cheap labour in almost every case. The employer doesn’t give a shit if this leaves the original worker unemployed – the cheaper the labour, the more profits for them.

The sad truth is that the international capitalist interests who have created this arrangement also own the mainstream media. As a result, this media has convinced us that this state of affairs is natural and that anyone who complains about their wage must be a racist. They don’t care if they’re hated – they still own everything and hate doesn’t stop them. What they do care about is a weakening of their negotiating position.

The New Zealand Labour Party – like neoliberal parties everywhere – has completely betrayed the New Zealand working class by keeping the floodgates of cheap labour wide open. It is by doing this that the Labour Party have kept wages low and contributed to the current social problems. As this magazine has argued previously, this betrayal risks that the New Zealand working class turns to fascism. The only way out is to strengthen the negotiating position of the workers.