Nayib Bukele is the President of El Salvador, having won re-election earlier this year with almost 85% of the popular vote. Most of his popularity is a result of his security strategy, which has transformed El Salvador from an extremely dangerous country to a safe one. On X, Bukele describes himself as a “philosopher king”. His security philosophy might be applicable to other places plagued by gangs.
Bukele’s approval rating today is some 89%, making him arguably the most popular leader of any country. Understanding why he is so popular requires understanding the difference between the El Salvador before Bukele took power, and the El Salvador now.
Bukele came to power in 2019. The homicide rate had fallen from its peak since then, but was still extremely high. In March 2022 there was a spike in homicides due to MS-13, wherein 87 people were randomly murdered by the gang over a three-day period. This was apparently an attempt by MS-13 to intimidate the people of El Salvador into submission.
The crackdown saw the arrest of around 2% of the Salvadoran population and the construction of a 40,000-person maximum security prison, known as the “Terrorism Confinement Centre”. Since these measures were taken, El Salvador’s homicide rate has plummeted. In 2023 it was a mere 2.4 per 100,000 (c.f. Canada at 2.3).
Could a similar strategy work here?
For one thing, New Zealand gangs don’t cause as much damage as the gangs in El Salvador. The homicide rate in New Zealand is lower than even the 2023 rate there. New Zealand gangs might be feral by New Zealand standards, but by Latin American standards they’re standard-bearers of civilisation.
However, the general cancer metaphor is apt. As family members of gang members can tell you, the damage caused by gang members is not limited to crime. Immeasurable quality of life damage is caused by the constant threats, intimidation and antisocial behaviour that comes with the presence of gang culture.
Moreover, existing gangs could cause extreme damage in the future. The example of El Salvador shows that the homicide rate can increase manyfold in a short period if the economic and social environment permits. Given the ongoing economic collapse of the Anglosphere, anyone could confidently predict a rise in both volume and intensity of gang activity in coming years.
Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre has room for 40,000 people. New Zealand was known to have 8,300 gang members nationwide near the end of 2022. We could, therefore, build a much smaller prison – one that fit 10,000 people – and still have enough room to put every single gang member in it for life.
Other anti-gang measures could readily be adopted from El Salvador.
One of these is the reduction of the age of criminal responsibility, from 16 to 12. Having the age at 16 makes sense in a high-trust, high-social capital environment where most people want to do good. In a low-trust environment, however, tolerance and kindness just gets taken advantage of. Gangs exploit that tolerance and kindness by getting younger teenagers – too young to be charged – to commit crimes. This phenomenon also exists in the New Zealand gang scene, so we might benefit from a similar reduction in the age of criminal responsibility.
Of note is that one element of Bukele’s crackdown was banning media from expressing pro-gang sentiments. If implemented in New Zealand, this would prevent The New Zealand Herald offering a column to former Black Power pack rapist Denis O’Reilly. It would also prevent the numerous hagiographies about gang leaders doing community work.
Unfortunately, no measures will be taken to protect the New Zealand people from the gang menace as long as globalists are in power.
What New Zealand needs is a leader that cares about the New Zealand nation first and foremost.
Also of note is that the political philosophy of Bukele’s movement is explicitly anti-democratic. Bukele’s Vice-President, Felix Ulloa, has said “The democratic system that existed for years in El Salvador only benefited crooked politicians.” The system that exists in New Zealand also only benefits crooked politicians. That suggests that solving our leadership problems might require also solving the democracy problem.
All this might be too much for New Zealand for now – we are yet to see the Mongrel Mob, the Headhunters, Black Power or the Hell’s Angels murder random civilians in New Zealand to intimidate the Government. But the worse our gang problem becomes, the more we will need to consider the need for a Nayib Bukele-style crackdown.
Society in the Clown World of 2024 is full of mental illness. This mental illness operates on all of the individual, family, community and national levels. Although some of this mental illness is organic, resulting from the natural struggles of biological life, most of it is artificial. One of the most prevalent psychiatric problems today is almost entirely artificial: workamania.
Workamania, simply put, is the artificially-generated obsession with working as much as possible.
This involves the obsession with being in the workplace for as many hours as possible. It particularly involves being seen in the workplace for as many hours as possible. From this mindset comes the phenomena where workers try to arrive before their boss but not leave until after them, and where employees are on-call 24/7. From these phenomena come all kinds of stress-related mental and physiological disorders, most of which are considered normal when they’re really caused by workamania.
Workamania comes with its own complete moral schedule.
In the same way that, for money worshippers, a person’s value can be measured by their net worth, for workamaniacs a person’s value can be measured by hours worked. In truth, it is not hours worked but amount suffered that is the measure of moral value for the workamaniac. But hours worked serves as a useful proxy.
For money worshippers, the outgroup are the poor. For workamaniacs, the outgroup are the idle. Beneficiaries are a special enemy. No-one is permitted to live a low-consumption lifestyle in an effort to reduce environmental pressure. Hippies are almost as low as beneficiaries.
The deep ingroup are employers, who are like gods. Employers give meaning to life. Before the employer came into the world, all was chaos. A person is only considered a legitimate human being if they have an employer giving them directions all day. Anyone without an employer has no real status to the workamaniac. One’s employment is one’s identity.
The concept of a universal basic income is anathema to the workamaniac. The automatic assumption is that a UBI would encourage laziness, and no-one would ever work again. This masochistic logic reveals that Protestant Christianity is one of the major influences on workamania.
Implicit to workamania is the acceptance that an employer can never offer so low a wage that a job isn’t worth doing. No matter how miserly the wage, it’s good honest work. In fact, the worse the working conditions, somehow the more honest the work. In any case, the experience will no doubt be invaluable, the workaholics say. In no case is a worker permitted to think that an offered wage is too poor to accept a job.
Another aspect of workamania is that all is forgiven if you work a lot. You can beat your partner, abandon your kids, drive drunk and cause accidents, but if you work a large number of hours then you’re still an upstanding member of society. This goes double if you have worked for a large number of years at the same place.
Likewise, a person who is known to not work long hours is irredeemable. Even if that person spends their time looking after elderly family members or doing volunteer work in the community, they’re still a bad person if they don’t have a job. Taking a holiday is only acceptable if your doctor says you have to do it for stress-related reasons.
It’s crucial to note that workamania is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon. It’s pushed on us by a sadistic, slave-driving ruling class that controls the mainstream media and, by so doing, controls our moral sentiments.
Our rulers want two things from us: productivity and obedience. Productivity makes our rulers rich and powerful, by giving them a big surplus to skim off our labour. Obedience makes the position of our rulers secure. Workamania achieves both objectives, which is why people are brainwashed into it through the school system, the media and in their place of employment.
In C-PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving, Pete Walker describes four major types of reaction to traumatic stress: fawn, freeze, flight and fight. Flight is the moderately extraverted response that involves using high amounts of energy to escape a situation. In today’s society, many people with traumatic stress disorders develop into workaholics. This is because they can’t sit still and enjoy their own thoughts.
Workamania can be considered the collective-level equivalent of what workaholism is to the individual level. It’s a traumagenic self-hatred that leads to an inability to enjoy everyday life. It’s when an entire people cannot appreciate its own company, and has to keep itself busy to avoid coming face-to-face with that fact.
Workaholics and workamaniacs naturally get on well together. After all, they share very similar goals. The difference is that the workaholic is escaping something and is thus usually in a state of low-excitement depression, whereas the workamaniac is in a state of high-excitement hysteria.
None of this is to suggest that working is bad, or that a work ethic is not important. The high standard of living that has been built in the West in recent centuries has been made possible largely through a good work ethic. Working hard is the most likely way to go from poor to comfortable.
We need to draw a line, however, between a healthy amount of work and workamania. A healthy amount of work is one that maximises the worker’s quality of life. An unhealthy amount of work is one that maximises the profits of the worker’s owners, to the exclusion of all other considerations.
The Mithraic Ladder is an occult concept referring to a ladder of seven steps. This ladder is not a physical object, but something that exists in the World of Forms. To climb the Mithraic Ladder is to perfect oneself spiritually. Thus, climbing higher involves going through a number of spiritual transformations. Symbolically, this ascent represents a return to God, to fully harmonise with the will of the Tao.
The Ladder of Mithras was a concept from the Mithraic Mysteries, a mystery school of ancient Persia. The Roman Empire stretched as far as Persia during the time of Trajan, and some of the Persian gods were syncretised into the Roman pantheon. By the time of the Late Empire, many legionnaires had been initiated into the Mithraic Mysteries and were followers of Mithra.
Initiation into the Mithraic Mysteries involved a series of seven degrees, wherein the candidate was subjected to a number of ordeals, with each ordeal somehow related to the degree in question. Precise knowledge of the true nature of each ordeal has been lost, but it is known that each one had an alchemical correspondence.
Symbolically, the Mithraic Ladder can be understood as the entire spectrum between good and bad, arranged vertically and then divided into seven steps, such that the bottommost step was the most bad and the topmost step the most good. These seven steps represent ascension through the degrees of the Mithraic Ladder.
The Mithraic Ladder is very similar to what an Elementalist would call the Great Masculine Axis. This is because it is in the nature of the masculine to divide between good and bad (as opposed to the nature of the feminine, which is to divide between masculine and feminine). It’s a line that runs directly upwards.
The seven steps of the Mithraic Ladder are roughly equivalent to the seven chakras in Vedic philosophy. As such, the process of rising up the Mithraic Ladder is similar to a kundalini awakening. Because this book is written primarily for a Western audience, it uses primarily Western esoteric terms to describe this process. Thus, the seven steps, from lowest to highest, are named in this book after the seven alchemical metals: lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, mercury and gold.
The level of spiritual development of any person – whether real or fictional – could be described as a position on the Mithraic Ladder. The bottommost step represents an undeveloped person, still an animal. The uppermost step represents a spiritually perfected person. The five steps in between represent the intermediate stages.
The book makes the argument that the most interesting thing about the development of any character (in this context, we are talking about fictional characters, but much applies to real-life ones) is their spiritual development. As such, the plot of any story can be summarised as the protagonist’s efforts to climb the Mithraic Ladder – or to descend it, in the case of tragedies and anti-heroes.
The Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey is the ultimate archetype of fictional stories.
The most complete description of the Hero’s Journey was made by Joseph Campbell, the American mythographer. Campbell, in his landmark Hero With A Thousand Faces, wrote “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men”.
Campbell described the Hero’s Journey as the monomyth underpinning the heroic stories and folk tales of cultures all around the world and all throughout history. It’s the one basic template of a story that everyone seems to naturally take an interest in, whether old, young, male, female, educated, uneducated, black, white or anything else.
Campbell’s basic formula is separation-initiation-return. The hero begins the story in their ordinary world, where their ordinary life progresses as usual. Then, some event upsets the natural order of life. Usually there is an evil antagonist behind this event. The hero is then cast into the special world, where they undergo a number of trials. If they pass them, they are initiated into a higher order of being. Then they return to their ordinary world, transformed into a hero.
Over the course of an interesting story, the protagonist has to change – from an ordinary person into a hero. They have to develop, otherwise the author is writing pulp fiction. The term ‘Hero’s Journey’ describes the typical pattern of development. It can have up to 20 stages depending on how detailed a person wants to get.
In children’s stories, it’s acceptable for the protagonist to develop in crudely material ways. They gain a fortune, they kill the enemy commander, they rescue the princess. But the sort of person who keeps reading fiction into adulthood soon wants more from their literature. They want more subtle character development.
Sophisticated literature is more about the emotional, mental and spiritual journeys than about physical ones. Readers want characters who change, who become permanently transformed by the trials they have undergone. What they want is a relatable Hero’s Journey that appeals to them on a deep level.
In a complete story written for modern audiences, the plot will be more complicated than separation-initiation-return. There will be multiple separations and initiations, and multiple false returns. The tripartite nature of the monomyth doesn’t change, however. The general pattern can be thought of as a descent down the Mithraic Ladder, then a spiritual transformation, then an ascent back up.
The contention made by this book is that this Hero’s Journey is most interesting if it’s considered in alchemical terms. Thus it is changes in a character’s frequency of consciousness over time that primarily makes a story interesting to a sophisticated, intelligent reader.
Alchemy
Alchemy is defined in this book as the process by which a person goes up or down the Mithraic Ladder. It has nothing to do with the transmutation of anything physical into anything else physical – it’s all about spiritual transformations. As such, there are two major types of alchemy: anabatic and katabatic.
Anabatic alchemy is the process of increasing one’s frequency of consciousness and ascending the Mithraic Ladder.
The ordeals of the early stages of this process only require small efforts, but they must be diligently repeated. Once the process is underway, greater efforts must be made to progress further, but with less emphasis on repetition. The process is finalised by a few acts of immense will.
This is what is typically referred to as the alchemical process. Spiritual lead is made into spiritual gold through a series of six refinements: enlarging, hardening, colouring, brightening, quickening and perfecting. This process is discussed in detail in the six chapters under the ‘Anabasis’ heading.
Katabatic alchemy is the process of decreasing one’s frequency of consciousness and descending the Mithraic Ladder.
As with anabatic alchemy, the process of katabasis begins with a large quantity of actions of individually low impact, and ends with major acts of high impact. The essential difference is that acts of katabatic alchemy are bad ones, increasing the suffering and misery in the world. Thus, spiritual gold is made into spiritual lead by a series of six defilements: imperfecting, retarding, dullening, discolouring, softening and shrinking. These stages comprise the six chapters under the ‘Katabasis’ heading.
This reverse alchemical process is not generally considered to be alchemical or heroic, but the fact is that before any character can rise to perfection, they must have first fallen out of it. As Carl Jung wrote “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Any character can be made more realistic and easier to identify with if they have a bit of a dark side. Also, katabatic alchemy can help expand your antagonist’s back story, letting the reader know how they became that way.
The alchemical maxim solve et coagula, is very much like separation and return. This is closely analogous to the katabatic and anabatic stages of the alchemical process. The idea is to break apart one’s consciousness and then build it back stronger, like an athlete breaks apart his muscles in order to grow them.
The initiation phase, which occurs outside, between and beyond katabasis and anabasis, is where the real magic is. This initiation phase, in alchemical terms, is where the real magic of the fictional story happens, where katabatic energy is transformed into anabatic energy, and a character begins to ascend the Mithraic Ladder again.
At least in theory: a real story plot will be far more complex than this. In practice, a character attempting to rise up the Mithraic Ladder will encounter numerous obstacles, reversals, challenges and setbacks that will knock them back down a level or two. Betrayals and unexpected events might demand a temporary step down the Mithraic Ladder in order to get business done.
The Alchemy of Character Development
Understanding the Mithraic Ladder, the Hero’s Journey and alchemy, the reader of this book will understand the essential nature of excellent literature. The alchemy of character development is the storytime magic that causes your fictional characters to transform from one spiritual level to the next.
Almost everyone can relate to the basic struggle of wanting to be good but sometimes being bad out of weakness. Even young children understand the basic challenge of temptation to do things that aren’t in their long-term interest. This is why so many intriguing stories are based around temptation and moral dilemmas (for more on this specific topic, see Book 3 in this series, 16 Moral Dilemmas).
In alchemical terms, this is the struggle of wanting to rise up the Mithraic Ladder. The desire to rise up and reunite with divinity is understood by people everywhere. Mature readers will also understand that there is a dark side to the human being, something that drives them down the Mithraic Ladder, and that this is in conflict with the first force.
This alchemy is what makes fiction good, and what makes literature memorable.
The goal of this book is to describe, in the clearest terms, all the possible alchemical journeys that could be taken by a character in dramatic fiction. This description can be thought of as a series of archetypal templates of psychological transformation. How those transformations happen is explained in depth in each of the individual chapters.
This magic of alchemy, as described in this book, is not limited to the protagonist of your story. Minor characters that undergo the transformations described in this book will be much more interesting than static characters. So will antagonists that undergo katabatic processes. Even characters that are only described in passing can be made more interesting if their backstory is explicated in alchemical terms.
You can also use this book as a source of prompts by randomly choosing one of the twelve transformations described in the Anabasis and Katabasis sections, and using that as the basis for a story.
However this book is used, the information contained herein will deepen and broaden the reader’s understanding of the spiritual aspects of reality as well as the alchemical process.
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This is an excerpt from Vince McLeod’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.
The Free State of Thuringia is one of the sixteen states in the German federal republic, with a population just over 2.1 million. Normally, little of importance would come from Thuringen – but the state elections earlier this month have upset that. The much-feared Alternative fuer Deutschland party – regularly dismissed as neo-Nazis by the opinion-shapers in the mainstream media – won 33% of the total vote, taking first place.
Mainstream commentators were aghast at the AfD’s success, labelling it a return of Nazism. But in the hysteria over the AfD result, other results with deep implications have been missed.
The BSW is also nationalist and also opposes Germany getting sucked into the war in Ukraine. Hence, they are as anti-Establishment as the AfD. But, unlike the AfD, they are a leftist movement that wants to empower the negotiating position of workers, and which has no interest in the Christian dogma so common to alternative right movements (the BSW also lists ‘reason’ as one of its two core values).
Sahra Wagenknecht is a former top-ranking Die Linke (The Left) candidate, which means that she’s coming from a very leftist perspective. If the AfD had done well and the BSW not, it might be possible to blame everything on TikTok. But because the BSW also did so well, it’s impossible to speak of a “right-wing wave”. The BSW winning over 15% shows that support for nationalism, not just support for the AfD, is what’s rising.
Perhaps the most striking change from the previous election was the collapse of Die Linke. They were the biggest party in 2019, with 31% of the total vote. Their 2024 vote was a much humbler 13%. The vast bulk of this fall can be attributed to the rise of the BSW, which didn’t exist in 2019.
In total, the nationalist bloc of AfD and BSW won 48.7% of the Thuringen vote, more than the 47% for the globalist bloc of CDU (23.6%), Die Linke (13%), SPD (6.1%), Gruene (3.2%) and FDP (1.1%). Nationalists outpolling globalists in a Western European region the size of Thuringen is something unprecedented since World War II. Since that war, nationalists have been reduced to small minorities. For them to become the majority again, anywhere, came as a shock to many.
Even more shocking was the voting breakdown.
The first result of note here was that some 49% of working-class voters in Thuringen voted AfD, and a further 16% voted BSW. This means that 65% of working-class voters went for a nationalist party, as opposed to a mere 30% for the five major globalists.
This is a remarkable result because it speaks to the extent to which working-class people feel themselves betrayed by the globalist establishment, in particular the leftist globalist establishment.
One of the issues that forced Sahra Wagenknecht out of Die Linke (along with COVID-19 measures and Ukraine/Russia policy) was German refugee policy. Die Linke supported the globalist approach of constantly and permanently increasing the refugee quota. Wagenknecht abandoned Die Linke in the belief that many left-wing voters would prefer a nationalist option to a globalist one, and she has been vindicated by this month’s polling.
Of even more import is the fact that this process has just begun. The AfD has been around for a while but the BSW is new. If they can already poll this high in a regional election, they can dream of doing so at a federal level. Then the possibility arises of an AfD-BSW coalition ruling Germany.
The second result of note here relates to age. If one looks only at voters aged 18-24, who are traditionally globalist left voters, we can see a radical seachange towards nationalism. 55% of men and 46% of women in this age group voted for one of the two nationalist parties.
The only real supporters of the establishment now are the Boomers whose rental property portfolios and stock portfolios are the prime beneficiaries of mass immigration. The Western ruling classes have denied for 80 years that mass immigration leads to higher rents and lower wages, but the people of West widely understand now, and the working-class understands well. Many of those people are now desperate for an anti-establishment alternative.
As the Boomers continue to die off over the next decade, globalist sentiments in the West will continue to weaken further. Those who believe that nationalists are only rising because of social media may succeed in banning that social media to a major extent. But they won’t stop what’s coming, because it’s not a social media phenomenon. It’s the inevitable end consequence of many tens of millions of unpleasant encounters with the diversity that the globalists have imported.
These results of note, taken together, suggest that the vast majority of young, working-class men in Thuringen are now nationalist. Perhaps then, a smaller majority of young, working-class men in the West in general might be nationalist. This means that the nationalist forces now control the loyalties of the precise demographics needed to control the streets – or overthrow the government.
