psychopathy – Page 18

Our Mental Health System Shouldn’t Run on WINZ Logic

A lot of people complain about the way WINZ treats its clients, but their logic makes a certain sense. By verbally and psychologically abusing many of the people who come to them for help, WINZ staff sharply reduce demand for WINZ services and thereby save taxpayer money. This is called WINZ logic, and our mental health system runs by the same principles.

WINZ logic seems to appeal to the vast majority of New Zealanders. We like to consider ourselves a people who have “hardened up”, and who don’t need faggy things like welfare. Moreover, the high levels of diversity in our society mean that those at the top are unwilling to pay taxes for the greater good, because those taxes won’t be helping people like them. So we make sure that WINZ runs an extremely tight ship, where there is absolutely no wastage.

Somewhere along the way, someone working at WINZ realised that many of their clients could easily be discouraged from seeking WINZ services. Many people who need WINZ services are socially outcast or psychologically damaged, and so they are easily disheartened by abuse. If these people were spoken to like thieving, bludging, malingering scum, instead of being treated like fellow humans who need help, they were less likely to come back and ask for more money.

Ultimately, the essence of WINZ logic is this: the more unpleasant the experience of being a WINZ client can be made, the fewer resources WINZ clients will collectively consume.

With ever-tightening social welfare budgets under nine years of a National-led Government, treating the clients badly became the default way to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor. If someone really needed a benefit, WINZ logic claimed, they’d keep coming back despite the mistreatment. So treating the clients badly achieves the twin goals of saving money while still helping the needy.

Unfortunately, our mental health system works on the same logic. In order to save money, patients are systematically verbally and emotionally abused by support workers. They don’t admit to this, and nowhere is it written that this is official policy, but it’s apparent from collating the experiences of many users of the mental health services that this is the case.

The logic appears to be that it’s better for a hundred schizophrenics to starve in the street than it is for one person to perhaps get a benefit that they didn’t 100% need. After all, a severely mentally ill young person who is unlikely to work again is liable to cost the country up to half a million dollars in benefit payments alone over the course of their lives. If people like this could be convinced to commit suicide instead, the potential savings could run into the hundreds of millions.

This might sound implausible to some, but it’s a natural consequence of neoliberal reasoning. Human life has a dollar value. If mentally ill people can’t contribute to the tax farm, and if we can’t just kill them directly, we have to encourage them to kill themselves. This reasoning was introduced to New Zealand by Ruth Richardson in the 1991 Budget and it’s now an indelible part of our culture. After all, we already have “by far the highest youth suicide rates in the developed world”.

If this wasn’t true, then the experience of being a user of the mental health services would be entirely different. One would be treated much like a person ill with a physical illness – as a fellow human being who had had something unfortunate happen to them and required care in order to recover to normal function. Doctors would answer your questions honestly. Consultations would work towards improving your mental health rather than merely assessing your work readiness.

Further evidence for this comes from the refusal to acknowledge cannabis medicine. Despite the fact that there was enough evidence for the medicinal value of cannabis for California to make it legal already in 1996, New Zealand politicians and doctors still have their heads up their arses. Now even Zimbabwe has legal medicinal cannabis.

What this approach to cannabis tells the mentally ill in New Zealand is that the mental health system isn’t really interested in helping them. It’s just: “Take these sedatives and get back to picking cotton.” It wouldn’t matter if 100,000 people all lined up to tell doctors that cannabis had helped them sleep or had helped with anxiety, depression or suicidal ideation. No-one’s listening, no-one cares.

Our mental health system shouldn’t run on the WINZ logic of withholding aid to as many people as possible. It should be recognised that an investment in a person’s mental health now will have excellent returns in both their future productivity and future unwillingness to use mental health services. The emphasis should be on treating them well so that they can get better and we can save money over their lifetime, not treating them like shit to save money this month.

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How Terrorism Works

The 2005 London terror attacks killed 52 people; a decade later, the British Police are so intimidated by Islam that they won’t investigate Muslim grooming gangs even when they have raped hundreds of British children

Terrorism often seems senseless to modern, pampered Westerners. Killing for the sake of killing is a long way from our everyday lives of peace and bounty. But terrorism isn’t just killing for the sake of killing – there’s an established calculus behind it, and it works. This article looks at how.

The ultimate reason for committing any act of terror is to induce submission in an enemy population towards the collective that the individual terrorist is a representative of. The idea is that the terrorist does something so horrifically cruel and destructive that the observers of it become afraid of attracting the wrath of the terrorist or his allies, and so become submissive towards them.

The first king learned that submission could be induced by publicly smashing the skulls of his enemies in, and the natural logic of dominance and control that applied thousands of years ago also applies now. For instance, the vast majority of us are submissive towards government representatives because we have observed that governments will spare no cruelty when it comes to getting their will through.

This is no accident; all Western governments have purposefully committed acts of cruelty towards those they claim to be representing, for this is the simplest and most effective way to induce submission. Had they not done so, they would not exist.

The same is true of religions. All Abrahamic religions encourage and promote human rights abuses, whether those be infant genital mutilation, denial of rights to women or homosexuals, the murder of unbelievers or the incarceration of medicinal drug users. Neither is this accidental. All of these cruelties create an impression in the minds of the victims – an impression of the frightful consequences of resisting these people.

The purpose of terrorism, then, is to create an impression that it’s better to go along with the wishes of the collective you represent than to resist them. Therefore, submission means you can get your will through. Every woman burnt at the stake is another woman who doesn’t resist the will of the next priest to come through the village.

In the world of 2018, we can see that repeated acts of Islamic terror in Europe have led to incredible freedom and prosperity for that religion. British Police are so scared of being called Islamophobic that they happily turn a blind eye to thousands of young girls getting raped by Muslim grooming gangs – a phenomenon most recently uncovered in Telford – but they’re more than happy to arrest people for growing medicinal cannabis, knowing they can do so without risk to themselves.

This fear is a direct consequence of Islamic terrorism. In other words, the British Police have been successfully terrorised.

This is how fear and terrorism work, and it’s how the usual way that territories get conquered by foreign invaders, because the locals seldom acquiesce to such a thing without coercion. The British did similar things when they built the Empire, which is what makes it all the more surprising that they don’t resist when it’s being done to them.

Every Islamic terror attack in the West, especially if the attacker dies in the act, makes Westerners ever more impressed by the strong will and faith of Muslim people and ever more willing to bow down to those Muslims rather than stand up to them and risk being killed. The public response to terror attacks is usually horror and condemnation, but the unconscious individual response – especially among individuals who adhere to slave morality – is to be impressed by the bravery and conviction of the killers.

Terrorism bypasses the rational mind and makes its appeal directly to the unconscious. When laid out like this, it’s clear that terrorism is simply a form of iron magic like any other. All successful uses of iron magic induce submission in observers, and broadcasting those terror acts into every household during the evening news is a genius way of amplifying the magic.

All this is lost on the Pastafarians. There have been several cases where individuals have ostensibly had their religious rights denied to them on the grounds that Pastafarianism isn’t a “serious” religion. They all miss the point. A religion counts as a serious one when its followers are willing to slaughter anyone who mocks or disagrees with them. That’s the only way that the rest of us can be forced to take the kind of garbage written in Abrahamic holy scriptures seriously.

Every Westerner instinctively knows, whether they’re willing to admit it or not, that if they stand on a street corner wearing a Bomb Muhammad tshirt mocking the prophet of Islam, pretty soon a Muslim will come and stab or shoot them to death or run them over. So they don’t mock Islam, neither on the street corner nor anywhere else. From the terrorist’s point of view, that’s victory.

Kiwi Virtue Signalling

Humanity’s Greatest Conceit

Many people are happy to hold the belief that other creatures have a “lesser” or “lower” form of consciousness to themselves, despite the absence of a logical basis for it

The single greatest conceit of the human animal is that humans like it are somehow more conscious or self-aware than the beings who make up the rest of the animal kingdom. This belief is not only insane and irrational, but it has had devastating consequences for the rest of the Earth.

When it comes down to it, no-one has any fucking idea who or what else is conscious. This follows simple logic. After all, how could we possibly know? Each one of us can assert with absolute certainty that, as an individual, they are conscious, because being conscious of your own consciousness is sufficient evidence that it exists. But this gets taken to illogical conclusions.

The vast majority of humans labour under the erroneous assumption that other creatures are only conscious to the degree that they are like those humans. A chimpanzee is considered to be very similar to us relative to the rest of the animal kingdom (and it is if the comparison is made in physical and anatomical terms), but this has no relevance to whether or not the chimpanzee is conscious.

If we can’t observe or measure consciousness in other humans, then we can’t measure it in other creatures either. So if consciousness has never and can never be either observed or measured in other creatures, then any belief about the consciousness of another creature must of necessity be an article of faith.

Simple enough, but the difficulty arises when this iron-clad logic meets the infinite human capacity for self-delusion. The vast majority of people make the erroneous assumption that their brain generates consciousness and therefore that other creatures are similar to the extent that their brains are believed to be similar.

But this is pure superstition, and not logical.

Even worse, despite being a majority, are those who assume that they are superior to all creatures of “lesser” consciousness, and that the supposed lower consciousness of other creatures give us a green light to abuse and exploit them.

It’s common for humans to look at a cat and think we see an animal that is uncomprehending of the greater existential questions, but how can we rule out that the cat has long since solved all these questions and is now blase about them, to the point that any human wondering about them merely appears sophomoric?

How can we know that the cat, who sleeps 15 hours a day, isn’t meditating for most of this time? Cats might all be spiritual masters on the order of Buddha.

How do we know that the ant that appears to go forward mindlessly, isn’t at perfect peace with its role in the world and accepts it without reservation?

The logical flaw is also evident if one observes that many people are willing to assume that these creatures have less consciousness on account of that they didn’t evolve as much of it as we did – but they aren’t willing to make the same assumptions of different races, even though the logic is the same.

The argument that differing selection pressures could account for differences in consciousness between humans and the other mammals, but could not also account for differences in consciousness between white people and black people, is a contradiction on its face.

Humanity’s greatest conceit is that our consciousness is somehow more special or worthy of not suffering than the consciousness of other creatures, and this line of reasoning is what has enabled the rape of the planet that has occurred over the last century.