Understanding New Zealand 3: Who Voted Labour In 2020?

Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party comprehensively won the 2020 General Election, drawing 50.0% of the party votes (1,443,546), up from 36.9% (956,184) in 2017. This allowed the Sixth Labour Government to continue governing alone, and without needing help from either the Greens or New Zealand First. This shift towards Labour is the main story of the 2020 General Election.

The main reason for it was the large number of white New Zealanders who shifted loyalty from National to Labour between 2017 and 2020.

The fact is that New Zealand is a majority white country (around 70% of New Zealanders are white according to 2018 Census data). So there only have to be small changes in average sentiment among white people to have major electoral effects. Winning back a large number of white voters from National was chiefly how Labour won a Parliamentary majority.

VariableLabour Vote 2020Labour Vote 2017
European0.11-0.65
Maori-0.330.58
Pacific Islander0.230.61
Asian-0.040.01

The numbers show a major change in sentiments towards Labour among white people. In 2017, the correlation between voting Labour that year and being of European descent was -0.65. By 2020, the correlation between voting Labour and being of European descent was 0.11. This is an enormous change, and it’s the primary reason for Labour’s comprehensive win at the 2020 General Election.

What it means is that the average white person, despite their relative wealth, supported the Labour Party in 2020. This wasn’t close to being true in 2017.

In fact, so many white people voted for Labour in 2020 that there was no longer any significant positive correlation between voting Labour that year and being either Maori or a Pacific Islander. Both of these correlations were very strong in 2017, but had faded away by 2020 owing to the fact that the Labour voting demographic was much whiter that year.

VariableLabour Vote 2020Labour Vote 2017
No qualifications0.060.38
Level 1 certificate-0.050.07
Level 2 certificate-0.050.11
Level 3 certificate-0.010.20*
Level 4 certificate-0.020.20*
Level 5 diploma-0.15-0.75**
Level 6 diploma0.06-0.75**
Bachelor’s degree-0.06-0.24
Honours degree0.04-0.22
Master’s degree0.01-0.19
Doctorate0.17-0.17

The people who switched allegiance to Labour in 2020 were often the highly-educated ones who strongly supported National in 2017.

The correlations between voting Labour in 2017 and having any university degree were all negative and either significant or bordering on it. The correlation between voting Labour in 2017 and having a doctorate was -0.17, but by the time of the 2020 General Election, this had flipped to a positive correlation of 0.17. Holders of other degrees also became notably more Labour-friendly, although less drastically than those with doctorates.

Meanwhile, the correlation between voting Labour and having no qualifications weakened, from 0.38 in 2017 to an almost neutral 0.06 in 2020. This underlines the extent to which the new Labour supporters in 2020 were primarily from the middle class.

VariableLabour Vote 2020
20-24 years old-0.02
25-29 years old-0.07
30-34 years old-0.01
35-39 years old0.03
40-44 years old0.06
45-49 years old0.04
50-54 years old0.10
55-59 years old0.18
60-64 years old0.17
65-69 years old0.17
70-74 years old0.20
75-79 years old0.21
80-84 years old0.27
85+ years old0.27

Those who shifted to Labour in 2020 weren’t just educated, they were also old.

In 2017, there was a correlation of -0.70 between being aged 50-64 and voting Labour, and a correlation of -0.61 between being aged 65+ and voting Labour. The reason for this was easy to explain at the time: old people overwhelmingly prefer conservative parties, a general rule across the entire democratic world.

They didn’t in 2020. Although the correlations between being old and voting National in 2020 are much stronger than the correlations between being old and voting Labour, the correlations between being aged 80-84 years old or 85+ years old and voting Labour in 2020 were both significantly positive, an enormous swing from 2017.

Expressed in rough terms, very few old people voted Labour in 2017, but in 2020 about half of them did. This may be because old people were particularly impressed by Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which threatened to kill many of them, or because they’re concerned about the kind of New Zealand that the National Party would create for their descendants.

VariableLabour Vote 2020Labour Vote 2017
Managers-0.42-0.69
Professionals0.10-0.14
Technicians and Trades Workers0.22-0.01
Community and Personal Service Workers0.110.39
Clerical and Administrative Workers0.250.05
Sales Workers0.110.10
Machinery Operators and Drivers0.060.54
Labourers-0.060.24

Commensurate with increased support for Labour among highly-educated people was increased support among high-skill occupations. Although there was a negative correlation of -0.14 between voting Labour in 2017 and working as a professional, by 2020 this had flipped to 0.10. A thaw in sentiments was also observed among managers. The correlation between working as a manager in 2017 and voting Labour was -0.69, but by 2020 it was only -0.42.

Another notable change from 2017 is that there is no longer a significant positive correlation between voting for Labour and working as a machinery operator or driver. This correlation was 0.54 in 2017, but a mere 0.06 by 2020. A similar, but smaller, pattern is observable with labourers and with community and personal service workers.

This shows that Labour expanded from its base to the centre ground between 2017 and 2020. Over these three years, Labour reduced its reliance on traditional working-class occupations, and increased its appeal to high-skill ones.

VariableLabour Vote 2020
Personal income < $5,000-0.14
Personal income $5,000-$10,000-0.06
Personal income $10,000-$20,0000.12
Personal income $20,000-$30,0000.21
Personal income $30,000-$50,0000.14
Personal income $50,000-$70,0000.02
Personal income > $70,000-0.14

Labour also reduced its traditional reliance on poor voters.

In 2017, the correlation between voting Labour and having an income between $5,000 and $10,000 was 0.58. This is strong enough to show that Labour got many of their votes from there. By 2020, the correlation between being in this income bracket and voting Labour had become negative. This was because Labour shifted from the party of the poor to the party of the everyman.

In 2017, the correlation between voting Labour and being in any income bracket above $60,000 was significantly negative. However, in 2020, the correlation between earning over $70,000 and voting Labour was negative, but not significant. Much of this could be explained by wealthy people starting to feel that Labour had no real appetite for raising taxes.

Indeed, the correlation between voting Labour and median personal income became much less strongly negative between 2017, when it was -0.52, and 2020, when it was -0.27. So although wealthy people still avoid Labour, they do so much less eagerly than they did in 2017.

VariableLabour Vote 2020Labour Vote 2017
Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing-0.23-0.27
Mining-0.03-0.04
Manufacturing-0.050.23
Electricity, Gas, Water and Waste Services0.100.08
Construction-0.03-0.00
Wholesale Trade-0.19-0.15
Retail Trade0.23-0.03
Accommodation and Food Services/Hospitality-0.100.08
Transport, Postal and Warehousing-0.010.54
Information Media and Telecommunications0.070.10
Financial and Insurance Services-0.04-0.08
Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services-0.36-0.58
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services-0.05-0.20
Administrative and Support Services0.010.37
Public Administration and Safety0.360.20
Education and Training0.120.15
Healthcare and Social Assistance0.440.14
Arts and Recreation Services-0.160.02

Labour’s resurgence might have been pronounced along lines of race, age, education, and occupational skill level, but it was not particularly pronounced along any industry lines.

Generally speaking, the demographic of Labour Party voters became a lot closer to the demographic of everyday New Zealanders between 2017 and 2020. This was apparent from the fact that most correlations between voting Labour and working in a particular industry became weaker as Labour expanded from its working-class base.

Most striking was the correlation between voting Labour and working in transport, postal and warehousing, which crashed from 0.54 in 2017 to -0.01 in 2020. Other industries went in the opposite direction. The correlation between voting Labour and working in rental, hiring and real estate services went from -0.58 in 2017 to -0.38 in 2020.

Wholesale trade, retail trade, manufacturing, public administration and safety, professional and technical services, and agriculture, forestry and fishing all moved towards no correlation with voting Labour from 2017 to 2020. This reflects the broad-based increase in appeal achieved by Labour over the past three years.

One notable exception was the correlation between working in healthcare and social assistance and voting Labour. In 2017 this was not significant, at 0.14. By 2020 it had leapt up to 0.44, and was the strongest correlation between working in any industry and voting Labour. It may be that this workers in this industry, more than any other, anticipate a lot of help from the Sixth Labour Government in its second term.

VariableLabour Vote 2020
No Source of Income-0.18
Wage or Salary0.02
Self-employed or Own Own Business-0.26
Interest, Dividends, Rent, Other Investments0.03
ACC or Private Work Insurance-0.09
NZ Super or Veteran’s Pension0.22
Jobseeker Support-0.09
Sole Parent Support-0.16
Supported Living Payment0.28
Student Allowance0.08

Labour also drastically reduced their reliance on unemployment and invalid’s beneficiaries. In 2017, the correlation between being on the unemployment benefit and voting Labour was 0.73 – by 2020 it was -0.09. This is partly because a great many non-unemployment beneficiaries switched to Labour, but it’s also because of strong support among unemployment beneficiaries for the New Zealand First, Maori, Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis, ONE, Vision NZ and Advance NZ parties.

The correlation between being on the invalid’s benefit and voting Labour in 2020 was significantly positive, at 0.28. This was much weaker than in 2017, when it was 0.58. As with the unemployment benefit, this reflects how Labour broadened their appeal beyond beneficiaries.

Perhaps the most striking change involved pensioners. There was a correlation of -0.51 between being on a pension and voting Labour in 2017. By 2020, this had flipped to a positive correlation of 0.22. The fact that Labour did much better among old people in 2020 has been discussed above. Along with the coronavirus response, the introduction and then doubling of a winter energy payment to pensioners no doubt helped Labour here.

There was still a significant negative correlation between being self-employed or owning one’s own business and voting Labour, but at -0.26 this was much weaker than most people would have guessed. The correlation between being self-employed and voting Labour in 2017 was -0.77.

VariableLabour Vote 2020
National Vote 2020-0.16
Greens Vote 20200.29
ACT Vote 2020-0.12
New Zealand First Vote 20200.06
New Conservative Vote 20200.13
The Opportunity Party Vote 20200.33
Maori Party Vote 2020-0.37
Advance NZ Vote 2020-0.19
Sustainable NZ Vote 20200.02
ALCP Vote 2020-0.27
TEA Party Vote 2020-0.21
Heartland NZ Vote 2020-0.17
Social Credit Vote 20200.25
NZ Outdoors Party Vote 20200.01
ONE Party Vote 20200.25
Vision NZ Party Vote 2020-0.23

That the average Labour voter is much whiter and better-educated in 2020 than in 2017 can be seen from the change in correlations between voting for Labour and voting for other parties.

For one thing, there were significant positive correlations between voting Labour in 2020 and either voting Greens in 2020 (0.29) or voting for The Opportunities Party in 2020 (0.33). These are much stronger than the correlations between voting Labour in 2017 and either voting Greens in 2017 (0.14) or voting for TOP in 2017 (0.00). Greens and TOP voters are disproportionately white and well-educated, two groups that heavily switched to Labour in 2020.

For another thing, there are now significant negative correlations between voting Labour in 2020 and voting for most of the Maori-heavy parties. Although Labour won a great number of votes from old white people, they lost a smaller number of Maori voters to fringe parties. Losing such marginal voters to fringe parties is the inevitable blowback from Ardern’s drive to the centre.

A further noticable change is the correlation between voting Labour in 2017 and voting National in 2017 (-0.94) and the correlation between voting Labour in 2020 and voting National in 2020 (-0.16).

This is a profound difference, and tells the story of a major shift in the demographics of the average Labour voter. In 2017, Labour and National were sharply opposed along lines of wealth, ethnicity, age and education. By 2020, most of those distinctions were eroded. National was still the party for rich old people, but Labour had transformed from the party of the disenfranchised, the brown and the working-class to the party of the average Kiwi.

VariableLabour Vote 2020Labour Vote 2017
Percentage of males-0.15-0.33
Urban electorate0.170.11
Percentage NZ-born-0.050.22
South Island electorate0.23-0.05
Turnout Rate 20200.28n/a
Turnout Rate 2017n/a-0.72

The Labour Party won a lot of male voters from National over the three years before the 2020 General Election. The correlation between voting Labour in 2017 and being male was -0.33. By 2020, this had fallen to -0.15. This suggests that Labour did well in 2020 not only because they demonstrated compassion since 2017 but also because they demonstrated competency.

Labour voters also became much less New Zealand-born between 2017 and 2020. This is mostly because there was not a disproportionate number of Maori voters this time. Immigrants to New Zealand tend to be wealthier than the New Zealand-born, so if Labour wins more middle-class voters they will also win proportionately more immigrants.

Some conspiracy theorists suggested that the 2020 General Election may have been rigged by Labour, the proof being Labour dominance in the rural South Island electorates. But rural South Island voters overlap heavily with the elderly, middle-class voters who switched overwhelmingly to Labour in 2020. In 2020 Labour won a significantly greater proportion of votes from South Island voters than from North Island ones, unlike in 2017.

One of the most striking changes between the 2017 General Election and the 2020 edition were the correlations between voting Labour and turnout rate. In 2017, the correlation between turnout rate and voting Labour was -0.72, which is extremely strong and evidence that Labour voters that year were mostly heavily disenfranchised people. By 2020, the correlation between turnout rate and voting Labour was 0.28, showing that Labour had won the centre between 2017 and 2020.

In summary, Labour won the 2020 General Election by broadening their appeal to the average New Zealander. Increased support for Labour from 2017 was especially noticeable among rich people, white people, old people and the well-educated, all of who are traditionally antipathetic to social democratic parties.

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This article is an excerpt from the upcoming 3rd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing. Understanding New Zealand is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people.

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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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Clown World Chronicles: History In Clown World

When George Orwell wrote that “He who controls the past controls the future,” he meant that whoever controls the historical narrative gets to control the direction the entire culture takes. The historical narrative gives us our common ideas of right and wrong, and suggests the direction in which we’re all headed. So whoever controls our culture’s understanding of history also holds the steering wheel of Western civilisation.

When he wrote “He who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell meant that whoever is able to seize power in the present moment gets to dictate what the popular history will be. They will not only control the historians, and decide which of them gets published and which promoted, but they will also control the education system and the history it teaches. One of the main spoils for anyone who seizes power is the ability to dictate what official history is.

The telling of history in Clown World has been twisted to meet the objectives of the current ruling class.

Clown World is under the control of the Globohomo Gayplex. Their control of the present allows them to set the historical narrative. The narrative we’re given is that nationalism led to constant warfare, and so only by uniting under one global system can the world ever know peace. Therefore, all national assemblies must subordinate themselves to foreign decisionmakers, such as the United Nations.

Furthermore, all warfare in the history of the world has been triggered by intolerance, so we have to be maximally tolerant towards everything, even the mass rape of children by foreign grooming gangs. Any discontent with the way things are is a threat to other people’s safety. Just lie back and think of world peace.

This globalist historical narrative is pushed by the globalists’ footsoldiers in the education, entertainment and information systems.

The shock troops of the globalists are the SJWs who now infest teachers’ colleges everywhere. Although history as a discipline has traditionally been resistant to pozzing on account of that it was inherently interested in classical values, the degenerative effect of Clown World is overwhelming. Many history teachers are now SJWs who think it virtuous to push a neoliberal narrative.

The heavy artillery of the globalists are the capital interests who push their version of the historical narrative through the mass media and popular culture, instead of through education. The basics of the narrative are, however, the same. Before neoliberal globalist capitalism, we are told, there was misery. After neoliberal globalist capitalism, there was joy.

The capitalist influence on Clown World history has led to a complete denial of the effectiveness of non-capitalist systems. The Soviet Union did not transform from a quasi-medieval economy to one that put the first man in space in 50 years, and neither did China transform from Africa-level poverty to Argentinan-level personal wealth in 40 years. And the less said about Nazi Germany the better.

The capitalist influence on the historical narrative prevents anyone from asking why it is that no-one can afford a house on a single wage today when that was common a century ago, or how a system that prevents students from graduating because they owe money to the school canteen is anything other than an egregious failure. One might think that the SJWs would criticise this system, but they are more concerned with virtue signalling about the latest trendy issue.

None of this would be so bad if it were easily possible to find honest historians, because then we could simply listen to them.

Unfortunately, the prevalence of honest historians in Clown World is about the same as that of honest people in general: extremely rare. Very few can resist the temptation, when recounting history, to spin the account to suit their own personal moral or political values. Even before Clown World this was the case. But in Clown World, every last aspect of the popular history has been warped.

The most warped takes on history come from the New World. Clown World history has it that the inhabitants of the New World lived in perfect harmony with Nature before the white man turned up. There was never any war or hunger. Not until the white man’s technology disrupted the local power balance was there any disharmony at all. This has been described as the ‘White Man Bad, Brown/Black Man Good’ school of history.

Pretending that everything was great before white people showed up is an example of “white erasure“. The intent is to delegitimise the existing white populations of New World countries, to make them feel guilty for the supposed historical crimes of their ancestors and to make them feel obliged to humble themselves and repent. In New World countries, it also serves to weaken local resistance to globalism.

The emphasis on historical crimes also serves a more nefarious purpose: it conditions people to accept use of the favourite weapon of the globalist – mass immigration. The logic is that, if white people stole the land they’re living on, they can’t rightly object to other people showing up and demanding to share it with them. So there’s no legitimate reason for a white person living in the New World to oppose mass immigration. “Given the historical context”, any such opposition is racist.

The situation is similar, if not quite as acute, in the Old World. In the Old World, there’s no wider narrative of land theft and colonisation, but the masses are still taught that their ancestors were evil and their history shameful. Everyone in the Old World, even if they fought the Nazis, is guilty of the Holocaust, and so none may express any desire for national self-determination. The nation state, they are taught, is to blame for Europe’s bloody history.

If the demands of the ruling class call for it, it’s possible to entirely ignore any piece of history that is inconvenient. In the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings and the drive to ban firearms, some said that the shootings were “New Zealand’s darkest day“.

Fifty-one foreigners getting shot on New Zealand soil is a tragedy, true, but it is nowhere close to the magnitude of the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele, in which over 800 genuine members of the New Zealand nation were killed, and almost 2,000 more wounded. It’s really an insult to the New Zealand nation to compare the Christchurch mosque shootings to the first day of Passchendaele, but Clown World history is modular – any part can be removed and substituted with any other.

These prevailing historical narratives are not entirely fabricated, but they are grossly inaccurate on account of that they make a number of false assumptions about human nature. The behaviour of the human animal might be highly malleable, but we do not come into the world as blank slates; we are more like possibility trees. Moreover, it is not a historical fact that the modern world has “outgrown” spirituality. These false assumptions lead us to fundamentally misunderstand what history has to teach us.

Solving the problem of bad history in Clown World requires two things: proper education and lack of ego. The first is important because it will enable people to accurately analyse the historical information they are presented with and to determine what’s true and what’s a lie. The second is important because, without it, there is no objectivity, just angry primates asserting tribal interests.

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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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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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Clown World Chronicles: Politics In Clown World

In The Republic, Plato laid down the facts about the political cycle. The political cycle begins with the introduction of an aristocracy by a class of educated philosopher-kings, then degrades into timocracy, then degrades into oligarchy, then degrades into democracy, which finally degrades into tyranny. It is at the junction between democracy and tyranny that we find ourselves in Clown World.

By 2020, the enlightened aristocracy is long gone. The timocracy ended with the World Wars. Oligarchy reigned for some decades, perhaps up until the 1990s, and since then we’ve been firmly in democracy. With the intensification of Clown World after the Global Financial Crisis, we’re arguably now in a state of tyranny.

Tyranny is when the rulers work to enrich themselves instead of working to enhance the common good. This state is characterised by an absence of reason among the ruling class. Not being reasonable, the rulers make decisions based on crude lusts and impulses. Usually these relate to gratifying their egos in some way, often at the expense of others.

When the ruling class gratifies their egos at the expense of the common man, the common man comes to feel as if he lives in a Clown World. He can’t find a job that pays enough to buy a house and raise a family, but political discussions in the mainstream media ignore such issues, focusing instead of trivialities. It all seems so callously absurd.

Callous absurdity is the hallmark of tyrannies throughout history, and that’s exactly what Clown World is – a kind of tyranny.

As Plato anticipated in his famous Analogy of the Cave, people who figure out that it’s Clown World are treated with violent contempt by those who think that it’s Normal World. Anyone who has a problem with the current order of things is marginalised. Although the numbers of the marginalised are growing, the Normies are still in control.

The general rule of Clown World politics is that everything is either the opposite of how it should be or a grossly corrupted form of it. Politics may have always been corrupt, but only in Clown World has it reached such a shameless, venal and shallow intensity.

In Clown World, we’re led by the worst of us. The American Presidential Election of 2020 will be contested by two very old men, both of who are very much past it. The challenger, Joe Biden, was the Vice President during the Barack Obama era, and so helped to oversee the destruction of Libya. This unprovoked war led to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the deaths of 100,000 Libyans and the reintroduction of slave markets to the Libyan capital – and Biden is painted as the good guy in this election.

In Clown World, politicians no longer have to know what they’re talking about. Obama constantly read from a teleprompter, relying on it so much that if it broke down he didn’t know what to say. Clown World politicians in general are barely better informed than the population they’re ruling over – and are frequently worse informed. They are no longer orators, performing feats of wit and memory. Instead they speak in soundbites aimed at the lizard brain.

Because Clown World politicians don’t work towards the greater good, they have no philosophical grounding, and therefore no principles. As such, they are whores who will jump into bed with whoever’s paying. This has led to some exceptionally strange alliances.

One such strange alliance is the one between fundamentalist religious Muslims and left-wing social justice warriors. The social justice warriors are strong supporters of homosexual rights, but the Muslims are strong supporters of homosexuals being thrown off rooftops. They appear to have allied on the basis of having a common grudge against middle-class white men.

Another strange alliance is between Antifa and the corporate elite. Antifa’s great enemies are the Nazis that supposedly lurk around every corner, and their strongest ideological point of difference relates to immigration. Antifa believe that the working class is international and should not be restricted by borders – but the corporate elite have exactly the same opinion. They love to be able to import cheap labour without restriction.

Yet another strange alliance is between feminists and the so-called transphobic. In Clown World, it’s possible to have your cock and balls chopped off and then play for a woman’s sports team. Many right-wingers are disgusted by trans culture, and in getting accused of transphobia they find themselves on the same side as the devotedly left-wing feminists, who want to keep trans people out of women’s spaces.

Perhaps the weirdest of all is the alliance between the fundamentalist religious who want to ban cannabis and the criminal gangs who currently supply the black market with it in the places where it is illegal. Fundamentalist Abrahamists, in particular, are against cannabis because it is a spiritual sacrament, and here they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the criminal gangs who need it to be illegal to profit from it.

It can be observed, as Plato did so many centuries ago, that democracy leads to widespread bickering and resentment. Eventually this gets so bad that people come to support a tyrant in the hope that unlimited power will make it possible to clean away all the filth. Clown World is at the stage where people might support a charismatic dictator, should one arise. Our political situation is a tinderbox.

Unfortunately there’s no easy solution. A revolution of philosopher-kings seems unlikely owing to the fact that there’s no widespread agreement as to who the philosopher-kings would be. Although Plato described the philosopher-king as being motivated primarily by the love of wisdom, people don’t agree on what constitutes wisdom.

In Clown World, life has become so deeply politicised that every philosophical or scientific question is now divided by political camps. If a person identifies with the left, it can be confidently predicted that they agree with the climate change science but deny the human biodiversity science. If a person identifies with the right, the exact opposite is true. So every question of philosophical wisdom or the nature of reality is corrupted by political influence.

The only solution to the political problems of Clown World might be waiting for it all to collapse.

Politics is now total war, permeating every level of society. No-one can escape the new social justice Inquisition, which scours everyone’s mind for any sign of wrongthinking. Everyone must maintain a state of high alertness and watch over their every word, lest they inadvertently give their political enemies a boost. This anxiety can’t last forever – and it won’t – but it will last as long as Clown World does.

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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.

*

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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If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund. Even better, buy any one of our books!

Clown World Chronicles: The History Of Clown World

Most of us can accept that we’re in a world that is a twisted parody of what life should really be like. The world seems like a bizarre three-ring circus, with marching lines of honking clowns reflecting the people’s dumbfounded surrender to it all. It’s permanent absurdity. It’s Clown World. But how did it get like this?

Certainly life was not always this way. Reason used to prevail. Anyone old enough to remember the 1990s remembers a time when things mostly made sense, and the world generally appeared free of malice. There were plenty of bad things in the world then – as there always have been – but the common approach to solving these human problems was logical.

The contention of this author is that Clown World began on September 11th, 2001, with the World Trade Centre bombings in New York City.

Ever since this date, the world has been in a state of mass hysteria. This was first apparent from the lack of resistance to George W Bush’s PATRIOT Act, a set of laws that took away basic human freedoms from the American people. Some of those freedoms had, until then, been considered protected constitutional rights, but the degree of panic was so high that such concerns were ignored.

The West seemed to collectively decide that security concerns now weighed higher than liberty concerns.

The panic continued in the form of an intense fear of further attacks. With the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the years following 9/11, anxiety about Muslim reprisals spiked. Indeed, there were many Islamic terror attacks in the West since 9/11. But there were also a great number of school shootings, which suggests that there was a general trend towards increased political violence.

This increase in spectacular violence (even as everyday violence decreased), coupled with a sharp increase in the presence of Muslims and Africans in the West, led to a level of tension that had never previously existed. This state of panic has now lasted for so long that it has been normalised.

This ongoing hyperanxiety has placed most people in a state of learned helplessness. Passivity and fear are now the default modes of being. The average person submissively and apathetically awaits further instruction from the television, daring not to think through the issues themself or with their friends. Desperation for relief for the anxiety keeps people engaged with the mass media.

Perhaps even worse than the terror threats has been the intensification of technological intrusions into our lives. Many people are now welded to their smartphones from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed, inhabiting a world which is often more digital than physical. This has inevitably led to a population which is disconnected from the natural world and its workings.

Most people under the age of 30 cannot remember what life was like before Clown World began. For them, the heightened panic and complete technological absorption is normal. The world has simply always been a paranoid, tense place with widespread surveillance. Any older person who claims otherwise is dismissed as viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses.

The history of Clown World has been the collapse of solidarity, the festering of political corruption, the relentless forward creep of the surveillance state and an intensification of the all-round fear of everything, pushed by a monomaniacal mass media in pursuit of a share of dwindling profits. This began with 9/11, and became a global affair thanks to the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and the London bus bombings of 2005.

Clown World intensified with the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. The collapse of American mortgage markets led to unprecedented economic measures, such as bank bailouts measuring in the hundreds of billions. After this crisis, it became impossible for the average worker to maintain the standard of living that they had become accustomed to.

This crisis was followed by record low interest rates, which allowed speculators to bid up the price of housing to the point where it was unaffordable for most people. Since 2010, Clown World has observed a sharp increase in the number of people who have moved back in with their parents. Today, more young people live with their parents than during the Great Depression.

From about 2015 onwards, it started to become apparent that the West had lost its greatest gamble, namely when it gambled on being able to assimilate millions of Third World immigrants. Those who assumed that Third World immigrants would simply adopt Western values out of gratitude were proven flat wrong.

It turned out that the leaders of Western countries, since opening the borders to the whole world in the 1960s, had effectively imported gigantic hostile elements that were now engaged in a low-level war of attrition with their host populations. The quality of life in every Western country was permanently lowered. It was the sort of mistake that could never be openly admitted to, lest the enraged populace drag the people responsible for it out into the street.

Unfortunately for the ruling class of the West, the Internet made it possible for the masses to share information that did not appear in the mainstream media. People became aware that they lived in a Clown World, and not one that was being run according to principles of wisdom or justice. The predictable consequence of widely recognising this truth: extreme anger on the part of the peoples whose countries have been destroyed.

In attempting to suppress this anger, so that it doesn’t boil over into violence, the ruling classes have pushed the intense brainwashing and narrative control that exists in Clown World at the time of writing, at the end of 2020.

At the end of 2020, the mainstream media is 24/7 brainwashing. The ruling class is doing everything they can to keep the ponzi scheme going, but the inexorable reality of currency depreciation means that the average worker in the West now has a standard of living comparable to the average Chinese worker. Young Westerners don’t have it any easier than young Chinese people when it comes to buying a house and raising a family.

2020 has seen widespread rioting across the Western World, amid immense despair at our future prospects. This is the current state of Clown World. Whether it gets better or worse from here on out is, at least partly, a matter of how well we understand the situation we’re in. This requires that we look at Clown World from both a specific and a general point of view.

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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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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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