Clown World Chronicles: What Is 'Oversocialisation'?

Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Oversocialisation’?

In Industrial Society and its Future, author Ted Kaczynski analyses at length the psychology of the modern leftist. One of the phrases he uses is ‘oversocialisation’. It’s necessary to understand this concept if one is to understand Clown World behaviour.

‘Socialisation’ is what psychologists call the process of being conditioned into one’s place in society. The human animal has changed little over the past 20,000 years, so all babies are born savages. Only by a lengthy process of mimicry and conditioning, spanning many years, do they learn to behave in a manner acceptable to civilisation.

During the socialisation process, people learn to resist their natural violent and sexual impulses. We learn to seek consent before engaging in either. We even learn to pre-empt violence by being polite and forgiving. The socialisation process transforms us from barbarian to civilised.

Many behavioural problems stem from being undersocialised, particularly with regards to the aforementioned violent and sexual impulses. A person who is undersocialised may not be aware that they cause harm to other people by forcing their urges on them, or they may not care. In this sense they are like wild animals.

However, as Kaczynski understood, many behavioural problems also stem from being oversocialised. It has been noted elsewhere that the socialisation process creates an urge to conform. Problems arise in Clown World society because people are more socialised than ever. This has led to a stronger urge to conform than ever.

Before Clown World, people did many more things to unsocialise themselves. They went hiking, hunting, fishing, camping or just for a walk by themselves through their neighbourhood streets. This time away from other people offered a chance to come back to reality, to be socialised by Nature.

There, they learned from observing the various animals, birds, fish and insects, and from observing the daily and the seasonal changes in the environment, how Nature works. Truths such as the fact that all forms are transitory, or that no two things are the same, or the importance of kin, became deeply internalised.

Even when at home, people used to spend much more time alone on account of that there was no social media to connect them to anyone else. A lot of that time was spent working on projects alone, with no-one observing and judging. The result of this moderate level of socialisation was a healthy, balanced self-esteem.

Today, a person is socialised through screentime from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. The largest change of all is that they now get instant feedback on all of their thoughts and behaviours. As such, the average person worries more than ever before about what other people think of them.

This preoccupation with what other people think of them has led to an extreme form of neuroticism. This has had society-wide consequences. One of the most prominent is an increased psychological malleability. The average person is now so neurotic that the slightest sign of approval from an authority grants a powerful sense of relief. This conditions them to seek approval even harder.

The oversocialisation process has produced a large number of people who are completely unable to think outside the box, a generation of teacher’s pets. They are too afraid to say or do anything original in case someone expresses disapproval. This disapproval would represent a mortal wound to their egos.

As Kaczynski put it, “the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him.” It can be understood from this that oversocialisation is akin to a form of brainwashing. Clown World is – even though it’s not spoken aloud – a totalitarian system, and as such it seeks to control every last thought of its subjects.

Explaining oversocialisation goes a long way to explaining why there are so many baizuos, gutmenschen, soyboys and other weaklings in Clown World. Many of these people would have been normal if they’d spent more time in the wilderness hiking or hunting. But because they have always been immersed in the urban world, the natural world is known to them only by YouTube.

It’s not that the world needs more violence and uninvited sexuality. What it does need is a higher quality of socialisation, instead of quantity. Instead of a paranoid state of permanent moral alertness, we need to learn to know ourselves, so that we can intelligently transmute our impulses into correct action.

The chief problem is that the rulers of Clown World are perfectly happy with oversocialisation. In a society as corrupt as this one, the greatest threat to the ruling class comes not from the outside, but from the people. So the rulers are more interested in keeping the masses down than they are in strengthening the nation to resist external threats.

The answer is not anarcho-primitivism but a return to a more nature-based way of living. Clown World will end sooner or later, probably when the cheap oil runs out, which will make big city consumerism impossible. This might see the population of the West move out of the cities and spread across the land, going back to a village model.

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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How Absolutely Fucked Young Kiwis Are

Everyone knows that the housing situation is bad, but few realise exactly how bad it is. Politicians only propose tinkering around the edges; no-one is willing to propose fundamental change. However, as this article will show, the situation is bad enough that only fundamental change can fix it.

Statistics nerds were overjoyed by the release of the updated Parliamentary profiles last month. These profiles contained information from the 2018 Census, allowing us to update our knowledge of each electorate.

One important thing the Parliamentary profiles tell us is how wealthy each electorate is. We know that 648,537 people out of 3,776,355 aged over 15 in the General Electorates and 66,126 people out of 597,498 aged over 15 in the Maori Electorates make over $70,000 a year. This equals 714,663 people out of 4,373,853, or slightly more than 16%.

Being in the top 16% means that anyone making $70,000 a year is creaming it in comparison to the average Kiwi worker. They’re getting paid much better, and will likely have a commensurately harder job. Either they’re working much longer hours than average, or they have a job with a greater than average level of responsibility, or they are applying much greater than average human or industrial levels of capital.

However, even on this top 16% income, it’s all but impossible to own a house.

If you earn $70,000 a year in New Zealand, you will pay about $15,000 in taxes. That will leave you with $55,000 a year – assuming you opt out of KiwiSaver, otherwise you’d be down to $52,000 a year. That isn’t a lot of money once the high cost of living is factored in.

The cost of living in New Zealand can be estimated by the New Zealand Government’s own cost of living calculator. New Zealand isn’t a cheap country to live in. It can be seen from using the calculator that the average Auckland family of two adults and two dependent children has living expenses of around $2,000 a week.

This means that one working adult in the top 16% of Kiwi wage-earners only makes half of what they need to keep the average family running. If that sounds paradoxical, that’s an indicator of how fucked young people in New Zealand are now.

If we change the calculations to two working adults, each earning a wage in the top 16%, things become a bit easier. But even with two working adults both earning such a wage, it’s extremely difficult for a family with two children to save any money. According to the cost of living calculator, a family of two parents and two children can expect that their living expenses will be in the neighbourhood of $2,000 a week.

This means that a family with two parents and two children, where both parents are in the top 16% of wage-earners, saves no money on a weekly basis. All that work is just to stand still. The family will never own its own home, not even with two adults working and only two children. And that is even if both adults are earning in the top 16% of wages.

Now let’s consider a family with a special talent for living frugally. Let’s say both adults have unusually high levels of determination, willpower and resourcefulness, and they are capable of making do with considerably less than the average family of two children.

In this case, we can take the cost of living calculator and reduce the expenses to the lowest 25% or so of all families of four. This involves taking the sliders and setting them halfway between the average expenditure and the absolute minimum required to survive.

This gives us expenses of $200 per week for food and alcohol, $30 for clothing and footwear, $360 for housing and household utilities, $38 for household contents and services, $13 for health, $121 on transport, $22 on communication, $62 for recreation and culture, $25 for education, $81 for miscellaneous spending and $124 for other expenditure.

This gives us a total of $1,080 per week in expenses for a family of four. So our husband and wife duo of professional workers, both in the top 16% of Kiwi wage earners, if they cut their family expenses down to the bottom 25%, can expect to save around $950 a week, or close to $50,000 a year.

The average house price in New Zealand as of July this year was $739,000. So if a family can manage to have two breadwinners both earning in the top 16% of all wages, and if they can manage to cut their expenses down to the lowest 25% of all families of four, they can expect to own the average house after 14.8 years.

Let’s say, more realistically, that the partner of the main breadwinner works part-time in order to look after the two children, and so makes $30,000 a year. This would leave them $400 a week after expenses, or around $20,000 a year. At such a rate of saving they could expect to own their own home after 37 years.

Let’s say, even more realistically, that their expenses are at the average level for a family of four in Auckland. In such an instance, they will be unable to save money even if both parents are working and earning in the top 16% of wage earners. According to the cost of living calculator, a family of four in such circumstances will have to borrow $50 a week to be able to live. Saving will be impossible.

And that’s for people in the top 16% of earners.

Even if a person and their partner are in the top 16% of earners, they will have to cut their expenses down to less than average merely to save any money at all. They will have to cut those expenses to far less than average to save enough to own a home. Anyone earning less than this, or anyone whose expenses are higher than this, will never own a home, not even if they worked to age 100.

Simply put, you have to earn far, far more than average if you want to own your own home in New Zealand. The dream of home ownership is now only a reality for a fraction of the population. The rest of us are effectively serfs, doomed to labour our whole lives without ever owning land.

To compare this with how the previous generations had it, in 1992 the average New Zealand house price was $105,000. Also in 1992, the average wage was $15. So in 1992, the average house could be purchased for the equivalent of 7,000 hours of labour. Today, with an average house price of $739,000 and an average wage of $34, buying the average house requires the equivalent of over 21,000 hours of labour.

There simply aren’t enough years in one lifetime for the average Kiwi to save enough money to own their own house. Either you inherit, or, failing that, become a professional worker with an income of $150,000+ per year.

Another way of looking at it is that if house prices had only increased in proportion to the increase in the average wage between 1992 and 2020, i.e. 2.25 times instead of 7 times, the average house price today would be around $236,000.

The grim reality is that we are some two-thirds poorer than our parents were. This conclusion is inescapable unless one denies the maths.

In summary, the Millennials and the younger generations have been effectively enslaved by the Boomer generation. The Boomers own everything, and they pay such pitiful wages that we have no chance of bettering our positions. Only two outcomes can give the young of New Zealand basic dignity: wait 30 years for the Boomers to die, or revolution.

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The Bread And Circuses Are Winding Up

Panem et circenses is an ancient Roman phrase, attributed to the poet Juvenal, that means “bread and circuses.” The idea is that a degenerate society, once it has abandoned all higher values, has nothing left but bread and circuses. Take that away, and the society will fall apart. Our bread and circuses are in the process of being taken away.

The Roman Empire discovered that paying for public circuses was a great way of preventing civil unrest. If the people had an upcoming gladiatorial games to look forward to, they were much more likely to be content. When they didn’t have anything to look forward to, they tended to entertain thoughts of rebellion.

Eventually, the Romans found themselves unable to pay for more games, and that was the tipping point. The cessation of the circuses meant that the citizens got their entertainment from wrecking society instead, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

The Western World appears to be going through a similar process.

Professional sports have replaced the circuses in the West, and most professional sports leagues have been severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. The English Premier League season lost three months, the Major League Baseball season lost 100 games, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, predicted that running the NFL later this year would be impossible.

In New Zealand, there hasn’t been a single All Blacks match so far in 2020, and it looks like there won’t be. There hasn’t been a Black Caps match since March, and there is no news of upcoming fixtures (although a tour to Bangladesh has supposedly been planned).

Even worse, the increasing politicisation of professional sport has seen many turn their televisions off. NBA viewership is down some 20% compared to this time last year. Although the linked article suggests injuries to star players may be the cause of the decline, the truth is that many viewers are sick of having political issues shoved in their faces.

People watch sport to be entertained. They don’t care about the political opinions of professional sportsmen, any more than they care to watch Donald Trump play basketball. They know the sportsmen are not educated intellectuals who study history and human nature. As such, their political opinions don’t need to be taken seriously.

Compounding the problem are blatant double standards when it comes to the political issues being pushed.

In an NBA match earlier this month, Los Angeles Clippers player Montrezl Harrell called Dallas Mavericks player Luka Doncic a “bitch ass white boy“. Although a white player calling a black player a “bitch ass black boy” would be a worldwide scandal, it appears that Harrell is going to avoid sanction entirely.

There might be an inherent demand for entertainment once a person’s basic survival needs are met, but it’s hard to be a white person and keep watching a sports league when you know that league explicitly endorses anti-white racial abuse. It’s a direct humiliation, and many sports fans have found themselves switching off instead.

As in ancient Rome, the lack of easily-available entertainment has led to people seeking it elsewhere, in more destructive ways. There is a direct link between the winding up of the American circuses and the widespread civil unrest there. Instead of finding entertainment in sport, people are finding it in other people getting shot and beaten to death.

More worryingly, the bread is also winding up.

When Juvenal spoke of “bread” he was referring to the grain dole, another Roman invention for defraying rebellious sentiments. Because of the psychological effect of starvation, hungry populations soon become violent. The Roman masses were pacified with free grain, then free bread, wine and pork.

When this food dole wound up, people started going hungry, and this led to even more trouble than the boredom. A bored person can get entertained quickly by setting something on fire; a hungry person won’t be satisfied until they kill someone. For the Roman ruling classes, to not dole out bread meant the collapse of their society.

The West doesn’t have a grain dole, but we do have a system of social welfare which has much the same effect. It’s also being scaled back.

In America, negotiations for a second stimulus check are in doubt, because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on terms. The first stimulus check was granted because the coronavirus pandemic had destroyed many American jobs, but those jobs are yet to return, and therefore the economic stress has not gone away.

In New Zealand, the COVID-19 Resurgence Wage Subsidy – designed to have a similar effect to the American stimulus checks – is expiring later this week. The likely outcome is a high volume of job losses. Already the New Zealand economy has been hit hard by the near-total annihilation of our international tourism sector; further major job losses would cause widespread despair.

It’s possible that Donald Trump and Jacinda Ardern will extend welfare benefits, at least for now. But the largesse cannot be continued indefinitely. The New Zealand national debt was $US 59.6 billion in March this year, but has already blown out to $US 81.1 billion by September. They can’t keep borrowing money to keep the party going forever.

When these special coronavirus payments are stopped, the inevitable result will be an increase in the number of people taking to the streets in protest. Given how ugly sentiments already are, with multiple protesters having been shot dead in America over the past week, a wider collapse of order is a very realistic prospect.

In summary, society is held together by bread and circuses, and both of those are winding up thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. This phenomenon is occurring across the Western World, which suggests that we’re all in for some difficult times over the next 12 months or so.

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The Four Ages Of The Internet

A previous essay on this page recounted the life cycle of Internet forums. The Second Hermetic Principle teaches us that as below, so above. As this essay will describe, the Internet itself is running on a life cycle – and we’re moving into the less enjoyable part of it.

The Golden Age of the Internet began in August 1995, with the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95. This operating system took the Internet out of the hands of the technological elite, and put it in the hands of the masses. This was the beginning of the personal computing revolution.

At first, the Internet appealed mostly to nerds, who had been starved of information thanks to the relative inefficiency of the book-and-library system. These nerds did what came naturally, which was to use the Internet to share information. They created all kinds of websites, most of them on subjects appealing to young men, like science, technology and engineering.

In the Golden Age of the Internet, websites consisted of little other than pure information and hyperlinks to more. Being restricted by bandwidth, websites focussed almost entirely on sharing the greatest quality of this info. Search engines such as Metacrawler indexed it all for ease of access. It was like having a library in every house.

The peak of the peak may have been around 2002, when an enormous number of small websites were available on GeoCities (later known as “GeoShitties”). This was also the peak of websites such as SlashDot, which appealed specifically to the programmers who were building the infrastructure of the Internet.

By 2003, the seeds of the decline had become apparent. Google AdSense was launched that year, which changed the web publishing game permanently. AdSense offered something truly revolutionary: cold, hard cash. But as is usually the case when cash is on the table, there were conditions.

The Google AdSense program was funded by advertisers, and those advertisers expected a certain degree of influence. In the same way that advertisers in newspapers 100 years ago exerted influence over what those newspapers published, AdSense advertisers pressured Google to not show ads on sites that carried certain content.

That meant content relating to illicit drugs, erotic literature, serial killers, violent anarchy and political extremism (i.e. all the interesting stuff) was produced less. This was the start of the great decline. Once Google AdSense money got involved, website owners started self-censoring to keep the shekels flowing in. The Golden Age of the Internet ended, and the Silver Age began.

The Silver Age of the Internet began on the 26th of September 2006, when FaceBook became open to everyone, and not just university students. This was the point at which social media really began to take off, a big deal because it meant that users could generate their own content. This steady stream of content could then be exploited by inserting advertising slots in it.

With the arrival of FaceBook, the Internet became a true commercial venture. Now there were billions of dollars involved. This was a Silver Age because of advertising, which corrupted the purity of the information. Although there was a greater quantity of information than ever, it had advertisements all through it.

The advertisers demanded more and more influence over the content. Eventually, FaceBook and YouTube became televisionised, with an extensive list of content restrictions. People started to get banned for calling each other ‘faggot’ or ‘nigger’. But still the Internet grew, to the point where the government decided that they had to get involved.

Once Big Government started to take an interest in what was being said on social media, and making up laws over who was allowed to say what, the Silver Age ended. The Bronze Age of the Internet began in April 2016, when Count Dankula was arrested for a YouTube video of a dog giving a Nazi salute. The freewheeling, freespeaking Internet of free expression was gone.

By the time of the Bronze Age of the Internet, there were so many retards online that much of cyberspace became detrimental to mental health. As the IQ of the average Internet user continued to decline, the quality of the average Internet experience became lower and lower. During the Golden Age of the Internet, the world’s retards bullied people for using computers – in the Bronze Age, they bully people by using computers.

If the Golden Age of the Internet saw its realisation, and the Silver Age saw its commercialisation, the Bronze Age saw its weaponisation. It was realised that, in the 21st Century, wars would be fought with information rather than bullets. The politicisation of the Internet saw people act to restrict the platform access of their ideological enemies.

By the time of writing this article, wrongthinkers are getting purged left, right and centre. Even websites like Reddit, founded in the twilight of the Golden Age specifically as a free-speech platform, are banning entire subforums on a weekly basis. It’s forbidden to discuss any subject that displeases the advertisers.

This has seen the rise and rise of imageboard culture, especially the chans such as 4chan. The ‘anything goes’ nature of these sites appeals to those who appreciated the Golden Age. In the Bronze Age of the Internet, those parts of cyberspace that still uphold the values of the Golden Age are dismissed as “cesspits”. This merely causes the appeal of the chans to grow further.

The Iron Age of the Internet is yet to begin. We can predict what it will look like: a totalitarian surveillance network in which the activities and social interactions of every citizen are tracked to the finest detail. 5G networks offer the bandwidth to transmit high-definition video footage faster than it can be viewed, and the advent of facial recognition technology means that they will know exactly where you are in real time.

Free speech restrictions might be bad now, but they can get worse. Improving AI tech will make it possible for any social media comment to be analysed and, if necessary, shadowbanned before anyone can see it. Even more ominously, the governments of all Western nations appear willing to increase Police harassment of online wrongthinkers.

When the Iron Age of the Internet is fully upon us, the Internet will be unrecognisably different from its Golden Age, much like today’s religions are radically different to those practiced during the Western spiritual tradition’s Golden Age in ancient Greece. We will then, as per Plato’s Republic, have to wait for a movement of philosopher-kings to overthrow the old Internet and institute a new one.

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