Hate Is Good When It Keeps You Safe

An enormous amount of effort is being made right now to “fight hate”. The logic is that a great deal of suffering in the world is caused by hate, and so there is no place for it. Although this might be a lovely sentiment, it’s a futile one, because hate is a natural and inescapable part of life. This essay explains.

All human emotions, without exception, evolved for a particular reason.

Love evolved to create pair bonds. If a man and a woman genuinely love each other, their mutual care will create a much better family environment than if they did not. A better family environment means that the offspring are much more likely to survive to adulthood in a state where they’re fit to reproduce. So over time, the offspring of those who were capable of love outcompeted the offspring of those who were not.

Fear evolved to keep us safe from danger. A person who feels an instinct to retreat at the sight of a dangerous animal will have a much better chance of surviving than one who does not. As such, the offspring of those who felt fear at the sight of danger outcompeted the offspring of those who did not.

Hate evolved for the same reasons as love and fear. Although the reasons for hate are not as obvious, the same general rule applies. Like all other emotions, hate evolved because it either helped people reproduce or it helped them survive. The role of hate in helping people reproduce is minimal, but its role in helping people survive is great.

Simply put, if someone wants to kill you or enslave you, then hating them will greatly increase your chances of survival. People who were able to hate those who wished them harm were more often able to destroy those enemies, instead of being destroyed by them. As such, they survived to reproductive age more often, and their offspring outcompeted those who were incapable of hate.

More specifically, hate motivates people to protect that which is valuable to them. If an intruder breaks into your house to rape your family and steal your possessions, it is hate that keeps you safe by providing the motivation to destroy that intruder. So hate, despite its bad rap, is simply an adaptation that keeps people safe in the face of danger. The main difference between hate and fear is that hate moves towards threats to neutralise them, whereas fear moves away from them.

It’s necessary here to distinguish between justified hate and unjustified hate.

Justified hate occurs when another person’s actions cause suffering to you or to someone you care about. If a person hates you, or if they have such contempt for you that they exclude you from due consideration, or if their indifference to you is such that their actions cause you harm, then hating them might be justified.

If someone is actively trying to harm you, then hate will motivate you to stop them. If you express hate at the person harming you, they might stop on account of that they didn’t realise their actions were harmful. If they knew but didn’t care, then hate might motivate them to stop on account of that they fear retaliation. And if they don’t stop harming you, hate might help you destroy them.

Unjustified hate is the kind of hate that is not beneficial. The classic example is disrespecting someone of a different group merely because you hate that group as a whole, or because you had a bad experience with one member of that group and generalised it, or because you were conditioned to hate that group from childhood.

If the group as a whole is truly odious (such as an ideology of hate like Communism, Nazism or Abrahamism), then hating them might be justified. But if they are a national or racial group – and therefore contain good as well as bad – then hate has to take a back seat. Otherwise, hating them is liable to get you involved in a blood feud of some kind, which will not benefit you.

Another example of unjustified hate is when an individual does something bad or harmful and regrets it, but is not duly forgiven. Many people cause harm not from deliberate malice but from making an honest mistake. On such occasions it’s common for them to regret it, and to feel sorry. A person who has caused harm, and is genuinely sorry, should be forgiven and not hated.

This logic sounds simple, but the problem with it is politics. Those who would rule over other human beings don’t want their subjects making free decisions, because that makes them harder to control. As such, they try to take authority away from those people. A common authoritarian tactic is to assume the authority to decide when hate is appropriate, through such means as “hate speech” laws, or through religious admonitions to love everyone until a priest tells you otherwise.

Ultimately, no-one can have the right to decide whether another person’s hate is justified, any more than they can have the right to decide whether another person’s love is justified. Every adult has the right to decide for themselves if their own actions are justified, and that includes deciding who their enemies are.

Therefore, “fighting hate” is as futile and authoritarian as trying to decide which consenting adults are allowed to sleep together. It’s impossible to decide on behalf of other people who their enemies are. Hate is a good thing when it keeps people safe, and only the individual can decide when this is the case.

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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Is It Time For Anticom?

In the wake of the German Revolution of 1918-19, cadres of nationalist street fighters formed to stop Communist violence and destruction. Known as the Freikorps, they served the keep the streets and speaking venues safe from interference. Given that Communist agitation has once again led to widespread chaos and destruction, is it time for the Freikorps to rise again in another form?

Many people have been horrified by the mindless street violence carried out recently by left-wing agitators under the guise of anti-racism protests. Videos have circled of people getting their heads smashed in by mobs in full chimpout mode. When not committing violence against people, the mobs are destroying property, in particular monuments and statues.

The most egregious incident occurred last week in the CHAZ district of Seattle. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone formed in downtown Seattle some weeks ago, supposedly in protest at the death of George Floyd. However, it didn’t take the CHAZ security services long before they themselves gunned down an unarmed black man. Shortly after this incident, the local police cleared the area.

The lazy assumption is that Antifa and their fellow carnage-wreakers can’t do too much damage because, if they did, the local police would stop them. But this assumption ignores the current reality of policing in the West. All over the West, the local police forces are on the brink of losing their ability to enforce law and order.

For one, many Western police forces are about ready to walk off the job on account of adverse job conditions. Because of the widespread availability of phone cameras, and because of increased attention paid to police brutality in the wake of the Floyd killing, several American police officers have already been charged with brutality offences when they would ordinarily have gone unpunished.

Given that the entire public is baying for the blood of the police, and given that the occasional officer keeps getting thrown to the mob to appease them, many of the other officers have thought “fuck it” and either surrendered their badges or stopped following orders properly.

For another, the police bureaucracy is no longer motivated to enforce law and order. Most high-ranking police officers are political appointees, because the Establishment won’t let the rank and file elect their leaders (far too dangerous!). These appointees haven’t been chosen for their freethinking ability, but the opposite. They’ve been chosen for their ability and willingness to carry out an agenda.

It isn’t easy to say what “The Agenda” is, because it’s being pushed on us by multiple factions that all have their own intentions. The easy way to understand it is to think of what David Icke calls the “Totalitarian Tiptoe”. This is when the ruling class deliberately foments problems among the population, provoking a reaction that demands a response, so that they can offer the “solution” of greater totalitarian controls.

High-ranking police officers, all around the West, have directed their underlings to not enforce certain laws. As such, various laws relating to property damage and freedom of movement have not been enforced. Sensing weakness, criminal movements and gangs have moved in to do what criminals do everywhere: prey on the citizenry.

The plan is that this increasing disorder will lead to protests, which will lead to violent unrest. This unrest will then be used as a pretext to introduce totalitarian measures, such as increased surveillance, stripping away rights or draconian prison sentences.

The way to counter this is for the citizenry themselves to impose order upon the environments in which they live. The first step is for them to organise in cadres of fit, determined men with a strong instinctive dislike of Communism, horizontalism and all forms of resentment-fuelled slave moralities.

Each of these cadres would form a cell in a wider movement, one without leaders but which shared an ideology and which communicated and organised based on this ideology. This ideology could be anti-Communism, and the movement would be known as Anticom.

Anticom would be an anti-Communist movement that would battle Communist and pseudo-Communist movements like Black Lives Matter. They would also provide security for anti-Communist speakers and rallies. At least initially, one of their major uses would be to counter Communist deplatforming attempts.

In performing these actions, Anticom would act similarly to the anti-Communist Freikorps who battled the Communist street gangs in Germany after the Revolution of 1918-19.

The original Freikorps were made up of World War One veterans and unemployed youth. The America of 2020 has plenty of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, and the numbers of unemployed youth are increasing as the economy tanks. There are now large numbers of young Western men who would be willing to volunteer for local anti-Communist actions.

The first thing would be for an intelligent and competent man in every locale to organise a group of ex-military and marginalised youth for the purpose of resisting Communist mobs. These groups would need a distinguished uniform, something that helped them operate as a single unit under pressure. They might also need weapons, both non-lethal and lethal.

It would be important not to organise in the sense of having a defined national hierarchy and command structure, because doing so would invite government action. The Communist street gangs organise themselves in cell format, with a small group of leaders who take the responsibility to co-ordinate with other cells and to organise their followers for action. Anticom would have to do something similar.

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The Four Basic Political Subjects

Underneath all the talk about politics today lies a great confusion. People talk about what politics is supposed to achieve, but they have generally forgotten who it’s supposed to achieve it for. For our ancestors, the political subject was obvious, but for us it is not. This essay explains.

The first and original political subject was the tribe. In the biological past, humans had no conception of nations or kingdoms. One was born into a tribe of roughly 50-150 people, and these people were your blood kin. As such, their interests were your interests, in almost every case.

Every member of the tribe was in the ingroup, and everyone not in the tribe was in the outgroup. This made politics very simple. If you encountered a stranger, they were the enemy, and it was acceptable to do anything to that stranger if it furthered the interests of the tribe. This tribal mentality still exists today, only it has become much weaker than it used to be (in most cases).

The second political subject is the state. This came into being when civilisation did. With the advent of civilisation, it was possible to have two strangers share the same space without chimping out and attacking each other. This meant that it was possible to have towns and cities made up of people from different tribes, perhaps even competing ones.

With the advent of towns and cities, it was necessary to have an administrator class that dealt with any disagreements that arose. The bringing together of different tribes meant competing schedules of moral values. These administrators, employed to smooth over differences between tribes, became the state. Their different approaches for settling quarrels became ideologies.

One way of dealing with the tensions created by identification with the tribe was to identify with the state instead. In practice, this is much the same as identifying with an ideology. Thus, a judge who was from a particular tribe would not necessarily rule in favour of his own tribesman. This was a radical new way of thinking when compared to the tribal solidarity model. It required a new political subject.

Thinking in terms of the state provided this new subject. If people were able to abandon their previous allegiances to their tribes, they could band together and build a mighty state that challenged the world, such as Rome or America. The memetic hybrid vigour brought about by multiple tribes all agreeing to work together under a state banner proved to be immensely powerful.

Not every civilisation succeeded in making this transition, however. If a state was not capable of creating an egregore powerful enough to persuade people to abandon their tribal allegiances, the divided loyalties caused by those remaining allegiances would pull the state apart from the inside. Corruption reigns in every state where tribal allegiances continue to hold sway.

The third political subject is the individual. This political subject arose as a way of settling firstly the tensions between those who identified with the tribe and those who identified with the state, and secondly the tensions between those who identified with different states or ideologies. In the world of 2020, the individual is the default political subject.

The logic is that, by identifying with the individual ego, people would no longer be drawn into conflict on account of competing tribal or ideological loyalties. Only caring about oneself might seem selfish and egotistical, but it has the bonus effect of settling tensions between groups. If people only care about the next hit, they will not take collective action.

It is true that what Adam Curtis called the Century of the Self led to a great peace. In recent decades, Hitlers and Stalins have been impossible on account of that no-one would follow them. Collective efforts demand individual sacrifices, and people who identify with the individual ego will not make them. However, this identification brings its own problems.

The fourth political subject is the consciousness itself.

The limitations of identifying with the individual ego are now obvious. Although doing so was a logical move forwards from the horrors of state-worship, the human animal is still fundamentally a social one, and it has social needs. Identifying with the individual ego might make warfare between nations less likely, but it sharply increases the emotional and spiritual suffering of the people, who find that their lives no longer have any meaning.

Some philosophers, like Alexandr Dugin, have suggested a return to Dasein as the basic political subject (Dugin frequently refers to Heidegger’s Dasein in The Fourth Political Theory). This is much the same thing as having consciousness as the basic political subject. In either case, it solves most of the problems of the first three political subjects.

Identifying with the consciousness allows the best of all worlds. Not only can a person meet their social and spiritual needs through connection to other conscious beings, but they can also do so without necessarily getting set against them because of tribal or ideological loyalties. Identifying with consciousness means that one is automatically allied and opposed to every other person.

There’s one problem with this otherwise elegant solution: most people have never learned to distinguish between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. They don’t know the difference between the True Self and the False Self. As such, most people operate either on the level of crude instinct (and thus tend towards tribalism), the level of conditioned responses (and thus tend towards fetishising the state or an ideology) or on both levels at once (and thus tend towards soulless globohomo consumer whoring).

As is so often the case, it appears that our great challenge is primarily a spiritual challenge. Identification with the consciousness might prevent us from getting drawn into tribal or ideological conflicts, and it might prevent us from getting bogged down in mindless anomie. But it will only be an option for those with the spiritual acumen to meditate and perform self-inquiry.

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Why The West Should Replace China With India

It’s apparent to all that the world is currently undergoing a strategic realignment. When the COVID-19 dramas have settled down, we will be left with a new set of alliances and global political arrangements. This essay will argue that the Western World should use this opportunity to replace the economic ties it currently has with China.

To a major extent, those who are powerful in the non-Western world are only so because of the favour of Western elites. China’s economic miracle is chiefly the result of the transfer of manufacturing capacity from the West since the early 1980s. After forty years of this, China has grown into a major world power.

In 1990, China had a smaller economy than Canada. Their GDP per capita was a pitiful $349 per year, putting them in the same class as Uganda, Mali and Rwanda. Today, China is second only to America by total economy size. Their GDP per capita is now in the same class as fringe Western nations such as Russia, Argentina and Bulgaria.

This development has brought with it great wealth, not only to China but also to their major trading partners. But with this wealth has come power, and with that power has come ambition.

China’s strategic goals in the South China Sea are evident: to take control of the entire region. As their economy continues to develop, their ability to actualise these goals increases. They are now wealthy enough to devote a vast sum of surplus capital to military outfitting and development. Some of this has been devoted to building artificial islands – rightly considered forward military bases – in the South China Sea.

Given that Chinese strategic goals often don’t align with ours, and that Indian strategic goals often do, it might be time for the West to make an immense pivot away from China and towards India. There are several reasons why this might be a good idea.

The most obvious strategic reason to replace China with India is the aforementioned military one. A close alliance with India would all but guarantee Western control over the Straits of Malacca, which is the jugular vein of Chinese shipping and trade. This would minimise the potential for China to get tempted into further expansionism.

Existing tensions on the shared border between India and China have flared in recent weeks. China has already moved a brigade’s strength of men into territory India claims as its own. This is an extreme provocation by any measure, if not an outright act of war. India’s response could lead to a wider conflagration.

If it does, it would be the perfect time for the West to throw our lot in behind India. Not only would it enable us to impose a collective will upon China in a weak moment for them, but giving assistance to India in their time of need would engender the greatest amount of long-term goodwill from their side.

More subtle are the economic reasons. China’s economy has advanced to the point where it is a competitor to the West in many ways, whereas India’s has not. Many Chinese firms have been able to drive Western ones out of certain markets by way of having a superior product. The general level of scientific knowledge in the Chinese population is now high enough that Chinese firms are likely to pose a consistent threat into the future.

It would be much better to co-operate with Indian firms, and to raise them to the level where they can compete with the Chinese ones, than to continue to raise Chinese firms so that they can compete with ours in the future. We can help India to adopt technology that both the West and China already have, at no strategic loss to ourselves.

As mentioned above, Chinese GDP per capita has increased sharply in recent decades. Today, it is over twice as high as the GDP per capita in India. This has brought with it increasing expectations of living standards, such that India now offers better opportunities to employ cheap labour. Factories could be set up in India at competitive prices.

The greatest reasons to pursue an alliance with India at the expense of China are cultural.

India is culturally superior to the West in several ways. Here we are not merely talking about lamb saagwalas. Their compassion for animals is such that India has more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together. This compassion is a feature of Dharmic religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism.

The sadistic Abrahamic religions have no such restrictions, and neither does Chinese culture with its hellish wet markets. As such, there is an opportunity for us in the West to learn from Indian culture and from the Indian approach to life, and to use its inspiration to better ourselves.

The Indian spiritual culture fills a need in the Western soul for answers about how to morally conduct ourselves in this life. This is not to claim that all Indians conduct themselves perfectly, or even better than Westerners do on average. It is merely to suggest that there is great value to Westerners in the spiritual traditions of the Indian people, in particular Buddhism and Hinduism.

Because India has cultural advancements that we in the West ought to learn from, there is the possibility of genuinely reciprocal trade. We have scientific, technological and commercial knowledge that they would benefit from learning, and they have spiritual knowledge that we would benefit from learning. It would be a two-way exchange.

A further point relating to culture is the shared love of cricket. That cricket is popular in India as well as in Britain, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand means that men from all of these places have a shared bond, and this naturally allows for some degree of solidarity. After all, it’s through sport that men learn to conduct themselves in wartime, and men bonded in such a fashion are bonded deeply.

No such bond is shared with China.

In summary, an entire spectrum of reasons suggests that the West ought to take the economic bonds that tie us to China, and to replace them with bonds that tie us to India. This would not only make a great deal of natural sense, but it would also strengthen the strategic position of the West deep into this century.

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