Hierarchies of Silver Versus Hierarchies of Gold

There is a lot of discussion about power dynamics, and whether the people who end up at the top of them have got there through competence or by machination. A person’s position on this question will correlate extremely strongly with their level of revolutionary zeal. This essay seeks to illuminate the subject from an esoteric perspective.

There are three ways for a person to dominate another one. They can do so physically, in a manner akin to the effect iron has on clay; they can do so with trickery, in a manner akin to the effect silver has on clay; they can do so by offering up an example of behaviour that ought to be emulated and allow the clay to imitate it, in a manner akin to the effect gold has on clay.

For the most part, people can generally agree that hierarchies of iron are illegitimate, except for the odd occasion when they are entered into legitimately, such as an army volunteer or a consensual BDSM participant. In nature, the effect of iron upon the clay is necessarily coercive and non-consensual, and the majority of people find this sort of thing unpleasant, so hierarchies of iron are generally discouraged.

Everyone generally agrees that hierarchies of gold are ideal. The ideal form of hierarchy is for an excellent person to behave excellently and for people who aspire to a similar excellence to support that first person on account of their great deeds. This is identical to the philosopher-king model proposed by Plato in The Republic and most people can immediately see the merits in it.

The difficulty arises when a hierarchy of silver is formed in imitation of the hierarchy of gold. To some extent this is unavoidable because almost all hierarchies of silver are – in the human world at least – imitations of the hierarchy of gold.

For example, a man might arise who is crafty enough to swindle the people around him into believing whatever he said. He might then, as many men have previously chosen to do, take advantage of this opportunity and tell them all that he’s a living god and that his every word is infallible and that his will cannot be questioned.

This is an ancient trick – it worked 10,000 years ago and the Pope is still running it now. It works because the hierarchy of silver built by the swindler is sufficiently close to the ideal hierarchy (assuming a sufficient level of stupidity among the peasantry) that the dull cannot tell the difference, and those who do can be silenced by swift application of sharp iron.

Hierarchies of silver have a multitude of forms, as numerous as there are opportunities to cheat others. They all have in common, however, the property of illegitimately acquiring and concentrating power.

Either they put the power into the wrong hands or they put it in the right hands but in the wrong amounts. The hierarchies of silver share this quality with the hierarchies of iron, but unlike the iron they do not do so by acquiring powerful weapons, but rather by controlling the minds of the men who control the weapons.

In other words, a hierarchy of silver will misdirect the men of iron. This means that the men of silver will make laws that are unjust, such as levying unfair taxes, or banning certain luxuries that should remain freely available. The men of silver will not be able to adjust their system to reflect accurate criticism because, not being of gold, their hierarchy is not intended to represent correct rule.

Hierarchies of gold are when the right people have the power in the right amounts, and usually result in Golden Ages for the people within them. However, they are more fragile than the others, in the same way that gold is the softest of all metals. The proximate challenge for the philosopher-king is usually keeping the men of silver from hatching some plot to steal the loyalty of the men of iron.

The Four Kinds of Dark Age

The four types of Dark Age are the Age of Poverty, the Age of Violence, the Age of Ignorance, and the Age of Cowardice. There can be more than one of these ages occurring at any one time, and there can be none, but the invariable is that people suffer in a Dark Age for reasons outside of themselves. These four ages also correspond closely to the four masculine elements of clay, iron, silver and gold.

Humanity seems to have been cast into a world in which all four Dark Ages were in operation simultaneously and when we were little more than animals. One by one, we rose out of these Dark Ages and into a Golden Age, but most would argue that we have since degenerated again.

The Dark Age corresponding to the element of clay is the Age of Poverty. This is when people are unhappy because the basic necessities are hard to come by. A famine would be the typical example of an Age of Poverty, as would a depression. The natural state of humanity in the biological past – i.e. as some kind of ape-thing – could be described as an Age of Poverty.

In an Age of Poverty, children suffer from hunger and basic disease, clothing and housing is shabby and falling apart and getting through every day is a question of making the right sacrifices. There is no surplus, and everything keeps getting harder.

Corresponding to the element of iron is the Age of Violence. The obvious example of this is a war, where people are actively trying to kill each other for whatever reason. In an Age of Violence, people are unhappy because their basic physical security is under threat and this leads to immense anxiety and suffering.

The Ages of Poverty and Violence are related in that the elements that represent them are the two base elements. This suggests that these ages are dark for immediate physical reasons.

The element of silver corresponds to the Age of Ignorance. As silver is brilliant, shines and is reflective, so are those qualities lost in an Age of Ignorance.

Brilliant people become rare; the sort of mind necessary to make original scientific advancements or to produce great works of art, architecture or engineering become impossible to find. No-one shines creatively, instead being possessed of a zombie-like dullness that finds expression in anti-intellectualism and a kind of moronic pride in not reading or being educated.

In a real Age of Ignorance, all aspects of silver are mistaken for signs of either foppishness, passivity and faggotry (from the perspective of iron) or a cruel, detached, insectoid lack of emotional warmth (from the perspective of clay). The real benefits to the quality of life that intelligence brings are either not appreciated or actively despised.

Gold corresponds to an Age of Cowardice. The essence of this age is when men and women lose the Will to confront and to face up to the truth.

That silver and gold are valuable tell us that getting out of an Age of Violence is the most we can expect as a decency. Ages of Ignorance and Ages of Cowardice are ever-present threats owing to the valuable nature of the metaphysical elements that keeps them away.

Generally speaking, human culture devolves from the highest stage down to the lowest, a phenomenon that Plato observed in The Republic. One begins in an aristocracy, which might correspond to an absence of a Dark Age, with the various steps down the ladder of correct rule reflecting a Dark Age corresponding to rule without the next element down. Then comes an Age of Cowardice, when the philosopher kings no longer have the courage to assert their right to rule.

This Age of Cowardice leads to the high-spirited and assertive person taking over, which Plato referred to as a timocracy. This degenerates into an Age of Ignorance, when the rulers ignore the philosophers for so long that the importance of learning and knowledge is forgotten.

Inevitably this leads to poor political decisions being made, which leads to an Age of Violence as the frustration of the people reaches a boiling point. This can either clear out the incorrect rulers and replace them with a new aristocracy of philosopher-kings, or destroy all semblance of civilisation and return humanity to a truly primitive state – the Age of Poverty.

Generation X’s Most Bitter Realisation

Instead of seeing the next generations as inheritors of a world that they were duty-bound to steward, The Baby Boomers see the young as resources to be exploited

Some things have been part of life for so long that we’ve taken them for granted. We take for granted that parents pass wealth onto their children in the form of knowledge and silver; we take for granted that technological and social improvements mean that the quality of life increases for every generation that passes; we take for granted that each generation has an obligation to the leave the world in order for the one that comes after it. Generation X has come to bitterly realise that some of these assumptions are no longer true.

The most bitter realisation of Generation X is that we will be the first generation in history to inherit a lower standard of living than the previous generation enjoyed. The Baby Boomers ticked up so much debt on the intergenerational credit card that they can never pay it back themselves, even if they intended to. We will pay it back through the sweat of our own labour so that our parents can enjoy a lengthy retirement, the vast majority of them still fit to work.

What is currently taking place is the greatest theft in history: the Baby Boomer’s theft of the production of the Generation Xs and Millennials, who will lose a large proportion of their wages to pay back the debts their parents accumulated, and for rents on houses that they can never own, merely so that those parents could experience an unprecedented level of comfort.

They did this by giving themselves tax cuts without cutting spending, so that our nations had to borrow to pay for basic social services, many of which the Baby Boomers themselves used more frequently on account of being elderly. All over the world this was done, not just New Zealand; everywhere an excuse was found for the increase in borrowing.

At the same time, the wages of the next generation were squeezed between having to pay back massive student loans that the Baby Boomers were not themselves subjected to, competing with foreign labour to a degree that the Baby Boomers were not themselves subjected to, and forking out for ever-scarcer affordable housing to a degree that the Baby Boomers were not themselves subjected to.

So not only did the Baby Boomers ensure that they enjoyed the highest standard of living ever recorded by one generation in human history, they did so explicitly at the expense of the generations who would follow, saddling them with a debt so heavy that even war reparations would be less burdensome.

They ticked up this unique standard of living for themselves on the national credit card, and simply left us to pay the debt off, which will take half a century. For most Western nations, cleaning up this mess will involve trying to integrate millions of individuals from very strange and often barbaric cultures, people that the Baby Boomers let into our countries because they didn’t want to pay us proper wages like they themselves had been paid.

The question that will define the soul of Generation X is whether we do the same thing to the generations after us out of bitterness and resentment for what our parents put us through, or if we treat the generation after us fairly out of a belief that we learned something from the greed of our parents.

VJMP Reads: The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand VI

This reading carries on from here.

The sixth essay in The Interregnum is ‘Radical Kaupapa Maori Politics’ by Carrie Stoddart-Smith. Turning to maoridictionary.co.nz I discover that kaupapa means, in this context, something like ‘agenda’ (indeed, within the first page it has been defined as “something like first principles”), but the essay itself explores the various definitions of ‘Kaupapa Maori’.

At the core of this essay is the question that Maori have been asking themselves for 200 years. To what extent to we cling to the old ways, and to what extent to we abandon them for the sake of adaptation to a world that is different to what it was when the old days arose?

Many mainstream readers, conditioned to mainstream journalism, will find the tone of this essay jarring, as it is heavy on the kind of guilt-based sermon-style rhetoric that so many have learned to manipulate otherwise well-meaning audiences with.

It’s also full of the unnecessary race-baiting and shit-stirring that has become associated with the American style of race rhetoric, such as when Stoddart-Smith justifies the exclusion of non-Maori with “empowering Maori voices that continue to be silenced by the noise of history, and by the protestations of white New Zealand that insist on shouting us down and shutting us out.”

Unfortunately this dishonest, deliberately aggravating style of rhetoric is a throwback to the Cultural Marxism espoused in the introductory essay. Only “white New Zealand” is the enemy; the fact that Asian and Pacific Islander New Zealanders think much less of Maoris than white people do, not having had two centuries of living together, is ignored on account of not fitting the narrative (the fact that Asians and Pacific Islanders are harder to guilt trip may also be a factor).

It’s a shame that a confrontational and antagonistic stylistic approach was taken, because there’s plenty of philosophical value in this essay. In particular, Stoddart-Smith draws multiple parallels between kaupapa Maori and the anarchist philosophy of mutualism.

After all, pre-European contact Maori did not have a central government, and as a consequence they adapted to learn patterns of mutual support that helped them and their neighbours to survive. In some cases the agreements over which tribe had the rights to access what were very sophisticated and complicated, but the important thing was that they were mutually consensual, in contrast to today’s arrangement where representatives of the Queen enforce the law whether people like it or not.

If this side of things had been emphasised, this could have been a good essay. Unfortunately it’s full of common separatist canards like “colonialism embedded patriarchy in tikanga Maori” and the revisionist attempt to ignore He iwi tahi tatou, as if the historical nature of interactions between Maori and British settlers had been entirely involuntary on the part of the Maori, rather than mutually beneficial.

One feels that a sophisticated approach to redressing the historical wrongs done to the Maori people, and this essay falls a long way short of that. It is, however, a good example of Marxist agitprop.