Understanding New Zealand 3: Who Voted New Zealand First in 2020

The New Zealand First Party were polling poorly in the lead-up to the 2020 General Election, and they did not recover on the night. Their 75,020 votes comprised 2.6% of the party vote, not enough to win representation in Parliament. With that, Winston Peters disappeared, perhaps for the last time.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
European	0.27
Maori	0.32
Pacific Islander	-0.18
Asian	-0.55

The most important thing to note about New Zealand First is that it is (or, at least, pretends to be) a nationalist party. As such, it appeals to demographic groups in proportion to how Kiwi those groups are. So the more loyalty a person has to overseas interests, the less likely they are to vote New Zealand First.

Almost all Maori voters were born in New Zealand, which is why the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to a particular race was the most strongly positive in the case of Maoris (0.32). The next most positive correlation was with Europeans (0.27), and the strongest negative correlation was with Asians (-0.55).

This closely mirrors the depth of the roots that each of those groups has in New Zealand. It’s fair to say that, the deeper one’s roots, the deeper the nationalist sentiments, and so the more likely one is to vote New Zealand First.

Variable	% of electors NZ-born
Voting New Zealand First in 2020	0.55
Voting ALCP in 2020	0.69
Voting Advance NZ in 2020	0.72
Voting Labour in 2020	-0.05
Voting National in 2020	-0.24
Voting Greens in 2020	-0.24
Voting ACT in 2020	-0.01
Voting TEA Party in 2020	-0.75

Underlying New Zealand First’s nationalist credentials are a high proportion of NZ-born voters. No party got both more votes than New Zealand First and a higher proportion of New Zealand-born voters in 2020.

The only parties to get a higher proportion of New Zealand-born voters were the ALCP and the Advance NZ parties, who, like New Zealand First, are heavily supported by disenfranchised people. The globalist parties, like National, Greens and the TEA Party, were the opposite to New Zealand First by this measure.

Some might be surprised that the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being born in New Zealand was not higher. After all, very few foreigners vote for nationalist parties anywhere. The explanation is that New Zealand First voters tend to be disadvantaged, which means they are often forced to live alongside cheap labour imports and refugees, who almost never vote for nationalists.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
No qualifications	0.51
Level 1 certificate	0.59
Level 2 certificate	0.49
Level 3 certificate	-0.13
Level 4 certificate	0.62
Level 5 diploma	0.37
Level 6 diploma	-0.00
Bachelor’s degree	-0.55
Honours degree	-0.46
Master’s degree	-0.50
Doctorate	-0.34

New Zealand First voters in 2020 tended to be poorly educated. There was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having any of the university degrees. These correlations were much weaker than in 2017, when all four correlations (between voting New Zealand First and having a degree) were around -0.70.

The strongest support for New Zealand First came from older people with School Certificate (Level 1 certificate) and younger people who have completed a polytechnic course (Level 4 certificate). This tells us that nationalist sentiments were more common among working class voters.

This set of correlations can best be explained by the fact that a large proportion of New Zealand First voters are rural and Maori, two groups that tend to be less educated than others.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Working as a manager	0.10
Working as a professional	-0.41
Working as a technician or trades worker	0.28
Working as a community or personal services worker	0.31
Working as a clerical or administrative worker	-0.27
Working as a sales worker	-0.32
Working as a machinery operator or driver	0.17
Working as a labourer	0.36

Variable	Voting New Zealand First 2020
Working in agriculture, forestry or fishing	0.44
Working in mining	0.18
Working in manufacturing	0.09
Working in electricity, gas, water and waste services	0.33
Working in construction	0.29
Working in wholesale trade	-0.39
Working in retail trade	0.07
Working in accommodation and food services	-0.16
Working in transport, postal and warehousing	-0.03
Working in information media and telecommunications	-0.45
Working in financial and insurance services	-0.50
Working in rental, hiring and real estate services	-0.15
Working in professional, scientific and technical services	-0.50
Working in administrative and support services	-0.25
Working in public administration and safety	0.00
Working in education and training	0.02
Working in healthcare and social assistance	0.34
Working in arts and recreation services	-0.15
Working in other services	0.31

There was a significant positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and working as a technician or trades worker (0.28), as a labourer (0.36), or working in agriculture, forestry or fishing (0.44), electricity, gas, water and waste services (0.33) or construction (0.29). In other words, there was significant New Zealand First support among typical working-class people.

This can be easily explained with reference to the fact that working-class Kiwis are the big losers from mass immigration, which drives down their wages and drives up their rent. As such, working-class Kiwis are much more likely to support nationalist – and thereby anti-immigration – sentiments than middle-class ones.

There were significant negative correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and working as a professional (-0.41) or working in professional, scientific and technical services (-0.50). This reflects the fact that nationalism often doesn’t appeal to the highly educated, who see it as potentially restricting their freedom to travel and to ply their trade in new places.

It’s necessary to note, however, that a high proportion of people working in professional industries are foreign-born. It might be that middle-class Kiwis are just as likely as working-class ones to be nationalists, but because the overwhelming majority of immigrants are middle-class and not nationalists (at least not Kiwi nationalists), middle-class people, taken as a whole, are not nationalists.

Contrary to the perception that New Zealand First voters are all selfish bigots, there were significant positive correlations between voting for them in 2020 and working as a community or personal services worker (0.31) or working in healthcare and social assistance (0.34). Selfish people don’t tend to choose occupations or industries where helping other people is the focus.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
No children	-0.52
One child	-0.34
Two children	0.14
Three children	0.55
Four children	0.60
Five children	0.45
Six or more children	0.32

Being nationalists, it follows that New Zealand First supporters like to breed. The correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and family size was strongest with those who have four children (0.60). There were also significant positive correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having three children (0.55), five children (0.45) or six or more children (0.32).

On the other hand, there was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and having no children (-0.52) or only one child (-0.34).

These correlations can best be explained by reference to the fact that New Zealand First voters tend to be rural, Maori and poorly-educated, which are three factors suggesting a higher-than-usual birthrate. Moreover, the sort of person who moves to a big city and does not have children is almost invariably attracted by globalist ideals.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Is married	0.02
Is divorced/separated/widowed	0.64
Has never married	-0.23

One of the harder-to-explain correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and another demographic variable is that with being divorced/separated/widowed, which was 0.64. It’s not immediately apparent why nationalists who have large families would so often be divorced or separated.

The most plausible reason is that New Zealand First has been highly demonised in the mainstream media and in popular consciousness, and therefore attracts an unusually high proportion of disagreeable people, the agreeable ones having fallen in behind the mainstream parties. As there is a correlation between being disagreeable and getting divorced, disagreeableness could explain the high divorce rates of New Zealand First voters in 2020.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Lives in an urban electorate	-0.43
Lives on North Island	0.10
Is male	-0.00

New Zealand First had strong rural support in 2020. A correlation of -0.43 between living in an urban electorate and voting New Zealand First in 2020 was as strong as the correlation between living in an urban electorate and voting NZ Outdoors Party in 2020, and was exceeded only by voting Advance NZ in 2020 (-0.56).

The slight North Island bias of New Zealand First voters was not significant, and probably reflected Winston Peters’ personal support in his home electorate, rather than an actual North Island bias. It is probably not the influence of a higher proportion of Maori voters on the North Island, because there is a higher proportion of Pacific Island and Asian voters on the North Island as well.

New Zealand First voters tend to be sterotyped as angry men, but the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being male was -0.00, i.e. non-existent. Popular consciousness refuses to accept the extent to which nationalism and anti-globalism are supported by women. The voters of actual far-right parties, such as ACT and New Conservative, had a pro-male bias in 2020, whereas New Zealand First voters did not.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Receiving NZ Super or Veteran’s pension	0.47
Receiving Jobseeker Support	0.34
Receiving Sole Parent Support	0.24
Receiving Supported Living Payment	0.25
Receiving Student Allowance	-0.31

New Zealand First voters are often characterised as angry pensioners who can’t handle change. This perception fits nicely with the stereotype of nationalists as elderly bigots. There might be some truth in this, but it’s misleading.

For one thing, the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being on a pension was 0.47, which is significant but not particularly strong. The correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being on other benefits were also significant: with being on Jobseeker Support it was 0.34, and with being on Sole Parent Support it was 0.24. Very few people on Sole Parent Support are elderly.

For another, the correlation between being on a pension and voting ACT in 2020 was 0.72, with voting New Conservative it was 0.65 and with voting National in 2020 it was 0.64. So the elderly bigot segment of the population would apparently much rather vote for right-wing parties led by whites than for a centrist party led by a Maori.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First in 2020
Aged 20-24	-0.44
Aged 25-29	-0.47
Aged 30-34	-0.50
Aged 35-39	-0.57
Aged 40-44	-0.40
Aged 45-49	-0.09
Aged 50-54	0.18
Aged 55-59	0.44
Aged 60-64	0.44
Aged 65-69	0.45
Aged 70-74	0.43
Aged 75-79	0.39
Aged 80-84	0.31
Aged 85+	0.19

New Zealand First voters are, true to stereotype, significantly older than average. There was a significant negative correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group under 45 years of age, and there was a significant positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group between 55 and 84.

These correlations are, however, not as strong as those between voting for other parties.

The strongest positive correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and belonging to any age group was with those aged 65-69. The correlation in this instance was 0.45. But the correlation between being in this age group and voting ACT in 2020 was much stronger, at 0.77. The correlations between being in this age group and voting National in 2020 (0.67) or voting New Conservative in 2020 (0.61) were also stronger.

In fact, the correlations between being in any age group above 45 years of age and voting National in 2020 were stronger than any of the correlations between being in those age groups and voting New Zealand First in 2020. So New Zealand First’s reputation as a pensioner’s party is mostly unfounded. The reality is that pensioners tend to be wealthy, on account of having much longer than average to accumulate wealth, and wealthy people prefer National to New Zealand First.

Variable	Voting New Zealand First 2020
No religion	0.18
Being a Buddhist	-0.55
Being a Christian	-0.09
Being a Hindu	-0.41
Being a Muslim	-0.43
Being a Jew	-0.37
Following Maori religions	0.36
Following Spiritualism or New Age religions	0.35

Further proof that New Zealand First voters are not from the political establishment comes from the correlations between voting for them in 2020 and religion.

Highly telling is the negative (if not significant) correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2020 and being a Christian. This was -0.09. Given how many Christians are in positions of power in New Zealand, the fact that few of them vote New Zealand First reveals the extent to which New Zealand First is an anti-Establishment party.

The most strongly negative correlations between being religious and voting New Zealand First in 2020 were with being a Buddhist (-0.55), being a Muslim (-0.43), being a Hindu (-0.41) and being a Jew (-0.37). This can be easily explained by reference to the fact that people in these four groups tend to be immigrants, and therefore do not possess nationalist sentiments.

The most strongly positive correlations between being religious and voting New Zealand First in 2020 were with the Maori religions (0.36) and with Spiritualism and New Age beliefs (0.35). The former can be easily explained by the heavy Maori support for New Zealand First. The latter can be explained by the fact that many New Zealand First voters feel like outcasts in a globalist system, and people who follow Spiritualism and New Age beliefs are also usually outside the mainstream.

In summary, New Zealand First voters are a cross-section of salt-of-the-Earth working-class Kiwis. They like to have children, don’t like to live in big cities and don’t care much about higher education. Most of them belong to similar demographics as Labour voters, but are put off by Labour’s pandering to globalist interests.

The stereotypes about them carry a grain of truth, in that New Zealand First voters tend to be older than average, but are grossly misleading in the main. For one thing, Maoris vote New Zealand First more than white people do; for another, New Zealand First voters are much more likely to be family people than crotchety old bigots.

The best hope for New Zealand First in the 2023 General Election is possibly that disaffection with Labour’s Maori Caucus sees many Maori voters switch to New Zealand First. Labour gets far more Maori votes (by absolute measure) than either The Maori Party or New Zealand First, and if New Zealand First can pick up most of those Maori voters who have abandoned Labour since 2020 they could get over 5% in the 2023 General Election.

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.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, 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 They Bred Us For Docility

George Carlin was right when he said that we have owners, who own us. The world is not really a patchwork of nations, but a series of farms, in which human livestock breeders have created a population of docile animals that can be milked for profits and taxes, forever. This essay explains how we’ve been bred for maximum passivity so that we never challenge our owners.

The basic modus operandi is for the human livestock breeders to tell blatant lies, to force those lies on the population, and then to destroy anyone who resists the lies. The resisters will always be the most aggressive of the herd, so by destroying them the herd is selected for docility.

This process began in the West with Christianity. Every Westerner with a functioning brain knows that Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef is not the exclusive god who we are all obliged to worship else we burn in eternal hellfire. But for 1,200 years, between the murder of Hypatia and the Greco-Roman Renaissance, anyone who questioned the exclusive divinity of Rabbi Yeshua was either murdered or ostracised.

Because the people questioning the Christian lies were the intelligent, the honest and the courageous, and because these people were destroyed by the human livestock breeders, the net result was that the genes coding for intelligence, honesty and courage became less frequent, and the genes coding for stupidity, dishonesty and cowardice became more frequent.

This was all by design.

After centuries of people getting killed for speaking the truth, Westerners learned not to think for themselves. Thinking for yourself was dangerous, because it led to you getting killed by Christian mobs. So we learned to look to authority to tell us what’s true and what isn’t true. Along the way, we became passive, submissive, weak.

From around 1600, when Christianity started to lose its deathgrip on Western society, people became able to speak out against it without getting punished. The murder of Giordano Bruno by Christians in 1600 marked the end point of a period that had begun with the murder of Hypatia. Although Christians kept murdering people for not following their cult, their zealotry waned as it lost support, and the natural aggression of Westerners returned.

The period from 1750 to 1950 was marked by extreme volatility. Revolutionary movements sprang up all over the West, with people everywhere happy to risk death for freedoms. The end result was, by 1950, the highest standard of living for the common man that history had ever known. So the ruling class, terrified of where this could have led, launched the War on Drugs to beat people back down.

The War on Drugs was effectively just another form of the same breeding-for-docility process that Christianity had been. Just as intelligent people knew that Rabbi Yeshua was not exclusively divine, people also knew that cannabis and magic mushrooms were not so harmful that users deserved to go to prison for using them. But the ruling class pushed the War on Drugs on us anyway, for the same reason they pushed Christianity on us.

Intelligent, honest and courageous people continued to use cannabis and the psychedelics despite the legal status of these sacraments. And the authorities continued to persecute them with prison or even death, as they did to non-Christians for centuries. The net result was similar: a strong selection pressure in favour of submission and docility.

Mass immigration is a third example of the same phenomenon. Everyone knows that the mass immigration of Third World cheap labour does not increase the standard of living of the average native. But, as with Christianity and the War on Drugs, anyone speaking out against the lies was smashed. People weren’t murdered or imprisoned for opposing mass immigration, but they were ostracised from polite society, which had the same dysgenic effect.

Finally, in recent years, we have Covid “vaccines”. Without even ascertaining that the vaccines are effective, Western authorities have persecuted anyone not taking them, shutting them out of normal life, barring them from accessing many shops and services, and hounding them through the mainstream media.

Those resisting the vaccine mandates have been treated in a similar fashion to those resisting Christianity, the War on Drugs or mass immigration: they have been shunned and abused. As past resisters have been demonised as heretics, druggies or Nazis, people resisting vaccine mandates have been dubbed “anti-vaxxers” and have been blamed for killing people’s grandmothers.

These four examples are all forms of the same phenomenon: the ruling class pushes something obviously false, knowing that only the docile will go along with such an obscene falsehood. The intelligent, the honest and the courageous stand up to resist the falsehoods, and are duly smashed by the authorities and their lackeys in the justice system.

The end result is a population brutalised into submission, bred for docility in the same way that aurochs were bred into modern cattle.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020 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 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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The Abrahamic Origins Of Wokeness

A new moral fanaticism has swept the upper echelons of Western society in recent years. Called Wokeness, it’s cancelling wrongthinkers everywhere with the fervour of a jihadist driving a van through a crowd of Christmas shoppers. Although most people consider it an entirely new phenomenon, Wokeness is, in fact, another form of Abrahamic religion. This essay explains.

As first observed by Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya, Marxism is itself another form of Abrahamic religion. He defined it as an atheistic Abrahamism, in recognition of the fact that the Abrahamic cults are political religions and not spiritual ones. As a form of Abrahamism, Marxism shares with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Baha’i a megalomanical desire to control the world and a psychopathic hatred of outsiders.

Wokeness developed out of Marxism in a similar manner to how Christianity and Islam developed out of Judaism. The only major difference between Wokeness and Marxism is that the latter was concerned with class questions, whereas the former has abandoned those for identity politics. In any case, Wokeness shares many characteristics with the Abrahamic religions.

Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya observed that the Abrahamic cults shared “A profound sense of religious exclusivity, creating two strictly delineated camps of ‘believers’ in opposition to everyone else.” The ‘with-us-or-against-us’ logic of Abrahamism has been adopted directly into Wokeness. The absurd outcomes of this can be seen in the purity spiral phenomenon.

One central belief of Wokeness is that those who follow it are considered saved, in the sense that they need not fear future judgment, whereas those who don’t follow it are considered damned. This judgment is absolute: anything a person may have achieved in their lives, any good works they may have done, are secondary to the question of whether they were Woke. In this manner, Wokeness builds a sense of community in the same way that the Abrahamic cults do: through hatred of outsiders.

Another observation of Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya is that the Abrahamic cults share “The belief that there is only the sole true faith, and that any other form of religious expression external to the ‘one true faith’ is necessarily wrong.” The Woke follow this belief, only with regard to political expressions.

They don’t care much what your religious beliefs are, but if you hold a contrary political opinion then you are the enemy. This is because the Woke have never questioned their own righteousness, not even once. So if you disagree with a Wokist, you’re simply wrong. There is no room for dialogue or discussion, because, to them, that would be to platform evil.

This attitude is similar to the Abrahamic attitude that no outside religious ideas can ever be entertained, lest it lead to a crisis of faith. The same way that Abrahamists seek to eradicate all trace of competing religious dogmas, the Woke seek to eradicate all trace of completing political dogmas. As their idol, Joseph Stalin, once said: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”

Yet another observation is that the Abrahamic cults share “The acceptance of terrorism, violence, mob action, looting and aggressive missionary tactics to spread their religion.”

The Wokeness equivalent of crusading and jihading is cancel culture. The Woke don’t like to use mob terrorism to lynch people – that’s too working-class. The middle-class way to use mob terrorism is by doxxing wrongthinkers and trying to get them fired or deplatformed. The apogee of cancel culture is getting the mainstream media to run a hitpiece on someone.

Like the Abrahamists, the Woke derive a powerful sense of group bonding from destroying outsiders. The thought that those outsiders might take revenge thrills them because it suggests an escalation of conflict. Also like the Abrahamists, the Woke look forward to the one glorious day when they might destroy their enemies completely.

A further aspect of Wokeness shared by Abrahamism is “A common sense of being at a war to the death with the Dharmic (‘Pagan’) world that preceded Abrahamic ascendency.”

It has often been remarked that, for all their blustering about tyranny and oppression, the Woke don’t really care about the prohibition of spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and the psychedelics, and the countless people whose lives have been ruined by its enforcement. VJM Publishing has produced multiple books on the subject of cannabis law reform. But the Woke still consider us bad guys.

Some find this highly odd, but the explanation is simple. The Woke are politically religious, not spiritually religious, and as such they fear genuine spirituality, which they see as a competing ideology. Being soulless, the freedom to use spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and the psychedelics is not important to them. Moreover, people who do use such sacraments are usually anti-authoritarian, and therefore anti-Woke.

There are further similarities between Wokeness and the Abrahamic cults besides those observed by Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya.

Like Abrahamism, Wokeness is a conduit for sadistic and controlling urges, and attracts people with those urges. The sneering, arrogant superiority of the Woke is a mirror image of how Abrahamists behave towards non-believers. The Woke, just like the Abrahamist, want people punished for rejecting their religion. Also like the Abrahamic cults, Wokeness appeals to that base desire to punish.

Wokeness is also a universalist religion. A core part of Woke mentality is that it is a mindset for all times and all peoples. In the same way that individuals today can be judged as unworthy of respect for not being Woke, so too can individuals from centuries ago. Any person or any group of people is morally obliged to be Woke, even if they didn’t know about it.

The Woke believe that the Laws of Wokeness are written upon the hearts of men at birth.

Like Marxism and Christianity, Wokeness explicitly seeks to raise up the low and tear down the high. The difference is that instead of raising the proletariat above the bourgeoisie, or the meek above the cruel, the Woke raise the dark-skinned above the light-skinned, the homosexual above the heterosexual, the insane above the sane. The fact that this mentality harms the white working-class is seen as a bonus, as it punishes them for their rejection of Wokeness.

The most telling fact of all is that Wokeness is heavily promoted by Abrahamists. Jews, Christians and Muslims love nothing more than lecturing goyim/infidels/kaffirs about how concern for one’s own nation is the same kind of in-group favouritism that inspires genocides, and therefore evil. Wokeness can therein be understood as an ideology that serves the wider Abrahamic objective of destroying natural political organisation, and thereby competitors to Abrahamism.

Ultimately, Abrahamism and Wokeness share a great many characteristics because they are both forms of slave morality. Just like the Abrahamic cults, Wokeness is based on resentment for life, and saying No to it. As such, Wokeness can rightly be considered an evil that increases the human suffering in the world.

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Political History Follows A Reverse Sawtooth Wave Function

We live in a world of explicate order. Because this order is hard to understand, the events of our lives often seem random, or at least unpredictable. But understanding the implicate order underneath the surface phenomena can give us great insight into how those phenomena will develop. Within this implicate order are the repeating patterns of history.

A sawtooth wave is a pattern like a sine wave, only the rise is much slower and the fall much faster. The sawtooth wave pattern is often seen in Nature, such as when a population slowly grows until it has consumed all available resources, and then plummets sharply. The reverse sawtooth wave is the same except the rise is extremely rapid, and the descent gradual.

Political history follows this pattern of a reverse sawtooth wave. If we imagine that the x-axis is time and the y-axis is the quality of leadership, a distinct pattern can be observed. The quality of political leadership gets gradually worse and worse over time until a revolutionary vanguard of high-quality leaders, excluded from the old system, overthrow that system and institute a new one.

This pattern is so old that Plato was able to write about it 2,300 years ago. Book VIII of Republic recounts the political cycle as observed by Plato. It begins with humanity’s natural rulers – an aristocracy of philosopher-kings – in charge. This leads to an initial state of maximum happiness but, over time, bad decisions are made when it comes to selecting new rulers from among the young people, and the quality of leadership starts to degrade.

The cumulative effect of these bad decisions is that the ruling class comes to think less about wisdom or rectitude and more about honour. This leads to a high-spirited militarism which creates more suffering than the enlightened benevolence of the philosopher-kings. This alone wouldn’t be so bad, if it didn’t lead to further degradation.

The tension between the aristocratic way of governing and what Plato called the timocratic way of governing leads to another step downwards, in the form of oligarchy. Eventually, rulers stop valuing money as an instrument to honour and start valuing it for its own sake. Once money starts determining who may hold public office, oligarchy is in effect.

This isn’t the end. Once money rules, people start using it to indulge their unnecessary desires. This leads to a base form of man taking control – the democratic man. The democratic man follows no higher order. He simply lurches from one whimsy to another. Much like today’s Baby Boomers, the democratic man lives a life of pure indulgence. This has serious consequences, in particular the rise of the tyrannical man.

Once people start living for indulgences instead of virtue, and society loses all discipline, the lowest form of man takes control. This is a man motivated by base lusts and consumed by lawless desires – the tyrant. His spiritual functions are entirely absent. Rule by tyrant leads to immense suffering, especially when contrasted by rule with philosopher-king.

This immense suffering brings about the humility necessary for people to finally listen to the philosopher-kings, instead of indulging their base desires. Chastened by the hangover of their indulgence, the people recognise the philosopher-kings as the most excellent among them, and make them leaders. This aristocratic revolution reinstalls the philosopher-kings as the ruling class, whereupon the cycle begins anew.

In Republic, Plato suggests that this pattern of gradual decline leading to revolution is inevitable, owing to the inevitable imperfections within each successive generation of people. This idea – that perfection existed in the past but decayed as time progressed – is one that the ancient Greeks shared with their co-religionists in ancient India, but not with today’s Westerners.

Most Westerners today adhere to an erroneous view of history that follows a regular sawtooth wave, in which progress is slowly made until resources are exhausted, at which point the system collapses. This regular sawtooth wave pattern is more typical of material phenomena, whereas the reverse sawtooth wave pattern is more typical of spiritual phenomena. It follows that history is fundamentally a spiritual phenomenon.

A modern understanding of political psychology sheds some light on how this could be possible. The potential risk in allowing society to degenerate one step further is small, whereas the potential risk in revolution is massive. Therefore, the temptation is to “kick the can down the road”. The best, most recent example of this phenomenon is the money printing of the last 14 years in response to the Global Financial Crisis.

So the future of Clown World is easy to predict. Our political difficulties, and our suffering, will both further intensify. At some point, people will get so pissed off about it that they decide to risk their lives in revolution. The only people willing to risk their lives so that their kin can avoid suffering are the best of all people, the philosopher-kings.

Before this happens, high-frequency young people will, in ever-greater numbers, reject Clown World in preference of simple lives away from the big cities (presaged today by the Chinese Lie Flat movement). These young people will have realised that money and pleasure do not provide meaningful happiness, following the example of voluntary poverty set by William James and Henry Thoreau. In seeing beyond the trappings of materialism, this cohort will have proven that it is fit to rule.

Away from the degeneracy of the cities, these young people will eventually form their own aristocratic and revolutionary culture, more excellent than anything that has gone before. So when the Globohomo Gayplex collapses, as it always does, these young aristocrats will surge into the halls of power, aided by all those who are glad to see the back of tyranny.

Our current position in Clown World can be understood as a point, found near -1 on the y axis, on a reverse sawtooth wave function. Our currently intense confusion and suffering presages a revolutionary vanguard of philosopher-kings. When the revolution comes and this aristocracy of philosopher-kings are installed as leaders, Clown World will end and a new spiritual golden age will begin.

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