history – Page 70

Understanding New Zealand: Demographics of the Non-Religious

One statistic that many will find suprising is that there is a positive (if insignificant) correlation between having no religion and median age – this was 0.16. In other words, the average non-religious Kiwi is older than the average religious one.

There are some easy ways to misinterpret this trend so one has to be careful. One common way to misread it is that religion is growing in power again, by somehow having increased its appeal to the youth of today.

The reality is that the most strongly non-religious demographic is the group of Kiwis of European descent, and this group is also significantly older and larger than the other racial demographics.

The correlation between being of European descent and having no religion was 0.69, and because the correlation between being of European descent and median age was 0.72, we can already happily explain the correlation between no religion and median age.

With being Maori there was a positive but not significant correlation with having no religion – this was 0.13. Some might be surprised that this is not higher, as Maoris are not particularly religious compared to most other demographics.

At least part of the reason is that there are many Maori families with high numbers of children, or headed by solo mothers, in the lower sociodemographic groups that affiliate with Mormonism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the children in these families will be counted as religious when they may well grow up not to be.

This can be seen if we look at the correlations between having no religion and being in certain age bands. With being aged between 0-4 and having no religion the correlation was -0.22, and with being aged between 5-14 and having no religion the correlation was -0.13. Obviously, children this young have not made the decision to adopt a religion but are simply counted as that of their parents or mother.

Predictably from this, there is a moderately strong correlation between being born in New Zealand and having no religion – this was 0.49.

So it is not surprising, then, that the correlation between being a Pacific Islander and having no religion is a very strong -0.81. This is not quite as strong as the correlation between being born in the Pacific Islands and having no religion: this was -0.86.

This tells us what many already know: that Pacific Island societies are almost entirely religious and that immigrating to New Zealand has the effect – if gradual – of eroding religious conditioning.

The correlation between being Asian and having no religion perfectly mirrored that of being born in New Zealand. Here it was -0.49. Because we can see that the correlation between having no religion and being born in North East Asia is only -0.15, we can guess that the bulk of these religious Asians are Hindus and Muslims from South Asia.

People with no religion were significantly more likely to be born in Britain. The correlation between having no religion and being born in Britain was 0.28.

As has been established in other countries, there is a positive correlation between having no religion and having educational aspirations. The correlation betwen having no religion and having a doctorate was 0.26, and with having an Honours degree it was 0.27. At the other end of the scale, the correlation between having no religion and having no qualification was -0.08.

Working in arts and recreation services was the industry where people are the most likely to not have a religion – the correlation between the two was a strong 0.60. This is probably because this is the industry that requires the most free and unique thought, and that has a negative correlation with religious sentiments.

Other industries working in which had high correlations with being non-religious were construction (0.46), retail trade (0.45), hospitality (0.42) and education and training (0.41).

The simplest way to explain all of these correlations is that they also overlap with being young adults, and the youth (leaving aside the reproduction rates of young solo mothers) are less likely to be religious.

This is not as evident in the numbers as it could be, of course, as has alraedy been explained by immigration patterns. The correlation between having no religion and being in the 15-19 age bracket is 0.02, and with being in the 20-29 age bracket it is 0.01.

These two age brackets correlate positively with being a Pacific Islander, so it’s possible to say that the general Western pattern of people becoming less religious with each passing generation holds true if one looks at Kiwis of European or Maori descent seperately from the confounding factor of recent immigration from a religious culture.

The religious hold true to another stereotype in that they breed at a significantly higher rate than the non-religious. The correlation between having no religion and being in a couple without a child was 0.49, compared to the correlation between having no religion and being in a couple with a child, which was -0.37, or being a solo parent (-0.33).

Perhaps also fitting with the general correlation with youth, the non-religious are significantly less likely to take a private car to work, and like to walk and bike. The correlation with having no religion and taking a private car to work was -0.50, and with walking to work it was 0.37 and with biking to work it was 0.32.

There is a significant correlation between having no religion and belonging to any of the income bands above $40K. The only income band to have a significant negative correlation with having no religion was the loss or no income band: here the correlation was -0.34.

Some might be surprised by the fact that there was a stronger correlation between having no religion and working as a manager (0.49) than there is between having no religion and working as a professional (0.33). The explanation for this might be that relatively more professionals than managers are immigrants and therefore have a nominal adherence to the religion of their ethnic origin.

Finally, the South Island is the godless island: the correlation between living on the South Island and having no religion was a significant 0.29. For the most part this simply reflects the fact that a much higher propertion of South Islanders are New Zealand-born compared to North Islanders.

This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

The Left Needs to go Back to Its Working Class Roots

The sentiment expressed here – that if you do a working class job you must be a piece of shit – is depressingly common among people who claim to be leftists

A common sentiment among many leftists today is that the working class is fundamentally deplorable, as if everyone who works with their hands or rides the bus is something out of Romper Stomper, just waiting for the chance to bash some poor transsexual or Muslim and get away with it.

These regressive leftists even use codewords like “fascist” to disguise their contempt for the working class. That this has been allowed to happen is the reason why left-wing politics are in such a state of complete disarray in the modern West.

In many ways this is deliberate. The children of the political elite know that the more effectively they can destroy working-class movements, the more power they will inherit when they inevitably do inherit it, and so they have gone to some effort to cause them to rot from within.

This is why social justice movements are so often full of middle-class people who aren’t really serious about the issue. It’s also why so much mainstream media attention is given to leftists who are fighting for issues that only, or primarily, affect the middle class.

Essentially, the middle and upper classes have infiltrated the political and media structures that used to give a voice to working-class people, and have twisted them to middle-class interests, or simply destroyed them where this was not possible.

This is how we have ended up with a situation where the white working class votes for a Republican like Trump, and those claiming to be in favour of the disadvantaged force those same disadvantaged to compete with refugees for housing, jobs and public space.

No-one in the working class could give a damn about gay adoption, or Syrian refugees, or transsexual toilet rights, or global warming.

If you’re hungry, the only thing you care about is food.

If you’re sick, the only thing you care about is medicine.

If you’re cold, the only thing you care about is shelter.

If you’re broke, the only thing you care about is money.

If you’ve had a hard day, the only thing you care about is chilling out for a bit.

Watching Jacinda Ardern on television passionately arguing the need for homosexuals to be allowed to adopt kids, while her party has gone silent on meaningful questions like cannabis law reform and the TPPA, is a disgusting sight to the working-class people who used to be represented by the Labour Party.

As mentioned above, much of this is deliberate. The Labour Party are, despite their rhetoric, ultimately as conservative as National, because ultimately they are part of the same establishment. Just look at the ease with which Shane Jones shifts from one wing to the other if you doubt that the ruling class is on the side of the ruling class and the rest of us are on our fucking own.

Ardern’s objective, as it was for the multimillionaire David Cunliffe, is to waste the energy of the people who wish for social change, and to misdirect it to where it can do no damage to the establishment.

This is why the Labour Party promotes gay adoption, which affects perhaps a hundred Kiwis, and ignores cannabis law reform, which affects four hundred thousand.

After all, fucking another man in the arse does not generally bring about patterns of thought that are dangerous to the control systems of the establishment, whereas taking psychoactive chemicals regularly does.

A far higher proportion of cannabis users than prospective gay adoptive parents are societal outcasts, which is hardly surprising when you can be put in prison for being one.

Until such a time as the left goes back to its roots – which is giving a voice to the truly disadvantaged, not merely to whoever’s cause is the most fashionable this moment – it will continue to lose influence.

The Use of Major Psychedelics in Healing Psychological Trauma

At some point in the near future, the potential for using psychedelic medicines to help heal the major psychological traumas that cause most mental illnesses will be a hot topic. Unfortunately, we will have to begin almost from the beginning, as the bulk of our historical knowledge about these substances has been destroyed.

Despite this, there is still a considerable amount of shamanic knowledge in the underground culture, certainly much more than what exists in the mainstream medical establishment, for whom the retarded calculus of “drugs = brain damage” still dominates thinking.

The essential thing that has to be understood is that psychedelics, like cannabis, serve to decondition the mind and brain, only in a much deeper and more sudden way than cannabis.

Deconditioning is here used in the clinical psychology sense to mean a process of unlearning – in particular, of unlearning involuntary subconscious reactions to things that may have been useful to deal with the problems of the past but which no longer are.

This is principally why the psychedelic experience is so difficult. It is also why the psychedelic experience is so exhilarating. One sees things as they actually are, as one did when a child, without the experience being filtered through hundreds of layers of conditioning collected over many forgotten years.

It is possible to condition oneself into a mental illness by thinking too hard about things, because the brain (crudely speaking) works like muscles in the sense that the more it is exercised the stronger it becomes.

Because anxiety and depression are often little more than a habitual fixation of thinking on either the future or the past, respectively, a psychedelic experience often has the effect of deconditioning a person from thought patterns that made them unhappy.

This is why a lot of practiced psychedelic users take them when they feel it’s time to reset the thinking. Usually this is after a certain amount of time has passed since the last experience.

Likewise, many people have suppressed traumatic memories. The suppression often makes good short-term sense in that it allows the damaged person to deal with their immediate problems of survival, but it often makes bad long-term sense in that the warping effect it has on someone’s personality magnifies over time.

This points the way to the major positive use of psychedelics in healing mental illness. Any mental illness that has been caused by overconditioning in an area of the brain/mind could be helped by a medicine that deconditions a person from the thoughts they did not want to have.

It could also give them an opportunity to bring up the suppressed memories and to consider them in a new light, free of the conditioned anxiety response that usually accompanies recollection of past traumas.

Where more research will be necessary is to make sure that the patient does not lose conditioning in areas of the brain/mind that actually helped them in their life.

There are many concepts and habits that people have learned for good reasons, in particular concepts around good social conduct that make life much easier for all of us. An 18-year old adult will have been conditioned for almost their entire life about many things.

So in order to be able to use these tools effectively, mental health practitioners will have to educate themselves past the barbaric superstitions that currently inform our approach to pre-pharmaceutical medicines.

Much of this will involve sitting down with drug users and talking to them to discover what benefits they have found in the use of various substances in their explorations of the mind.

This cannot happen until society comes to appreciate both that psychoactive drug users are people who have followed the prehistoric shamanic path, and that this path is still necessary in our society to protects us from the excesses of groupthink, of tradition and of mindless, knee-jerk programmed reactions and thinking.

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of Asian New Zealanders

Asians represent the fourth major wave of immigration to New Zealand, and, partially as a consequence, their voting patterns are the least well understood. What makes it especially difficult is that “Asian” covers a very large number of people, many of whom are very distinct from some of the others.

The most striking thing about Asian New Zealanders is their love of the ACT Party. The correlation between being Asian and voting ACT in 2014 was an extremely strong 0.85, which is enough to suggest that most ACT voters are Asians (note that it does not mean most Asians are ACT voters, because the population of Asians is many times higher than the number of ACT voters).

As is described elsewhere, the highly educated class tends to split into a right wing that votes ACT and a left wing that votes Green. If the correlation between voting ACT in 2014 and being Asian is so strong, one could predict that there were fewer educated Asians left to vote Green, and indeed the correlation between voting Green in 2014 and being Asian was 0.00.

Also because of the extremely strong ACT support, one could predict that there was little conservative sentiment left over for supporting the National Party. This is indeed the case – the correlation between being Asian and voting National in 2014 was 0.09. There was even less for the real Conservative Party, voting for which in 2014 had a correlation of -0.07 with being Asian.

The correlation between being Asian and voting Labour, by contrast, was 0.17. Some might be surprised by this, given that there are a large number of Asians attracted to the ACT Party. The explanation is that most of the ACT-voting Asians are from Far East Asia and the many from India, Thailand, Malaysia etc. are more likely to have social democratic sentiments.

Given that Maoris were the first wave of immigrants and Asians the most recent, it’s not really surprising that being Asian had a significant negative correlation with voting for any of the four Maori-heavy parties. Being Asian had a correlation of -0.23 with voting Internet MANA, one of -0.30 with voting Maori Party, one of -0.50 with voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and one of -0.60 with voting New Zealand First.

This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.