2020 has been the year of the revaluation of values. Many things once thought acceptable are being re-evaluated with a new mindset. One thing once thought acceptable is the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger. This article asks: is it time to rename him?
The name ‘Schwarzenegger’ evokes many sentiments in the modern Western mind – similar sentiments to Arnold’s former nickname “The Austrian Oak”.
Physically, one thinks of the superbly well-crafted physique that won multiple world bodybuilding titles as well as the role of Conan the Cimmerian. Mentally, one thinks of the preternatural will and ambition that took a teenage Austrian boy to Hollywood superstardom and from there to a successful term as Governor of California.
Linguistically, the name evokes other sentiments. ‘Schwarz’ is German for ‘black’, and ‘neger’ is German for… well, you guessed it. Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name literally means ‘black nigger’.
A white man going around calling himself “black nigger” cannot be acceptable under today’s moral standards. It’s no different to a white man conducting his daily affairs entirely in blackface. The name Schwarzenegger must be cancelled.
Perhaps Schwarzenegger could instead be called Arnold von Osterreich, a name that respects the black community while still evoking Arnold’s heritage. American President Donald Trump should pass a law renaming him as soon as possible in the hope of appeasing the black rioters currently rampaging through American inner cities.
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Note: this article is a pisstake! If you really thought that we support the renaming of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you’re stupid!
‘Kayfabe’ is a professional wrestling term which means acting like what you are doing is real, although it isn’t. The professional wrestlers have since abandoned kayfabe, choosing now to present themselves as sports entertainment instead of as serious competitors. This essay asks: should our mainstream media follow suit?
In the early days of professional wrestling, people took things a lot more seriously than they do nowadays. Life was much more brutal a century ago, and people were far less given to flights of fancy. As such, the vast majority of people wanted to watch real wrestling matches between two fit, determined men out to triumph over the other. Although professional wrestling was fake, this couldn’t be admitted.
By the 1990s, when life had become easy, people had come to take things less seriously. It no longer seemed important to pretend that the matches were real and that the outcomes were not fixed. The definitive moment came in 1996 when superstars Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Shaun Michaels and Triple H all embraced in the middle of the ring after a match, when, according to the WWF coverage, they all hated each other (see image above).
In professional wrestling, where the wrestlers are playing characters, the actual wrestlers are usually great friends. After all, they have to trust each other very closely in performing their dangerous physical stunts, and this combined with the inherent danger of the job leads to a strong sense of camaraderie. Their feuding and battling is just an act, one that is now admitted to. Kayfabe has now been abandoned.
A convincing argument can be made that it’s time for the mainstream media to follow suit, and to admit that what they say does not reflect reality. Should they come out and admit that the product they sell is not information, but dramatic entertainment portrayed as political conflict? Is it time for the mainstream media to abandon kayfabe?
In professional wrestling, it’s understood by all that Vince McMahon runs the company, and his primary interest is making money by producing a quality entertainment product. So no-one pretends the matches are real anymore, they just go along with it as if it were pantomime. The sporting media reports on it as if it were entertainment, and it’s understood as such.
When two politicians clash, however, the mainstream media portrays it as if they genuinely hated each other. Election debates are presented to the populace as if they were heavyweight title fights, with two sides going head-to-head for an accolade that only one of them can possess. The television journalists describe mere insults as if politicians were ripping into each other like pit fighting dogs.
The story we’re sold is that all sides are ready to beat each other’s brains out. In reality, every single politician has a mutual interest in keeping the gravy train going, and this sentiment is shared with the owners of the mainstream media. For the political class, it’s very much them against the people whose taxes keep them in luxury. They will choose to put each other first before the plebs, anywhere and always.
Evidence for this assertion comes from how closely members of the political class interact with each other when the cameras aren’t rolling. They populate think tanks together, they party with each other, they marry each other. Politicians might ostensibly represent interests that are implacably opposed to each other, but the reality is that almost all of them come from the ruling class, and represent the interests of that class above any other.
This is why New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, of the Labour Party, can have a cousin named Shane Ardern, who is a Member of Parliament for the National Party. It’s no contradiction that one family can produce MPs for both sides of the fence, because Parliament is a ruling class institution, and the Arderns are a ruling class family.
The average man in the street had figured out 20 years ago that professional wrestling was fake, but is only just figuring out today that the mainstream media is equally as fake. Yes, the mainstream media is just as scripted, dishonest and utterly unreal as any professional wrestling show. Now that this is widely recognised, it’s time to admit it.
It should be openly accepted by the mainstream media that they are the employees of their owners, the international finance and banking interests. As such, they are presenting a program that serves the interests of those owners. Their product is drama, in particular drama between different political actors and/or factions. They aren’t selling objective information, or an objective overview of what’s going on in the nation and in the world.
The WWF, its acronym redolent of the Olympic wrestling federations, rebranded as the WWE and started calling itself “sports entertainment”. It’s time for our mainstream media to do something similar – to stop pretending that their role is to inform or to hold power to account, and to start calling itself “journalistic entertainment”.
Most people consider apartheid to be one of the recent century’s many evils. Elderly Kiwis speak with pride of opposing the 1981 Springbok tour and helping to bring the regime in South Africa to its knees. Today, though, it’s apparent that race-based policies are making a comeback. This essay asks the inevitable question.
To Kiwis in Generation X, apartheid was placed along the Holocaust as an example of the worst of all possible crimes – racism. We were made to write essays in school denouncing it. The television and radio told us every day that ending it was one of the world’s most pressing issues. So when apartheid ended with the democratic elections in 1994, we all cheered.
In recent years, however, apartheid has surged back into fashion. The powers that be, for reasons nefarious, have encouraged a renaissance in racial consciousness. In 2020, most people’s identities are once again based primarily around their racial heritage. It’s once again common for people to think of themselves as their race first and as a Kiwi second.
In New Zealand, successive strategic Government decisions have rejected the idea that New Zealanders are one people under one law. They have enshrined separatist sentiments, promulgating the belief that the essential nature of relations between whites and Maoris is one of oppression, deceit and exploitation.
Part of the New New Zealand history is that white people have stolen some innumerable wealth from the Maoris, and that justice demands therefore that the Maoris get their own back on white people whenever they can. This blatantly racist narrative has inspired an anti-racist counter-reaction, as the nation has been set against itself.
Anti-racists were appalled by recent news that the Sixth Labour Government was allocating coronavirus support funding on the basis of race. GPs of Maoris and Pacific Islanders were given $4.50 per patient, but GPs of white people were only given $1.50 unless those patients had been previously marked out as belonging to the poorest quintile. This is a blatantly racist policy, and some were surprised it was even legal.
Given that the most recent Budget allocated $1,000,000,000 to Maori causes alone, some could be forgiven for thinking that the Sixth Labour Government had given up on the white working class completely, and had settled for being a brown party. If this is the case, then we’re arguably on our way to an apartheid system where political factions argue for racial interests first and foremost.
This news came in the context of the realisation that the Police had no intention of stopping certain Maori tribes from blockading public roads, particularly roads in Northland. Despite the fact that blockading a public road is a crime, the Police have not made any arrests, and have even said that they weren’t going to do anything about it.
So many people have supported these actions that it seems as if New Zealand is taking tentative steps towards a fully apartheid system, where different laws apply depending on one’s skin colour.
The question raised by this essay is: should New Zealand embrace this shift, and institute full apartheid? Should we organise our society to reflect a fundamental and unbreachable difference between Maoris and non-Maoris, such that the two different groups cross each others’ paths as little as possible?
The first step would be to entrench the Maori Roll. This would mean that all Maoris were forced to vote in the Maori electorates whether they wanted to or not. Their race being their defining quality, they would no longer be eligible for the General Roll. Correspondingly, Maori voters would not be permitted any influence over non-Maori affairs.
The second step would be to declare certain areas as tribal reservations. In principle, these already exist. The areas being blocked by roadblocks are, by virtue of that residents are allowed to block them, effectively the same as North American-style reservations. Eventually, Maoris would be transported from the cities into these tribal enclaves.
Future steps would entail the institution of separate drinking fountains, toilets and beaches. Sports leagues would also be segregated, with a special Maori league for rugby. Maori players would no longer be eligible for the All Blacks or Black Caps.
The reality, of course, is that apartheid between Maoris and whites in New Zealand is impossible on account of that they’re already too mixed together.
At least 25% of New Zealanders – including the author of this piece – are some kind of mixed-race Northern European/Polynesian. Those of us who are cannot reasonably be expected to pick a side in the great race war that so many seem to be agitating for.
If you’re a mixed race white-Maori, you are probably the result of a relationship in which a white person and a Maori loved each other. Your entire existence is an expression of co-operation and goodwill between these two peoples. Therefore, it’s impossible for a Kiwi of mixed blood to choose one side over the other, any more than they could choose their left hand over their right one.
The majority of New Zealand already has white ancestry. Sooner or later, the majority of the country will also have Maori ancestry – this is inevitable given that Maori ancestry is already carried by many Kiwis who are indistinguishable from fully white people, and that interbreeding rates between Maoris and whites are extremely high (the average Maori woman is more likely to breed with a non-Maori than with another Maori).
Seeing as there is no reproductive barrier between the two groups, it seems inevitable that mixed-race white-Kiwis will eventually comprise a majority of Kiwis. From that point, there’s no looking back.
If apartheid really is impossible, then it’s a mistake to take steps towards it. That means that all separatist measures have to be opposed, both intellectually and legally. No Treaty favouritism, no race-based funding, no Maori roadblocks, no official narrative of hatred, division and revenge. It’s time to replace our national narrative with Esoteric Aotearoanism.
Films and history books warn us of the dangers of evil geniuses coming to power. Skillful orators like Hitler, we are told, are able to trick masses of people into following them, with dire consequences. But the lone evil genius is not as big a danger as a horde of mediocre people. Understanding the midwit phenomenon is crucial to understanding Clown World.
A ‘midwit’ is someone of middling intelligence. They are higher than lackwits, halfwits and fuckwits, but are lower than any genuine wit. They’re not dull, just not bright. Although this sounds very ordinary, the sheer mass of humanity at the very centre of the bell curve creates its own phenomena that we have to be wary of.
Psychologists have observed a curious phenomenon that is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This is when a person with a low level of ability or knowledge heavily overrates themselves. It’s a specific example of an area of Psychology known as illusory superiority.
A person is most liable to fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect when they know a little bit about a subject. This is because a person who doesn’t know the boundaries of a field of knowledge will not know the limitations of their own knowledge either. The tendency in such cases is to discount the volume of the knowledge not known.
When someone uses the term ‘midwit’ they are referring to this kind of person. They don’t mean a person of merely average intelligence, but rather a person who is utterly incapable of recognising their own intellectual shortcomings. The midwit secretly thinks he might be the smartest person who ever lived. This is because his understanding of his limitations is minimal.
Central to midwit psychology is their tendency to go along with the herd. Midwits can’t actually see ahead, much less beyond, but they like to give the impression they can. They only way they can continue to give this impression is by expending great energy determining what actually smart people think.
The problem here is that midwits can’t generally tell the difference between people smarter than them and crazy people. This leads to three characteristic midwit errors.
The first is dismissing people smarter than them as crazy.
Midwits don’t have the academic acumen to read scientific journals, much less conduct scientific literature reviews. As such, they are dependent on the word of experts in order to understand anything. Of course, if a person doesn’t have any expertise themselves then they have to rate those who do on trust, and that is a crapshoot at the best of times.
Any genuine scientific or cultural advance will, at first, only be understood or appreciated by the genuine experts and geniuses in the field. From them, it filters out to the merely brilliant, then to the bright and then finally to everyone else. So any really interesting scientific advance will only be appreciated by a minority – until it stops being interesting.
Because the midwit follows the herd, the midwit will always dismiss the genius as crazy on account of his low number of followers. When the genius becomes recognised by the masses, the midwit will follow along, up until the point where the genius becomes unfashionable. Then the midwit will drift into the next intellectual trend.
The second characteristic midwit error is following a crazy person out of the belief that that person is smart.
The archetypal example of this is the Manson Family. Charlie Manson was certainly capable of sounding smart, but his was more of a carnival storyteller’s glibness than the wisdom of a sage. He could take people for an enjoyable ride and show them some incredible places, but at the end of it they were left with regret.
Manson was certainly capable of expressing advanced spiritual insights. After all, if you hang around the psychedelic drug scene long enough you will come to hear some profound insights into the nature of reality from genuine shamanic adventurers. All he had to do was parrot them accurately enough and a couple of dozen Southern California midwits decided that he was a guru.
Because midwits are mediocre, they’re especially prone to mistake convoluted insanity for profundity. Consequently, there are all kinds of lunatics who have followings on account of that their babblings have become fashionable. Most of these lunatics are mainstream media figures – television celebrities are to the midwit what the gods were to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
These errors are magnified by the sheer number of midwits out there. Because there are so many of them, most midwits are used to the experience of encountering others who agree with them. This leads to the third, and most characteristic error of the midwit: groupthink.
Because the midwit knows that they are not distinguished in any fashion, being entirely mediocre, they come to prize the bare average above the exceptional. From this they develop a tendency to ignore anything vaguely controversial. If the herd thinks it, that’s good enough for the midwit. As the midwit is right on the centre of the bell curve, their opinions are the most common. Therefore, they conclude, they must be correct.
Related to this, midwits are especially fond of labelling any explanation they cannot understand a ‘conspiracy theory’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they fall for all sorts of conspiracy theories themselves, especially ones that get popular in the midwit’s circle, or which may have been pushed in the mainstream media.
The traditional solution to the midwit problem was beating them into submission with a Bible. In recent years, control has shifted to a combination of psychological abuse (at school) and pacification (through the mainstream media). The contentment of the midwit is the dam protecting Clown World from the waters of change. If it goes, we fall into chaos.
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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.
