The Second Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Second Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of excessive freedom. The Second Rejection is the contention that excessive freedom leads to chaos.

Order might be suffocating, and breaking out of an excess of it might feel wonderful. It might feel so wonderful, and the freedom such a relief, that it becomes easy to believe that the more freedom, the better. But, just as with order, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. When the last vestiges of order are obliterated, one is left with something more resembling chaos than freedom.

In the same way that a classroom becomes chaos without a teacher, because all are maximally free, society becomes chaos without a ruler. If you, like me, have had the experience of being a relief teacher of a class of primary school kids stuck inside on a rainy day, you will understand that even the perception of unlimited freedom leads quickly to chaos. The line between freedom and chaos becomes thinner and thinner the more freedom there is.

The valuation of freedom above all rests on a certain interpretation of human nature. The assumption of the Left – both its establishment and alternative forms – is that human nature is inherently good.

Here they go much further than Mencius’s argument that a person observing a child crawling towards a well will naturally act to prevent it falling in. The argument is closer to that of Rousseau’s noble savage, in which human nature, unspoiled by modernity, is naturally desiring of peace and goodwill for all living beings, unblemished by malice.

The main problem is that people are naturally selfish, even if they are not sadistic. The world is complicated, and it’s not always obvious if a certain action is a fair one. Consequently, many people just act on what is best for themselves, and rely on the outside environment to provide self-correction. Thus, simple ignorance is enough to guarantee that, given enough freedom, people will take advantage of each other. Without at least enough order to have law, social carnage is the result.

This is why the belief that people don’t need rulers is considered childish by the alternative centrist. It reminds one of children asserting that they don’t need bedtimes.

One can easily imagine what would happen to a society without any laws. Films such as The Purge give us some idea: there would be enormous numbers of revenge attacks, reprisals and blood feuds. The history of Anglo-Saxon England before the imposition of the Danelaw is rife with blood feuds. We know from psychological studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment that there are very dark streams of malevolence within the human heart. To some extent it’s only fear of legal consequences that keeps this under control.

The French Revolution is perhaps the most famous example of sudden extreme freedom. Although freedom was one of the rallying-cries in 1789, by 1793 the revolutionaries were already chopping off heads en masse. It seems that the more extreme the freedom, the more tenuous, and therefore the greater the need to protect it by purging anyone who might threaten it. This can, of course, be considered a new form of order, which illustrates the degree to which the pendulum of history naturally swings between order and chaos.

The common failure of co-operative societies is a further example. It sounds good having a job where you only work if you feel like it, because it affords the maximum possible freedom from slavery. In practice, few people really feel like it unless they keep their production for themselves. So very little gets done.

Perhaps the failure of Communism itself is the ultimate example. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” would be a great slogan if human nature was inherently highly altruistic, instead of opportunistic and callous. The freedom to choose not to contribute is too much for most. The vast majority of people will choose idleness over drudgery and submission to a boss.

The freedom to remake society is also the freedom to destroy everything good about it. This is never the plan, but seems to nevertheless keep happening. Awareness of this is what inspires the Second Rejection.

The major flaw of leftism in general is the leftist misconception of human nature. Human nature isn’t evil, but it certainly isn’t good either. The Second Rejection is also, implicitly, a rejection of the naivete of the Left. In rejecting absolute freedom, the alternative centrist rejects the inaccurate (both misguided and stupid) narratives about human nature that have plagued the Left since the beginning.

An excess of freedom is not limited to legal freedom. Social freedoms are also political, and also subject to the Second Rejection. At time of writing, the New Zealand Parliament has a Green MP with a reputation for coprophagia embroiled in an indecency scandal, and the Spanish Parliament recently produced someone similar: a man filmed eating his own excrement. The ongoing trans hysteria is another example of freedom having undesirable consequences. The alternative centrist happily says No to such dubious freedoms.

All of this degeneracy reminds of the madness of the Weimar Republic (which presages the Third Rejection).

The general rule could be described thusly: when social order is overturned, freedom is the result, but if a new order is not imposed – at least to some extent – the freedom will collapse into chaos.

Plato describes this exact phenomenon in detail in Republic. A lower class of person demands freedom above any other consideration, such as propriety: “In democracy […] there’s no compulsion […] to submit to authority if you don’t want to.” As a result, democracies lack moral authorities and moral guidance. People simply follow their most bestial impulses – fear, lust, wrath, greed – unless or until something stops them.

The end result of too much freedom, Plato tells us, is tyranny. People who are too free can never agree on what the right way forward is, and the all-too-inevitable end result is the rise of a dictator who promises to use force to smash through the deadlock. It can seen thusly that an excess of order and an excess of freedom both lead to dystopic misery.

Even worse, the struggle between these two visions of dystopia causes more dystopia. Without a mediating force, the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left fight it out on the battlefield, often resulting in Pyrrhic victories for whichever of the two remains.

The alternative centrist, in both the First and the Second Rejections, rejects both too much order and too much chaos. But the problem of warfare between the two remains: the pendulum of history keeps swinging, and with each return destroys the lives of millions. Some degree of balance needs to be struck between order and freedom. This presages the Third Acceptance.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the book that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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The Cheap Labour Spectrum

If you are incredibly fortunate (or unfortunate), you will have inherited lands that bring in such an income that you don’t need to work. This will place you in society’s ruling class. If you do not inherit such a fortune, you will have to sell your labour to those who did in order to survive. You will have a position on the Cheap Labour Spectrum.

This position, in turn, is primarily a matter of your negotiating position with regards to employment.

What is the best alternative for you to taking this job? For a member of the upper class, the alternative is to sit at home collecting rents. For everyone else, it’s starvation – there are no longer any commons to hunt or gather as they have all been enclosed. Everyone else is on the Cheap Labour Spectrum, where the upper class tries to pay you as little for your labour as they possibly can.

At the top of the Cheap Labour Spectrum are those in the best negotiating position. This will be friends or family of the upper class. Those who inherit the land usually have someone else manage it. These stewards of the great estates are at the very top of the spectrum. Often they are minor aristocracy themselves, and work to gain political, business or cultural contacts, not because they need to.

In more meritocratic systems, those in possession of the most important skills also have excellent negotiating positions. People who understand how the national electricity grid works, who can perform extensive surgeries, who can lecture the sciences – they will always be able to command an impressive income. They could be said to comprise the upper middle class.

The next level down are the unextraordinary professionals and managers. These people might not be brilliant, but they are willing to work hard for long hours. They sacrifice themselves for the landowners, and this is generally rewarded: the landowners can’t push people willing to work 80 hour weeks down the Cheap Labour Spectrum because there isn’t enough supply of these people. So they make up the core middle class.

In the middle of the Cheap Labour Spectrum are people like you and me (probably). Here one might have a small amount of savings or some skills of minor note, but the general trend is towards getting ground into oblivion. Even if one has a supposedly decent job, time and rent/mortgage pressures will eat heavily into one’s quality of life. This is the fabled lower middle class. In a time of high social mobility (i.e. not today’s Clown World) it’s an okay place to be.

If there’s an upper working class right now, it’s the trades. Many tradesmen today are earning more money than people supposedly above them in the middle class. However, one’s position on the Cheap Labour Spectrum is not a question of income, it’s a question of negotiating power: two related but differing concepts. Even if the tradesman makes more money than some of those in the middle class, he is still more vulnerable to mass immigration.

The middle working class, or core working class, are doing it hard. They’re low enough on the Cheap Labour Spectrum to not be considered fully human by the upper class. As such, they are targeted for replacement. All over the West right now, the simple retail jobs that would have gone to such people now go to cheap labour imports. One can see already that, at the lower levels of the Cheap Labour Spectrum, the quality of life is very low indeed.

Even further towards the lower end of the spectrum are people earning the minimum wage. These are the lower working class, the real precariat. These people have to exhaust themselves through work, but are paid barely enough to live on, and they consider the thought of one day owning a home a sick joke. In the modern West, this is the lower cutoff point of the Cheap Labour Spectrum.

Indentured servants are the next step below this cutoff. Indentured servitude might not legally exist in today’s West, but it has existed in the recent past. Over 300,000 people are believed to have crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants up until the American Revolution, mostly from Britain. A modern form of indentured servitude is when a people smuggler will confiscate a person’s passport while waiting for that person to work off a debt.

Modern wage slavery is akin to indentured servitude. It has been suggested that the secret goal of saddling young people with student loan debts is to make them more desperate and to weaken their employment negotiating position, pushing them down the Cheap Labour Spectrum. Many indentured servants in the Americas were granted land upon the completion of their tenure, a privilege never afforded to 21st Century wage slaves.

Serfdom is the stage below this. In serfdom, a person is bound to a piece of land as a labourer. In theory, the serf and his family get military protection from the landlord, but in practice the lord gets the lion’s share of the serf’s production in exchange for a few promises. The serf might not be cheap enough labour to be expendable, but they’re getting down there.

Slavery is the lowest stage of the Cheap Labour Spectrum; the purpose of the spectrum itself is to drive people towards slavery. Even here, there are divisions. The chattel slavery of the American South was one of the most brutal and dehumanising forms ever practiced. Barbary Coast slavery was also brutal. In certain other slavery systems, the law restricts the extent to which slaves can be abused. Some forms of debt slavery are little different to indentured servitude. In any case, to be a slave is to be at the bottom of the Cheap Labour Spectrum.

In ancient times, slavery meant literally capturing your enemies at spearpoint and enslaving them, or buying them off a king who had enslaved his enemies. In modern times, it’s more a matter of pushing your enemies down the Cheap Labour Spectrum. By opening the borders to hordes of cheap labour, the ruling classes push the middle and working classes further down this spectrum. This is why mass immigration takes place everywhere in the Western World, despite never having been voted for in any democratic election.

For the 99% of us plebs not in the ruling class, social status is primarily a matter of where one is on the Cheap Labour Spectrum. That’s why the number of dollars per hour a person earns is considered the ultimate measure of their value. That number is a measure of how much leverage the upper class has over them – it’s a measure of the degree to which they have not been brought to heel.

Escaping the strictures of the Cheap Labour Spectrum is not an easy task. Because so many of us are on it, a high proportion of us get pushed towards the bottom by sheer competition, making it harder and harder to escape. Perhaps the best hope is a revolution that destroys the modern labour system completely, or a mass dieoff that collapses the labour supply.

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The First Acceptance Of Alternative Centrism

The First Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Establishment Right is correct when they speak of the importance of order.

Both forms of the right tend to take a more historical perspective than the left. As such, the right generally understands better than the left that the initial state of the human being is one of chaos. Early man had to contend not with rival kingdoms but with the predations of Nature, in particular the elements and wild animals.

This chaos was deadly. Nature seemed to will the death and dissolution of the bodies of early men. The first order, then, was imposed in a simple effort to survive.

At some point, an intelligent warrior among the early men would have figured out something profound: he was more likely to win battles if he had other men by his side. Through charm and threat, this intelligent early warrior would have marshalled other males in his tribe to form a war band, much like the ones seen today in places like the Amazon Basin or Papua New Guinea. The first war band whose leader commanded two dozen or so males would have quickly dominated the males of other tribes. The organisational structure of this war band would have spread, like a technology. Sooner or later various tribes would have united into a clan.

Thus began a process by which social order continued to increase – with temporary and localised setbacks – until it developed into the political world of today.

Perhaps the greatest imposition of order in human history was the establishment of law. The first full-scale lawgiving enterprise was that of Hammurabi of Babylonia, who gave us the Code of Hammurabi. The Code of Hammurabi was responsible for the order of Babylonian society – order sufficient to develop into a great empire.

Law and order are in many cases synonymous; one tends to follow the other. The Establishment Right represents the powers that imposed the initial order that created civilisation. In this sense it manifests as the warrior-king or the kshatriya class. In a modern context, the Establishment Right represents The Man, the Big Daddy who imposes order upon society.

A state of Nature is similar to a state of chaos in many respects – the most obvious being the absence of human civilisation. The Establishment Right exhorts us to accept order on the basis that, without it, there is nothing. And they’re right in the sense that, without order, humankind falls prey to the elements and to wild animals again.

Characteristic of the Establishment Right mindset is that order is to be imposed whether people like it or not. It’s too important to worry about whether others agree. The government has the right to run over people who resist the order. The Establishment Right values hierarchy, and therefore does not value consensus. This is why they also value law enforcement. The sort of person who has a “Back the Blue” bumper sticker is very likely a supporter of the Establishment Right.

This is why it’s usually members of the Establishment Right who have the least sympathy for people arrested for victimless crimes. Because order is its own good, people are obliged to obey unjust laws. This corresponds closely to the ‘Law and Order Morality’ that Lawrence Kohlberg considered to be the fourth stage in his six-stage model of moral development. This is also why it’s the Establishment Right who most strongly supports conscription.

This is also why the Establishment Right supports inheritance rights the hardest. The most orderly way to advance through the generations is for each man to inherit his father’s position. Any other sons can go into the military or the clergy. This was basically the feudal model of medieval Europe, a time that many in the Establishment Right look back upon fondly.

Related to all this, the Establishment Right likes to support any aspect of the status quo that maintains order, even if there are obvious flaws with that aspect, and even if that aspect causes immense harm to many. For example, the Establishment Right is the biggest supporter of Christianity in the West. They are also the strongest proponents of the divine right of kings.

The imperative to uphold order is why the armies of the world shoot deserters. If people are allowed to desert, order is lost, and when order is lost so is the battle. Part of the First Acceptance is accepting that the Establishment Right is correct when it says we need to shoot deserters. In fact, many unpleasant things have to be done to maintain social order.

Aristotle wrote in Politics that the purpose of politics was happiness, and that this was mostly achieved by justice. Justice, in turn, is mostly achieved by a well-ordered polis. This (like Aristotle in general) is an argument that the Establishment Right agrees with. Order is understood to be the basis of justice, and therefore of happiness. The alternative centrist is happy to accept that, without order, nothing political is possible.

The basis of the First Acceptance, then, is accepting that the imposition of order makes everything else in society possible. All the wealth and culture that exists is dependent entirely on the initial imposition of order by the first warrior-kings, and the maintenance of that order. Should that order ever be fully lost, so too would society be lost. Order is the great defensive line ensuring human survival against Nature.

To a major extent, order is imposed by fear. There’s a very strong correlation between suffering intense feelings of helplessness and trauma in childhood and growing up to become a control freak. By the same token, its often fear that creates the will to impose order. This is why populations that become afraid often react by putting the Establishment Right back in power.

The dark side of this fear-based will to impose order is, as mentioned above, control freakery. There is an element of the Establishment Right that will go into hysteria if anything changes at all, no matter how minor, believing this to be the first step on the slippery slope to chaos. This element has aspects of childishness and autism to it. The displeasure it causes is the basis of the First Rejection.

There are many historical examples of fear leading to too much order, causing unhappiness: the Inquisition, the War on Drugs, the Satanic Panic and burqas are just some. When this happens, it leads naturally to the First Rejection of Alternative Centrism.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the book that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

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The Harvester Judgement And How Much Has Been Stolen From Us

Mainstream media propaganda would have us all believe that the West has never been wealthier. Our glorious leaders have led us into an unparalleled age of prosperity. Never before have the lives of everyday Westerners overflowed with such abundance. Apparently, even the lowliest Westerner has easy access to luxuries that kings could not have dreamed of in ages past.

If you don’t agree, the media tells us, you’re a terrorist. A filthy, ungrateful reprobate whose resentment endangers the entire project of civilisation itself. How could a person not be grateful for the beneficence shown by our ruling classes? Just how?

As it turns out, anyone with a solid knowledge of history has reason to feel ripped off at their current treatment.

In 1907, the idea of a minimum wage was introduced in Australia. In a case relating to the Sunshine Harvester Company of Victoria, Justice Henry Higgins determined that a “fair and reasonable” wage for a manual labourer was that which could support a family of five. A skilled worker should receive even more. This was later known as the “Harvester Judgement“.

Because people higher up the social ladder would make more money than manual labourers, the Harvester Judgement created a floor underneath which no full-time worker could fall. It therefore ensured a decent quality of life for everyone in Australian society, not just the rich. This judgement became a core principle of Australian employment law and is one of the main reasons why the Australian worker’s standard of living has been so high until recently, and why Australia is known as “The Lucky Country”.

According to Grok, a family of five living in Auckland requires some $7,000 per month to meet housing, food, utilities, transportation and other costs. This means some $84,000 per year – after tax. Before tax, it’s $112,963 per year. Less than that means a family of five has to start going without some things.

This is the income necessary to have a similar quality of life to a labouring family in 1907. This means nothing extravagant – just basic housing, decent food, the lights on, the ability to get to work and visit some people etc. It doesn’t include luxury travel or building an investment portfolio.

Also according to Grok, fewer than 8% of New Zealand workers earn $112,000 or more. Because some 10% of the population has an honours degree or higher, this means the top 8% of the workforce will be mostly professionals and managers, i.e. highly qualified, highly experienced people. Those few in the top 8% without an honours degree or higher will mostly be top managers.

$112,000 is about 70% higher than the median New Zealand wage of $66,000. What’s more, that median wage figure itself includes those highly-paid professional and managerial jobs, which means that the median manual labourer’s wage is even lower still. The minimum wage in New Zealand is currently $23.15 per hour, which works out to $46,300 per annum if one works 50 weeks of 40 hours, and many manual labourers will be close to this.

In practice, therefore, almost none of the people working in manual labour positions in New Zealand are paid enough for their wage to be considered “fair and reasonable” under the Harvester Judgement. The entire idea that a wage ought to pay enough to raise a family has been abandoned, seemingly by the employees as well as the employers.

Our wages are now less than half of what is needed to support a family of five. But the quality of life promised by the Harvester Judgement has not simply been lost, it has been stolen from us.

It has been stolen from us in a number of ways, but the mass importation of cheap labour is the foremost of these. The explanation for how full-time manual labourer wages were decoupled from the requirement that they could support a family of five is simple: employers have undercut local workers by importing cheaper ones from overseas.

The Neoliberal Era normalised this practice, so that it become ideologically impossible to even object to the imports. Anyone who did so was smeared as a racist acting out of pure hate. Several decades of this allowed the employer class to drive wages down so far that they’re now about half of what they need to be, as per the Harvester Judgement.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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