1. The objective definition of virtue is the ability to overcome suffering in order to achieve one’s Major Aspiration.
2. The subjective definition of virtue is the ability to overcome suffering in order to achieve one’s Minor Aspiration.
3. Virtue is will exercised in the service of the divine, when mercury is in line with gold.
4. Virtue is activated rectitude.
5. One is more virtuous the more one’s true will is aligned with the will of the divine.
6. The first failure of virtue is a failure to overcome the Underconditioned Self.
7. The second failure of virtue is a failure to overcome the Overconditioned Self.
8. The Underconditioned Self is the beast that rises up from below, and which represents chaos.
9. The Overconditioned Self is the angel that falls down from above, and which represents order.
10. A failure to overcome the Underconditioned Self leads to violence, rape, filth and mayhem.
11. This entertains the gods only somewhat, because it’s indistinguishable from animal behaviour.
12. A failure to overcome the Overconditioned Self leads to saying No to life.
13. This also entertains the gods only somewhat, because it’s indistinguishable from death.
14. The Great Fractal can be compared to a single line that threads its way throughout all possible physical and metaphysical space.
15. Likewise, the will of the divine threads through a person’s life. Abandoning it causes suffering; following it alleviates suffering.
16. The most virtuous is the person who zigs when the will of the divine is for them to zig, and to zag when the will of the divine is for them to zag.
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This chapter is an excerpt from Elemental Elementalism, the foundational scripture of the new religion of the Age of Aquarius.
1. All physical, emotional, mental and spiritual truths exist as vibrations within the Great Fractal.
2. This includes all possible scientific, spiritual and philosophical truths, which all exist as vibrations within the metaphysical realms of the Great Fractal.
3. Speaking the truth is a matter of expressing a vibration that is appropriate for the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual environment that one is in.
4. Speaking falsehood is a matter of expressing a vibration that is inappropriate for the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual environment that one is in.
5. Speaking falsehood is usually motivated by a desire for wealth or status.
6. There are two ways to wage war: force and deception.
7. In cases where force is not appropriate, war must be waged by deception, and falsehoods must be spoken.
8. Waging war by deception does not allow one to escape the Law of Assortative Reincarnation. The speaker of truth will reincarnate in a world full of speakers of truth; the speaker of falsehood will reincarnate in a world full of speakers of falsehood.
9. The speaking of truth is the path of peace; the speaking of falsehood is the path of war.
10. The best reason to speak falsehood is to entertain the gods.
11. Reject the truth, and suffer; suffer, and entertain the gods!
12. Expressing falsehood always leads to an amount of suffering that matches the magnitude of the falsehood. This suffering can be physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.
13. The magnitude of a falsehood is the degree to which the vibration expressed differs from the vibration of the environment, multiplied by the number of people who hear this expression, multiplied by the degree those hearers believe the expression.
14. The most egregious of all falsehoods are those which deny the Four Tenets.
15. The most common egregious falsehood is denial of the First Tenet.
16. Much of the suffering in the world is the result of denial of the First Tenet or the Fourth Tenet.
17. Correctly understanding these tenets is to understand that consciousness, in its natural state, knows everything, and therefore all learning is remembering.
18. The best reason to speak truth is to alleviate ignorance, and thereby to alleviate suffering.
19. Skillfully spoken truth will alleviate ignorance as well as entertain the gods.
20. Speaking falsehoods may or may not be a bad thing, if the suffering prevented outweighs the suffering caused, or if the suffering entertains the gods.
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This chapter is an excerpt from Elemental Elementalism, the foundational scripture of the new religion of the Age of Aquarius.
A wave of young people in China, driven to exhaustion by the relentless demands of their industrial culture, have launched what they call the ‘Lying flat’ movement. They protest their workplace pressures by doing the absolute minimum amount of work possible. This essay will suggest that it’s time to bring the lying flat movement to the world stage.
The lying flat movement is inspired by the idea that a chive lying flat cannot be reaped. In this context, to lie flat is to refuse to be exploited, to disengage from the rat race. The usual path involves moving to the countryside and living as cheaply as possible. Someone lying flat might still work, but they’ll do it for themselves or their family or village instead of some corporate.
The lying flat movement began in China as a reaction to their onerous 996 culture, which insists on a 9am to 9pm, six day workweek. These 72-hour workweeks are incredibly profitable for those who own and run the factories and offices, but, for those supplying the labour component, they’re brutal.
Such long hours are tough even when well-remunerated. A 72-hour workweek leaves very little time or energy left over for recreation. It’s an extreme grind, and will drive a worker to exhaustion in short order.
Unfortunately, the post-nationalist capitalist mentality is that workers are just replaceable parts, and if one breaks down it’s a simple matter of chucking it out and replacing it with a new one. The Chinese industrialists, like the Western industrialists, import outside cheap labour to replace the native labour that they drive into the ground, only theirs comes from rural China instead of everywhere in the world.
The net result is the same, however. An oversupply of labour can only lead to one thing, and that’s a discounted labour price, which itself leads to the impoverishment of the working class. The mass importation of cheap labour has such a destructive effect on native wages that the inevitable end result is a shit life for everyone except for the employers of that cheap labour.
The Chinese have figured out that there’s no winning for workers under these conditions – so why don’t we?
Why don’t we take the lying flat movement to the whole world?
A global lying flat movement would firstly recruit the already rapidly-growing legions of NEETs in the West, and the hikikomoris in Japan. These groups have already dropped out of the industrial profit machine, and are essentially part of a global lying flat movement already. They were the first to realise that the equation of how much was being asked of them to how much they were rewarded did not add up, and their example can inspire others.
The movement would next recruit anyone who works full-time but can’t buy a home or raise a family on their wage. The individuals in this group have not yet suffered psychological collapse, unlike those in the first group, and are still able to labour. However, the equation doesn’t add up for them either. The difference is that this second group is now close to 50% of the working-age population, and higher in the younger demographics.
Before either group can be recruited, a canon of high-quality propaganda must be developed. This propaganda must suggest persuasively that industrialised hyper-capitalist society is in fact evil, and that refusing to power it with one’s life energy is a moral imperative. One example of such propaganda argues that a life on welfare is morally superior to a life as a worker, because the welfare beneficiary uses fewer resources, and resource conservation is now more important than production.
This propaganda will be effective because many who hear it will already be receptive to it. Many are already tempted to drop out of the system, having long ago calculated that their wages will never allow them to save enough to own their own home and raise a family. If they see that other people achieve a higher standard of living by dropping out of the system, they’ll become motivated to drop out as well.
That people will drop out of the system is inevitable at this stage of the cycle. Working hard in the city only makes sense during the boom times, because in the boom times the workers have the leverage, and so they can get a fair share of their own productivity. But capital always outpaces labour (link goes to .pdf), so when the bust part of the cycle hits, the people who own everything will maintain their share by reducing the share of the workers.
If you’re a worker and not an owner, then, you want to be living cheaply in the countryside when the bust hits. This is what great numbers of young Chinese have already figured out. It’s harder to do in New Zealand, because we don’t have villages everywhere, but it’s still possible. The basic leverage equation makes city life less and less worthwhile with every year that passes.
A global return to cheap, low-stress country living would cripple the industrial capital juggernaut, and shift the balance of wage negotiation leverage back towards the worker. Starved of cheap labour, the ruling class would be forced to pay a fair wage or go without producers. It’s time to go tang ping, and bring the lying flat movement to every corner of the industrialised world.
A number of wage subsidy scams are being reported right now, usually involving a worker being coerced into working for free or for discounted wages. Many people seem surprised that employers would be so brazen as to take advantage of a struggling person, especially in times when solidarity is needed. The reality is that employers would go back to chattel slavery if it wasn’t against the law.
The typical attitude of an employer in New Zealand is most accurately summarised by the Magic Talk caller known only as “Mark”. Mark called in to say that Kiwis were lazy and that immigrants made much better workers. This contempt for New Zealand workers is shared by most of the ruling class. John Key spoke for this ruling class when he said that we need to import foreign workers because Kiwis are lazy and on drugs.
As any Kiwi who has worked overseas knows, Kiwi workers are highly sought-after specifically because we are not lazy. If we had been lazy, we would never have survived the challenges put before us in our short history, because those challenges demanded that we shape an entire nation out of almost nothing, and we overcame them.
The truth, as is widely understood if not widely admitted, is that workers who are dependent on their employer for a visa will be much more submissive, and will accept much worse treatment, than those who are not dependent. This is why foreign workers are desired in New Zealand and New Zealand workers desired in foreign countries.
The mentality of the average employer, anywhere in the world, hasn’t changed much from 200 years ago. People from the working class are still considered cattle; their suffering is routinely ignored in the pursuit of profit. The mindset of today’s employer is still to put profit first and to discount human suffering, especially if those suffering are poor. It’s little different to the mindset of a cotton plantation owner.
Understanding the psychology of the employer – and, thereby, understanding why our economies are structured the way they are – requires the realisation that the ruling class would rather pay the workers nothing at all. If society was governed by an employers and landowners union, it would happily go back to chattel slavery.
Because the ruling class can’t get away with that, they can only push the worker as close to chattel slavery as the law allows. This is achieved by taking away as much of their productivity as legally possible. And so, most of the productivity of every worker is taken from them by the three lions of profits, taxes and rents.
The employer in a capitalist system is obsessed with profit. Profit is a matter of maximising incomes and minimising expenses, and the major expense is usually labour. It’s not cheap to get a person to work on your plantation all day when they’d rather be at home taking care of their family and community. So employers usually have to pay big. This has conditioned them to seek out any and all opportunity to maximise their access to cheap labour.
It can be said that cheap labour makes the world go around.
One of the first things that Brazil did after coming into existence was to import slaves – some 5 million were brought to Brazil before 1866, mostly to farm sugar cane. America, likewise, didn’t wait long before importing African slaves of their own. Even though only 300,000 were brought to the United States, it was enough to significantly depress wages in the Deep South. Much of colonial South and Central America operated on the slave plantation model pioneered by the Portuguese.
Australia and New Zealand never operated on this model. The Anzac ruling classes, however, have always been subject to the same temptations as the other colonial ruling classes. The temptation to maximise profit by minimising the cost of labour has always been present, sometimes intensely. We can see this from the fact that the Western ruling class have pushed the workers as close to slavery as possible without calling it slavery.
Rather than import slaves, and maintain them at the employer’s own expense on their plantations, it’s easier for those employers to import foreign cheap labour, and dump them into working-class neighbourhoods to fend for themselves. This is not only as profitable as chattel slavery, but it outsources the mental labour of arranging to feed, clothe and house the workers back to the workers themselves.
The importation and then naturalisation of cheap labour externalises the cost of diversity onto wider society, while keeping all the profits for the employer. The major negative consequence of diversity is lower wages. This occurs because diversity makes it more difficult for the working class to present the united front necessary to force the employer class to share the productivity of the workers.
The net result of 70 years of the mass importation of cheap labour: our wages have fallen so far that the average worker has no hope of owning their own home. The mainstream media screams ‘Racist!’ at anyone who draws the connection, but even high-school economics students understand that an oversupply of cheap labour will inevitably crash the price of working-class wages.
In 1992, the average Kiwi could buy the average house after about 7,000 hours of labour at the average wage. Today, so much of the average Kiwi’s productivity is sucked away in profits, taxes and rents that it takes over 25,000 hours of labour at the average wage to buy the average house. Vast numbers have completely given up hope. It’s already becoming the case that people are working just to stay alive, and some have to borrow money just to be able to do that!
All this was made possible by the working class getting pushed, closer and closer, over several decades, towards chattel slavery.
