It's Time For A Global 'Lying Flat' Movement

It’s Time For A Global ‘Lying Flat’ Movement

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.

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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They Would Go Back To Chattel Slavery If They Could

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.

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In Clown World, Spirituality Is Considered Mental Illness

The strangest item in the New Zealand popular consciousness this week was the story about the University of Canterbury sociology lecturer Dr. Anne Scott. It seems like Dr. Scott was dismissed for having unorthodox religious beliefs, in particular “spiritualist beliefs”. She appears to have been another victim of the fact that, in Clown World, any genuine spiritual wisdom is considered to be mental illness.

Everyone alive today is subject to what is known as the Clown World Fork. This is the major cause of strife in Clown World today.

The Clown World Fork is that only two attitudes towards the divine are allowed. Either you declare yourself to worship a dead rabbi nailed to a tree and call it God, or you declare the world to be a soulless, meaningless slaughterhouse of unending despair and horror. Anyone who asserts any other attitude is mentally ill, and can get forked.

This fork, or something similar to it, has been observed long ago by other commentators. Cyril Scott, in An Outline Of Modern Occultism, noted that only a minority saw appeal in occult philsophy: those who thought both that mainstream religion was illogical, and that materialism was empty and soulless. However, as mentioned above, being in this minority comes with social risks.

Dr. Scott fell victim of the Clown World Fork. She bravely tried to assert a third path, away from mindless superstition and mindless nihilism, and towards using reason to uncover spiritual truths. Unfortunately, the modern university system is no place for any kind of original thinker, and she was duly shunned.

Our society is grounded on three spiritual falsehoods, and anyone who denies any one of them is likewise shunned. Christians are allowed to pretend to deny these falsehoods, as long as other people understand that those Christians aren’t really serious. These three spiritual falsehoods are reinforced by all official conduct and by all popular culture. To question any of the three is to be considered psychotic.

The first falsehood is that the brain generates consciousness, and so, with the death of one’s physical body, one’s consciousness will be extinguished. The second falsehood is that this physical world is all there is, and the worlds seen in dreams and visions are illusory. The third falsehood is that neither consciousness nor the physical world is divine in any sense, both being mundane expressions of physical causes.

All of these falsehoods are known to be falsehoods by anyone who has studied occult philosophy – but therein lies the problem. Anyone who realises that any of these three assertions are false is labelled mentally ill by the Clown World herd. In Clown World, it’s taken as granted that only the mentally ill would question one of these three great spiritual dogmas, and so these terrible metaphysical lodestones continue to weigh us down.

The Western World of 2021 is in desperate need of a spiritual revolution.

During the recent cannabis referendum debate in New Zealand, the mainstream media featured people making most of the arguments that VJM Publishing has also made for cannabis law reform. One argument they didn’t make, however, was that cannabis is a spiritual sacrament that helps people reconnect to the divine, and therefore ought to be legal on spiritual grounds.

Arguably, cannabis is already legal under Sections 13 and 15 of the NZ Bill of Rights Act, which enshrine the right to religious practice. Unfortunately, no-one except for VJM Publishing made this argument. Alternative spiritual practices are highly taboo in Clown World society, as evidenced by the case of Dr. Scott. As such, the prevailing narrative is that cannabis causes mental illness, not that it grants spiritual insight.

As anyone who has ever dealt with the mental health services has learned, the Establishment will not allow any talk of spirituality. Anyone who denies one of the three assertions mentioned above is considered mentally ill – and no discussion will be had. This goes triple for anyone who came to deny one of those assertions after doing a psychoactive drug. Such people cannot escape the label of mental illness, because the three false assertions are believed with such obstinate righteousness that even questioning them is an outrage.

The natural reaction, upon learning that society is built on false metaphysical assumptions, is to become anxious. It is terrifying to realise that society has got the basics wrong and that we’re causing a massive amount of unnecessary suffering to ourselves for no rational reason. It’s horrifying to realise that Plato, the founder of Western civilisation, wrote about his belief in reincarnation in Timaeus, and yet this belief is routinely casually dismissed by far, far, far lesser minds.

Western society today has no conception of “took a spiritual sacrament, became wiser, is now operating on a higher plane.” It’s merely “took drugs, went mad.” Clown World, being the combination of soulless corporate whoring and soulless anti-intellectual rabble rousing, has no ideological space for anything spiritual. All talk of spiritual insight, all questioning of the three great dogmas, is merely mental illness. Anyone expressing such sentiments needs sedative medication, or, at least, to get kicked out of their job.

Such is the wretched state of spirituality in Clown World.

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VJMP Reads: Gaddafi’s Green Book III (fin)

This reading carries on from here.

Part III is titled ‘The Social Basis of The Third Universal Theory’. This is divided into eleven chapters.

In the first, ‘The Social Basis of The Third Universal Theory’, Gaddafi declares that the social bond is the basis for the movement of history. Each group has common social needs which must be collectively satisfied. The national struggle is the basis of history. “…just as community is the basis for survival of all groups within the animal kingdom, so nationalism is the basis for the survival of nations”.

“Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin.” The destruction of nations leads to minorities. National unity is the basis of survival – Gaddafi compares it to gravity. Gaddafi channels Edward O Wilson at one point, stating that the social bond works automatically towards the goal of national survival. Nationalism is the secret of group survival and it’s harmful to go against this. He observes that marriage within a group strengthens its unity.

In the second, ‘The Family’, Gaddafi compares the family to a plant, both being an expression of Nature. Any “dispersion, decline or loss of the family” is unnatural and could be compared to the destruction of a plant. Gaddafi compares society to a garden. The ideal form is one in which the individual can flourish within the family and the family within society. A society in which individuals lived without their families would be artificial.

In the third, ‘The Tribe’, Gaddafi notes that a tribe is just an extended family, and a nation is just an extended tribe. This same point was noted in Aristotle’s Politics. “The relationship which binds the family also binds the tribe, the nation, and the world.” Feelings of kinship decrease the larger the kinship group is. Gaddafi ridicules those who think otherwise.

In the fourth, ‘The Merits Of The Tribe’, Gaddafi describes the tribe as a secondary family. It raises and educates those within it. It also allows more freedom than the family, which supervises closely. Blood is the prime factor in its formation, but a person or family can be part of the tribe by affiliation and then later part of the tribe by blood.

In the fifth, ‘The Nation’, Gaddafi notes that loyalty to any one of family, tribe, nation and humanity weakens loyalty to the other three. Selfishness is harmful to the wider group, but self-respect is beneficial to it. A shared destiny is essential to nationhood. “The national state is the only political form which is consistent with the natural social structure.” The nation-state will naturally endure unless attacked from the outside or unless it collapses into tribal mentality.

All states composed of multiple nations will eventually destroy themselves, because the social factor of national bonds will inevitably triumph over the political factor. The tribe develops individuals at the post-family stage, and the nation develops individuals at the post-tribe stage.

In the sixth, ‘Woman’, Gaddafi opens by declaring it self-evident that men and women are equal as human beings. However, the fact that both exist and not just one shows that they occupy different roles. Men and women cannot replace each other in those natural roles. Nurseries are unnatural and should not exist, save for the case of orphans, where nurseries are better than foster homes.

“In need, freedom is latent.” Therefore, women should not be forced to work to provide the necessities of life. Belief in gender equality deprives women of their freedom. Gaddafi notes, with disapproval, that societies everywhere seek to turn women into men. “Men and women must be creative within their respective roles.” Women should not be forced to carry out men’s duties to gain equality with men.

In the seventh, ‘Minorities’, Gaddafi outlines two kinds of minorities. One belongs to the nation, which provides its social framework, whereas the other must form its own social framework. He suggests that the problems of minorities have to be solved at the national level, in a society controlled by the masses. Minorities should not be seen as substrata.

In the eighth, ‘Black People Will Prevail In The World’, Gaddafi claims that black people are motivated to vengeance by slavery. Much as Asians and white people had eras of dominance over history, so too will the blacks. He notes that the backwardness of blacks has led directly to their numerical superiority. The populations of other races are declining because of their obsession with work, but this hasn’t affected the blacks.

In the ninth, ‘Education’, Gaddafi speaks against rote learning. He notes that the style of education that is typical in the world goes against human freedom. Forcing a human to learn according to a curriculum is dictatorship. State-controlled and standardised education stultifies the masses. Education of all kinds of subjects should be available. “Knowledge is a natural right of every human being.”

In the tenth, ‘Music And Art’, Gaddafi laments that there is no common human language. He makes the startling claim that the stylistic sentiments of earlier generations are passed down to later ones in the genes. “People are only harmonious with their own arts and heritage”. Eventually, Gaddafi claims, all people will speak one language, or society will collapse.

In the eleventh, ‘Sport, Horsemanship And The Stage’, Gaddafi equates spectator sport with watching someone pray or eat at a restaurant. Much of this chapter has no real Western context, as our participatory sports are organised in a different way. He agrees with the general Western sentiment that sports should be for the masses. But he makes some odd claims, such as that the grandstand was invented to deny popular access to the sporting field.

In summary, Gaddafi’s The Green Book is a wide-ranging summary of his political and social beliefs. It is penetratingly insightful at places, and bafflingly vague at others. His criticisms of democracy, as it is practiced, are brilliant, but the book is light on practical detail regarding the alternative. Far from coming across as a dictator, Gaddafi seems intelligent and reasonable in this book. There is no focus on destroying his enemies, but rather on how a great country could be built on nationalist and socialist principles.

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