How A Person From A Gang Family Would Deal With The Gang Problem

I come from a very rough family. At various points in my life, I have been the son of a gang member, the nephew of a gang member, the brother of a gang member and the cousin of a gang member. Both of my brothers have spent time in prison, both of my mother’s brothers have spent time in prison, and I had been struck in the head or face by four different adults by the time I was five years old. Despite all this, I managed to get a research degree in psychology. This is how I would deal with the gang problem.

Any effective program of behavioural modification has to have two elements: reinforcement of desired behaviours and punishment of undesired behaviours. This is popularly known as “the carrot and the stick approach”. Solving our gang problem requires such an approach.

My proposal for the carrot is universal basic income.

People in the upper and middle classes have great difficulty imagining what life is like in the bottom 5%. Only very rarely do they have the life experience to understand how being raised in an environment of abuse and fear causes a person’s brain to develop differently to normal. As such, they have great difficulty understanding why some people can’t hold down a full-time job.

Being raised in an abusive environment causes the brain to develop in a way that is highly optimised for war, and poorly optimised for peace. One consequence is that mild levels of stress can push a person so damaged into homicide mode. If a person’s brain is wired to react with instant and overwhelming aggression to threatening stimuli, they are very unlikely to be able to deal with the daily challenges of the workplace.

The solution to such mental problems isn’t being stuffed full of sedatives and told to get the fuck back to work, as per standard mental healthcare practice in New Zealand. The only effective treatment for the damaged person is to allow them to rest until they grow out of their condition. This requires time, and that’s where a universal basic income can play a role.

A small but guaranteed income would not only help practically by removing an enormous amount of financial stress, it would help morally by removing resentment. Many young people from difficult family environments deeply resent the fact that work is demanded of them before they’ve had a chance to develop a fully functioning brain. A UBI would take away one of the major reasons for people born into disadvantaged families to rage against the system.

My proposal for the stick is crating.

Psychopaths consider all kindness to be weakness. All. As such, lenient sentencing and political engagement merely encourages them to commit more crimes. Not all gang members are psychopaths, but the gang environment provides an excellent environment for them to hide. With the exception of entering Parliament, joining a gang is the optimal path for a psychopath who wants opportunities to abuse people and get away with it.

The key to solving the gang problem lies in accurately being able to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths. The single biggest flaw of the entire “Justice” system is that it makes no effort to distinguish between sadists and psychotics. As such, the former are penalised too lightly and the latter too harshly.

The non-psychopaths should be treated with patience. If someone is from a gang environment and isn’t a psychopath, despite having ample motive to become one, they must possess some measure of spiritual gold. They must possess the capacity to say ‘No’ to evil. People like this need to be cherished. Mental illness is not a reason to punish someone, as it’s often a good thing, because it’s often an alternative to psychopathy.

The psychopaths should be crated. The first step here is to introduce a new category of crime: those committed with malicious indifference to human suffering. A typical example of such crimes are coward punches like the recent ones in Auckland. Most murders and rapes will naturally fall into this category.

The second step is to subject every convicted criminal to a full psychological examination, with the goal of determining whether they have irreparable brain damage making them sadistic.

Modern psychological science can make such a distinction. The amygdalas of such people are less likely to activate in response to observing human suffering, making them callous, and their pre-frontal cortexes contain less grey matter, making them impulsive. Such unusual brain structures reveal that those people are dangerous.

If a person is found to have irreparable brain damage of the kind characteristic of psychopaths, and is later found guilty of a crime committed with malicious indifference to human suffering, then, upon being found guilty, they are immediately nailed into a crate instead of being taken back to the cells. This crate is then loaded into a helicopter, flown 20 kilometers out over the ocean, and jettisoned from a great height.

This carrot-and-stick approach will succeed because of the twofold benefits it offers.

The first benefit is that a more compassionate approach will neutralise resentment. Most young men who join gangs do so because they learn early in life that society hates them, and they reason that they might as well hate society back. A UBI would take away the most of the financial incentive to join a gang (this incentive is much bigger than most people realise). This will mean fewer gang members.

The second benefit is that, on account of the more compassionate approach, it’s justified to be extremely firm against the intractable criminal elements that remain in the population. People would no longer be forced by economic necessity to join gangs, so those who do can be assumed malicious. The widespread crating of known psychopaths will spread fear among the remainder.

The combination of these two effects would be a drastic reduction in both the number of gang members and the amount of suffering caused by gang activity.

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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Why Banning Social Media Won’t Fix Anything

Many of the world’s current social ills are blamed on social media. Some have the idea that FaceBook, Reddit, YouTube and similar websites are responsible for an increase in psychological abuse and a decrease in mental health. This has brought calls to ban them – but, as this essay will argue, banning social media won’t work out any better than banning anything else has.

With the hysteria around the killing of George Floyd, many have realised that social media found Derek Chauvin guilty before the trial. The pressure to convict Chauvin was so great that, had he been found innocent, riots were likely. U.S. Representative Maxine Waters even took to social media to call for a confrontation in case of acquittal.

Government representatives elsewhere are also using social media to destroy their own citizens. In New Zealand, Member of Parliament Debbie Ngarewa-Packer launched an online petition to ruin the life of podcaster Lee Williams, smearing him as a white supremacist and evil wrongthinker. This quickly received several thousand signatures after being shared by Maori supremacists.

That government representatives use social media to stir up hate against private citizens is deeply concerning. Lynchings are the obvious next step. In countries with weak rule of law, influential people regularly call for their followers to murder their political enemies. It isn’t hard to imagine a Maori Party MP using social media to form a physical mob that kills someone.

However, the idea of banning social media is a neo-Luddite delusion. It’s the same knee-jerk retardation that inspired alcohol and cannabis prohibition, both of which failed. Proof? Before social media, it was even worse than this.

The newspapers spread just as much fake news a century ago as they do now. But it was worse then, because there was no alternative media to ask questions. If the newspapers said that Germans were bayoneting Belgian babies, that was the truth and no discussion about it could be had. Everyone had to believe it or be shunned from society.

The radio and the television are just as bad as the newspapers. Like the newspapers, the radio and television dictate the truth to a passive audience, with no dissenting voice allowed. Although they claim to be objective speakers of fact, the reality is that each of these media has an owner, and that owner ultimately decides what gets said and how.

Newspapers, radio and television are all one-way media. None of them are superior to social media, which, despite its crapness, at least allows for a discussion. But it is precisely the possibility for discussion that has the ruling class upset about social media.

The ultimate reason why social media is now so heavily opposed by the Establishment, and its lackeys in the mainstream media, is that it allows for an alternative narrative. As Josef Goebbels outlined in his Principles of Propaganda, propaganda is most effective if it is executed by only one authority. As was true in Nazi times, the greatest enemy of the ruling class is the alternative media.

It’s imperative that we, the people, develop a better way to manage social media, lest our rulers find an excuse to ban it. The correct way to deal with the problems caused by social media is to ensure that its use does not lead to hysterical chimpouts, i.e. that its agitprop potential is neutralised.

This will involve a twofold process.

The first step is to educate people to reflexively disbelieve everything they’re told. Currently, our education system is set up in such a way that the most credulous students get the highest grades. This is a consequence of the fact that, when our education system was invented, information was extremely scarce.

But the information environment of today is much different to the past. Information is no longer scarce; in fact, we have far too much low-quality information. Our education system, therefore, needs to be re-tooled, so that students are taught to question everything – literally everything – that is said by an authority figure.

A properly sceptical culture would have no need to fear social media, because sceptical people don’t share news articles or videos unless they’re confident the information in them is accurate. Even if they did, any sceptical people reading or viewing that information wouldn’t chimp out like they do in today’s Clown World.

The second step is to run society in a way so that people have hope. Right now, the atmosphere of the Western World is thick with despair. This despair encourages people to spread hate and madness on social media. A great many people are in a great deal of pain, and this encourages them to share garbage.

A society with rectitude, one which the average person felt proud to belong to, would naturally encourage its members to share higher quality information. The main reason people are so drawn to conspiracy today is because they know something’s seriously wrong with our social environment. The quality of social media will always reflect the quality of the social environment, and improving the latter is the easiest way to improve the former.

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Why You Should Join A Gang Instead Of Working

New Zealand now has over 7,000 gang members, an increase of some 13% from a year previous. Many theories have been put forward to explain this sudden rise, but none of them are adequately grounded in economic psychology. This essay makes a seemingly preposterous argument: that it makes more sense to join a gang nowadays than to work.

According to the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, the average New Zealand house price is now $810,000, up 19% from a year earlier. According to interest.co.nz, the ratio of this average house price to the median household income is now 8.43.

This ratio was 5.87 as recently as July 2016. Even back then, it meant that a working couple able to save 25% of their total wage could expect to take over 23 years to pay for the average house. That was considered “severely unaffordable” by all honest commentators. But it’s now almost 50% worse than even that.

These are terrifying statistics for anyone at, or near, the bottom of the educational ladder. The average household income, according to the stats mentioned above, is $96,114. That means over 33 years for the average couple, saving 25% of their total wage, to pay for the average house. Any household with a minimum wage earner will likely have it much harder than this.

This means it’s now realistically impossible for a significant, and growing, proportion of New Zealand workers to ever own a home on their wage. It’s even more difficult for those who aren’t part of a steady couple.

Historically speaking, those at the bottom of society have always had one universal method of radically improving their position: crime. And the bigger the crime, the better. Many people say that crime doesn’t pay, but this is only true for the lower classes. Pull off a big enough heist and you can go up an entire league.

As Chuang Tzu once observed: “The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.” Petty thievery won’t get you into a house that you can raise a family in, but full-time drug running is another story.

A young New Zealander without an education might have no chance of ever owning a house by working for one, but there’s a ready alternative: to join a gang, and get $810,000 through crime.

It’s common for dedicated meth users to go through $1,000 of meth in a week. Someone supplying it need only have a dozen customers with this level of demand and they could sell $600,000 worth of meth in a single year. Assuming $400,000 of expenses in precursor/bulk wholesale costs, rip-offs and fees to one’s own gang so as to keep covering for your operations, this means an income of $200,000 per year – tax free.

The only major downside is a small risk of getting killed or imprisoned.

Gangbanging is relatively dangerous, but the vast majority of gang members manage to conduct their affairs without getting killed. In recent years, New Zealand has averaged about 61 homicides a year. Even assuming that the majority of those were gang-related, it means that a person in a gang has little more than a 0.5% chance of being killed in any given year.

Even if this risk is 50 times higher than the risk of being murdered if one isn’t in a gang, it’s still a fairly low risk. It means that, after four years of selling meth and saving $4,000 a week, one would have earned enough to buy the average house, with a mere 2% chance of getting killed (approximately).

The risk of being imprisoned is also relatively minor. Furthermore, as shit as prison might be, it’s not a whole lot worse than busting a gut for 40 hours a week and being left with nothing after taxes, bills and rents are paid. At least rent is free in prison, and while there you can easily make the contacts that will help you sell meth more discreetly once you get out.

In the cold light of day, a young New Zealand man, one with ambitions to own a home so that he can raise a family in it, is better off joining a gang and getting taxed at 0% than getting educated, earning a professional wage and getting taxed at 39%. He can actually own a house the first way, whereas the second demands decades of work for partial equity in one. Even if he does manage to own a house the second way, he likely won’t have enough spare energy to raise a family in it.

What many middle-class people – especially those who inherit wealth – don’t realise is that few people join gangs purely out of malice and spite. Some of them join gangs because, on balance, they can have a better life in one. The prospect of working for 50 years to merely own some equity in a cold, damp house is a miserable one. It’s not surprising that the more daring of the country’s young men are tempted to gamble for a better life.

The solution to New Zealand’s rising gang problem will inevitably be a multifaceted one, but the basis of it must be enabling even poorly-educated workers to own their own home and raise a family. As long as workers aren’t getting paid enough for this to be possible, they’re better off joining gangs.

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Could New Zealand Legalise Cannabis On Maori Land?

The outcome of last year’s cannabis referendum was bitter for many Maori people. Despite that some 80% of Maoris voted in favour of changing the law, heavy anti-cannabis sentiment among Pacific Islander and Asian voters saw the referendum ultimately fail. Fortunately for all, an elegant solution exists overseas, and we could copy it.

The 2020 cannabis referendum was close. 50.7% of eligible voters wanted to continue with cannabis prohibition, and 48.4% did not. There was a significant positive correlation between being New Zealand-born and voting Yes in the referendum, so within that 50.7% were a large number of recent immigrants, particularly Chinese ones. Some 80% of Chinese voters voted in favour of locking Kiwi cannabis users in cages.

There are roughly 250,000 ethnic Chinese in New Zealand. Assuming that 80% of them were eligible to vote in the referendum, and assuming that 80% of those did, that gives us 160,000 ethnic Chinese voters. We know from above that 80% of those voted in favour of cannabis prohibition, which gives us 128,000 Chinese No voters opposed to 32,000 Chinese Yes voters. This represents a majority of around 96,000 for the No side among Chinese voters.

In the cannabis referendum overall, 1,474,635 people voted in favour of the continued persecution of cannabis users, and 1,406,973 voted to end it (for more detail on who these people were, see Understanding New Zealand 3). This means that the No side won the cannabis referendum by 67,662 votes.

So a little bit of primary school-level maths shows us that non-Chinese voters wanted to change the cannabis laws. But the native Kiwi majority that wanted reform was forced to endure further prohibition because of the wishes of recent immigrants, often from totalitarian political systems, and with little understanding of our culture.

For someone born in New Zealand, with centuries-deep roots in New Zealand, it seems outrageous to me that voters who came to New Zealand in the last decade took away our right to use cannabis. The voters who have flooded into the country since John Key threw the borders open have no real loyalty to, or respect for, the New Zealand people. They shouldn’t be deciding what rights the rest of us have.

That mostly rural-dwelling Maoris wanted legal cannabis, but got trumped by city-dwelling Pacific Islanders and Asians, has worsened existing social tensions in New Zealand. Maoris already had reason to resent the cannabis laws, which were forced on them by outsiders in the first place. The Sixth Labour Government’s response to their 80% support for legal cannabis has been, so far, to tell them to go fuck themselves.

One obvious, and obviously superior, solution presents itself.

In 2014, the United States Federal Government stated that it would not interfere with any Indian reservation or territory that wanted to legalise cannabis on its land. This declaration was a formality that followed from their already declared policy of non-interference with legal cannabis in Colorado.

One tribe, that of Squaxin Island in Washington, opened a legal cannabis store called ‘Elevation’ in 2015. First nations peoples in Canada have also allowed for legal cannabis sales on their lands. Native tribes in the Americas are generally pro-cannabis for the same reasons that Maoris are: they know it’s much better for them than alcohol is and that cannabis prohibition was pushed on them by outsiders.

This article proposes that the New Zealand Government allow individual Maori tribes to legalise and sell cannabis on their land.

There are two major benefits to this proposal.

The first, and most major, is that it shows some respect to the 48.4% of Kiwis and roughly 80% of Maoris who want a legal respite from cannabis prohibition. Currently, these two groups of people are told that they just have to eat shit, because neither a Labour nor a National Government will do anything about the cannabis laws.

Legal cannabis sales on Maori land would allow for the pro-cannabis half of the population to freely access and to use cannabis there, away from the judgment of those who think they’re scum. This would allow for the custodians of that land to build cannabis dispensaries, cafes and accommodation for the cannabis tourists. If the anti-cannabis half of the population doesn’t like it, they can stay in the cities and drink booze.

The second major benefit, or group of benefits, relate to the tourism potential of this proposal.

If you’re a young Western tourist, and you can choose between travelling to the American West Coast and using cannabis and alcohol, or travelling to New Zealand and using alcohol only, it’s an easy decision. About as easy as choosing between travelling to a Western country and using alcohol or travelling to a Middle Eastern theocracy and using nothing.

Legalising cannabis on Maori land would create a massive tourism boost in rural and impoverished areas like Northland and the East Coast of the North Island. These areas would benefit from both domestic and international tourists, and it would also create a spillover tourism effect for non-Maori businesses who catered to the international tourists who would otherwise have gone to a country with legal cannabis.

The idea of legalising cannabis on Maori land is a sure win for the first party to propose it. It’s the kind of solution that New Zealand needs. Unfortunately, our current parties are either bereft of imagination or more interested in grandstanding than making positive, practical solutions.

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