Why Inequality Destroys Nations

One often hears the argument that inequality destroys societies, but it isn’t easy to understand why. The mainstream media tells us that a rising tide lifts all boats, and so people ought to enjoy the bounty of the modern day without worrying about how other people have more. But the economic psychology of inequality is complicated. This essay explains.

Casting an eye over a list of countries ordered by their degree of income inequality, one trend leaps out: unequal countries tend to be shitholes, and egalitarian countries tend to be decent.

Among the most unequal countries are places like Brazil, Mexico and the majority of African countries. Among the most equal countries are the European ones, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea. The pattern is obvious: a strong correlation exists between economic equality and overall quality of life.

The reasons for this can be understood if we compare the motivations of individuals in equal societies to individuals in unequal ones. The simple rule is that once inequality gets to the point where you no longer have a stake in society, then you no longer have a stake in society. This has behavioural consequences.

In an equal society, the members closer to the bottom of it still have enough of a stake to feel engaged. They are not so far from the decision-making level that their desires are ignored. Having a meaningful chunk of power, they are incentivised to work towards society’s betterment (or at least its upkeep).

In equal societies, all members feel a sense of ownership. A sense of pride at the quality of life offered by the society follows naturally. With ownership and pride, a person will take action to uphold that society. This is why people in countries like Sweden, Canada and Australia tend to perform prosocial behaviours like putting their shopping trolleys away and disposing of their litter in bins.

In an unequal society, the members closer to the bottom are without influence. Decisions are made so far above their heads that they aren’t consulted. As such, the people at the bottom are not incentivised towards prosocial behaviour. They perform antisocial behaviours, like aggressive panhandling, theft, robbery, sex crimes and murder.

In a society like this, not everyone feels a sense of ownership. Those who don’t tend to not contribute to society’s upkeep. In exactly the same way that rented cars and houses are treated much worse than personally owned cars and houses, a society in which people can only rent a stake (at best) will be treated much worse than a society in which people can own one.

The inevitable result of increasing inequality is a decline in prosocial behaviour and an increase in antisocial behaviour. You might as well throw that Coke can in the gutter, because it isn’t you that will have to pay to clean it up. In fact, the more damage you can do to society the better, because it will take the bastards who locked you out down a peg or two.

New Zealand might be in the middle of the inequality pack, but it’s still practically impossible to own a home here without inheritance. The average wage today has less than 40% of the housebuying power that it had 26 years ago. Our society is now so unequal that what used to be the elementary sign of having a stake in it – owning a home – is practically a dream unless you’re born rich.

This inequality has all but destroyed our society. It’s easy to see why if one imagines how it has affected people’s motivations.

As a non-landowner who will never own land while the average wage cannot buy the average house, I don’t care what happens to society. I have no stake in it and will never have one as long as the prevailing economic circumstances continue. New Zealand is someone else’s property, and as such I don’t feel motivated to defend it or to do any work to maintain it.

It’s said that if too many people drop out of society, then our economy would collapse, leading to New Zealand becoming ungovernable, perhaps even to civil war. I say: “Good!” If civil war means that I can afford a house in five years, then bring on civil war!

Many people will be appalled to hear such reasoning. But such reasoning is inescapable once a person has no stake in society. If the order of society as being maintained at my expense, then bring on the chaos! It’s irrational to reason otherwise unless one is content to be the slave of the rich, effectively a serf whose labour will never allow them to own land.

Given this psychological calculus, it’s apparent that increasing inequality will inevitably lead to society collapsing as fewer and fewer people feel like they have an interest in keeping it going. Prosocial behaviour will decline, and antisocial behaviour will rise, to the point where the fabric of society no longer exists, and we are back in Hobbes’s state of all against all.

Eventually, inequality will get so bad that intelligent people born poor will realise from early childhood that they never had a chance. These people will be hardened revoutionaries by the time they become adults, and will know nothing other than hate. They will be exceptionally dangerous and capable of ushering in a new order of the world.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 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 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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National Cannot Win While They Oppose Cannabis Law Reform

The latest Reid Research poll was a disaster for the National Party. They hit their lowest polling numbers since the 2017 General Election, a dismal 25.1 percent. This result raised fears of an electoral humiliation like 2002. In order to avoid this, National will have to convince the electorate that they have learned the lessons of the past.

The Labour Party scored over 60% in the Reid Research poll, an incredible result less than two months out from a General Election. Unless there are major changes in sentiment between now and then, a second term for the Sixth Labour Government is all but assured. The same poll also suggested that Jacinda Ardern is seen as a much more competent leader than Judith Collins.

The reason why Labour and Ardern are doing so well is primarily because of their leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. It might sound simple, but when faced with a medical crisis, Ardern’s Labour listened to the scientists. The spread of an infectious virus is too complicated a subject to be understood by someone with a public relations degree, so they listened to people with medical degrees.

It does sound simple, but it’s not always that case that politicians follow the advice of relevant experts. Often they put political considerations ahead of reality.

It’s impossible to know whether a Judith Collins-led National Party would have listened to the scientists on the matter of COVID-19. What we do know is that she is currently completely ignoring the scientists on the matter of cannabis law reform. This attitude does not inspire confidence.

The scientists have been saying, for many years now, that the medicinal properties of cannabis are sufficiently well understood to know that the plant is not dangerous if used correctly. Even when used irresponsibly, it’s not worth locking people in cages over. The danger comes from prohibition, which creates a black market with no quality control.

The National Party has resolutely ignored these experts, opting instead for the politics of hate that served the Fourth and Fifth National Governments so well. National has always known that a large proportion of crusty old Boomers hate cannabis users and are happy to see the law destroy them. It is to them that Collins is signalling when she supports prohibition.

The problem for National is that many of those people are now dead.

It’s not the 1990s anymore. Opposing cannabis law reform has always been wrong, but in the 1990s it looked prudent. Back then, there was so little available science that it made some sense to err on the side of caution. Cannabis was always medicinal, but in the absence of a body of empirical evidence precisely detailing its effects, it seemed wise not to open the floodgates.

By 2020, opposing cannabis law reform seems pointlessly antagonistic and vindictive. Today there’s ample evidence that, not only is cannabis not really harmful, it’s a beneficial medicine to a great many people. It’s clear now that cannabis prohibition achieved nothing but cause misery to the many people who needed it to alleviate suffering.

If the National Party would change their approach on cannabis, from a “punishment and pain” model to one that put business interests first, they could win back a lot of the centrist voters that they have lost since the previous election. Abandoning their commitment to cannabis prohibition would signal that National is letting go of old prejudices and is ready to move forwards.

Already, some 67% of Americans want legal cannabis, and more Australians want it than don’t want it. Cannabis law reform in New Zealand is inevitable – National will not win another General Election while they oppose it. If they were smart, they’d steal a bunch of centrist voters off Labour by coming out in support of it today.

Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for ending cannabis prohibition.

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Why Corporations Support Black Lives Matter When They Didn’t Support Occupy Wall Street

Western corporations are falling over themselves to show their support for Black Lives Matter. Professional sportsmen proudly display BLM logos on their shirts, television shows hold moments of silence for George Floyd, and the FaceBook and Twitter accounts of countless large entities have paid their respects. But no corporation did anything like this for Occupy Wall Street. This essay explains why.

The Occupy Wall Street movement began in September 2011 with a campout protest at New York’s Zuccotti Park. The protest was sparked by rising inequality in America, something that had increased sharply after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. Bank bailouts had ensured that the wealthy avoided any of the suffering from the crisis, and that the poor took the entire burden.

OWS’s most famous chant was “We are the 99%”. This referred to OWS’s belief that the top 1% of Americans were hoarding a grossly disproportionate amount of resources and power. Their fundamental motivation was to express outrage at this state of affairs in the hope of forcing change to a more equitable system. They made demands such as getting corporations and corporate lobbyists out of politics, granting the working class a greater share of production and reforming the banking system to restrict speculation.

The movement appealed to an entire generation of young people, who were just then beginning to understand that they were going to have a lower standard of living than their parents did. These young people saw in OWS the potential to arrest the relentless decline of their living standards by enabling them to come together to assert their collective interests.

This terrified the American Establishment.

If there’s any one single thing that the Establishment fears, it’s poor people coming together on the basis of class. Class solidarity is the only way that the people can form a broad enough front to work against inequality without being divided and conquered into impotence. The formation and expression of class solidarity, then, is a direct threat to the interests of the ruling class.

In the wake of Occupy Wall Street, the 1% came together and decided upon a strategy to prevent this from happening again. They realised that they had to pre-emptively divide and conquer the people because, left to their own devices, the people would inevitably organise and demand their right to an equitable share of production.

The greatest fear of the Establishment was the coalescence of the 99% under one banner. Having previously observed the degree of animosity that existed on account of racial tension, a plan became apparent: to divide the 99% up along racial lines. This was primarily to be achieved by pushing a racial oppression narrative that claimed that white people owed blacks reparations for past injustices.

Because the 1% owns the mainstream media, they simply directed their employees in the media to start pushing that narrative. And they did. The mainstream media everywhere stopped reporting on class issues entirely, and started reporting only on racial ones. Any case of racial injustice was blown up to seem an atrocity, and overcoming it a pressing issue, while class inequality was ignored completely.

After some years of this, OWS’s narrative of the 99% versus the 1% was overwhelmed by the Establishment’s narrative of black versus white. People stopped thinking in terms of class solidarity, and started thinking in terms of race. This was all by design.

Thinking in terms of race can never, ever lead to justice for the simple reason that many blacks and browns are middle-class while many whites are working-class. Fighting to improve the position of middle-class blacks and browns instead of that of poor people is unjust, and fighting to worsen the position of working-class whites instead of that of rich people is unjust. This fact is understood deeply by intelligent people.

So all attempts to increase racial consciousness must be treated with the deepest suspicion, as suspected attempts to destroy class consciousness. Every time someone pushes race conflict or a racial issue, the astute observer ought to ask if this is an attempt to distract from class issues. In the vast majority of cases, any racial issue being pushed will not really be worth attention.

This divide and conquer has now been ramped up to such a degree that the mainstream media now acts as if each person is their race first and foremost. If you are white, you’re on team Bad Guy and have to pay compensation. If you are black, you’re on team Good Guy and get to claim compensation. Your skin is your uniform, and your moral standing is dictated at birth by that skin’s melanin content.

The 1% more or less succeeded in their scheme to destroy class consciousness after Occupy Wall Street. Today, more people are concerned about what happened to George Floyd than by the unaffordability of housing (which is now out of control). Thanks to the mainstream media, most people can tell you about Black Lives Matter but few know how far their house-buying power has fallen in recent decades.

This is the reason why all of the big corporations support Black Lives Matter when they didn’t support Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter pushes a narrative of racial division, of Team Black against Team White, and in doing so it splits the 99% down the centre, leaving them powerless against the predations of the 1%. Anyone who decries this racial narrative in favour of a class one is accused of not paying full respect to the oppression of blacks and browns, and is smeared as a racist.

It’s a perfect recipe for rendering the working class incapable of taking collective action against their rulers.

The basic rule is that any future movement seeking to bring the lower classes together against the Establishment will be opposed, and any future movement seeking to set the lower classes against each other will be supported. It can be predicted that any future movement promoting racial grievances, gender grievances or grievances relating to sexual orientation will be promoted widely by the mainstream media and supported by major corporations.

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Clown World Chronicles: Who Are The ‘Alt Centre’?

The Taoists are fond of telling us all that, even in the darkest of times and places, there is always a spark of light that will expand to illuminate the entire world. The same is true of Clown World. Despite that things are grim and that the trends suggest they will get worse, there are a small number of men and women who represent the light shining in the darkness. They are the alt centrists.

Understanding alt centrism first requires that one understand the alt right and the alt left, and that means understanding the Fourth and Fifth Acceptances and the Fourth and Fifth Rejections.

The alt centre accepts that the alt right has a point when they say that multiculturalism has failed on a number of levels, that mass Muslim and African immigration has brought misery to the West and that Clown World is primarily a spiritual phenomenon. In other words, the alt centre shares many of the masculine sentiments that the alt right possesses.

The alt centre, however, rejects the alt right’s proposed solution to Clown World, which is segregation. The alt centre considers this a denial of life. Ultimately, the desire for segregation is motivated by a will to cruelty (this doesn’t necessary apply in places like South Africa). This Fourth Rejection is held at the same time as the Fourth Acceptance, which accepts that multiculturalism has failed.

Likewise, the alt centre accepts that the alt left has a point when they say that neoliberal capitalism has failed on a number of levels, and that inequality has increased to the point where the social fabric is becoming torn and civilisation is starting to break down. This is known as the Fifth Acceptance in alt-centrist thought.

Also likewise, the alt centre rejects the alt left’s proposed solution to Clown World, which is forced wealth redistribution and anti-white resentment. The alt centre explicitly rejects all slave moralities under the Second and Fifth Rejections. Intersectionality is explictly rejected under the Fifth Rejection. Collective resentment is not a solution.

This might sound like a contradictory set of opinions to hold, especially to anyone who is used to letting the mainstream media define what’s what. But the alt centrist embraces these apparent contradictions. Simple rhetoric is for simple minds, and the political scene doesn’t need any more dumb people in it.

It isn’t easy to describe the demographics of alt centrists, because a person only becomes one if they see the flaws and merits in all of the other positions. As such, alt centrists are hard to distinguish by race, sex or social class. The most one can say is that they are not the same demographics that are commonly found in Establishment institutions.

It’s certainly true that alt centrists tend to be intelligent, because a person needs to have a certain level of historical knowledge to have noted the positives and negatives of the other five political positions. But intelligence, or at least education, is not enough. There are plenty of great intellects justifying the horrors of all of those other positions.

Alt centrism is more a matter of wisdom than intelligence. As such, it does not attract followers on the basis of education or ideological fashionability. Alt centrism is more a position one comes to once one has become too wise to fall for the rhetorical and emotional trickery of the other five positions. When a person is no longer swayed by appeals to order, or freedom, or peace, or revenge, or justice, that person can become an alt centrist.

A person is most likely to become an alt centrist if they have amassed an uncommon amount of life experience.

If a person has done a lot of world travel, they will have experienced a great variety of other cultures, and will no doubt have noticed some good things and some bad things about each one. If they are wise, they will have allowed this to influence them, so that they became good where other people were good but resisted becoming bad where other people were bad. This will have made them a more well-rounded person.

This is also true of people who have moved between social classes over the course of their lives, or whose occupations have brought them into contact with a large number of people from a variety of classes. The more reality one has been exposed to, the greater the power one has to correctly mold oneself into the desired form.

Alt centrism works in a similar fashion. The alt centrist is one who has tried out all the other political positions, and found them all wanting. They have argued for monarchy, they have argued for revolution, they have argued for capitalism, they have argued for neoreaction and they have argued for social justice. So they are aware of the shortcomings of each, but they also know why people are inclined to assert these positions.

This almost Luciferian approach is in harmony with alt centrists’ fundamental belief in the value of independence and freethinking. As such, it is rare to find them in popular mass movements. An alt centrist is liable to support a universal basic income and drug law reform at the same time as opposing open borders and affirmative action. So they don’t fit into boxes neatly enough to be someone else’s tools.

Fitting with their anti-Establishment sentiments, alt centrists tend to be against modernism. Being also against totalitarianism, they are happy to hearken back to the distant past, to the Classical Age, whether the Greco-Roman, the Chinese or the Hindu one. People who read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Chanakya and Chuang Tzu are often alt centrists.

In summary, the alt centre are Clown World’s good guys. They outright reject political fanaticism on account of that it ignores the human will to avoid suffering, but they are just as fanatical about increasing their intellectual and spiritual depth. They are the philosopher-kings whose revolution overthrows tyranny and institutes a new Golden Age. Let us hope that one day they can lead us out of Clown World.

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.

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