justice – Page 86

VJMP Reads: Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger I

Having chosen a left-wing work (The Interregnum) for our previous reading, we now go to the right again and have a look at Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger. Subtitled “A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul”, it’s based on the premise that the fight against modernity has been lost and the only thing a thinking man can do is ride the tiger of modernity until it’s time to rebuild on the other side.

Part I of the eight parts of this book is called “Orientations” and divides into two essays.

The first of these is called ‘The Modern World and Traditional Man’. This opens outright with a declaration that this text isn’t for everyone. Like The Satanic Bible, Evola is explicit in that his book is only for a particular kind of person. Ride the Tiger is written for the outsider.

Evola’s style seems timeless in the sense that his complaints about the nature of society apply just as well to 2018 as they did to his time, and probably apply well to many times in the past. Things are collapsing, certainly in social terms if not yet physical ones, and so Evola advocates a return to traditional values.

These traditional values are not bourgeoisie ones, Evola is at pains to point out, but in fact “the very antithesis of them.” Indeed, he hints at evoking the perennial philosophy, such as when he writes “It is good to sever every link with all that which is destined sooner or later to collapse. The problem will then be to maintain one’s essential direction without leaning οn any given or transmitted form.”

Psychonauts such as the readership of VJM Publishing will commiserate with this feeling, as it’s a handy description of the ego death experience that comes with the peak of a psychedelic trip. One loses all touch with and memory of the fleeting forms of energy that make up the material world, and resides solely in pure consciousness, and thereby reunites with God.

Fittingly, then, Evola states that the Tradition that inspires him has “the character of an esoteric doctrine.”

The second essay, ‘The End of a Cycle – “Ride the Tiger”‘, continues in the same vein. Evola explains that the expression “to ride the tiger” is from the Far East and refers to the idea that it’s safer to ride on the tiger’s back than to try and flee and get pounced on, for the tiger will eventually tire out and then one can make an escape.

Essentially, the idea expressed here is this: great and terrible changes are sweeping the world, and will continue to do so. They will destroy much, if not all, of the existing order, regardless of whether this order is good or bad. There is no hope of resisting this process.

All of this sounds terribly pessimistic and nihilistic on the surface, but it’s clear that, like Nietzsche before him, Evola has anticipated the nihilism that follows the destruction of the incumbent value system, and is speaking of what must come beyond that. He writes of the “Four Ages” system famililar to readers of Plato’s Republic as well as to Hindus.

The warning of this chapter is that the forces of destruction and degeneracy are too powerful to be overcome; resisting them is as futile as resisting the tide. But in this there is still a message of hope: those destructive forces are too mindless, stupid and disorderly to hold sway for very long and so, like the storm, they will pass, and leave an opportunity to rebuild order in their wake.

And so, Evola mocks the “progressive” and “advanced” thinking of the West as little more than symptoms of a disease of the soul. This is apparently the context in which the book ought to be read.

The object of the book is summed up in the final paragraph of this essay: “defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today”. In other words, how do we deal with the fact that everything’s falling to bits?

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

When The Stories About Mistreated Babies Come, War is Imminent

In the popular mind, wars are very sudden things, usually launched without warning against an unsuspecting enemy. Pearl Harbour is the most famous example, but we’ve also been conditioned to fear the possibility of an ICBM exchange, which would mean that we could potentially all be destroyed before more than a handful of us even knew what was going on. The truth is that The Powers That Be plan major wars long in advance – and their propaganda is calculated accordingly.

Even in video games like Civilization VI, it rarely happens that war is just launched out of the blue. The game mechanics incentivise a belligerent to make a denouncement before declaring war, and this is faithful to how history has transpired. There are far too many signs of impending war for this article to cover, but it will cover one sign that war has become imminent: when the mainstream propaganda organs begin to accuse a foreign enemy of mistreating babies in some manner.

In World War One, the British propagandists spread stories about the soldiers of the Huns (Germans) bayonnetting babies in their cribs when they invaded Belgium. The logic appeared to be that an enemy accused of such deeds was so evil that anyone who considered themselves a right-thinking person was morally obliged to volunteer for the armed forces so as to go and smash it.

The propaganda was effective – the British Empire recruited millions of its men to fight the Germans, and these men fought with the genuine belief that they were opposing an evil order.

When World War Two rolled around, Anglo propagandists saw no need to reinvent the wheel. And duly, we were told the same stories about Japanese soldiers bayonetting babies, this time babies of Chinese and Filipino origin. This had a similar effect on the receiving population, and millions of men signed up to fight the Imperial Japanese.

In the lead up to the Gulf War in 1990, the infamous Nayirah testimony got the American public onboard with an American invasion of Kuwait. Nayirah was purported to be a 15-year old Kuwaiti who had been present when Iraqi soldiers invaded. Her testimony involved a harrowing tale about watching helplessly on as plundering Iraqi soldiers went as far as dumping babies out of incubators in their haste to steal everything.

Neither the American public nor the media saw fit to challenge this narrative. Who could be so cruel as to ask sceptical questions when the well-being of incubator babies were on the line?

In 2018, the Eye of the Empire is turned upon North Korea. Because of their intercontinental ballistic missile program, North Korea threatens to become a brutally disruptive force in the Asia-Pacific region. They could already put a nuclear warhead on a missile and hit Japan with it, and America might well intervene before America itself comes into range.

That explains why there has been so much anti-North Korea propaganda in the mainstream media in recent months, such as this piece in Australia. The linked piece recounts another harrowing story, this time of a “hero defector” who is now informing the world that the dogs in China eat better than North Koreans.

This degree of propaganda, with phrases like “hero defector”, is worrisome, as it speaks of an effort to make North Koreans appear killworthy to Western audiences. The real cause for alarm will come if and when the Western propaganda organs start reporting stories about babies being starved to death, or being thrown into soup-pots by starving villagers.

If stories like that ever come then you will know that the war drums are beating.

The Left Are the New Christians – For Better or Worse

The essence of Jesus Christ, as he appears to the modern Left, can be summed up in the word ‘nice’

In the West, most of us associate Christianity with the political right. It’s the right – especially in America – that makes the most overt appeals to the Bible and to Jesus. But if one looks past these appeals to the Christian religion, it seems that the political left is more interested in virtue signalling in general. Have they become the new Christians?

People profess Christian beliefs in order to virtue signal. The idea is that Jesus Christ was the perfect man and without blame, and therefore the more Christ-like a person appears to be the more perfect they are.

The problem with this mentality is that a people’s perception of what Jesus was like – and therefore, their conception of what entails moral perfection – is an artifact of the time and place they live in. Even worse, the popular perception of what Jesus was like is usually fabricated wholesale to suit the needs of the ruling classes.

It has now become fashionable to associate Jesus with socialism. Pope Francis, when not covering up for the numerous child abusers within his institution, makes a concerted effort to link his church with progressive attitudes to refugees, homosexuals and climate change. These are all trendy, left-wing issues that promote globalist solutions – which is what Francis really wants.

The idea is to recast Jesus as the “Lord of Nice,” and since it would be really nice to open your borders to anyone who wanted to wander in and claim welfare for the next 50 years, it’s presumed to be the sort of thing Jesus would have done. Jesus wouldn’t let refugees into his actual home, of course, or even his neighbourhood, because of the imperative to keep house prices up, and he definitely wouldn’t have opened the doors of his church to them, but he surely would have at least dumped them in poor neighbourhoods and offered to pay some tax to go towards their upkeep.

When Jesus was cast as the Lord of morally upstanding and wholesome, then it was the right wing that virtue signalled about how much they were like this. Now, the Baby Boomers that comprise the right don’t care about anything other than money, and Generation X don’t even care about that, so it’s left to the Millennials to virtue signal about how much they are like Christ.

In much the same way that the Biblical Christ taught people to give up concerns for pleasure in this material life, so does 21st-Century Jesus teach that we give up concern for maintaining basic law and order in our societies and protecting our women from rape and our vulnerable youth from physical abuse.

These are mere physical, material concerns, and will naturally dissipate. So it doesn’t matter if Muslims and Africans flood into the country in their millions and rape and destroy everything in sight – the fools simply don’t understand that the real pleasures are in the afterlife!

Of course, this is the reason why the Romans threw Christians to the lions in the Colosseum – the presence of any Abrahamic cult will inevitably cause the society that hosts it to rot from within unless action is taken. The left do not realise that they are controlled by whoever controls their perception of what Jesus Christ was like – and these people tend to be the major moneyed interests who control the mass media.

In other words, their sworn enemies.

The purity spiral of the neo-Christian Left has led to them breathlessly supporting the importation of rapists and religious fanatics into the West, in the hope that this masochistic niceness will be seen and appreciated as Christ-like and rewarded. In this sense, they are much like the original Christians who were too concerned with moral posturing to do anything about the hordes of Germanic invaders that ended up destroying the Roman Empire.

A Person’s Politics Follow From Their Conception of Human Nature

People who believe that humans are more like bonobos than chimpanzees tend to be left-wing, and vice-versa

Most people with strong political opinions like to think that their opinions are perfectly logical, and derive directly from natural principles. Although most people are correct and reasonable in that their political opinions follow logically from their perception of human nature, the problem is that people have an extremely varied range of beliefs when it comes to their perceptions of human nature. In some cases, there’s no way of knowing who’s right.

Take, for example, the question of nature versus nurture. This is another way of asking: how much of a person’s behaviour can be attributed to natural causes that they were born with, such as genes, and how much can be attributed to environmental causes, such as how they were raised?

All positions on this extremely important question fall somewhere between 100% nature and 100% nurture, the former being known as “genetic determinism” and the latter being known as the “tabula rasa” (“blank slate”) theory. This sounds objective and scientific, but it really isn’t, because one’s attitude here will reflect one’s political opinions.

Take the question of Third World immigration and refugees, for example. A person who believes in genetic determinism might be extremely reluctant to open the borders to African or Muslim refugees, because they will tend to believe that these people will never and can never learn to behave in a civilised manner.

A person who believes in the tabula rasa theory, by contrast, will tend to believe that the wealth of Western nations is because of cultural reasons, and therefore African and Muslim refugees will acclimatise to the Western way of doing things, and therefore over time their crime rates and income levels will equalise with the native population.

Another area in which this occurs is with regard to bonobos and chimpanzees. Here we can also see that a person’s belief about the scientific, biological reality of the human species has a profound effect on their political beliefs.

Bonobos and chimpanzees are the two generally accepted chimpanzee species, and some (such as Jared Diamond) have argued that humans are so similar to them that we belong in the same group as them as a third chimpanzee. But from which of the two can we draw more accurate inferences about the true nature of behaviour in the human animal?

The bonobo is a creature of peace, the chimpanzee is a creature of war. This is evident from observing the two species in their natural habitat. The chimpanzee is violent, cruel, loves fighting and tends to cure anxiety by bashing a weaker chimp. The bonobo is hypersexual, loves bonding and grooming and tends to cure anxiety by having sex.

If a person believes that humans are more like the bonobo they will tend towards pacifism and polyamory, and will be left-wing. If a person believes that humans are more like the chimp they will tend towards violence and monogamy, and will be right-wing. This is true even if the person in question knows nothing at all about the ethology of the two species.

A third is whether or not people are naturally lazy. This one is especially difficult because attitudes to industriousness are biological to a major extent.

Few appreciate this, but in a cold environment people evolve to be active because physical activity keeps you warm, and this confers a survival advantage by staving off colds and hypothermia-related conditions. In a warm environment people evolve to be inactive because physical activity gives you heatstroke.

This is why pale-skinned people tend to work hard and dark-skinned people don’t – it’s not because of any moral failure on the part of the latter.

Consider this information in the context of whether or not we should bring in a universal basic income. The fear on the conservative side is that a universal basic income would cause certain demographic groups to become lazy and shiftless, and they would all stop working immediately and live the parasitic lifestyle natural to their kind.

If a person’s conception of human nature is not that people are lazy but rather that people are industrious, they will be much more likely to support a universal basic income out of the hope that it will free people from drudgery and therefore enable them to put their energies into creative endeavours of more benefit to human happiness.

In summary, it’s usually possible to surmise a person’s political opinions from their belief in human nature. Political opinions are not formed in a vacuum – they are informed by many factors, one of which is a person’s belief in how other people naturally behave given a certain schedule of reinforcements and punishments.