justice – Page 95

The Conscript’s Dilemma

No forced hierarchy could ever form if those conscripted into it at the bottom killed those doing the conscripting

The thought experiment known as the Conscript’s Dilemma is at the very core of anarcho-homicidalism. It poses a very basic and very primal question that invites the listener to question their inherent attitudes to hierarchy, violence and submission. This essay discusses it from an anarcho-homicidalist perspective.

Imagine that you are a young man entering the prime of his life. Your village lies in the territory of a despotic king who regularly raises conscript troops to go and fight for treasure in overseas adventures. Those sort of adventures are foreign to you. You have you own life to live in the village – obligations to discharge, maidens to court etc. Life is orderly and good.

One day a conscription officer rides into your village. He explains that it’s war time again, and that he has come to round up for the army all fighting age men – which means you. The penalty for refusing to heed the king’s call is death.

This scenario has played out millions of times throughout the history of the Earth. It’s well-known what happens in the vast majority of cases: the villagers, cowed by fear of the distant king, willingly give up their sons to the war machine for fear of incurring the king’s wrath.

After all, if incurring the king’s wrath means certain death, and going to war only means the possibility of death, and there is no third option, going to war is the obvious correct choice.

Or so it might seem.

An anarcho-homicidalist thinks otherwise. Central to the idea of anarcho-homicidalism is that dominance hierarchies could not form without the consent of the dominated, and that anyone trying to enslave you can rightfully be killed if necessary to protect one’s own liberty. This means that the conscript at the centre of this dilemma has a third option: kill the conscription officer and trust that his fellows are also anarcho-homicidalists.

If the others are also anarcho-homicidalists, they will back him up. They will understand that killing the conscription officer was necessary to protect the village and its residents from the kingdom’s hierarchy. They will understand that the king’s actions are tantamount to an attempt to enslave, because they are implicitly claiming that the bodies of the villagers are the property of the king.

If they are not anarcho-homicidalists, that is to say they are normal men, that is to say they are cowards, they will be terrified of getting into trouble from killing one of the king’s men. They will turn the anarcho-homicidalist in, probably for the inevitable reward, or perhaps even kill him themselves out of a belief that he is a murderer and that the conscription attempt was legitimate.

The anarcho-homicidalist knows that if he killed the conscription officer, the punishment is unlikely to be much more severe than the worst potential cost of obeying the demand for conscription, which is to go to war and get slaughtered.

However the potential reward, should he find enough support in his actions that he is not simply taken down by the king’s local sheriffs, is total freedom.

Ultimately, this is what the question of anarcho-homicidalism often boils down to. If you’re not willing to kill to maintain your freedom, then you can’t maintain it in the face of someone willing to kill to take it away.

The Conscript’s Dilemma could be described in much the same way as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, with which it shares much of the same meathook logic. Essentially it’s a question of game theory, and it’s a curious one because the people involved, despite being best served by co-operation, are challenged by powerful incentives that incline them towards not co-operating.

More precisely, the dilemma is that if everyone was an anarcho-homicidalist, and everyone had confidence in everyone else’s faith in anarcho-homicidalism, they would all choose to kill any conscription officer who tried to force them into the army and thereby make slavery impossible, but if sufficiently few of them are anarcho-homicidalists then they will not resist enslavement efforts out of fear that the slavers will punish them, and so slavery becomes possible.

It is a useful rebuttal to those who reject anarcho-homicidalism right off the bat on account of that it explicitly calls for killing people. Very often, the alternative to having a will to kill in self-defence is to become a slave.

How to Not Sound Crazy When Talking About Your Psychedelic Experiences

It’s hard to talk about the world beyond to people who aren’t familiar with that range of frequencies

Even though the Internet has led to a sharing of shamanic knowledge completely unprecedented (and impossible) for any other point in the world’s history, it hasn’t filtered down to the mass consciousness yet. Probably it never will – the men of silver and iron and clay cannot be expected to concern themselves with what lies beyond this veil. This essay gives some tips for talking to them about the world beyond without sounding insane.

The most important thing is to have a feel for what the person you are talking to is likely to be able to handle. This means that you have to look for clues from what you already know about them to give hints about what they already believe.

The easiest way to sound crazy is to express a belief that does not accord with consensual reality of the mass consciousness of the people around you. This is true whether you are in meatspace or cyberspace. The lower the intelligence of the person you are speaking to, the less likely it is that they will have challenged any belief widely-held by the people around them.

It is in this will to challenge consensual reality that most people judge sane from insane. All you have to do is to assert that things are not as they are commonly believed to be, and some people will start to consider you crazy. Essentially you only have to contradict the television, or in other cases the radio or FaceBook.

You might start a conversation with a suspected normie by questioning the narrative that you are fed by the network news, or by the broadsheet papers. Even that is enough to sound pretty crazy to most people, who are on the level of “they couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.” If a person is on this level they are in no way ready to handle the idea that the government has lied to them about psychedelics for the sake of making them easier to control.

A useful tactic here is to point out how the governments and mainstream media of Anglosphere countries colluded to sell the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in order to manufacture consent for the Iraq War. It’s possible now, though, that a person remembers those times differently and will choose to remember it in a way that denies this collusion.

It pays to be wary of the fact that most people are materialists, which implies that they believe that the brain generates consciousness, and that upon the death of the physical body this consciousness somehow “disappears”. These people consider all kinds of religious ideas like karma and God to be superstitions, and the bitterest contempt is reserved for those religious who believe that the consciousness survives the death of the physical body.

Unfortunately, this belief is also one of the major insights of psychedelics – perhaps it is this psychedelic insight that forms the foundation of most religious beliefs.

Psychedelics are hard, and integrating their lessons extremely hard

Mathematics is the way to get at people who are the hardest to reach. Expressing a sense of awe and wonder at how, for example, the Fibonacci sequence reoccurs in the state of Nature is a good way of getting a person to ask themselves whether there’s something other than sheer chance going on. Other ways are to express similar sentiments about the non-reoccurring nature of pi or the import of Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

The way to talk about it so that it makes sense is by talking about previous beliefs that you once held that you either questioned or abandoned after taking a psychedelic. Usually this makes it possible to apply logic to dismantle one erroneous idea after the other, and it’s seldom necessary to mention that this destruction of illusion was achieved by means of psychedelics (any insight that psychedelics have brought you can be plausibly credited to either meditation or a near death experience as well).

For example, a psychedelicised person might be able to conduct a conversation with a normie about the boundaries of the human body, and how it’s not clear where inside ends and where outside begins. The very idea of selfishness starts to unravel if the idea of what it is that one might be selfish about is challenged, and by such means light can shine through.

This column believes that the ultimate goal of consciousness expansion is apotheosis, where an individual consciousness reunites themselves with the universal consciousness and becomes privy to certain mysteries, such as that there is no such thing as time and that the death of the physical body does not impact the true self.

Contemplation of this alone is liable to induce a psychiatric breakdown in a lot of people. Most people are so utterly terrified of the concept of their future death that they have pushed the very idea of it into a deep, dark part of the mind, only to be ventured into in an emergency. Even fewer people have looked deeply enough into their own minds to have made a surgically precise distinction between consciousness and the content of consciousness.

Starting with such subjects is probably too much. Most people will declare you crazy for talking about them rather than risk psychosis by dwelling on them.

Questioning the materialist dogma that the brain generates consciousness is the quickest way to be seen as crazy. This dogma is taken by many to be the absolute, inviolable and axiomatic truth of reality and conversation along these lines is likely to make materialists fear or despise you.

The best thing is probably to declare skepticism of the claims of a mutual enemy. The Government, the Church or Big Business can all serve as excellent mutual enemies. Skepticism of the claims of these mutual enemies might then be generalised into skepticism about other claims and dogmas.

The World That Sober People Built

Sober minds built the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima; sober minds gave the orders to drop that bomb; sober minds followed those orders

“That person must have been on drugs” is a common response to observing all kinds of wacked-out behaviour, as if taking a psychoactive drug inevitably brings about false kinds of thinking – a cognitive bias this column has previously described as Sobriety Bias Syndrome. But if we look around the world that sober people built, and the moral values agreed upon by sober people, things really didn’t turn out that great.

It was pious and sober people who decided, a few thousand years ago, that mutilating the genitals of baby boys was a legitimate expression of God’s will. It was sober people who decided to adopt this tradition from the foreigners who practiced it, and people are sober when they argue for the “health benefits” of the mutilation.

George W. Bush, completely sober, decided that sending the firepower of the US military after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a great idea, even though it led directly to the deaths of over a million people. The US Congress, elected to represent the American people, also soberly decided that this was a great idea.

In the 1930s we created and watched “documentaries” such as Reefer Madness, which exhorted us to tell our children that smoking cannabis will turn them into murderers; a dozen years later, with god-fearing sobriety, we built nuclear weapons and dropped them on Japanese civilians, killing hundreds of thousands in one hit.

These are the actions of sober minds. So clearly a person doesn’t have to be intoxicated in order to do terrible things to someone else.

Far from it. In many ways, sobriety can be seen as a kind of virus. Its presence in a person’s mind tends to work to drive out periods of non-sobriety, usually because of egoistic religious delusions about achieving purity of thought. The sober mind tends to have thoughts repeating in it over and over again, and this repetition can lead to a powerful commitment to some ideas.

This is a fact long understood by television programmers, who appreciate how repeated exposure to a short, powerful stimulus is more likely to induce purchasing behaviour in a potential consumer than a single exposure to e.g. a lecture about the qualities of a product.

Because novel psychoactive experiences tend to destroy this conditioning by allowing the conditioned person to see things from new perspectives, if you want to get everyone marching in lockstep then these psychoactive experiences need to be either discouraged or made illegal.

Consequently, entirely sober people have decided, presumably using sober logic, that putting another human being in a cage is a fair punishment for being caught growing a medicinal plant without permission.

Maybe there’s an argument that too much sobriety makes an individual mean from a lack of levity, and a society dumb from a lack of questioning?

After all, the mass shooters making the front pages recently are definitely not smoking weed, taking ecstasy or tripping on mushrooms or LSD, and neither are the genital mutilators, military warhawks and brainwashers that are responsible for most of the world’s evil.

The truth is that the world needs a diversity of ideas if humans are to survive the challenges of coming years. Never mind a diversity of skin colour – such superficial qualities do not constitute real diversity. Real diversity is diversity of ideas, even outlandish ones, even crazy ones, because that is the kind of diversity that saves us from groupthink and prevents us from making the kind of error that arises from self-righteous conviction about one’s correctness.

To that end, sobriety is our enemy and getting wasted is our friend.

When Opening the Borders to Mass Immigration, The Effect on the Locals’ Quality of Life is Not Considered

The forces pushing for mass immigration in recent decades have been an alliance of both the left and the right, which is why the West has seen so much of it, despite that it often has clearly negative effects for the locals. Some people don’t seem to fully understand that, when agitating for mass immigration, the forces in favour of it have got no interest whatsoever in the effect of that immigration on the quality of life of the locals. This essay looks at why.

Western conservatives are not only terrified of being seen to oppose immigration lest they be confused with the racial conservatives who lost World War II, but they are more than happy to open the floodgates to mass immigration for economic reasons.

First among those economic reasons is that mass immigration destroys the existing bonds of solidarity among the native population, which works to divide and conquer them and make them ripe for wage exploitation. Western conservatives know that Westerners are too afraid to protest the importation of low-skilled workers from outside the country lest they be seen as racist, even when that same importation is undermining their labour power and thereby sharply lowering their quality of life.

It’s obviously much harder to start a union when much of the workforce doesn’t speak English, or if they’re here on temporary visas, or if they’re from a cultural tradition that has little idea of worker’s rights (which is most of them). So the wealthy know that by opening the floodgates to the whole world they can smash the sentiments that prevent workers from selling each other out as cheaply as possible.

Second among these economic reasons, but no less important, is that mass immigration drives up the value of investment property, which a large proportion of Western conservatives hold. In so far as the value of any given piece of land is a function of the amount of money willing to bid to own it, it’s mathematically obvious that opening the borders to all and sundry will remove previous restrictions on demand, thereby driving it up – alongside the price of the property.

After all, no-one is making more land, so the supply of land in New Zealand is a constant. By letting in a few extra million people, the wealthy can stimulate demand which pushes the price of that land up.

Which is great if you’re in the minority that already holds land, and terrible if you’re in the majority that doesn’t.

This reason, incidentally, is why the population will never be allowed to fall, and why it has not been allowed to fall in Western European countries where the birthrate has been below replacement level for a number of generations. Economic reasons mean that the rich will simply force their puppets in Parliament to maintain the price of their land holdings by opening the borders.

This is why the population of France has not decreased in several decades, despite that native French women have had a below replacement level birthrate for over a century now. The French elites would rather import foreigners to replace the missing locals than allow their property values to decline with a falling population – and the same is now true of Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany.

After all, if you’re in the top 1%, then it doesn’t matter if the average goes down as long as inequality rises by enough to compensate, because rising inequality will see the top 1% cream more and more of it. Selling your countrymen out for shekels might lower the standard of living of the nation, but it won’t lower yours (until enough other people do it of course, but the hope is that this point is never reached).

Western liberals, for their own reasons, are also more than happy to open the floodgates to mass immigration.

One reason is that these liberals do not generally live in the same neighbourhoods that are affected by mass immigration and the crime that comes with it. So the negative side of agitating for mass immigration is not considered to outweigh the positive side of virtue signalling one’s good will towards poor foreigners.

Another reason is that they are ideologically opposed to national bonds for the reasons that these are impediments to a global communist state. The sharper the lines are around who counts as a Kiwi and who doesn’t count as Kiwi, the more difficult it is to subsume New Zealand into the global communist consciousness.

None of this is to argue that immigration is a bad thing or that it should be stopped. But it’s clear that the National Party has lost control of the immigration system above and beyond the desire to keep wages low and house prices high. The wishes of the people who already live in New Zealand, and who have inherited a sense of guardianship over the land, is not respected and the effect of this immigration on their quality of life not considered.

Ultimately, the New Zealand immigration system needs to be run according to the philosophy that the New Zealand population as a whole are to be the beneficiaries of the fact that this is a nicer place to live than most of the rest of the world. Not right-wing special interests who want cheap labour for the sake of maximum profits or left-wing special interests who want the destruction of social coherency for the sake of maximum control.