philosophy – Page 127

Verticalisation and Horizontalisation

Dividing the political spectrum into two poles depending on a person’s attitude to sociobiological dominance hierarchies can be more instructive than left and right

There are many competing theories of political spectrums. The best known is left-right, but libertarian-authoritarian and traditionalist-progressivist are two popular others. This essay contends that the most instructive way to look at the basic political division is to split it into what we call verticalists and horizontalists, based on crude biopolitical sentiments.

These terms refer not to a person’s ideal distribution of resources or land, or to the status quo or change, but to a person’s preferred form of social dominance hierarchy. In this sense, verticalists correspond to what has traditionally been called a “masculine” kind of politics while horizontalists correspond to what has traditionally been called “feminine”.

Verticalists also overlap heavily with what has hitherto been considered the right, and horizontalists with the left, but it isn’t as simple as this.

The basic belief of a horizontalist is that the dominance hierarchy ought to be flattened, or at least that the ideal dominance hierarchy is a relatively egalitarian one. This entails that no-one can exalt themselves too far above the others or above the average. The basic belief of a verticalist is that it is morally permissible for an individual to acquire many, many times more wealth or power than the average person.

Horizontalists are therefore much like mainstream leftists when they contend that CEOs should not be allowed to earn 500 times more than the most lowly-paid workers at their company, or when they express a dislike of feudal monarchy. Their core sentiment seems to be a belief that people should not be allowed to wield power over others, and that to do so is obscene.

Verticalists don’t feel the same sense of injustice that horizontalists do at the thought of a dominance hierarchy in which some positions carry much, much more power or prestige than others. They are much more comfortable with the thought of a person having exclusive control over an area, such as a fascist dictatorship.

There are essentially two types of verticalists.

The first are those who think that they themselves are the natural inheritors of the top of the dominance hierarchy. These people are the natural alphas. Usually they are distinguished from the others by being exceptionally vigorous, strong or intelligent. Sometimes their distinction is a matter of will.

The second are those who want to serve the first group, in the hope that some of the spoils of war fall to them. These are the natural betas. If one observes the natural dominance hierarchies that occur in chimpanzee troops, it is clear that this alpha-beta vertical distinction is a naturally occurring phenomenon in social creatures.

Horizontalism draws its power out of a discontentment with this primitive way of things. Some people naturally have a moral objection to others wielding great amounts of power. Horizontalists tend to think that such a thing is obscene, and that “the people” (i.e. the betas) need to work together to avoid being exploited out of their fair share of the proceeds of their labour.

Horizontalisation probably came about when some early primate realised that the alpha male of their tribe was preventing them from accessing reproductive opportunities by means of extreme jealousy and possessive violence over the tribe’s females, and that if our early primate teamed up with a like-minded they could collectively eliminate the alpha male and thus gain access to those females.

Over time, this created a selection pressure in favour of those males who reacted angrily to other males asserting dominance and control over large amounts of resources. In other words, there was a selective pressure in favour of those who believed in horizontalism.

There are also two types of horizontalists. The first are those who do not themselves think they are the natural inheritors of the top of the dominance hierarchy. These people are similar to the beta males who become verticalists, only they have chosen another strategy. Instead of trying to work with and for the alphas, they aim to supplant them and become the new alphas themselves.

The second are those who promote horizontalisation for idealistic reasons, despite being in the upper half of the dominance hierarchy themselves. These people are often very intelligent and have taken a particularly long-term view, because a long-term view will naturally suggest that one should focus on co-operation rather than competition. These people are the natural nation-builders and philosopher-kings, and are extremely rare.

A verticalist generally has no problem stating that one thing is more valuable than another. For example, they might be comfortable saying that Person A is a great man and that Person B is a piece of shit. A horizontalist, on the other hand, is disinclined to show great respect to Person A and is also disinclined to show great disrespect to Person B. In this sense the verticalists are more masculine and the horizontalists more feminine.

Verticalism differs from the popular conception of right wing in several ways. A verticalist has no problem with a person smoking cannabis, for example, because that doesn’t impact the individual verticalist’s ability to get ahead. Whether or not cannabis is legal doesn’t make it harder or easier for a verticalist to get ahead from their own effort, so they won’t support it for the sake of mere tradition like a conservative, or for the sake of destroying poor and non-white people like a right-winger.

Also, verticalists don’t tend to be either racist or misogynistic. A verticalist doesn’t have a problem with respecting a black man or a woman as long as those people are capable of distinguishing themselves from the plebs by their own merit. In this manner, there is an overlap between verticalism and Luciferianism.

Conversely, horizontalism differs from the popular conception of left wing in that it doesn’t need to posit a new ruling class in the form of any kind of global authority. A horizontalist feels absolutely no need to crate a global hierarchy in which an entity like the United Nations wielded great power over the peoples of the Earth. Horizontalists are fairly anarchistic in that sense.

Furthermore, a horizontalist would likely oppose mass immigration from poorer countries, for the reason that this tends to form an underclass of people who aren’t really a part of the nation, and an overclass of wealthy landowners who benefit handsomely from the cheap labour and increased demand for housing. Horizontalists might therefore have more in common with national socialists than with regular socialists or Marxists.

Alchemically, all of these positions relate to the four masculine elements. The basic verticalist dichotomy can be said to reflect the basic feminine-masculine distinction between clay and iron, between the passive, receptive yin and the active, outgoing yang. The horizontalists are themselves split into the false egalitarians of the silver and the true philosopher-kings of gold who intend to lead humanity out of the brutality of biological dominance hierarchies.

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).

VJMP Reads: Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger IV

This reading continues on from here.

The tenth essay in Ride The Tiger is called ‘Invulnerability – Apollo and Dionysus’. Here Evola further describes his conception of an aristocrat of the soul as someone who feels very deeply and who is very moved by things. The modern man (the man of clay, essentially), only feels very shallow emotions, and quickly moves from one such shallow impression to the next.

In this essay, Evola touches on the truly aristocratic topic of deliberately exposing oneself to great trials and tribulations, for the sake of learning one’s true nature. Alchemists will recognise this mentality as the one necessary to burn away everything but the gold so as to learn to distinguish Spirit from Nature. The purifying fire is that which burns away body and mind and leaves one with one’s true nature – it is necessary because it burns away everything shallow, leaving only actions which arise from the depths.

A person who has done this may find themselves gifted with a “transcendent confidence” that is characteristic of the aristocrat of the soul. This is important because in purifying oneself down to the gold one also strips away all of the conditioned belief in life’s meaning. To proceed past this stage, the alchemist must find within themselves the will to assert a meaning to life independent of any outside source. Then one is invulnerable.

To open oneself without falling apart is not easy in an age of dissolution. Here Evola takes care to point out that it’s very easy to fall at the second hurdle. Just because mainstream religion is bullshit doesn’t mean that we should abandon it for wild paganism and barbarianism. There is more.

The eleventh essay is called ‘Acting Without Desire – The Causal Law’. Once a person discovers their true nature, they should also learn the ability to act without desire. This entails taking the correct action at any given time instead of becoming distracted by profit or loss, or by what other people might think of you. Doing what needs to be done.

This needs to be qualified, however. There are naturalistic desires, that arise from the biology of the human animal. These are generally to be avoided. There are also, however, heroic desires, that arise from something greater than the merely physical, from something transcendent. These may be acted upon.

An aristocratic person, then, thinks not in terms of sin but in terms of error. The concept of sin is impossible because God has long been repudiated; all that remains is adherence to standards that one sets from within as an expression of one’s true nature.

One ought to act with a mind to what is effectively a law of karma, in that actions have consequences, regardless of whether those actions conform to any conception of good or evil. Those consequences are real and should be regarded as such. This is fine because the real man of gold doesn’t just live, but rather manifests himself and his true nature in the world.

This is the end of the second part of the book. The next part is called ‘The Dead End of Existentialism’, and the first essay here is the book’s twelfth: ‘Being and Inauthentic Existence’. This deals with the two types of existentialism (as Evola sees it): the philosophical, academic tradition and the practical tradition exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Evola dismisses existentialism almost entirely, for the reason that the existentialist philosophers are too much a product of their times, and because they are not themselves interested in the world beyond. The existentialists are very materialistic and this disqualifies existentialism from being a philosophy that an aristocrat might be concerned with.

Despite this, existentialism can be credited with some things. For one, the idea that “existence precedes essence” serves to keep the existentialist in touch with the metaphysical and transcendent. It also helps to highlight the dual nature of the aristocratic soul, which, as described earlier, is much deeper than that of the pleb.

The Four Ways to Destroy A Population

The people, united, will never be divided – but there are other ways to destroy them

Ruled as we are by a parasitic, incestuous cadre of abominations, it isn’t easy to get our minds around all the ways that we have been destroyed. So many underhanded tricks have been used to divide and conquer us that it’s impossible to list them all. This essay tries to make sense of them by grouping the tactics of the ruling classes into four major categories.

The first is to disincorporate the target population. This means to take action that prevents them from forming any bonds of solidarity. Interpersonal solidarity, if too much of it is achieved, will allow a group of people to form their own sovereignty without being dependent on the State. Therefore, the State has to smash it.

The easiest way to achieve this has been known for millennia – it is to enclose public space. This is where people meet and where people talk, and where that happens there tends to grow opposition to the State. From the marketplace that spawned Socrates to the beer halls that spawned Hitler, anywhere people can meet and share their discontent about the way things are run is a place where that discontent can fester.

Alchemically, this category is equivalent to clay, because that represents the masses coming together. Disincorporation, therefore, means fences, walls, blockades, moats, trenches and everything else that prevents the natural flow of conversation from taking place.

The second is to disintegrate the target population. This is essentially Plan B, for when disincorporation fails. Here, disintegrating means to literally take away sources of order from within the body of the target population. The result of doing so is to render into chaos the bonds of solidarity that hold the people together, making them less able to take action.

This involves schemes like the War on Drugs, in which half of the population is demonised and persecuted for no good reason while the other half of the population keeps their mouth shut lest they be the target next time. The people don’t need to be literally split apart by force (although that’s an option), because it’s easier to split them apart by turning their own natural greed and cowardice on each other.

Alchemically, this strategy is equivalent to iron, because it’s the sharp edges of iron that cause bodies of clay to disintegrate. Although bullets are definitely one method by which this can be achieved, it’s mostly about forcing people apart by legal boondoggles and trickery.

The third is to disorientate the target population. This is where actual lying comes in. This is Plan C in the sense that the ruling class only uses it if their target population form bonds of solidarity that resist initial attempts to break them. Here they have to spin a web of deceit, confusion, misdirection and pure bullshit.

In the West, which has generally high levels of freedom of movement, association and speech, it’s not easily possible for the ruling classes to prevent the population from forming strong bonds of solidarity. Therefore, the ruling class has to direct the natural rage of the target population somewhere else.

Mainstream media such as television and radio does an outstanding job of this in our societies. There are new, shiny and loud distractions every moment of the day, blasted into our brains in the ever more frequent gaps in the programming. These are the alchemical equivalent to silver, in that they shine things at us to distract and one risks becoming blinded by it all.

The fourth is to demoralise the target population. This is the plan of last resort, and the ruling class only try it if the previous three methods have failed. It’s a question of the will of the people: if they are many, united and well-organised, they will win unless their will to be free can be sapped.

Alchemically this relates to gold and is therefore primarily a question of spirituality. It can be seen that, in the modern West, all spiritual traditions are attacked and persecuted while corrupt and empty religious ones are allowed to thrive. Our natural spiritual relationship with God has been destroyed and replaced with a pathetic McDonaldsisation of old Hebrew myths.

This absence of genuine spirituality has sapped our wills to live, and our ability to feel joy. Instead of being united with our birthright, which is to know spiritual truths about the survival of consciousness beyond the death of the physical body and the laws of karma, we are told that we are merely accidents of chemistry. Consequently, fear of death pervades our every waking moment, and we are thus paralysed.

Demoralisation is arguably a more powerful tactic than any of disorientation, disintegration or disincorporation because it can destroy a population at any level of intellectual advancement or physical organisation. This explains why so many of the problems and stresses we encounter in everyday life exist – they are placed there, deliberately and maliciously, to demoralise us.

A Technoshamanic Update to the Perennial Philosophy

The perennial philosophy comes and goes, all throughout time and space, being a reflection of the mind of God in the Great Fractal. In every new age it updates itself, taking a form that makes sense to the people of the time, depending on the characteristics of that age. Because technological change has been so rapid over the last 150 years, the perennial philosophy has not been able to keep up. This essay makes an attempt to do so.

The metaphors of the former age were the crucifix, the fish and the crescent, just as they were the pyramid, the bull and the sacrificial brazier in the age before that. The age that we are now entering has its own zeitgeist – perhaps it is time for a technoshamanic update to the perennial philosophy?

The perennial philosophy is informational gold and is more fundamental than language and therefore cannot be described in words. However, we can predict what some of its teachings are going to be, by applying the axiom of “As below, so above” to the modern day.

In its earlier incarnations, through the writings of Hermes Trismegistus and others, the perennial philosophy explained the metaphysical world by analogy to the natural world. “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one,” reads the Emerald Tablet, “Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.”

This remained an extremely effective metaphor, until today. The world of today is so bizarre, so surreal and impossible that distinguishing it from a dreamscape is no longer easy. Moreover, modern people are almost completely out of touch with the natural world – many of us haven’t so much as looked at the Moon in years.

We need a new metaphor for a new age, and virtual reality seems like the obvious replacement.

Following this line of reasoning, one might expect that the creation myths of the new century will be based around the same binary division as always but with a modern twist; in other words not of yang and yin, fire and water or Sun and Moon but of 1 and 0. The hardware is the brain, the software is the mind, and electricity is the Holy Ghost.

Different lives could be seen as nothing more than differing sets of sensory impressions upon consciousness. As long as these impressions could be accurately recorded and reproduced, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be accessible for any conscious person to experience at any time.

My own The Verity Key twisted the ordinary perception of consciousness through a machine that could replace the consciousness of another person with that of the operator of the eponymous device. The idea was to play on the usual belief of the reader that their consciousness was directly connected to their physical body, and could never be separated.

This played with the idea of the Great Fractal, which is conceptualised as an immense algorithm that calculates all of the possible combinations of senses that make up the illusion of the material world. This is a modern way of expressing how all things flow from one, i.e. “all created objects come from one thing, an undifferentiated primal matter”.

In other words, all of the contents of consciousness ultimately flow from consciousness itself, because nothing more than consciousness is needed to create them all – a fact known to all who have managed to purify their consciousness to the level of gold and thereby completed the Philosopher’s Stone.

Other ancient alchemical or hermetic beliefs can likewise be transliterated into a modern context.

The laws of karma can be expressed in terms of frequency, which no-one understood before the days of widespread radio, and which now everyone does. If one can imagine such a thing as a frequency of consciousness, a higher frequency would produce a more harmonious tone and joy among those who heard it, whereas a lower frequency would produce a discordant tone and fear among those who heard it.

A technoshaman might contend that, upon the expiration of one’s physical body, the frequency of consciousness that one had cultivated is the only thing that passes into the next world. They might even go as far as to contend that this frequency will attract those of a like frequency, and therefore that, post-death, one’s frequency dictates which part of the Great Fractal one’s consciousness becomes attuned to and the frequency of those who populate it (until, of course, one dies there as well).

One’s “frequency of consciousness” can here be likened to an analog television or radio signal. The more pleasurable frequencies are not necessarily the first ones discovered, or the most popular ones, and they certainly aren’t the easiest to tune into. In order to tune into higher frequencies one must know where to find them on the dial.

The alchemical quest of transforming lead into gold is a physicalist metaphor for the mystical quest that, in modern language, could be said to be about tuning a low frequency of consciousness into a higher one.