Category: philosophy

Should People Lose The Right to Vote When They Get the Pension?

Ideally, the people who voted would be the same people who had something at stake

When our democracies were set up, there was one thing that was never anticipated: medical advances leading to a white-haired horde of pensioners that held the balance of power in almost every single election. We’re essentially living in a gerontocracy now, and there’s no giant ice floe to push them out onto. This article looks at a potential compromise for our society.

Life expectancy in New Zealand was about 71 years in 1960, which meant that the average person was only expected to live a handful of years once they went on the pension at age 65. When the pension was brought in, in 1898, it was obviously much less than even this.

Life expectancy was over 81 years in 2015, and it keeps climbing as medical advances and social changes like the decline in tobacco smoking prevent what had until recently been incurable diseases. This has led to a problem arising: New Zealand now spends over $12,000,000,000 per year on pension payments, as the average person now lives a dozen years or more extra past the pension age, which has not increased.

The reason why the age of 65 was usually chosen as the age of universal pension was that, by age 65, a person’s body is usually no longer capable of the physical labour necessary to earn a full wage. The wear and tear of life as a working man meant that a full effort was no longer possible from age 65 and, because the vast majority of jobs going around were working-class ones, it was a reliable rule of thumb that most people would be knackered by then.

But if we now live in a knowledge economy, as many politicians and economists are now insisting we do, then the original reason for setting the pension age at 65 is null and void. If we live in an economy where a person’s productivity is primarily a function of their intellectual capabilities then there’s no reason to have a pension age determined by the limitations of the physical body, because there is no need to treat mentally productive people as infirm.

It might be that a person’s intellectual capabilities are not enough to keep them in employment either. Perhaps that person traded on the strength of their body and, for whatever reason, their mind was not developed to the point where participation in a knowledge economy was possible. Such a person should still have the right to a pension.

But the unfairness arises when a person who is still more than capable of earning a living from their mind does so, at the same time as pocketing a $370 a week pension that was intended specifically for people incapable of working. Winston Peters has shown that even a career as intellectually demanding as top-level politics can be undertaken until one’s mid-70s, and yet if he retires in 2020 he will have claimed the pension for ten years while still working full time.

This is really a gigantic con game, in which the elderly have forced payment for their unsustainably lavish lifestyles on the young. Worse, the larger this 65+ age bracket grows, the ever more incentivised they are to vote against any reform to this Ponzi scheme.

Democracy was never intended to have this massive bulk of old voters gumming it up. Once a person is at this stage, they have relatively little stake left in the future running of the country. No major decisions need be taken by such people – they’re already sorted.

Perhaps our old people need to have a deal put to them?

If you reach 65 and feel that you are no longer intellectually capable of participating in the knowledge economy, that’s fine. Here’s a pension – but you are no longer considered intellectually capable of participating in representative democracy.

If you want to keep working on the grounds that you’re entirely capable of it still, you can – and you get to vote as well. But you don’t get to claim a pension on the grounds that you’re too infirm to participate and still get to wield power over others.

We can accept that, for some people, the fair price to pay for being looked after until death is to forfeit their right to further influence the political system in their favour. After all, if you have a political class that pays you $370 a week no questions asked, when you almost certainly own your own home already and don’t have to pay rent out of it, you’re already creaming it by any measure. Life is sweet and easy at that point.

It’s time to stop the Baby Boomers’ theft of the production of the following generations. Taking the right to vote away from pensioners will make it possible for a fairer balance of taxation and benefits to be struck.

Thoughts of a Luciferian Occultist on the Occasion of His 36th Birthday

My life has been divided into four nine-year blocks that correspond to the four masculine elements of clay, iron, silver and gold. This has culminated in my own apotheosis as someone who no longer fears the death of the physical body. Such thoughts became apparent to me when I marked the occasion of having been around the Sun thirty-six times, and reflected upon the wobbly path that was taken.

The phase of clay, representing the first nine years, was when simple survival skills were learned. This phase is shared by all creatures that need to survive, right down to the dumbest herbivore. This is the phase that we are born into, one that is characterised by fear as we learn to balance our innate curiosity with staying away from dangers.

In the first nine years of my life I was little different to a sheep or chicken. Essentially all actions I took were reactions. Usually I was guided along by well-meaning adults, and usually I had no reason to not comply. In this phase a basic civilising process took place, and I learned to enjoy life.

The alchemical culmination of this phase is tin, which corresponds to the planet Jupiter. Like Jupiter, it is large, larger-than-life in some ways. It’s bombastic and narcissistic but it is grounded in a healthy affirmation of life and therefore is necessary before the next phase can begin.

The iron phase began when I learned to take competitive sport seriously. Here the enjoyment of life becomes strong enough that a desire to challenge oneself and others arises. This happened at about the same time as puberty began, and with that came a desire to kill other males.

This is the phase when it becomes useful for a child to learn a martial art, or when it becomes enjoyable to seriously develop a set of skills for a competitive sport. Fittingly for iron, during this phase I became a harder individual, but in becoming so I also became a more useful one, in the same way that tools of iron are much more useful than tools of clay.

Its apogee was an incident on a rugby field where I hit an opposing ball carrier so hard in a tackle that I broke my own collarbone on impact and was knocked to the ground. He and I had developed a grudge over the course of the game, hitting each other harder and harder in tackles to try to show off who was strongest. I was about 15kg lighter than him and resorted to a shouldercharge to make up for it.

Unfortunately, he saw he coming and put the shoulder in himself, and I came off second-best (in an odd coincidence, that player, Simon P. Murphy, went on to become the author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, published by this company!).

The incident taught me to appreciate the limits of the sphere of iron. It was effectively where I learned the limitations of aggression and violence, and that knowing how to guide aggression intelligently was much more important than sheer volume of aggression.

It represented a softening to something of greater value, and this was represented alchemically by the phase of silver. This was also where I learned the value of intelligence. On the rugby field it didn’t seem like intelligence was worth much, as it appeared to me mostly about strength. But knowing how to direct one’s strength, not strength itself, was the real ability of value.

This phase began around age 18 and involved going to university. At university it is expected that one has gotten over the testosterone-fueled dominance battling of the phase of iron and therefore that one can work on polishing oneself up.

For me, embarking on the path of silver began with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology, and with losing my virginity to a Swedish nursing student. Upon managing both of these things I developed an appreciation for what intelligence had to offer the world.

I learned to use my own intelligence to go travelling and work around the world, spending three years in Europe and a year in other foreign climes. During this time I learned a few languages, and upgraded my education to a Master’s degree, and by the end of this nine-year block I was capable of thinking logically and rationally.

Being able to think intelligently is an ability that dazzles those still on the level of iron or clay, and as such it corresponds to the reflective ability of sunlight off a mirror. But intelligence itself is not, by itself, necessarily an expression of the will of God.

The silver became, in itself, more alive, and this moved me into the realm of mercury. This was represented in the material world by doing a lot of bar work. Here I learned to become silver-tongued, and to crack jokes, and to parry insults into harmless banter, and to be glib and slick and easygoing.

Seven grams of psilocybin mushrooms, taken shortly after I turned 27, marked the end of this phase of silver and mercury. These I had been given by a hippie workmate upon expressing to him what I felt to be the mental health benefits of smoking cannabis, especially for someone like me who had long suffered problems from nausea and insomnia.

I recall, at the peak of the trip, standing before God and being asked how much I thought I could handle, and replying that I wanted the full measure. In that moment I became entirely reunited with God and understood that I was forgiven for all errors, past and future.

This experience obliterated my mind, and taught me that everything I knew was wrong. I had been granted a glimpse into the face of the divine, but because of my ego and attachment to false self I was not immediately able to manifest the knowledge that I had been granted in my everyday life.

I had two options: to abandon the shamanic path and dismiss the insights gleaned from psychedelics as delusions and insanities, or to accept the challenge of the phase of gold.

I accepted the challenge of the phase of gold, and this involved a willful refusal to allow myself to forget the insights that I had been granted at the peak of the mushroom trips, such as an insight into the true nature of consciousness, or the fact that the contents of consciousness could be represented as a Great Fractal.

The culmination of this phase was writing a manuscript called The Pyrrhonist, an exercise in questioning reality from first principles. This caused the complete disintegration of my entire personality and of everything I believed to be real. I systematically questioned every belief I had, even the most fundamental, and by the end of that process I had questioned the fundamentals of reality so thoroughly that I was mad.

At the nadir of this phase I spent ten days in a mental health unit.

This dark night of the soul served as an nitric acid, dissolving all of the less pure elements of my soul; I was completely humbled. I was forced to stand before the judgment of God and concede that the maintenance and preservation of my ego was a fool’s errand – not only did I make myself less happy, but everyone who encountered me got less out of it than they otherwise would have done.

At this point I had been completely broken, and was ready to rebuild.

This took another three years or so, and involved a kind of self-nurture that, ironically, I had been too selfish to previously allow myself, lest the softness made me weak. It also involved smoking a tremendous amount of cannabis, for the reason that this medicine prevented the pull of the body from dragging my frequency back down to clay because of pain and nausea.

I had to learn to accept that I was not and could never be judged by ephemeral concerns. I embarked on an attempt to purify my soul, which involved abstinence from all of tobacco, alcohol and women.

This last of the four nine-year blocks of my life ended this week, upon turning 36. It ended with my acceptance of the fact that I feel entirely at peace and that there is nothing, fundamentally to fear. I am absolved of all sin and can take my part in the play.

This, I feel, is the lesson of the element of gold. It cannot shine directly on people, in the manner of silver, because where people become blinded and dazzled by silver they become humbled by gold, and in being humbled they become resentful, and in becoming resentful they become destructive.

Gold, being the softest of all metals, can least tolerate that destructive will, and so it has to learn to be subtle. Its essence is therefore gentleness and precision. Working on the level of gold means learning to influence on the level of spirit, not just the level of mind (as is silver).

I feel that now, at age 36, a certain alchemical process has come to its end and that now I can live on whatever level of clay, iron, silver or gold is necessary for the environment that I am in, now that I know how to tune into the appropriate frequency.

The Four Feminine and the Four Masculine Elements

Most readers are familiar with the concept of there being four classical elements, and that those classical elements are fire, air, water and earth. Those four elements do indeed form a complete quadripartite system, but this system is itself a feminine perspective on the ideal of a quadripartite system. This essay looks at its masculine counterpart as well.

The difference is that both sets of four flow from only one of from what can be described as The Fundamental Masculine Orientation and The Fundamental Feminine Orientation. Fundamentally, a masculine orientation will see the world in terms of differences, and a feminine orientation will see the world in terms of similarities.

This is because the masculine tends to measure itself against other men in a hierarchy, and to struggle to become greater than other men, whereas the feminine tends to smooth differences over for the sake of group solidarity, and in doing so implicitly asserts that no-one is any greater than anyone else.

The four feminine elements are known as the four classical elements of fire, air, water and earth. These are feminine elements because they all have equal value – the world and life could not exist without any of the four.

They are also known as feminine elements because they directly correspond to the natural, physical world, which is feminine in contrast to the masculine world of ideals. The earth refers to the clay underneath us, the water refers to the rain, the oceans and the rivers, the air refers to that which we breathe and move around in and the fire refers to the light of the Sun and the stars.

More precisely, it can be said, as Aristotle did, that fire represents that which is hot and dry, air that which is hot and wet, water that which is cold and wet and earth that which is cold and dry.

The four masculine elements have been known for as long as the four feminine elements – but this fact is not understood by all. They are even more esoteric and secret than the four feminine elements because they refer to the spiritual world that modern people have become blind to, whereas the feminine elements refer to the material.

They can be described as clay, iron, silver and gold. These are masculine elements because they refer to an explicit hierarchy in which the latter three elements are the result of a refinement process performed on the element previous.

Firstly, one has a state of clay. This could be considered analogous to the natural proportions of fire, air, water and earth in the material world, i.e. those that were present without any conscious effort to refine them.

What naturally happens after then is a hardening of some part of the clay, into iron. In the natural world this has taken the form of the development of bones, muscles, horns, spikes and fangs. These developments were a masculinisation in that they made the extant chaotic and potential-rich element of clay into something of defined shape and application, like a tool.

The correct balance of clay and iron represents a further refinement of the natural world, this time into silver. This has a greater value than both iron and clay because of its optimal balance of both. Silver is harder than clay but softer than iron, and because of this more intelligent utility it shines with higher value.

The highest refinement is that of gold, which is the correct balance of clay, iron and silver. This is considerably more complicated than just balancing masculine and feminine, and as a result gold is the rarest of all of the masculine elements.

Note that the four masculine elements are abstractions, and as such they do not directly correspond to anything in the material world. Thus, what counts as gold and silver is often a matter of opinion (value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder).

Thus we can see that the four masculine elements relate to a kind of alchemy, in that they describe in metaphor a willful attempt to raise one’s level of consciousness (where clay = completely unrefined, iron = partially refined, silver = mostly refined and gold = completely refined) whereas the four feminine elements relate to materialist science in that they are a description of the natural world (for example, fire = plasma, air = gas, water = water and earth = solid).

Essentially, the masculine is concerned with up and down, and the feminine is concerned with in and out. This is the ultimate difference between the two fundamental orientations.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto XII

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages 949-1067), Breivik continues to evaluate strategies and tactics for terrorist acts. Chillingly, here he writes specifically about the benefits of targeting a party conference of social democrats, for the reason that security will probably be poor, as well as expounding on why this would be so excellent a propaganda move for the cultural conservatives.

This section continues the high detail discussion about how to best carry about a terror attack. Given the comprehensive nature of the rest of the document when it comes to listing Islamic crimes, one is left with the impression that an extreme amount of thought went into the planning for the massacre that Breivik did carry out.

The idea that the ends justify the means comes through very clearly in this section. On the subject of attacking a left-wing party gathering with a flamethrower, he writes that “A severely burned category A or B traitor will in reality become a living symbol of what awaits individuals guilty of trying to sell their own people into Islamic slavery.”

There is something grimly medieval about mutilating living people to let them serve as a reminder of what befalls traitors, and this section is much darker and more demented than the sections about history. One is reminded of the admonition not to lose one’s own humanity in the course of warfare.

Again the paranoid nature of the rest of the document shines through when Breivik writes, of the largest annual conference of Norwegian investigative journalists, “98% of them are considered quality category B traitor targets”. With a worldview like this, Breivik could justify killing almost anyone.

Unsettlingly for us at VJM Publishing, this explicitly includes us – “90%+ of [writers] support multiculturalism and usually portray their world view through their works.” So we would also be marked for death if Breivik had his way, as those who work in the arts and recreational services tend to have broadly leftist sympathies.

The descriptions of how to break out from being pinned down by Police forces during an operation read like Breivik is writing about a video game. One passage describes how a car can be stolen and driven through any cordon that the first wave of Police officers might set up. This gives the impression that Breivik must have spent countless hours in dark plotting and fantasising.

Reassuringly, Breivik is able to demonstrate a sense of moderation. On the subject of using nuclear weapons in terrorism he writes that this “would normally inflict too many civilian casualties and it is therefore hard to imagine how nuclear weapons could benefit our cause.”

Breivik emphasises in this section the need to keep “civilian” casualties at a minimum. By this, of course, he means people who are not leftists. One is further reminded of the paranoid and oppositional nature of the document. It is also grandiose, which comes through in passages such as the description of how to blow up a nuclear reactor for the sake of financial damage to the “mutilculturalist regime”.

An unappreciated irony, at least on Breivik’s part, is that the document repeatedly emphasises how important it is that any prospective “operative” avoid getting flagged by the domestic security and intelligence services, yet it is possession of this document itself, with its voluminous advice for how to carry out terror attacks, which is most likely to get a person flagged by said spooks.

In fact, given that Breivik actually did go on to carry out a mass shooting, possession of this document is possibly the biggest red flag one could raise to the security services. Instead of being titled “A European Declaration of Independence” it could just as well be titled “A European Declaration of War.”