The Spectrum Of Slavery

This essay claims that all people can be placed on a spectrum, wherein their point on that spectrum reflects how much of a slave they are. The totally enslaved are at the top, whereas the truly free are at the bottom. The exact position of any given person is primarily a matter of how much economic duress they are under.

Economic duress is a legal term, defined in such a way that the ruling class is almost never guilty of it. But, in practice, everyone not born into property ownership is subject to a kind of economic duress. The more extreme forms of it are slavery by another name – the term ‘wage slavery’ is not a complete exaggeration.

“Do this or I kill you” is maximum duress. This is the mainstream conception of slavery, inherited from the American plantation experience. It’s true that being forced to obey orders on pain of death is as extreme as duress can get. Someone at this level is at the very top of the spectrum of slavery.

Unbeknownst to many, slavery in other times and places wasn’t quite as awful thanks to the absence of the chattel aspect. There were often rules limiting the extent to which a slave owner could abuse their slaves (n.b. this is not a defence of slavery but an explication of the degrees of it).

“Do this or you will miss your rent, get kicked out into the street and die” is a high level of duress. Getting kicked out of your apartment is better than being killed, but it’s still a deeply unpleasant and stressful experience. If you have to keep working otherwise you get evicted, you don’t have a strong negotiating position.

Same with “Do this or I’ll replace you with some cheap labour”. The position of the employer in the West of 2023 might not be quite as strong as that of the plantation owner in the American South of 1850, but it’s almost as strong, for supply-side reasons. The Western worker of 2023 knows that he better not ask for raises to match inflation when there are a thousand Third Worlders lined up to replace him.

“Do this or you’ll have to look for another job” is no threat when the economy is humming and there are plenty of good employers willing to pay decent wages. When the economy is doing badly, it’s a significant level of duress. In a good economy looking for a new job is a mere hassle. In a bad economy, it raises the spectre of homelessness.

An actual free person, under no economic duress, can meet their needs for food, shelter and clothing without needing to obey an employer for money. This is the bottom of the spectrum of slavery, and surprisingly few people are here.

The simple rule is that anything improving the negotiating position of the worker decreases the extent of duress they are under, and moves them down the slavery spectrum towards free people.

Note that the more duress the worker is under, the greater the profits. This is why there is never a free market for labour. The ruling class will always try to put the working class under as much duress as possible, because this will suboptimalise the working class’s negotating position and optimalise the employer class’s negotiating position, thereby maximising ruling class profit and control.

If the worker needs the job or they will starve, it’s possible to negotiate them down to a minimum. Similar if they need to feed a family or pay a mortgage. Imagine, by contrast, that the worker wins $10 million in the lottery. Do they still need your job? Maybe not. If someone has $10 million sitting in the bank you can be sure that they only work because they want to.

Increasing the supply of labour weakens the negotiating position of the worker and thereby drives them towards slavery. Likewise, decreasing demand for labour (through e.g. raising interest rates) also drives the worker towards slavery.

Decreasing the supply of labour strengthens the negotiating position of the worker and thereby aids them towards freedom. Likewise, increasing demand for labour (through e.g. raising wages) also drives the worker towards freedom.

A sharp decrease in the supply of labour, such as through the Black Death or World War II, leads to unprecedented prosperity for the remaining workers. Employers are forced to pay a high wage because they have so few options.

Thus it can be seen that the intent of allowing mass immigration is not to create freedom for foreign workers but to deny it to domestic ones. It was to push the workers back down that Western countries opened their borders to cheap labour imports in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The end result, by 2023, is that workers in Western countries can’t own homes – slaves by any other name.

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Clean And Dirty Information, And How To Tell The Difference

This essay describes a concept in information science. This is a concept that is of extreme importance in today’s Post-Truth Age, now that the media is even more full of propaganda than usual. It relates to the art and science of deciding whether a given set of information is trustworthy.

There are already conceptions of clean vs. dirty data. However, those conceptions are inadequate, because cleanliness is considered the same thing as accuracy. As such, they are not useful, because it would be simpler and easier just to use the term ‘accurate’ instead of ‘clean’.

A useful conception of clean vs. dirty information has to take into account the moral dimension of the people promulgating the information. Essentially, then, clean information comes from a clean source who cares about the truth only, with no view to the propaganda value of the information, and dirty information comes from a dirty source, who doesn’t care about the truth at all.

This division is very simple, but applying it in the real world of propaganda is highly complex.

For one thing, it takes great knowledge of the world and of the people in it to make accurate judgments about other people’s biases. The usual, poorly-educated approach is to trust people based on whether they have attributes in common with oneself: race, class, education, occupation etc. The more qualities they have in common, the more trusted.

Another poorly-educated approach used by many people is to determine truth based on whether the speaker has a high rank in the listener’s herd or not. So one’s pastor, boss, father or club leader becomes the authority to which one listens. All that matters is a high position in a friendly dominance hierarchy. This was the approach described in detail by Edward Bernays in Propaganda.

It can safely be said that all information from a political source is dirty. Any press release put out by a political party can be considered filthy. So can any article or book written by a member of a political party. The greater the influence of politics on any source of information, the dirtier it is.

It can also safely be said that most information from religious sources, particularly Abrahamic ones, is dirty. This is especially true of those who are seeking to gain followers for money or political power. Anyone who says that you have to obey them or suffer everlasting pushishment in a Hell Realm can be confidently written off as a dirty source. But in this regard, as with others, the world’s religions vary greatly.

Here it’s necessary to look at the reputations of the people pushing the information. Have they murdered their way around the world over the centuries? Do they regularly sexually abuse their children? Do they practice barbarisms such as infant genital mutilation? Do they have transparently sadistic animal slaughter protocols?

Perhaps there was once a time when the mainstream media was a clean source of information. This was back in the times when honest people chose to become journalists for the sake of spreading the truth (i.e. before the Charlie Mitchells took over). Today, no rational or intelligent person can trust anything in the mainstream media.

It used to be possible to trust scientists, because a lot of the people drawn to academia are the sort of person who values truth above merely material concerns such as political power or wealth. But then corporations started buying research favourable to their products. It turns out that scientists are only slightly harder to buy than politicians.

Who actually does tell the truth?

In order to reliably tell the truth, a person has to believe that there are positive consequences for speaking truth and negative consequences for telling lies. They have to believe in something like karma, or at least the Law of Attraction, before they can be trusted to put the truth before their own interests.

This is to say that it’s possible to trust genuinely spiritual people. But there, again, is another major problem: usually it’s impossible to tell if someone is genuinely spiritual or not. The low-IQ approach is to trust people at the top of the same religious herd as yourself. High-IQ people go on the reputation of the source among other high-IQ people.

If you would ask the ten most intelligent people you know who they consider clean sources of information, and if more than one of them suggested the same source, you could be reasonably sure that source was clean. This is the same logic as academic peer review, and, while an effective way of distinguishing clean from dirty, it’s far from infallible.

The tough news is that there’s no truly reliable way to tell if someone is a clean source of information other than going through everything they have written or said, comparing all facts therein stated to known truths, and subjecting their logic to the most rigorous examination. If they regularly make predictions that turn out to be false, that’s a good sign they’re a dirty source.

Perhaps the two rules of thumb are firstly: never trust an authority figure, because they have reason to lie to you. Secondly: prefer to trust someone who is trusted by smart people and distrusted by dumb people.

The great thing about clean information is that it can be absorbed without the need to take time and energy correcting for bias. A truly clean source of information is worth gold in the information marketplace of 2023. In this age of pervasive AI-generated content though, best of luck finding it.

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Elon Musk: Kshatriya

In the ancient Laws of Manu, a quadripartite division of society is made. Known in the West as the “caste system”, it divides people into prescribed social roles based on the type of person they naturally are. There are few more controversial ideas in the West today than the caste system, but there’s an esoteric truth to it that cannot be ignored.

In this conception there are brahmin (the scholars, priests and teachers), kshatriya (the warriors, rulers and administrators), vaishya (the merchants and farmers) and shudra (servants and labourers). Each person can be assigned into any one of these castes depending on the gunas they inherit, where gunas are understood to be properties, qualities or attributes.

This essay contends that this caste system reflects the true alchemical divisions of humankind.

Plato, in the Parable of the Metals in Republic, wrote about a division of human souls into gold, silver, bronze and iron. These are very closely analogous to the four castes, such that those with souls of gold are brahmins, silver are kshatriyas, bronze are vaishyas and iron are shudras.

These divisions are not as arbitrary as they might first appear. They come very close to a natural fourfold division of the Great Masculine Axis, namely into two precious metals and two useful metals, wherein the two precious metals represent the wealth of the royalty and the wealth of the gentlemen, and the two useful metals represent the commerce of the merchantry and the tools with which the peasantry works the soil.

This division, much like the cycle of energies represented in the Quadrijitu, is natural and archetypal. As such, it can be found in the West today even if not acknowledged. Not only can the souls of people be placed along this four-step axis, so can the spirits of times and places.

The current problem in the West is that we have sunk into a dark age, deeper and darker than any before. As such, there are no longer enough brahmins or kshatriyas for quality government. Society now mostly produces shudras, with the vaishyas forming the ruling caste.

In situations like these, what’s needed is for a kshatriya to rise up – a man of silver above the men of bronze and iron – and to lead the people to somewhere greater. It’s necessary for a higher man, with a higher vision, to lead the way, and for the masses to follow. This kshatriya must open the space for a new generation of brahmins to thrive before a true Golden Age can begin.

Enter Elon Musk.

The West today is marked by a complete collapse in spiritual values. The vast majority of us are soulless, nihilistic consumers, and most of the rest are clinging to the corpse of a religion that no-one really believes in any more. Nietzsche’s prediction that widespread atheism would lead to widespread misery comes more true every year.

We’re primed to enter a new spiritual paradigm. Never before has the West been more ready to receive a new interpretation of the perennial philosophy. All that’s needed is for some great king to make space for the priesthood of that new interpretation.

In purchasing Twitter, and in firing most of the censors, such that Twitter has become the Internet’s premier free-speech platform, Musk demonstrated to the whole world that there are values higher than profits. Free speech is such an important value that, without it, society is lost, and he understands this. Musk has raised a middle finger to the totalitarians and to their attempts at curtailing free speech.

This essay also contends that Musk is the first of the great kshatriya souls that will be born into the West as we pass out of our Iron Age and into a new Golden Age. These kshatriyas will create the conditions for the brahmins to expand into. That the brahmins have souls of gold means that, once enough of them are present, a class of philosopher-kings can be formed.

There are few things kshatriyas like more than making merchants seethe, which is why Musk trolls the money-worshippers so hard. Merchants can’t understand Twitter being used for a higher purpose (i.e. more than mere profit), hence why they’re so upset right now. But this is only the beginning.

If Elon Musk would form the provisions for a new spiritual school – one that is tasked specifically with bringing genuine spirituality back to mankind – the seething would be unprecedented. He would truly be the kshatriya king that created a portal for brahmins to re-enter the world.

The foremost sign that such a thing might be possible was when Musk smoked cannabis on the Joe Rogan show. Rogan is one of those who are aware that cannabis, along with other substances, is a spiritual sacrament. How long until Musk walks the pathway from cannabis to psilocybin and DMT? From at least one vantage point, that seems like his fate.

Elon Musk could be more than merely an heir to an emerald mining empire. He could be the spark that sets off a new spiritual era. The way he has run Twitter suggests that he is aware of higher values, something above the prime vaishya value of profit. Could he be the conduit through which higher values return to Western life?

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Five Aspects Of Masculinity

People are deeply confused today about what masculinity is. There are many differing thoughts, depending on the emotional maturity of the person thinking. Looking at masculinity from an alchemical point of view, there are five different aspects to be considered, corresponding to the top five steps of the Mithraic Ladder.

For young boys and emotionally retarded men, masculinity is about physical force, especially violence. The spiritually stunted tend to think of everything in terms of who could beat up who. These men represent the element of iron, at the third step of the Mithraic Ladder.

In pre-civilisational societies, or in societies of feral humans (such as criminal gangs), the dominance hierarchy is all about ferocity and physical strength. This sort of behaviour is masculine in a sense, but that’s only one very limited aspect of masculinity.

A higher kind of man grows out of the violence and learns how to make love. He represents the element of copper, which is the first of the precious metals on the Mithraic Ladder. Having realised, consciously or otherwise, that the point of fighting is to win women, the man of copper simplifies the procedure and simply works on making himself attractive to women.

Men who can readily attract women look down on brawlers as meatheads. If the meatheads take each other out, then the more women for the rest of us. In at least one major sense, men like this are far more masculine than the men of iron: they can attract women with less opposition.

A still higher kind of man grows out of cooming and learns social influence. The fifth step of the Mithraic Ladder is represented by silver, which is brilliant in comparison to the lowest four steps. This brilliance leads the man of silver to see a bigger picture, one that goes beyond mere dominance and pleasure to the creation of political structures.

Men at this level also look down on the brawler as a meathead, but on top of that they see the manwhore as a pointless coomer. The reasoning is that a man only needs one woman to have a family and children, so interacting with women beyond that is pointless unless one is seeking social influence.

A yet still higher kind of man judges his fellows on intelligence. Fighting, lovemaking and politics might entertain the gods to some extent, but they’re ultimately all mundane pleasures. Some rarer pleasures are only open to a few, no matter how hard they work. One of those pleasures is achieving a deep and accurate insight into the workings of Nature.

For men at this level, the level of mercury, mainstream interests no longer suffice. The aspect of mercury judges men on how far they have seen into the nature of reality. Fighting and lovemaking might be fun but they’re really for lower animals. Even gaining political power is barely respectworthy. The creative man, the one who can summon divine inspiration and transmute it into worldly forms, is higher than all of those.

The highest kind of man is spiritual. Men at this level are all but invisible to those who have not seen beyond. Despite this, their influence is the most powerful. These men of gold complete the divine calling begun by the men of mercury. The spiritual man has transcended the need to control the material world. Only the higher pleasures are still desired.

At the top level of the Mithraic Ladder, not even seeing beyond is enough. One must have fully integrated those visions, such that one’s own being radiates the divine. This is a conception of masculinity enormously far removed from the warrior at the level of iron. If the warrior imposes order upon the physical, the philosopher imposes order upon the metaphysical.

Complicating this admittedly one-dimensional view of masculinity are the great many bullshitters and bluffers. Because spiritual achievement is not something that can readily be measured, false gurus abound. The sour grapes of failing to assert oneself physically or sexually drives many a man to claim a spiritual acumen he doesn’t truly possess.

It must be emphasised that a man of true power is capable of representing all five of these aspects simultaneously, as per the needs of the situation. Plato may have been a superb philosopher, but he was also a superb wrestler. The completely masculine man is not limited to the level of gold, much less any other one of these five aspects.

These five conceptions of masculinity encompass the spectrum from most material to most spiritual. When times are tough, the men of iron will come to the fore. But when peace reigns, the men of gold start to shine through. The higher the proportion of men of gold in a society, the closer it is to divinity.

These five aspects of masculinity also correspond closely to Plato’s five stages of political decline, as described in Republic. Men of gold correspond to aristocracy, men of mercury to timocracy, men of silver to oligarchy, men of copper to democracy and men of iron to tyranny. Thus, the quality of any political system is primarily a reflection of the quality of the men who comprise it.

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