Mainstream political discourse is hopelessly divided into the two poorly-defined camps of left and right. Leftists believe they’re the good and nice people against the evil and nasty rightists, and rightists believe they’re the good and tough people against the evil and weak leftists. The truth is that both sides are fuckwits.
The left vs. right axis is bullshit anyway – it’s completely arbitrary. Leftists claim to be for the working class, then dump hordes of violent refugees into working-class neighbourhoods. Rightists claim to be conservatives, but have conserved nothing, being more than happy to sell their descendants’ inheritance at discount price.
The truth is that there is a multitude of different axes upon which we can divide people’s political attitudes. The left vs. right axis has been subject to so many lies over the decades that talking about it no longer conveys any useful information. But there are at least three political axes that are still useful.
First: Authoritarian vs. Libertarian.
Mainstream academia likes to pretend that there’s no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism. As anyone who has read The Gulag Archipelago knows, this is bullshit. Left-wingers are more than happy to dictate how others are allowed to live, as evidenced by the creeping spread of cancel culture.
Right-wing authoritarians exist, of course, in the form of theocrats, and centrist ones exist in the form of Nazis. But fighting against one or two of the three kinds, while ignoring the malice of the others, is foolish. All that can be achieved by such an approach is to let authoritarianism in through the backdoor.
George Orwell summarised this insight best when he wrote that “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” As a simple comparison of the American Revolution versus the French and Russian ones makes clear, libertarian revolutions tend to go much better than authoritarian ones.
Second: Globalist vs. Nationalist.
The received wisdom for most of the last 100 years has been that globalisation is inevitable. The reality is that increasing globalisation is dependent on increasing energy use, and we’re running out of the fossil fuels that have provided us with so much cheap energy. As this cheap energy declines, so too will the impetus for globalism, and nationalism will ebb back into fashion.
As with the previous axis, there can be left-wing globalists and right-wing ones, and the same is true of nationalism. A person’s position on the globalist vs. nationalist axis will tell you more about their position on issues such as immigration, free trade and military interventionism than their position on the left vs. right axis.
Globalist interests overlap heavily with authoritarian ones in the age of the World Economic Forum. In any case, there are plenty of left-wing reasons to be a nationalist, and plenty of right-wing reasons to be a globalist. So it’s more indicative just to say if you are a nationalist or a globalist. The truth is that many people use the labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’ to hide the fact that they are globalists.
Third: Materialist vs. Idealist.
People act as if someone’s position on materialism vs. idealism is just a philosophical whimsy, a private matter of faith with no import. The reality is that people who don’t believe in an afterlife behave predictably differently to those who do.
As Erwin Schroedinger realised, people who don’t believe in an afterlife have little moral incentive to act altruistically. If the brain generates consciousness, and if the death of the physical body means the extinction of consciousness, then all possible karmic debt for bad actions is annulled upon the death of the physical body. If no afterlife exists, then death wipes the slate clean.
Because many people who claim to believe in God actually don’t, and are just superstitious, it’s impossible to tell from a person’s assertions if they are an idealist or not. It’s possible to tell from their actions, though – if they act as if it’s possible to truly get away with fucking another person over, chances are they’re a materialist.
In summary, dividing people into left and right is low-IQ, and rarely helps a person make accurate predictions about people’s future behaviour. The left-right spectrum considers globalist neoliberals to be centre-right, and nationalist socialists to be far-right. It considers ultra-conservative theocrats similar to low-tax anarcho-capitalists. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
The next time someone claims to be proudly or staunchly left-wing or right-wing, ignore it, and ask yourself where they stand on the questions of authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, globalism vs. nationalism and materialism vs. idealism. That will tell you much more about them than their position on left vs. right.
The case of Baby Will has received international attention in recent weeks. Will needed heart surgery and his parents, quite reasonably, requested that the surgeons use blood that did not contain a Covid vaccine. The logic of Will’s parents was that the Covid vaccines have not been adequately tested, and therefore are not safe to put into an infant. The Government disagreed.
The Government’s position, as it always is, is that the Government decides what you’re allowed to do and not allowed to do. It doesn’t matter if you’re the one that ends up suffering from getting it wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a postgraduate degree in the topic under discussion. Might makes right, and the Government has the might, therefore the Government is right.
The Government didn’t want Baby Will to be given unvaccinated blood. No official reason was given, but from unofficial statements it appears their chief concern was the logistical expense and hassle of needing to give unvaccinated blood to everyone who wanted it. As is often the case, the Government was reluctant to treat people humanely in case it set a precedent that they would be expected to live up to.
However, there was an impasse. Will’s heart surgery was urgent. Any delay waiting for official permission to use unvaccinated blood risked his death.
Rather than accede to the parents’ request, the Government uplifted Baby Will, sending Police officers in to rip him out of his mother’s arms. The surgery was performed with vaccinated blood, and Will was returned to his parents. As far as the Government is concerned, the story ends there. But questions remain.
If Baby Will had been given vaccinated blood, and if this blood turned out to have been harmful on account of that the vaccine had not been properly tested, and thereby may have had unexpected side-effects, the Government would have taken no responsibility for any of it. But Will’s parents – and Will – would be the ones who had to wear the consequences.
All the hypotheticals reduce to one question: whose baby is it anyway?
In the ancient Roman pater familias system, the fathers of the family exercised absolute control over the individual members. Not only did those fathers have the legal right to kill members of their own family, they were even obliged to in some cases, such as obvious deformities. Life was cheap in the ancient world.
Today we don’t have the same resource scarcity that Ancient Rome did. There is no longer a fear that feeding deformed children will lead to famine. So now we have a compromise position. The popular opinion today is that parents may exercise authority over their children, subject to certain exclusions that are widely agreed to cause harm.
Difficulty arises when it comes to areas where the existence of harm is not widely agreed upon. The real question is who gets to decide, in these edge cases, what constitutes harm. Like so many social issues, this question tends to break down into two sides: one authoritarian and the other libertarian.
The authoritarian position is that the Government should get to decide. In the case of Will, that means that the Government decides whether Covid-vaccinated blood is safe or not.
The libertarian position is, of course, that the parents, having the closest kinship bond with the child, ought to decide. It is the parents who will end up suffering the most if the Covid-vaccinated blood kills the child or not.
Unfortunately, the authoritarian side of social issues is in the ascendancy thanks to various recent outcomes like the cannabis referendum. With that referendum, a narrow majority of us said, yes, the Government can lock us up if we presume to decide for ourselves what goes into our own bodies. Because of outcomes like this, and others, the authoritarians within the Government have become emboldened.
As a result of the weak pro-freedom sentiments among Kiwis, the Government has seen fit to override the wishes of Will’s parents, reasoning that the New Zealand population will accept such authoritarianism. And we mostly have. The authoritarians in the New Zealand public howled for Will to be taken away and his parents prosecuted. So far, there have been no prosecutions, but a precedent has been set.
A predictable risk for the New Zealand people is that the same logic is next used for gender reassignment surgery. Globohomo likes to make the argument that denying gender reassignment surgery is risking that the trans person commit suicide. So in the eyes of the Government, denying gender reassignment surgery can carry a similar degree of risk to delaying Will’s surgery. And they were willing to uplift a baby over that.
Being torn away from one’s parents is one of the most traumatic experiences a child can go through. In order to justify it, the Government has to have excellent reason to believe that they’re preventing significant harm. In the case of Baby Will, the only potential for harm came from the Government itself. As such, they are very much the bad guys in this story.
For many people – especially Germans – nationalism is equated with right-wing politics. We are told that nationalism is necessarily ethnosupremacist, and that nationalists must necessarily hate and want to destroy outsiders. Like most aspects of the popular narrative, this is total bullshit. This essay explains.
Following their victory in World War II, Communist forces realised that they could silence all of their enemies by calling them Nazis. So they did. Anyone opposing the globalist left – whether nationalist right, nationalist left or globalist left – was called a Nazi, and hounded into silence.
When those same Communists completed their Long March Through the Institutions at the turn of the century, and took control of the mainstream political narrative, the Communist weltanschauung was normalised, to the exclusion of all others. By today, we’re expected to believe that the left wing are inherently globalist and that the right wing are inherently nationalist.
The truth is more like the following:
The globalism vs. nationalism axis and the right vs. left axis are orthogonal. So it’s entirely possible to have left-wing nationalists and right-wing globalists. Having one Nazi/Commie right-wing nationalist/left-wing globalist axis only tells half of the story.
Nationalism comes from the word ‘nation’, which is a cognate with ‘natural’, ‘nativity’ and ‘nature’. It refers to the fact that, as tribes expanded beyond provinces, they came to organise themselves as nations, so that it was possible to speak of French, English, German, Russian etc. nations.
A nation, then, is the natural organisational model of a people.
Like everything else natural, a nation has a masculine, yang aspect and a feminine, yin aspect. In microcosm, this is reflected in the way that families have a father and a mother. Analogous to parents, there is a right-wing nationalism that reflects nationalist approaches to masculinity, and a left-wing nationalism that reflects nationalist approaches to femininity.
Right-wing nationalism, then, is about being a father for the nation. In the same way that the father of a family protects that family from external threats, and gathers the resources that family needs to survive, right-wing nationalism is primarily concerned with defence, immigration and economics.
That right-wing nationalists have a reputation for opposing mass immigration is not surprising. The father of the family is the one tasked with keeping dangerous outsiders away from the family home, and, by analogy, the right-wing nationalists are tasked with keeping dangerous outsiders away from the national home.
Left-wing nationalism, by contrast, is about being a mother for the nation. So in the same way that the mother of a family creates and nurtures the next generation, left-wing nationalism is primarily concerned with education, health and housing.
Taxation is not a concern for left-wing nationalists. Right-wing nationalists don’t like paying taxes, reasoning that it’s better for families to learn how to be self-reliant. But left-wing nationalists are happy to crank taxes up, reasoning that the children of the nation need taking care of now.
In any case, whether right-wing or left-wing, nationalism is the natural form of governance.
Globalism is an unnatural form of governance. Only in the case of empire does a person become subject to decisions made by others who are neither blood nor language kin. Indeed, it can be argued that globalist consciousness is inevitably the enemy of the natural, nationalist, consciousness.
Right-wing globalism is about plundering and exploiting the nations in the service of international capital. Right-wing globalists want low corporate taxes, few regulations and reduced barriers to the flow of international capital and labour. The more immigration, the higher the house prices and the lower the labour costs, so the greater the bank profits.
Modern slavery was created by right-wing globalists looking for people to exploit for profit. The transatlantic slave trade, involving African slaves, Jewish merchants and white plantation owners, was one of the first major globalist enterprises. The East India Company was another famous one. Both were concerned primarily with maximising return to shareholders.
Left-wing globalism is about plundering and exploiting the nation in the service of international communism. So the left-wing globalists will demand that the nations burden themselves with refugees, and will demand that local workers be taxed to pay for it. They will constantly push for refugee resettlement and foreign aid.
The left-wing globalists don’t use economic arguments to convince nations to take in foreigners, but rather moral ones. Much like Christians (their fellows in slave morality) left-wing globalists heap shame on those unwilling to accept their logic. Anyone who doesn’t want the refugee quota is labelled cruel and callous. The fact that people already in the country need resources is of no matter to the left-wing globalist.
What both right-wing and left-wing globalists agree on is importing foreigners. This always serves globalist interests because foreigners only rarely have true solidarity with their host nations, and so mass immigration reliably weakens national consciousness, and weakening national consciousness makes it more difficult for nations to organise to resist globalist depredation.
Nationalists don’t actually have a problem with foreigners in general, any more than someone who cares about his family has a problem with people outside his family. They merely demand that the foreigners that do come provide a net benefit to their host nation. In practice, this primarily means: no cheap labour driving down working-class wages and driving up working-class housing.
In summary, it’s entirely possible for a left-wing person to call themselves a nationalist, and to oppose both right-wing and left-wing globalism. Understanding this requires that people look past the crude Nazi vs. Commie narrative and realise that globalism vs. nationalism is the true political struggle of our times.
The title is necessarily misleading here, because for reasons that will hopefully one day become quite clear to you, you cannot discover yourself any more than the eye can see itself directly. Where we do have space to act is in introducing novelty to our otherwise well habituated lives.
The following exercises, whilst beneficial, are not designed with comfort or accomplishment in mind. In fact, many of these exercises will feel about as comfortable and familiar as stepping into a shower fully dressed. There is an enormous comfort in the tried and true, and conversely there can be great discomfort in the discovery of that which is unfamiliar, even when it is wholesome.
The problem with truth is that it is the slipperiest thing in the known universe if your goal is to arrive at it. We can’t grab hold of it for inspection, or to congratulate ourselves upon having caught it. We are it, but it is not ours to own. We can however consent to look with the eyes of innocence, but it asks something in return, and that is postponing our insistence upon asserting the presumed known, which includes the comfortable and the familiar.
One day, all of the familiar could suddenly be gone. This could come by way of death, but not necessarily. The important thing to know is that death, like any other psychic or physical upheaval, is not an obstacle to your ongoing existence. If you ever become determined to uncover that which lies beneath your mind by whichever method, you may end up with these discoveries in spades. For our purposes here, as an introductory exercise in which you are by small degrees introduced to the nature of your soul, it is sufficient to look for the light shining through tiny cracks in the walls of our minds.
Exercise One:Do not justify your choices or actions before other people and do not give in to the temptation to defend your image.
This one is simple and straightforward, yet the core message of this exercise, if explored to its fullest capacity, will reveal the most brilliant jewel of your being; it will also completely suck at first. Make no mistake, it is going to feel terrible – but so would detoxing off of a drug such as nicotine or heroin.
Anything by way of action in defending your ego you thought was going to work in fact didn’t, so what do you have to lose? People berate, judge and insult us in many ways, but what does defending our image actually achieve? Is that which we are defending even real? Really? Do you know that for certain? And if it is indeed real and factual, why should the truth require your defense? Is it temporary nuisance, or do the same issues keep cropping up again and again? Do we really need to either become thick-skinned, or a master of witty comebacks? What about not participating, inwardly or outwardly?
We often feel like defending our image and justifying ourselves is not only so familiar, but feels like coming up for air when we have been trapped under water for a time. It is less an activity than it is a compulsion attached to suffering.
The reason that this feels so central to the way you are used to functioning in social situations is that because of the way humans have been conditioned in our upbringing, you have grown up having conflated the ideas about who you are, with who you truly are.
This is an error of the first order – something you thought was real was not. That has a lot of repercussions, and it is going to take some getting used to once you really see through it. The not so well-hidden secret is that your justifications and personal defenses are intimately linked with your suffering and your sense of separateness. That is what makes you feel like you ought to defend yourself.
The promotion and defense of your false image is the ongoing cause of great pain.
Choosing to not act upon even these often forceful compulsions of psychic activity initially presents a unique discovery when ventured into, which is that you don’t actually have to follow your each and every compulsion. Not only that, but because it is not even really you, it will not ultimately impact you. In other words, the real you cannot be hurt by this. In fact, you can only be liberated by this. Try this often enough and you will eventually discover that whatever people say about you, doesn’t touch upon that which is observably and changelessly true about who you are. We have it collectively wired internally that the complete opposite is true, and the cultural world we inhabit is more than happy to encourage this lie.
If you decide to keep going with this, it could lead you to enormous discoveries. You may also decide that this isn’t for you quite yet. Ego or false self can even in some instances lead to a very buoyant and upbeat life while things seem to be going right for it. The common varieties of ego, however, I find to be quite run-down, generally miserable and exhausted, and very much in need of retirement.
It is relatively easy to stay true to inquiry when there is great pain, but we often don’t recognise what pain includes. It also includes augmentations to our ego such as being told we are wonderful, intelligent, or otherwise special. A more advanced version of this exercise is not to allow compliments to influence your inner states, not because they are true or untrue, but because your worth is elsewhere and independent. Whether you are being insulted or complimented, and you accept it, what is really happening is that you are being presented with a power differential, and you are going into agreement with it. That is a game, and you aren’t being forced to play it, it is a proposition.
All you are doing in this exercise is not agreeing to the power differential being proposed. Do this often enough and it will soon be very clear that what is changelessly real is not subject to personal, social and cultural tides.
Another way of looking at all of this is that one day, your body will be deceased and likely either buried in the ground somewhere, reduced to ashes, or perhaps even strewn out in the open for wild animals to pick amongst. In that situation, if people continue to say upsetting or hurtful things about you, what is going to happen then? One day you will not have any power over this, so you might as well introduce yourself to the truth of the situation now in order to get some benefit out of it.
Exercise Two:Observe the wave-like nature of the present moment
Place your attention on the fact that as time passes, or seems to pass, it consists of an energetic wave, very much like the waves upon the ocean. In the case of water, it appears to be the case that water is moving along, whereas really it is the energy moving through the water itself that seamlessly composes the wave in each instance.
That wave you occupy is very, very special. It is not just an idea. You are always at the peak of this movement, and it is impossible not to be. This is why it is always the present moment whether your body is five, fifty, or one hundred years old. We are all here now, and there is no option but to be here now. This makes this moment supremely worth paying attention to.
All activities, all birth and death come through this one gateless gate. Notice it with diligence and it will reward you with insights beyond what you currently conceive of as knowable. This is not a ploy, and it is not a trick of perspective.
Exercise Three:Become aware of the stream of thought and emotions passing through awareness
Notice at every available opportunity the nature of thought and feeling. You do not need to apply analysis to this, simply observe. Eventually what will begin to happen is that in a very tangible way, it will sink in that you are not a person at all – although being a person is included in the space you currently inhabit as awareness. All things, people, thoughts, emotions and events, real or imagined, come to pass within the theatre of this space. This awareness itself is not localised in space and time, at least not in our usual way of thinking, and its contents are capable of endless permutations whilst that which is unchanging remains shiningly, eternally changeless.
Such is the power of the psyche.
At some point in human history, as well as in our ‘personal’ history, we decided something else was more important, or more worthy of attention. Once you see this, you will not be able to fathom why, nor will you be able to return to the world’s illusions with anything like unwavering commitment. Awareness will become the primary value of your life, your most treasured am-ness.
Plato used the Analogy of the Cave in which the dedicated troglodytes who eventually made it out of the darkness were blinded by the sunlight above, and were thus unable to see the contents of the cave in the same way ever again. The difficulty of seeing this is that your perception of the things that you thought were so important before will be greatly altered. Most people I know who have seen this have had major personal upheavals as their perspective shifts.
You will likely find the majority of cultural institutions and things everyone else is enamoured by quite trivial and uninteresting by comparison. Be forewarned, this isn’t a game. The perception of the soul is a serious business, even though this experience on earth is something of a temporary game. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you would be unwise to seek this for thrills, or for a mere change in scenery.
Dedicated inquiry can and will turn your comfortable inner world upside-down. The only way to stomach the often disruptive results is to have touched upon either an insatiable desire for Truth for its own sake, or a total dissatisfaction with the flimsy and shallow offerings of the material world. You are warned, but you are also encouraged and supported. Eventually every entity on this planet will have to proceed beyond this point anyway, so you may as well start as soon as you sense that you are ready.
Exercise Four: challenge the authority of displacement.
Have you ever noticed within yourself a kind of internal lockdown where you suddenly go into unconscious, automatic and usually negative patterns or thoughts or behaviours? One word for this is displacement. You are being shut down and kicked off your seat of consciousness so that the real ‘you’ is no longer there to observe, learn and act anymore.
This habit is very deeply ingrained. It is a dysfunctional habit of the psyche that has been encouraged by a deeply confused and misled society. It happens most often when emotions which are very powerful such as anger or fear arise. They are strong stimuli that threaten to tug you down into unconsciousness like a swimmer being drawn into a swift, strong undercurrent.
The feeling when this is about to happen is a sense similar to when you first start to fall asleep at night. Witness it in action and get a feel for it so that you can understand the warning signs and remain seated for the coming events as consciousness. You will surprise yourself. Your willingness alone to pursue this will begin to net you immediate results. I know of no one person who has applied themselves willingly to the discipline of awareness whose life was not immeasurably enriched, and usually within a matter of months if not weeks.
For example: someone starts to insult you or imply something facetious about your actions or your motives. You feel the inner urge to react in some way, so you feel the pull to duck down behind a psychic shield. Now your psychological defense mechanisms are active. You are blind, in fact you are not there. Your third eye is squeezed shut whilst fear takes over to run its well scripted code. You begged the mind to keep you safe, and it is dutifully trying to do just that in the only way it knows how. It doesn’t work – at least not for the real you.
The mind’s habituation to withdraw from suffering IS what keeps suffering happening.
Originally, it is the misperception of separation that causes suffering, but it is our panicked reaction to escape that really keeps the fire of suffering alight. Psychological suffering is always represented in our body by some form of discomfort, physical pain or tension, and it is an excellent gauge of the truthfulness of our inner state.
Suffering is how the separate sense of self, being the false self, attempts to convince you that you are not whole, that you should withdraw like a snail into its shell, shrinking from reality. When believed and thus obeyed, it gives birth to inner hells. When firmly rejected, there comes a strange peace that passes all understanding. Despair cannot touch you.
Do you want to give anyone the power over you to turn you into an unconscious, reactive idiot? Does that line up with your inmost sense of who you truly are in spirit? Have you seen those plastic toy animals whose limbs are held erect by cable tension, and when you press the button, all the tension releases and the animal crumples into a heap? That is what you give people the power to do to you, even when you get very angry and respond with what we call ‘assertiveness’.
No one wants this slavery, because it is a lie against the truth of who we are. Once you know about it, that is sufficient motivation to act from a space of wisdom.
If you can stay awake during these episodes of rage, anger, anxiety and fear- and I guarantee that you have the capacity to – what a joy and wonder you will discover! None of it is real. It isn’t a real threat, it is all a mass hallucination. It is instructional in educational terms, yes, but not ultimately real. It is a dream of form we were all born into, with our consent. That birth didn’t happen ‘once upon a time’, it is repeated every day – this is the nature of re-birth. It is happening in every waking moment, every day.
You never need to let yourself throw a tantrum over a dream. Spend some time addressing the illusions of yourself and others – not with more arguments, but with awareness itself – then see what problems you have. Your efforts will be recognized as reality shifts around you to accommodate one who has eyes to see and ears to listen. You will encounter more and more openings and insights until there is only one timeless, uninterrupted seeing. Then, instead of piloting an insane ego that insists upon the totality of the universe being beaten into its preferred shape, you will become a willing student of reality.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
