Clown World Chronicles: What is 'Cancel Culture'?

Clown World Chronicles: What is ‘Cancel Culture’?

Unlike most of the other terms in this book, ‘cancel culture’ does not have an easily discerned meaning. It refers to a very specific mentality that is mostly found in a very specific sort of person, both of which are becoming much more common nowadays. Understanding it is necessary if one wishes to understand Clown World and where it’s headed.

It’s not currently feasible, in the current political environment, to physically exterminate one’s enemies. There are laws against that sort of thing. Therefore, the way to destroy them is to silence them.

In the old days, tyrannical kings would cut the tongues out of anyone they did not wish to speak. That’s no longer feasible either, but the sentiment motivating it can still find expression. Today, silencing people is still a matter of denying their ability to speak, but in an age of mass media it’s about denying them access to speaking platforms.

Cancel culture refers to a certain mentality where a person tries to silence anyone who they do not wish to speak. This means to get them banned from any media where they might have the chance to express themselves – a process known as ‘deplatforming’. This isn’t really a new thing, as examples of it have existed ever since the New Left came to prominence in the 60s and 70s.

One of the first victims was psychologist Hans Eysenck, who upset the Left with his research into the average IQ scores of different races. As discussed at length in a recent paper in the Personality and Individual Differences Journal, arguing in favour of human biodiversity is highly likely to aggravate the numerous fanatics who adhere to the Equalitarian Dogma.

These fanatics made a strong effort to cancel Eysenck on account of his statements that most of the differences in IQ between different races can be explained by genetic differences, and that this evolutionary explanation is much more powerful than the environmentalist explanation. Eysenck was punched in the face, had his family threatened with death and had numerous speaking arrangements cancelled by leftist agitators.

50 years later, cancel culture is as strong as ever. Jordan Peterson ran afoul of it when he refused to accept the far-leftist dogma about transgenders. Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux ran afoul of it when they wanted to speak about the science of human biodiversity in Auckland. Even VJM Publishing upset the shrieking loonies when we sold ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts on TradeMe.

Cancel culture, then, is how the Left does violence in lieu of being able to use actual violence. The irony is that, despite constantly crying about how words are violence and that causing offence ought to be prison-worthy, it is the Left themselves who are most willing to aggressively interfere with other people’s right to free assembly and free speech.

The logic is that, if people promoting unwanted ideologies were allowed to speak in public or to hold gatherings, they would convert or at least invigorate a nonzero number of people. That someone could argue against them doesn’t matter – today’s Left affords no value at all to human reason. Merely speaking is enough to convince people in their minds.

Therefore, allowing the enemy to speak is tantamount to allowing the enemy to gain strength. If the enemy is gathering their forces, better to smash them now lest they become stronger in the future, as per Machiavelli’s maxim. Cancel culture is a form of ideological warfare, in which wrongthinkers are smashed and persecuted to the fullest legal extent possible.

Support for cancel culture is closely intertwined with an individual’s support for authoritarianism. Authoritarians don’t see anything wrong in taking away other people’s rights to express themselves, because they don’t consider other people to be full human beings. In Clown World, anyone who thinks incorrectly is a subhuman, and subhumans don’t have rights.

The problem is that people who are prevented from speaking rapidly turn to violence. John F Kennedy said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable,” and history is replete with examples. What the cancellers don’t understand is that those cancelled don’t feel admonished or chastised – they feel enraged. This rage is easy to justify, considering that their human rights have been violated.

Cancel culture, with its egregious unreasonableness, empowers the far-right and feeds directly into their narratives about totalitarian censorship. Shutting down a person for speaking, when the right to speak is specifically protected by human rights legislation, is precisely the kind of action that makes conspiracy theories about Communist takeovers seem realistic.

Clown World promises to become ever more vicious, ruthless and insane as phenomena like cancel culture spread. It’s become so bad in some places that it’s every bit the persecution hysteria that lead to witchcraft trials. People all over the West are losing their livelihoods just for uttering opinions that contradict the bloodthirsty mob. Cancel culture may end up cancelling liberty.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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Clown World Chronicles: What is ‘Neoliberalism’?

In the financial sections of the world’s news websites, the reader often finds reference to “neoliberalism” or even “the prevailing neoliberal paradigm.” This is something so all-pervading that its necessity is taken for granted. It’s very important to understand neoliberalism, because the neoliberal mindset is the one in which things get done. This chapter explains.

In short, neoliberalism is the prevailing economic paradigm of Clown World.

The ‘neo-‘ prefix denotes that this is not the first time we have lived under this economic paradigm, and the ‘liberal’ root means that this economic paradigm is characterised by a lack of regulation of business activities. The liberty in question isn’t your liberty from coercion by capital; it’s the liberty of capital to coerce you.

As anyone who has played a game of Monopoly will be aware, the problem with economic liberalism is that it ends up with massive inequality. Absent a system of wealth redistribution, the ability of landowners to charge rent means that they eventually end up with all the money. Their ever-increasing ownership of capital leads to ever-increasing rents until the masses are as impoverished as any medieval peasant.

In the real world, economic liberalism led to the Great Crash of 1929, and from there to the Great Depression. This always happens under liberalism, because once all the money ends up in a few hands then no-one but them have any spending power. One no-one has any spending power, the economy slows down, workers get laid off, and recession begins.

The original liberalism was ended by American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who brought in the “New Deal“. This was a drastic reorganisation of the economic system, intended to reverse all the advantages accrued by what Theodore Roosevelt had earlier called “the representatives of predatory wealth.” Decried as both Fascism and Communism by FDR’s opponents, the New Deal ended the Great Depression in America.

The Great Depression ended much more violently in Europe. The anger and paranoia brought about by the terrible economic conditions saw many people cast about for a scapegoat. This desire to find someone to blame for the desperate problems made it possible for an opportunist like Adolf Hitler to come to power, and the consequences of that are known to all.

After World War II, Western politicians became extremely cautious about allowing a return of the economic conditions that they believed were the ultimate cause for the bloodshed. Absent extreme and desperate poverty, they reasoned, the people would have no cause to give their power to a supremacist who wanted to conquer their neighbour.

As a result, those politicians allowed the workers to get a fair deal. Instead of all the economic power being held by a few people who ruled the others like kings, it was widely distributed across the population. This egalitarian economic arrangement continued for almost 40 years. This time period encompassed some great decades – the 50s, 60s and 70s allowed for freedom and creative expression to flourish all over the West.

It was too good to last.

Neoliberalism arose in the early 1980s, after the ruling class realised that it had been 40 years since the end of World War II, and the hard-won lessons about solidarity had been forgotten. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, no less opportunistically than Hitler himself, came to power promising a shake-up of the existing economic paradigm. Their recipe for greatness was low taxes, low welfare and free markets.

The influence of America and Britain is such that practically the entire Western World is now neoliberal. Arse-licking dogs like David Lange forced neoliberalism on an unsuspecting New Zealand public after 1984, laying the economic foundations for the Clown World era. The demented Ruth Richardson piled on the pain by slashing the Family Support allowance. Helen Clark opened the immigration floodgates and John Key kept them open.

This obsession with money, at the expense of society itself, led us to here. Neoliberalism is to consume, mindlessly and without end. All higher culture and all spiritual traditions are to be destroyed because they prevent people from consuming. The borders must be thrown open because every new immigrant – regardless of what crimes they commit – is a new consumer.

By 2020, neoliberalism has, much like the original liberalism, led to the concentration of wealth in extremely few hands. Although society has become shittier in a great many ways, this increasing shitness has brought with it vast profit potential, and those profiting greatly are putting enormous energy into perpetuating the system. This combination of increasing diversity and increasing inequality is one of the major causes of Clown World phenomena.

All over the West, economic desperation is now standard for the youth. A study showed that the average wage in New Zealand has less than 40% of the house-buying power that it had 26 years ago. The youth suicide rate is skyrocketing, and the individual despair felt by these unfortunates is starting to become a generational malaise.

Much like the original liberalism, neoliberalism has set the scene for totalitarian extremists to come to power in the West. Although Donald Trump isn’t the one, a new Hitler could easily take advantage of the worsening economic conditions to channel the people’s desperation into another paroxysm of violence. The Weimar Republic was the original Clown World, and our current iteration of it could end in a similar fashion.

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Class Consciousness Is Dead – And It Was Murdered

Class consciousness was once widely understood to be the vehicle that the workers would use to liberate themselves from the divide-and-conquer tactics of the rulers. For that reason, the rulers sought to oppose the flourishing of class consciousness wherever they could. Today, class consciousness is dead – and we can tell you how it was killed.

From the point of view of the ruling class, watching class consciousness take root is like being a feudal lord and watching the peasantry assemble outside your manor with pitchforks and burning torches. You know that you’re going to have to do something about it sooner or later, or risk losing your position.

For the rulers of our society, it’s an imperative to destroy class consciousness wherever they can.

For a long time, the go-to tactic for destroying class consciousness was virulent nationalism. The ruling class had learned that they could take the hate and anger ordinary people had as a result of their suffering, and channel it towards rival neighbours. All they had to do was subject their working classes to several years of propaganda about how the neighbouring nation was evil, and then those working classes could safely be marched off to kill each other, at no threat to the rulers.

The ruling class eventually overplayed their hand. After the Hemoclysm of World Wars I and II, class consciousness made a resurgence. Although fraternisation between opposing troops was rare, it was common enough that the average soldier was able to figure out who their real enemy was – their real enemy was behind them all along.

Returning to the West, these soldiers brought with them an immensely strong class solidarity and a dogged refusal to allow the ruling class to divide and conquer them. This powerful class consciousness set the stage for the economic boom times of the 1950s and 60s. Because class consciousness was so strong, wages were high and working conditions were favourable. One worker could easily buy a house and raise a family on one wage.

The extreme unfashionability of nationalism meant that workers were no longer willing to kill another man simply because he wore a different uniform. The ruling class needed a new way to divide and conquer the workers. The ongoing Civil Rights Movement would provide the inspiration for their next strategic advance.

The masterstroke was to divide and conquer the workers in the exact opposite way to how they were divided and conquered before 1945. Thus, the workers never saw it coming. Whereas they were once united along ethnic lines, now they would be divided along them. Since the advent of neoliberalism, which was when the ruling class started to win back the territory they had lost over the previous 40 years, the working class has been divided among racial lines.

The secret to this has been manipulating a rise in the level of racial consciousness. The logic was that, if racial consciousness could be increased beyond a certain point, both working-class and middle-class people of the same race would come to see each other as being on the same team, and start to see people of the same class but a different race as being on a different team. With this achieved, working-class people of any race would stop fighting for their class interests.

To that end, the ruling class directed their lackeys in the mainstream media to overemphasise racial issues and underemphasise class issues. Any incident of racial conflict was magnified out of proportion and made to appear a terrible evil, while measures that damaged the working class were trivialised or made to appear inevitable (and therefore not objectionable).

Thanks to all of this, the number of people who identify with their race first and foremost has increased sharply, while the number of people who identify with their class first and foremost has decreased. People now say “If Maoris do well, then New Zealand does well,” but no-one ever says “If the working class does well, then New Zealand does well.” They used to – back in the days when class consciousness existed.

Wages were much higher back in the days when class consciousness was stronger than race consciousness, as was housing affordability, which ought to provide a couple of clues as to why it’s important. Sadly, not enough people get it.

Today, the ruling class knows that it can divide the working class neatly in two, simply by appearing to exclusively help the non-white half. They don’t have to actually help them – the Government gives with one hand and takes away with the other – they just have to give the impression that they do, and that they’re ignoring the white proportion of the working class.

As they do this, they tell the non-whites that this advantageous treatment is the result of past white racism. When the whites complain about being demonised, they’re told to suck it up because of the crimes of their ancestors. The outrage and resentment that naturally arises from this inevitably causes the working class to disintegrate from bickering. Then the ruling class laugh and go back to their gated communities.

The reality is that class consciousness is by far the greater threat to the ruling class’s stranglehold on our society than race consciousness ever could be. It allows the working class to present a united front to their rulers, which makes their negotiating position much stronger, and consequently their wages much higher.

A smart person will ask themselves, the next time they see a racial issue being blown out of all reasonable proportion in the mainstream media: what important issues is this hysteria intended to distract me from? In most cases, a small amount of investigation will reveal a class issue that our rulers would rather sweep under the rug. Racial issues were always a distraction from class issues, and the focus on them has made the working class much poorer.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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How To Get Rid Of The 5% Threshold Without Empowering Extremists

New Zealand runs elections under a Mixed Member Proportional system, meaning that parties contesting the election win a number of seats in Parliament proportional to how many votes they receive. This system has advantages and disadvantages, one of the latter being that it facilitates extremists coming to Parliament. Various methods have been adopted to counter this, such as a 5% threshold – this essay suggests a more elegant solution.

As John F Kennedy warned us, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Although it’s never admitted, the purpose of the democratic system is to pre-empt the violence that inevitably follows when people are not given a say in their own destiny. The problem with totalitarianism is that people resent it, and if they resent it enough they end up killing their rulers.

Democracy is a charade in which the ruling class pretends to take the opinion of the working classes seriously, in exchange for a dampening of revolutionary sentiments among those working classes. If the ruling class can successfully placate the workers, then they can continue to do as they please. If they cannot, then resentment will arise, and this will eventually lead to radical extremism.

Kennedy might have warned us that a 5% threshold to get into the New Zealand Parliament creates a number of problems.

It is set so high that no new party has ever crossed it. In 24 years of MMP elections, the only parties to achieve representation apart from National and Labour were parties that broke away from them (New Zealand First and United Future from National, ACT from Labour, the Greens from the Alliance that itself broke from Labour).

The ruling class considers this a win, but the people consider it a great loss. It has meant that no opinion, other than the mainstream ones, can find expression in Parliament. Only those opinions that have been so thoroughly vetted and curated by the Establishment that they pose no threat are allowed into the House of Representatives. This does little to soothe the people’s feelings of frustration.

It could be argued that having a 5% threshold leads directly to outcomes like the Christchurch mosque shootings. The mass immigration of the last half a century has caused immense resentment among the many who have lost out from it, but their voices are silenced by a system that profits heavily from the cheap labour. Sentiments like these are liable to boil over into xenophobic violence on occasion – a pattern that has been seen all around the world.

There is a possible solution to these tensions – one that has never previously been tried. This is to firstly scrap the 5% threshold, and secondly for each voter to have three votes instead of one. Two of the votes can be cast for any candidate or party, much like the current system, but one vote can only be cast against a candidate or party. This anti-vote cancels out one of someone else’s votes for that candidate or party.

Having two positive votes, one negative vote and no threshold means that (in theory) small parties who do not engender hatred can still achieve representation in Parliament, while the extremists who do engender hatred get eliminated by the negative votes.

Parties like the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, Social Credit, or The Opportunities Party, who have unfashionable ideas but who are not malevolent or extremist, ought to be able to take some seats in Parliament. The ideas that these parties represent are long overdue for serious consideration, but the 5% threshold has prevented them from ever being represented.

Other parties like the New Conservatives, who combine popular ideas like ending mass immigration with horrendous human rights abuses like increasing penalties for cannabis use, are the reason for the 5% threshold in the first place. It was precisely to keep aggressive, narcissistic, Bible-thumping morons like them away from power that it was invented.

In practice, we could expect that parties like the New Conservatives would attract a high number of negative votes. If the total number of negative votes for a given party was greater than the total number of positive votes, they would receive no seats in Parliament. Therefore, the ability to cast a negative vote would mean that human rights abusers could be kept out of Parliament, but not at the expense of other small parties who have ideas the country needs to hear.

Then again, Germany has a 5% threshold (our version of MMP was modelled on theirs) and they have six parties currently polling well over that. So it could be argued that the New Zealand political class severely lacks imagination, which is the reason why no party other than Labour, National, Greens or New Zealand First has ever presented a compelling enough case to get over the threshold.

The positive/negative vote model would allow our electoral system to not only measure and weigh the sympathy of the public for the various political platforms, but also to measure and weigh their antipathy for those platforms. The biggest advantage with this suggestion is that platforms that inspired disgust, hatred and contempt would now find themselves judged for that, instead of getting away with it.

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