philosophy – Page 82

Is Being A Worker in 2019 Preferable To Chattel Slavery?

The school system and the mainstream media put a lot of effort into convincing us to be grateful for our lot. An entire apparatus of propaganda is devoted to pre-emptively quell rebellious impulses, so that our ruling classes can go about their business unaffected. As this essay will discuss, the overall quality of the lives of many of us today may be lower than that of chattel slaves in times past.

Although it is not acknowledged today, there are many advantages to being a chattel slave that are not enjoyed by modern workers.

The physical body of the slave is an expensive asset. The joke is that slaves are antique farm equipment, but there’s truth to it. In relative terms, spending on maintenance to keep the bodies of the slaves healthy is one of the largest expenses borne by a plantation owner.

One thing about the modern system of employment is that responsibility for the maintenance of the body of the worker is placed back on the worker. The worker is paid when the slave is not, and this single fact alone is supposed to entail perfect freedom. But this means that the worker themselves have to bear the cost of maintaining their body so that they can continue to work.

In today’s economy, there are many workers who are also homeless. This doesn’t happen under a system of chattel slavery, because under such a system the slaveowner is obliged to provide shelter to his valuable assets, lest they become sick and unproductive. This incentivises the slaveowner to build and provide adequate housing.

The modern employer has no such concerns. The worker themselves is responsible for their housing, and if they have to go homeless then tough shit. The employer doesn’t need to care because, if the homeless worker becomes sick or dies, they can just import some more cheap labour from overseas.

The modern worker is also responsible for their own food and medicine. One might argue that the range of food choices available to the modern worker greatly exceed that available to the slave. Against this, it has to be pointed out that the slave ended up eating more nutritious food on average – as evidenced by lower rates of obesity and diabetes. The slave may not have had a banquet every night, but their owner did have an interest in maintaining their body.

This interest in maintaining the body of the slave, on account of that it was a valuable asset, is why slaves were not beaten and whipped as much as is often supposed. The degree to which this happened would seldom have exceeded the point at which it cost the slaveowner money. A slaveowner isn’t going to beat a slave to death any more than a farmer is to set his own combine harvester on fire. It would just cost too much.

This disinclination to abuse underlings does not apply to the modern working environment. Although corporal punishment is illegal, in practice any amount of psychological abuse is legal. Bullying and threats are considered normal and acceptable ways to establish compliance.

So those who say that a slaveowner wasn’t punished for working a slave to death have to balance that with the fact that a modern employer isn’t punished for working an employee to suicide.

Some might make the argument that the modern worker is free to choose another workplace if they don’t like their arrangement at the current one. At least the modern worker is not bound to one physical area like the slave is.

The reality, however, is that all employers within a country collude to make sure that labour costs never rise above a certain point. This they primarily achieve by lobbying the government to allow, and by propagandising the population to accept, the mass importation of cheap labour. This has the effect of driving labour costs to the floor. Therefore, it doesn’t matter where the worker goes – he can only earn a pittance.

If the worker wants more than a pittance, then fuck him out the door and replace him with an immigrant who lives thirty to a house and who is (ironically) supporting a family in their homeland with their remittances. They will be happy to be earning minimum wage because they’re not trying to raise a family here.

Others might make the argument that the modern worker is free to upskill if they don’t want to take a position where they are treated poorly.

For one thing, this ignores the fact that many people are not capable of upskilling to the middle class on account of that middle-class jobs almost invariably require an IQ of 100 or higher – and only 50% of the population has that.

For another, it ignores the fact that mass immigration has been so intense in recent decades that even wages for skilled labour have been driven to the floor. Realistically, in our modern society, there are owners and the owned – and the owners feel they have the right to staff their properties with whoever they see fit.

A further advantage to being a chattel slave on a plantation is that it was possible for your work to get done. A cotton plantation only has a certain acreage, and the harvest only occurs at certain times. Outside of these times, if there’s no work to do then no work gets done. When it was time to work the days would have been long and arduous, but the shifts wouldn’t have been longer than those worked by oilmen or hospital staff today.

This contrasts with the modern workplace. In the modern workplace, the employer has their systems optimised to squeeze every last second of productivity out of their worker, who works to an industrial schedule. The average workplace is no longer supporting a local industry, but is now part of a globalised network of industries that pillages the local area for the profit of someone who lives on another continent.

Perhaps the foremost advantage to being a chattel slave, however, is that it was possible to have someone to hate. The slaveowner might expect that you will work a certain number of hours for no pay, but at least you could hate him and talk to the other slaves about how terrible and evil he was, and you could expect them to agree.

The modern workplace offers no such simple pleasure. Hating your employer will see you fired nine times out of ten, and even confessing such a hatred to a workmate is liable to see you sacked. You’re expected to absorb psychological abuse and remain grateful for the fact that you’r able to eat.

All in all, the modern industrial worker might have many reasons to feel envious of a chattel slave from bygone times. That kind of life would not have been easy, but at least the suffering inherent to it would be limited by what was technologically possible for the time. The advanced and sophisticated psychological cruelty of the industrial system would not have been a factor.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 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 2017 is also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: The Great Awokening

For thousands of years, intellectual and spiritual humans have dreamed of an age where people would come to cherish truth and wisdom – a Great Awakening. Such a golden age would bring peace and harmony to the entire world. Unfortunately for us, we’re not getting such a thing. Even worse – we’re getting a sickly, plastic, pallid imitation of it – The Great Awokening.

“Wokeness” is one of the foremost sociological trends of our time. This refers to a particularly shameless form of virtue signalling that has become extremely common today. The point of it is to present oneself as morally superior to ones fellows – more sensitive, more refined, more enlightened.

There is little more to wokeness than the usual ego-driven posturing and oneupmanship that has depressed honest people since before civilisation. At its core, it’s a desire for the little dopamine hit that comes with triumphantly rubbing another person’s face in the shit. The sort of person who participates in the Great Awokening is generally incapable of doing this to a person physically, so they do it metaphorically.

One notable thing about wokeness is that it is equally as hateful and discriminatory a philosophy as anything that has come before. Wokeness has its ingroup and its outgroup, and the ingroup is fully encouraged to shun, bully and abuse the outgroup. In this sense, it can be said that wokeness, and SJW culture more generally, is like a sort of cult. As with other cults, abusing outgroup members can strengthen solidarity among ingroup members.

The outgroup of the Great Awokening are the unwoke. In theory, the unwoke are those without the moral strength to act with compassion. The woke believe that the moral values held by the unwoke are primitive, backwards and animalistic. The unwoke have failed to undergo the necessary self-reflection to achieve wokeness, and therefore any abuse one feels to give them is justified. The unwoke are the untermensch, the infidel, the goyim, the heathen.

In reality, wokeness is not based on any transcendental truth but is rather based on whatever is fashionable in the moment. It was once woke to oppose Islam on the grounds that it was cruel to women and homosexuals – now it’s woke to support Islam on the grounds that Muslims are non-white. The same people who were praised for an enlightened attitude to Islam are now excoriated for being Nazis – without changing a thing.

Likewise, the unwoke are bullied for little more than being unfashionable. This is one reason why people from the working class are seldom considered woke – it takes a lot of leisure time and a lot of socialising with the right people to learn the right values. Because these values can change on a whim, knowledge of them has to be maintained via continual access to the high priests. Poor people don’t have this access.

The Great Awokening could be described as the grand climax of the worldwide epidemic of virtue signalling that has now run for some years. Never before has the world been this pretentious. Never before have people at large made such a strenuous effort to create a false image of themselves for the sake of preening their egos. Never before have the social stakes been so high, and the error margins so thin.

The problem is that we’ve started to believe our own lies.

For decades now, we’ve been blaming everything on white men because it was the woke option. White men had most of the power, therefore it stood to reason that they took most of the blame. No-one woke could oppose this because the woke attitude is that all wealth was earned by theft, and all privilege stolen from someone else. Opposing this meant to believe that non-whites and women deserved their relative poverty – a horribly unwoke position.

This has led to a situation where if you don’t openly hate white people now, you’re unwoke. The paradox of claiming to be the least racist person while at the same time hating white people is an example of the doublethink that is now everywhere. The Great Awokening doesn’t worry about contradictions like this because the most important thing is the intention. Hating white people isn’t racist if you do it for the right reasons.

The hypocrisy is how the highest echelons of woke can get away with jetsetting around the world to browbeat us into reducing our carbon footprint. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle represent the most vomit-inducing excess of unearned wealth. They are triple distilled privilege. But for them, the Great Awokening is an opportunity to market themselves as enlightened world leaders.

The Great Awokening is why comedy is essentially dead today. In order for humour to exist, someone has to be willing to tell the truth. Humour is when needles of truth prick the balloons of falsehood, and laughter is released as a form of catharsis. It has been a fundamental part of civilisation forever, but today people are so afraid of getting a moral browbeating that they’re less willing to crack jokes.

The Great Awokening is essentially the final victory of slave morality over life on this planet. Resentment now has free rein, and the slaves are trying to rip down everyone and everything in the world. The total victory of slave morality means that everything of value in the world is to be destroyed, and the weakest and most execrable aspects of humanity are to be held up as exemplars.

As there is always a seed of yang even when yin appears to be triumphant, so is there a seed of truth within the bullshit of The Great Awokening. That seed is the small number of truth-tellers who are not tempted into telling lies, despite the social pressure of the woke hordes. The longer the Great Awokening goes for, the more ridiculous it will become, and eventually it will become so ridiculous that the merest whisper of truth will cause the music to stop.

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Could The Government Fund Itself With A Georgist Tax?

One of the great political problems is how to fund a government. Governments cannot realistically be funded by donations, so they have to levy taxes. No matter how you slice it, levying taxes on the people will always create discontentment, and not levying them is often no better. This essay discusses whether Georgism might work for New Zealand.

Georgism is a political philosophy named after American theorist Henry George. The essence of it is the belief that, while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land (often including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society. Income provided by things that are part of the natural world, and which do not depend on human activity to have value, should be the common property of the citizenry.

Georgist ideas were very popular a century ago, before the rentiers used their ownership of the apparatus of propaganda to persuade the population that government should be funded by taxes on labour and consumption. Since then, the mainstream media has normalised the idea of taxing labour and consumption, mostly by not allowing any discussion of Georgism, and by restricting discussion to a narrow range of pro-capitalist models.

Alt-centrism finds much in common with Georgist ideas. Georgism is a very alt-centrist approach to funding a Government, because it rejects the Establishment, and their focus on taxing labour. Georgism stands directly opposed to the Establishment because it is precisely the Establishment who profits the most heavily from charging rent. In taxing the Establishment the most heavily, Georgism accords with alt-centrism the most closely.

An Australian study suggested that heavy taxation of rents could provide up to 87% of the funding necessary to run the Australian Government. The remaining money could be raised according to a similar philosophy – i.e. it could tax other properties whose value did not depend on human labour inputs (such as oil and mineral royalties), or it could charge fees to use common property such as the electromagnetic spectrum and fishery stocks.

Georgism rejects the idea of levying taxes on economic activity that is the result of a direct human labour input. The idea is that tax on ground rents ought to be enough to fund the Government, and therefore that taxes on income would no longer be necessary. For a modern state like New Zealand, the numbers don’t quite add up, but a Georgist tax could be enough to slash income taxes.

According to the New Zealand Household Expenditure Statistics for 2016, rent costs comprised 31.8% of New Zealand’s total weekly housing costs, which were themselves 25.6% of the total weekly household expenditure of $1,300.

31.8% of 25.6% of $1,300 is $105, the average weekly household rent expenditure. Multiplying this by 52 weeks equals $5,460 every year per household on rent. Multiply this by the 1,500,000 households in New Zealand, and we arrive at a figure of $8,190,000,000 charged in rent money every year. This is just from household rents – it does not include commercial rent, rural rent, mineral royalties, banking license fees or fishing licenses.

The Australian study linked above found that the total resource rents of Australia were over two times the size of just the household rents – in fact, household rents are only about 40% of the total resource rents charged in Australia. $8.2 billion divided by 40% gives us a figure in the ballpark of $20 billion dollars every year.

The total operating costs of the New Zealand Government run at about $76 billion per year, so a Georgist tax of 90% on resource rents wouldn’t cover more than a quarter of this.

However, it’s notable that individual income taxes bring in about $37 billion every year to the New Zealand Treasury. A Georgist tax of 90% on all resource rents would therefore provide the leeway to slash individual income taxes by a half.

Another way to look at it is that New Zealanders pay tax of around $7,400 on income up to $48,000. So if there are 2,500,000 taxpayers in New Zealand, this suggests that a Georgist tax on resource rents in New Zealand could replace all income taxes up to $48,000 per annum.

Eco-Georgism is a variant of Georgism that gives special consideration to the environmental challenges facing humanity this century. This involves heavy emphasis on making polluters pay for the externalities that they introduce to the environment. This would combine the heavy tax on resource rents discussed above with e.g. carbon taxes.

21st century Georgism for New Zealand, then, would be the political philosophy of funding government activity through two primary means: heavy taxes on resource rents, and heavy taxes on all activities that cause environmental destruction.

In particular, ground rents on urban locations, such as city-centre shops and rental apartments, would be taxed the hardest. This is because such economic activity amounts to little more than parasitism. Shifting the burden of taxation to this kind of extortionate activity, and shifting it away from labour, will also make the economy not only more fair, but also more efficient.

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The Four Kinds of Tribe

Humans are tribal animals, and have been since before we were even humans. It’s very difficult for an individual to feel at peace if they do not also feel like they are part of a tribe who are watching their back. As this essay will examine, there are four major kinds of tribe, corresponding to the four feminine elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire.

The element of Earth corresponds to the soil, and reflects one fundamental kind of tribe: that which grows out of the soil together. This kind of tribe is that which occupies a particular geographical territory. The element of Water corresponds to blood, and reflects the other fundamental kind of tribe: that which is related by family relations. Roughly speaking, Earth can be described as neighbourhood and Water as family.

In a state of Nature, there is very little difference between the first two kinds of tribe. This is because, in a state of Nature, the overwhelming majority of people don’t move very far from where they were born. So what people usually mean by their tribe is those who they share bonds of soil and blood with. For the first 99% of human history, one’s tribe was the same thing as one’s tribe of Earth or Water.

The third kind of tribe is the tribe of ideology. This corresponds to the element of Air. This could be said to have first come into existence with the arrival of civilisation. The advent of civilisation brought with it original dilemmas, such as whether or not a person should leave their tribe of savages to join the clean and peaceful people. This opportunity would have created great tensions with the loyalties to the tribes of Earth and Water.

In this sense, religions count as ideologies, because they are also supranational and also of the mind and not the physical world. The existence of religion creates an ideological tribe that inevitably leads to tension with existing bonds of solidarity with tribes of soil and blood. This is especially true now that the Age of Imperialism has mixed things up so much.

The fourth kind of tribe is the tribe of spirit, or frequency. This corresponds to the element of Fire, and reflects a person’s soul or true nature, independent of outside influences.

The bonds of solidarity at this level are, like flames, both subtle and extremely powerful. Not everyone automatically understands what their own spiritual tribe is, which is why the bonds are subtle. When understood, however, these spiritual bonds can often override the others.

All four of these tribal affiliations can play off against each other.

The tribes of Earth and Water can come into conflict when two blood tribes come to compete for the same territory. One tribe might get pushed out of their territory by a natural disaster or by a stronger tribe, and this often leads to them fighting with the incumbent tribe in the new territory they enter.

They also conflict a lot in today’s world on account of that there has been so much immigration. A New Zealander might find himself facing a loyalty test between people of a different race but who they grew up around and people of the same race but from other countries. This conflict occurs anywhere there is mass movement of peoples.

The tribes of Air often conflict with those of Earth and Water when ideological demands cause bonds of physical solidarity to weaken. Certain religious traditions, in particular the Abrahamic ones, run across racial lines. This means that followers of a religion might have divided loyalties, where they are as loyal to a foreigner of the same religion as they are to a countryman who follows a different creed.

Luke 12:51-52 cites Jesus as saying “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.” This says explicitly that the religious ideology promoted by Jesus would threaten existing bonds of soil and blood. This is all but inevitable, unless a person’s ideology stems directly from the soil and blood themselves.

Another common conflict here is when a person from a particular family graduates into a different social class. A person from a working-class family might get an advanced education, and this might put them in conflict between their intellectual peers – who respect that person’s education and appreciate them for it – and their blood relatives who don’t appreciate it or who feel envious about it.

The tribes of Fire conflict with all of the others. A person’s spirit will see them form bonds of solidarity with others who have the same spirit, and this is true even within a family or an ideology. These spiritual bonds can cause all kinds of subtle tensions – or gross ones.

A classic conflict is when a couple’s romantic inclinations cause them to come into conflict with their tribes of Earth, Water or Air. This often happens when a person falls in love with a foreigner, because foreigners are often of different religions and races as well as different geographical areas. Some family and friends will not approve – others will think it great.

Another one is when a person’s true Nature causes them to feel bonds of solidarity with certain people – and not others – within a workplace or social club. This phenomenon could be said to be the basis of true friendship, because the solidarity involved does not necessarily confer material benefit.

These four basic kinds of tribe can be found all over the world, and so can the basic types of conflict between them. As the world continues to rapidly change and become more complex, we can predict that conflicts between the four kinds of tribe will occur with greater frequency. This is true whether the conflict occurs between or within groups, or between or within individuals.

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