philosophy – Page 89

Why New Zealand Is So Fucked Up

A lot of thought has seemingly gone into answering the question of why this country is so fucked up. Most of it coalesces around ideologies, with liberal capitalism, globohomo, ethnonationalism and anarcho-nihilism being the foremost. None of these theories have as much explanatory power as the psychohistory model, as this essay will show.

The British Empire found itself with some severe problems in the 18th century. Because of industrialisation and modern science leading to advances in medicine and sanitation, there was a population explosion in Britain. This led to overcrowding, a problem that was alleviated by emigration. In some cases this was voluntary, in the form of gentleman settlers; in other cases it was involuntary, in the form of penal transportation and indentured servitude.

Like Australia, New Zealand came into being as a place for the rapidly expanding British Empire to dump some of its surplus cannon fodder, in case it needed to be called upon later. With the American Revolution of 1776, it became a lot harder for them to dispose of their convicts in North America, which is why, 12 years later, the First Fleet landed in Sydney Harbour to begin the colonisation of Australasia.

Within a few decades, the strategic imperative of colonising New Zealand had become apparent to the commanders of Empire back in London. Not only would it facilitate the projection of British military force into Asia, but it would also prevent the French from getting hold of it (as they later would New Caledonia).

To that end, Britain resolved to populate this new territory with some of its surplus people. This was not done with convicts, as Australia, but with free settlers exclusively, many of who were victims of the Highland Clearances (a little-known truth about New Zealand history is that many of its early settlers were people who were “encouraged” to emigrate to New Zealand because of unusual sexual proclivities that weren’t technically illegal in Britain, but which made the others want to get rid of them, such as homosexuality and pederasty).

This means that New Zealand is not, and never has been, a nation. Right from the very beginning it was nothing more than an artificial construct – a company. Indeed, the people chiefly responsible for the early settlement of New Zealand were called The New Zealand Company. Like Australia, and America before it, the people it initially attracted were Britain’s expendables.

Real nations don’t know who settled them or why, or where their name comes from. In a real nation, the people have been there since the beginning of time as far as they are concerned, and the stories of their ancestors are not hard historical facts but myths. Their founders are demigods, not Colonial Secretaries.

A nation is a group of people who are united by ties of kinhood, and who therefore all share a common goal (the perpetuation of their kin). Nation refers not to a geographical space (as does country) but to the people who populate that space. Consequently, one speaks of France and the French nation.

The beautiful thing about nations is that, being based on extended kinhood, each one is like one large family. Consequently, the ties that bind each citizen to each other are strong. In places like Japan and Sweden this leads to an unwillingness to commit violent and property crimes against other people, and a willingness to pay taxes for the sake of other people getting proper healthcare and a proper education.

In a place like New Zealand, the ties that bind are weak. As a result, people don’t care very much about the suffering of the other members of the collective. Although bullying exists in all other countries, it’s rare that it’s quite as vicious as what is tolerated in New Zealand, one reason why we have the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world, and the second-highest rate of workplace bullying in the world.

The other reason why our suicide rates are poor is because we don’t have a mental health system. In 2016, our mental health funding was a pitiful $1.3 billion – for the entire country. This is why many New Zealanders who present to the mental health authorities are just told to fuck off and die. When you’re a company and not a nation, the death of an unproductive person is preferable to paying out a long-term benefit to them.

Simply put, being expendable, it’s not considered important if we suffer and die – and it never has been.

This is why New Zealand troops went to Europe to fight the German Empire in World War II, instead of fighting against the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. Had New Zealand been a nation, we would have defended ourselves, and dealt to the main threat to us, which was Japan. It’s also why we fought in World War I and the Boer War, instead of staying at home, which would have been far better.

Because we are a company and not a nation, we do what our shareholders tell us to do, which was to attack who they tell us to attack. It doesn’t matter if its the Boers, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Afghanistanis or the Iraqis – if it serves the interests of global financial capital, we’re ready to pick up our rifles and die for it.

Australia and New Zealand lost around 1.5% of our entire population in World War I, almost as much as Belgium, where many of the battles took place. Australia suffered more combat deaths than Belgium, despite a smaller population and despite being 20,000 kilometres distant from the fighting. 42% of all New Zealand men of military age served with the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces in World War One, meaning that experience of mortal combat was almost normal for an entire generation of men.

The reason for all this was that our men were conscripted into battle by ruling classes that served imperial interests, and not national ones. This national history of being used as cannon fodder for imperial military adventures (despite it being the reason for us being brought into existence in the first place) is the main reason why Aussies and Kiwis have so many psychiatric problems.

The immensely heavy exposure to combat fucked up our country in two major ways.

The first is obvious: the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Called “shellshock” in World War I and “battlefield fatigue” in World War II, this refers to the dissociation that can arise from the trauma of combat. It is because of the heavy incidence of PTSD that we developed a culture of drinking ourselves to oblivion and indifference to domestic violence. Unfortunately for us, this is the sort of trauma that gets passed on down through the generations.

The second was that it created our infamous “harden up” culture. The deprivations of war are no place for preciousness. Any man who expressed grief at what he had seen or done had to be made to shut the fuck up in no uncertain terms, lest the morale of the unit become affected. The battlefield is no time to talk about one’s feelings. While in the realm of iron, the ability to suppress emotions is often the difference between life and death.

This is all well and good if there is a war that needs to be won, but our cultures seem to have made permanent what should have been a temporary indifference to the suffering of our fellows. Genuine nations don’t do this. Because New Zealand isn’t a proper nation, however, the New Zealand Government doesn’t take this into account when it makes decisions.

If we had a proper nation, we would have spent the money to fix our psychiatric casualties. As it is, we have a nation where crying children are as likely to be bashed or sworn at as comforted. Young people seeking mental healthcare are excoriated for being weak. This is brilliant for raising a country of warriors, but it isn’t how a nation naturally raises its next generation, which is with firm, but relentless, compassion.

Not having a proper nation to keep check on them and to inspire their will, the New Zealand Government runs the country according to the will of foreign moneyed interests. These are essentially the same interests that own the New Zealand media, and just about everything else.

The New Zealand people never, ever wanted to double the refugee quota, and especially not when the number of New Zealand families on the housing waitlist already exceeds 12,000. The New Zealand people also wanted cannabis law reform decades ago. The New Zealand people wanted a sharp cut to our immigration intake. None of it matters.

The fact is that, not being a nation, Kiwis have very little solidarity with each other, and so we don’t stand up for each other. This is why it’s so easy for politicians like the Sixth Labour Government to strip away our rights to free expression and to firearms ownership. Because we don’t stand together, we have no way to resist aggression, whether from outside or inside the country. Thus, we remain divided and conquered.

There is only one way to unfuck New Zealand, and that is for us to come to operate as a nation. This is impossible as long as multiculturalism and mass immigration exists, and stopping those things are all but impossible as long as an industrial society with an economy based around eternal growth exists. But if we can come together as an extended kin group, we can develop the solidarity necessary to make ending each other’s suffering a primary goal.

The reality is that this will take several hundred years, and will not begin until after the collapse of the current economic paradigm. Some hundred years after this, both Kupe and Captain Cook will be mythological figures, and most of the rest of the world, Britain included, will be forgotten. At that point, a great race of bronze and copper will arise, and the nature of their influence will be to move inwards, towards the centre of the world.

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.

How to Deal With the Fact That We’re All Going to Die

Many psychologists and psychiatrists have noticed a sharp recent increase in the number of people who present to them with anxiety about ecological collapse. The proliferation of media relating to end-of-world environmental disaster scenarios has made many people fearful. This article will give some tips for dealing with the fact that we’re all going to die.

The phenomenon has been called climate despair. Fuelled by headlines about people dying in Japanese heatwaves, how last month was the hottest month in human history, or how humanity only has 18 months to act if catastrophe is to be averted, climate despair is when people give up on life on account of believing that humans have destroyed the climate of Earth, and thereby its capacity to support life.

It could be said to be a kind of existential horror, one that arises at the thought of a future Earth that is barren of life owing to Venus-like conditions. What is the point in doing anything, in struggling to achieve things, if we’ve just wrecked the planet and are all going to die?

Climate despair may not be irrational. Some climate models do indeed predict that we have cooked the planet beyond the point where human civilisation can continue to exist. Even though things are ticking along alright now, there may be several degrees of warming that are inescapable from this point owing to what has already been added to the atmosphere.

However, from an existential and spiritual point of view, climate despair is a needless suffering and therefore ought to be counteracted. The good news is that, in principle, climate despair is nothing more than bog-standard death anxiety wearing a new mask. Therefore, the old ways of dealing with death anxiety are applicable to dealing with climate despair.

The problem that we’re going to die is essentially two problems rolled into one.

The first is that it isn’t obvious, to many people, that consciousness survives the death of the physical body. In much the same way that the Earth intuitively feels flat, many people intuitively feel that the brain generates consciousness, and therefore the death of the brain with the death of the physical body means that consciousness ends.

The second is that it isn’t obvious, to many people, that anything we do here has any meaning. We’re all going to die, and even if consciousness survives this and goes through into the next world, we don’t appear to be able to take anything with us. We can’t take property with us, we can’t take family with us, we may not even be able to take memories with us. Therefore, no actions in this world have meaning, and despair must follow.

Solving the first problem isn’t too difficult. That’s a simple matter of refuting the common illusion that the brain generates consciousness.

If a person makes the argument that the life is meaningless because we all die, and with the death of the body goes our consciousness, therefore we are doomed to forget everything we have done and everything we are, they run into a problem. This problem is called the Argument from Biological Necessity.

Evolution is an extremely efficient process, and it only ever selects for traits that confer an immediate advantage in either survival or reproduction. But, as anyone who has read any Dostoevsky can tell you, being conscious confers no such advantage. The human animal could just as well fight and fuck without being aware of what it is doing.

If anything, consciousness is an impediment to survival, on account of that it leads to depression, anxiety and existential angst and horror. These emotions paralyse us and drive us to suicide. It would be much better to not be conscious – then one could simply do whatever was necessary to best further one’s genes.

If consciousness is not necessary, then it cannot have been selected for by natural or sexual selection, as all of the facets and qualities of the brain have been. Therefore, it cannot be generated by the brain, and therefore there’s no reason to assume that the death of the brain should affect the presence of it.

The second problem is much harder. Even if you can logically and convincingly argue that consciousness must survive the death of the physical body, is not clear that anything apart from consciousness survives with it. This raises the possibility that, after the death of the physical body, one has to start again, as if this life had never happened.

Broadly speaking, there are three ways to get life wrong as a result of all this, and one way to get it right.

One can become obsessed with breeding, and adopt the delusion that one has cheated death by producing offspring. People under this delusion know no greater pleasure than just to rut like animals, and seldom consider the stark fact that their offspring will also grow old and die, as will their offspring etc.

One can become obsessed with physical dominance, and adopt the delusion that just because one is hard to kill that one has cheated death. Even if a man is really big, strong, fit, trained in martial arts and carrying weapons, time will grind him down. Age will weaken his arms, and eventually a major organ will fail. This is no solution either.

One can become obsessed with intellectual dominance, or wealth and social status. Such a person adopts the delusion that one can live on in history if one achieves sufficiently great deeds. Of course, as the example of Ozymandias showed, even the greatest deeds are worn away by time. One can never be famous enough to overcome one’s own mortality because no-one can escape the fact that everyone dies alone.

The solution is to focus on refining one’s frequency of consciousness, because that is something that might well carry through into the next world. This means to use the power of will to work one’s consciousness into a state where it serves to bring peaceful and joyous order to the intellectual, emotional and physical environment.

The Law of Karma tells us that the energy we put out is the energy that we get back. Therefore, one ought to direct one’s will towards reducing the suffering of the conscious beings around you. If one does this correctly and of one’s true will, then chances are that one comes to be reincarnated in a place where beings with similar wills exist.

This act of changing the frequency of one’s consciousness is the only way that we can work to taking something with us into the next world. It’s therefore always possible to improve the quality of one’s spiritual position by working towards the cessation of the suffering of other sentient beings. This is true no matter what the current or future state of the world’s climate.

New Zealand Can No Longer Look to Britain For Moral or Cultural Guidance

New Zealand is a small country of fewer than five million people, and we do not have a lot of intellectual depth, neither presently nor historically. For these reasons, it has been tempting, perhaps even necessary, to look for moral direction from overseas. All well and good, but this essay argues that New Zealand ought to immediately stop looking to Britain for it.

Our history of looking to Britain for guidance is a long one. After all, we’re a British colony.

The problem is that today’s Britain is fucked. It’s not even a shell of the great Empire it once was, the one that unified the trade routes of the whole world into a single maritime system and which did so much to diminish the practice of slavery in the world. The culture that produced great minds such as Watt, Hume, Smith, Faraday, Wilberforce, Darwin, Mill, Locke, Dickens, Whitehead, Orwell and Huxley has rotted away. Only a carcass remains.

One could argue (as we have done elsewhere) that the British exported most of their alpha males to the colonies, because only the hardiest and most adventurous preferred hewing a new life out of untouched wilderness to sitting comfortable in Europe. This had a heavily dysgenic effect for the remaining British population, which is now every bit the dystopia depicted as Airstrip One in 1984.

Jacinda Ardern spent several years serving as a senior policy adviser in Tony Blair’s Government. Incredibly, Ardern wasn’t put off by the fact that Blair had helped to orchestrate the invasion of Iraq – an event that killed over a million people. The War Criminal’s Apprentice was happy to work under this mass murdering psychopath and learn his, and the modern British, ways of governing.

Like so many Kiwis, Ardern has returned from Europe with the idea that New Zealand ought to do things a lot more like they do things. This was a great thing up until the turn of the century, because Europe was the result of thousands of years of great minds working to determine the best way to live. Ever since then, Europe has rapidly gone down the toilet. This process has intensified in recent years, and nowhere more so than Britain.

Scottish comedian Mark Meechan, stage name Count Dankula, was found guilty of a hate crime in 2018 and risked six months’ imprisonment for posting a YouTube video of his dog giving a Nazi salute. Despite that the video was clearly a joke, he was still put in a cage for his impudence. The country that produced comic luminaries like John Cleese, Rik Mayall and Rowan Atkinson now arrests people for making the wrong jokes.

Attracting Police attention from one’s social media posting has become an everyday occurrence in modern Britain.

Getting arrested for making an anti-Muslim post has been a fact of life for several years now, with thousands of people being charged with public order offences like “inciting religious hatred” for criticising Islam. Ardern seems more than happy to adopt this totalitarian mentality wholesale, instituting a mass harassment campaign of her critics.

Worst of all, however, are the numerous child rape gangs that have flourished in Britain because of a national unwillingness to investigate Muslim criminals, out of fear of being seen to be prejudiced (a form of dhimmitude). The most infamous of these was the Rotherham child exploitation scandal, which saw 1,400 British girls raped by a Muslim grooming gang over a period of 35 years.

Britain has completely lost its moral compass, and we should not be following them anymore. Better to take our lead from places in Far East Asia. 60 years ago, South Korea had near-African levels of poverty, and as recently as 1980 the GDP per capita was barely over USD2,000 per year.

As of 2017, their GDP per capita is now higher than New Zealand’s. This they achieved not by inflating the housing market through mass immigration but from adding value through improving human capital and investing in technology, research and development. They have done much that we could learn from.

Some will argue that these Far East Asian countries are doing well because of their high native IQs. But that’s precisely the point. South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan make high-IQ decisions, and because of those decisions their standard of living is now significantly higher than that of Western countries.

We need to stay a high-IQ people, and we can’t do that by following the British obsession with the mass importation of cheap labour. Therefore, it’s time to go it alone.

We Kiwis are the offspring of two of the most adventurous and masculine races in the history of the world. The Polynesians that rowed here from other Pacific islands, and the Northern Europeans who sailed here and provided the impetus to build New Zealand into a wealthy modern nation, comprise two of the hardiest and most alpha peoples .

The hybrid vigour of these two makes us something truly special – special enough that we can rely on our own abilities to navigate the world and to determine our path forwards. We can turn our backs on the soulless, materialistic greed and nihilistic apathy of modern Britain, while aspiring to maintain the spirit of adventure that made New Zealand into a First World country.

Fundamentally British we might still be, but we can no longer look to them for inspiration. Great Britain is no more; what remains is fit to be euthanised. We need to cut our cultural ties with Britain immediately, and decide for ourselves what the way forward is going to be. This will involve intelligent public discussions about political issues, instead of blindly following international trends in the hope of getting approval from someone in a big country.

Why The Left Doesn’t Give A Shit About Drug Law Reform, Gun Rights or Free Speech

For many of us in Generation X, it was easy enough to associate the right with authoritarianism. The association was so obvious that it was near enough to a universally held belief for those born between the mid 60s and early 80s. As this essay will describe, the sands have shifted under us, and the left is now the authoritarian side.

In the 1990s, Christian fundamentalism still had a powerful grip on the moral consciousness of the West, especially the Anglo part of it. Age restrictions on television and movie content were standard. Music was made to carry labels that warned of explicit lyrics. Purchasing restrictions on alcohol were commonplace.

All of these restrictions were driven by a religious fundamentalist sentiment that not only believed that pleasure was sinful, but that those same religious fundamentalists had the right to force laws restricting those pleasures on the population at large. This self-righteous indifference to the will of others engendered a great deal of hatred for the right among those who grew up at the end of the 20th century.

Generation X hit adulthood, therefore, with the near-universal belief that the right wing, and anything associated with the right wing, was the authoritarian side, and the path to liberty and freedom lay in opposing them.

This worked out pretty good for about a decade. It inspired Generation X to resist the Iraq War, in part by organising history’s largest ever protests. It also inspired them to resist the PATRIOT Act, the West’s first example of true mass surveillance. By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, many had a sense that a golden age awaited the world once the Baby Boomers ceded power to the Gen Xers.

It wasn’t until Barack Obama was elected, ironically, that things really started to go to shit.

Obama was the first Generation X American President (more or less). He had taken office with a lot of fanfare about a new age of democratic politics, where Presidents listened to the people instead of mysterious, unelected advisers. Exemplifying this new era was a website where the American people could submit their concerns directly to the political class by way of Internet petition.

The most popular petitions on this site generally related to cannabis law reform, for the reason that cannabis prohibition is arguably the most egregious modern example of Western governments abusing the human rights of their people. To the surprise of many, Obama just completely ignored all of these pleas, and went about instituting the agenda that he had had long before running for the Presidency.

A recent mainstream media piece made an appeal to Helen Clark to intercede on the side of cannabis law reform. This appeal is misplaced, because the left hasn’t cared about freedoms for a long time. They didn’t have to, mostly because the right so conspicuously didn’t care for so long that the left won the libertarian vote by default.

The New Zealand Labour Party’s total refusal to campaign for the repeal of prohibition has astonished some and disappointed others. Many of us expected Clark to make a move on medicinal cannabis 20 years ago, when she was in power and had the chance. After all, California made medicinal cannabis legal in 1996 and the Fifth Labour Government came to power in 1999.

Their flat refusal to do is, however, just part of a wider pattern of leftist indifference to human rights. The left has now completely sold out to corporate interests, as evidenced by their support for the mass importation of cheap labour, by their working hand-in-glove with the corporate media and by their refusal to accept the result of the Brexit referendum.

When the Sixth Labour Government came to power, many had similar hopes for them to the ones they had for Obama. But like Obama, the Sixth Labour Government has done less than nothing to bring freedom to the people they represented. One can write ‘less than nothing’ because they have taken freedoms away.

Gun rights have been stripped, and the right to express political opinions without interference has been thrown out the window. Kiwis are now facing a protracted campaign of Police harassment for anti-Government posts on social media, so much so that one can now seriously ask if New Zealand is a police state.

The reason for all this is that the left, now being authoritarian, demands ideological purity with the same kind of bone-headed ruthlessness that the Nazis once demanded racial purity. Therefore, any and all measures that increase ideological diversity must be opposed. Anything that increases a person’s propensity to generate novel thoughts or ideas is right out.

They don’t want people using cannabis because then people come to think freely, and they want to be the ones dictating what people think (for the greater good, of course).

When the left champions diversity, they mean the sort of superficial diversity that makes a people easier to control. They mean the diversity that allows them to divide the population into numerous teams and to set those teams against each other through their control of the apparatus of propaganda, in particular the mainstream media.

They don’t mean ideological or intellectual diversity. This constitutes a threat, such that all ideological and intellectual diversity must be suppressed. This has reached its worst expression in countries such as Britain and New Zealand, where regular citizens face increasing Police harassment for the content of their social media posts.

In summary, the reason why the left doesn’t care about human rights any more is because they are now the authoritarians. One entire generation has passed since the right were the authoritarians, and now the political landscape is very different.

The right, for their part, have been extremely slow to capitalise on this by moving towards libertarianism. If the right would set its flag on the libertarian side of the fence, as a few politicians have done (David Seymour of the ACT Party being the most prominent), they could benefit heavily from it. If Donald Trump would call for legal cannabis, the right would achieve a masterstroke of propaganda.