philosophy – Page 89

Civilisation Is An Act of Alchemy

The art of alchemy is the art of transmuting base elements into precious ones. On the personal level, a successful alchemist will transmute their own baser nature into something that is in tune with God. As above, so below: such a process also occurs on the collective level. Civilisation itself is an act of alchemy.

The main life objective for any spiritual person is to overcome their raw animal instincts, especially when those instincts cause suffering to other sentient beings. The instincts to dominate and destroy, and to kill and conquer, are controlled by the spiritual person so that they don’t harm anyone. The spiritual man seeks to impose order upon the chaos of his soul.

Chaos, in this sense, represents the vital biological energies and instincts that have been shaped by evolution to meet survival and reproduction challenges, and which would have found expression with or without consciousness. Chaos represents the workings of Nature in raw form.

As awesome as the workings of Nature in raw form may be, they don’t take into account the suffering of conscious beings. Nature is famously indifferent to that. In a state of Nature, men fight and kill each other over food and territory and women, and survival to adulthood is rare. The spiritual impulse is the impulse to transcend and to overcome this.

Transcending and overcoming is the reason why so many religious traditions practice some form of abstinence. To fast is to learn to go without food, which is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to eat. To be celibate is to learn to go without sex, with is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to reproduce. Admonitions against violence and greed are likewise intended to encourage people to go against their savage natures.

It’s also why many religious traditions practice repetitive tasks, such as Buddhism with meditation, which requires a person to sit still for some time. If a person can learn physical discipline, then they can try to learn mental discipline, and if they can learn that, then they can try to learn spiritual discipline. Achieving spiritual discipline is the highest goal of the alchemist.

The ideal is to take the energy of some instinct, such as for sex or violence, and to sublimate it into a higher order, such as an art. This is what is meant by the transmutation of lead into gold. An alchemist can take their base impulses (represented by lead), which are indifferent to the suffering of others, and transmute them into energies (represented by gold) that work to reduce those others’ suffering .

As above, so below: all the things stated above as truths of personal alchemy are also true on a global level. There is a work of alchemy taking place right now on Earth that amounts to the imposition of order upon chaos on a planetary scale.

The fundamental act of civilisation is, like the fundamental act of alchemy, the imposition of order upon chaos.

The history of civilisation is the history of the imposition of the higher order of will upon the chaos of raw animal instinct. To be civilised is to have developed the ability to resist impulses to attack, rape and steal. A civilised man can laugh off insults, because he knows that to give in to his instinct to punish would be weakness. His highest value is not dominance but composure.

Our society invests a tremendous amount of time in trying to teach young people to think twice before giving in to temporary impulses that might have permanent consequences. Children are told morality stories from when they are old enough to listen and they continue getting lectured well into adulthood. The idea is to induce them to behave in ways that do not cause suffering to others.

Civilisation, then, is the same thing as alchemy, only it is the name given to alchemy at the collective level.

A statesman transmutes lead into gold by passing a law that proscribes certain behaviours. A great author does the same thing by writing a novel that gives its readers insight into the human condition. A great sportsman transmutes tribal bloodlust into a performance of improvisational theatre. All of these people further civilisation by minimising actions that cause suffering.

An ideal civilisation will operate on the frequency of gold. At this level, the ruling class is guided by God, and all of their actions are in tune with the will of God. If the ruling class is correctly devoted to God, then those devoted to the ruling class will be devoted to God, and so on, so that even the simplest peasant acts in accordance with the divine will.

A civilisation that has lost touch with God might operate on the level of silver, as ours appears to. We are godless but are yet to disintegrate into the level of all-out warfare – although this may happen if we fail at the great work of alchemy that is civilisation. A civilisation at war has fallen to the level of iron, and one that falls so far that its very survival is in question has regressed to the level of clay.

The alchemical future of our civilisation will depend on whether we can reconnect to God, or whether we fall further into violence and savagery. It seems that many of our most primal instincts for acquisition and competition are making a comeback, and this has led to a lower frequency of consciousness all over the world. If it keeps decreasing, then war is all but inevitable.

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The Three Elementary Threats Used by the Ruling Class to Establish Compliance

In an ideal state, the ruling class doesn’t need to threaten people, because they will rule correctly and this will inspire devotion. Whether this is unrealistic or whether we live in a degraded age is unclear, but what is clear is that our ruling class threaten people a lot, sometimes covertly, sometimes overtly. As this essay will show, the ruling class has three major strategies for keeping the plebs in line.

The easiest way to keep the plebs in line is to starve them. Starvation is represented by the element of clay. In the old days, the rulers of the community would gather together all the product of that season’s agricultural harvest and portion them out to the deserving. Anyone deemed to be undeserving was given a smaller portion of food, or none at all. This is natural logic – one can see it replicated in lion prides.

If a child is seriously misbehaving, the go-to strategy for many parents is to send them to bed without any dinner. This is unpleasant for the child, because it plays on deep, primal fears of starvation. Much like a hand around the throat, which quickly gains compliance thanks to the fear of death, withholding food from someone can quickly cause submission. People are hard-wired to be afraid of hunger, for obvious biological reasons.

Starvation is more subtle than just denial of food. It can also refer to denial of the means to procure food, i.e. money. The way this is most commonly achieved in the modern world is to create uncertainly about the future of one’s job. All talk about economic downturns, mass layoffs, global financial crises etc. has the psychological effect of inducing submission among the plebs by stoking subconscious fears of starvation.

Some people often wonder why, in poor African countries, people still starve despite the enormous amounts of foreign food aid that is pouring in. The answer is that the people in charge of those poor African countries regularly refuse to distribute food aid to those groups thought to be enemies. If the dictator in charge comes from a particular tribe, he might withhold food aid to that tribe’s traditional foes as a way of settling scores.

Threatening to impoverish someone by taking away their food supply is the most elementary and primal way to establish control and compliance, which is why it’s so effective. This is the ultimate reason why men “follow orders”, even when those orders are criminal – the alternative might be unemployment, which means starvation.

Imprisonment is represented by the element of iron, and is the way that the ruling class threaten anyone they cannot starve. If you can access your own food supply, or earn your own wage with which to buy food, fair enough, more power to you. It means you have avoided enslavement at the level of clay, but the ruling class can escalate things to the level of iron.

Imprisonment is what happens to you if you break the law. The law is how the ruling class gets you to do things when the threat of starvation is insufficient.

The ruling class determines what the law is by drawing up a list of all the things they don’t want you to do. The initial list is one of all the things that common law has agreed causes harm to people, because making these things against the law grants the ruling class legitimacy. To this list they add certain things they don’t want people doing.

For example, the Western ruling classes have been afraid that if cannabis were legal, their livestock would be less productive. The belief is that cannabis use saps ambition, which our economy relies upon. This belief is warranted to some extent – cannabis use tends to cause a drift away from materialism, which implies less interest in money and consumption. So making it illegal causes the cash cows to grow fatter.

The threat of imprisonment is the threat of ripping someone away from their usual environment at gunpoint, and then putting them in an enclosed environment with people who have caused harm to others. Furthermore, if you don’t want to go in the cage the Police will kill you on the spot. It’s the threat of a deeply unpleasant experience, which is why the threat of iron is so effective at modifying the behaviour of the peasantry.

Ostracisation is represented by the element of silver. As silver is more subtle than iron, so is ostracisation more subtle than imprisonment. However, as silver is more valuable than clay, the fact that it is more subtle than iron makes it stronger, and not weaker. Ostracisation can affect people who cannot be targeted for enslavement in the realm of clay or iron, on account of that their behaviour is not objectionable enough.

The ruling class can still threaten to destroy their social reputation, and these threats are just as capable of insidiously affecting a person’s mind as the threats of starvation or imprisonment. Whispering campaigns and rumour-mongering are both capable of making someone’s life much less pleasant, and the threat of being subjected to these is often enough to induce compliance where other methods are inapplicable.

In practice, ostracisation is an extremely powerful tool, because all it takes to employ it is to tell enough lies about the target. A sufficiently motivated rumour-mongering campaign can blacken the reputation of even the most exalted of people. Such campaigns can be waged with the strength of thousands if the person spreading the rumours is influential enough.

Moreover, the clay and iron strategies of starvation and imprisonment only work if the ruling class has clear physical dominance. Ostracisation can be employed by any member of the ruling class, established dominance or not. All they have to do is induce people to feel contempt for some other member of the collective. They can also target other members of the ruling class with such means.

Ostracisation also plays on fundamental primal fears, because humans are a social animal, and the vast majority of us cannot function well without healthy social interaction. The real beauty of it, from the ruling class’s point of view, is that it’s always possible to change what’s fashionable within society, and therefore always possible to ostracise a person (or group of people) so long as the apparatus of propaganda are controlled.

Through combining these three major threat strategies, the ruling class is able to induce submission in virtually all of the members of the lower classes. These three are enough to cover the entire spectrum of man’s lower nature, and therefore are sufficient to appeal to all elementary human fears.

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When The Last Boomer Dies, God Will Return To Earth

The Boomer is an utterly Godless creature. Having completely forsaken divine guidance and surrendered to ego, it lives a life of pure narcissism, driven only by instinct, lurching from one impulse-fuelled drama to the next. However, there is always a resurgent spark of yang everytime yin appears triumphant. When the last Boomer perishes, God will return to Earth.

The Boomers are a deeply damaged generation, in two major ways.

Men who spend several years in mortal combat, as the parents of the Boomers did, almost inevitably end up with warped attitudes to violence, abuse and mental health. This isn’t to blame that generation – this is simply pointing out a psychological fact by way of explanation. When you add large amounts of alcohol to this mix, in lieu of an actual mental health system, you end up with a parenting style that doesn’t lead to healthy offspring.

Many returning veterans became alcoholics to deal with the trauma of surviving combat and the deprivations of war. Many others became emotionally distant. A great number found that a screaming child brought them straight back to the screams of the wounded on the battlefield, and this brought with it bursts of adrenaline – hardly the right mindset to be raising children with.

For Boomer children, it was common to only see one’s father when completely pissed after work. When they did interact with fathers, it was often with damaged, broken men who behaved unpredictably. Coming to one’s parent with a problem was often met with a “Fucking harden up!”, and causing problems frequently led to the bash. What the Boomers learned from this was to put themselves first, always, because the world was a terrible and dangerous place.

However, World Wars One and Two did a lot more damage than merely causing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to millions of veterans who would then go on to neglect and abuse their children. It also demolished their belief in God.

In the lead up to, and during, World War One, people on all sides were told that their nation’s participation in the war was the Will of God, and that God wanted them to go and fight in Europe. This severely weakened the belief that most Westerners had in God. World War Two destroyed it. By the end of World War Two it was widely believed that the very idea of God was for weaklings, and was just a trick to sucker people into doing the priest’s bidding.

Consequently, the Boomers were raised in an unprecedented absence of spirituality and spiritual sentiment.

This combination of self-centredness and godlessness led to a narcissism that had never previously been seen. This monstrous egotism has pushed the world into an extremely precarious state, with numerous dangers that pose existential risks to the human species. Not only is the environmental and military situation precarious, but the ideological climate is conducive to fanaticism.

Generation X is aware that the selfishness of the Boomers is far from normal. We’ve seen our grandparents’ generation, who were entirely different. Despite the hardships they themselves had endured, they were kind, thoughtful, other-focused: the anti-Boomers. Some of us can even remember our grandparents saying that there was something wrong with the whole Boomer generation, that they must have been spoiled or left in front of the television too long.

Generation X, as described in Fight Club, has faced a different dilemma. With a parental generation so self-centred as to be all but absent, and a grandparental generation mostly shuffled off this plane of existence, our Great War is a spiritual war. We have problems such as finding gratitude for what we have when we know that our parents had it so much better. We must look for meaning in a dying culture.

Many people like to act as if God was an unnecessary thing altogether, and that an absence of belief in God had no meaningful effect on a person’s behaviour. The reality is that, absent a belief in God, an individual will inevitably behave as if they were an animal, driven only by biological concerns for resource acquisition, social dominance, shitting, pissing and sex. This causes tremendous suffering to all.

The first Boomers were born in the mid-40s, and the last ones in the early 1960s. This means that the oldest Boomers are already in their mid-70s, and that means that they’re about to start dying off in droves. Right now, Boomers are in complete control of the political, economic and cultural agenda, but their impending mass retirement means that they will cede all of this to their offspring over the next fifteen years.

The death of the last Boomer will be as the bursting of a great dam, one that held back the flood of a new spiritual age. With no more Boomers to trash the planet in search of an ever-comfier retirement, Generation X and the Millennials will be able to build a world that focused on the cessation of suffering. This we shall achieve through a great spiritual renaissance.

Democracy Has Failed

It’s starting to appear that the democratic system now causes more misery and chaos than it solves. The ancient Greeks were well aware of its shortcomings, and now that our cultural decay is starting to become conspicuous, we’re learning about its shortcomings as well. This essay shows how democracy in the West has terminally failed, and what we can do about it.

In The Republic, Plato wrote about how the franchise begins with a small number of people and then gets expanded, in successive waves, to encompass everyone. When it does encompass everyone, it encompasses unwise people who don’t know how to keep their egos and desires in check, and these people cause the government to make bad decisions in trying to placate them.

Democracy leads to tyranny because people eventually get so fed up with the chaos, pandering and incompetence that they vote a strongman into power to sort it all out. This strongman usually rigs things so that it’s hard to get him out of power, and with that done, the system can become extremely brutal and autocratic. It’s a story so old that even by Plato’s time there were enough examples to describe a generalised form of it.

Democracy is to the people’s will to resist as a lightning rod is to the lightning bolt. The purpose of it is to dissipate energy so that it doesn’t do any property damage. Democracy takes the people’s anger about the way they have been abused and uses it to fuel this great ritual called an election. The point of the election is to dissipate the people’s anger by making them feel as if they are being listened to.

In order to keep people voting (and thereby not rioting), politicians have to keep up the facade that the people are in charge. If they can’t keep this facade up, then cynicism will become widespread, and people will start supporting other politicians or systems other than democracy. This cynicism, then, is the sign that a political system is failing.

Much like a fiat currency, a democracy needs to inspire confidence in order to keep existing. This can only happen if the people feel that they are in charge. Unfortunately for everyone, it’s now obvious that the people are not at all in charge.

The Brexit charade has now been going on for three years. It has been three years since the British electorate voted to leave the European Union, but not only is Britain still in, their rulers appear to have no clear plan for leaving. It’s obvious that the British Parliament has done everything they can to delay the process in the hope that it can somehow be abandoned outright.

There are many within that Parliament who appear to think it legitimate to work against the will of the people at the same time as drawing a paycheck for representing those people. They plan to force a second referendum and, if that should lose, a third. Some have responded to news of this plan with talk of civil war. Resisting Brexit has caused massive cynicism and resentment, dealing a crippling wound to British democracy.

The mainstream media, joined at the hip to the political class, pumps out propaganda as if there was a war on. The Economist magazine ran an editorial this week demanding yet another Brexit extension, at the same time as running a feature article about the danger of rising cynicism among the voters. All over the West, the mainstream media appears oblivious to how badly it has failed in its duty to inform.

In New Zealand, a similar situation is arising with refugees. It’s already more than apparent the vast majority of New Zealand do not want an increase to the refugee quota on account of that there are already 12,000 Kiwis on the public housing waitlist. Despite this, the Sixth Labour Government doubled that quota, knowing that most of the beneficiaries of doing so would be lifelong Labour voters.

Worst of all, the New Zealand First party that campaigned on a reduction to immigration is the same one that refused to table an objection to the doubling of the quota. This betrayal, among others, will further reduce faith in democracy among the very population groups whose confidence was wavering the most.

On top of all this, it has come to public awareness that pedophile rings operate at the top levels of government in every Western country. Jimmy Savile and Jeffrey Epstein were not outliers, but emblematic of a wider predilection among the ruling classes. Our ruling classes are literally raping our children en masse, and voting does nothing to stop the rot, as all of our elected representatives are on the same side as the child rapists.

It seems that the existing social contract is dead. There is no longer any pretence that the ruling class need take the opinions or even the wellbeing of the plebs into account. It’s now transparent that the ruling class make decisions based on what benefits them and their sponsors as a group, and the suffering caused to the lower classes is simply ignored as insignificant.

If it doesn’t matter when the demos gets overruled, left without shelter or raped by grooming gangs of predatory foreign men, then democracy is dead. What we have now is a tyrannical oligarchy held together by extremely sophisticated propaganda and a dogged refusal to allow any non-approved items onto the agenda.

The problem with declaring democracy dead is that there are a great many shitty alternatives to it. One of the foremost of these is the idea that the abolition of democracy constitutes a green light to getting rid of “them”. Authoritarianism is no alternative to democracy because it always leads to warfare, as authoritarianism naturally provokes all manner of people into becoming enemies.

However, that isn’t the fault of the observers, it’s the fault of those who killed democracy – the liars, the bullshitters, the opportunists, the narcissists and psychopaths whose conduct eroded faith in political co-operation. Let us not forget, the alternative to political co-operation is violence. For future co-operation to be possible, however, the three major failed ideologies must be rejected and a comprehensive understanding of inherent human rights embraced.