philosophy – Page 92

Why Beneficiaries Are Morally Superior to Workers

It’s a nearly universal assumption nowadays that people who work are morally superior to people on welfare. People on welfare, we are told, are essentially parasites that do nothing but suck wealth out of the system, and we’d all be better off without them. As this essay will explain, this is almost the exact opposite of reality. People on welfare are, in fact, morally superior to those who work.

The vast majority of human history has been one of deprivation and toil. Having evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, the primary survival challenge facing our species for almost the entirety of its existence was finding enough food to meet the metabolic needs of our bodies. For the most part, this was a brutal and bloody struggle against the world – and each other.

This had a powerful effect on the evolution of human behaviour – and our morality.

Because resources are scarce, and the metabolic clock is ticking, humans have always needed to be active. We have always needed to work, whether that be hunting, gathering, fishing or working the land in the form of agriculture. This was how we gathered enough resources to survive. The alternative to activity was death.

Because working was necessary for survival, we have always praised those who did it, and always excoriated those who did not. It was probably necessary to do this, because, had we not done so, the lazy would have dragged all of society down with them. Our culture, especially Northern European culture, came to consider work something almost holy, as if the meaning of life.

Working more and harder is how wealth is built, but as can be seen in the graph at the top of this essay, the planet cannot support the level of consumption that humans are currently subjecting it to. There simply aren’t enough of the necessary resources. The resources that do exist are being depleted at such a pace that we can see hard physical limits approaching, and there’s no escaping it.

The fact is that a profound paradigm shift has taken place over the past few hundred years, and we’ve barely even noticed it, let alone adapted to it.

American agricultural productivity increased 1200% between 1950 and 2000. This was thanks to something called the Green Revolution, which increased agricultural productivity severalfold all across the world. What this means is that it requires far, far fewer people to feed society today than what it took in the past. Therefore, most people are now surplus labour.

We have adapted to this by setting the now-redundant agricultural workers to work in other industries. First was manufacturing, then service industries. This worked out great for a long time, because all of these non-essential workers were able to produce things that raised the human standard of living, even if those things weren’t necessary.

This was pretty awesome for a few decades, and arguably continues to be. However, we are now aware of some things that we once didn’t know. In particular, we are now aware of the pressure we’re putting on the natural environment through shifting those surplus workers into manufacturing all sorts of things. We now know that we can’t keep doing this.

The world doesn’t need hard work and production any more. Those days are over. What the world now needs are people who can restrict their consumption to a level that the world can sustain. As seen on the graph above, that level is about half that of the average Chinese level of consumption, some $15,000 of resources every year.

In other words, a First World standard of living will, necessarily, become a thing of the past sooner or later.

For the average Westerner, restricting one’s consumption to about $15,000 worth of goods and services a year will not be easy. This will demand an extremely sharp curtailment of material desire. It will mean that far fewer international trips can be taken, and far fewer new cars or big screen televisions can be bought. It may require vegetarianism or something like it. It will require great sacrifice.

Without such a great sacrifice, our planet cannot survive, or at least not in a form that can sustain human life. Therefore, doing so is a moral imperative.

The average Western beneficiary has already achieved this. Considering that the average Western beneficiary already survives without the excessive consumption displayed by almost everyone in a job, they are in fact showing the way forward for the rest of the Western World. They are the pioneers of the future, demonstrating the correct way for the rest of us to behave. They are the Men of Gold.

Like the holy ascetic men of the great Eastern religions, the Western beneficiary class has liberated themselves from materialism. They are therefore showing the way forward for the rest of humanity, and ought to be praised as spiritual masters. The rest of us need to follow the path of the beneficiary, and stop following the path of the worker/consumer. The first step is recognising the moral superiority of the welfare recipient.

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.

The Asylum At The Top of The Mountain

This world is a crazy place, and getting respite is all but impossible. We are bombarded with lies from all directions, all the time. The newspaper lies, the radio lies, the television lies, and now the Internet is lying to us. Living in this whirlwind of untruth is enough to drive the most disciplined man to insanity. The good news is that a place of respite exists.

Who are VJM Publishing? You can’t be leftists, because you are against mass Muslim and African immigration, believe in the right to own firearms and believe in God. You can’t be rightists, because you promote comprehensive drug law reform, a universal basic income and strengthening the negotiating position of workers. You can’t be centrists, because you’re not pathetic and mealy-mouthed.

So who are you?

In the real world, there are many topics that one cannot speak about, at least not with full openness. One may not speak of how psychedelics and cannabis are spiritual sacraments, or of the inherently violent nature of Abrahamic religion, or of the etiology of homosexuality, or of the correlation between race and intelligence, or of the unsustainable nature of capitalism, or of the well-documented structural brain difference between men and women. All of these subjects are taboo – only the television may speak of them.

At the Asylum at the Top of the Mountain, all those taboos are left behind. Here, it doesn’t matter what your political views are, not in the least! Every political ideology is considered both a work of brilliance and idiocy. Every political activist is considered both a genius and an imbecile. Alt-centrism is the overriding philosophy, and we follow the Five Rejections and the Five Acceptances.

At the Asylum at the Top of the Mountain, anyone who wants to bring politics into an intelligent discussion about science, philosophy or spirituality can go fuck themselves!

Here, the highest moral imperative is to see reality accurately. If you can’t deal with the biological reality of human existence, or the transitory nature of the human experience, you will be ripped down. The Asylum at the Top of the Mountain is not a place for virtue signallers. It is a place for truthseekers, even if those truths should cause suffering to those who bear them.

There will never, ever be public awards bestowed on VJM Publishing. No Government will ever hail us as the honest men and women that this benighted world so desperately needs. No media will ever honour us as speakers of truth, no priest, rabbi or imam will ever praise us. Any person who desires such accolades best turn away now, lest they waste their energy climbing to us!

We can only ever be the Asylum at the Top of the Mountain. We can only ever be a tiny space, walled off from the madness, inside which a small number of exceptional people can find like-minded company. Entry to the Asylum is not difficult, but finding it is. Its light may burn eternal, but it is equally subtle.

It’s obvious that civil war is coming to the West. The population is already divided into intractably opposed groups. Anyone trying to make a right-wing argument on Reddit gets banned; anyone trying to make a left-wing argument on 4chan gets ridiculed. Not only is the middle ground vanishing, but neither side appears willing to restore it.

The Asylum at the Top of the Mountain is for those who are before and after this great impending conflict. We know the education system is fucked – merely a drone factory. We know the media is fucked – merely propaganda for corporate interests. We know religion is fucked – all spiritual knowledge was lost centuries ago. The Asylum is for those outside of time.

We know all this is not going to blow over, but rather come crashing down in a maelstrom of fire and blood. Our entire societies and economies are built on a unsustainable Ponzi scheme that demands new people be stuffed into them like so much coal into a furnace. The cracks have been showing for decades, and the bursting is inevitable.

Very well. We wait for it here in the Asylum, and then we will return to the World.

When the inmates of the Asylum at the Top of the Mountain return to the scorched earth of tomorrow, we will do so with the intent of bringing the light of God to a devastated people. Therefore, those we seek now are those who carry that light within themselves. We are not interested in religious people, who look for that light in the outside world. Such people belong in the valleys below.

In the New Century, it will no longer be possible to speak of Magic Jews on sticks and fiery pits of eternal torment for freethinkers. Spirituality will return to the world, and with it will come genuine knowledge about eternity and its laws, and the true, infinite nature of the human condition. Although such things cannot be spoken of now, their time will come, as the apocalypse burns away all falsehoods.

When this time comes, the men and women from the Asylum at the Top of the Mountain will be there. We will be ready to transmute the light of God into actions that alleviate the suffering of other sentient beings. New life will form from the ashes, and new order will form from the rubble. As it does, we will be there.

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.

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.