philosophy – Page 95

Did The World End on December 21st, 2012?

Many people thought that the end of the calendar year 2012 would mark the end of the world. Not only had it apparently been predicted by ancient Mayan astronomers that the world would end then, but Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero program supported those predictions. This essay examines a terrifying possibility: that the world actually did end on December 21st, 2012 – we just haven’t realised it yet.

People have been conditioned to believe that if an end of world scenario arose, it would look a particular way. Nuclear war, comet strike, zombie virus or mass tsunami are the most popular examples, but we have been made to think that it would be spectacular and cinematic. Chest-rattling explosions and flashes of light and fire come to mind.

Therefore, when December 21st 2012 came and went, and no-one got engulfed in a firestorm, most people assumed that the world did not end, and that it was business as usual. However, there are other, much subtler ways for the world to end.

Leading up to the end of 2011, televangelist Harold Camping ran an extensive fear campaign about an upcoming apocalyptic event called the Rapture. This event would involve all of God’s chosen being “raptured” up into heaven, leaving us sinners behind.

Could something like this really have happened?

Since the end of 2012, many people have been struck with a sense that something is going wrong. It seems like something took a dark turn at some point in the recent past. Since then, there has been less kindness in the world – less light, love and laughter. Things seem to have become unusually grim and serious.

This is reflected in the rising suicide rates. The suicide rate in America has increased by 33% since 1999, and the rate in New Zealand is the highest since records began. Not only suicide, but phenomena correlated to suicide have also increased. There is more depression, more opiate addiction, more loneliness throughout all levels of society.

Some commentators have chalked it up to the lingering financial effects of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, something which bankrupted many businesses and created mass unemployment. The problem is, of course, that the unemployment rate has since recovered: in America it’s an almost nonexistent 3.6%, and in New Zealand it is 4.2%. The malaise has not.

Many feel like we have been forsaken by God. It’s possible that the world really did end in this manner: God’s presence may well have withdrawn from the material world.

It’s possible that the world ended in the sense that the forces that constrained the evil and chaos of the world are no longer present.

Something like Camping’s Rapture may really have happened at the end of 2012. It may be, however, that instead of being pulled into the sky in rapture, those of us who had pleased God enough simply disappeared, their consciousness returning to God’s embrace while the rest of us continued our lives.

After all, we don’t know which of our fellows are conscious and which are not. So it’s entirely possible the consciousness of many people, perhaps a large percentage of people, withdrew from the material world and reunited with God, leaving the rest of us here.

The effect that this would have on the remainder of the world would be subtle, but over time it would become clear.

Absent a divine spark, people will come to make decisions based on the raw programming of their bodies. This means instincts and conditioning, with no higher functions. Apart from sheer intelligence, such people have no tools with which to moderate their behaviour. Not being conscious, they are incapable of using empathy. Metaphysical gold is absent.

Consciousness is essential for empathy because, without it, it’s impossible to truly imagine that another person is conscious, and therefore it’s impossible to realise that causing harm to that person causes suffering to their consciousness.

This means that raw animal lusts, particularly for wealth, status and women, start to reign. When they take over, concern for suffering caused to other people is thrown by the wayside, and the world becomes a much nastier place.

It could be that, on December 21st 2012, a significant amount of consciousness was withdrawn from the world, leaving the rest of us here in a place that had essentially ended.

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 Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Harms Social Cohesion

Cannabis prohibition does a lot of harm to various groups within society, as other articles here have shown, but it also has an effect on society as a whole. Not only does society have to pay for the cost of enforcing cannabis prohibition, but it suffers at a collective level the same harm done to individuals: as below, so above. As this article will examine, cannabis prohibition harms social cohesion.

Our society relies on co-operation between different groups at all levels.

One of the most important ways is the solidarity between generations. In order for the young to be willing to care for the old when the time comes, the youth have to feel some kind of solidarity with those older ones. They have to feel like those older ones managed the country in such a way as to leave them a worthy inheritance. They have to feel like the old cared about them.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, there is a sharp distinction between young and old when it comes to support for cannabis law reform. The correlation between voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 and being in the 65+ age bracket was -0.43 – not extremely strong, but strong enough to suggest that the average person in that age bracket is decidedly against cannabis law reform.

There are several reasons why a young person might feel that the generations before them had failed in their duty of stewardship, but the unwillingness to reform the cannabis laws are one of the foremost. For a young person today, the thought that the nation’s elderly are sitting back on a fat pension drinking whisky and chomping painkillers, while at the same time putting you in prison for growing a medicinal flower, seems obscene.

Given these reasons, why would the young not come to see the elderly as evil? The indifference of the elderly towards the suffering caused to the young by cannabis prohibition certainly appears evil to those suffering it. As a result, their coming to hate those pushing it on them is inevitable. And by such means, society is divided and conquered.

Cannabis prohibition doesn’t just divide society on the basis of age.

Understanding New Zealand also showed that the correlation between voting ALCP in 2017 and being New Zealand-born was 0.73, which is very strong. This is because cannabis use is an integral part of Kiwi culture – it brings Maoris and white people together as well as rugby and barbecues, and especially when it comes to younger demographics.

Because of the central role of cannabis in Kiwi culture, cannabis prohibition is something that pits New Zealand-born Kiwis against immigrants. This is a recipe for deep resentment, because this plays along a pre-existing fracture line in society. If the New Zealand-born would come to feel that it was only because of recent immigrants that they were not allowed to freely use cannabis, they could become very angry.

Neither is the damage done to social cohesion just a matter between different groups. Cannabis prohibition also destroys solidarity within groups.

There are occasions where people don’t get together because the illegal nature of cannabis means that some people don’t want to be associated with others. Many a party guest has been uninvited because the hosts were not sure that the guest would be comfortable with the cannabis being smoked there, or because the hosts didn’t want the guest bringing cannabis to their house.

In such ways, all manner of natural social bonds have been broken because one or the other party was a cannabis user. This isn’t just seen at parties but in romantic relationships and in the workplace too. If cannabis is illegal, then cannabis users will naturally not trust non-cannabis users and non-cannabis users will naturally not trust cannabis users. These divisions are so needless.

As mentioned in another chapter, cannabis prohibition has had a severe impact on people’s respect for the Police. But cannabis prohibition impacts other industries as well. Some people no longer trust their doctors because of their inability to speak honestly about the medicinal value of cannabis. Some people no longer trust journalists because of their past fearmongering and sensationalising over the issue. This loss of trust impacts social cohesion.

Worst of all, prohibition has caused some people to dislike their country and society, when that need not have been the case. This is especially true of those who have faced the wrath of the justice system.

How can a person respect a society that wants to put them in a cage for using a medicinal plant? How can a person respect the hypocrisy that sees hundreds of people kill themselves with alcohol every year, while at the same time targeting others for something much less harmful? Cannabis prohibition is such a poor idea that it cannot be enforced without stoking massive anger and resentment.

All this anger and resentment has had an injurious effect on social cohesion. Prohibition has caused people to dislike and mistrust each other when they otherwise wouldn’t have done so. This has had the total effect of making society worse. The only way to fix it is to legalise cannabis.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

Slave Morality in 2019

Some people have made the assumption that, because Christian morals have faded from the zeitgeist in recent decades, Nietzschean concepts like slave/master morality are no longer relevant. As this essay will examine, this is not only wrong but the opposite of the truth. Slave morality, in 2019, is more influential than ever before.

The slave/master morality dichotomy comes from The Genealogy of Morals. In this book, Nietzsche outlined the distinction between the master morality that arises in a state of Nature, which divides the world into good and bad, and the slave morality that arises after civilisation and which divides the world into good and evil, with the evil being the same as the good of the master.

Understanding slave morality is to understand resentment: the man with slave mentality resents the man with master morality, and seeks to bring him down. This resentment is the emotion that arises when the ego cannot get consensual reality to conform to its will, as a slave cannot. Resentment is, therefore, the natural consequence of weakness, whether that weakness be physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual.

One major problem with the modern world is that it is heavily overpopulated. We are coming up to 8,000,000,000 human inhabitants on this planet. This means that the vast bulk of us have effectively no influence over the course of the world, or even over our own lives. We can only move around in small boxes built by other people.

The result is that there are now previously unheard of levels of resentment in our society. This resentment has found a florid range of expression.

Social Justice Warrior culture is one of most apparent examples. The resentment of the weak can be clearly heard in the cries about privilege and oppression. The mantra of SJW culture is that whoever has power is automatically the bad guy in any conflict against someone with less power. The intention of SJWs is the same as that of the slave moralist: to rip down anyone strong and call them evil.

As Ted Kaczynski pointed out in Industrial Society and Its Future, these impulses on the part of the leftist can’t ever be satisfied. Their passion to change the world comes from the resentment of being stupid and ignorant, and this doesn’t go away no matter who they destroy. So every time they succeed in destroying someone, they simply move on to the next target.

Therefore, as long as resentment exists, there will be Social Justice Warrior culture. This culture will, like slave moralities everywhere, try and destroy anyone who is happy. SJW culture chooses to do this by calling them bigots, Nazis and racists, and declaring that all good in their lives is privilege that has been stolen from someone else.

Related to SJW culture is ethnomasochism. This is when a person derives a particular kind of thrill from running down their own people. In the same way that a regular masochist will tell his dominatrix that everything he does is wrong, so does the ethnomasochist declare that the history of his people is littered with acts of irredeemable evil.

This ethnomasochism is related to the Holocaust religion, in the sense that it posits a white boogeyman whose excessive in-group favouritism has brought terrible suffering and evil to the world. In the quasi-religious context of ethnomasochism, ‘sin’ is replaced with ‘racism’, which has to be beaten out of society by ripping down anyone who suggests it’s okay to be white.

The resentment of the ethnomasochist leads them to destroy their own nation through support for things like open borders and the mass immigration of Muslims and Africans. The paradoxical fact that they derive a sense of control from this can be explained by comparing the mentality to someone who cuts their own arms: if one must suffer, then at least one can learn to suffer on demand.

Trans culture is a third example. Many men who have found that they don’t come up to the mark as men, i.e. men who women are not naturally attracted to, also find that they can get more attention if they pretend to be women. This is particularly common among men who are physical weaklings. This behaviour mimics a mental illness known as gender dysphoria.

The fundamental motivation for many of these people is to destroy the legitimate enjoyment that normal people get out of natural interactions between masculine and feminine. They want to destroy the natural concept of both “man” and “woman” so that healthy people who fit into these roles cannot enjoy them. A generation ago, homosexuality filled this social niche, but today it’s no longer shocking enough to do so.

Already trans culture has had enough of an impact to make it difficult for quality women to find a man worth being devoted to. By continuing to delegitimise and denormalise healthy expressions of masculinity and femininity, those who promote trans culture find expression for their resentment by destroying the natural and the beautiful.

The inability to understand the importance of free speech or the right to self-defence is yet another example. When a person with slave mentality gets into power, as has happened in New Zealand with the ascension of Jacinda Ardern to the Prime Minister’s position, they are liable to strip these rights away from the populace.

This is made possible by the resentment of the dumb and boring conformists who have nothing interesting to say. Slaves don’t care about the erosion of free speech because they have nothing to say worth listening to, and therefore are not impacted by the loss of an ability to speak, any more than the average person would be impacted by a ban on professional boxing.

People with slave morality don’t understand the desire of master moralists to have the ability to defend themselves either. After all, the defining feature of a slave is that he will not defend himself if he is beaten. The resentment that comes from being this weak manifests as a desire to remove other people’s ability to defend themselves.

A fifth way is the bizarre alliance with Islam. As a psychologist writing in New English Review has explained, Islam is the perfect religion for the resentful who like to see themselves as victims. It takes the same persecution mania as the other Abrahamic cults and raises it to another degree. Muslims resent the current order of the world, and so they are natural allies to the slave moralists.

Many secular Westerners with slave mentality have powerful sympathies for Islam, and can relate to a person throwing their life away in a suicide bombing. After all, the more one resents life, the less value one puts on it. As Nietzsche wrote, the slave moralist is the one who has said ‘No!’ to life, and there is no more vivid expression of this rejection of life than a suicide bombing.

The depth of the resentment can be seen by the size of the cognitive dissonance that arises when the Islamophile is asked about Islam’s attitude to women and homosexuals. Despite the brutally cruel oppression of these groups by Muslim culture, the resentment of the Islamophile is so great that all of these crimes will be swept under the carpet. In this sense, the Islamic apologist is to this generation what the Communist apologist was to the previous one.

These are merely a sample of all the various ways that slave morality expresses itself in 2019. The frightening thing is that, as the world gets more impersonal and more overpopulated, slave morality looks set to become even more influential. The only solution appears to be a massive cull, and an emptying out of the cities where this cancerous mentality has its strongholds.

Understanding the Globalist/Nationalist Dichotomy

In psychologist and political scientist Lee De-Wit’s recent book ‘What’s Your Bias?‘ he spoke of a new order of political alliances. The political order of today, he contends, is no longer a matter of change vs. stability, as it was during the French Revolution, or a matter of labour vs. capital as in the Industrial Revolution. Today it’s nationalist vs. globalist.

The natural basis of solidarity is biological. The strongest bond in the world is between the mother and offspring of animal species, in particular K-selected species such as humans and elephants. Mothers of any mammal species become dangerous if their offspring are threatened; many men have been killed by wandering between a mother bear and her cubs. This fierce willingness to protect is the basis for all solidarity.

It is in order to work in accordance with this natural bond that men choose to form monogamous families. The formation of a nuclear family allows for the maximum possible division of labour, so that the mother is able to fully utilise her natural love for her offspring, while the father is able to fully utilise his muscular advantage in gathering resources. Therefore, the father works with the natural solidarity of mother and child.

Families naturally bond together and form tribes, with a chieftain who settles disputes. These tribes naturally form together and form clans, and these clans naturally bond together and form nations. This process of natural bonds of solidarity leading to higher levels of social order was described by Aristotle in Politics. A nationalist, therefore, is someone who identifies with their wider kin group.

Globalism comes from the other direction. The first truly global system was the British Empire, because the British were the first to control the ocean navigation routes of the entire planet. This they achieved after their victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. Being in control of a global system, the British used it to meet their desires for increased material prosperity.

They did this in a manner similar to the previous empires, such as the Spanish and Portuguese – they imposed it on whoever had the materials. Because controlling the sea lanes made them militarily unstoppable, it was not necessary to obtain the consent of the people who lived on top of those resources. If the British respected the locals enough, they worked with them; if not, they butchered them.

Globalist logic, therefore, is not to see the nation as a family to which one belongs, but as a collection of resources that one exploits. The horrific thing about globalist logic is that it reduces human beings to dollar values and spreadsheet entries. This is why the idea of globalism imposing itself on the nation engenders so much anger among those who are loyal to a kin group.

Whether or not a person is a nationalist is primarily a matter of whether they are loyal to the people of the nation, or loyal to foreign ideologies and interests that might seek to exploit it. A person cannot be neither, unless they are also indifferent to all of the political issues influenced by this dichotomy, and those are many.

For instance, whether or not a person was born in New Zealand has a moderately strong correlation with their likelihood to vote for a nationalist party. Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand that the correlation between being born in New Zealand and voting for the New Zealand First party was 0.54.

This is entirely logical, because there’s no point in having in-group loyalty towards a group that you don’t really belong to. If a person is born overseas, then it’s much easier for them to up sticks and move to yet another country. A person born in New Zealand, however, probably has cousins (and aunts and uncles etc.) also born here. Therefore, the New Zealand nation is their kin group.

Globalists are the children of the Empire. They don’t necessarily have loyalty to the people who they live around, because their immediate ancestors are often from somewhere else. Because the people around them are not part of their wider kin group, they feel no need to make decisions with that kin group in mind. They are comfortable exploiting them for the sake of their own personal gain, or for the gain of their kin group.

A nationalist, then, represents their people, whereas a globalist represents either another kin group somewhere else, themselves or an ideology. This ideology can be anything, but it’s usually the ideology of the Empire itself. A thousand years ago, the globalist ideology was Christianity. Today, the globalist ideology is neoliberalism, otherwise known as globohomo.

An important point is that this globalist-nationalist dichotomy cuts right across the left-right dichotomy, and could be argued to have replaced it.

The world’s globalists are split across the left and the right wings.

The left-wing globalists are ecocommunists who want a one world government that manages and allocates all of the world’s resources. These ecocommunists see ecological crises – and the perceived threat of such crises – as a great opportunity to get people to accept a global government. Mass immigration is great because it destroys national loyalties, making people more willing to accept being loyal to a global system.

The right-wing globalists are hypercapitalists who don’t want any government at any level. These free marketeers are in favour of globalism for purely economic reasons. They don’t care about the effect that importing cheap labour has on working class neighbourhoods, because they don’t live in them. All they want is the freedom to come, plunder, and then leave with the loot, and therefore laws protecting the nations are opposed.

Neither of these groups care much for natural bonds, such as to family or village. They are simply those with loyalties elsewhere, or to themselves only. ‘Globalist’ is, therefore, not at all a euphemism for Jew. An Englishman living in Auckland who has no loyalty to New Zealand is just as much the globalist as any New York Jew working in high finance.

The nationalists, likewise, are split across the left and the right wings.

Left-wing nationalists opposes mass immigration on account of the effect it has on the nation’s workers. They are concerned about the effect that a reserve pool of cheap labour will have on their people’s wages. They are also concerned that mass immigration will destroy the solidarity necessary for the nation to agree to welfare measures like a UBI.

Right-wing nationalists, by contrast, oppose mass immigration for the reason that they dislike people not of their nation, and believe they should stay away. Right-wing nationalists have problems with things like racemixing, which left-wing nationalists don’t really care about. Both sides also sharply disagree when it comes to measures such as work for the dole or drug law reform. Right-wing nationalists don’t care about working-class wages and don’t want a UBI anyway.

Because of their shared opposition to globalism, left-wing nationalists often get lumped in with right-wing nationalists by globalist propagandists. This has led to the absurd spectacle of politicians who are supposedly working-class representatives championing things like raising the refugee quota, despite that it instantly weakens the bargaining position of the native working class.