elementalism – Page 40

The Alt-Centrist Response To Increasing Polarisation

No-one is in any doubt that political polarisation is increasing all across the Western World. The centre seems to be collapsing in every Western country, with the extremes of both the left and the right gaining in power. This essay describes the alt-centrist response to this increasingly apparent phenomenon.

Although America is usually given as the example of polarisation, with Donald Trump on one wing and Trump Derangement Syndrome on the other, they are still relatively civil compared to Europe.

In Germany, alt movements now have the support of at least 36% of the population. This is only including the alt-left Greens at 24% and the alt-right Alternative for Germany at 12%. If one adds the Left Party at 8%, then the alt movements are now getting more support than the Establishment.

In Sweden, the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats are now the second biggest party outright, with the mainstream Moderate (Conservative) Party continuing to fall away. The Sweden Democrats have been so successful that even more hardline neo-Nazi movements have started up to compete for that voting bloc.

In Britain, support for the mainstream Conservative and Labour Parties have collapsed in the space of one year, with both now polling below 25%, and the newly-founded Brexit Party coming from nowhere to poll 20%+. With four completely different movements all polling around 20%, it looks like the next General Election will render Britain all but ungovernable.

In France, the Socialist Party that ruled the country for decades has disintegrated. Their candidate now has a meagre 4% support ahead of the next French Presidential election in 2022. Marine Le Pen’s far-right nationalist movement the National Rally, by contrast, is polling at 28%. This is just barely behind the Establishment’s golden boy Emmanuel Macron, at 30%.

What it looks like, all over the West, is that the centre is collapsing and the extremes are growing. This pattern is easily recognisable as the terminal one that precedes almost every war, ever. This is to say, the West is headed for full-scale civil war. This is not because of any ill will on the part of any faction of actors – it’s simply a function of the growth rate of the various forces that underpin social cohesion (or the lack of it).

The Western World can be compared to a running washing machine, where someone chucked a brick called ‘neoliberalism’ inside the main chamber about 20-30 years ago and things are just starting to fall apart. This newspaper has already pointed out how similar the social and economic situation is to the 1920s in Central Europe. It will get worse.

Everyday rhetoric reflects this. Many people now feel that either the left wing has gone off the deep end and are calling everyone Nazis, or the right wing has gone off the deep end and are calling everyone Communists. It’s almost impossible to stake out a position in the centre, because the more polarised the environment is, the more likely either side is to see centrists as the enemy.

This is where the alt-centre comes in. A time of collapse and chaos actually benefits the alt-centrists, because it is then that we come into our glory.

The original right, left and centre represent a stable system, or one that’s at peace. The alt-left and the alt-right, by contrast, don’t care about peace – they want war. The alt-left want to smash down all borders by force; the alt-right wants to expel anyone who doesn’t fit in by force. In the eyes of the new positions, peace has failed, and the fault lies squarely on “them”.

The presence of the alt-right and the alt-left is a sign that the broader system is disintegrating. The presence of the alt-centre is a sign that this disintegration has passed the point of no return. We must now get used to living in a new paradigm. But first, we’re going to have to go through some pain.

When the broader system disintegrates, there are no longer any forces holding the victorious alt-left or alt-right factions to task, no matter which of the two wins. Whoever gains the ascendancy can all but wipe out their enemy. Those are extremely dangerous times, and we’re heading towards them.

The alt-centre, therefore, acts as a moderating effect in a time of increasing disorder. This is a rare quality, and and it is achieved by appealing to universal values such as truth. The intent of this moderation is not to help one side or the other to win, because the alt-centrist knows that the excesses of one age lead directly to the excesses of the next.

We’re not here to help one side or the other to victory. We’re not even the peacekeepers. What has to happen will happen, and we know that we’ll be there to rebuild on the other side.

The intent is to make the crash landing as soft as possible.

This makes the alt-centrist position a very interesting one to take. The alt-centrist must serve as a kind of undertaker to the remnants of the last age. The point of this, however, is so that the new age can begin in the right way. It falls upon us to understand how and why this collapse is happening so that we can organise things to resist collapse the next time.

The alt-centre, then, is the unwobbling pivot at the very centre of the taijitu. The right and the left will come and go, and will periodically destroy the entire world, but we in the alt-centre are the seed of a new philosophical order that will arise in the aftermath, one that promises less suffering than the one before it.

After the crash landing, the survivors will stumble out of the wreckage and ask “Now WTF do we do?” The pilot will be morally obliged to take command then, even if only for long enough to establish a new right and a new left.

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 Conceit of Silver

Alchemically speaking, there are two great conceits – one lesser and one greater. The lesser one is known as the Conceit of Iron, and relates to the arrogance that comes with physical dominance. The greater one, generally speaking, comes with intellectual dominance, and is closely related to the concept of hubris. This essay will examine what is known as the Conceit of Silver.

Silver is the first of the two precious metals, and one arrives in the realm of silver once iron is sufficiently brightened. As one progresses up the alchemical scale, thought moves from the simple bipartite distinction of strong/weak to the new distinction of smart/dumb. As such, there are now two distinct kinds of weak: the dumb-strong, and the dumb-weak.

The Conceit of Silver is not the same thing as simply thinking one is smarter than everyone else, although it is related. If one is intelligent enough to dominate both attractive women and muscular men, it’s very easy to become arrogant. Possessing unusual intelligence can feel like a superpower, because it makes it much easier to create change in accordance with one’s will.

The problem is that silver, by itself, cannot make moral decisions. Intelligence is a great thing, but without wisdom it can only ever be directed towards fulfilling egoic desires. Without the capacity to feel empathy for other sentient beings, an individual cannot act to end the suffering of them. Such a person is unenlightened.

Without at least some of the element of gold, a person acting in the realm of silver will act to accumulate resources or to raise their social standing, not to reduce the suffering of other sentient beings. Much of the moral grandstanding that people of silver engage in claims to achieve the latter, while really achieving the former. It isn’t always clear how much of this is conscious and how much is unconscious.

The Conceit of Silver is, in short, the belief that higher intelligence, education or social standing makes one a moral authority.

This happens in two major ways: by thinking one is gold when one is silver, or by denying the existence of gold altogether. This is a very easy mistake to make if one is of the silver, because if one is aware of such, then it follows as a general rule that most of the rest of the world is baser. Generally speaking, others are dumber, and their desires short-sighted. But this rule does not always hold.

The classic example of the Conceit of Silver is when a person achieves a high position through scheming, inheritance or politics, and then assumes that they must possess a commensurate moral superiority. At its worst, this conceit can lead a person into thinking that their individual egoic desires are the same as the Will of God. Such a person can be extremely dangerous if in power.

The Conceit of Silver is that it assumes itself to be divine. Individuals prone to this conceit are apt to say things like “Intelligence makes humans unique from the rest of the animal kingdom,” inspired by their failure to appreciate the perspectives of others. This will usually reinforce a belief that intelligence confers moral authority, or, even worse, a belief that education or birth station confers moral authority.

In fact, there’s an argument that the only reason why intelligence evolved so prodigiously in the human animal is because our social structure allowed for an unprecedented degree of scheming, lying, backstabbing, cheating and all kinds of general skullduggery. From this perspective, intelligence could even be seen as a moral negative, a sign that one clings to material power.

Finding an example of the Conceit of Silver is easy. All it takes is to go to a university and to find a person who believes that they might be smarter than everyone else there. At any university, there will be plenty of them. In the absence of a university it’s only necessary to find a place where intellectuals gather, or even a professional association.

Almost invariably, when a person becomes intelligent enough, they start to assume that they are a moral authority of some kind. They start to conflate their understanding of how systems are with how systems should be. People who do this are not always wrong – understanding a system often does lead to an understanding of how that system could be optimised to minimise the suffering it causes. But that isn’t necessarily so.

It isn’t easy for an intelligent person to agree that their brainpower is not particularly valuable in comparison to wisdom. The majority of intelligent people make a living out of their brainpower by way of learning a valuable profession. It’s therefore very hard for them to set all of this silver aside, and to admit that possession of it doesn’t make someone a morally superior person.

It takes a mercurial sort of personality to admit that one’s intelligence, however vast, is not sufficient to conclude that one is fundamentally more valuable. That, despite being smarter, one might be of less value than a person of iron or clay if the right circumstances arose, or if one had the wrong moral direction. This element of mercury is necessary for the alchemist to successfully transition from silver to gold.

The truth is that gold is the most malleable of all metals, and that gives it one paradoxical quality: it doesn’t resist when claims to leadership are made by men of silver. Because silver is harder than gold, it’s usually possible for those of silver to force those of gold out of leadership positions by way of intimidation or verbal and social aggression.In today’s degraded age, this has taken place all over the world.

The universities, the religious and spiritual movements and the political movements have all been taken over by materialists pushing some irrational political ideology or other. The element of gold has been pushed to the peripheries, making it possible to ask whether we live in the Kali Yuga. The Conceit of Silver is everywhere.

21st Century Masculinity

To say that the world is suffering a crisis of masculinity is an understatement. The kind of man who Doug Stanhope once described as a “half-faggot” is now a majority. Our old models of what it means to be masculine have to be updated for the fact that we live in a high-technology age of physical comfort. This essay will explore the need for a masculinity appropriate for a new century.

Masculinity has always been represented by the straight line, or number 1, and is opposed to the feminine that is represented by the circle or the number 0. This is why the masculine has always been represented by the Sun (whose rays strike us as straight lines and which impose order) and the feminine by the Earth (upon whose watery surface no straight lines naturally exist).

In the purest esoteric sense, masculinity is the ability to impose order upon chaos. This means the ability to impose straight lines and rules upon the natural world, which is, in its raw state, made up of curves and which only acknowledges laws of iron. The masculine is that force which clears jungles and plants wheat fields, and which builds stone walls around the home city and temples in mountain caves.

When the masculine instinct goes too far, it imposes such a strict order upon the world that life is strangled out of existence. This sort of environment can be found in the equatorial deserts, which is why these areas have produced so many cruel and hypermasculine ideologies. When it doesn’t go far enough, there are no limits to how life carelessly spawns. This sort of environment can be found in the deep seas.

Back in the old days, the most masculine was the man who went out and explored. He was the Viking who got into a longboat and came back with silver and slave women. He was the navigator who led those rowing the great canoes across Polynesia to an island even further than those already known. He was the king who brought the rule of law to neighbouring barbarian tribes.

This masculinity may have reached its apogee in the centuries leading up to 1969, as it led men to conquer the world, then each other, then space. But then, man ran out of space. In the 21st century, there is no longer any physical space to explore. We have been to the ends of the Earth, we have been to the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches, we have been to the Moon.

Even more crucially, we have imposed order not only in a horizontal sense but also a vertical one. We now live in an extreme of comfort, where the vast majority of us can count on living to be elderly if we don’t do anything stupid. Each of us can access a more sumptuous range of food at the local supermarket than anything Queen Victoria could have dreamed of, and our options for entertainment are even vaster.

All of these things are, however, only physical phenomena.

The masculinity of the 21st century will be fundamentally the same as the masculinities of previous ages. The core of it will still be the ability to impose order upon chaos. But it won’t be the physical world that we impose order upon – that doesn’t need any more order imposed upon it. The terrain that needs to be set to order is the forgotten metaphysical.

We’ve spent so long focusing on mastery of the physical world that other, more subtle, disciplines have been lost. This hyperfocus on physical dominance has caused us to lose our orientation in the metaphysical planes. We’ve drifted so far from our spiritual groundings that most of us no longer believe in God. The prevailing metaphysics is purely material; the Earth existed, then we evolved upon it, and so here we are.

We are our bodies, and nothing else – when the body dies, then we are dead. This belief is taken for granted by the majority of people nowadays.

The majority of people don’t understand that this materialism is a primitive superstition that has only arisen because our metaphysical order has collapsed. It isn’t accurate, and not only is it not accurate, it’s a laughably crude and ignorant simplification. The worst of all is that it is a superstition that has driven millions of good people into a state of existential despair, on account of the belief that their inevitable physical death renders all actions meaningless.

Therefore, the future involves spirituality.

That these new spiritual vistas are dangerous ones can be seen from the attitudes that many have towards spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and the other psychedelics. The majority of people are terrified of the effects of psychedelics, much as they were once terrified of the beasts and savages that lay across the sea. But this is precisely why such vistas will be the target of 21st century masculinity.

In the new century, those who channel masculine energy into the world will be the same brave and adventurous individuals that they always were. The difference is that the vistas they explore and map out will not be physical, but will be the terrain of the mind and the soul. The 21st century masculinity will involve less Mars and more Hermes; the 21st century man will be a warrior of the soul first and foremost.

Overcoming the Black Pill

Many are familiar with the paralysing despair that seems to leak from the stomach, into the bloodstream, and into all the other organs, especially the brain. One looks around and examines the world, and the resulting despair makes life seems hopeless and pointless, and suicide like a viable way of ending the suffering. Those who recognise it call it the Black Pill. This essay looks at how to overcome it.

It’s worth noting that getting black pilled is very different to being depressed from a chemical imbalance or similar. The Black Pill is not the same thing as depression, which usually arises as a consequence of brain damage brought about by childhood neglect and abuse. Depression is a clinical condition; the Black Pill is an existential one.

Black pills arise for a variety of reasons. They can be generalised into three groups, however, which crudely correspond to the spiritual challenges that this column has described as the Three Hurdles.

The first major black pill is the realisation that no-one knows what the fuck they’re doing on this planet. Basically everything you’ve ever been told by an authority figure (with the exception of a few scientists and similar) has been a crock of horseshit. The world’s politicians, priests and captains of industry don’t see reality accurately. And they’re leading us to disaster.

The environmental situation on Planet Earth is a black pill so large that it has to be taken as a suppository. It’s apparent to anyone who looks at the climate science that we’re currently exhausting the Earth, and some major lifestyle changes are necessary for the human species. The alternative is, potentially, ecological collapse – a collapse that will take us with it.

Anyone searching for meaning in this place eventually realises that it’s impossible to ask any authority for this, because none of them know what the fuck’s going on either, and asking them for direction will only lead to one’s own enslavement. Authority is achieved by understanding the rules of politics and the political environment, not by understanding reality accurately. Therefore, none of our rulers can be said to be legitimate.

The second major black pill is that this life ends, and it isn’t obvious what happens then. The fact that we’re all going to die is about the only material phenomenon that we can predict with absolute certainty. Although many of us entertain thoughts of an afterlife, there are very few who are absolutely certain that they will reincarnate somewhere else.

It really seems that we can take nothing with us from this world into the next, and therefore there is nothing to be won here, nothing to be achieved, collected or hoarded. Therefore, it isn’t obvious that there’s any meaning to life in this material plane. To know that all one’s works are to be dust is not a pleasant experience, but that appears to be the fate before us.

Many who realise that all of their works will be lost with their own death try to get around this by reproducing, but the inescapable fact is that one’s offspring will all themselves die, as will theirs. Simply spawning like any other animal may be a massive distraction that lasts for decades, but it doesn’t make it meaningful. It doesn’t take the black pill away, it just distracts you from feeling it.

The third major black pill is that living for pure pleasure is not fulfilling in anything but the immediate short term. It might be possible to accept that the world is going to end and that we’re all going to die, if only we could enjoy ourselves while we’re here. But it doesn’t seem to be as simple as that.

The human brain is wired up in such a way that repeated exposure to a particular stimulus eventually leads to a weakened response to that stimulus (at least, under normal circumstances). In less technical terms, too much of the same thing eventually becomes boring. This is the reality that every hedonist has tried to escape in vain. You can’t chase the dragon forever.

It might be true that the brain has a reward/punishment system built in that makes us feel good or bad, but there’s no real meaning in just stimulating this system until we die. At least, not in the sense of trying to maximise pleasure. It’s impossible for a mortal being to maximise pleasure because their mortality, and inevitable decline into death, inherently means that their life will be one of misery.

The combined effect of these three black pills has been too much for millions of people throughout history. The butcher’s bill for suicide is attestation enough to that. As a consequence, people have devoted an incredible amount of time and effort into overcoming black pills.

The art and science of overcoming black pills is, more or less, the same thing as spirituality.

All suffering arises from the illusion of separation from God. Where it gets tricky is that all life itself is the illusion of separation from God. It was understanding this grim calculus that caused Buddha to conclude that life itself was suffering. Indeed, life itself is suffering – that is the biggest black pill of all. But the fact is that, once one has accepted this, it’s white pills all the way back up again.

Life, after all, is temporary, and if life is suffering then it follows that suffering is also temporary. No matter what might be afflicting one in this material plane, there is no guarantee that it will continue to afflict one outside of it.

In fact, if life in this material plane is both temporary and suffering, that means that the true state of consciousness is one of bliss, and only through temporarily becoming enthralled in the illusions of the material world do we ever leave it. Therefore, a return to eternal bliss is inescapable. This realisation is the true Good News of spirituality.

Understanding this requires understanding that materialism is a false ideology, borne of the same simplicity that caused people to once declare the world is flat. Just because something appears to be so, doesn’t mean that it actually is so. That is just as much true of the existence of the material world as of the shape of it.

Materialism causes black pills because it insists that the brain generates consciousness and so consciousness is extinguished with the death of the brain. This leads directly to the assumption that nothing has any meaning, and therefore that causing suffering to oneself and others is just as good as doing the opposite.

The truth is that this reality in which we find ourselves is not material, but the dream of a God, whose consciousness has been split into an infinite number of individual consciousnesses, whereupon each of those individual consciousness falls under the delusion that it is the only consciousness that exists. This is for the sake of maximising the sense of novelty arising from exploring the metaverse of illusion, something otherwise known as the Great Fractal.

The meaning of this existence is not to achieve anything in particular, because God is already perfect and there is nothing to achieve. In reality, there is nothing more to do than to entertain ourselves for eternity. God seems to be of the opinion that the game of forgetting the great spiritual truths of reality, and then remembering them again, is exciting enough to repeat over and over again, forever.

We can take our frequency of consciousness with us from moment to moment, and it may be true that we take it past the death of the physical body as well. The Black Pill can thus be overcome by focusing on being the kind of energy that one would like to see expressed in the world. This will cause one to eventually incarnate in a part of the Great Fractal that reflects this energy.