futurism – Page 18

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 Black Caps Can Win The World Cup If They Summon The Spirit of The Crusaders Team of 1999

Some say that you need to lose a final before you can win one, and therefore the Black Caps should win Sunday’s Cricket World Cup decider since they lost the final in 2015. Others point out that their opponents, England, have already lost three finals and are playing at home. The 2019 Black Caps, as Dan McGlashan writes, need to take their inspiration from the champion Crusaders team – of 1999.

The 1999 Super Rugby season followed a similar format to this year’s Cricket World Cup. The twelve teams all played each other in a round robin league, and then the top four played in semifinals, with the top team playing the fourth-ranked one and second playing third. The final would be played at the home ground of the highest-ranked finalist.

The Crusaders started the season with wins, but the wheels fell off the campaign in later rounds and they limped into the semifinals in fourth position. Their semifinal was away against the Queensland Reds, a team that had beaten them by 13 points during the round robin stage. To the surprise of many, the Crusaders won the game 28-22.

The lesser-favoured team also won the other semifinal, with the Otago Highlanders taking down the Stormers in South Africa. This meant that the Highlanders were the highest-ranked finalist, having been third at the end of the pool stage to the Crusaders’ fourth. The final would therefore be at Carisbrook, Dunedin.

Despite having qualified fourth, and despite having to win away, the Crusaders were able to overcome. They won the final 24-19 despite the hostile Otago crowd and the gallant efforts of the Highlanders.

The Black Caps have had a similar campaign this year. Their World Cup started with a number of wins against the easy teams, and then some very tight games, and then some losses. Consequently, they limped into the semifinals in fourth place.

India was heavily favoured to win the semifinal, having only lost one game during the round robin. However, vulnerabilities had been exposed in the Indian win against Afghanistan, and the Black Caps took advantage to win the fixture by 18 runs.

That the Black Caps have not been favoured to win is an understatement. Smarter media pundits, such as VJM Publishing, have been reporting for years that this Black Caps unit is an excellent side: their players stack up statistically to the world’s best, they’re better man-for-man than the 2015 side and we believed years ago that they could be the No. 1 ODI side in the world.

The mainstream media, by contrast, has been spewing out pessimistic garbage. They don’t simply remember the sporting landscape of 1999 – they’re stuck in it. Hence, they write as if the Black Caps were still as unfavoured as the team of 1999.

This garbage, however, could be used as fuel to spark a fire, the kind of fire that inspired Andrew Mehrtens to give a one-fingered salute to a raucous Bulls crowd on his way to leading the Crusaders to the 1999 title.

It’s true that the English team is probably the favourites. Not only are they the No. 1 ranked ODI team in the world, but they also beat the Black Caps in their pool stage encounter. This isn’t a bad thing from the Black Caps’ perspective – it just means that they have to do two things.

The first is to go to the final with an attitude of defiance. It’s probably fair to say that the 2015 Black Caps side were a little overawed by the occasion of a Cricket World Cup final. They were playing in the 90,000-seat home stadium of the five-time world champions. The Black Caps looked, and played, nervously that day. Those nerves may have led to incorrect decisions being made.

The 2019 side shows no sign of this. Kane Williamson has been a colossus of silk and steel who plays with the self-belief of a prophet of God, and his lieutenants all have experience from playing in the last final. Martin Guptill, Ross Taylor, Trent Boult and Matt Henry have all played multiple World Cup knockout games by now, with Guptill and Henry even winning Man of the Match in two of them.

They need to take this newly-won confidence into the final, then double down on it. Let them rage coldly against their doubters, against the sheep-like mockers. Let them take the field with the belief that they’re not there to do well or evenly merely to win, but to write their names into history.

For a second thing, they have to do something new that England isn’t expecting.

That something unexpected might be swapping Guptill and Tom Latham in the batting order. If Latham opened the batting with Henry Nicholls, the Black Caps would have their two best leavers of the ball to see out the first six overs. So far this World Cup, the ball has not swung much past the six over mark, and so surviving this period becomes crucial (as India found out to their dismay).

Opening with Guptill makes sense if the bat dominates the ball, as it has done for most of the past four years. If the ball dominates the bat, however, as has been the case for much of this World Cup, Guptill tends to nick off or miss a moving one early and get out. Better to have Latham and Nicholls deal with this, then to have Guptill come in at 5 once Williamson and Taylor have seen off the main danger.

Nothing needs to change in the bowling department. The Black Caps produced one of their greatest ever bowling performances in the semifinal, with lethal accuracy up front and then a dogged refusal to give away bad balls as the innings progressed. If they can bowl that well again, or even close to it, England will have to play extremely well to score 270 or more.

The Black Caps need to summon the iron-willed spirit of the 1999 Crusaders team. Then they can go into an away final against a favoured opponent with the attitude of sticking it up all of them, their crowd and their media. This need not mean they go against their established culture of goodwill and fair play – it just means they have to play with a bit more steel in the spine.

Summon the spirit of the Crusaders side of 20 years ago, and the Black Caps could be world champions on Monday morning.

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).

Should We Sell New Zealand to China on A 99-Year Lease?

Many Kiwis are concerned about the amount of New Zealand land being sold into overseas hands. This concern has been heightened by last week’s sale of Westland Milk to China for $588 milllion. This essay asks an extremely controversial and unpalatable question: should we sell the country to the Chinese on a 99-year lease?

Thomas Porter of the Colonial Defence Force was a famously close ally of Ngati Porou war chief Ropata Wahawaha. When a captain, he served with the Ngati Porou contingent under Wahawaha that hunted down mass murderer Te Kooti in the Uruwera ranges. From the 1870s onwards, he was involved with work as a land purchase officer, a job made easier by his fluent command of Maori and his marriage to the daughter of a chief who had once paid for Wahawaha’s release from slavery.

Porter knew that the settler thirst for land was insatiable. The British Empire was possibly the most rapacious enterprise ever created by humans, and it had its eyes set on New Zealand. The Maoris would have to give up most of their land or be annihilated, as the Aborigines had been in Australia and the Native Americans before that on the other side of the Pacific.

However, Porter had a trick up his sleeve.

He was aware of the Highland Clearances, where the relentless desire for maximum profit had led to the evictions of tens of thousands of people from communal land in Northern Scotland from the middle of the 18th century. Some of the original landholders had survived the clearances by giving up their land on 99-year leases rather than selling it. By the time 99 years were up, the original pressure to sell had gone.

A great friend of the Ngati Porou, Porter did them a great favour. Instead of arranging for the land to be sold outright, he arranged for much of it to be sold on 99-year leases. This meant that the land was returned to Ngati Porou control in the years after World War II. Hindsight would prove this to be a stroke of genius.

A 99-year lease, Porter reasoned, would give the leaseholder all the security they wanted, as well as all the freedom they needed to use the land for whatever purpose. Consequently, there would no longer be any pressure on the Ngati Porou to sell it forever. So at the end of the 99 years, much of the original Ngati Porou holdings were still in their hands – and worth a packet.

This decision is part of the reason why the Ngati Porou are doing so well today compared to many other Maori tribes. Rather than accept a windfall that was inevitably squandered, the land was effectively put into a 99-year investment account. When that account matured, the whole tribe shared in the profits.

The Chinese demand for food products to feed their population of 1,400,000,000 is as difficult to meet as the Western demand for land once was. The Chinese population might not be growing any more, as birthrates have declined sharply since 1980, but Chinese wealth has been growing strongly since then, and their demand for food products has increased commensurately. The pressure to sell our land in the coming few decades will be immense.

This was a similar situation to what the Ngati Porou faced in 1870, and the factors that apply to us were considered by Captain Porter in his decision to arrange 99-year leases. We ought to ask ourselves if we should do the same. Would it not be better, instead of selling it for good bit-by-bit, to lease the whole country to the Chinese on a 99-year contract?

We wouldn’t be the first to have the idea. The Northern Territory Government has leased Darwin Port to the Chinese on a 99-year lease. This move has been criticised severely on account of its strategic implications, but the fact remains that Australia will get the port back after 99 years, the same way that the Chinese got Hong Kong back. So there is precedent, among other places faced with Chinese expansionism, to consider this option.

Some might not like the idea of selling the country into Chinese leaseholdership. They might reason that China is a human rights abuser, a corrupt, totalitarian dictatorship that strangles honest aspirations and which is incompatible with the Western desire for personal freedom.

However, these sentiments have to be balanced with the fact that the whole country is being sold into Chinese ownership anyway. Chinese nationals purchased $1,500,000,000 of New Zealand residential real estate in 2017 alone. Eight-figure sums are not uncommon for land purchases made by Chinese interests, many of which are owned in part by the Chinese Government.

Moreover, the old Western traditions of freedom are gone. Zimbabwe has legal medicinal cannabis, and Malaysia has announced that it will decriminalise it. New Zealanders are, therefore, less free than citizens of either Zimbabwe or Malaysia in important ways. Uruguay, South Africa, Chile, Mexico and even North Korea are further examples of countries with greater cannabis freedom than New Zealand. Our time as a human rights leader is long over.

Perhaps worst of all, New Zealanders are now going to prison for years for sharing videos, or getting harassed by the Police because they might like Donald Trump. There is ample evidence that we are no longer a free people, so there’s nothing to lose on that front.

Maybe it’s time to concede that it’s better to lease the whole country to China on a 99-year term today, get them to build some proper houses and infrastructure, and then to get it back in 2118, than to have it sold piece-by-piece into Chinese hands permanently. We would probably not suffer more under Chinese leadership than we already do under our own.

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.