Category: futurism
Alt-Centrism: A Political Philosophy Whose Time Has Come
The cozy political paradigm that most of us went into 2016 with has now been completely shattered. Way back then, there was still some vague kind of belief that it was possible to strike a meaningful compromise between the various political actors on the world stage.
Now, everyone to the left of Adolf Hitler is screaming “Nazi!” at everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders, and those people are screaming “Cuck!” right back.
This means that most people are both Nazis and cucks, depending on the degree of political fanaticism of whoever is screaming at them at any given time and to which pole that person happens to have gravitated towards.
It’s an ugly scene all round.
Simply speaking, the left is a reaction to the right. The right are the same people who naturally have all the power (namely, the orderly) and the left is a reaction to this. In particular, it is a recognition by the disorderly that they have to impose some order upon themselves or lose ground in the political battlefield.
The centre is a reaction to both the left and the right. More precisely, it is a reaction to the constant fighting that once characterised the two-party (or two-pole) system. It’s an attempt to put peacefulness above all.
The alt-right is similar. The alt-right is a reaction to the left being shit and then a counter-reaction to the right being also shit. The alt-right cannot be understood unless it is seen as a double rejection, of both the left and the right.
The alt-centre, therefore, is a rejection of all of the left and the right and the centre, not to mention the alt-right and – in anticipation of it ever standing up – the alt-left: in other words, it’s a rejection of the entire political system.
This triple rejection of tired old political dogmas makes alt-centrism the real alternative way of political movements. It finally provides a solution to the balance fallacy when applied to politics.
The balance fallacy in politics occurs when a person or voting bloc decides that some kind of vague middle ground between the demands of capital (right wing) and the demands of labour (left wing) is necessarily the best compromise solution.
Note that pointing out this fallacious reasoning here does not mean that one is saying that a balance is bad in and of itself, or that either of the two extremes of left and right would be better in charge.
That is a false trilemma, which is what you get if you see through the false dilemma posed with left and right.
All three positions – pro-capital, pro-labour, and pro-compromise – are all terrible positions because they are all necessarily pro-political system. They are all positions within the broader paradigm of legitimising the use of the political system as a mechanism by which one can exploit one’s class enemies.
The reason why it is impossible to simply strike a balance is that the two wings of the political system co-operate to take power incrementally away from the populace under the pretense of striking a balance. This works in the same way that a cartel works – the members of the cartel agree to offer an equally bad deal to different groups of people.
The way forward will be the way promoted by neophyte political movements like Not A Party. This rag-tag bunch of New Zealanders, led by whoever a random number generator says is the leader on any given day, run in elections with the specific intent of losing.
They then claim the people who have not voted are their supporters, which gives them the largest number of seats in the Not A Parliament. Control of Not A Parliament allows them to not pass any laws, which makes them not responsible for things like cannabis prohibition, which costs New Zealand $400,000,000 per year.
The delusion that all questions of human suffering must be solved first and foremost through the political system is one that has to be rejected if we are actually to make any progress on those questions.
Because there are very, very, very few politicians who could rightly claim that their actions as a politician resulted in a net win for the human survival project.
*
If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).
The Use of Major Psychedelics in Healing Psychological Trauma
At some point in the near future, the potential for using psychedelic medicines to help heal the major psychological traumas that cause most mental illnesses will be a hot topic. Unfortunately, we will have to begin almost from the beginning, as the bulk of our historical knowledge about these substances has been destroyed.
Despite this, there is still a considerable amount of shamanic knowledge in the underground culture, certainly much more than what exists in the mainstream medical establishment, for whom the retarded calculus of “drugs = brain damage” still dominates thinking.
The essential thing that has to be understood is that psychedelics, like cannabis, serve to decondition the mind and brain, only in a much deeper and more sudden way than cannabis.
Deconditioning is here used in the clinical psychology sense to mean a process of unlearning – in particular, of unlearning involuntary subconscious reactions to things that may have been useful to deal with the problems of the past but which no longer are.
This is principally why the psychedelic experience is so difficult. It is also why the psychedelic experience is so exhilarating. One sees things as they actually are, as one did when a child, without the experience being filtered through hundreds of layers of conditioning collected over many forgotten years.
It is possible to condition oneself into a mental illness by thinking too hard about things, because the brain (crudely speaking) works like muscles in the sense that the more it is exercised the stronger it becomes.
Because anxiety and depression are often little more than a habitual fixation of thinking on either the future or the past, respectively, a psychedelic experience often has the effect of deconditioning a person from thought patterns that made them unhappy.
This is why a lot of practiced psychedelic users take them when they feel it’s time to reset the thinking. Usually this is after a certain amount of time has passed since the last experience.
Likewise, many people have suppressed traumatic memories. The suppression often makes good short-term sense in that it allows the damaged person to deal with their immediate problems of survival, but it often makes bad long-term sense in that the warping effect it has on someone’s personality magnifies over time.
This points the way to the major positive use of psychedelics in healing mental illness. Any mental illness that has been caused by overconditioning in an area of the brain/mind could be helped by a medicine that deconditions a person from the thoughts they did not want to have.
It could also give them an opportunity to bring up the suppressed memories and to consider them in a new light, free of the conditioned anxiety response that usually accompanies recollection of past traumas.
Where more research will be necessary is to make sure that the patient does not lose conditioning in areas of the brain/mind that actually helped them in their life.
There are many concepts and habits that people have learned for good reasons, in particular concepts around good social conduct that make life much easier for all of us. An 18-year old adult will have been conditioned for almost their entire life about many things.
So in order to be able to use these tools effectively, mental health practitioners will have to educate themselves past the barbaric superstitions that currently inform our approach to pre-pharmaceutical medicines.
Much of this will involve sitting down with drug users and talking to them to discover what benefits they have found in the use of various substances in their explorations of the mind.
This cannot happen until society comes to appreciate both that psychoactive drug users are people who have followed the prehistoric shamanic path, and that this path is still necessary in our society to protects us from the excesses of groupthink, of tradition and of mindless, knee-jerk programmed reactions and thinking.
Chains of Clay and a Universal Basic Income
Some forward-thinking people are starting to discuss the idea of a universal basic income. This is the idea that the Government would make a small but weekly payment to each adult resident citizen, just enough to keep them alive but not enough for any luxuries or even any decencies.
Predictably, the idea that the Government might help the poor in some new fashion has resulted in cries of communism from those who expect to inherit large amounts of property.
But there are reasons to believe that bringing in a universal basic income, even if it was as little as the current unemployment benefit, would significantly raise the standard of living of the average New Zealander.
For instance, a universal basic income would, at a stroke, remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of desperate poverty.
One might object here that they would not remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of greed – and that’s true in some cases – but consider this.
Every great dictator or tyrant who convinced a mass of people to go against their better nature, and to later regret that they had done so, convinced those people by offering them money.
How?
They just looked for desperately poor people. Poverty is control. That’s the way it has to be understood for the psychological reactions of people to the question of a universal basic income to be understood.
Hitler could not have achieved what he did without the Great Depression and the economic restrictions imposed on Germany as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty.
People like to make a big deal about Hitler’s rhetoric and oratory skills, but the naked fact is that the NSDAP paid men to serve in the military, and they could pay a lot of men for not much money because those men were all as poor as shit.
This is why getting the rich to give up some of the money they have extorted out of the poor through their control of the Police and of private property is not a simple matter of appealing to the simple fact that it would reduce the sum total of human suffering.
One must also take into account the loss of power this entails.
Think of all the women in history who were forced to accept the sexual advances of a man they didn’t like because they needed the money.
Think of all the men in history who have wound up doing violence to strangers because they were forced to be obedient to someone violent for the sake of money.
Think of all the kings and queens who were able to raise an army to invade some other peaceful place because the peasants of their kingdom had no access to the commons on account of enclosure, and therefore were forced to take the monarch’s silver or starve.
Think of all the times a parent who, on account of stress from worry about where the next meal was coming from, took a short-sighted decision in the heat of the moment and came to regret it.
Go back as far in history as you like. How many robberies, how many burglaries, how many thefts, how many assaults and murders could have been prevented had we merely seen to it that people didn’t need to go hungry, and did so with a similar effort to what we already put into punishing and protecting ourselves from robbers, burglars, thieves and murderers?
We’re not talking about an equal distribution of luxuries, or even decencies. A person living merely on a universal basic income will be too poor to afford much beyond food and shelter – but at least they will not be so poor that they will take violent actions out of desperation.
One might raise an objection to this on the grounds that, if people were willing to look after each other enough to introduce a universal basic income, they would have done so already and would not need coercion through Government taxation.
This objection is only reasonable up to a certain historical point. When the productivity of the average citizen has advanced to such a degree that simply by pressing a button they can cause machines and computers to produce a million dollars worth of goods, there’s no reason barring a sadistic need for control to cut non-machine-owners out of this cornucopia.
Of course, much of this discussion is academic in the case of New Zealand, which is 20 years behind the rest of the world in progress on questions like this and getting worse. Medicinal cannabis was legalised in California in 1996 and we are yet to even have a proper discussion about it, so we will likely be several decades behind the rest of the world on the basic income question too.