Category: futurism

We Used to Rape Them for Their Natural Capital, Now We Rape Them for Their Human Capital

Back in the day (19th century) the Western world completed the Scramble for Africa and held virtually the entire continent in bondage. Every part of Africa under European control was raped for its natural resources, a process that made Europe very wealthy and Africa very poor.

In recent decades, the West has more or less come to widely accept that this process was immoral. The primary reason for this is that it’s apparent in hindsight that, in order to get the populations to be compliant with colonialism and the processes of resource extraction, massive abuse and neglect had to be inflicted upon the native populations of Africa.

This abuse and neglect led directly to a widespread emotional, intellectual and cognitive impairment that has been passed down through the generations, crippling the capacity of Africans to care for themselves to this very day.

But, we also know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In today’s world, wealth has less to do with natural resources and more to do with human resources. After all, diamonds or oil buried deep under the earth are not valuable without the human capital that knows how to extract and process them.

In an age when the total dollar value of services are five times the value of manufacturing, why go through the expense of building an empire just to dig up shiny rocks and extract rubber?

We know that doctors, engineers, psychologists, nurses etc. are generally more than happy to abandon their own people the moment you wave a fat Western paycheck in front of them, so it’s much better to loosen the immigration policy and let the human capital come to you.

The great irony here – which has been entirely unappreciated by the left – is that, from the perspective of people in the developing world, anyone who becomes capable of making a positive difference to the people around them usually ends up disappearing before they do, abandoning those they grew up with.

After all, why should a Kenyan doctor get paid $5,000 for saving 1,000 kids from malaria when he can move to New Zealand and get paid $50,000 to wipe old white people’s arses?

The next time a wealthy person tells you that allowing mass immigration is a moral imperative because of prior colonial action in the developing world, just know that the purpose of this mass immigration is not as moral as it sounds. The purpose is to plunder the affected areas of their human capital, making the West once again wealthy at the expense of Africa and the Middle East.

The only difference with the 19th century is that, today, the capital is getting itself on planes and delivering itself to us.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Did Aleister Crowley Predict That Donald Trump Would Become a Great Man?

Aleister Crowley, love him or not, saw further beyond than almost anyone. He skewered the establishment of his day with his withering sarcasm and wit, and established himself as one of the premier iconoclasts of all time. The mind boggles at what a genius like Crowley would have made of our modern age.

This article discusses the applicability of one particular quote of Crowley’s to the rise and rise of Donald Trump, namely:

The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without. Inevitably anyone with an independent mind must become “one who resists or opposes authority or established conventions”: a rebel. If enough people come to agree with, and follow, the Rebel, we now have a Devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have — Greatness.

This “essence of independence” has a paragon in our culture today: Donald Trump. Let’s take this quote sentence by sentence.

It can’t be denied that Trump acts according to standards from within: indeed, this is one of the reasons why he has caused so much consternation. There are no gurus or mentors who can be examined for clues as to Trump’s influences, and he is not an ideologue of any known stripe.

Because it’s so difficult to slap such a label on Trump it’s obvious that he must be a highly free-thinking man. But, as any free-thinking person reading this article will know, to think freely is to incur social pressure intended to force you back into the herd.

The agents who exert this social pressure are the extremely powerful men and women of silver, and they are the authority in the sense that they control the media and the government and therefore are the psychological programmers of the populace.

Trump was firmly in the ‘rebel’ stage when he first announced his presidential bid. He was laughed at, like teenage rebels tend to be. Not taken seriously, a clown, a buffoon. The purpose of all this social pressure was to bring Trump back to the herd, to coerce him into bowing the knee before the masses.

He refused, and won the Republican nomination. The Hitler comparisons began – Hitler being perhaps history’s prime example of an independently-thinking politician. Because Trump won’t be cowed by the bleating of the masses, the logic went, he would inevitably start another world war.

That Trump was self-funded, and thus able to act independently of the money men who seek to make all politicians into whores in exchange for putting them on the throne, was made out to be a negative. It was as if, by not grovelling before those who had set themselves up as the powerbrokers, Trump had committed a heresy.

This was the moment he transitioned out of rebellion and into devilry. Every single day, the New Zealand media had a headline piece about how Trump was evil and if he became President we would definitely all die in nuclear hellfire.

As we now know, even this didn’t stop him, or the Trump voters. Donald Trump duly won the Presidential election by a considerable margin, and in doing so set himself up for greatness.

One might argue that, in becoming President of the United States that Donald Trump has already achieved greatness. However, a look at the recent alternatives for the role – Hillary Clinton, Obama, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney – tells us that the standards are very low indeed.

Certainly with the world being a powderkeg right now, Trump has an unprecedented opportunity for greatness. Whether he takes it is a matter of Fortune and Will.

Why There Always Has Been War And Always Will Be War

It’s as simple as looking at a yin-yang, and knowing that the yin represents chaos and the yang represents order. Keeping in mind the Fifth Hermetic Principle – the Principle of Rhythm – we can surmise that it is true of order and chaos that “the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left.”

In a Taoist sense this is to say that an excess of order, by its very nature, leads to a minuscule element of chaos arising within it, which grows, and soon takes on a momentum of its own, only to itself crystallise from a tiny seed into order, and ever more rigid order, until the cycle begins anew.

Too much masculinity in the alchemical world is represented as fire and iron, and these stand as metaphor for how too much masculinity in the physical world leads to violence.

An excess of masculinity is like fire when it has too much energy because it causes violence which burns flesh and sears souls, and is what the ancient physicians meant when they diagnosed a person with a choleric personality.

It is also like iron when it imposes too much order because it is harsh and cuts mercilessly, and when it breaks down it shatters, as with an excess of masculinity one loses one’s ability to yield and to withdraw and breaks like a tree that cannot yield to a storm.

This is evident in the natural world even when one looks at biological life in the simplest way. A seed that sprouts and begins to grow towards the light must eventually break the surface if it is to survive (for a literary description of this phenomenon see Chapter 21 of Anna Nilsen’s Writing With The I Ching: Biting Through).

As below, so above: the world of men is no different. If a person observes the current order of the day and finds it unworthy of continued existence, then – if they are intelligent – they will soon come to appreciate the degree to which, and the vigour with which, the established order maintains itself (indeed, that’s all that order is).

But like the rising yin, the desire to break the established order – once it takes hold – grows ever more powerful by virtue of its position within nature. As the dusk darkness consumes ever more of the light, so does the chaos dissolve ever more of the existing order, until it breaks through and imposes an order of its own.

If you look at the current state of world history, there is an established Anglo-American order, which has dominated world affairs for about 200 years. This order is generally known as ‘The West’, because it represents the powers on the Western side of the world when viewed as a chessboard.

This world order arguably began at Waterloo, when the then wielder of the Spear of Destiny – Napoleon Bonaparte – was defeated in battle and the First French Empire sundered.

The nature of yang is to decline into yin – we know this, and already it’s possible to observe an America in cultural decay. Already the American Empire has degenerated in certain ways further than any empire in history, with the most recent 50 years giving us everything from Charles Manson and Ted Bundy to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The nature of yin is to rise into yang – and this can be observed with the awakening of the sleeping giants of China and India. These countries were poor and were always going to remain poor as long as they were too corrupt to organise any meaningful invest in the human capital of the young. This was how it was when the Spear of Destiny was held in Europe, but now, as it crosses the Pacific, the East is awakening.

There is every chance that a rising Eastern power that wants its place in the Sun will naturally come into conflict with the established Western one that wants to hold onto power. Indeed, many believed that the Japanese action in the Western Pacific theatre of World War II was this event playing out (this column is far, far from the first to suggest it).

The collapse of the established order is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. The established order never collapses peacefully (observe adult male elephants for an analogy in the natural world).

Therefore, war is a fundamental aspect of life, and always will be, as long as there are masculine and feminine.