Own Or Be Owned

Most Westerners are starting to realise that their positions are little better than those of chattel slaves. The average Western worker now understands that they will never own their own home, no matter how hard they work, because the house price to income ratio is too high. Awareness of this state of affairs is causing widespread misery.

If you control land, you also control the people on that land. It follows that anyone who doesn’t own land is the slave of those who do. Non-landowners, as a class, are effectively put to work by the landowner class. Proof comes from the fact that the average hours worked to pay rent alone is not much less today than the average hours worked full stop during the medieval era, despite centuries of labour-saving technological advancements.

If you don’t own land, you have to pay rent to someone who does, otherwise you die of exposure to the elements. If you try to live on land that you don’t own without paying rent, the Police will come to smash you and throw you out into the street. So in order to make money to pay rent, you have to labour for a second landowner, who takes profits out of your productivity. Then you have to pay income taxes to the Government, representing the landowner class in the abstract.

This arrangement was tolerable when the worker had enough money left over, after profits, taxes and rents, to enjoy a decent standard of living with a decent amount of leisure time. But this hasn’t been the case for decades now. Moreover, it is getting worse. The average worker now labours all week, often 50-60 hours, and is left with almost nothing after the landowners have taken their cuts.

The reason why this state of affairs is so heavily resented is because it’s reminiscent of a state of barbarism. To labour all week and be left with nothing is similar to the system that existed when we were earlier primates, where might makes right and anything you can extort out of another person is legitimately yours.

In a state of Nature, your options are: own or be owned.

Males of sexually reproducing species compete for territorial dominance, because this implies control of the resources in that territory. Whoever can establish that he is willing and able to kill the other also wins the ability to control all the resources of that other. Because females of sexually reproducing species are primarily concerned that their mates demonstrate a capacity for resource acqusition, there is a strong incentive for males to own as much as they can.

In human society, the most valuable thing you can own is other people. Ownership of women allows you to control reproduction. Ownership of men allows you to control resources. Ownership of both allows you to control society. Owning people is heavily incentivised because the more people you own, the more secure your position.

Most people in our supposedly free societies are owned, little different from livestock. This is especially true of those who labour all week but are left with nothing after profits, taxes, rents and basic living expenses are paid. This isn’t categorically different to how a unit of livestock produces e.g. a certain volume of milk but is not paid for it.

Some other people are owners. In every stable society, this ownership class raises a police force from among the owned. This police force is then paid, and paid well, to enforce the ownership claims of the ownership class. Without such a system, a society will collapse into violence over control of land. As such, a police force that smashes anyone who questions land ownership rights is essential for stability.

Wealth, throughout history, was primarily a matter of how many other people you owned. If you were the patriarch of a large family, you might control a dozen other people. A chieftain of an average village might control a dozen dozen. The lord of a fiefdom might control a dozen dozen dozen.

Today, people are owned indirectly, through owning the land underneath them. This allows for great profits without having to go through the hassle of managing people. The owners of tenement housing don’t have to worry about what their tenants do with their days, as long as they pay the rent and don’t damage the housing stock.

If life as a non-human animal is kill or be killed, life as a human is own or be owned. Class and caste systems can be seen as ways to formalise the ownership arrangement so that societies suffered less internal conflict.

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If You Want An Alliance To Work, Leave Out The Christofascists

Suggestions did the rounds again this week that the minority parties unite under one banner. This has been a perennial suggestion since my first time in the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2007. Now, as then, egos prevented the suggestion from getting anywhere. One thing would make forming an alliance to get over the 5% threshold much easier: leave out the Christofascists.

Ironically, the most recent suggestion to unite was made by Brian Tamaki. But few are willing to work alongside Tamaki on account of his toxic reputation. Tamaki is a classic example of a Christofascist, Christofascism being “the political direction of all attempts to place Christ at the center of social life and history.”

Tamaki, like his fellows Elliot Ikilei and Leighton Baker, wants to use the State to smash people he hates: drug users, homosexuals and prostitutes being the usual targets. The Christian fascist logic is that these people shouldn’t be tolerated. Like other fascists, the Christofascist has a massively overflated opinion of their own moral judgment.

Christian fascists don’t work well with others. Combining the ruthlessness of the authoritarian right with the arrogance of the authoritarian centre, these fascists are everything politics shouldn’t be: narcissistic, pompous fanatics who literally believe they’re appointed by God to rule over the rest of us.

Few others are as obnoxious as the Christofascist. Like their Abrahamic counterparts the jihadists, the Christofascist exists in a perpetual state of war against all outsiders. This puts him in a mindset of antagonistic, spiteful aggression, exemplified by their rejection of cannabis law reform.

As was observed at the Wellington protests earlier this year, co-operating with Christian fascists is extremely difficult. Not only do they want to hog the stage and the PA system, but they have no respect for other points of view, are happy to negotiate on behalf of everyone else without getting their consent for it, and are willing to jump in at the last minute to steal the limelight.

This level of arrogance is not as great as the arrogance that launched the Inquisition or murdered Hypatia, but it’s getting up there. It’s an arrogance that can only be submitted to, not co-operated with. So the proposal of this essay is that we don’t co-operate with them, i.e. we leave the Christofascists to form their own party and let the true freedom movement unite under a separate banner.

This arrangement would leave New Conservative, Advance NZ, ONE Party, Vision NZ and any Brian Tamaki, Elliot Ikilei or Leighton Baker-related vehicles to form their own Christofascist party. This party could then have the policy of banning all drugs, homosexuality, prostitution, music, dancing and levity. They can even freely propose to again make it legal to rape your wife.

The non-Christofascist parties outside of Parliament won 138,455 votes in 2020, or some 4.9% of the total (New Zealand First 75,021, or 2.6%; The Opportunities Party 43,449, or 1.5%; Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party 13,329, or 0.5%; NZ Outdoors Party 3,256, or 0.1%; Sustainable NZ Party 1,880, or 0.1%; Social Credit 1,520, or 0.1%). If these parties would combine under one non-Christofascist banner, they could seriously challenge the 5% threshold.

Possibly this would have to be a Winston Peters-led movement in order to get enough votes, and he might reason that he has a better chance by himself with New Zealand First (which is fair, considering that he’s been in Parliament with them before). Some might not think favourably of Peters, but he has one quality that contrasts him with the Establishment – he’s a nationalist.

An anti-Establishment, anti-Christofascist alliance would inevitably be nationalist in character. As such, it’s fitting for Winston Peters and his party to be at the centre of it. This might make it hard to integrate The Opportunities Party, who are led by – of all things – a foreign ex-Goldman Sachs banker. But integration of the others would not be too difficult.

The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party is already nationalist in the sense that the vast majority of their voters are New Zealand-born, and very few of their voters are immigrants. An alliance that explicitly rejected the War on Drugs could easily win the support of ALCP voters, and this would suit a nationalist vehicle, as the War on Drugs was an imported foreign concept from the beginning.

The Outdoors Party, Sustainable NZ and Social Credit have several quality candidates in (among others) Sue Grey, Vernon Tava, Chris Leitch and Amanda Vickers. If candidates like these could ally with the high-IQ Kiwis in The Opportunities Party (like Dr. Ben Peters), with a token representative from the ALCP, and under the paternal guidance of Winston Peters for one last crusade against the Establishment, they could do well.

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Why The Government Lets Violent Criminals Run Rampant

Many were stunned by the news this week that Daniel Havili, who killed Fau Vake with a coward’s punch in Auckland, was sentenced to a mere 33 months’ imprisonment. Havili will, in all likelihood, be released after serving a little over a year. Considering the historical severity of sentences for killing people, this is very close to getting away scot free.

This incredibly light touch comes in the wake of other soft sentences for violent assaults. In one notorious recent case, Mongrel Mob chapter president Terry Berryman was sentenced to 23 months’ imprisonment for an 18-man gang home invasion that stomped on a man’s head in front of his children. Most of the gang members involved were not prosecuted.

This has prompted many to ask: why such light sentences for such barbaric crimes?

These sentences seem incongruous with the fact that cannabis growers such as Harley Brown get a similar amount of time in prison for growing medicinal cannabis. Brown was sentenced to 27 months’ imprisonment for a piddling amount of cannabis – at most $100,000 worth. This is for an “offence” that not even 51% of the New Zealand population believes should be an offence.

Other working-class whites, like Philip Arps, don’t even have to grow cannabis. Arps was sentenced to 21 months’ imprisonment for sharing the Christchurch mosque shooting video.

So why do violent criminals almost get a free ride from the courts, when peaceful people get smashed? Why would sharing a video attract a similar sentence to a gang leader doing a home invasion in which children are subjected to the sight of their father getting his head stomped?

The answer lies in understanding the motivations, intentions and aspirations of the ruling class.

Everyone who knows anything about psychology knows that violent criminals cheer at such weak sentences as the ones listed above. For professional criminals, arrests and prison time are just part of the cost of doing business. The lighter the sentencing, the lower the expenses. Therefore, the lighter the sentencing, the more crime pays.

These weak sentences mean that criminals can freely intimidate other people with threats of violence, knowing that the judicial consequences will be minimal. When sentences are as weak as they are in the West today, violent criminals get to reign in terror over the vulnerable (usually working-class) communities in which they reside. Even if the Police deal to them, they’ll be out again soon enough, and in most cases barely inconvenienced.

This end result – widespread terror – is not accidental. It is, in fact, the entire goal of having a justice system in which violent criminals are left to run rampant. In a state of terror, both individuals and populations are unusually willing to forfeit their rights, needs and desires. As such, it’s easier to rule over a terrorised population than a free one.

The Government allows violent criminals to run rampant in New Zealand for one simple reason: to terrorise the rest of us into submission.

VJM Publishing wrote in a previous article why the Government lets in terrorists like the New Lynn supermarket stabber Ahamed Samsudeen. The reason is the same. They let violent criminals run loose for the same reason that they let terrorists run loose: to maximise the degree of fear the average person feels.

Widespread fear makes the population submissive, and is necessary for any authoritarian government to maintain control. Without the fear, the population would rise up against authoritarianism and overthrow it. The fear beats them down and makes them suspicious of their neighbours and workmates, so that no-one organises any resistance.

The control system has many ways of spreading fear through the populace – the foremost of which is the mainstream media – but violent criminals serve this purpose as well as terrorists do.

The surge of adrenaline people get from seeing a patched gang member in public, and the adrenaline fatigue that inevitably follows it, primes people’s minds to submit. Engendering this submission, as George Orwell showed us, is the end goal of all political action and is the ultimate aspiration of the control system.

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Most Westerners Are Now Slaves

New Zealand was appalled yesterday by the news that a Samoan chief named Joseph Matamata had been convicted of enslaving 13 of his fellow Samoans. Matamata had brought the slaves to New Zealand as cheap labour to work in vineyards and orchards, and had kept for himself the vast bulk of their wages. New Zealand may have been appalled, but the average Western worker is a slave anyway.

A slave is defined as a person “who is someone forbidden to quit their service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as their property. Slavery typically involves the enslaved person being made to perform some form of work while also having their location dictated by the enslaver. Historically, when people were enslaved, it was often because they were indebted, broke the law, or suffered a military defeat.”

The position of the average worker in the current economic and political paradigm of the West fits this definition. We currently live in a system where the average worker can labour all week long and have all of their productivity taken off them so that they are left with nothing at the end of it all. They might, in theory, be able to choose their location, but in practice they either don’t have enough money to change location or the remuneration is no better anywhere else.

The chattel slavery of the American South before the Civil War is held up as one of history’s worst human rights abuses. We are told that slaves in America were treated so poorly that they had every moral right to kill their enslavers. This is a belief with potentially serious implications, given that chattel slaves weren’t treated significantly worse than the average Western worker, who also labours all week to be left with nothing.

Profits, taxes and rents are so high in New Zealand that even those earning above the median wage are left with almost nothing that they can put towards owning their own house one day. Not only is the average house price now close to a million dollars, and not only is saving any real money restricted to the very wealthiest of income-earners, but what little savings one can accrue is getting rapidly eaten up by interest.

According to the New Zealand Government’s own cost of living calculator, a general practitioner living in Auckland with a partner and two children and making $133,000 per year will run a $317 deficit every week if they want an average standard of living. So not even a qualified doctor can afford to save anything towards a house now.

If a qualified doctor, in the top 1% of the population by education, can’t afford a house, that effectively means that no worker can. The only people who can afford houses now are those who already have money and those who manage the workers on their behalf, and the rest of us are just slaves, doomed to labour our entire lives for a standard of living lower than that our ancestors enjoyed 100 years ago.

Some might argue that the situation of the New Zealand worker is different today because, although the New Zealand worker is left with nothing after their workweek, at least they don’t have to endure the physical abuse that chattel slaves did.

But physical abuse has simply been replaced with psychological abuse. The New Zealand worker isn’t hit with whips, but they are told every day in the media that they are racist, sexist, hate speakers, wrongthinkers and generally a river of filth. This psychological abuse has a similar end effect to physical abuse: it depresses the spirit into a state of abject submission.

Moreover, at least a slave in the American South could rely on the solidarity of his fellow slaves. The New Zealand worker can’t even rely on that. Should the New Zealand worker complain of their poor situation, they’ll be told to “suck it up” or “just work harder”. As if how hard one works means anything when all one’s productivity is taken away!

Although workers have an easier time of it in other Western countries (Europe, North America and Australia), these countries are all also trapped in the low wage/high house prices and inflation death spiral.

Goethe once said that “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Workers of the West don’t have physical shackles around their ankles, but they have psychological shackles around their minds. These shackles have made them submit to a system where the vast majority of workers are left with no surplus for even the most physically or psychologically challenging work.

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