Clown World Chronicles: What Is 'Weimarisation'?

Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Weimarisation’?

Every history student knows that the Weimar Republic preceded the Nazi Era in Germany. Fewer understand that the process of historical decline goes through certain predictable stages, one of which is characterised by the Weimar Republic and its infamous successor. This article explains.

The process of political decline is so well established and so predictable that Plato, over 2,300 years ago, was already able to describe it at length in The Republic. A healthy political system begins with an aristocracy of philosopher-kings, and then degrades into a timocracy, then an oligarchy, then a democracy, and finally into a tyranny.

Plato’s description of democracy corresponds closely to how it is practiced today. He criticised it for being a stage in which every man was out for himself, and no-one thought of long-term considerations when making decisions. This leads to a lack of order and discipline, which leads to it becoming impossible to tell the truth. Eventually all kinds of crooked liars fill the vacuum and come to office.

The problem with democracy is that it makes men weak, as it panders to their crudest and most primitive desires, and does not encourage them to cultivate their higher moral senses. Being weak, they are then unable or unwilling to resist cruel men who come to oppress them. When the cruel are in charge, we are in a state of tyranny.

The most widely known example of this latter process occurred a century ago in Germany.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated at the end of World War I and the German Government collapsed, it was replaced by a republic whose first national assembly took place in Weimar. This short-lived experiment was a highlights reel of all of the worst things about democracy, and it caused so much distrust that it made Adolf Hitler start to look reasonable.

Few would argue that the worst thing about the Weimar Republic was that it led to the rise of the Nazis. This process occurred exactly as Plato had described over two millennia previously. It is this final stage of democracy, and the related phenomena that lead to the rise of tyranny, that could be described as Weimarisation.

Weimarisation involves the process of making the polity ever weaker and ever more decadent and degenerate until no-one is willing to stand up for anything. Most bonds of solidarity are broken by this increasing selfishness, because no-one cares about anything other than the next buzz. This ongoing disintegration of the social fabric leads to the most characteristic feature of Weimarisation: it precedes a tyrant coming to power.

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Weimar Republic itself were the child prostitutes. History recalls a relatively clean child prostitution trade in 1920s Berlin, but parts of it were much grottier than what is described in the linked article. At the most desperate, during the heights of the hyperinflation in 1923, it was possible to see children being pimped out on the streets.

The extreme levels of disgust induced in German men by the awareness that their children were being rented for sex was the emotional fuel for the rise of Hitler and everything that followed. Exposure to depravity on that scale tends to cause people to lose their moral compasses. If renting children for sex is permitted, then what could possibly be forbidden? Certainly not killing the people to blame – or so many millions of Germans reasoned.

From our current position in Clown World, there are two paths. The path recommended by Plato is a revolution of philosopher-kings who institute an aristocracy that justly governs. The other path is to decline into tyranny, wherein the average man becomes so pathetic and weak that he is unable to resist any injustice, whether physical, intellectual or spiritual.

If Clown World is to decline into tyranny, it will be the final result of the Weimarisation process. There’s an eerie parallel between the Weimar child prostitutes and the 19,000 young girls raped by grooming gang members in Britain alone last year. This ongoing mass sexual exploitation of Britain’s young children is the kind of dystopic horror show that makes people lose their humanity entirely, as it did in Germany.

In Rotherham, where one of the most prolific of these grooming gangs was based, the Police actively worked to cover up the rapes. Investigation of the rape gangs was made more difficult by the investigators’ fears of seeming racist (this is an outstanding example of what another chapter in this book calls race neurosis). There’s no way to understand such phenomena other than as the last gasps of a dying culture.

One of the reasons why Hitler was able to summon so much rage against Jews was because of the widespread belief in Germany that Jewish men had played a disproportionate role in the buying and selling of these child prostitutes. Those same grounds for murderous rage are also present in the case of Muslim men in Europe this century.

It’s entirely plausible that if a man would stand up in Britain or elsewhere in Europe and threaten to get revenge on the forces that had humiliated his nation, he would get widespread support. The neo-Nazi Sverigedemokraterna are already polling at close to 25% in Sweden, which is evidence of the deep anger that exists elsewhere in Europe over such issues.

The big problem with Weimarisation, of course, is that the original form of it ended with a war that left 60 million dead.

There’s little doubt that the existing tensions in Europe are sufficient to trigger a civil war that could kill similar numbers. One of the reasons why Western political authorities are so concerned about “Islamophobia” is that they are fully aware of the rage that their failures have caused. They are aware that great numbers of men feel deeply humiliated by the rape gangs and would very much like someone to give them the opportunity to get revenge.

The cure for Weimarisation can also be found in the philosophy of Plato. A new cultural movement of philosopher-kings must arise, and attract so many followers that it destroys the old order and replaces it with a just one. The alternative, as history has shown, is almost too terrible to contemplate.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 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 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Why Is Rent-Seeking Legal?

Our legal system has many quirks and contradictions that defy easy explanation. It seems strange that doctors are allowed to mutilate the genitals of infant boys, yet they are not allowed to prescribe medicinal cannabis products that would save lives. This article will discuss another activity of questionable morality: rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking is an attempt to increase one’s personal wealth without creating or producing any. It is the use of resources, such as land, to extract economic benefits (known as rents) from others without making any contribution to the overall economic good.

The most common form of rent-seeking today is found in residential property. There are some 625,000 rented houses in New Zealand today, and the average weekly rent is $390 a week for small houses and $525 for larger ones. Assuming an average rent of $480 per week, rents on residential property bring in some $15,600,000,000 every year in New Zealand alone.

Rent-seeking is correctly understood to be a form of parasitism. As with other forms of parasitism, rent-seeking is a net negative for the overall health of the system. Not only does it suck money away from the productive and gift it to the unproductive, it also incentivises anti-social behaviour. Economically, it disrupts market efficiencies, limits competition and creates artificially high barriers to entry for market participants.

Despite being a form of parasitism, rent-seeking is a long and honoured tradition in New Zealand. Many a fortune has been built in this country by taking advantage of people’s need for shelter from the elements. As a previous essay here has discussed, there’s nothing as profitable as human suffering, and being exposed to the elements is one of the worst kinds of suffering.

The beauty of rent-seeking is that it carries little risk. All you need to do is to own property and the Police will keep people away from it unless those people pay you money. As long as there are men willing to enforce other people’s claims to property in exchange for a wage (and there always will be), then owning some of that property is effectively a licence to print money.

In reality, there’s little difference between a landlord charging someone rent on the threat of throwing that person out into the street, and an armed robber charging someone their wallet on the threat of stabbing them in the guts. In both cases, the power to charge a fee or levy comes from the power to cause extreme physical suffering. Both are a form of extortion.

Given the apparent net harm of trying to extract wealth from the system instead of creating it, the question has to be asked: why is rent-seeking legal?

The main reason why rent-seeking is legal is simply because the rent-seekers make the laws. It was they who, way back in the day, invented Government by paying some weak-minded arse-lickers to defend their property against outsiders (this is all that Government is). Those arse-lickers bifurcated into the Police and security services (whose prime directive is to protect and serve property owners) and the Government (whose prime directive is to organise the protection of property owners).

At the end of the day, the Government is there to manage the affairs of the rich, and they don’t care if the poor are impacted adversely. People too poor to own property don’t have a seat at the table. This is the same reason why businesses were compensated directly in the form of wage subsidies, rather than workers being given a universal basic income – the wealthy take the lion’s share, the poor get the scraps.

This arrangement has created a great deal of resentment, however. Those forced to pay rent on threat of being thrown into the street don’t feel much less resentful about it than those forced to give up their wallet on threat of being stabbed. The fact that rent-seeking is socially accepted in our culture barely softens the blow. It still feels like a robbery.

As is usually the case for such abuses of power, this resentment has built to the point where it threatens to spill over.

The Sixth Labour Government has made it illegal to evict tenants from residential property for the next three months at least. Some groups of tenants have realised that, if they collectively refused to pay rent until the end of the coronavirus crisis, they could pretty much get away with it. There’s no way to enforce an eviction during the lockdown, so anyone who refuses to pay rent from now on can get at least three months of living rent-free.

Other people and places overseas have already declared rent strikes on account of that the coronavirus has made earning their usual income, and therefore paying their usual expenses, impossible. Housing Minister Megan Woods has said “there was also an obligation on tenants not to abuse the situation,” but it’s hard to see why, other than the possible threat of being blacklisted in the future.

The only reason why property owners can get tenants to pay them rent in the first place is because they have the power to force them to on threat of eviction. If that power is taken away, there’s little reason for those who had been coerced into paying rent to continue playing ball.

Perhaps the fairest outcome would be to continue to allow the extraction of rents, but to levy a 90% tax on incomes derived from it. An outcome similar to this was discussed in a previous article here that proposed the introduction of Georgist-style taxes on rent-seeking activity.

In short, rent-seeking is legal because it always has been, and because we’ve never questioned it. We’ve never been able to, because not only did the rent-seekers control the law enforcement forces but they also controlled the apparatus of propaganda, and these combined to normalise the practice. The legitimacy of rent-seeking doesn’t survive scrutiny, and there is a very real chance that it will be as illegal as armed robbery later this century.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Race Neurosis’?

People in Clown World exhibit all kinds of neuroses, most of them caused by our highly unnatural way of life. Adapting to modern industrial society has proven to be challenging for even the most resourceful of people. As this essay will examine, the forced diversity that we all live under has created a form of mental illness particular to itself.

A neurosis refers to a class of mental disorders that are characterised by anxiety, obsessional thoughts and avoidance behaviour. Karen Horney considered the defining characteristic of neurosis to be a worldview that is distorted by compulsive needs. Neurotics exhibit their unusual behaviours, according to Horney, to meet their exaggerated needs for power, prestige and affection.

It’s common for people to be neurotic about cleanliness – some are excessively anxious about getting infected by germs and will obsessively wash their hands or clean their teeth. These behaviours feed the neurosis by causing the neurotic to feel themselves superior to others on account of their greater hygiene, and that other people will be more affectionate towards them because they are so clean.

People with race neurosis are similar. Their need for power is met by silencing others for making ‘racist’ comments, and their need for prestige is met by looking down their noses at those moral inferiors and shaming them. As with other ingratiating behaviours motivated by neurosis, those with race neurosis believe that this virtue signalling will cause others to like them more.

‘Race neurosis’ refers to a very specific kind of neurosis that is most accurately considered a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The compulsive need in the case of race neurosis is the need to deny human biodiversity. This compels them to believe that all human subgroups are precisely the same and, when different, only different for environmental and not genetic reasons.

The person with race neurosis will instantly disregard any explanatory theory of human behaviour that assumes that human biodiversity exists. They do this out of a deeper compulsive need – the one to assert that all human subgroups have equal value. This assertion may be true in a metaphysical sense, but it isn’t at all true in a biological sense – and the racial neurotic has trouble making a distinction.

No two things in Nature are the same, whether measured as individuals or as groups. Of any two, one will be taller, one will be darker, one will be relatively more endomorphic – and one will be smarter. This means that, by any measure you care to name, one will be superior and the other inferior. A person with race neurosis has extreme difficulty accepting this.

This neurosis is an echo of the earlier Christian neurosis that was triggered by the realisation that humans were just another form of animal. In the same way that this realisation led to people denying the science of evolution and castigating Darwin as a heretic, race neurosis also leads to people denying the science of evolution and castigating its proponents as evil.

Race neurosis goes hand-in-hand with creationist narratives about the origins of the human species. Because no two things in Nature are the same, human biodiversity denial is most plausible when it can appeal to a creator God, who (for various reasons) is presumed to be unwilling to create superior and inferior groups of people. Therefore, certain qualities (like intelligence) can be assumed to be equal across all human groups.

People suffering from race neurosis also practice a variety of avoidance behaviours, on account of that they live in constant fear of empowering “far-right wing extremists”. They are extremely reluctant to acknowledge either white or Asian superiority in any intellectual or behavioural facet, out of the fear that, if either was widely acknowledged, certain races would find themselves in gas chambers again.

Race neurosis can even go so far that a person can think it immoral for someone else to say that it’s okay to be white.

A person can confidently be said to have race neurosis if they become angry or distressed when a belief in human biodiversity is asserted. If a person merely disagrees with hereditarianism, they will be able to discuss the relevant scientific evidence without becoming distressed. But if they suffer from a form of race neurosis, they will sense that one of their sacred beliefs is being challenged, and they will become defensive.

Race neurosis is deliberately aggravated by the mainstream media, who play up stories that have a racial angle and play down stories that don’t. Examples can be found right now in the numerous articles admonishing people to abstain from any anti-Chinese racism that might have been provoked by coronavirus fears. This constant hammering has created the false impression that racial prejudice causes a significant proportion of the world’s avoidable suffering, and that is one of the world’s foremost issues.

Also contributing to the problem is the common eschatological belief that all of the world’s races are destined to fight to the death for supremacy in some future race war, willingly or otherwise. People who hold this belief are often afraid that talking about human biodiversity will set this conflict off. Their logic is that recognition of group differences is a step on the slippery slope to warfare.

The cure for race neurosis is genuine hardship. Anyone genuinely worried about whether they have signalled their anti-racism hard enough is immensely privileged – to worry so much about something so meaningless is evidence of no genuine troubles. In Clown World, the disconnect that many people have from reality manifests in psychiatric conditions such as race neurosis.

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Things The Coronavirus Has Already Proven

The Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 is only just beginning. Although it is already dominating the headlines, most of the suffering is still to come. Exactly how much suffering there will be – and who will suffer it – is still unknown, as are most outcomes of this rapidly-unfolding drama. However, there are some things that this pandemic, and the response to it, have already proven. This essay explains.

Many people, mostly for egotistical reasons, believe that human beings are categorically superior to other animals. The usual belief is that our high brain volume to body volume ratio has granted us an unmatched degree of intelligence, if not spiritual insight. Therefore, we’re above “animal behaviour”.

The ongoing panic buying that has seen supermarkets in the West stripped bare is stark evidence against this. Human beings are another kind of primate, only narrowly less impulsive and aggressive than the others. The “monkey see, monkey do” logic that causes juvenile primates to imitate their peers is on vivid display in the now numerous videos of people fighting over water and toilet paper.

In reality, humans are just as prone to panic-fuelled acts of selfish aggression as any “lower” animal. All we need is enough fear to cause a limbic hijack and we’re operating on raw animal instinct again. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has proven that we’re as susceptible to that panicky fear as any flock of sheep.

A second thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has proven is that borders are good. Because the West has been so wealthy for so long, we have developed a kind of tameness. We forgot that the world is dangerous, and that much of that danger comes in human form. We started to believe the fatal delusion that all human groups are the same.

The pandemic caused us to remember that borders are there for a reason – the same reason why you have a fence around your property and skin around your body. It’s to keep bad things out. Esoterically speaking, a border is just a hard masculine line that protects a softer, feminine core, like a skull, a ribcage, a door or a fence.

We have now remembered that borders are good because they keep bad things out. Whether people infected with viruses or people infected with hate-filled ideologies, borders serve to keep us safe from danger. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that having open borders makes as much sense as leaving your front door open at night.

A corollary to this is that the pandemic has proven that the Government can stop mass immigration if they want to.

For the past few decades, neoliberals have screamed that everything would collapse if we stopped the mass importation of cheap labour – our fruit and vegetables would go unpicked, our garbage would go uncollected and our elderly would go without care. Western Governments have closed the borders anyway, reasoning that, absent cheap labour imports, wages will rise to the point where these jobs can be filled by natives.

More worryingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that our dependence on offshore supply chains for some basic goods and medicines has made us not only economically vulnerable, but also strategically vulnerable.

Many industries are running into procurement difficulties, because China shut down so many of its factories and docks that the flow of exports has been throttled. Many Western manufacturers are just learning that, because so much has been outsourced there, when China shuts down the world shuts down. It has become common to hear a person exclaim their recent realisation that X% of a vital industrial widget is produced in China and so, without Chinese production, no-one can get hold of it.

Our exposure to medical shortages threatens to be much worse than our exposure to industrial shortages.

Two weeks ago, India, the world’s leading producer of generic drugs, instituted export restrictions on 26 of them. Because the coronavirus pandemic has impacted pharmaceutical factories in China, many Indian drug manufacturers can no longer acquire precursor ingredients. The panic buying has already shown how close we are to chimpout – once people start being told that the pharmacies can’t supply their psychiatric medicines there could be riots.

Perhaps more fundamental than any of these things is that COVID-19 has proven that the Government doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing. This was already widely understood by most intelligent people, but by now most poeple have had the nauseating realisation that the Government is made up of people who are good at winning elections and not people who are good at governing. All around the world, they are panicking.

One of the main things that Western authorities now have to concern themselves with is civil unrest. It’s slowly dawning on people that this pandemic has the potential to disrupt life as we know it for a significant length of time. As this realisation spreads, all kinds of negative sentiments will grow. Anger, fear, vengeance and short-term thinking will all increase – and they won’t be rational.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that our society is on much shakier foundations than it used to be, and shakier foundations than many had realised. The bonds of solidarity that comprise every community are much fewer and much weaker. The potential for chimpouts at any time have never been greater.

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