society – Page 84

Civilisation Is An Act of Alchemy

The art of alchemy is the art of transmuting base elements into precious ones. On the personal level, a successful alchemist will transmute their own baser nature into something that is in tune with God. As above, so below: such a process also occurs on the collective level. Civilisation itself is an act of alchemy.

The main life objective for any spiritual person is to overcome their raw animal instincts, especially when those instincts cause suffering to other sentient beings. The instincts to dominate and destroy, and to kill and conquer, are controlled by the spiritual person so that they don’t harm anyone. The spiritual man seeks to impose order upon the chaos of his soul.

Chaos, in this sense, represents the vital biological energies and instincts that have been shaped by evolution to meet survival and reproduction challenges, and which would have found expression with or without consciousness. Chaos represents the workings of Nature in raw form.

As awesome as the workings of Nature in raw form may be, they don’t take into account the suffering of conscious beings. Nature is famously indifferent to that. In a state of Nature, men fight and kill each other over food and territory and women, and survival to adulthood is rare. The spiritual impulse is the impulse to transcend and to overcome this.

Transcending and overcoming is the reason why so many religious traditions practice some form of abstinence. To fast is to learn to go without food, which is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to eat. To be celibate is to learn to go without sex, with is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to reproduce. Admonitions against violence and greed are likewise intended to encourage people to go against their savage natures.

It’s also why many religious traditions practice repetitive tasks, such as Buddhism with meditation, which requires a person to sit still for some time. If a person can learn physical discipline, then they can try to learn mental discipline, and if they can learn that, then they can try to learn spiritual discipline. Achieving spiritual discipline is the highest goal of the alchemist.

The ideal is to take the energy of some instinct, such as for sex or violence, and to sublimate it into a higher order, such as an art. This is what is meant by the transmutation of lead into gold. An alchemist can take their base impulses (represented by lead), which are indifferent to the suffering of others, and transmute them into energies (represented by gold) that work to reduce those others’ suffering .

As above, so below: all the things stated above as truths of personal alchemy are also true on a global level. There is a work of alchemy taking place right now on Earth that amounts to the imposition of order upon chaos on a planetary scale.

The fundamental act of civilisation is, like the fundamental act of alchemy, the imposition of order upon chaos.

The history of civilisation is the history of the imposition of the higher order of will upon the chaos of raw animal instinct. To be civilised is to have developed the ability to resist impulses to attack, rape and steal. A civilised man can laugh off insults, because he knows that to give in to his instinct to punish would be weakness. His highest value is not dominance but composure.

Our society invests a tremendous amount of time in trying to teach young people to think twice before giving in to temporary impulses that might have permanent consequences. Children are told morality stories from when they are old enough to listen and they continue getting lectured well into adulthood. The idea is to induce them to behave in ways that do not cause suffering to others.

Civilisation, then, is the same thing as alchemy, only it is the name given to alchemy at the collective level.

A statesman transmutes lead into gold by passing a law that proscribes certain behaviours. A great author does the same thing by writing a novel that gives its readers insight into the human condition. A great sportsman transmutes tribal bloodlust into a performance of improvisational theatre. All of these people further civilisation by minimising actions that cause suffering.

An ideal civilisation will operate on the frequency of gold. At this level, the ruling class is guided by God, and all of their actions are in tune with the will of God. If the ruling class is correctly devoted to God, then those devoted to the ruling class will be devoted to God, and so on, so that even the simplest peasant acts in accordance with the divine will.

A civilisation that has lost touch with God might operate on the level of silver, as ours appears to. We are godless but are yet to disintegrate into the level of all-out warfare – although this may happen if we fail at the great work of alchemy that is civilisation. A civilisation at war has fallen to the level of iron, and one that falls so far that its very survival is in question has regressed to the level of clay.

The alchemical future of our civilisation will depend on whether we can reconnect to God, or whether we fall further into violence and savagery. It seems that many of our most primal instincts for acquisition and competition are making a comeback, and this has led to a lower frequency of consciousness all over the world. If it keeps decreasing, then war is all but inevitable.

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The Three Elementary Threats Used by the Ruling Class to Establish Compliance

In an ideal state, the ruling class doesn’t need to threaten people, because they will rule correctly and this will inspire devotion. Whether this is unrealistic or whether we live in a degraded age is unclear, but what is clear is that our ruling class threaten people a lot, sometimes covertly, sometimes overtly. As this essay will show, the ruling class has three major strategies for keeping the plebs in line.

The easiest way to keep the plebs in line is to starve them. Starvation is represented by the element of clay. In the old days, the rulers of the community would gather together all the product of that season’s agricultural harvest and portion them out to the deserving. Anyone deemed to be undeserving was given a smaller portion of food, or none at all. This is natural logic – one can see it replicated in lion prides.

If a child is seriously misbehaving, the go-to strategy for many parents is to send them to bed without any dinner. This is unpleasant for the child, because it plays on deep, primal fears of starvation. Much like a hand around the throat, which quickly gains compliance thanks to the fear of death, withholding food from someone can quickly cause submission. People are hard-wired to be afraid of hunger, for obvious biological reasons.

Starvation is more subtle than just denial of food. It can also refer to denial of the means to procure food, i.e. money. The way this is most commonly achieved in the modern world is to create uncertainly about the future of one’s job. All talk about economic downturns, mass layoffs, global financial crises etc. has the psychological effect of inducing submission among the plebs by stoking subconscious fears of starvation.

Some people often wonder why, in poor African countries, people still starve despite the enormous amounts of foreign food aid that is pouring in. The answer is that the people in charge of those poor African countries regularly refuse to distribute food aid to those groups thought to be enemies. If the dictator in charge comes from a particular tribe, he might withhold food aid to that tribe’s traditional foes as a way of settling scores.

Threatening to impoverish someone by taking away their food supply is the most elementary and primal way to establish control and compliance, which is why it’s so effective. This is the ultimate reason why men “follow orders”, even when those orders are criminal – the alternative might be unemployment, which means starvation.

Imprisonment is represented by the element of iron, and is the way that the ruling class threaten anyone they cannot starve. If you can access your own food supply, or earn your own wage with which to buy food, fair enough, more power to you. It means you have avoided enslavement at the level of clay, but the ruling class can escalate things to the level of iron.

Imprisonment is what happens to you if you break the law. The law is how the ruling class gets you to do things when the threat of starvation is insufficient.

The ruling class determines what the law is by drawing up a list of all the things they don’t want you to do. The initial list is one of all the things that common law has agreed causes harm to people, because making these things against the law grants the ruling class legitimacy. To this list they add certain things they don’t want people doing.

For example, the Western ruling classes have been afraid that if cannabis were legal, their livestock would be less productive. The belief is that cannabis use saps ambition, which our economy relies upon. This belief is warranted to some extent – cannabis use tends to cause a drift away from materialism, which implies less interest in money and consumption. So making it illegal causes the cash cows to grow fatter.

The threat of imprisonment is the threat of ripping someone away from their usual environment at gunpoint, and then putting them in an enclosed environment with people who have caused harm to others. Furthermore, if you don’t want to go in the cage the Police will kill you on the spot. It’s the threat of a deeply unpleasant experience, which is why the threat of iron is so effective at modifying the behaviour of the peasantry.

Ostracisation is represented by the element of silver. As silver is more subtle than iron, so is ostracisation more subtle than imprisonment. However, as silver is more valuable than clay, the fact that it is more subtle than iron makes it stronger, and not weaker. Ostracisation can affect people who cannot be targeted for enslavement in the realm of clay or iron, on account of that their behaviour is not objectionable enough.

The ruling class can still threaten to destroy their social reputation, and these threats are just as capable of insidiously affecting a person’s mind as the threats of starvation or imprisonment. Whispering campaigns and rumour-mongering are both capable of making someone’s life much less pleasant, and the threat of being subjected to these is often enough to induce compliance where other methods are inapplicable.

In practice, ostracisation is an extremely powerful tool, because all it takes to employ it is to tell enough lies about the target. A sufficiently motivated rumour-mongering campaign can blacken the reputation of even the most exalted of people. Such campaigns can be waged with the strength of thousands if the person spreading the rumours is influential enough.

Moreover, the clay and iron strategies of starvation and imprisonment only work if the ruling class has clear physical dominance. Ostracisation can be employed by any member of the ruling class, established dominance or not. All they have to do is induce people to feel contempt for some other member of the collective. They can also target other members of the ruling class with such means.

Ostracisation also plays on fundamental primal fears, because humans are a social animal, and the vast majority of us cannot function well without healthy social interaction. The real beauty of it, from the ruling class’s point of view, is that it’s always possible to change what’s fashionable within society, and therefore always possible to ostracise a person (or group of people) so long as the apparatus of propaganda are controlled.

Through combining these three major threat strategies, the ruling class is able to induce submission in virtually all of the members of the lower classes. These three are enough to cover the entire spectrum of man’s lower nature, and therefore are sufficient to appeal to all elementary human fears.

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The Gender Wage Gap Is Bullshit

Periodic outrage arises at something called the “Gender Wage Gap.” We are constantly being told that men are paid a certain percentage more than women because of anti-female discrimination and prejudice within the workplace. The problem is that the idea of a gender wage gap is absolute bullshit. Demographer Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, explains.

There is, indeed, a correlation of 0.23 between net median income and being male (and commensurately a correlation of -0.23 between net median income and being female). This is not a very strong correlation, and in this study is only on the borderline of statistical significance.

This does mean that men control slightly more of the nation’s money supply than women do. Some people, particularly on the left, make the assumption that all human population groups are precisely the same, and therefore any difference must be the consequence of oppression. The existence of a positive correlation between personal income and being male is taken as proof that women are systematically underpaid.

However, a closer look at the data reveals the lie in this lazy assumption.

The correlation between being male and having a personal income above $150,000 was 0.03 – essentially nonexistent. The correlation between being male and having a person income between $100,000 and $150,000 was even less than this, at 0.01. This shows that the distribution of the highest-earning jobs is almost perfectly even between men and women.

Indeed, we can see from Understanding New Zealand that there is essentially no difference between men and women when it comes to higher education. The correlation between being male and having a Bachelor’s degree is not significant, at -0.04, and for the postgraduate degrees the correlation is weaker still. So the equal share of educational achievement leads naturally onto an equal share of the top professional jobs.

The best-paid jobs in New Zealand are appointed on the basis of education and not gender. Further proof for this comes from the fact that the correlations between working as a professional and having any degree are extremely strong – around 0.80 to 0.90. The correlation between being a professional and being a male, by contrast, is not significant, at -0.10.

Nearer the centre of the earnings scale we can see that the correlation with being male rises, to 0.22, for an income between $50,000 and $60,000. This correlation is borderline significant, but it is in the wage brackets between $40,000 and $70,000 where the bulk of the nation’s income is earned. All of these wage brackets have a positive correlation of at least 0.18 with being male.

Lower down the earnings scale, we can see that the correlation with being male is negative for all income brackets below $30,000. It is a borderline significant -0.19 for the prime beneficiary’s income bracket of $10,000 to $15,000. Indeed, we can see that the correlation between being male and being on the unemployment benefit is -0.39, so women are significantly more likely to be bringing in less than average.

So if women and men are paid the same at the top levels, why do men earn more in the middle levels?

As mentioned above, the reason that men make more money than women overall is because of the fact that there are more of them in the $40,000 to $70,000 range and fewer in the $30,000 and below range. But the reason for this is not prejudice.

Most of this difference can be explained by the correlation of 0.48 between being male and being in full-time work. There is also a correlation of -0.48 between being male and being unemployed. Simply put, this means that men work a lot more than women do. Further proof comes from the negative correlations between being male and being on the unemployment benefit (-0.39), being on the invalid’s benefit (-0.26) or being on the student allowance (-0.21).

What this means is that the plum jobs are shared out equally between men and women, but the lower one goes down the socio-economic scale, the more likely it is that women will become unemployed instead. This makes perfect sense, because the less one earns the more marginal working becomes in comparison to spending that time on one’s family, and women are much more likely to make such a calculation than men.

The gap in earnings between men and women can be best explained, therefore, not by sexism or any other form of prejudice, but by life history patterns. Men tend to work hard as young adults and then work hard as older adults. Women, by contrast, tend to work hard as young adults and then transition to part-time work as they get older, shifting the primary focus of their concern from their career to their family.

What the statistics show is a very reasonable pattern of women starting out as professionals if they can, otherwise starting at the bottom and transitioning into family care as they age. Men also start out as professionals if they can and also otherwise start at the bottom, but the difference is that they tend to transition into managerial positions as they age. This is evidenced by the correlation of 0.49 between being male and working as a manager.

The “gender wage gap”, therefore, is best explained as the result of different choices made by the average man compared to the average woman. It has nothing to do with prejudice or sexism, and anyone claiming that it does is either misguided or lying.

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).

A Universal Basic Income Would Pay For Itself In The Bitching It Would Prevent

The Internet is full of bitching about who is entitled to what and who is ripping who off. Endless back-and-forths that have been running for decades already, and sometimes for centuries before the Internet was invented. This bickering does a tremendous amount of social damage, fostering distrust, suspicion and cynicism at all levels. As this essay will examine, a universal basic income would pay for itself by settling much of this bitching.

One of the eternal debates relates to the pension age.

Our society is currently structured so that 64-year olds are made to work under threat of starvation, but 65-year olds are gifted $370 a week from the state until they die, no questions asked. A person’s life is radically different from the week before they turn 65 compared to the week after. Turning 65 grants you access to so much free money that it’s like winning the lottery.

The problem, from the state’s point of view, is that the pension already costs New Zealand some $16 billion dollars per year – a figure that is rising by about a billion a year. This means that there is a great incentive to cut down on costs by raising the pension age. On top of that, many argue that the current pension arrangement in unsustainable, on account of that people are in good health for longer.

Naturally, proposals to raise the pension age are bitterly resented by those close to it. Howls of outrage are inevitable every time the media raises the subject. Also naturally, those younger still, who have no hope of the luxury pension lifestyle that today’s elderly enjoy, don’t give a shit, and are happy to just laugh. Therefore there is bitter resentment on all sides.

We already have a universal basic income for those over 65. If we would lower the size of the payment to something more reasonable, and then extend the age limit all the way down to 18, would could get rid of the need to argue over the pension age entirely.

Another eternal debate revolves around making a distinction between the mentally ill and the lazy. The logic is that it’s fair to pay mentally ill people welfare because they can’t be expected to hold down a job, but it’s not fair to pay lazy people on welfare because it will just encourage them to not work.

The difficulty is, of course, that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between the two. It’s not at all routine to find agreement between two psychiatrists as to whether a given patient is mentally ill or a malingerer. It couldn’t possibly be, given how complicated the average mind is and how long it takes to get to understand it.

In practice, there’s essentially no way to tell whether a person’s unwillingness to work stems from mental illness (thereby demanding a feminine solution) or a failure of the will (thereby demanding a masculine solution). There is no scientific test, so the psychiatrist just asks a bunch of questions and then offers a degree of help commensurate with how much they like the patient.

This means that a large part of the welfare apparatus – that devoted to distinguishing the “deserving” from the “undeserving” – is superfluous and could be scrapped at no loss. A universal basic income would remove the need for absurdities such as the requirement to get a doctor’s certificate every year or so to “prove” that one was too mentally infirm to hold down a job.

A mentally healthy person will not choose to avoid work, for the simple reason that employment is the only realistic way to meet one’s social needs today. Some people might need to take a break away from intense social pressure on occasion, and a UBI would help them do this. Then they could return on their own terms when able. This would prevent people from being ground down into destruction through the stress of trying to maintain employment with a mental illness.

Seldom does a person stop and think about how much social damage is caused by arguments about who is worthy to receive a basic level of financial dignity and who isn’t.

A universal basic income would settle all of these disputes in one stroke. It would say: there is no such thing as public welfare anymore, only dividends. Every citizen gets a basic dividend of the nation’s wealth, enough to stave off abject misery, no questions asked. No more squabbling about who’s paid in enough and who has been promised what.

There is a lot of talk about a looming financial crisis, and how we can’t lower interest rates to fight it, and will therefore have to print money. The last time we printed money we gave to the banks, and that didn’t help alleviate the human suffering. This time we should print money and give it to everyone to meet their basic survival needs.

If 3,500,000 people received a dividend of $250 for 52 weeks, the total cost would be $45,500,000,000. According to the New Zealand Treasury, crown income was $81,800,000,000 for the 2016/2017 financial year. That same link also shows us that the current cost of social security and welfare is $30,600,000,000, currently paid for by taxation and not money printing.

This means that we could scrap the entire social security and welfare bureaucracy, shift all of the funding for it to a UBI, and we’d only be $15,000,000,000 short. This shortfall could be made up for by money printing, or from increased economic efficiencies brought about by the structural change of every person having government-backed poverty insurance.

One likely side-effect of a UBI is that is will make many things much cheaper.

For instance, without the life-or-death pressure of needing to get a job before one starves, Kiwis would be much more willing to live in places with fewer job opportunities. This would create a drift to rural areas and release some of the demand pressure on urban land. Introduction of a UBI would, of course, mean the termination of the Accomodation Supplement, as there is simply no justification to live somewhere you can’t afford if this isn’t necessary for work purposes.

The fact is that New Zealand needs entrepreneurial activity if it is to succeed this century, and much of this will necessarily be Internet-based owing to New Zealand’s extreme geographical isolation. A UBI would make it possible for small start-ups to get off the ground in the smaller centres, because these start-ups would have much lower initial costs.

The rest of the value might be made up from the social benefits of putting a definitive and official end to all questions about who was worthy of Government assistance and who was a bludger, malinger, thief etc. Everyone gets $250, and when the rate goes up it goes up for all. Because everyone gets it, and the same amount, there would be no question over who is entitled and who isn’t.