society – Page 86

Understanding The Coomer Meme

A new meme has swept across cyberspace in recent weeks. Called the Coomer, it depicts a balding social reject with bloodshot eyes and a massively outsized right arm. This essay explains how the Coomer meme came to prominence, and what it means.

Ever more frequently, we are hearing reports of people being alarmed about Internet pornography. Politicians all around the world are suggesting measures to combat this supposed new scourge, one that is apparently especially dangerous for young people. The image portrayed is one of miserable degenerates, as hopelessly addicted to jerking off as other men are to heroin.

Enter the Coomer.

The Coomer is a figure of mockery. He has completely lost control of himself. His eyes are baggy, reflecting the fact he was up all night jerking it. The Coomer no longer has any interest in social relations or the political environment in which he moves. All he lives for is to bust another nut. Consequently, he represents a wretched figure, almost vampire-like in his detachment from the outside world.

The Coomer meme is actually based on solid scientific grounds. Not only is it entirely possible to get addicted to masturbation, but it’s also possible to overstimulate yourself to the point where everything else has less impact. This creates a kind of amotivational syndrome where nothing is stimulating enough to motivate action – except for more porn (and more extreme porn). It’s very similar to the amotivational syndromes that can arise from excessive stimulation from anything.

Those promoting the Coomer meme are the usual trolls and windup merchants, but there’s a strong sense of what Rick Giles would call Dignity Culture among them. It might sound astonishing to some, but the ease and openness of modern sexual relations have led many to become bored (or even disgusted) with the idea of casual sex, and many of these people have then become celibate.

A common experience among men who become celibate, especially if they had previously had intense engagement with women, is that it feels much like giving up any other drug addiction. Withdrawal eventually gives way to an exhilarating sense of freedom. After all, much of the pleasure of making love comes simply from oxytocin and dopamine release, and experiences as intense as orgasm can easily lead to psychological dependence.

On the surface level, then, the Coomer meme serves as a light-hearted warning about the pitfalls of excessive porn consumption. On a deeper level, the Coomer meme is a satirical jibe at the materialism and hedonism of our age. In a world where God is still dead, finding a higher meaning is impossible. Therefore, there is no motivation to strive. Following one’s basest instincts towards the crudest pleasures is the order of the day.

Many young people have become aware that the problems of previous generations have been caused, to a major extent, by a lack of spirituality. The capitalist system that has wrecked communities and environments all over the world has been powered by an acquisitiveness that itself is fuelled by spiritual ignorance. Poking fun at the Coomer is a way that this awareness manifests.

The Coomer is an archetypal figure that warns against the consequences of sex addiction and genital worship. Much like Tolkien’s Gollum, whose obsession with the One Ring reduced him to a wraith-like figure, the Coomer is a pitiful creature. Invoking him serves to ward off addictions to pornography and the slack-jawed sedation that comes from oxytocin overload, a phenomenon known as “cumbrain”.

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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).