Biology Denial

One of the most influential social phenomena in the modern world is also one of the least understood. It is the widespread denial of the laws of biology and of the biological reality in which the human species has evolved. Although this might seem, to some, to be an academic point, denial of biological reality can have an immense impact on a person’s values and political opinions.

The reality is that human society and behaviour is primarily a biological phenomenon.

Psychologists today know that all the warring and aggression shown by humans in today’s society is little more than adaptations to a biological past where violence was commonplace. In a state of Nature, resources are scarce. Because of this scarcity, it can happen that multiple creatures desire them. When that happens, conflict is the inevitable result.

The same is true of co-operation and love. It’s been well established, ever since the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, that it’s impossible to make sense out of human history without understanding that the human species evolved sociality for the sake of overcoming survival challenges.

Human society, then, is most easily understood as a web of mutual aid that increases the survival and reproductive opportunities of all of its members. The more cohesive groups drive out the less cohesive ones. The Rambo-style individualist doesn’t survive a state of Nature, because one serious injury will kill him. The tribe that works together, on the other hand, can easily recover from non-fatal injuries to individuals.

However, this neat and elegant explanation for much of the complexity of the world does not appeal to some. There are some out there who deny that human behaviour is analogous to primate behaviour, or that human behaviour has evolved to meet survival and reproductive challenges in the natural world, or that significant biodiversity exists within the human species, or that ethology and evolutionary psychology are valid approaches that can make accurate predictions.

This insanity is known as biology denial.

As it turns out, there are several reasons why a person would deny biological science.

One of the most common reasons is narcissism. This is particularly true when it comes to evolution by natural selection. Many people don’t like to think that they evolved from a common ancestor with today’s monkeys. They prefer to think of other animals as a different category to themselves, something categorically lower.

This is related to another major reason to deny biology – religious reasons. The fundamentalist religious nutter believes that Yahweh created the entire Universe, perhaps as recently as 6,000 years ago, and therefore there’s no such thing as evolution. As anyone who knows anything about biology can tell you, if you deny evolution you deny all of biology. This is the reason for the “never say dinosaur” strain of Christcuckery.

The main reason why people deny biology is for political reasons.

This is most obvious when it comes to the subject of race and IQ. Every primary school student learns that there are no two things within Nature that are exactly the same – no two snowflakes, no two cats, no two mountains, no two races. Because biological life evolves to fill different ecological niches, the characteristics of life within those niches is always different.

On the subject of race and IQ, however, the truth is just about the most politically incorrect subject that it’s possible to speak of. As per Ibram X. Kendi, one of the world’s foremost biology deniers, “the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences”. Anyone who disagrees is cancelled.

In reality, Blank Slate Theory (what Kendi is pushing) is a form of biology denial, because it denies the heritability of natural characteristics. This goes against the available evidence, which is why Steven Pinker was able to meticulously and comprehensively demolish it in his book The Blank Slate. That biology denial can reach pathological proportions is evident from the magnitude of the evidence in favour of heritability.

Because biology denial is political, it varies in intensity depending on the aspect of biology under discussion.

Some people deny it totally. One notorious case involves a university student who believed that the reason why men are stronger than women is because they are encouraged to play more sports as children. Most children figure out when very young that there are significant physical differences between men and women. That an adult might deny this is incredible.

The modern transexual fad is another example of biology denial. Some heterosexual men are getting called bigots for preferring biological women over biological men pretending to be women, as if there was truly no difference between the two.

That men are naturally more violent than women, on the other hand, is accepted without question. That this heightened propensity towards violence necessitates exclusion of males from female spaces is, likewise, accepted without question. Any degree of biology can be denied, but whether it is depends on who would benefit from the denial.

All are equal, but some are more equal than others.

The ultimate end effect of biology denial is delusion and suffering. As Philip K Dick wrote: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Westerners are now discovering that human biodiversity is a real thing, and that immigrants from low-IQ nations can’t simply be educated to behave exactly the same way as everyone else.

Biology deniers are so twisted up in their irrational thinking that they believe Asian immigrants to America to have white privilege. Asian students in America frequently find themselves having to get better grades than non-Asians to access the same privileges. Sometimes they need to get even better grades than white students.

Biology denial can only lead to inaccurate perceptions of reality, and thereby to a failure to accurately predict human behaviour, and thereby to political policy that harms instead of helps. Had it been widely understood that intelligence was genetic and that some human populations are an entire standard deviation or more less intelligent than whites, the mass immigration of cheap labour from the Third World to the West might never have happened.

At time of writing, biology denial is one of the greatest threats to our ability to wisely navigate the ship of civilisation through the challenges facing us.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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The Vital Experiment

When all things have run their course, when every avenue has been exhausted, somehow you will end up back here. Not with me, but here with you, where it all began. Welcome back!

It may have been a long time, or it may not. It doesn’t really make much of a difference, because this is where time has no dominion.

I have to take some space here to elaborate on my part in all this, because it shouldn’t be overstated. My role in this is very limited. I am not an academic, priest, holy man or a teacher, I wouldn’t presume to teach you anything that you do not already know at a deep level. If anything, my role here is that of a facilitator. I’m just doing what I am inclined by my nature to do. I reach out to you, but strictly speaking I don’t help you, because any help you receive is that which you have chosen to do for yourself.

This is to serve as a reminder appearing within the dream inviting you to return home and disengage from that which causes you unnecessary suffering. This disengagement on your part will naturally allow a bringing forth of that which is authentic within you. I try to make this process simple and direct, because in this endeavour we are not looking to add more layers of complexity, nor are we primarily seeking to alleviate the symptoms of dysfunction. Instead, we are going to the absolute core of all error, which could be provisionally worded as your felt sense of being a separate someone.

Another way of putting this is, you think what is happening is finally, ultimately real, and as a result, stemming from a confusion about who you truly are. In other words, you don’t know who you are, even though you may have many revolving thoughts and intimate beliefs about who you are, or who you think you should be. The litmus test is, if there is any confusion about who you are, any suffering, any enduring question, then know that this denotes the influence of separation.

Again, I can’t claim responsibility for any of the work, I am just on standby with a supportive hand on the shoulder. Your input alone is decisive wherever you happen to turn up, and in whatever form this moment happens to take. You do all of the important work, and this really is the only way you will ever benefit from it.

I do not have endorsement by the authority of any person, tradition, or institution to do this. I would argue that this is for the best, because it is important that propositions be weighed according to their own merit, not upon any assumed authority of the speaker.

If there was one thing that I would pass on as any benefit to the human condition at this time, it would be the one vital experiment that would call all else into question. This is the invitation for you yourself to undertake the vital experiment, to stand at the very beginning of what is true and has always been true, not separate from who you are for a single moment. If silence is going to be broken, it may as well be for that. It is something you need to see directly for yourself in order to understand the nature of who and what you are.

A belief, however sophisticated or fervent, is never going to be enough to produce freedom. If there is any confusion, any question as to who and what you are, then you haven’t come to the discovery yet. Any way you think things ought to be, any conditions or expectations you place upon the outer world derive from archaic dissociation with your true identity.

There is a small part of you that wants to make sure its notion of ‘waking up’ will fit the profiles of its wants and needs. What will I get out of it? What will it look like? Ego is a foolish project in this regard, because every person has that which awakening fosters already. We are already familiar with it from our earliest inception. We should perhaps instead look at what has never changed, that which has never been different.

All difference arises from that which is never different – strange paradox, but if we observe this for ourselves, the truth in it is revealed. The fruit of awakening isn’t on the other side of some process or behavioural program. We don’t go over there to get it. That is the other business – delusion, separation.

That is what we move for, that is what we leave home to try to grasp onto.

There is a deep yearning for truth, for home. This is a real desire, perhaps even deeper than what we consider within the usual spectrum of human desires. You could call it a soul desire. It is a mystery at this level as to why it comes forward strongly in some individuals and less in others. It is not a ‘bad’ desire in the sense that it does not invest in more cycles of suffering. It makes itself known, either fiercely or quietly, and it isn’t really addressed until you start to acknowledge the woods for the trees, which can be quite a drawn-out process of stepping back, again and again.

This enterprise is all about stepping back. If you are honest and inquisitive about your wants, needs and desires, you will start to find the same kinds of energies as other people involved in this process tend to. Don’t believe this, look for yourself and see whether it is true in your experience.

Most people will not read through something like this unless there is a pre-existing familiarity. There is a part of you, actually much smaller than you might think, that is terribly afraid, fearful, and only asks for things to get better, for the suffering to be relieved. There is another part that gravitates so strongly toward the value of truth and wisdom for its own sake that it wants nothing else. It won’t settle for any less. It doesn’t care in the least about the egoic energy and its small wants.

This may even strike us as quite an anomaly, given that the human lives we occupy are otherwise so richly bound with that which falls within the providence of the biological, such as succeeding, staying safe, finding a mate and so forth. That small part of you under strict cultural and genetic instructions to get more and do better than others is exceptionally narrow, and really doesn’t have any power when it comes to truth. In a sense, when you bring this conditioning into awareness, you are beginning to put down the playthings not only of the small self, but really those of the entire species.

There is the part of you that knows its way back to truth, like a homing pigeon. It is interested in an entirely different game to the small self. Your simply being in this world evokes an open-ended story. There is a tiny but disproportionately represented energy within you that wants to get rid of just enough dysfunction to avoid waking, and keep separation. It is like a mote of dust trying to block out the sun. If you keep it close enough to your eye, it can – that doesn’t mean it is as big as you think it is.

Now, be warned: you cannot get rid of what you do not want, and reserve the right to pick and choose from other illusions. It is an all or nothing deal. How do you set one part of a building ablaze? The other component, utterly vast in comparison but skilfully clouded by the insistent needs of the other energy movement, seeks waking up – truth – unreservedly, because it knows this is home, this is unity. It is the part of us that is finally, truly real, but it doesn’t play games. It is like the fire of the Sun. When it comes through into your life, it will bring with it a conflagration of things that the personal identity has no control to pick and choose.

So what is required of you if you seek resolution to this open question of your being?

I have extremely good news.

You do not need to undertake effort, except insofar as discipline is effort. You need awareness, you need to commit to observing clearly. There are no two ways about it – a platform of awareness is required, and this consists in devoted self-observation.

The next part of the good news is that discipline will usually come to you in a measure proportionate to the dissatisfaction you have experienced by way of falsehood hitherto. This is fed by an egoic pipeline of frustration with the cycles of feeling at the behest of painful dysfunction and thwarted ego projects. In other words, if the illusion continues to entice you back into its fold, out of the wholeness of awareness and back into the fear-driven sleep-state of separation, then it is only because there is enough of an investment there to call you back to it.

It is often said that the proof of a desire lies in the habit of response. You must ultimately decide what is most important in your life, waking up or going back to sleep within the illusion, and if you are like most of us, you will most likely have to re-commit to this repeatedly.

You might be surprised at how much truth seeking and spirituality is just another level of distraction within the illusion. Reality runs astonishingly deep, and beyond a certain point there are no longer words or images that will serve us. Eventually, you may come to prefer inner silence above all else. The rule is, if self-recognition isn’t realised at the deepest level of being, then it isn’t relevant to the experience of unity. A belief in unity will not serve you any more than any other belief. If transformation is what you want, then you must come to it experientially, or not at all.

The third part of the good news is this is an eternally open invitation – it is always available for consideration in this moment, and it is unconditionally extended to everyone.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

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Arriving At The Beginning

Much of what we call ‘waking up’ or ‘enlightenment’ is really just about our finally becoming comfortable with living paradox, which is to say living as paradox.

Our usual modality is to live through the screen of the mind with its beliefs, judgments and preconceptions. Awakening isn’t really a choice so much as it is a conscious recognition of that which is happening regardless. What is it that is finally real? Who is this one to whom we attribute all of these thoughts, experiences and memories?

These are answers you will not find in any book.

When you awaken to the truth of who you are, you aren’t in a state of knowing or unknowing, rather you are in a state of authenticity. This becomes self-evident, because no further question emerges. Even calling it a state does not adequately pull together the breadth of awareness that transcends all states.

It isn’t something new that you come across. It is always immediately available as the closest truth of who you are. It can’t be an object of knowledge. There isn’t a separate someone to figure it out, and there really isn’t anything to figure out.

Our various traditions have played a part in advertising awakening as some kind of permanent removal from the challenges of earthly existence, in which we are removed to some distant heaven or nirvana in a perfected state. The trouble with this view is that our freedom is very intimately linked with our authentic engagement with this moment, wherever it is that we happen to find ourselves. In one sense, our ground of being is so ordinary we do not see it and we therefore completely take it for granted.

We have also inherited a notion of someone who as awakened to their true nature as being someone who has ‘arrived’ on a spiritual level, which is really another extension of the dream state.

These people can easily become attributed with all kinds of projected virtues and assumptions. This invariably leads to much confusion and disillusionment.

It is intoxicating to the ego to imagine that people have crossed over the threshold in this way, and the allure that we too could also achieve this, on the implicit condition that we follow instructions carefully and repeat the program step by step. In other words, if we act and behave just right, we will get it. Can you think of any other field of human life this condition has been promoted?

This is a remarkably dangerous misunderstanding. Everyone has seen the effects of this in our world. We worship those we think have made it, and this attitude filters down into every facet of life until our entire worldview and life structure is dictated by the insatiable need to arrive. The big ways are easier to see, but what about the small ways in which we give away our freedom?

For example, allowing others to decide when we are happy or upset, or placing our sense of worth in the eyes of others – as though we even knew what they were seeing!

This is all a very elaborate, coherent, and above all convincing illusion, and it is one we have all bought into at some point. Some of us continue to pay the subscription to this worldview, while others among us have grown to see it as flimsy and untenable, but are not really quite sure what could replace it as a foundation.

This brings us to awakening to yourself as awareness, which is simply the withdrawal of identity from the pervasive illusions of the mind-ego, and quite literally, coming to your senses.

This withdrawal from illusion is actually easy in principle. You simply stop investing your energy in what you recognise to be illusory. The mechanism is quite simple, only it requires a lot of honesty which is usually leveraged upon the total dissatisfaction with the consensus of illusory beliefs which form the status quo.

The difficulty comes from the tendency to withdraw from illusion being quite painful, at least initially. It can very often lead to pain in the same way that recovering from a foolish investment can be painful, because often there is a great degree of investment by way of time, money and resources.

When there is only who you truly are, then what will end is the mind’s fascination with the mythologised ‘other’ which is always frustratingly just out of your reach. Your hunger for spiritual attainment will naturally retire, and you will accommodate no opinion of yourself – yours nor anyone elses, because you will know that in the final analysis, none of this touches who you truly are.

This is not a theory, but an experiential transition. Be forewarned – you will not gain anything. In fact, you will lose your fictional world, and you will know your place humbly amongst your brothers and sisters. The only part of you that desires reconnection with what is real is the only part of you that is real.

We are so hungry for the imagined reality of this success that we will often bargain away nearly anything in the transaction, including our honesty, our integrity, our happiness and well-being.

People are often quite prepared to allow themselves to be brainwashed by whoever they have delegated authority to on the condition that they will be allowed to partake in their share of glory.

The discovery of who you are is the termination of the primary identity pursuit, and the ending of the persistent denial of one’s own inherent freedom and worth. Awakening is the end of existential insanity.

Fortunately, you never need to worry about trying to figure out who you truly are. All you need to do is to stop energizing every thought and movement away from your natural state, and witness that which is right in front of you. Your arrival at the beginning is simultaneously to comprehend the nature of the end. This unspeakable depth of experience is what is hinted at in the symbol of the ouroboros, the serpent eternally swallowing his own tail.

It is one thing to believe that there is neither beginning nor ending, but another thing entirely to bring forth that truth within your experience. This is the sacred invitation to living paradox. You must eventually come to arrive at the point that you always were. How could you do otherwise? What else is there worth doing? All that it requires is the complete willingness to forfeit every idea of who and what you are – just for one moment.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 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 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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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.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 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 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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