21st Century Signs Of A Slave Mindset

Many people believe that slavery ended in the 1860s in America, in the 1820s in the British Empire, and it hasn’t existed since then. In reality, slavery just changed forms. It became more subtle.

In truth, our rulers don’t need to put chains on our bodies, because they already have chains on our minds. In the 21st Century, people are made into slaves not through beatings but through relentless, all-pervasive media propaganda, psychological brutalisation in schools, unforgiving work schedules and an irrational, capricious government. This mental beatdown creates slave mentality, of which various signs are evident.

The first and most obvious sign that a person is spiritually a slave is being against freedom. If they don’t understand what motivated the American Revolutionaries, they are very likely to possess powerful slave sentiments. Note that this doesn’t mean free people necessarily support degeneracy: the degenerate is as much a slave to their biological impulses as anyone is a slave to anything.

Freedom as a philosophical concept is rejected by all spiritual slaves. They simply don’t understand the pleasure that comes from exercising free will. Ever the yin element, they prefer to be directed.

A slave mentality is often present in cases where a person doesn’t understand the important freedom issues of the day. Those who vote against cannabis freedom in the various referendums want the government to tell them what they’re allowed or not allowed to do, which is pure slave mentality. Someone without a slave mindset will naturally try to maximise their agency. Thus they support freedom as a general principle.

A second sign of a slave mindset is a tendency to lick upwards and kick downwards. The tendency to fawn towards one’s social superiors and abuse one’s social inferiors is extreme in many Third World cultures, and Western travellers immediately notice.

The tendency exists in Western countries too (but to a lesser extent) as it reflects an aspect of human nature: when enough fear is put into a person they become vicious. This viciousness is the reason for the abuse of the weak. In contrast to the truly belligerent, however, those with slave mindset do not challenge the strong.

A third sign is respecting violence more than intelligence. In a normal, healthy society, people think further than their immediate environment. Those who are the best at that naturally gain esteem and rise in the social hierarchy, where they are given power to make some decisions on behalf of the collective. This is natural because the survival of the tribe is best served by giving the most power to those who have the deepest understanding of reality.

In slave morality, normal morality is inverted. Long-term thinkers are resented, and short-term, impulsive thinkers are prized. Anyone who thinks long-term is assumed to be weak, nerdish, sickly of mind. Thoughtfulness is hesitance is weakness. Being “tough” is more important than being wise or intelligent. Thus, the most thuggish and aggressive are at the top. The slave doesn’t see such people as thuggish, of course, but rather cool, fun, spontaneous, powerful etc.

A fourth sign is perhaps the most subtle, but also the most characteristic: resentment. As Nietzsche understood, slaves feel immense resentment at the strength and beauty of free people. A person deep into a slave mindset will feel resentful at life itself. If a person resents the role that Fate seems to have placed them in, and makes life harder for others thereby, they are a certainty to possess a slave mindset.

A perpetual bad mood is a clear sign that a person knows they’re a slave and can’t get over it. If a person is constantly surly, disagreeable, sullen – chances are very high you’re dealing with a slave mindset.

A fifth, and probably the most telling sign, is that a person has given up. There is a great word in Swedish called ‘uppgivenhet’, which means ‘resignation’ in English, but which literally means ‘given-upness’. A person’s level of slave mentality correlates highly with their level of uppgivenhet.

Much like the dog that has been shocked so many times that it lacks the will to take an obvious escape offered to it, a person who has given up will do nothing to better their situation even when presented with opportunity. Those who, when given freedom, spend it watching television, mindlessly scrolling, gossiping or boozing are slaves by any other name.

It’s best to avoid people who demonstrate these five signs of a slave mindset. They won’t lead you into physical bondage but even worse: psychological enslavement.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

Thoughts On Suicide From Someone Who Hasn’t Done It Yet

I have endured a lot of suicidal ideation in my life. As I have written and spoken about at length previously, I have a traumatic stress disorder that has damaged my nervous system. This has led to constant hyperarousal of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is deeply unpleasant to experience. Symptoms of this include nausea, insomnia, anxiety and depression. This has involved a lot of vomiting, a lot of migraines, and a lot of deep breathing until the pain has passed. Although I strive always to say Yes to life, and although I have never made a suicide attempt, I am very tired and will be relieved when this life is over.

This essay has been inspired by the passing of Shane Christie, former Tasman Makos captain, who was well-known in Nelson. I now know a handful of people who have died by suicide, and many others who have made a genuine attempt to die. Many VJMP readers will know at least one suicide victim. The New Zealand nation suffers some 600 suicides every year. Despite our familiarity with the subject, it’s not well understood.

The first thing that people ought to know about suicide is that it’s done because people want the suffering to end.

I was about 13 the first time I felt true suicidal ideation. I had been having a bad time as a result of my mother getting institutionalised for an acute psychotic episode (again). This was the first time it occurred to me that death would solve my problems (I did not believe in reincarnation at this time). I was walking through town, and I realised that I could permanently liberate myself from physical suffering by throwing myself under a truck.

Since then, I have always suffered suicidal ideation to some degree or other, although much less in recent years. It was worst at particular times. 2003, when I realised the West was committing suicide; 2006, when my marriage fell apart; 2013/14, when my grandparents were dying. At these times, the thought of anything in the future evoked the deepest dread. The future itself seemed to be an infinitude of misery, inescapable, an ocean in which I had already drowned and sunk to the bottom. Often I would walk across a bridge and wonder if it could really be so painful to dive head-first onto the road below.

These are typical thoughts for a person tempted by suicide.

I have kept going for mostly two reasons – one, I received unconditional love from my grandparents, which created a large part of me, deep inside, that thought the world was maybe a sort of okay place, despite the bountiful misery elsewhere; two, I was lucky enough to be born really smart and I wanted to see where this could lead. It seemed like an egregious waste to throw that away. In recent years there has been a third reason: the Elementalist imperative to live in a manner that entertains the gods, which involves overcoming suicidal ideation.

People who have more-or-less decent lives usually don’t appreciate how unwelcoming life is for those at the bottom of society. If you were abused as a child, you learn that the world would be better off without your presence. If you were abandoned by one or both parents (and over 20% of New Zealand children grow up without a father in the home), you learn as a child that the world doesn’t want you. Add on top of this the confusion that comes from sexual abuse (this didn’t happen to me, but it happens to many), and it’s understandable why so many make the decision to exit.

I actually hope to die by suicide, which might sound strange. But this is only because I would like to go out on my own terms, mentally prepared. The way Hunter S Thompson did it – just as the decline into old age began – strikes me as ideal (this is still at least 25 years away). Dying in such a manner would not necessarily be a tragedy.

In my religion, Elementalism, there are tragic and understandable suicides. An understandable suicide is when there was, rationally considered, no quality of life remaining. A typical example is an elderly person with terminal cancer. Only sadists would demand that such a person carry on when they don’t want to.

A tragic suicide is when there was significant quality of life remaining. Many tragic suicides are when people surrendered to a bout of depression. These are cases when a person might have gone on to live a decent life, but succumbed in the moment to what should have been a temporary impulse. These cases are truly tragic because of all the lost opportunity they represent.

It’s important to me to reduce the amount of tragic suicides. I support this in my personal life by keeping a friendly ear open for depressed friends and family. I support this in my civic life by advocating for investment in mental health care, particularly for treating depression. Many people don’t realise that a large proportion of suicides are effectively depression deaths. It’s also not well known that depression is usually treatable to a major extent.

The biggest problem with depression is that, when you have it, you don’t think rationally. You become deluded. It’s entirely possible, when depressed, to think that everyone hates you and wants the worst for you. In reality, even if you have a lot of enemies, you don’t have that many. But when depressed, you can feel hate oozing out of every face you see. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re not wanted on Earth.

Another big problem with depression is that if you ask your doctor about it they will throw you on antidepressants and tell you to get back to work. These antidepressants probably won’t be very effective and will probably come with awful side effects. The doctor won’t do the most helpful thing, which is explain to you what depression is and why you have it. So you will have to learn about it from somewhere else.

What I plan to do is to keep informing people about the reality of depression in particular and of mental illness in general. I feel like my own life has been saved thanks to being able to access useful and accurate information about the condition. I feel great joy at the thought I could save another life by popularising such information.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

Coping With The Transition To A Low-Trust Society

Everyone with any sense can feel that society is breaking down. The general atmosphere is much less pleasant than it was ten, even five years ago: more anger, depression, madness. Less laughter is heard. All the economic news is bad, and people no longer speak of the future as a friend, but as an enemy collecting a debt.

There is precedent for understanding what is happening: broken families.

There are many broken families in our society. These families are broken societies in microcosm. It’s common for parents in broken families to be negligent or abusive, even to have abandoned their own children. This is closely analogous to how governments work in broken societies. What the New Zealand Government did to its own people with Ruthanasia differs only in scale from what a parent does when it abandons its family, and Ruthanasia was only the worst of many examples of governmental neglect. More are to come.

Broken families produce low-trust people. Trust is essentially a person’s estimation of the probability of encountering honourable behaviour. Neglecting one’s children is a highly dishonourable act, a total failure to be an adult. A child so neglected will very likely grow up to be a low-trust adult. They will seldom punish dishonourable conduct, having normalised it, and they will seldom reward honourable conduct, believing it to be an aberration.

Broken societies are full of low-trust people. They expect the worst from others. As such, they’re not willing to give any “benefit of the doubt”. This makes them generally unpleasant to be around. But, like broken families, they aren’t natural. They only exist when an authority figure refuses to do their job properly. This is why low-trust societies are full of rebels and revolutionaries. As Western society becomes lower and lower trust, we can expect more dissidents of all kinds, especially violent ones. As low-trust neighbourhoods produce gang members, low-trust societies produce revolutionaries and tyrants.

A high-trust environment is honour based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of honourable conduct. People’s reputations for past honourable conduct determine the extent to which they are respected. Sophocles once said “Better to fail with honour than succeed by fraud”. In high-trust environments, a person can expect to lose but still be respected.

A low-trust environment is fear based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of malice. Only people malicious enough to do harm are respected; everyone else is exploited. In a low-trust environment, exploiting people is seen as intelligent. A caring person is just a target. Kind people are stupid, because if they were smart they would have perceived that they were operating in a low-trust environment. Low-trust people don’t view the kind as the freemasonry of society (which they are in high-trust environments). They view the kind as wolves would view a lamb.

For instance, people in Thailand have different attitudes to theft to people in Singapore. In Thailand, if you leave your property unguarded, the assumption is that you’re too stupid to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. The logic is similar in gang environments: if you’re too weak to defend your property through fighting for it, them you’re too weak to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. This kind of logic will become more common in the future.

In a low-trust environment, you exploit people up until the point where they push back. The low-trust presumption is that they would do they same to you if they could.

In a low-trust environment, you expect people to be lying. Speech is not assumed to be factual: people are assumed to be “talking shit” unless proven otherwise.

Low-trust thinking and short-term thinking overlap a great deal. As such, a high time preference is another psychological weakness we will have to contend with in the future. People in low-trust families don’t make rational long-term decisions. Neither do governments in low-trust societies. Probably Western governments will torch their economies in coming decades to keep Boomers in comfort. What comes after then will be a truly low-trust environment.

Coping with low-trust environments is primarily about lowering expectations. Lose the expectation of honourable conduct. Lose the expectation that your property rights will be respected. This means to become more cynical, paranoid and suspicious, which is a shame. But it’s a reasonable reaction to the way society is going. High-trust people are going to get destroyed.

Also important in the transition to a low-trust environment is learning to control oneself (to some extent this is downstream of lowering expectations). Living in a low-trust environment is stressful. One’s threat detection mechanisms are often running at full power. Adapting to a low-trust environment means suppressing emotion, both in range and intensity. Unfortunately this means that many people will become sadistic, even psychopathic. But many will have to choose between honour or survival in coming years.

Because low-trust environments are fear based, overcoming one’s fear of death will gain you respect. Thus, a genuinely spiritual attitude will gain you respect. People in low-trust environments have only contempt for the superficially spiritual. But if a person’s spirituality enables them to endure physical deprivations, stresses, threats and intimidation, they will do much better in low-trust environments than non-spiritual people.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Fourth Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Fourth Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of cruelty. The Fourth Rejection is the contention that an excessive focus on truth leads to cruelty.

The Alternative Right is initially made up of people rejected from the Establishment. This does not mean the peasantry but those unjustly rejected from the ruling class. Those people have peculiarities that those within the Estabishment don’t have. Understanding the Alternative Right is a matter of understanding those peculiarities.

Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction theory is relevant here. The problem with the Establishment (as suggested in the Third Rejection) is that it comes together to keep out elite individuals from non-Establishment families. This corruption leaves those elite individuals with a stark choice: submit to the corruption – and accept a lesser place – or revolution.

This is a brutal choice which leads to much resentment and bitterness, which leads to cruelty. This cruelty is magnified by the desire to crack down on perceived degeneracy, as per the Third Rejection. The Alternative Right sees an Establishment that has failed to impose a correct order. The resulting disorder threatens the viability of society. Thus it becomes a moral imperative to overthrow that old order and bring in a new, healthy one. Cruelty is justified under the “if you want to make an omlette, you’ve got to break some eggs” principle.

In Alternative Right discourse one sees a lot of extremist rhetoric. “Gas the Jews” is a common sentiment. So are sentiments about killing all non-whites. These sentiments might seem cruel, but those who express them are simply reflecting the cruelty of the political Establishment in rejecting people who it would have accommodated, had it not been corrupt. Like so many who have suffered cruelty, the Alternative Right has lost inhibitions against inflicting it themselves.

This tendency towards excessive cruelty is what is rejected in the Fourth Rejection.

The increased level of antipathy towards their enemies is the principal difference between the mentality of the Establishment Left and the Alternative Right. The main enemy of the Establishment Left are those born into privilege; the main enemy of the Establishment Right are traitors. If the Establishment Left are a revolution of the middle class, who are looking for accommodation, the Alternative Right are a revolution of the excess ruling class, who are looking to replace the existing ruling class entirely. Thus the revolution of the Alternative Right is more vicious.

Alternative Centrism accepts, as per the Fourth Acceptance, that truth is a virtue. Truth is always good, but there are cases where people are just not ready for it. Exposure to truths that a person is not ready for leads to trauma.

In the same way that it’s (kind of) cruel to tell a child that Santa Claus isn’t real, and it’s cruel to expose children to graphic gore and pornography, it’s also cruel to expose some adults to certain ideas about death or the ruthlessness of the control system. A person who isn’t fully self-realised might not have the psychological fortitude to withstand a blackpill of such magnitude. The Fourth Rejection rejects the paranoid and depressed aspects of truth-seeking, and the dark energies associated with those aspects. It is cruel to inflict such energies on people when they are not prepared or ready for them.

The search for truth needs an element of compassion or it fixates on material truths at the expense of spiritual ones. Dispassionate truth-seeking may have given us the Internet and the HIMARS rocket artillery system. But it also gave us the nihilism of positivism and a centibillion-dollar pharmaceutical apparatus that mostly exists to numb people to the horror of their own spiritual ignorance (of course this is widely denied). To seek truth without compassion is robotic, computer-like, inhuman.

The Fourth Rejection, then, in rejecting the uncompassionate nature of an excess focus on truth, also reflects the First Rejection of excess order. Both rejections are movements away from the excess masculine and towards the feminine.

The Alternative Right speaks the truth about human biodiversity, especially regarding race and IQ. This truth – that some human populations have significantly lower IQs than others for mostly genetic reasons – is a particularly cruel one for those lower IQ populations. It might be true that the facts of this biodiversity ought to inform immigration policy. But it might also be true that egregious trumpeting of these facts is cruel. No-one likes to hear they’re from a dumb race.

The Alternative Right also speaks the truth about immigration in general and the Muslim rape gangs in Europe in particular. The Western Establishment has told lies for decades about the prevalence of sex crimes by immigrants from primarily Muslim and African countries. Although speaking the truth here is good, there is a cruelty inherent in the obsessive focus on these crimes. It reflects a will to blackpill others, which is a form of sadism.

A degree of xenophobia is natural. It’s a tough world and a there’s lot of evil in it. But the “kill all outsiders” mentality of some of the Alternative Right is unhelpful. The Alternative Right will read Karl Schmitt and come to apply the friend-enemy distinction, but the more one dwells on this distinction the more enemies one will create. Moreover, consideration of those outside the immediate in-group will build allyship, and any successful political movement will have to make as many allies as possible.

A sophisticated approach to outsiders is to lead with mild friendliness, and then to increase or decrease this friendliness depending on whether it’s reciprocated. This is the Alternative Centrist approach.

The Alternative Right also has the Establishment Right’s mindset of imposing order on others whether those others like it or not. Thus they have the same tendency to create enemies. The cruelty of the Alternative Right makes them particularly indifferent to the suffering of those disadvantaged by any proposed new order. It might be possible to appeal to the magnanimous side of the Establishment Right. But the Alternative Right are too lean and hungry to be magnanimous.

There is a sense in which the Alternative Right is an attempt to re-establish the pre-civilisational natural order, the civilised order having become corrupt and degenerate. Absent an inherited order, people will manifest an instinctual order. This is why the Alternative Right so readily leads to gangs and criminality, as well as to active clubs. This manifestation explains much of the attitude and approach of the Alternative Right: it’s easy to imagine them as pack hunters on the prehistoric savannah.

It might be pointed out that the Establishment Right is also very cruel. The difference is that the Establishment Right has to be cruel in order to impose the order necessary for society to exist. The cruelty of the Alternative Right, by contrast, is often egregious. There is something adult about the cruelty of the Establishment Right and something juvenile about the cruelty of the Alternative Right.

In rejecting cruelty, the alternative centrist foreshadows the importance of justice, and therefore foreshadows the rise of the Alternative Left.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books! https://www.amazon.com/author/vincemcleod

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!