the human condition – Page 44

Why Beneficiaries Are Morally Superior to Workers

It’s a nearly universal assumption nowadays that people who work are morally superior to people on welfare. People on welfare, we are told, are essentially parasites that do nothing but suck wealth out of the system, and we’d all be better off without them. As this essay will explain, this is almost the exact opposite of reality. People on welfare are, in fact, morally superior to those who work.

The vast majority of human history has been one of deprivation and toil. Having evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, the primary survival challenge facing our species for almost the entirety of its existence was finding enough food to meet the metabolic needs of our bodies. For the most part, this was a brutal and bloody struggle against the world – and each other.

This had a powerful effect on the evolution of human behaviour – and our morality.

Because resources are scarce, and the metabolic clock is ticking, humans have always needed to be active. We have always needed to work, whether that be hunting, gathering, fishing or working the land in the form of agriculture. This was how we gathered enough resources to survive. The alternative to activity was death.

Because working was necessary for survival, we have always praised those who did it, and always excoriated those who did not. It was probably necessary to do this, because, had we not done so, the lazy would have dragged all of society down with them. Our culture, especially Northern European culture, came to consider work something almost holy, as if the meaning of life.

Working more and harder is how wealth is built, but as can be seen in the graph at the top of this essay, the planet cannot support the level of consumption that humans are currently subjecting it to. There simply aren’t enough of the necessary resources. The resources that do exist are being depleted at such a pace that we can see hard physical limits approaching, and there’s no escaping it.

The fact is that a profound paradigm shift has taken place over the past few hundred years, and we’ve barely even noticed it, let alone adapted to it.

American agricultural productivity increased 1200% between 1950 and 2000. This was thanks to something called the Green Revolution, which increased agricultural productivity severalfold all across the world. What this means is that it requires far, far fewer people to feed society today than what it took in the past. Therefore, most people are now surplus labour.

We have adapted to this by setting the now-redundant agricultural workers to work in other industries. First was manufacturing, then service industries. This worked out great for a long time, because all of these non-essential workers were able to produce things that raised the human standard of living, even if those things weren’t necessary.

This was pretty awesome for a few decades, and arguably continues to be. However, we are now aware of some things that we once didn’t know. In particular, we are now aware of the pressure we’re putting on the natural environment through shifting those surplus workers into manufacturing all sorts of things. We now know that we can’t keep doing this.

The world doesn’t need hard work and production any more. Those days are over. What the world now needs are people who can restrict their consumption to a level that the world can sustain. As seen on the graph above, that level is about half that of the average Chinese level of consumption, some $15,000 of resources every year.

In other words, a First World standard of living will, necessarily, become a thing of the past sooner or later.

For the average Westerner, restricting one’s consumption to about $15,000 worth of goods and services a year will not be easy. This will demand an extremely sharp curtailment of material desire. It will mean that far fewer international trips can be taken, and far fewer new cars or big screen televisions can be bought. It may require vegetarianism or something like it. It will require great sacrifice.

Without such a great sacrifice, our planet cannot survive, or at least not in a form that can sustain human life. Therefore, doing so is a moral imperative.

The average Western beneficiary has already achieved this. Considering that the average Western beneficiary already survives without the excessive consumption displayed by almost everyone in a job, they are in fact showing the way forward for the rest of the Western World. They are the pioneers of the future, demonstrating the correct way for the rest of us to behave. They are the Men of Gold.

Like the holy ascetic men of the great Eastern religions, the Western beneficiary class has liberated themselves from materialism. They are therefore showing the way forward for the rest of humanity, and ought to be praised as spiritual masters. The rest of us need to follow the path of the beneficiary, and stop following the path of the worker/consumer. The first step is recognising the moral superiority of the welfare recipient.

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

How to Deal With the Fact That We’re All Going to Die

Many psychologists and psychiatrists have noticed a sharp recent increase in the number of people who present to them with anxiety about ecological collapse. The proliferation of media relating to end-of-world environmental disaster scenarios has made many people fearful. This article will give some tips for dealing with the fact that we’re all going to die.

The phenomenon has been called climate despair. Fuelled by headlines about people dying in Japanese heatwaves, how last month was the hottest month in human history, or how humanity only has 18 months to act if catastrophe is to be averted, climate despair is when people give up on life on account of believing that humans have destroyed the climate of Earth, and thereby its capacity to support life.

It could be said to be a kind of existential horror, one that arises at the thought of a future Earth that is barren of life owing to Venus-like conditions. What is the point in doing anything, in struggling to achieve things, if we’ve just wrecked the planet and are all going to die?

Climate despair may not be irrational. Some climate models do indeed predict that we have cooked the planet beyond the point where human civilisation can continue to exist. Even though things are ticking along alright now, there may be several degrees of warming that are inescapable from this point owing to what has already been added to the atmosphere.

However, from an existential and spiritual point of view, climate despair is a needless suffering and therefore ought to be counteracted. The good news is that, in principle, climate despair is nothing more than bog-standard death anxiety wearing a new mask. Therefore, the old ways of dealing with death anxiety are applicable to dealing with climate despair.

The problem that we’re going to die is essentially two problems rolled into one.

The first is that it isn’t obvious, to many people, that consciousness survives the death of the physical body. In much the same way that the Earth intuitively feels flat, many people intuitively feel that the brain generates consciousness, and therefore the death of the brain with the death of the physical body means that consciousness ends.

The second is that it isn’t obvious, to many people, that anything we do here has any meaning. We’re all going to die, and even if consciousness survives this and goes through into the next world, we don’t appear to be able to take anything with us. We can’t take property with us, we can’t take family with us, we may not even be able to take memories with us. Therefore, no actions in this world have meaning, and despair must follow.

Solving the first problem isn’t too difficult. That’s a simple matter of refuting the common illusion that the brain generates consciousness.

If a person makes the argument that the life is meaningless because we all die, and with the death of the body goes our consciousness, therefore we are doomed to forget everything we have done and everything we are, they run into a problem. This problem is called the Argument from Biological Necessity.

Evolution is an extremely efficient process, and it only ever selects for traits that confer an immediate advantage in either survival or reproduction. But, as anyone who has read any Dostoevsky can tell you, being conscious confers no such advantage. The human animal could just as well fight and fuck without being aware of what it is doing.

If anything, consciousness is an impediment to survival, on account of that it leads to depression, anxiety and existential angst and horror. These emotions paralyse us and drive us to suicide. It would be much better to not be conscious – then one could simply do whatever was necessary to best further one’s genes.

If consciousness is not necessary, then it cannot have been selected for by natural or sexual selection, as all of the facets and qualities of the brain have been. Therefore, it cannot be generated by the brain, and therefore there’s no reason to assume that the death of the brain should affect the presence of it.

The second problem is much harder. Even if you can logically and convincingly argue that consciousness must survive the death of the physical body, is not clear that anything apart from consciousness survives with it. This raises the possibility that, after the death of the physical body, one has to start again, as if this life had never happened.

Broadly speaking, there are three ways to get life wrong as a result of all this, and one way to get it right.

One can become obsessed with breeding, and adopt the delusion that one has cheated death by producing offspring. People under this delusion know no greater pleasure than just to rut like animals, and seldom consider the stark fact that their offspring will also grow old and die, as will their offspring etc.

One can become obsessed with physical dominance, and adopt the delusion that just because one is hard to kill that one has cheated death. Even if a man is really big, strong, fit, trained in martial arts and carrying weapons, time will grind him down. Age will weaken his arms, and eventually a major organ will fail. This is no solution either.

One can become obsessed with intellectual dominance, or wealth and social status. Such a person adopts the delusion that one can live on in history if one achieves sufficiently great deeds. Of course, as the example of Ozymandias showed, even the greatest deeds are worn away by time. One can never be famous enough to overcome one’s own mortality because no-one can escape the fact that everyone dies alone.

The solution is to focus on refining one’s frequency of consciousness, because that is something that might well carry through into the next world. This means to use the power of will to work one’s consciousness into a state where it serves to bring peaceful and joyous order to the intellectual, emotional and physical environment.

The Law of Karma tells us that the energy we put out is the energy that we get back. Therefore, one ought to direct one’s will towards reducing the suffering of the conscious beings around you. If one does this correctly and of one’s true will, then chances are that one comes to be reincarnated in a place where beings with similar wills exist.

This act of changing the frequency of one’s consciousness is the only way that we can work to taking something with us into the next world. It’s therefore always possible to improve the quality of one’s spiritual position by working towards the cessation of the suffering of other sentient beings. This is true no matter what the current or future state of the world’s climate.

Clown World Chronicles: What is A ‘Dhimmi’?

With a world being thrown into upheaval, many concepts once thought forgotten are making a resurgence. This is often a good thing, as VJM Publishing has tried to show with our work on alchemy, elementalism and esotericism, but it can also be a bad thing. As this essay will explain, one of the concepts we will again have to familiarise ourselves with is that of the dhimmi.

Growing up with stories about World War II, an idea of what constituted an awful person arose. It wasn’t good to be a coward, and it wasn’t good to be the sort of person who shot prisoners, but the worst sort of person was the kind that collaborated with the enemy. These collaborators were a particular kind of traitor, but of the lowest possible sort.

The actions of men such as Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian who collaborated willingly with the Nazis during the Norwegian Occupation, became infamous. When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, Quisling volunteered to lead a local version of the Nazi Party, with him as head. This was considered such an obscenity that Quisling was executed as soon as the Nazis were expelled.

Warfare has always had collaborators, a consequence of the depravities that it inflicts upon soldier and civilian alike. The first enemy of warfare may be the truth, but the second might be common decency, as people are flung into situations where they are forced to do terrible things or die. The conditions of warfare mean extreme shortages of food, medicine and safety, and that means desperation.

Sometimes there is so much warfare and so many collaborators that a specialist vocabulary arises to describe them. During the Islamic conquests, collaborators were so common that they were given the title dhimmis (“protected person”). A dhimmi was given certain rights, such as exemption from persecution, as long as they paid the jizyah, or special tax. This was a form of protection money and therefore a sign of submission.

A dhimmi, then, is one who collaborates with an invading Islamic force to secure personal benefits at the expense of their people as a whole. Because the Islamic conquests were so vast, there are many stories of dhimmis in different cultures, but all of them share the quality of being considered execrable cowards.

Becoming a dhimmi isn’t necessarily a dumb move, even if it’s a morally deficient one. As many of the Norwegian women who hooked up with Wehrmacht soldiers during the Norwegian Occupation discovered, collaboration can secure food and other resources if the enemy ends up being triumphant.

Dhimmitude could be considered a kind of prostitution. As can be seen by the image above, anyone who becomes a dhimmi can expect to be praised in the most effusive of terms. The most gratifying thing a jihadist can experience is to see an infidel submit to the will of Islam, whether that be conversion or paying tribute. It’s the same sort of gratification a man feels watching a woman suck his cock.

A lot of Westerners feel that they can already see the writing on the wall, and believe that some form of Islamic conquest is inevitable. It was being seriously asked 15 years ago if France was on its way to becoming a Islamic state; now people just shrug their shoulders and await the inevitable.

A dhimmi in a modern context would be someone who actively supports Islamic interests ahead of those of her own people, in exchange for the hope of goodwill from Muslims as a whole. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as votes from the Muslim voting bloc within the country or support from Muslim countries when it comes to fulfilling future United Nations ambitions.

British Member of Parliament Jo Cox was a classic example of a dhimmi. Elected to serve the Batley and Spen constituency of West Yorkshire, she instead spent most of her time campaigning for refugees and ethnic diversity. Many considered her assassination a predictable response to her support of foreigners over her own people.

Jacinda Ardern is another example of a dhimmi. Ardern could be said to be “The world’s favourite dhimmi” on account of her response to the Christchurch mosque shootings, which was to excoriate white men in general while opening the door to further Muslim immigration. Her crackdowns on the rights of New Zealanders to possess firearms and to free expression made every jihadist in the world grin from ear to ear.

These young women have calculated that Islam will be much more influential, perhaps even dominant, in a few decades, and therefore the time to ingratiate oneself with them is now. They want to show themselves to be great friends of Islam, in the hope that Muslims will treat them more favourably when they assume power. They have deeply internalised a sense of dhimmitude, the condition of accepting being a dhimmi.

The left-wingers who prioritise Muslim refugees over their own homeless are deep into dhimmitude. As is often the case with slaves, dhimmitude can become so deeply internalised that the dhimmi thinks their behaviour is natural, even admirable. But the actions of women like Cox and Ardern are little different to those of the women who prostituted themselves to the victorious Nazi armies. After all, human nature hasn’t changed in many thousands of years.

In any case, the West is likely to see a lot more dhimmitude in coming decades, as the Muslim population – and therefore their militancy – continues to increase. Soon it will become important to identify dhimmi politicians like Cox, Ardern and Angela Merkel, so that they can be counteracted before they destroy our societies from the inside.

The Conceit of Silver

Alchemically speaking, there are two great conceits – one lesser and one greater. The lesser one is known as the Conceit of Iron, and relates to the arrogance that comes with physical dominance. The greater one, generally speaking, comes with intellectual dominance, and is closely related to the concept of hubris. This essay will examine what is known as the Conceit of Silver.

Silver is the first of the two precious metals, and one arrives in the realm of silver once iron is sufficiently brightened. As one progresses up the alchemical scale, thought moves from the simple bipartite distinction of strong/weak to the new distinction of smart/dumb. As such, there are now two distinct kinds of weak: the dumb-strong, and the dumb-weak.

The Conceit of Silver is not the same thing as simply thinking one is smarter than everyone else, although it is related. If one is intelligent enough to dominate both attractive women and muscular men, it’s very easy to become arrogant. Possessing unusual intelligence can feel like a superpower, because it makes it much easier to create change in accordance with one’s will.

The problem is that silver, by itself, cannot make moral decisions. Intelligence is a great thing, but without wisdom it can only ever be directed towards fulfilling egoic desires. Without the capacity to feel empathy for other sentient beings, an individual cannot act to end the suffering of them. Such a person is unenlightened.

Without at least some of the element of gold, a person acting in the realm of silver will act to accumulate resources or to raise their social standing, not to reduce the suffering of other sentient beings. Much of the moral grandstanding that people of silver engage in claims to achieve the latter, while really achieving the former. It isn’t always clear how much of this is conscious and how much is unconscious.

The Conceit of Silver is, in short, the belief that higher intelligence, education or social standing makes one a moral authority.

This happens in two major ways: by thinking one is gold when one is silver, or by denying the existence of gold altogether. This is a very easy mistake to make if one is of the silver, because if one is aware of such, then it follows as a general rule that most of the rest of the world is baser. Generally speaking, others are dumber, and their desires short-sighted. But this rule does not always hold.

The classic example of the Conceit of Silver is when a person achieves a high position through scheming, inheritance or politics, and then assumes that they must possess a commensurate moral superiority. At its worst, this conceit can lead a person into thinking that their individual egoic desires are the same as the Will of God. Such a person can be extremely dangerous if in power.

The Conceit of Silver is that it assumes itself to be divine. Individuals prone to this conceit are apt to say things like “Intelligence makes humans unique from the rest of the animal kingdom,” inspired by their failure to appreciate the perspectives of others. This will usually reinforce a belief that intelligence confers moral authority, or, even worse, a belief that education or birth station confers moral authority.

In fact, there’s an argument that the only reason why intelligence evolved so prodigiously in the human animal is because our social structure allowed for an unprecedented degree of scheming, lying, backstabbing, cheating and all kinds of general skullduggery. From this perspective, intelligence could even be seen as a moral negative, a sign that one clings to material power.

Finding an example of the Conceit of Silver is easy. All it takes is to go to a university and to find a person who believes that they might be smarter than everyone else there. At any university, there will be plenty of them. In the absence of a university it’s only necessary to find a place where intellectuals gather, or even a professional association.

Almost invariably, when a person becomes intelligent enough, they start to assume that they are a moral authority of some kind. They start to conflate their understanding of how systems are with how systems should be. People who do this are not always wrong – understanding a system often does lead to an understanding of how that system could be optimised to minimise the suffering it causes. But that isn’t necessarily so.

It isn’t easy for an intelligent person to agree that their brainpower is not particularly valuable in comparison to wisdom. The majority of intelligent people make a living out of their brainpower by way of learning a valuable profession. It’s therefore very hard for them to set all of this silver aside, and to admit that possession of it doesn’t make someone a morally superior person.

It takes a mercurial sort of personality to admit that one’s intelligence, however vast, is not sufficient to conclude that one is fundamentally more valuable. That, despite being smarter, one might be of less value than a person of iron or clay if the right circumstances arose, or if one had the wrong moral direction. This element of mercury is necessary for the alchemist to successfully transition from silver to gold.

The truth is that gold is the most malleable of all metals, and that gives it one paradoxical quality: it doesn’t resist when claims to leadership are made by men of silver. Because silver is harder than gold, it’s usually possible for those of silver to force those of gold out of leadership positions by way of intimidation or verbal and social aggression.In today’s degraded age, this has taken place all over the world.

The universities, the religious and spiritual movements and the political movements have all been taken over by materialists pushing some irrational political ideology or other. The element of gold has been pushed to the peripheries, making it possible to ask whether we live in the Kali Yuga. The Conceit of Silver is everywhere.