the human condition – Page 57

Writing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an unusual condition in that almost everyone has it to a greater or lesser degree, but few realise the impact that it has had on their lives. As the name implies, the condition describes when a person’s stress levels or reactions don’t go back to normal after a major traumatic experience. This article looks at how to write believable characters and situations involving PTSD.

PTSD is caused by exposure to a traumatic event, usually one in which a person thinks they are going to die. The classic examples are exposure to warfare, traffic accidents, sexual assault or physical assault. Experiences like these cause the brain to flood with fear, which can form long-term associations with the other stimuli present. This means that future exposure to those stimuli can trigger that deep fear again.

The classic symptom of PTSD is becoming full of adrenaline and going into combat mode when exposed to a loud noise or a touch to the head. In the former case, the loud noise might remind a character of the explosions of grenades and shellfire in combat; in the latter case, the touch to the head might remind of early childhood abuse at the hands of a parent. In either case, powerful memories of immense fear can quickly come flooding back.

The effects of PTSD are what could be expected from a close brush with gruesome physical death: adrenaline and cortisol prime the character for either combat or running. A character with the condition might easily become stirred into fight-or-flight mode as a response to the trauma. Here it can be seen that PTSD has considerable overlap with other psychiatric disorders, in particular Panic Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder and Generalised Anxiety Disorder.

Other effects are an increased propensity for self-harm. After all, one of the natural consequences of having a massively traumatic experience is that a person comes to realise that the world is much nastier or more dangerous than they thought it was. Some people with PTSD might decide that this world is actually pretty shit and not worth living in, given the horrors it contains.

In the case of violent crime or rape, a person might also come to lose all trust in a major societal demographic, which entails everyday difficulties. If a woman comes to distrust all men or a robbery victim comes to distrust all blacks, their life might become a lot harder and quickly, for no real fault of their own. Like children who have had bad experiences with dogs, a person with PTSD might come to dislike anything associated with their initial trauma.

Because PTSD is frequently portrayed in dramatic fiction, care must be taken not to write in cliches. The example of a nightmare leading to someone waking up in the middle of the night screaming, only to realise that the object of their terror is no longer present, is a striking one but also very heavily used. So too is the man staring into the distance, reliving a traumatic experience, not hearing someone calling to them.

A protagonist who suffers from PTSD might be aware of their condition or unaware.

If they are aware that they have PTSD, they might be a deep and sensitive character. They could be directly aware that a particular early life event has damaged them irreparably. This might be the reason for their unusual levels of compassion – the character knows what it feels like to be scared to death and commiserates with others who also do.

A story featuring such a character might be one about how they overcame their psychic damage and managed to find a way to engage joyfully with life. Often this involves healing oneself, the shamanic path. An extremely wise character may have attained their insight through having overcome an equally extreme trauma earlier in their life. Perhaps this experience caused them to understand what another character is going through.

It’s common to have PTSD and to be unaware of it. This is especially plausible on account of that people who incur severe psychological trauma might not show signs of it until many years later. A person might grow into early adulthood with a particularly surly or nasty character because of some heavy trauma incurred while a child. They might also show other signs of being strongly emotional, reckless or impulsive.

Just because a character with PTSD is not aware that they have PTSD, doesn’t mean that other characters will not be aware. In some cases it will be very obvious, because they will observe the first character go into kill mode for what seems like an insufficiently grave provocation. The character with PTSD might soon find that their condition is part of their reputation – they seem “damaged” in the eyes of others.

A combination of the two can also tell a story, such as the case of a protagonist who gradually becomes aware that they have PTSD or something like it. Perhaps they are perceptive enough to realise that a prior event has damaged their psyche – for example, they observe that they feel intense anxiety when presented with a stimulus that reminds them of a particular traumatic event.

If your protagonist encounters a character with PTSD, how that protagonist behaves might depend on their naivety and openness. A naive character might think that simply by being nice to someone with PTSD they can get them to behave normally. Although this is sometimes true up to a point, the reality is that PTSD often carries with it sinister undertones of bitterness and resentment.

It’s common for people who have PTSD for similar reasons to bond strongly over the fact. This is especially true in the case of soldiers, emergency personnel and survivors of abusive relationships. For one thing, misery loves company, but for another, severe trauma is often the kind of experience that deeply shapes a person and their conception of life and reality, so people who share the trauma often share an entire worldview that’s based on it.

C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) isn’t actually in the DSM-V, but it’s worth covering here for the sake of completeness. Essentially it’s a similar condition, only brought about by repeated exposure to a traumatic person or stimulus, as opposed to one single, horrifying event as is usually the case with regular PTSD.

The major difference with C-PTSD is the loss of a sense of self. One’s boundaries are violated with such consistency that it becomes hard to say where one ends and the outside world begins. This can be related to Depersonalisation Disorder and frequently coincides with a deep sense of distrust about other people.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM-V (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

A Great Secret That You’re Not Privy To

If you’ve moved in conspiracy circles for long enough you will have heard the name of Albert Pike, and his prophecy of three future great wars, one which would see the old empires of Europe mutually annihilate each other, another that would see extreme nationalism and extreme communism mutually annihilate each other, and a third that would see Judaism and Islam mutually annihilate each other. This essay reveals a few truths about these prophecies.

In Pike’s time, freethinkers faced the problem of not being allowed to discuss intellectual subjects freely because of the paranoia of the ruling classes. This necessitated that free thinkers met behind closed doors, and that those who sought entry were heavily vetted. Recognising that these efforts to suppress the truth were grossly immoral, some schemers got together and hatched a scheme that would destroy all opposition to free inquiry and free speech.

Their plan was to use the principle of coincidentia oppositorum to destroy all of the corrupt institutional forces that made it impossible to honestly study and discuss the natural world and the things in it. This involved setting those institutional forces against each other in a series of wars, in blocs of equal power that would bleed each other dry. The kings would be first to go, then the dictators and finally the priests.

All of this is a great work of alchemy. As followers of this newspaper are aware, there are three masculine elements of iron, silver and gold, and each of them has a corrupted form that must be dissolved for the truth to shine through.

The corrupt form of iron was destroyed in World War One when the great European Empires that had developed from the military caste (i.e. the men of iron) destroyed each other. The corrupt form of silver was destroyed in World War Two when the great political falsehoods (i.e. the products of silver) in the form of national socialism and communism destroyed each other. The corrupt form of gold is destined to be destroyed in World War Three, when the great religious falsehoods (Judaism and Islam) destroy each other.

This is the great secret that you’re not privy to. Once you are privy to it, the rest of it all makes sense.

This is the reason why the Western world, whose politicians are beholden to the schemes of the great schemers, moved so certainly after the conclusion of World War Two to secure the position of Israel. The relentless pushing of the Holocaust religion ties into this as well – it has come to be considered extremely immoral to oppose a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.

The ceaseless propagandising on behalf of Israel serves two purposes.

First, it flushes out Jews from among Western populations and induces them to emigrate to Israel. Concentrating all of the world’s remaining Jews in one spot is an important precursor to exterminating Judaism – after all, if they were all in Israel it could be done with a handful of nuclear missiles.

Second, it primes the Western World for the massive retaliation against the Muslim World that we are intended to engage in once Israel is destroyed. The Illuminati scheme calls for the West, insane with rage and fear after Israel’s annihilation, to itself annihilate the Muslim world in revenge for their unthinkable crime against Israel. To this end, we are artificially being induced, by ceaseless media bombardment, to pay attention to the impending Middle Eastern cataclysm.

On the surface of it, allowing mass Muslim immigration to the West seems like absolute insanity. It has long been known that those who live among Muslims come to hate them, and for good reason, since Islam is an ideology of hate. Too many Muslims genuinely believe, as Christians once did, that their superstition is destined to rule over the whole world by the Will of God, and that violent acts that hasten this end are justified.

But stoking this hate is part of the plan. The people of the West have to be conditioned to despise Muslims so that we are motivated to provide the righteous flames of revenge to them after they destroy Israel. We become conditioned to despise them as a result of their presence and behaviour in the West. Therefore, opening the borders to them now causes Westerners to become ready to play their role in the third part of this great scheme.

Male infant genital mutilation is another part of it. Abrahamists would have you believe that the practice of male infant genital mutilation is not harmful and does not cause any trauma to the infant boy. To the contrary, it causes a massive amount of trauma, proportionate to having one’s earlobes sliced off, but this is desired and is intentional, because of the psychological malleability it produces.

This trauma makes the victim exceptionally receptive to certain suggestions, in particular suggestions to do violence against others. This is why the vast majority of the world’s terrorists, mass murderers and serial killers are mutilated. Revenge-fuelled outbursts of violence are natural for innocent beings who have been forced to undergo such a severe trauma for no good reason.

The three most notable areas of male infant genital mutilation are the Muslim world, America and Israel. The reasons for this are simple: these are the people who have been selected to play the starring roles in World War Three. Therefore, they have to be mutilated so that they’re submissive and malicious enough to follow the orders to destroy huge numbers of people when they are given them.

How this will come about has long been foreshadowed: Israel has been claiming for over two decades that Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons. Iran might be, Iran might not be, but the point is that it is part of the plan for them to develop nuclear weapons, and it’s part of the plan for them to use those weapons on Israel.

When this happens, the world will be so shocked, horrified and traumatised that we will be in a prime state to accept the introduction of a New World Order that promises to keep humanity permanently free from the great corruptions. This will involve the introduction of a world religion based on the perennial philosophy, and a world political system based on what we have learned scientifically from psychology and evolutionary biology about how the human species actually functions.

When this day comes, borders (iron) politics (silver) and religion (gold) will all be obsolete, because all humans will have been reunited with their birthright to know the truth. This will signify the end of the Kali Yuga and the start of a new Golden Age.

Of course, none of this really is a secret – you can find all these plans on the Internet if you have the patience to collate them. The real secret is whether or not what I’m saying is true. Is it truth, or it is bullshit dreamed up by some schizophrenic cannabis addict larping as a publisher while living at his mother’s house? You don’t know, you can’t know, unless and until you do the research, and in any case there’s nothing you can do about it. So enjoy the ride.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

How Mass Immigration Leads to The Loss of Freedom

The right to free expression is not a universally held cultural value, and can only be maintained as long as a sufficient proportion of the population support it

Historically speaking, the main reason why people have resisted mass immigration into their territories is because it usually leads to a loss of freedoms, in particular freedom to practice one’s culture. In recent decades, Westerners have been told that mass immigration to the West would not cause them to lose freedoms, but this turned out to be lies. This essay will examine how immigration, especially from undeveloped countries, leads to a loss of freedoms for the host population.

For people to have any freedoms at all they have to value those freedoms highly enough to assert them. If they cannot assert them, the ruling class will take them away. It can be seen in every society that, in order for people to value those freedoms highly enough to assert them in the faces of the ruling class, they have to share them in common, enough so to call it a culture.

Without a shared belief in the value of certain freedoms, they cannot be maintained. If only part of a population believes in a freedom, then the ruling class can ban it and not enough of the population will believe in it to assert it. Therefore, it will be lost. We can see, then, that freedoms are lost as soon as the proportion of the population that supports them falls below a certain level.

For example, naturally speaking, people are free to walk the land. There is no private property in a state of Nature, and originally there were no prohibitions on where one could go. Over the past 5,000 years, as something called civilisation got invented, this freedom was eventually stripped from the people by rulers who commanded men of iron able to use violence to drive undesired people away from certain territories.

The Swedes, possibly on account of the hard-won lessons of solidarity learned by their Viking forebears, were not willing to lose their right to walk the land freely. Thus, they asserted that right in the face of enclosures, and won what they call the allemansrätt (this was known as the Freedom to Roam back when Anglos used to assert this right). This means that Swedish people have the right to walk through property owned by other people as long as they do not come within sight of the main house (and some other restrictions).

Immigration is not likely to threaten allemansrätt anytime soon, but it is threatening (or has already destroyed) other freedoms, all over the West.

New Zealand Federation of Islam Associations president Hazim Arafeh voiced his opposition to a talk by journalist Lauren Southern in Auckland earlier this month, leading to it effectively getting banned by Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s refusal to approve a venue for it. Arafeh, in his attempt to get the talk banned, stated that “I don’t think insulting Muslims comes under free speech, that’s an abuse of freedom of speech.”

As everyone who actually values free speech knows, free speech is precisely what that is. The cultural value of free speech entails that the responsibility is on the listener to not chimp out when they hear something provoking. The reason why this is important is that it makes it possible to talk about things like rational human beings instead of keeping quiet out of fear, because this leads to resentment and then violence.

Satire, windups and pisstaking necessarily come under this umbrella, as do insults and criticisms of governments and religions.

Free speech acts as a safety valve that releases political pressure when the ruling class starts veering off path. An incompetent ruling class will always try to crack down on criticism rather than accept that they have been incompetent, and for this reason free speech must be ardently defended. The alternative is that ruling class corruption and incompetence becomes entrenched.

It is because the Anglosphere values free speech that we have never had a fascist or communist dictatorship come to power in any of our countries. None of Britain, America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand have ever had a totalitarian government, for the reason that our right to free expression enables us to criticise the bastards, and thereby to organise opposition, before they fuck everything up. Thus, no Hitlers, no Stalins, no Pol Pots, no mass starvation of tens of millions.

Arafeh, not being a Kiwi, doesn’t understand any of this. It’s not important to him. He will not defend it.

Islamic culture forces women to cover up because it considers those women responsible for the urges that their appearance might induce in men. The onus of responsibility is not on the Muslims, but on women, who are inferior, to moderate themselves. By the same token, the culture forces people whose speech it disapproves of to keep their mouths shut because it considers those people responsible for the violent urges that their speech might induce in Muslims.

The onus of responsibility is on us Westerners, as inferior, to moderate ourselves. We can see from what happened with Lauren Southern that Muslims are forcing us to shut our mouths in the same way they force their women to cover up – under the implicit threat of violence.

It’s obvious that if we had not allowed any Muslims to immigrate to this country, Arafeh could not have written a letter to Goff “on behalf of 50,000 to 60,000 Muslims in New Zealand”. It’s equally obvious that if we let in another 50,000 to 60,000 Muslims, we will lose even more rights, because we can see this happening in other countries that have made the mistake of opening themselves to mass Muslim immigration.

Multiculturalism necessarily means that the only freedoms that remain are universal values that are supported by all people. What Westerners have failed to understand is that free speech is not a universal value. Most people on this planet are pathetic slave-creatures, not educated citizen-orators that can be expected to assert their rights through reasoned debate.

In short, we’re losing our freedom to speak freely because we’ve let in a lot of people who do not value free speech, and this is just one example. As shown by Europe, if we continue to let these people in, our rights to free expression will be further curtailed, and then the rights of people to walk certain neighbourhoods free of molestation will be curtailed, and then the rights of women to walk in public without covering up will be curtailed.

As long as banks continue to demand mass immigration for the sake of propping up house prices, gutless politicians will continue to placate those making the threats of violence for the sake of appearing to maintain order. We need to take care that our immigration policies don’t end up robbing us of our hard-won rights of free expression.

National Alt-Centrism

A wide range of different political positions have been tried over the past 4,000 years, each one leading to varying but terrible amounts of human suffering and misery. If it is true that politics is the art of compromise, then all political philosophies are sets of compromises. This essay discusses one such: the philosophy of national alt-centrism.

National alt-centrism is the answer to all problems. In particular, it’s the answer to three massive questions that have divided people (both mentally and physically) since the dawn of civilisation.

The first question of politics is the question of how wide to throw open the circle of solidarity. Keep it too narrow, and you risk your people becoming insular, myopic, small-minded and inbred. Open it too wide, and you no longer have any bonds of solidarity that would cause a person to act bravely on behalf of another one, and you will be conquered.

This question has long been understood by political philosophers, who have had to strike a balance between the xenophobia that leads to a culture collapsing out of insularity, and the xenophilia that leads to a culture collapsing out of no longer possessing common bonds.

The fashion today appears to be in favour of removing borders, but it isn’t plausible that the human species is ready to unify as a single entity. The range of behaviours exhibited by people in various places around the world is so vast, that they cannot all mingle together peacefully any more than chimpanzees could freely wander the main streets of major Western centres.

Disagreements are already so numerous that no one single world authority could possibly hope to mediate them all without unrest. Worse, no one world government could possibly have the trust of the whole world, for it will inevitably be comprised of people who have deep historical antipathy towards other people who they intend to rule. The only possibility would involve the introduction of totalitarianism.

On the other hand, however, it’s obvious that very small units, such as city-states, are not viable (outside extremely unusual circumstances) on account of their inability to project any meaningful force on the world stage, which means that they quickly get overrun by larger neighbours. This suggests that a balance between global and parochial, such as national, is the right size of circle to optimise the benefits of solidarity and co-operation.

The second question is essentially the question between left and right. There are a variety of ways of posing this question and there are a number of ways of summarising what this question all boils down to. It’s apparent that the right is masculine and the left is feminine, but there are a near-infinite number of different ways of interpreting what this means.

In either case, it can be seen that the political solutions offered by either extreme are insufficient, and only cause the political pendulum to swing back equally as far as it is initially pulled. Leftist solutions are short-sighted, naive and reckless, and this inspires right-wing countermovements. Right-wing solutions are cruel, exclusionary and narrow-minded, and this inspires left-wing countermovements.

This swinging back and forth along the left-right paradigm has torn all nations of the West in two. None of them work as true nations any more: they are comprised only of a cadre of politicians and their wealthy backers trying to screw an ever-increasing horde of suckers as hard as possible. No-one has any national solidarity any longer because both sides have imported so many randoms that no-one has anything in common.

The left-right paradigm has to be abolished because it induces people to put their class interests above the national interests and, in so doing, makes it impossible for the people to have any real solidarity. Instead of being members of the nations, people self-segregate into social circles based on ideology. In doing so, they are divided and conquered.

Here it can be seen that a centrist position is the most naturally fitting to those who have already decided to operate on a national level. This avoids at once the cruelty of the right and the stupidity of the left, striking a balance in much the same way that silver is alchemically speaking a balance of iron and clay. This gives us National Centrism.

The third question is whether to go along with the established systems or to overthrow them. Regardless of the precise balances struck on the range of solidarity and the left-right questions, one separate question has to be asked: whether to co-operate with the established systems or to overthrow them if those systems are hopelessly corrupt. This is the alt question.

It’s apparent that the centrist parties have failed to create a worthy compromise between the left and the right. Rather than taking the best from both they have either taken the worst from both (in the form of neoliberalism) or adopted a piss-weak compromise that satisfies no-one except for major moneyed interests (such as most of the centrist parties in Europe). This is a political error akin to the balance fallacy in philosophy.

Alt-centrism is the refusal to fall prey to the balance fallacy. It seeks to harness both the strengths of the right and the strengths of the left. The right may be cruel, but within that cruelty is a healthy self-interest that can induce a people to stand up proud. The left may be stupid, but within that stupidity is an honest and earnest will to make the most out of what life offers.

Alt-centrism is, by contrast, an uncompromising position. The emphasis is not on the insipid compromises that have destroyed public faith in the West but rather on a dynamic fusion of the yin and the yang. This naturally eschews materialism by way of appealing to metaphysical ideals, and therefore leaves room in the national consciousness for the spiritual, which is the major domain in which the current political system has failed.

National alt-centrism is, therefore, a revolutionary nationalist philosophy that seeks to combine the orderliness of the wealthy with the creativity of the poor, for the benefit of both sides as one nation. It solves at once five separate problems: the problem of opening the gates to barbarians, the problem of becoming insular and weak, the problem of hoarding wealth in too few hands, the problem of losing touch with reason, and the problem of how to deal with an incumbent political system that is rotten to the core.