the human condition – Page 59

The Six Stages of Societal Collapse

Coming to a society near you: Brazilianisation

As Plato wrote over 2,300 years ago, societies tend to follow a predictable arc of decline after they are established. After being founded by philosopher-kings, states tend to degenerate as ever-greedier, stupider and baser people come to power. This essay charts the collapse of societies into six stages, each stage represented by a society from the world of 2018 A.D.

These six stages can be chunked into three larger stages when viewed on another level. In the first of these, the people help the Government and the wealthy and are helped in return. In the second two stages, the people are indifferent to the Government and the wealthy, and receive indifference in return. In the latter two stages, the people and the Government and the wealthy actively fight each other.

The initial stage of society can be called the Japan stage. South Korea is also here. In this stage, there are extremely high levels of solidarity. For a member of such a society, the entire nation might feel like one large extended family, where every new person you meet is like a cousin. Here there are no nations-within-nations made up of foreigners.

When a population is at this level, they will not vote for extremist parties, and the average citizen will hold a lot of faith in what they read in the newspapers and in the proclamations of Government. Political discussion is widely conducted without violence. People in these societies tend to walk around with smiles on their faces, unafraid of the future.

Europe was at this level until the turn of the century, when a combination of pressure from business interests looking for cheap labour and Marxist ideologues looking to destroy the nation state for the sake of a global command structure led to mass importation of Africans and Muslims. Many European states did not need minimum wage laws then, because solidarity was so high.

The first stage of collapse can be called the New Zealand stage. At this stage there are so many minorities and competing interests that social cohesion is beginning to falter. Big cities no longer feel like part of the nation but more like a patchwork of racial ghettoes. There is no longer a typical appearance for someone from this society, because in order to have typical anything you have to have common bonds, and those have been lost.

‘Solidarity’ as a concept is starting to be forgotten. People start to forget what it was that led to high levels of solidarity in the first place, and it’s simply assumed that the current levels will continue indefinitely. Europe is now at this stage. Major cities such as Paris and London are now so diverse that there are areas where natives cannot freely walk without being harassed, sometimes violently.

The population in this stage is split between those who benefit from the small amount of corruption and those who do not. Usually this split happens along generational lines, with an elderly group who were raised in good times thinking things are still good, versus a young group who are more aware of the state of decline. When this younger, more cynical group grows up to take power, this usually leads to the next stage of collapse.

The second stage of collapse is the America stage. At this stage, not only are there a lot of minorities but there is a waning sense of everybody being on the same team. People care more about money, and about making money, than about the nation. Actions that benefit the tribe, or the self, at the expense of the nation are taken without a second thought. Nations-within-nations are common, the “average American” merely a good-natured rube to be exploited.

At this stage, it’s possible for large moneyed interests to import millions of cheap labourers and to have the population accept it under the assumption that it’s “good for business”. It’s inevitable that the national myth will get changed at this point, from being a nation tied to an ethnicity to “a nation of immigrants”, or something else that suggests an extreme level of egalitarianism (and even fewer common bonds).

Here, people are aware of the lack of solidarity but feel powerless to do anything about it, because the term ‘solidarity’ has itself taken connotations of Communism and totalitarianism. The seeds for the next stage of collapse are sown when people stop even pretending that they belong to a coherent society, and it starts to become tacitly accepted that it’s every race, ethnicity or tribe for itself.

The third stage of collapse is the Brazil stage. This is where severe racial ghettoisation starts to begin, and solidarity starts breaking down completely, leading to an “urban jungle”. If life started to become cheap in some places in the America stage, by the Brazil stage this is a widespread sentiment. Robbery deaths from people being shot dead over a pair of shoes or a phone become common.

No-one thinks about the nation at this stage of collapse. Most people have degenerated so far that even the most enlightened can only think in terms of tribe. For most people it’s family at the most, and pure self-aggrandisement is standard practice. Greed is now the major motivating principle, with power and status closely following.

At this stage, pretenses to higher values are still made. People in general have long since stopped believing in God, but they still go through the motions; they still have hope. They just don’t have very much hope, because priests and policemen and politicians are happy to demonstrate every day that life has very little value. Many people are seen as superfluous at this stage, fit to be eliminated.

The fourth stage of collapse is the South Africa stage. Racial rhetoric is now openly antagonistic, with themes of revenge frequent. Things have gone well beyond the race-baiting of the America stage – here, politicians openly sing songs about killing members of the opposition. Many people talk openly of civil war, some looking forward to it.

Here there are no pretenses to higher values. It is accepted that God has forsaken the people. An atmosphere of hate pervades everyday relations, although this paradoxically can lead to increased solidarity among members of persecuted or beleaguered groups. Many people at this stage will be stocking up on guns and ammunition in preparation for some climactic final battle.

At this stage there is a pronounced exodus of the most productive and capable groups, who can see the writing on the wall. This immigration pattern – of the productive people leaving while more unproductive people join the society at the bottom – will trigger a positive feedback loop until the society ends up disintegrating entirely.

The final stage of collapse can be called the Haiti stage. At this stage the poor actively band together to destroy the wealthy. Here there is widespread violence, not for resources but simply out of savagery. Revenge or simple bloodlust are the motivating factors here. A society at this stage of collapse can be said to have utterly failed; a state at this level is a “failed state”.

The Haiti stage references the 1804 Haiti massacre, in which a slave revolt led to the slaughter of 5,000 men, women and children. In the total absence of interpersonal solidarity, murder and rape become standard. Any noticeable difference between groups is liable to trigger violence at a moment’s notice. A society that collapses this far will produce horrors that will be remembered for centuries.

This is, after all, the path that South Africa is on, and which Brazil will sooner or later fall into. One could even make the argument that America was on this path, and that collapsing in this manner may be inevitable. However, it might also be possible that collapse can be averted at any stage by a philosophical revolution that introduces a new paradigm and which leads to an increase in solidarity between groups in the society.

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).

Writing Conduct Disorder

Unlike most of the conditions in this book, Conduct Disorder (CD) is only diagnosed in children and adolescents. As the name implies, people who get diagnosed with it conduct themselves in ways that the clinician considers disorderly, in particular when it comes to respecting the rights of other people. This article looks at how to write believable and interesting characters with the condition.

The most important thing is to distinguish CD from Antisocial Personality Disorder. CD is the developmental precursor to Antisocial Personality Disorder – it can only be diagnosed in those too young to have a diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder (i.e. 18 years of age). It is therefore a developmental condition.

One of the key symptoms of CD is a lower level of fear. This will express itself in a wide variety of ways.

The most notable way that a lower level of fear expresses itself in young people is when it comes to transgressions. A young person has not yet had time to internalise knowledge about the effects that their actions have on other people. They therefore have to learn to be afraid of punishment. This corresponds to Level 1 of Kohlberg’s Scale of Moral Reasoning.

A young person with CD will have a hard time internalising rules about those transgressions, in part because they don’t feel much fear, and so don’t have as much inhibition when primitive impulses towards violence and destruction start playing up on them. Because of this, they regularly violate boundaries relating to other people’s personal space and property.

Another way low levels of fear find expression is in transgressions against one’s own health. Young people already play fast and loose with their health when it comes to having a good time; young people with Conduct Disorder are nihilistically reckless. If the protagonist of your story has Conduct Disorder, chances are that they will be into the booze, weed and pills from their early teenage years.

A character with CD will likely be something of a daredevil. If they are male, they might find themselves drawn to racing motor vehicles or street fighting; if female, to shoplifting and starting trouble between men.

A story with a protagonist who has Conduct Disorder might read like J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Care must be taken here, therefore, not to sound cliched. Anti-hero stories mostly appeal to the same young audience, because they will most readily identify with the spirit of rebellion expressed by such a character. People with Conduct Disorder push the boundaries, for good or ill.

Punk stories, in particular cyberpunk, often feature protagonists who would appear (at least from the authorities’ perspective) to have Conduct Disorder. Young men like John Case of Neuromancer or Jonty Gillespie of The Verity Key are unrepentant criminals, usually because they have to be in order to make a living in the cracks of the edifice of respectable society.

After all, one man’s Conduct Disorder is another man’s righteous rebellion against a tyrannical oppressor. So a character with the condition might be the perfect choice of protagonist if your story involves going up against a large, faceless, totalitarian entity. After all, most of us have a point which, if pushed beyond, we will no longer behave in a co-operative manner.

If a character with CD is pitted against a malicious, evil entity (corporation or government), much of the difficulty in writing your story will come from making that entity unsympathetic enough that the reader readily comes to identify with that character. The more credibly this can be done, the less that character will look like a CD sufferer and more like a righteous hardarse.

Unsurprisingly, Conduct Disorder is highly correlated with all forms of early childhood abuse. A character with the condition might have learned by way of mimicry of their parents that violence and cruelty are perfectly acceptable ways to advance one’s interests, and that fear is for the weak and an invitation to be destroyed.

So if you are writing a character with CD they might not necessarily be a cool, daring and adventurous antihero. Realistically they are more likely to be somewhat brutal. If your protagonist encounters such a character, they might find them intimidating – the class bully, or local street thug.

If your protagonist encounters a character with CD, they could respond in a wide variety of ways, depending on how they themselves are (and their decision will be very revealing to the reader). They might consider that character a cool rebel to be befriended, they might consider them a danger to be avoided, or they might consider them a little brat to be corrected.

Conduct Disorder often occurs at the same time as Attention Deficit Disorder. It’s likely, therefore, that any character with it will have extreme difficulty at school, at work, or with either friends of family. Their life will probably be very chaotic, and will considerable Police or social worker involvement.

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

Writing Avoidant Personality Disorder

Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD) is characterised by extreme action taken to avoid certain feared stimuli, usually social. Social anxiety, feelings of unworthiness, timidity and sensitivity lead to a pattern of avoiding situations that involve interacting or socialising with others. This article looks at how to write engaging and realistic characters with the condition.

AVPD is a Cluster C personality disorder, which means that it’s primarily an anxious condition. The essential characteristic of it is an inability to form social bonds brought about by an extreme desire to avoid particular feared stimuli. For example, people with AVPD tend to be very sensitive to social rejection or humiliation.

It is believed to be caused by abusive or neglectful parenting patterns. In particular, rejection by one or both parents is thought to correlate highly with the condition. It can be observed in other mammals that rejection by one or both parents sharply reduces the ensuing life expectancy for that creature. No doubt the trauma from such treatment makes an impact on the behaviour of human survivors.

If your protagonist has AVDP, it might be that they experience loss and social rejection so strongly that they are simply devastated by it. They might have an internal monologue that heavily plays on fears of social encounters going wrong. A story featuring them might read very strangely as it involved a number of events that ended up not happening or not being attended by the protagonist, who felt too anxious to participate.

This can easily lead to a darker, resentful pattern of behaviour, especially if a protagonist with AVDP comes to feel a malicious desire for revenge as a consequence of their rejection. Social rejection need not lead to learned helplessness and submission in every case – it can lead to violent reprisals, especially if the rejected person feels that they have been treated unjustly.

Someone with AVDP might make a convincing villain if the author can convincingly portray a character who has become nasty as a result of their pride. It might be that the villain received some mild slight or insult and their massive ego was punctured, leading to narcissistic rage. They could be the sort of person who never forgives an insult, leading to complicated revenge schemes.

To many outside observers, AVPD looks very similar to just having low self-esteem. People with the condition tend to believe that their social presence is unwanted, and that they are unworthy of the time and attention that they are given in their social relationships. In cases of parental rejection it’s obvious how such thinking might come about, but it can be caused by other things, such as a generalised perception of social rejection.

In the mind of a character with AVPD, the everyday experience might be one plagued by self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness, in much the same way that it can be for a depressed person. Indeed, one particular strain of AVPD has a number of depressive features, in particular the casting away of, and refusing to deal with, certain traumatic memories.

A protagonist with the condition is likely to consider themselves socially inept. There might be a lot of blame directed at the self in their internal monologue. It’s possible that there is a personal quality of their own that they fixate on as an explanation for their lack of social success. As mentioned above, this can easily become projected outwards onto society.

People with AVPD can be difficult socially because they can be very needy and very resentful. There is a particular strain of the condition that is hypersensitive in a way that is not dissimilar to those with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This type can become easily wounded by jokes or banter, to the extent that others might call them “precious”.

Feedback loops are an unfortunate common effect of this condition. Anxiety about being socially rejected often leads to a range of behaviours that themselves increase the likelihood of social rejection. Anxious eye contact often appears shifty to other people, who then come to distrust the person with AVPD. Because these people trust the person with AVPD less, they speak to them in a less friendly manner, which validates the initial feelings of anxiety and strengthens the avoidant behaviours.

A protagonist with AVPD might find their everyday experience tormenting, because people with the condition have a normal need for social interaction and intimacy – they just fear it. Because of this fear, and sometimes because of resentments, a protagonist with the condition might find their everyday experience tormenting. It might be a relentless march of anxiety, blame, missed opportunities, guilt and rejection.

AVPD sounds, and is, similar to Schizoid Personality Disorder, but there are crucial differences. For one, a character with AVPD will like be more anxious than a schizoid. For another thing, schizoids don’t generally care about other people, whereas people with AVPD will still desire positive social contact.

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

Why Neoliberals Love Mass Immigration

Mass immigration is often supported by the left, but it happens to also achieve a number of major right-wing goals

Neoliberalism is a right-wing movement in the sense that the ultimate aim of it is to take power away from the poor and give it to the rich. However, it is not a conservative movement, because neoliberals don’t care at all about the disruption that their policies have on people’s lives. So some of their positions are hard to understand at first. This essay seeks to explain why neoliberals love mass immigration so much.

Classical conservatism recognises that the wealthy already have the power, and so the wealthy try to keep things the same to preserve their good position. Change is therefore considered bad. Where this differs from neoliberalism is that the neoliberal tries to entrench the already strong position of the wealthy by further weakening the position of the poor. Accordingly, changes to the social structure are permissible if they make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The basics of labour solidarity work like this. The rate of pay is a function of the supply and demand of labour. As long as labour is not available below a certain level of pay, then the rate of pay must rise above this to meet a higher equilibrium. So if all the workers in a certain area or industry get together and agree to not work for less than, say, $15/hour, this constricts the supply of cheap labour, which presses the price of labour upward.

To counter this, employers like to import cheap labour from outside of the area. The most infamous example of this is the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the importation of labour doesn’t have to be involuntary. To the contrary – there is a virtually infinite supply of cheap labour in the world that can willingly be brought in to work for less, because there are always impoverished shitholes with high birth rates that people want to escape from in exchange for the McDonalds lifestyle.

Seen in union-busting terms, immigrants who are brought into the country by capitalist interests to work for less money than the locals are effectively scab labour. After all, there’s no real difference between scab labour that breaks a picket line and someone willing to immigrate to another country to do work at a wage lower than the locals would accept: both push wages down.

Not only does this outside labour have the effect of lowering wages through the scab effect, but it also makes future labour organisation more difficult. It’s much harder to conduct the conversations necessary to start a union when the workplace has no common language, and no-one is going to start a union anyway if their work visa is dependent on pleasing their employer.

It can be seen, then, that liberalising immigration through globalising the workforce has the immediate effect of not only driving wages down by increasing the supply of labour, but it also makes it harder to agitate for a higher wage, a double effect.

In other words, mass immigration is simply another example of the same union-busting behaviour that the ruling class has always used. The only difference is that it destroys the bonds of solidarity on the national level, instead of only destroying them in a certain area or industry. With a menagerie of different languages and cultures in the same area, the solidarity necessary to resist the divide and conquer attempts of the ruling class cannot be achieved. If that area is the whole nation so much the better.

Regular conservatives are a bit leery about destroying the working class in quite so brazen and irreparable a manner. The fear seems to be that they might rise up in anger and riot. Neoliberals have to be understood as significantly different to regular conservatives in this manner. They’re not at all shy about rubbing the faces of the Western working class in dogshit, knowing that their complete media domination makes the threat of retaliation essentially nil.

The real beauty of the mass immigration issue, from the neoliberal perspective, is that they can destroy the Western working class in this manner with the kindest of rhetoric. Mass immigration is presented by the mainstream media – almost completely owned by banks – as a compassionate solution to foreign poverty, only opposed by racists, bigots and rednecks.

This means that the already disadvantaged classes tear themselves in half as the globalists feel solidarity with the immigrants and refugees and the nationalists with the indigenous people. The neoliberals laugh all the way to the bank.