Category: the human condition

Beneficiaries Are The Only True Environmentalists

The only truly environmentally responsible way of life is to consume less than a sustainable level of the world’s resources. In the West, it’s mostly only those on welfare who manage this

Humans now need the equivalent of 1.5 planet Earths to sustain our current level of consumption, and if we all lived like Americans it would take four. In 2013 we reached “Earth Overshoot Day” – the day by which we had used an amount of the Earth’s resources equal to what it can replenish in a single year – by August 20, and every year it draws closer.

The reason why we would need four Earths to all live at the same standard as Americans is because Americans consume so much more of the planet than the average human. The average American consumes 25 tons of the world’s natural resources every year, and they operate 25% of the world’s motor vehicles, despite only being 4% of the population.

This is broadly true of Westerners in general.

We buy big cars, often with every family member having their own, we buy boats, we go on overseas holidays, we buy enormous amounts of plastic, especially in packaging, and we recycle electronic appliances well before they become obsolete.

One thing can be said for certain about all this consumption – namely, that it will end. The planet is finite whether we like it or not. Sooner or later, like sand through an hourglass, the supply will run out and activity will diminish.

Let’s be honest: we don’t work to live anymore, at least not in the West. Technological advancement has made it unnecessary. The average Westerner has so much accumulated capital increasing the value of their labour that a surplus exists easily large enough to feed us all.

We work because we want more stuff. Fuck Earth Overshoot Day! We want an even bigger car, the latest Playstation, and to upgrade to a McMansion – and we want it now!

We could collectively cut down to working half the number of hours that we do, but we won’t, because the need to accumulate stuff is its own moral imperative.

The GDP per capita in America is around USD57,000 per year, which is close to $75,000 in New Zealand dollars. If Americans use four times as much of the Earth’s resources than what the Earth can sustain, then we can put a dollar figure on the upper bound of possible consumption.

One quarter of $75,000 is $18,750 per year. This figure represents the maximum level of consumption that humans would have to limit ourselves to in order to collectively avoid ecological collapse.

Curiously, $18,750 is a level of consumption roughly equal to what New Zealand beneficiaries are already forced to live on, which raises an interesting point – in the long run, environmental laws dictate that the average person on Earth cannot be any wealthier than the average New Zealand beneficiary already is.

In other words, almost every Westerner with a job – who in almost every case will be spending far more than $18,750 a year – is consuming an amount of the world’s resources that is not sustainable in the long run.

In the long run, the average person cannot consume the world’s resources at a rate greater than that of the current average New Zealand beneficiary.

Considering that all of us will eventually have to cut down to this level of consumption, whether we like it or not, the people who are currently beneficiaries are actually giving us a glimpse of what level of wealth is realistically sustainable.

In that sense they are harbingers of the future, unlike the rest of us currently consuming an unsustainable amount of resources. Thus it could be argued that beneficiaries are the true environmentalists.

Should Kiwis With Historical Cannabis Convictions Be Compensated?

Now that the New Zealand Parliament has officially apologised to Kiwis convicted of historic homosexuality offences, the day when they apologise to medicinal cannabis users draws ever closer. So in much the same way that there are calls for gay men convicted for homosexuality offences to be compensated, there will also be calls for people convicted of medicinal cannabis offences to be compensated.

This isn’t necessarily a brand new idea – Article D of the twenty-six point plan in the Cannabis Activist’s Handbook calls for compensation on the grounds that a criminal record for a medicinal cannabis offence severely impacts the sufferer’s social and financial standing.

It’s easy for most to agree that a person’s rights to cultivate a herbal medicine are in the same category as their rights to have sex with another man. There is no good reason to sic the Police on people who do either, because neither action causes harm to anyone else.

And so it’s straightforward to accept that there is a genuine case for compensation for harm done to the victims of the Police and Justice systems. After all, putting someone in a cage for an action that harms no-one is itself a crime.

There are life-long consequences to getting a criminal conviction, such as extreme difficulty in finding a job, getting a loan or being accepted to an academic course. The financial losses to these three consequences alone might add up to half a million dollars or more over the course of a lifetime.

So most of us can accept that it’s fair that the Government pays money to put right the damage that it caused to its own people by effectively conducting a war on them without their consent.

If a person wants to make the argument that compensation should be denied because the offences were technically crimes at the time they were committed, they ought to ask themselves if they would be happy with a criminal conviction for reading this VJM Publishing article in a dystopic future where websites without state approval were considered pirate media.

Because it’s very easy to dismiss the psychological damage caused by arbitrary misapplications of judicial power when it doesn’t happen to oneself.

What ought to happen is, first, that it be written into the New Zealand Bill of Rights that actions that do not have victims cannot be crimes. This will not only entrench the legality of both homosexual activity and medicinal cannabis use, but it will also make it impossible for any future offence in this category (i.e. victimless ones) to be pushed into law.

What needs to happen, second, is that a commission is put together to calculate – using the same evidence-based methodology that is being pushed by some with regards to cannabis law reform – an accurate dollar figure corresponding to the amount of suffering caused by being persecuted by this law.

Possibly the fairest way would be to declare a set sum of compensation per conviction and per day in jail if there was a custodial sentence.

For example, we might say that the amount of personal damage inflicted on a person by giving them a criminal conviction was equal to $25,000, with a further $250 for each day spent in prison.

And third we need to decide if we’re actually going to pay this compensation or if we’re going to just say “Fuck ’em”.

An Anarcho-Homicidalist Primer

Homicidalism is a new branch of anarchist thought. The essential belief is this: authoritarianism will always arise unless dominance hierarchies are actively resisted by killing the people at the top of them. The impetus behind this line of reasoning comes from a passage from the great author Aleksnder Solzhenitsyn.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

In essence, homicidalism recognises that individuals have the ability to kill each other by exercising their free will, and that homicide (and fear of homicide) is the basic social tool keeping authoritarianism in check.

Consider this thought experiment. Try to think of a law that would not change that day if the people who were to be arrested all behaved in the manner that Solzhenitsyn described above.

A practical example of homicidalism in action was given in the case of the cannabis laws by Jan Molenaar, who was responsible for a Police siege that led to the death of one Police officer. Considering that there were 10,487 total cannabis offences in New Zealand in 2014, and that the total number of Police officers is fewer than this, it’s clear that cannabis prohibition could not continue for more than a few days if every victim of it resisted “Molenaar-style”.

Of course, Molenaar did not survive long after taking guns to the Police. This is both obvious and a crucial point.

The first law of homicidalism is this. All tyranny exists because the people oppressed are unable or unwilling to kill their oppressors. This is because it is in the nature of oppressors to tighten the screws further and further until the population begins to resist, and then to release them a little so that the population is oppressed but not enough to revolt.

Thus, homicidalism recognises the psychological reality that tyrants tyrannise to the degree that they can get away with it.

Therefore, all oppression exists because the people oppressed have set the point at which they will revolt and kill their oppressors too low. Had they “loved freedom enough”, as Solzhenitsyn put it, they would have revolted earlier, would have killed their oppressors before the oppressors could have established a stranglehold.

Anarcho-homicidalism is explicitly anti-Christian. The very message of Christianity is, as Friedrich Nietzsche taught us, a slave morality, in which people submit to authoritarians out of fear and then try to drag all others down by way of resentment.

To the homicidalist, the admonishment to “turn the other cheek” is to encourage tyranny by lessening the consequences of trying to oppress a population. “Render unto Ceasar” is the same as accepting the rule of tyranny in the world.

The real difficulty with homicidalism is that it is something of a taboo subject, for the obvious reason that anyone with an intention to commit tyranny instinctively fears anarcho-homicidalists. It is unlikely that homicidalism will ever be taught at a Government-funded school, for example. It is also very likely that anyone publicly promoting homicidalism will get a visit from the Police.

Homicidalism is explicitly anarchistic because it is considered immoral to kill anyone weaker than yourself. This inverts the usual pattern of things, and provides a clear distinction between homicidalism and serial killing. It is also a bridge between anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism, as both of these sides implicitly concede that the means of production always belong to those most willing to kill to control them.

It also has an immune system built in. One of the great problems with most anarchist solutions is that, when the power structure is abolished, there are no mechanisms in place preventing it from arising again.

Homicidalism gets around this by simply continuing to kill anyone who tries to take charge. The ruling class are killed until they stop ruling, and then anyone who tries to disrupt the ensuing anarchy by creating another dominance hierarchy is summarily executed by the nearest homicidalist.

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This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s upcoming Anarcho-Homicidalist’s Manifesto.