Workamania

Society in the Clown World of 2024 is full of mental illness. This mental illness operates on all of the individual, family, community and national levels. Although some of this mental illness is organic, resulting from the natural struggles of biological life, most of it is artificial. One of the most prevalent psychiatric problems today is almost entirely artificial: workamania.

Workamania, simply put, is the artificially-generated obsession with working as much as possible.

This involves the obsession with being in the workplace for as many hours as possible. It particularly involves being seen in the workplace for as many hours as possible. From this mindset comes the phenomena where workers try to arrive before their boss but not leave until after them, and where employees are on-call 24/7. From these phenomena come all kinds of stress-related mental and physiological disorders, most of which are considered normal when they’re really caused by workamania.

Workamania comes with its own complete moral schedule.

In the same way that, for money worshippers, a person’s value can be measured by their net worth, for workamaniacs a person’s value can be measured by hours worked. In truth, it is not hours worked but amount suffered that is the measure of moral value for the workamaniac. But hours worked serves as a useful proxy.

For money worshippers, the outgroup are the poor. For workamaniacs, the outgroup are the idle. Beneficiaries are a special enemy. No-one is permitted to live a low-consumption lifestyle in an effort to reduce environmental pressure. Hippies are almost as low as beneficiaries.

The deep ingroup are employers, who are like gods. Employers give meaning to life. Before the employer came into the world, all was chaos. A person is only considered a legitimate human being if they have an employer giving them directions all day. Anyone without an employer has no real status to the workamaniac. One’s employment is one’s identity.

The concept of a universal basic income is anathema to the workamaniac. The automatic assumption is that a UBI would encourage laziness, and no-one would ever work again. This masochistic logic reveals that Protestant Christianity is one of the major influences on workamania.

Implicit to workamania is the acceptance that an employer can never offer so low a wage that a job isn’t worth doing. No matter how miserly the wage, it’s good honest work. In fact, the worse the working conditions, somehow the more honest the work. In any case, the experience will no doubt be invaluable, the workaholics say. In no case is a worker permitted to think that an offered wage is too poor to accept a job.

Another aspect of workamania is that all is forgiven if you work a lot. You can beat your partner, abandon your kids, drive drunk and cause accidents, but if you work a large number of hours then you’re still an upstanding member of society. This goes double if you have worked for a large number of years at the same place.

Likewise, a person who is known to not work long hours is irredeemable. Even if that person spends their time looking after elderly family members or doing volunteer work in the community, they’re still a bad person if they don’t have a job. Taking a holiday is only acceptable if your doctor says you have to do it for stress-related reasons.

It’s crucial to note that workamania is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon. It’s pushed on us by a sadistic, slave-driving ruling class that controls the mainstream media and, by so doing, controls our moral sentiments.

Our rulers want two things from us: productivity and obedience. Productivity makes our rulers rich and powerful, by giving them a big surplus to skim off our labour. Obedience makes the position of our rulers secure. Workamania achieves both objectives, which is why people are brainwashed into it through the school system, the media and in their place of employment.

In C-PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving, Pete Walker describes four major types of reaction to traumatic stress: fawn, freeze, flight and fight. Flight is the moderately extraverted response that involves using high amounts of energy to escape a situation. In today’s society, many people with traumatic stress disorders develop into workaholics. This is because they can’t sit still and enjoy their own thoughts.

Workamania can be considered the collective-level equivalent of what workaholism is to the individual level. It’s a traumagenic self-hatred that leads to an inability to enjoy everyday life. It’s when an entire people cannot appreciate its own company, and has to keep itself busy to avoid coming face-to-face with that fact.

Workaholics and workamaniacs naturally get on well together. After all, they share very similar goals. The difference is that the workaholic is escaping something and is thus usually in a state of low-excitement depression, whereas the workamaniac is in a state of high-excitement hysteria.

None of this is to suggest that working is bad, or that a work ethic is not important. The high standard of living that has been built in the West in recent centuries has been made possible largely through a good work ethic. Working hard is the most likely way to go from poor to comfortable.

We need to draw a line, however, between a healthy amount of work and workamania. A healthy amount of work is one that maximises the worker’s quality of life. An unhealthy amount of work is one that maximises the profits of the worker’s owners, to the exclusion of all other considerations.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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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

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VJM – New Zealand’s Most Suppressed Author And Thinker!

Not since Arthur Desmond has a New Zealand author created as much controversy as myself. The simple fact that I am an educated, working-class Kiwi man willing to speak the truth has resulted in a devoted horde of haters. The purpose of this photoessay is to chronicle the Establishment’s attempts to destroy me.

The first sign I had that the Establishment wanted to shut me up was in May 2019. For a couple of years before then, I had been selling ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts on TradeMe as a way to wind up Communists. Sales had been slow, until one day I sold three shirts in the space of an hour. A friend rang me up, and told me to check the news.

The Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt, had taken to the mainstream media to declare there was “no place” for my satirical political expression. Calling me “ideologically adjacent” to Brenton Tarrant, Hunt intimated that selling such t-shirts was somehow anti-social in and of itself. The listings were soon taken down by TradeMe after a deluge of lies about how ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ was actually a white supremacist call to action.

The next move was the Establishment sending cops to my house to harass me as part of Operation Whakahumanu. This came in the form of a rap on my front door at about 10am one morning in July 2019. I opened the door to find a couple of uniformed officers, who wanted to ask me some questions about comments I had made on FaceBook. Apparently this was in the belief that I was at risk of shooting up a mosque. They had no warrant, so I asked them to leave immediately.

It was an unmistakable threat. The political establishment clearly saw me as an enemy. I understood directly that this opinion was a result of my VJM Publishing work, wherein I had explained to people for some years how the political system manipulates them against their best interests. My work to explain the psychology of submission and control was giving too much power back to the New Zealand people. I had to be countered.

Learning that the Establishment was targeting me, various sycophants and arselickers, attempting to curry favour with the powerful, followed suit.

The first of these was terrorist fundraiser Byron Clark.

Talia Levin’s book Culture Warlords mentioned an article about globohomo I had published in November 2018. Levin mentioned VJM Publishing as part of an effort to smear the counter-globalist resistance as deranged racists. Clark seized on this opportunity to attempt to have VJM Publishing books cancelled from TradeMe. His harassment campaign mostly involved posting lies about me to his Twitter account.

While this was going on, the Establishment was working behind the scenes with major tech firms to silence wrongthinkers such as myself. This was a consequence of the Christchurch Call.

I discovered that this had been happening when Google slashed traffic to the VJM Publishing company page by 75% overnight. Presumably Ardern had given them a list of New Zealand websites considered wrongthink, and Google had reached into their algorithm and given those websites a massive penalty. VJM Publishing traffic fell from around 200 hits a day to around 50. Over the next few years, before I stopped using Google products, it would fall to around five.

This was especially annoying as VJM Publishing had just released Clown World Chronicles, our best-selling book of all time, and the Google traffic to the Clown World Chronicles main page was the central plank of the marketing effort. This one move, more than any other, crippled my ability to make a living from speaking the truth.

Somehow the Establishment also recruited former Uruwera terrorist Rangi Kemara to do its dirty work harassing, stalking and slandering me. Kemara has clearly been given (or assumed) an agenda to associate me with neo-Nazism by adding this term before my name every time he gives his moronic followers an update on my activity.

As someone who has repeatedly criticised authoritarianism in all its forms – Nazi, Commie, Abrahamic, neoliberal – I can only assume this line of slander is being pursued because I am openly a nationalist. The VJM Publishing company page is full of essays and articles decrying war and authoritarianism, but it also features several arguing for the merits of nationalism and criticising globalism. It is for these latter reasons that I am so heavily targeted.

Almost as annoying as the loss of Google traffic to the VJM Publishing company page was when Byron Clark and friends were rewarded for their ongoing harassment and slander campaign. TradeMe finally caved to the bleating and removed Clown World Chronicles from sale (as well as the 2021 annual compilation of our best essays and articles).

Donna Carson, an “extremism researcher” at the notoriously Marxist-riddled Massey University, joined the pack attack against Clown World Chronicles, taking it upon herself to email TradeMe arguing for the book to be cancelled from sale.

The Police and academia are not the only weapons that the Establishment has been able to wield against me. They also have the mainstream media.

In 2023 I wrote an essay about provincialisation in New Zealand, and how it could potentially be the answer to the lack of human rights here. Tane Webster of Reality Check Radio read the article, was impressed, and arranged for an interview between me and Paul Brennan on RCR. The interview went well, the booking agent suggested I might come on once a month, and for a brief time there was a small amount of social media buzz.

At that point, mainstream media journalists launched their attack on me: a cancel campaign to have the interview taken down. Charlie Mitchell of The Press was the most prominent of these, using an article I wrote about Jewish opposition to hereditarianism as basis for a claim that I was (wait for it) anti-Semitic and therefore have no right to speak.

RCR soon folded, removing the interview from their website and ghosting me from all further email or social media contact.

All this is enough, by itself, to make me New Zealand’s most suppressed author and thinker. But perhaps the most shocking revelation of all came from the Police themselves, who revealed in an Offical Information Act response to Cameron Slater that they monitor the VJM Publishing website for potential wrongthink.

That’s right – the New Zealand Police spends money paying someone to read every essay or article that goes up on the VJM Publishing company page and to make a note of any counter-globalist sentiments that may be expressed. Any anti-immigration or anti-government sentiments are duly recorded (and presumably held on file against my name).

Why would the New Zealand Police take note of the fact that I “allege” that Muslims and Africans commit an enormous amount of violence and sex crimes wherever they go, an assertion that is borne out by law enforcement data from all over the Western World? Simple: noticing things is verboten. Only agreeing with my globalist masters is permissible.

In summary, I am monitored by the New Zealand Police, officers have been sent to my house to harass me, the Government teams up with major social media companies to restrict my reach, globalist activists work in packs to deplatform my books from TradeMe, terrorists on the Government payroll slander me all over the Internet, and mainstream journalists take to Twitter to cancel me from the alternative media.

All this yet I’ve never been arrested for a crime. This is all simply because I speak truth to power.

Never before has New Zealand produced an author or thinker who has attracted so much hate and aggression from the ruling class and their enforcers. I, VJM, your humble servant of truth, am the most dangerous man in New Zealand. This is for no other reason than because I take the side of the New Zealand people against their oppressors.

If you appreciate the risks I am taking to bring you the truth, then read my essays and articles, share my videos and buy my books, because they will kill me sooner or later.

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!

Mentally Ill? You May Actually Be Physiologically Ill

Some of the recent psychological literature has described a seachange in conceptions of mental illness. The old-fashioned model of understanding mental illness in terms of chemical imbalances has been abandoned by experts in the field. In its place is what’s being called the traumagenic developmental model. This reflects the modern understanding that most mental illness is caused by trauma in early childhood.

Throughout much of history, mental illness has been seen as a moral defect. The mentally ill were seen as weak or lazy. A person unable to sleep lacked discipline. Anyone who cried lacked emotional stability. If a person threw up, it wasn’t from stress, but from a refusal to exercise the willpower to prevent it. Social failings were all moral failings.

A mental illness was thereby different to a physical illness, as it had worse implications. A person can have a physical illness without blame. A mental illness is different. People are blamed for being mentally ill in the same way they’re blamed for being criminals. The logic is that they ought to have exerted the necessary willpower or foresight to prevent it, so if they didn’t, it was their fault.

Even the chemical imbalance theory confers some degree of blame. A commonly-heard story is that a person “blew their brains” on drugs, thanks to an irresponsible will, and as a result they’re now mentally defective. Either that or they worked too hard.

The traumagenic developmental theory, by contrast, does not blame mentally ill people for their own conditions.

This relatively new theory holds that the vast majority of behavioural problems are caused by traumatic early childhood experiences, particularly childhood abuse and neglect. Developmental psychology has long stated this, but awareness has taken a long time to reach popular consciousness.

According to traumagenic developmental theory, adverse early childhood experiences can alter the structure of the brain, leading to cognitive difficulties, impulse control problems and an overactive stress response.

The body’s stress response is mostly under control of the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal gland) axis. If this axis is chronically overstimulated, emotional regulation becomes very difficult. Growing up with a chronically overstimulated HPA axis can lead to significant alterations in brain function, and thereby behaviour.

The amygdala is a part of the brain that plays a major role in threat detection. In people who have grown up with a constantly active HPA axis, the amygdala develops to see threats all over the place. It’s common for such people to see threats and dangers that aren’t really there. This has an immense negative impact on social function. Such people have a much harder time trusting others, which makes forming relationships difficult.

People who grow up with an overstimulated HPA axis also tend to suffer impaired pre-frontal cortex development. This part of the brain is crucial for emotional regulation. An impaired pre-frontal cortex makes it much harder for a person to rationally and calmly consider their reactions to things. The tendency is to react strongly and often without justification.

Emotionally dysregulated people who see threats everywhere are typical of those who end up getting a mental illness diagnosis, whether it’s depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, Borderline Personality Disorder, C-PTSD or something else. But many of them are not actually mentally ill according to the traditional conception. The damage is in the body – as Bessel van der Kolk says, the body keeps the score. They don’t have psychiatric conditions because the psyche is not damaged. The body is.

Many people out there, suffering from a label of mental illness, ought to ask themselves: am I mentally ill, or just physiologically ill? Because if it’s actually the latter, you might feel better about yourself.

In actuality, many schizophrenia diagnoses might truly be C-PTSD. This is because schizophrenia and C-PTSD are known to overlap heavily in terms of both etiology and symptomology. Both conditions are commonly caused by early childhood abuse and neglect, and both commonly exhibit emotional dysregulation and relationship difficulties.

How many people labour under a schizophrenia diagnosis, believing themselves to be irreparably insane, when they actually have a physiological condition that causes similar symptoms to schizophrenia, but which can be treated much more easily with the right knowledge and approach?

It has been noted that Borderline Personality Disorder and C-PTSD overlap heavily as well, so much so that some are asking if BPD is even a different disorder. As above, how many people labour under a BPD diagnosis, thinking themselves weak or unreasonable, when they actually have a physiological condition that can be treated by avoiding stress?

Hypervigilance is a classic symptom of physiological damage. Many people who have it are not, in truth, “sensitive” or “uptight” but damaged. Such people would be better off being informed about how to downregulate their nervous system in times of need, and not being left to think they had a personality defect or a weakness of will.

Anyone feeling the pain of what Pete Walker calls the inner critic might benefit from asking themselves if the supposed illness of their psyche is not, in fact, an illness of the body.

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 Insanity At The Heart Of Western Culture In 2024

Mainstream media has made clear to every one of us that our current rates of material consumption are destroying the planet. If we don’t stop raping the limited resources of Planet Earth, we will induce a biosphere collapse that will probably kill us all. But there are very powerful forces preventing us from not pillaging the world.

Earth Overshoot Day is the day by when humans have used up all the resources that the planet can regenerate in a year. In 2024, that day was May 27. New Zealanders consume at such at rate that, if everyone consumed like us, we’d use up a year’s worth of resources by April 11.

The fact that an overshoot day even exists is proof that the world is insane. It means that we’re living in an unsustainable manner, much like a crackhead living on a giant ball of crack. We have to change course or we’re all going to die. But there are structural reasons why our global society can’t stop consuming the planet.

It’s not just a matter of resource depletion either. This March was the tenth straight month of record temperatures. The mainstream scientific consensus is that human activity has heated up the planet by almost 1.7 degrees Celcius since the late 1800s. If we don’t rein that activity in by reducing overconsumption, we will eventually cook the planet (and us with it).

The problem is that most of this consumption is motivated by the necessities of going to work and maintaining a state of work-readiness. A person must maintain a private vehicle, professional clothing and footwear, professional standards of grooming and body care, potentially all manner of tools and equipment, as well as pay for entertainment to destress from the demands of working. All of this costs resources – resources that are only used because of the obsession with working.

Realistically what we need is for a large number of people to go on something like a UBI, so that instead of driving to work every day and flying to meetings every week, and then spending the income they make from a forty-hour workweek on all kinds of consumer crap they don’t need, they can cut down both their work rate and their consumption rate.

The problem is that it’s simply not allowed to not work.

Our entire culture appears to be based on the logic that people not employed for wages are “not pulling their weight”, as if widespread starvation was imminent. There are dozens of words that can be employed to humiliate someone into working harder: bum, bludger, leech, moocher, parasite, lazy, shirker, grifter etc. To not be working for a wage is considered a great shame.

It could even be said that we live in a “workiarchy” where whoever works the most has the highest status. People brag about waking up extremely early in the morning to work, as if it was central to their moral value. This mentality has given us absurd humour like the “100 hours a week” meme, wherein it’s assumed that if you work less than 100 hours a week you’re taking it easy.

Mass abandonment of work is also not socially possible. The identities of most people are so closely bound with their work that they would suffer a catastrophic loss of personality structure if they were asked to give it up. In the same way that many people die shortly after they retire, because they no longer see a purpose to life, many people would lose the will to live if they were asked to stop working for the environment’s sake.

We’re killing the planet by consuming as much as we are. Yet it’s impossible to just simply not work. This irreconcilable conflict is causing immense levels of undiagnosed schizophrenia among Westerners, and especially younger ones, who are facing the existential dilemma of climate change head-on.

It is apparent from the widespread despair and malaise in Western society today that people want a change of direction. But who can change that direction, when most people are too busy working to pay rents to organise protest, and the people receiving the rents don’t want to change anything?

For the insanity at the heart of Western culture to be cured, we need to collectively come to the realisation that time spent in unpaid work can be just as valuable as time spent in paid work. We don’t need capitalists ordering us around for our lives to have value or meaning. We need to completely revalue the importance of work and industriousness in the light of the total ecological impact of humanity.

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!