Coping With The Transition To A Low-Trust Society

Everyone with any sense can feel that society is breaking down. The general atmosphere is much less pleasant than it was ten, even five years ago: more anger, depression, madness. Less laughter is heard. All the economic news is bad, and people no longer speak of the future as a friend, but as an enemy collecting a debt.

There is precedent for understanding what is happening: broken families.

There are many broken families in our society. These families are broken societies in microcosm. It’s common for parents in broken families to be negligent or abusive, even to have abandoned their own children. This is closely analogous to how governments work in broken societies. What the New Zealand Government did to its own people with Ruthanasia differs only in scale from what a parent does when it abandons its family, and Ruthanasia was only the worst of many examples of governmental neglect. More are to come.

Broken families produce low-trust people. Trust is essentially a person’s estimation of the probability of encountering honourable behaviour. Neglecting one’s children is a highly dishonourable act, a total failure to be an adult. A child so neglected will very likely grow up to be a low-trust adult. They will seldom punish dishonourable conduct, having normalised it, and they will seldom reward honourable conduct, believing it to be an aberration.

Broken societies are full of low-trust people. They expect the worst from others. As such, they’re not willing to give any “benefit of the doubt”. This makes them generally unpleasant to be around. But, like broken families, they aren’t natural. They only exist when an authority figure refuses to do their job properly. This is why low-trust societies are full of rebels and revolutionaries. As Western society becomes lower and lower trust, we can expect more dissidents of all kinds, especially violent ones. As low-trust neighbourhoods produce gang members, low-trust societies produce revolutionaries and tyrants.

A high-trust environment is honour based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of honourable conduct. People’s reputations for past honourable conduct determine the extent to which they are respected. Sophocles once said “Better to fail with honour than succeed by fraud”. In high-trust environments, a person can expect to lose but still be respected.

A low-trust environment is fear based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of malice. Only people malicious enough to do harm are respected; everyone else is exploited. In a low-trust environment, exploiting people is seen as intelligent. A caring person is just a target. Kind people are stupid, because if they were smart they would have perceived that they were operating in a low-trust environment. Low-trust people don’t view the kind as the freemasonry of society (which they are in high-trust environments). They view the kind as wolves would view a lamb.

For instance, people in Thailand have different attitudes to theft to people in Singapore. In Thailand, if you leave your property unguarded, the assumption is that you’re too stupid to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. The logic is similar in gang environments: if you’re too weak to defend your property through fighting for it, them you’re too weak to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. This kind of logic will become more common in the future.

In a low-trust environment, you exploit people up until the point where they push back. The low-trust presumption is that they would do they same to you if they could.

In a low-trust environment, you expect people to be lying. Speech is not assumed to be factual: people are assumed to be “talking shit” unless proven otherwise.

Low-trust thinking and short-term thinking overlap a great deal. As such, a high time preference is another psychological weakness we will have to contend with in the future. People in low-trust families don’t make rational long-term decisions. Neither do governments in low-trust societies. Probably Western governments will torch their economies in coming decades to keep Boomers in comfort. What comes after then will be a truly low-trust environment.

Coping with low-trust environments is primarily about lowering expectations. Lose the expectation of honourable conduct. Lose the expectation that your property rights will be respected. This means to become more cynical, paranoid and suspicious, which is a shame. But it’s a reasonable reaction to the way society is going. High-trust people are going to get destroyed.

Also important in the transition to a low-trust environment is learning to control oneself (to some extent this is downstream of lowering expectations). Living in a low-trust environment is stressful. One’s threat detection mechanisms are often running at full power. Adapting to a low-trust environment means suppressing emotion, both in range and intensity. Unfortunately this means that many people will become sadistic, even psychopathic. But many will have to choose between honour or survival in coming years.

Because low-trust environments are fear based, overcoming one’s fear of death will gain you respect. Thus, a genuinely spiritual attitude will gain you respect. People in low-trust environments have only contempt for the superficially spiritual. But if a person’s spirituality enables them to endure physical deprivations, stresses, threats and intimidation, they will do much better in low-trust environments than non-spiritual people.

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The Fourth Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Fourth Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of cruelty. The Fourth Rejection is the contention that an excessive focus on truth leads to cruelty.

The Alternative Right is initially made up of people rejected from the Establishment. This does not mean the peasantry but those unjustly rejected from the ruling class. Those people have peculiarities that those within the Estabishment don’t have. Understanding the Alternative Right is a matter of understanding those peculiarities.

Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction theory is relevant here. The problem with the Establishment (as suggested in the Third Rejection) is that it comes together to keep out elite individuals from non-Establishment families. This corruption leaves those elite individuals with a stark choice: submit to the corruption – and accept a lesser place – or revolution.

This is a brutal choice which leads to much resentment and bitterness, which leads to cruelty. This cruelty is magnified by the desire to crack down on perceived degeneracy, as per the Third Rejection. The Alternative Right sees an Establishment that has failed to impose a correct order. The resulting disorder threatens the viability of society. Thus it becomes a moral imperative to overthrow that old order and bring in a new, healthy one. Cruelty is justified under the “if you want to make an omlette, you’ve got to break some eggs” principle.

In Alternative Right discourse one sees a lot of extremist rhetoric. “Gas the Jews” is a common sentiment. So are sentiments about killing all non-whites. These sentiments might seem cruel, but those who express them are simply reflecting the cruelty of the political Establishment in rejecting people who it would have accommodated, had it not been corrupt. Like so many who have suffered cruelty, the Alternative Right has lost inhibitions against inflicting it themselves.

This tendency towards excessive cruelty is what is rejected in the Fourth Rejection.

The increased level of antipathy towards their enemies is the principal difference between the mentality of the Establishment Left and the Alternative Right. The main enemy of the Establishment Left are those born into privilege; the main enemy of the Establishment Right are traitors. If the Establishment Left are a revolution of the middle class, who are looking for accommodation, the Alternative Right are a revolution of the excess ruling class, who are looking to replace the existing ruling class entirely. Thus the revolution of the Alternative Right is more vicious.

Alternative Centrism accepts, as per the Fourth Acceptance, that truth is a virtue. Truth is always good, but there are cases where people are just not ready for it. Exposure to truths that a person is not ready for leads to trauma.

In the same way that it’s (kind of) cruel to tell a child that Santa Claus isn’t real, and it’s cruel to expose children to graphic gore and pornography, it’s also cruel to expose some adults to certain ideas about death or the ruthlessness of the control system. A person who isn’t fully self-realised might not have the psychological fortitude to withstand a blackpill of such magnitude. The Fourth Rejection rejects the paranoid and depressed aspects of truth-seeking, and the dark energies associated with those aspects. It is cruel to inflict such energies on people when they are not prepared or ready for them.

The search for truth needs an element of compassion or it fixates on material truths at the expense of spiritual ones. Dispassionate truth-seeking may have given us the Internet and the HIMARS rocket artillery system. But it also gave us the nihilism of positivism and a centibillion-dollar pharmaceutical apparatus that mostly exists to numb people to the horror of their own spiritual ignorance (of course this is widely denied). To seek truth without compassion is robotic, computer-like, inhuman.

The Fourth Rejection, then, in rejecting the uncompassionate nature of an excess focus on truth, also reflects the First Rejection of excess order. Both rejections are movements away from the excess masculine and towards the feminine.

The Alternative Right speaks the truth about human biodiversity, especially regarding race and IQ. This truth – that some human populations have significantly lower IQs than others for mostly genetic reasons – is a particularly cruel one for those lower IQ populations. It might be true that the facts of this biodiversity ought to inform immigration policy. But it might also be true that egregious trumpeting of these facts is cruel. No-one likes to hear they’re from a dumb race.

The Alternative Right also speaks the truth about immigration in general and the Muslim rape gangs in Europe in particular. The Western Establishment has told lies for decades about the prevalence of sex crimes by immigrants from primarily Muslim and African countries. Although speaking the truth here is good, there is a cruelty inherent in the obsessive focus on these crimes. It reflects a will to blackpill others, which is a form of sadism.

A degree of xenophobia is natural. It’s a tough world and a there’s lot of evil in it. But the “kill all outsiders” mentality of some of the Alternative Right is unhelpful. The Alternative Right will read Karl Schmitt and come to apply the friend-enemy distinction, but the more one dwells on this distinction the more enemies one will create. Moreover, consideration of those outside the immediate in-group will build allyship, and any successful political movement will have to make as many allies as possible.

A sophisticated approach to outsiders is to lead with mild friendliness, and then to increase or decrease this friendliness depending on whether it’s reciprocated. This is the Alternative Centrist approach.

The Alternative Right also has the Establishment Right’s mindset of imposing order on others whether those others like it or not. Thus they have the same tendency to create enemies. The cruelty of the Alternative Right makes them particularly indifferent to the suffering of those disadvantaged by any proposed new order. It might be possible to appeal to the magnanimous side of the Establishment Right. But the Alternative Right are too lean and hungry to be magnanimous.

There is a sense in which the Alternative Right is an attempt to re-establish the pre-civilisational natural order, the civilised order having become corrupt and degenerate. Absent an inherited order, people will manifest an instinctual order. This is why the Alternative Right so readily leads to gangs and criminality, as well as to active clubs. This manifestation explains much of the attitude and approach of the Alternative Right: it’s easy to imagine them as pack hunters on the prehistoric savannah.

It might be pointed out that the Establishment Right is also very cruel. The difference is that the Establishment Right has to be cruel in order to impose the order necessary for society to exist. The cruelty of the Alternative Right, by contrast, is often egregious. There is something adult about the cruelty of the Establishment Right and something juvenile about the cruelty of the Alternative Right.

In rejecting cruelty, the alternative centrist foreshadows the importance of justice, and therefore foreshadows the rise of the Alternative Left.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books! https://www.amazon.com/author/vincemcleod

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

The Fourth Acceptance Of Alternative Centrism

The Fourth Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Alternative Right is correct when they speak of the importance of truth.

It’s a broadly accepted truism that truth is the first casualty of war. This is because a propaganda campaign begins as soon as any war does; all sides in the war are forced to do propaganda to maintain morale, to attract allies, and to demoralise the enemy.

The process described in the previous six chapters of this book is war by any other name. The three positions of the Establishment jostle for relative control over the masses, fighting and killing each other to win that control. Eventually they realise that they have more in common with each other than with the masses. So the fulcrum of war shifts: from one of the Establishment against itself, to one of the Establishment against their own people. This is the beginning of totalitarianism.

The process described in the previous six chapters of this book also explains why there are so many lies in modern politics. If the Establishment is waging a war against the people it is ruling over, it follows logically that they are also lying to them. And it does.

The Establishment tells all kinds of lies in shoring up its position in opposition to those they rule over. Everything from the divine right of kings to the need for mass digital surveillance is a justification, however flimsy, of Establishment rule. But all of these narratives serve one singular purpose: to entrench the power of the Establishment at the expense of everyone else.

After a while, the people who have been shut out of the Establishment come together. In the same way that the different people within the Establishment realise they have more in common with each other, so too do the people shut out of the Establishment. Those initially shut out of the Establishment are usually motivated by anger at having been lied to. Hence the Fourth Acceptance of Alternative Centrism is the acceptance of the importance of truth.

For obvious reasons, the Establishment doesn’t admit that it’s waging a war against its own people. But the people figure it out anyway. Perhaps the best ever exposition of the war of the political establishment against its own people is 1984. Orwell’s magnum opus has variously been mistaken as a critique of Communism or Nazism in particular. In truth, it’s a critique of totalitarianism is general.

In 1984, the resistance against Big Brother is similar to the Alternative Right in reality. They are courageous, free-thinking desperadoes. In 1984, nothing happens: O’Brien helps break up any resistance before it can get anywhere. In reality, a variety of outcomes are possible (although it must be noted that most revolutions fail; the Establishment starts with the strongest position and usually wins).

In any case, 1984 describes how the Establishment lies to people about almost everything, reasoning that the more ignorant the people are, the stronger the position of the Establishment. ‘Ignorance Is Strength’ is one of the three mottos of Big Brother. The more lies the Establishment can tell the people, the more confused and off-balance those people are, and the less able to get the sure footing needed to mount a resistance.

The initial formation of the Alternative Right is a reaction against this cathedral of lies.

The Alternative Right is more masculine than the other positions for a variety of reasons. For one, the right itself is more masculine. Order is primarily a male concern. For another, it’s the masculine which is the revolutionary. The feminine tends to be passive and more accepting of tyranny (as has been noted as far back as Aristotle). Yet another reason is that those who stand up against the Establishment are hated, at least initially. So those who first rise up have to be willing to endure hate.

These reasons are why the Alternative Right today is characterised by active clubs. Those reacting to the failure of the Establishment to impose an acceptable order feel the duty to impose that order themselves. Thus they seek to recreate what the Establishment Right should ideally have been: masculine, in the sense of possessing both the ability and the will to impose order upon chaos. The paramilitary nature of active clubs shows they are alternative power structures in embryonic form.

This masculinity is also why the Alternative Right is obsessed with degeneracy, the concept of degeneracy and correcting popular moral philosophy. They aren’t merely looking to reimpose a lost physical order, but also a lost spiritual one. Thus they are metaphysically masculine as well as physically. This quality of masculinity, taken to excess, is why the Fourth Rejection arises.

The metaphysical masculinity is why the Alternative Right has a deep appreciation for occultists, wizards, prophets and knowledge-workers of all kinds. Anyone who seeks the truth with such fervour that they must pay a price is considered a hero. Socrates and Odin are two prime examples here. Getting killed by the Establishment for speaking the truth, as Socrates did, is ultimate.

If the First Acceptance is about the importance of order, the Alternative Right is the reaction to what they consider disorder. The Alternative Right considers that the Establishment is in dereliction of duty, in that they have failed to impose an acceptable level of order. In this sense, the Alternative Right is as much a reaction to the chaos of the Establishment Left as the Establishment Centre is.

Questions of order are why immigration is such a particular sticking point. The most elementary form of order, on the national level, is the national border. The globalist establishment of the West today is running a policy akin to open borders. This has convinced the Alternative Right (primarily) that the elementary order is now lost, which inspires much of their rage. The lies told to maintain open borders policies are particularly infuriating to the Alternative Right, hence why the Alternative Right prioritises truth so highly.

In the revolutionary sense, the Alternative Right has a lot in common with the Establishment Left. This reflects a paradox within both the Alternative Right and Alternative Left: they freely adopt parts of the opposite if they feel like it (a process that leads inexorably to Alternative Centrism). The reason for the shared commonalities is that both the Establishment Left and the Alternative Right are, in a sense, reactions to the Establishment Right. The difference is in the proposed solution: the Establishment Left proposes chaos, the Alternative Right proposes a new form of order.

The Alternative Right also targets many of the same supporters as the Establishment Left: the young revolutionary who wants action and excitement. The “Beefsteak Nazi” phenomenon is a classic example of this.

The Alternative Right doesn’t respect the Establishment Left though, seeing them as dishonest failures who sold out. They see the Establishment Left as claiming to represent the working class, but actually representing a degenerate middle class. The Alternative Right aspires not to wage class warfare, but to be a new aristocracy. They are not ashamed of this and are honest about it.

The uncompromising emphasis on truth, to the exclusion of other considerations, can seem cruel to those of the other positions. Thus, as with the other Acceptances, the Fourth Acceptance leads to the Fourth Rejection. The neo-masculinity of the Alternative Right is countered by the neo-femininity of the Alternative Left.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books! https://www.amazon.com/author/vincemcleod

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

The Five Types Of Power

Traditionally, power theory divides power into hard and soft forms, as proposed by Joseph Nye in 1991. The hard form relates to the common use of the word power, which means capacity for force. The soft form relates to more subtle forms of power, which aren’t about force as commonly understood, but rather influence.

The distinction has come into prominence in geopolitical discourse, e.g. when the hard power of America is contrasted with the soft power of Britain. But many of those into alchemy would prefer a more sophisticated breakdown of the potential power spectum. So this essay attempts just that.

In this essay, the “potential power spectrum” consists of the five highest stages of the Mithraic Ladder: iron, copper, silver, mercury and gold. Tin and lead are not considered because they are too passive to count as powerful, and are better considered part of that which power acts upon.

“Hard power” in the sense proposed by Nye covers what an alchemist would describe as the realm of iron. This is, in actuality, the least subtle form of power. In a geopolitical sense it refers to military power. In an alchemical sense it refers to gross physical force and violence. The realm of iron is the realm of the hard edge of the blade. Everything people understand by martial arts or war falls under the realm of iron and hard power.

Nye’s conception of hard power also covers economic power. This includes actions such as trade sanctions or tariffs. Such a power is like a medium power inbetween hard and soft. It’s analogous, in an alchemical sense, to copper. As my friend Fro once said: “money makes people move”. Buying and selling people, whether permanently or by the hour, is the realm of copper magic.

Copper is the metal of basic currency, which is itself the power of arranging force. A trade sanction is to a country much like a strangehold is to an individual. The use of debt to trap people also falls under copper magic – usurers can be considered copper magicians, perhaps the most powerful and dangerous ones of all.

The essential aspect of hard power is that it can be used to force people to do what you want them to do. Soft power, by contrast, is used to make people want to do what you want them to do.

“Soft power” in Nye’s meaning relates to silver, mercury and gold magic in the alchemical sense. These are not about forcing people into doing things, but influencing them into doing things. Sometimes that involves trickery, deception, enchantment, persuasion, bedazzlement or charm. In every case, it’s more subtle than hard power.

Silver magic is how the ruling class maintains its position as the ruling class. To a major extent, this silver magic is just public relations: how one brings allies to the negotiating table. As such, there’s a lot of psychology to it. The art of oratory, in which a politician convinces people to follow them through speech, is silver magic in action. So is organising a propaganda campaign through the mainstream media.

Softer than soft power exists in the form of willpower. This is so subtle a power that it’s hard to measure. The closest mainstream psychology comes to it is the concept of ego depletion. This is the name given to the phenomenon where a person finds it harder to achieve certain tasks if they have already exerted self-control on a previous task.

There are various ways to keep one’s willpower high. The foremost is to keep morale high through positive self-talk and the avoidance of blackpills. Another way is to avoid distractions, whether somatic or sensory. The most important is practice: anyone with truly high levels of willpower will have built up those powers through many years of practice.

This mercury magic can be just as much a form of military power as iron magic. B. H. Liddell-Hart once wrote “In war, the chief incalculable is the human will,” explaining how a larger force can lose to a much smaller one if it loses the will to fight (see the capture of Belgrade in 1941). Many Americans claim that their guns keep them free from tyranny, but outsiders readily point out that the American Government has committed countless crimes against their own people over the past century, without anyone taking up arms against them. Absent the will to use them, all weapons are useless.

The softest power of all is spiritual power. This is represented by the realm of gold and is very similar to moral authority. This is the power of having one’s will aligned with the will of the divine. If a person or group of people have such a will, it is impossible to righteously oppose them. They have what the Confucianists call ‘The Mandate of Heaven’.

India possibly has the strongest levels of gold power of any country today, on account of that many consider the religions from there to be good ones. Then again, possibly it doesn’t, on account of that its people have a reputation for dishonesty in many circles. Who holds the most gold power can be very hard to determine. It’s also ethereal: America lost a great deal of gold power with their invasion of Iraq, and those who supported refugee resettlement to the West lost much in the wake of the Muslim child rape gangs.

Moral authority is the softest of all powers because anyone can claim to have it. But viewed from another perspective, it’s also the strongest because it can be used without rest. The big drawback with physical weapons is that you can’t actually use them the vast majority of the time. Spiritual weapons can be employed on a permanent basis.

These five types of power constitute an alchemical breakdown of the various ways that people can subjugate others to their will. In short, Joseph Nye’s concept of hard power covers the realms of iron and copper, and his concept of soft power covers the realms of silver, mercury and gold.

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!

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