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.

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The Transmutation Of Tin Into Iron

The second transmutation on the path up the Mithraic Ladder is that of tin into iron. The jovial, laid-back energy of tin becomes the martial and grim energy of iron. This second transmutation completes the physical realm, and produces a character who is optimised for war and combat.

As a character enlargens when they transmute from lead into tin, they sharpen as they transmute into iron. This sharpening is the characteristic action of this third level. The character thereby becomes harder and more warlike. The person of iron is, of course, the warrior.

The transmutation of tin into iron begins when a character comes to see recreation and play, characteristic of the second level, as childish. No longer are the frivolities of tin seen as an esacpe from the cruel pressures of survival. A character starts to yearn for more than just recreation. A character aspiring to the realm of iron years to test themselves, to test their strength against opposition.

As such, the attitude of a character transmuting to iron sharpens as well. Iron is the frequency of maximum possible cruelty – but it doesn’t have to be cruel. It’s also the frequency with which a man protects his family. That might involve cruelty, but it can also involve acts of the most extreme physical rectitude. A character might come to learn this rectitude when they first have a family, giving them something to defend.

This stage can involve a character who has lapsed into gluttony getting fit and strong. Getting off the couch, and starting to lift weights, is an example of the sort of transformation that occurs in physical space at this stage. Thus the sharpening can involve pain – the pain of weakness leaving the body (as the US Marines would put it).

Motivation to get stronger comes mostly from the archetypal motivation of the stage of iron, which is honour. If a character comes to feel humiliated and dishonoured on account of being fat and unfit, the reader will easily understand that character’s motivation to become lean and fit instead. If a woman rejects them, or if they can’t climb a set of stairs, or if a child laughs at them, they might develop a powerful desire to get fit.

The transformation of tin into iron occurs primarily within the physical realm, being mostly a matter of sharpening the body. The two classic ways this can be achieved is through conflict against the environment or conflict against other people.

Conflict against the environment can come through means such as climbing a mountain, traversing a desert or sailing a vessel through stormy waters. The same way a blacksmith purifies iron by continually striking it, so can a person purify their body by continually taking one more step up the mountain.

Conflict against other people, in this context, primarily means battle. Many a man of tin has gone into battle with a distant grin, only to harden up quick when the man next to them got a spear through the chest. The deprivations of war will reliably harden a person more than anything.

The typical background of the transmutation of tin into iron is the gym. The fat of tin becomes the iron of muscle through repeated action.

This is especially true if the gym is a martial one. The line in Fight Club goes “A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” That line summarises the nature of the transformation of this stage. One puts the drinking vessel away and picks up the rifle.

A character who has transmuted their consciousness into that of iron will look at the pastimes that obsessed them in youth, and see childishness of no importance. Games in which defeat used to upset them now only evoke laughter. If a person can lose a game to a child with complete indifference, they might have passed into the realm of iron.

Although the transmutation of tin into iron is primarily a physical phenomenon, there are mental and spiritual aspects to it. A character that has mastered iron will be much harder to intimidate than one who has not. That character’s physiology will be like iron, in that they will not be nervous in the face of physical danger. They could stand on the edge of a precipice without feeling fear.

The character who has successfully developed a soul of iron will also be more inclined to think about eternity than the characters of lead and tin. To a character of iron, the character of tin seems like a degenerate and the character of lead seems like a wretch. The character of iron is the first on the ascent up the Mithraic Ladder to actually enjoy their life, i.e. not to suffer significantly.

The major mental transformations, however, are still to come, the mental realm being that which lies inbetween iron and silver. A character that completes the transmution into iron might have become an awesome fighter and the master of themselves, but they will only master themselves. Iron is still too low a level to command from. So a successful transmutation into iron will come with a new set of ambitions.

A famous example of this transmutation in popular culture is that of Rocky in Rocky 3. He starts the film fat and out of shape, and ends it super-fit. Another example is that of Conan in Conan the Barbarian. He gets put to work on the slave wheel as a boy, so that by the time he is a man he is exceptionally strong.

When the character of iron feels like they have truly proven their physical courage, they can begin the transmutation to copper.

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This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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The Working-Class White Question

Conventional political understanding is that the left wing is for the working class and the right wing is for the ruling class. But conventional understanding is in the process of being replaced by an alternative politics. In the politics of the 21st Century, the left wing is for browns and blacks. This has raised a number of, until now, unanswered questions.

Perhaps the foremost of those questions is: what is the position of working-class whites in the new paradigm?

The labour movements that formed in the West in the 19th and early 20th Centuries were almost entirely white. They formed in opposition to the capitalist interests that were also almost entirely white. But when globalists won World War Two, and began the mass importation of cheap Third World labour to the West, the white working class were put in a bind.

According to the Marxists, the white working class were obliged to embrace their replacements. The world’s working class were prophecised by Marx to come together across international borders, and so the destruction of national consciousness through mass cheap labour imports was a good thing. The white working class would have to recognise that they and the newcomers were of a shared mission: to destroy the capitalist system.

Working-class whites, however, didn’t feel like they had much in common with the newcomers. For one thing, the vast majority of working-class whites have at least some middle-class people in their extended family. For another, the newcomers usually hated the working-class whites and made that hatred obvious.

This caused working-class white sentiments to split: some embraced working-class culture, some embraced white culture, and others bunked down into an exclusivist working-class white culture that was hostile to outsiders. The net result was the shattering of working-class white solidarity and the neutralisation of working-class whites as a political force.

Today, we see working-class whites, on account of being white, forced to take a back seat to everyone else, even when those others are wealthier. Working-class whites are excluded from racial scholarships just as much as Bill Gates’s kids are. Working-class whites can also be, and often are, excluded from certain jobs under Diversity, Inclusion and Equity initiatives.

Naturally, this has led to immense resentment among working-class whites towards the Western political establishment. This resentment is strongest for those leftists who claim to be fighting for the white working class, but who in reality are fighting for an ideology that doesn’t care at all about working-class whites.

The working-class white question, then, is a way of distinguishing sane leftists from insane wokists.

If a person truly supports the underdog, they will support the working-class whites upon whose backs industrial civilisation was built, and who still bear the majority of the intergenerational trauma incurred through the various wars of the past 100 years: the same working-class whites who are currently getting squeezed out of housing all over the West.

If they are an insane wokist, by contrast, they might consider working-class whites traitors for their refusal to support the globalist revolution. Thus they will not care about the suffering of working-class whites from the mass importation of Third World cheap labour. That suffering is just a means to the end of globalist revolution.

Thus sane leftists can be distinguished from insane ones, simply by asking them what they think about working-class whites.

A leftist might make the argument that some particular racial group is disadvantaged because of colonisation, and therefore deserves special treatment by way of compensation. Very well. But what, then, explains the disadvantage of working-class whites?

If a left-wing politician makes the argument that browns and blacks are disadvantaged by colonisation, but working-class whites, who may be poorer than those browns and blacks, are advantaged by that same colonisation, and therefore are obliged to pay some of the reparations that are due from the whites to the browns and blacks, that politician is the enemy.

Likewise if a politician says that browns and blacks are poor because they have not had a chance yet, but working-class whites are poor because they have had a chance and have already blown it, that politician is the enemy. This is akin to saying that working-class whites are the only truly low-IQ faction of society, and therefore deserve a place at the very bottom of the ladder.

Working-class whites need to realise that, if a left-wing politician doesn’t support working-class whites explicitly, they will not support working-class whites at all. The fact that they are on the left cannot be taken to mean that they implicitly support working-class whites.

The working-class white question is a way for working-class whites to determine if a given leftist is a friend or a foe.

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The Case For Rejecting The Consensus

Here, I would like to suggest some reasons why someone might be justified in questioning their tacit, unswerving allegiance to the consensus.

Firstly, did you realise you were in an ongoing agreement? Because you may not have realised this, and you may not have already decided to say ‘no’ and walk away. What would that take? Simply that. Your refusal to continually go into agreement to that which no longer serves you – in your outer life, as well as your inner life. One produces a reflection of the other.

We have wars started by greedy idiots, bloodthirsty zealots and control-hungry ideological fundamentalists. We are brought to question whether we might abstractly agree or disagree that a given group of people could justifiably be blown to pieces, as though this were somehow our call. Your agreement or disagreement here doesn’t matter in order to qualify as insanity; what matters is that you are demanded to be on beck and call to participate​ in the insanity served up to you by a mentally diseased consensus.

The consensus wants to force your hand into playing the game to power the illusion that you were the one choosing it. Your choice to bear witness to all of this is your agreement to it. This happens in the same way a hostage might be forced to dictate the methods of his own torture – as though being invited to weigh your opinion on this narrative represents some kind of fairness, or democracy of mind.

We have political systems which are presented on the presumption of self-evidential necessity. You may choose this stream of madness, or the other – but you must​ choose. Remember that you tacitly agreed to this system, because you were born into it? At least, this is the narrative, as fragile as it is. Even the most benignant and equitable of these are a travesty – you are presented with an ultimate option of choosing one terrible option over another, as though there was no alternative.

This is in the service of democracy, the abstract notion that what is best for you lies in the appearance of having the ‘freedom’ to choose what is best for your region or your nation, when all of the information you are being fed derives from a source with an agenda to exert influence and control. Everything that was ever claimed to go to work on your behalf was an empty promise, a sham.

We are the inheritors of a scientific materialism, which against all true scientific spirit, presumes to dictate the total conditions of the universe at the level of human meaning. Specifically, that there is no possibility of individual or collective human participation in divinity, because we are all simply evolutionary automatons. 

Science is far from objective or disinterested – there is a wider agenda to uphold. Detraction from the mainstream narrative is punished through control of funding and decisions about how much influence you will continue to exert in academia. This is how public talks can justifiably be banned without red faces.

The new paradigm of the evil is named ‘pseudoscience’, although it has born different names as were suitable to the era or context, such as ‘witchcraft’, ‘atheism’, ‘socialism’ – essentially though, all it consists in is ‘the other’. It is the elephant in the room no one wants to discuss because it would undermine the authority of the institution in question.

All that this ‘other’ is ever reminding you of is the simple fact that you can’t ever know for certainty what you think you know – that is all it is, and yet this represents the vital human umbilical connection into the wider spiritual universe.

Our various cultural institutions’ insistence on the rigidity and finality of the knowledge they produce is leading us to squander our multidimensional heritage, our imagination, our shared godhood. What appears to be the groundlessness of epistemic uncertainty is far too subversive to those who pretend to this authority. So, the label ‘pseudoscience ‘is the new brush you will be tarred with if you dare detract from this reactive and emotionally fragile scientific consensus.

These are churches, if you haven’t noticed – there are priests, altars and rules to be followed. Dissent is not appreciated, and while we may no longer burn people at the stake physically, the same consequences can now be effected ruthlessly via social media. Technology has ironically permitted the expansion of ostracism to the digital realms, which are the foreshore of our mental meeting grounds as human collectives.

To adhere to a mindset whereby the majority of people in your culture will turn their backs on a person and say ‘we don’t acknowledge this person anymore’ is not only merely unhealthy, it indicates a collective personality disorder. Refusing to acknowledge a person whom the mainstream collective disapproves of is one of the tallest, broadest and brightest of red flags. It happens in small groups such as family groups and office environments, and it happens in nations – as above, so below. And yet, we retain the freedom to decide as the inheritors of the totality of human culture as to whether such behaviour is worthy to be kept.

The catch is, anything we sleep on is kept automatically. All it takes for the majority to continue to harbour such systemic insanity is to pretend that we don’t suffer from it, thereby immunising it from scrutiny.  Staying asleep then becomes akin to alcohol as the ’cause of’ and ‘solution to’ all of life’s various social ills.

We have a culture in which religious institutions are offered as fictitious oases from an insane materialism, only to discover that you are being thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire. The desire to save your soul and claim you for the eternal turns out to be yet another tentacle operating on the behalf of control and delusion, though flown under the banner of spirituality. The grandiose fantasies of the worldly ego are here offered in the spiritual realm, success, being chosen, included, and living forever as the personal self you know and love. The monotheistic religions reflect all the ego’s madness and self-importance back to it in an imaginary monarchy, which consists in a personal being at the top who variously approves, disapproves, judges, or becomes pleased or angry with you as the mood takes him. Your virtue and worth will be decided by how close you can get to the feet of the king at the expense of others through your various deeds, devotions and cringing prostrations. This is all for your group, the blessed and chosen, while those who have chosen incorrectly, believed wrongly, or failed to meet the standard within your group will be expelled like refuse through a cosmic garbage-chute.

The false promise propping up all of these religious institutions is this one delusional creed: unity through separation. Be better than the others, be better than the other groups. Then you will earn favour, then you will be united, so you had better make sure you beat down all the others. In other words, the spirit realm, as contextualised by the consensus ideocracy, is that if you are well-behaved, then you will be rewarded, but if you are poorly behaved or you have believed incorrectly, you will be punished.

You are either in line, or out of line.

Can you see how the cultural influence from the consensus reveals itself in the projection of the religious? It promises you the favour of an authority who is responsive to your own animal needs, wants and desires, and unresponsive of those whom you deem unworthy or inferior. Could there be a more tantalising ego-trip on offer for the disturbed human animal?

We have a media which enjoys success on the basis of how accurately the content resembles juicy gossip. We are offered these hints of what those individuals who are implied to be far more important than us are doing with their lives such as celebrities, including those we imagine to have sufficient fame and money to have earned freedom and happiness. The more important a person is deemed to be, the less significant the news about them need be in order to warrant publication.

For example, it is more important whether members of royalty are having a minor spat or social disagreement about wearing a certain hat in public than any question of whether you have any personal freedom or satisfaction in your life, from birth to death. Most of what we call ‘news’ is presented as a drama triangle in which you are framed as the victim, in the hope of inflaming your censure toward those framed as the perpetrators.

When slaves were kept, it was a common practice to lure them with the possibility that one day they might be freed by their own efforts. This ensured that they kept up the good work and didn’t lapse into despondency which might eventually collapse into such dense suffering as to spark an inner or outer revolution.

If you want to see how it is the consensus would prefer you to keep acting and thinking, take a look at how they medicate you with empty promises of your eventual success and freedom. These empty promises are on offer at every street corner, in every wing of human society. They are all clamouring for your investment of attention.

Does this sound like a balanced, sane society? Does this sound like a valuable investment of your ongoing input as a free being? What would it take to simply say ‘no’, and walk away from all of this idiocy once and for all – even if this only happened within your own most private inner sanctum?

Perhaps Aristotle was correct in his analysis of man as a political animal, and that humankind will always be bound by social conventions and the need for society in general. The big question however is: are you​ human? If not, what are you? Because if you are not what you think you are, what makes us think it is sensible to reduce our deepest needs to humankind’s needs, to the needs of the animal?

What are the requirements of the soul, what are the values of the true self? Maybe there are none, perhaps consciousness is just a temporary phantom. But how would you ever know unless you first cleared the table before you of all of the clutter?

There may not be very much time left to decide, as the human animal is now engineering intelligences capable of outsmarting itself. Consider the simplicity of the parlour tricks that have led man down the garden path over ages past. What is to come will likely consist in even more powerful demonstrations of illusion and persuasion.

What better time than now to inquire into the truth of who you are?

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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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