conflict – Page 73

Writing Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a condition characterised by extreme emotional instability and sensitivity to criticism. This means that characters with the condition are naturally well suited to dramatic fiction. This article looks at how to write interesting and believable characters with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Originally named because it was the label given to those on the border between diagnoses (in particular psychosis and neurosis), BPD has taken on a somewhat different meaning in recent editions of the DSM. Indeed, some believe the name is no longer accurate, and the condition ought to be renamed as something like “Emotional Disregulation Disorder”.

People with BPD tend to have extremely strong reactions to criticism. This is believed to stem ultimately from a weak sense of self, which makes them prone to being heavily impacted by what other people say about them. It’s as if they don’t have the same defences that most people have when it comes to accepting criticism and resisting bullying.

They also tend to have problems when it comes to interpersonal empathy. A character with BPD might seem a bit narcissistic or psychopathic to other characters because of their apparent refusal to take other people’s feelings into account when making decisions. Alternatively, they might perceive someone to be angry at them when they really are not.

If the protagonist of your story has BPD, it might be that they experience even mild criticism as brutal, sharp and denigrating. This could make them seem extremely sensitive, or even narcissistic, to other characters. The difference between BPD and narcissism in this sense is that a person with BPD can be reassured that the criticism was not intended to be wounding, whereas a narcissist would likely bear a grudge.

People with BPD also tend to have a very strong fear of abandonment. It is uncommon for them to feel secure in romantic relationships. A protagonist with this condition will probably experience a lot of thoughts of jealousy and suspicion going through their minds. They will frequently perceive their partner as flirting with others when they really aren’t.

A protagonist that gets involved in a romantic relationship with another character who has BPD is probably in for a rocky time. People with BPD tend to treat their lovers like a demigod one minute and dogshit the next. This is often very difficult for those lovers, who then don’t really know where they stand. The line between this kind of behaviour and narcissistic abuse is not obvious.

On the other hand, a character with BPD might be more than memorable in bed. The combination of emotional intensity, need for reassurance, and lack of inhibition can make for an incredible sexual experience – perhaps even enough to make up for all the insanity otherwise endured. A psychologist can tell you that this kind of treatment is liable to become addictive, which makes for a tumultuous time.

Realistically, an experience with BPD is more likely to be deeply unpleasant than it is to result in legendary erotic achievements. Self harm is common among people with the condition, and could be considered characteristic of it. If the protagonist of your story encounters someone with scars on their forearms, this could foreshadow some intensely emotional scenes.

If your protagonist encounters a character with BPD, they might realise something is amiss on account of that that character has dysfunctional life goals. The borderline character might seem to drift from one meaningless activity to another, with little awareness paid to the fact that they’re getting older and that time is passing them by. This might manifest as a nihilistic streak.

A character with BPD might be disliked by other characters, sometimes intensely, if they don’t have sympathy for the condition. Because people with it tend to be deeply wounded by criticism, they can develop a tendency to lash out hard at minor insults. This can make them antagonistic and grudge-keeping. Other characters might get the perception that they have to walk on eggshells around the borderline or else run the risk of being attacked.

BPD is around three times more common in women than it is in men (this is likely one of the main reasons why women are often seen as less emotionally stable than men). This can add to the difficulty of having the condition. If you’re writing a female character with BPD, that character might discover that other people don’t take their condition seriously, because their prejudice leads them to put it down to being a woman etc.

In the eyes of a protagonist who is encountering a character with BPD, the borderline character might just seem like a loose cannon, akin to certain other conditions like Schizophrenia and Histrionic Personality Disorder. Much as with those conditions, the risk of self-harm and suicide is often present with BPD. This is partially a result of the disinhibition that comes with the disorder but it is also the result of the fact that people with BPD tend to have difficult lives.

All in all, a character with Borderline Personality Disorder is a good choice if your dramatic fiction needs some more drama. Things are unlikely to remain stable for long with such a character around. However, care will have to be taken to portray such a character with compassion, and not make them seem like an arsehole.

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

How Mass Immigration Leads to The Loss of Freedom

The right to free expression is not a universally held cultural value, and can only be maintained as long as a sufficient proportion of the population support it

Historically speaking, the main reason why people have resisted mass immigration into their territories is because it usually leads to a loss of freedoms, in particular freedom to practice one’s culture. In recent decades, Westerners have been told that mass immigration to the West would not cause them to lose freedoms, but this turned out to be lies. This essay will examine how immigration, especially from undeveloped countries, leads to a loss of freedoms for the host population.

For people to have any freedoms at all they have to value those freedoms highly enough to assert them. If they cannot assert them, the ruling class will take them away. It can be seen in every society that, in order for people to value those freedoms highly enough to assert them in the faces of the ruling class, they have to share them in common, enough so to call it a culture.

Without a shared belief in the value of certain freedoms, they cannot be maintained. If only part of a population believes in a freedom, then the ruling class can ban it and not enough of the population will believe in it to assert it. Therefore, it will be lost. We can see, then, that freedoms are lost as soon as the proportion of the population that supports them falls below a certain level.

For example, naturally speaking, people are free to walk the land. There is no private property in a state of Nature, and originally there were no prohibitions on where one could go. Over the past 5,000 years, as something called civilisation got invented, this freedom was eventually stripped from the people by rulers who commanded men of iron able to use violence to drive undesired people away from certain territories.

The Swedes, possibly on account of the hard-won lessons of solidarity learned by their Viking forebears, were not willing to lose their right to walk the land freely. Thus, they asserted that right in the face of enclosures, and won what they call the allemansrätt (this was known as the Freedom to Roam back when Anglos used to assert this right). This means that Swedish people have the right to walk through property owned by other people as long as they do not come within sight of the main house (and some other restrictions).

Immigration is not likely to threaten allemansrätt anytime soon, but it is threatening (or has already destroyed) other freedoms, all over the West.

New Zealand Federation of Islam Associations president Hazim Arafeh voiced his opposition to a talk by journalist Lauren Southern in Auckland earlier this month, leading to it effectively getting banned by Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s refusal to approve a venue for it. Arafeh, in his attempt to get the talk banned, stated that “I don’t think insulting Muslims comes under free speech, that’s an abuse of freedom of speech.”

As everyone who actually values free speech knows, free speech is precisely what that is. The cultural value of free speech entails that the responsibility is on the listener to not chimp out when they hear something provoking. The reason why this is important is that it makes it possible to talk about things like rational human beings instead of keeping quiet out of fear, because this leads to resentment and then violence.

Satire, windups and pisstaking necessarily come under this umbrella, as do insults and criticisms of governments and religions.

Free speech acts as a safety valve that releases political pressure when the ruling class starts veering off path. An incompetent ruling class will always try to crack down on criticism rather than accept that they have been incompetent, and for this reason free speech must be ardently defended. The alternative is that ruling class corruption and incompetence becomes entrenched.

It is because the Anglosphere values free speech that we have never had a fascist or communist dictatorship come to power in any of our countries. None of Britain, America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand have ever had a totalitarian government, for the reason that our right to free expression enables us to criticise the bastards, and thereby to organise opposition, before they fuck everything up. Thus, no Hitlers, no Stalins, no Pol Pots, no mass starvation of tens of millions.

Arafeh, not being a Kiwi, doesn’t understand any of this. It’s not important to him. He will not defend it.

Islamic culture forces women to cover up because it considers those women responsible for the urges that their appearance might induce in men. The onus of responsibility is not on the Muslims, but on women, who are inferior, to moderate themselves. By the same token, the culture forces people whose speech it disapproves of to keep their mouths shut because it considers those people responsible for the violent urges that their speech might induce in Muslims.

The onus of responsibility is on us Westerners, as inferior, to moderate ourselves. We can see from what happened with Lauren Southern that Muslims are forcing us to shut our mouths in the same way they force their women to cover up – under the implicit threat of violence.

It’s obvious that if we had not allowed any Muslims to immigrate to this country, Arafeh could not have written a letter to Goff “on behalf of 50,000 to 60,000 Muslims in New Zealand”. It’s equally obvious that if we let in another 50,000 to 60,000 Muslims, we will lose even more rights, because we can see this happening in other countries that have made the mistake of opening themselves to mass Muslim immigration.

Multiculturalism necessarily means that the only freedoms that remain are universal values that are supported by all people. What Westerners have failed to understand is that free speech is not a universal value. Most people on this planet are pathetic slave-creatures, not educated citizen-orators that can be expected to assert their rights through reasoned debate.

In short, we’re losing our freedom to speak freely because we’ve let in a lot of people who do not value free speech, and this is just one example. As shown by Europe, if we continue to let these people in, our rights to free expression will be further curtailed, and then the rights of people to walk certain neighbourhoods free of molestation will be curtailed, and then the rights of women to walk in public without covering up will be curtailed.

As long as banks continue to demand mass immigration for the sake of propping up house prices, gutless politicians will continue to placate those making the threats of violence for the sake of appearing to maintain order. We need to take care that our immigration policies don’t end up robbing us of our hard-won rights of free expression.

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).

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.

Alchemical Iron, Iron Magic and Iron Magicians

A medieval knight in plate mail armour was the foremost iron magician of his time

A previous essay looked at alchemical silver, silver magic and silver magicians. This essay does the same for alchemical iron, iron magic and iron magicians.

Iron represents the masculine, in contradistinction to the clay of the feminine. It arose as an adaptation to scenarios in which clay was too soft, although like the clay, and unlike the silver and gold, iron is also base. Iron is heavy, like the clay, but unlike the clay it is hard and unyielding. This makes it an ideal substance from which to shape tools – and weapons.

This metaphorical use of iron is everywhere. Iron is used almost universally as a metaphor for men who are firm, determined, strong, protective – the kind of guy who would win the Hawaiian Ironman. This is why a person will say to a young man that he needs to “harden up” if he should adopt an attitude appropriate to war. Ozzy Osbourne, revealing his occult education, described things well in the lyrics of Iron Man, a song about a being that doesn’t seem to be alive and doesn’t seem to think (i.e. it lacks clay, silver and gold).

Iron is best found on the outside, protecting the three softer elements within. This is necessarily the case, except for very simple forms of life, in the biological world, which has evolved to reflect these fundamental principles. In creatures such as crabs, the iron forms an exoskeleton, on the outside. In humans, the iron takes the form of bones and muscles, which serve to protect the clay (in the torso), the silver (in the head) and the gold (the spinal column).

Even on the macro level this is the case – as below, so above. Groups of early proto-humans and even of primates are capable of organising themselves so that strong young men are on the outside, facing other iron magicians in the form of enemy warriors or dangerous creatures, and leaving the women and children on the inside. More notably, it is the instinct of almost every man to step in the way if he observes a physical threat approaching his wife or children.

In some ways, this is a tragic position, and a thankless one. It could also be considered an honourable position that demanded sacrifice, in the sense that it is the duty of a man to protect his wife and children from wild animals and from the elements etc. In this sense, iron is synonymous with masculine strength and virility.

A person who can be described as ‘anaemic’ is one who is physically weak and lethargic, and this condition arises from an absence of iron. So above, so below. A doctor might note that a person’s body lacks iron, but an alchemist might point out that a person’s spirit might also be lacking iron.

The elementary action of iron is to divide. This starts by dividing the clay. A lion that tears up the body of a zebra is essentially acting as iron naturally acts – to divide the clay. Iron is so good at this that it can also divide silver and gold – which is a point long understood by the creatures of silver and gold, who prefer to stay well out of the way of creatures of iron.

Iron magic, therefore, is the magic of dividing, of bringing chaos to order while preserving one’s own order – otherwise known as the art of war. After all, war is little more than maintaining structure while weakening or breaking the structure of the enemy. Indeed, the first time a group of natives saw a firearm discharged in their direction they usually thought it a form of magic.

A professional boxer or soldier is an example of a top-class iron magician. The boxer can throw his fists and cause chaos to a their opponent’s physical structure – a soldier does the same but with bullets. In either case, the methodology used to get past to opponent’s defences and take him out with a shot to a vital area is iron magic.

The Conceit of Iron is that might makes right. It’s easily possible for a man of iron to think that, just because he’s capable of beating everyone up if they disagree with him, that he must therefore be the right one to be in charge. The danger of this conceit is that it can reduce human interaction to an essentially chimp-like level, where power is little more than a matter of force.

Iron can clash with clay, and with silver, mostly because of the Conceit of Iron but also for other reasons. The hardness of iron can feel like fire to those it touches, and this can lead to extreme agitation. It’s common for iron to unwittingly cause discord with the softer elements through a lack of subtlety or caution. For its part, iron can easily become paranoid, and afraid of revenge for past brutalities.

Silver can intimidate iron with its brilliance, which is the main way iron loses to the precious elements. Furthermore, silver is not immediately yielding like clay and gold, and this resistance is usually enough to cause iron to think twice. As any seasoned fighter knows, simply having to think twice is often enough to cause a man to lose the will to fight, and in this sense silver magic can trump iron magic.

For fear of counterattack or future reprisals, iron tends to be wary about moving into silver or gold. If iron is capable of learning, it will quickly learn that silver is capable of anticipating its actions and accounting for them. Therefore, risking a direct attack is unlikely unless the silver already looks weak, or tarnished for some reason. It will also quickly learn that attacking gold invites massive reprisals from all quarters.

When it does, silver tends to become very resentful, because they may be forced to harden up in order to deal with the aggressive intrusion (and, in hardening, become more material and therefore less intelligent). Silver likes to think that iron serves it and works according to its direction. When the opposite happens it feels like a violation.

Traditionally speaking, men of iron were associated with the colour blue, because iron swords and armour have a blue tinge. This is the reason why Police forces in Western countries that have followed the Western alchemical tradition have blue uniforms – the Police are the wall of iron between the soft elements of women, children and the elderly ruling class against the criminal element.