The Alt Centrist Approach To Education

The existing model for the education systems of the West is the Rockefeller education model. Based around the workings of the General Education Board, a Rockefeller-funded vehicle, it systematically dumbed down education for multitudes of American students, and, through American soft power, for multitudes of non-American students as well.

Rockefeller was not interested in developing the natural capacities of the students. He wanted an education system that pumped out robots to serve an industrial machine. He summarised his aims with the statement “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” He didn’t want artists and philosophers; he wanted men who could build steam trains, aeroplanes, skyscrapers, artillery pieces, and who could work the machines needed to manufacture and transport goods.

This meant that education lost its classical focus. No more was it considered important to know Greek and Latin; now it was just numbers, mass, quantity, volume, speed, distance. Teaching students to reason through philosophical positions was abandoned in favour of a focus on simple obedience. The end result is today’s Clown World: a population terrified into believing whatever the television tells them, too afraid to read and come to their own conclusions.

Any education system that discourages students from reaching their full potential is cruel. It’s also stupid, because the economic consequences cause everyone in society to suffer a lower standard of living. It’s therefore rejected under the Fourth and Fifth Rejections.

A former teacher, John Taylor Gatto, wrote the book ‘Dumbing Us Down‘ to explain the workings of the American education system. Gatto’s central thesis was that the education system was primarily intended to teach submission and obedience, mostly by breaking the students’ self-esteem and making them psychologically dependent on approval from authority.

Running an education system in this manner is highly orderly, in a sense, because it maintains and solidifies the existing class structure. This approach, however, leads to stagnation.

Alternative centrism recognises that children are created different by Nature, and that the souls placed in them by God are also different. Therefore, justice is the right schooling for the right soul.

This results in different schools for the different grades of soul. For the purposes of the education system, these would be fivefold: clay, iron, copper, silver and gold. Primary schools would be of clay and iron; secondary schools would be of iron, copper and silver; tertiary schools would be of copper, silver and gold.

Clay schools would teach simple trades and arts. Iron schools would teach trades, sports and military science. So the focus for young children would always be on basic trades, life skills and survival skills, but in iron school there would also be a heavy sporting component. This would also exist in clay school, as arts would exist in iron school, but to a lesser extent. There would be no emphasis on forcing hated subjects on students on the grounds it “builds character” or similar. Education must be made to seem a universal public good.

Copper schools would teach arts and commerce. In early years, the commercial focus would be on running small enterprises, and in later years on multinationals and corporates. So the scope of teaching would become more macroeconomical as time progressed. The arts component would be heavy as the copper schools should produce the bulk of the artists, performers and entertainers, i.e. those who don’t need to be grounded in physical reality.

Silver schools would teach business, administration and military science. The business element would overlap with the copper schools to some extent, but in the silver schools the focus would be more on the organisation of human society rather than profit. The graduates of these schools would be expected to become the administrators of the governments of the future.

Gold schools would teach science, philosophy and military science. This would cover the most advanced subjects and be where the majority of society’s original research is generated. If the graduates of the silver schools are to be the managers of the governments of the future, the graduates of the gold schools are to be the leaders. These graduates would be the philosopher-kings of the alternative centrist utopia.

The students would be sorted thusly.

At age five, they would be tested for physical health and strength. Essentially the deciding question would be whether they enjoyed playing sports. They wouldn’t need to be good at sports, but those who enjoyed playing them could be expected to develop the fundamental grounding in reality that is absent in those who are uncomfortable in the physical. Those students are also more likely to be prosocial. So the ones that are good at sports go to iron school, and the ones that are not go to clay school.

At age eleven, the children would be tested again, only this time for intelligence.

The ones of clay, if they prove intelligent, would move to copper school (secondary) for the remaining years until age 17. If unintelligent, they move to clay school (secondary). The ones of iron, if they prove intelligent, would move to silver school (secondary) until age 17. If unintelligent, they move to iron school (secondary).

Then the ones in silver school (secondary), upon reaching age 17, either move to copper school (tertiary), silver school (tertiary), or to gold school, which is only tertiary. The qualification for gold school is that one is interested in taking a transformative dose of a psychedelic, as per the Eleusinian and Elemental Mysteries. Anyone who freaks out upon encountering their own soul is prohibited from attending gold school. This means that spiritual acumen is the major qualification for entrance.

The logic behind this system would be to educate students for the societal niche that they naturally belong to. The fashionable modern idea that any student can be made into anything is utterly rejected. Humans are far from blank slates. Biology and karma both work to limit choice. The most just and least stupid education system would identify the social niche a child belonged to as early as possible, and then tailor the child’s education for success in that niche.

This system would also have the immense benefit of keeping the merchant class out of the ruling elite, thereby resisting much of the degeneracy that has consumed the West.

Not all schools are available to all ages. Thus, the youngest children will end up in either the clay or iron schools, the intermediate ones in the secondary schools and young adults in the tertiary schools. Older adult students could attend any tertiary school they qualified for.

To maximise freedom, it would be possible for students to move to any different school they qualified for, perhaps after special qualifying examinations at the end of each school year.

Teachers in these schools will be graduates of the gold, silver and copper schools. The idea is that they would be the best examples of their metal, paragons that the students could model themselves after. Some of the sporting instructors could be graduates of the iron schools.

As with the other features of school life, discipline would depend on the school and the nature of the students: iron schools could use corporal punishment, copper schools could use social exclusion and shame, silver and gold schools could use reason. Perhaps lead schools could be instituted to deal with the antisocial students.

The underlying logic of this system is a total rejection of the “No Child Left Behind” logic of George W Bush. The end result of the alternative centrist system would be young people able to contribute to their niche in society. Those capable of further education would be able to receive it; those incapable of further education should at least have the base skills to make themselves useful.

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.

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How We Will Lose Our Free Speech Rights

Because we’ve had peace and prosperity for so long now, it’s a common belief that both states are natural and no special effort is required to maintain either. This is a grievous delusion. It’s possible that, as per Phaedrus, the natural state of consciousness is incarnated in a higher dimension where there is no suffering. But down here on Earth, the natural state of life is brutish, nasty and short.

The tribal and violent nature of pre-civilisational life has been ameliorated, post-civilisation, chiefly through the invention of marriage, which has allowed supertribal consciousness to manifest through homogenising existing tribes in their shared offspring. The more tribes that married into each other, the more this higher consciousness was brought into being. Eventually clans formed, and then city-states.

These city-states had plenty of what Aristotle called philia. This was a kind of neighbourly solidarity that served as the mortar holding the edifice of society together. This philia created a sense that people were on the same team, moving in the same direction, and this goodwill allowed them to agree on things, e.g. that free speech would be important.

For most of human history, there has been a widespread understanding that the standard of living afforded by this homogeneity was a good thing, and so that homogeneity ought to be defended. So when new blood was introduced from the outside, it was married in to the existing stock so as to avoid factionalisation. Aristotle wrote, in Politics, that “heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction – at any rate until they have had time to assimilate.”

This factionalisation is what destroys freedoms, as freedoms only exist when everyone can agree on their importance. Absent this agreement, any and all freedoms can and do become banned on the grounds they are destabilising, corruptive or degenerate influences. The sad truth about the human animal is that we are panicky, skittish beings prone to contagions of fear and hysteria. Hence we like to ban things, especially if we don’t understand them. If there isn’t general agreement that a particular freedom is important, it tends to get banned.

The freest country in the world, America, is the way it is because of general agreement on the importance of free speech, free assembly, free trade and various other freedoms. Children are taught at the earliest school that freedom is a foundational American virtue, and that only America’s enemies oppose freedom.

Unfortunately, this mentality is not universal.

New Zealand had a referendum on freedom with the cannabis referendum in 2020. NZ-born voters voted Yes, for freedom. Those born outside of New Zealand voted No. Their cultures don’t have freedom, they don’t understand it. So they voted ours away.

Kiwis responded with a shrug, and just got on with life. Another freedom gone, who cares?

We will lose our free speech rights the same way.

The image at the top of this article is a screenshot of a recent press release from a coalition of religious groups in New Zealand: the highest authorities for each of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs in this country. They have combined forces to agitate for further free speech crackdowns. This is in response to some of the statements made by Brian Tamaki (see 2:00 in this video for examples), in particular claims that Modi was purging India of Christians and that New Zealand ought to retaliate in kind, burning down mosques and temples and purging New Zealand of Hindus, Sihks and Muslims.

Tamaki has said several heinous things, and could rightly be charged with being a nuisance to public order. But if hate speech laws are introduced, they will soon become blasphemy laws. It’s no secret that some religions, particularly the Abrahamisms, would like to make criticising them illegal. Adherents of these religions will tirelessly push to widen any hate speech law that gets passed.

The main long-term danger is that, as New Zealand becomes less Kiwi through mass immigration, the population becomes less interested in freedom.

Free speech became a core Western value in the 1950s, as neither the Nazi opponents in World War II nor the Commie opponents in the Cold War believed in it. We were told that free speech was why our societies were better: it allowed them to self-correct, thereby avoiding the extremes of the totalitarian systems.

This worked out excellently for some decades, up until the end of the 20th Century. After then, there was mass immigration from countries with no traditions of free speech. Consequently, popular support for free speech started to waver. Having little of value to say, the immigrants could not see the value in free speech. So support for free speech is now declining. It will continue to decline as the West continues to muttify.

There might not be a referendum in New Zealand about free speech per se, but about a free speech-related issue. It might be about a proposed hate speech law. In any case, the Chinese, Muslim and Pacific Islander voters who voted away our cannabis freedom will (in all likelihood) vote away our free speech rights as well. They can’t be expected to vote for freedom because it’s not valued in their cultures.

If New Zealanders lose our free speech rights, it will be through the mass immigration of people who don’t value them.

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The Alt Centrist Approach To Taxation

Taxation is symbolic of the imposition of order, and therefore of the Establishment Right. Everywhere there was a king, there was also a taxman. For a political body to operate on a higher level, there have to be taxes, as anyone who doesn’t successfully collectivise gets wiped out by those who do. Thus, the kind of natural selection that operates at the human group level has selected for groups that can successfully levy taxes.

Without taxation, it’s impossible for a political entity to impose the order that it needs to survive at the collective level. Thus the Alternative Centrist has no time for the argument that taxation is theft. This is the narrative of a child who doesn’t want to share its toys. It’s a fundamentally unserious narrative for people who have never thought about things.

Related to this, the Alternative Centrist believes that it’s morally impermissible to tick up a debt today and pass it down to one’s grandchildren. All the bleating about taxation being theft doesn’t mean it’s okay to pass the theft onto one’s descendants. Taxes must be high enough to cover government spending, currently some USD7.1 trillion in the case of America and NZD183 billion in the case of New Zealand.

The Fourth Acceptance of Alternative Centrism emphasises the importance of truth. The truth is that some ways of earning, investing and spending income are more prosocial than others. The Alternative Centrist buys the argument that taxation is a useful tool for modifying behaviour: in fact, it’s almost as good as the law. If some ways of gaining money are borderline criminal, there’s no shame in taxing them hard.

Most people can agree that working a normal job is prosocial. Some jobs are dirty or dangerous and the people doing them are really at the coal face of society. Many jobs are downright depressing, but need to be done. Other jobs are tedious in a manner that is harmful for mental health, but also need to be done. People who do these jobs generally don’t get paid much, so they also ought not to get taxed much.

The usual approach here is a progressive income tax system. The two problems with this are: progressive income tax systems are disorderly (i.e. expensive to administrate) and they tend to hammer the hardest workers.

The Alternative Centrist solves these problems in two ways.

The first is a moderate tax-free threshold, roughly equal to what a person would get on an unemployment benefit (i.e. the minimum one can live on). This is mostly for the sake of order: there is no point in taxing someone to just give the same money back in services that people wouldn’t have needed if taxation hadn’t impoverished them. Most Western countries do this, but it’s pointless and inefficient. Much better to have a tax-free threshold near the amount of money that a person needs to survive.

The second is a flat tax. Flat tax proposals appeal to the Alternative Centrist sense of justice, because they do not penalise hard workers and high achievers. A so-called progressive income tax system penalises working long hours, which is in theory the sort of prosocial activity that ought to be encouraged.

The argument that low taxes (a typically right-wing concern) are pro-freedom (a typically left-wing concern) is rejected as money worshipping. However, the Alternative Centrist approach is to tax labour lightly, on the grounds that it is the most prosocial way to make an income. This is in accordance with the Fifth Acceptance.

The Alternative Centrist approach also suggests that unearned income should be taxed much more than earned income, on the grounds that earning an income is more prosocial than receiving one without earning it.

Unearned income in the form of rent is the most antisocial. The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say observed that “Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery.” The argument that landlords “provide” housing is summarily rejected: it’s like claiming that armed robbers provide health. As the most antisocial legal way to make money, rental income needs to be taxed heavily.

The Georgist solution to rental income is excellent.

Residential and commercial rents in the United States are estimated to bring in USD$2.2 trillion every year. If we assume that the ground rental value of these rents is about a third of that, an 80% tax on those ground rents ought to yield some USD$600 billion p.a.

Existing land tax proposals (c.f. that of New Zealand’s Opportunity Party) often make the error of taxing the family home. The error here is in destroying security of household tenure. If the household is the basis of society, then security of household tenure is the basis of the order of that society. This goes against the First Acceptance. The Alternative Centrist would rather see massive taxes on income from ground rents than taxes on a family home.

Wealth taxes are discouraged by the Alternative Centrist. Unlike land taxes, wealth taxes can be avoided by taking the wealth overseas. Thus they are rejected on the grounds they lead to disorder. Inheritance taxes on family homes are rejected for the same reason: breaking up family homes to pay inheritance taxes is grossly disorderly (inheritance taxes on investment properties would be severe though).

Earning money from investments is still prosocial, but not as much as working. Thus, dividends on stocks and shares would be taxed moderately under an Alternative Centrist system. Capital gains would also be taxed moderately under this logic. To get around the problem of tax havens, the Alternative Centrist approach is to work towards international minimum corporate tax agreements.

Moderate consumption taxes are supported by the Alternative Centrist. Consumption isn’t antisocial, but an excess of it is, and therefore taxes on consumption ought to be moderate. They can also bring in significant amounts of money, lightening the burden on workers. Transaction taxes are also considered good when and if they are workable. The concern is that they can be easily avoided, which is both disorderly and stupid.

Following the reasoning that taxation can guide behaviour, the Alternative Centrist approach to taxation involves heavy vice taxes.

Alcohol taxation brings in USD11 billion for the American federal treasury every year. Texas brings in USD1.6 billion in alcohol taxation annually for a state with around 9% of America’s population, and this revenue is generally considered typical per capita alcohol tax revenue for an American state. Extrapolating that across 50 states, and adding federal revenue, suggests some USD30 billion p.a. is currently gathered through alcohol taxes.

The examples of American states that have already legalised cannabis suggest that every million people can yield USD50 million in annual cannabis taxes. So a population of 350 million could yield over USD17 billion p.a. Taxes on cannabis consumption could bring in NZD490 million p.a. in the case of New Zealand, according to the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research.

Significant gambling wins would also be heavily taxed. There is no need to tax gambling wins below a certain threshold, but professional gamblers would be taxed moderately and those receiving huge windfalls would be taxed heavily.

These vice taxes would not bring in that much money, perhaps 2% of government spending at most. The point of them is primarily to use the tool of taxation as a way of imposing good order upon society; there is more to taxation than just government revenue.

Realistically, even with all of these measures, much of the tax burden will have to fall on workers. Even with AI and mass automation, this is inescapable. On account of the sheer volume of the masses, the bulk of economic activity consists of everyday workers. This will have to be taxed to some extent to keep the national machine running. But, with all the measures outlined above, the tax burden on workers should be minimal.

The general principle is threefold: light taxes on labour, moderate taxes on investment and consumption, heavy taxes on vices and unearned income.

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!
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 Alt Centrist Approach To Welfare

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduced the concepts of corrective and distributive justice. Corrective justice is the form that we’re used to: commit a crime, and you get corrected with punishment. Distributive justice relates to who justly gets how much of the boons of society. Aristotle believed that people ought to get rewards and honours in proportion to their contribution to society. He was emphatically not a communist, believing that those who contributed more ought to get more. But neither was he a capitalist, preaching that the poor deserve suffering. He promoted the Golden Mean between the two extremes.

Ancient Rome is often characterised as a cruel, sink-or-swim system, but they had an institution known as the annona, or the grain dole. After centuries of military expansion, many wealthy landowners had replaced Roman workers with foreign slaves. The resulting impoverishment led to constant rioting and civil unrest. So Gaius Gracchus introduced the grain dole in 123 BCE, resulting in free food for the Roman citizenry. Later emperors added pork and wine.

The concept of distributive justice barely exists in the modern West. In our system, which can be called whorehouse economics, whoever has the money decides. People are conditioned to believe that a person is entitled to what the money men give them, and no more. Anyone who doesn’t work for a capitalist deserves to starve. This is because the merchantry have long since driven the Establishment Right out of effective control, so concepts like noblesse oblige are long forgotten.

This approach is transparently cruel and therefore is rejected under the Fourth Rejection.

The Establishment Left’s argument for welfare is that it maximises freedom. The logic here is that poverty itself is the first and primary source of enslavement. Poverty makes people desperate, which enslaves them to landowners and other wealthy people in the hope of a paycheck. So raising the floor of poverty through welfare promotes freedom generally.

The Establishment Right counters with the observation that if the masses are allowed to vote themselves infinity free money, they will do it, and the economy will collapse. Tiberius is recorded as stating that if everyone would be granted everything they petitioned for, the treasury would soon be empty, and the state would have to extort or steal money to stay operational.

Therefore, distributive justice needs to find the mean between impoverishing the masses and impoverishing the treasury.

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck was one of the first Establishment Centrists. He championed a welfare state as a way of ensuring peace between the various classes of Prussian society, and to forestall the rise of Communism. His reasoning was that if people who couldn’t work had a safety net to fall back on, society would be much stronger.

Over time, other countries adopted similar systems. As decades passed, and more and more was handed out in exchange for votes, these systems became bloated. Tiberius’s warning applies to society in 2026 as well as to his time.

By today, disability insurance fraud in America is estimated by the FBI to cost USD40 billion per year, and in Australia is believed to cost up to AUD4.6 billion per year. These vast sums require further vast sums to investigate and police. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current approach to welfare: if you only give it to the “deserving”, following the belief that everyone is obliged to work unless disabled, it costs billions to determine who is deserving and who isn’t.

A universal basic income is an elegant solution. It maximises freedom and minimises cruelty (as well as expense).

The alternative centrist doesn’t buy the right-wing argument that everyone needs to “earn” a living. For one thing, that kind of moralising is the exact kind of slave morality that alternative centrism exists to oppose. For another thing, the UBI will not provide a high standard of living. Elon Musk’s idea of a universal high income is not realistic, because so much of wealth is about controlling other people, and that’s a zero-sum affair.

The UBI would be low, not generous, and there would be very little government largesse over and above this. Private charity would still be available, as it is today, but there would be no accommodation allowances, temporary additional support, disability bonuses or any other spending over and above the UBI (one might consider paying a half-UBI to mothers of under-18s for nationalist reasons).

The UBI would lead to all of order, freedom and peace for a variety of reasons.

One is because it would enable forward planning. Even if a UBI recipient only got $500 per week, they would know they were getting $2,000 in the next month and $25,000 in the next year, and could plan accordingly. This would open up opportunities for securing rental tenancies or business financing that did not exist previously.

The second is that it would minimise resentment. As of right now, young Westerners working the average job in their locale cannot afford housing. They watch half of their wages disappear in rent and are left with little after food and transport are paid for. It feels like a bitterly cruel rip-off. A UBI would let younger people also feel like they were getting a share of the bounties of modern society.

The third is less pressure on desirable housing. Most young people, upon finishing their education, find themselves forced to move where the jobs are. This is usually the big cities. The enormous demand for housing in urban areas is the prime driver of the housing affordability crisis. A UBI would make it possible to survive in low-cost, low-opportunity areas. This would release pressure on urban housing and make it more possible for younger people to afford the housing they need to raise families in, even if it meant taking a less ambitious job.

The fourth, and perhaps major reason, is that it would remove the desperation that is often the cause of crime. No-one would wonder where their next dollar was coming from: they’ll get $500 next Wednesday evening. This would promote orderly conduct. It would also make it politically feasible to introduce severe punishments for antisocial behaviour, the reasoning being that, absent desperation, people would only commit crimes out of malice. Therefore it’s justified to bring the hammer down on criminals.

It might be argued that a UBI will lead to degeneracy, as it pays people to do nothing, but that is countered in other ways (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Society).

The alt centrist approach to welfare is simple, neat and long-sighted: a moderate amount of distributive justice plus a high amount of efficiency.

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!
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!