The Alt Centrist Approach To Science And Technology

Thirty years on from the publication of the Unabomber Manifesto, it’s apparent that Ted Kaczynski was right about technology. It mostly enslaves rather than liberates. We were promised all of humanity’s information and learning at our fingertips; we received advertising, addiction and slop.

The difficulty is foreign relations. A technologically inferior nation will be subjugated by a technologically superior one, as history demonstrates.

Therefore, the alternative centrist state needs to find a balance between the enslaving effects of technology and the need to defend ourselves against foreign aggressors (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Defence for more on this).

Resisting the enslaving effects of technology does not mean surrendering to hysteria or propaganda. The alternative centrist opposes clumsy, anti-freedom measures like the under-16 social media ban. Such moves are egregious violations of the Second Acceptance. Research has shown that the harms of social media use for younger people are drastically overstated; opposition to social media is a moral panic.

However, despite the advantages of technology in minimising human suffering, it can also cause immense suffering, in particular through its enslaving effects. Kaczynski pointed out that the invention of the car did not make people freer, because they ended up needing cars. This is now also true of cellphones.

The alternative centrist approach divides media technology into one-way media and two-way media. One-way media is when the receiver cannot communicate with the sender or with any other receivers, such as television or radio. Two-way media is when it’s possible for the receiver to give their opinion and to discuss the merits of the broadcast with others. Two-way media is preferred, on the basis of the freedom and justice it offers compared to one-way media.

Much of the hysteria about social media is pushed by advocates of one-way media who don’t want people talking. The reality is that media did not arise organically as a way of informing people. The media has been an apparatus of propaganda since its inception. This constant propagandising has had extremely damaging effects on both social cohesion and on the mental health of the citizenry. It’s not natural to sit passively to get hectored and badgered into obeying the political establishment and consuming.

The alternative centrist state would levy massive taxes on technology that has significant deleterious effects on mental and social health. This would mean that televisions and smartphones, along with all other devices for receiving one-way media, were taxed as vices, like alcohol and tobacco. Advertising on one-way media would be heavily taxed also, to make up for the social harm caused.

The main advantage with future technology will be replacing harms caused by human error.

One area of application is self-driving cars. Human drivers currently kill over 40,000 people in America every year. The vast majority of these deaths are attributable to speeding, impaired driving, distracted driving and fatigue or drowsiness. Self-driving cars will not have these problems. Already there are video compliations demonstrating the superior ability of self-driving cars to avoid accidents.

It’s easy to predict that human drivers will soon be banned. This wouldn’t be much different to ships and planes using computers to navigate instead of humans using sextants and altimeters. The alternative centrist encourages all possibilities for reducing human misery through technology.

A similar case applies to medicine. Iatrogenic harm is believed to kill as many as 250,000 people annually in America. There are several reasons for this, but over and above the difficulties inherent to a complicated subject such as medicine, there is a lot of indifference among doctors as to the patients’ realities. Many people have had the experience of meeting an elderly doctor who checked out of learning new things 15 years ago and simply will not listen. Much like elderly drivers, elderly doctors like this do tremendous amounts of damage.

An alternative centrist state would leverage AI for potential healthcare benefits, especially in the area of preventative medicine. School students would be taught to use AI for this purpose, and also when to bypass the AI to enlist a human doctor.

Jurisprudence is a third area in which AI offers great advantages. People are regularly confused and appalled by the bizarre verdicts and sentences handed out by biased and prejudiced humans. Peaceful cannabis growers often get harsher sentences than people who beat others to death and people who sexually offend against young children. Grok recommends sentences more in line with what a decent human would.

One of the major problems with modern technology is that it is mostly controlled by corporate interests in America. The solution is government-controlled social media. The alternative centrist state would create social media platforms for domestic use. This is not hard to achieve today with many clones of existing platforms available. The state would then communicate with its citizens exclusively on these domestic platforms. This would allow for the social benefits of social media, but would prevent much of the manipulation by foreign actors.

In a related vein, foreign social media platforms that do not follow free speech laws will be heavily fined or banned. Platforms such as Reddit, which do not allow nationalists to speak, would be banned outright.

Aside from the heavy taxes on antisocial forms of technology, technological development would, like most economic issues, mostly be left to the free market (see The Alt Centrist Approach To The Economy). Close co-operation between the corporates and the military for the sake of technological development would be established, and facilitated, by the state.

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!

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The Alt Centrist Approach To Work And Employment

If politics is about securing the means of a good life, work and employment are how most people primarily achieve this. Both are therefore at the core of the alternative centrist approach.

The average person in our society, not having a spiritual or religious tradition, neither any intellectual or cultural interests, nor any meaningful family connections, imposes order upon their lives primarily through their employment. Prosocial behaviour is taught through the need to cooperate with workmates and submit to the corporate hierarchy. Work gives many people purpose and keeps many bad thoughts away.

The alternative centrist proposal is that the order imposed by the workplace needs to be balanced by an equal proportion of freedom.

The alternative centrist agrees with Julius Evola that spirituality ought to be the primary focus of a life, and a person’s way of earning a living is less important. Productivity is the measure of slaves; happiness is the measure of free people. As such, the alternative centrist state would not indulge in the vulgar GDP obsession that characterises our merchant-ruled age. Although productivity would be important, this would only be as a means to a happy life. The alternative centrist state would constantly emphasise, in contradistinction to a Marxist or capitalist one, the relative unimportance of wealth (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Spirituality).

The problem with work and employment in the West is that we never came to terms with the fact that we now live in an age of abundance. Our economic model was founded in an age when anyone who didn’t labour was likely to become a major burden to their community. The unemployed were mostly left to starve until the advent of unemployment benefits near the beginning of the 20th Century. Now there is so much wealth that there is no need for the workamania of bygone times.

However, the drive of the employer class to pauperise their workers has remained. Hence a battle has ensued, between the representatives of capital and the representatives of labour. Resulting from this battle was a multitude of laws and regulations concerning work and employment. The reasoning is that these laws should provide for a fair balance between the needs of the employer and the needs of the worker, such that the employer gets his profit and the worker gets his means to subsistence.

Unfortunately for the modern Western worker, he has been driven into a state of wage slavery. Even if the job only occupies his body for 40 hours that week, chances are it occupies his mind for many more. Many people go to bed thinking about their work and wake up in a state of dread. Because the alternative is often destitution, homelessness or imprisonment, the worker puts up with his awful conditions.

This situation has come about by design.

The alternative centrist supports a universal basic income (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Welfare). This UBI would be enough for anyone to renounce the world. Thus it would act as a floor on the level of desperation the worker can be subjected to, and finally give him some leverage, for the first time since the advent of neoliberalism and mass immigration.

With a universal basic income, there would be no need for minimum wage laws. So in one stroke, all of the right-wing arguments about inefficiency of minimum wage laws would be accommodated. The right wing likes to argue that they should have the freedom to work for a pitiful wage if they should so choose (e.g. to gain work experience). Under an alternative centrist system with a UBI, you could employ someone for $1 per hour.

There would also be no need for worker protections when it came to security of employment. The concept of “unfair dismissals” relates to a situation where losing one’s job entails a significant disruption to one’s life. A UBI moderates that disruption. Hence an alternative centrist government sees little problem with the “hire and fire” method of employment.

The universal basic income would defeat the argument that agricultural interests need to import cheap labour to do seasonal work. With a UBI, workers would be free to live cheaply in urban areas for most of the year, and then work hard for a season in an agricultural enterprise, before returning to the cities. By this means, the needs of the citizen for income, the employer for labour, and the nation for cohesion can all be met with a maximum of order, freedom and justice.

Anyone who aspires to more than a student’s lifestyle, however, will probably need a job. Unless a person is born into money, a UBI will only pay for the barest essentials. It will cover cheap rent in an undesirable location, basic foods and utilities, some simple clothing and little more. Aristotle noted that desires tend towards the infinite, so there will be plenty of motivation for people to get work and stay employed. Those who argue that a UBI will turn the workforce into couch potatoes don’t understand how unpleasant the student lifestyle is in the long term, and how difficult it is to meet one’s natural social needs without work and employment. The vast majority of people will desire more and they will need to work to get it.

The alternative centrist government would not seek to expand beyond the existing size of Western governments. However, it would maintain a Ministry of Works. This would employ a considerable number of people in national infrastructure projects.

Beyond a Ministry of Works, the alternative centrist government would leave most employment to the free market. The goal would be to facilitate the creation of internationally competitive firms, so as to maximise the nation’s return on the investment in education and infrastructure that made the firms possible in the first place.

Regarding specific jobs, the various schools would seek to link up students to firms in the appropriate industry. In theory, the schools ought to prepare people for whatever employment currently existed in the various realms (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Education). So in the realm of clay, the schools would funnel students towards agricultural, labouring, retail and simple trades. In the realm of iron, towards military, police and security jobs. In the realm of copper, towards more advanced trades, entertainment and the arts. In the realm of silver, towards business and administration jobs. Those in the realm of gold will seldom be employed, other than to learn experience.

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

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The Alt Centrist Approach To Mental Health

50 years ago, mental health was mostly ignored. Today, it’s a major issue. 50 years from now, mental health will be taken as seriously as physical health. The alternative centrist, approaching the midpoint of the 21st Century since the reign of Augustus, makes provisions for the mental health challenges of the future.

A point lost on most today is that ‘psychiatry’ is made up of two words, ‘psyche’ and ‘iatros’, which mean ‘soul’ and ‘healer’. A psychiatrist is supposed to be someone who heals the soul. They are not meant to be someone who prescribes pills and little more. Today’s psychiatrists are primarily concerned with preventing people from freaking out and damaging property. The vast majority of them don’t even believe in souls, let alone have any way to heal them.

As a result, some of those who have been through the mental health system, or who look at the rates of depression and anxiety today, ask if psychiatry has any value at all. One can readily concede it has value sedating people who might kill themselves or someone else in the next 24 hours. But it has much less value in taking the vast numbers of mentally ill people from outpatient treatment to good mental health.

The alternative centrist approach to mental health wouldn’t change much when it came to acute mental healthcare. When it came to chronic mental healthcare, however, a major change in attitude would be made. The approach of the past was that people can take care of themselves; psychological concerns are too subtle to be important anyway. This attitude reflects a grosser, cruder, more vulgar and more ignorant age.

In the time of the alternative centrist, it will be understood that the concept of health applies to all aspects of the human being, from the least subtle to the most. Thus, mental health is as important as physical.

Applying our Aristotelean maxim “the starting point is the fact”, the fact is that most mental health problems are caused by trauma. Another fact is that the chemical imbalance narrative was promoted by pharmaceutical companies who wanted people hooked on their products. The alternative centrist approach to mental health is fully trauma-informed.

The difficulty is that the three Establishment positions have created a system which is inherently traumatising. This has been by design – trauma breaks people, making them unwilling and/or unable to fight back, thereby securing the Establishment’s control. The alternative centrist system is necessarily anti-trauma.

Not creating more trauma is the purview of the other alternative centrist approaches. Fixing the trauma already created, however, is the basis of the alternative centrist approach to mental health.

According to this approach, mental healthcare is the equivalent of maintaining the psychological infrastructure of the nation. This makes it an essential spend, and not a luxury. Thus, the alternative centrist is happy to spend money sorting it out. This will mean, alongside the existing spend in training psychiatrists in acute mental healthcare, also training mental health practitioners about conditions like PTSD and C-PTSD. These traumatic stress-based conditions are rife in the Western World, and their accumulated effects over the past century are the chief reason why our society currently resembles a mental asylum.

The alternative centrist frees up money for healing trauma by not spending it on hopeless cases. This will involve euthanasia for the incurably feeble-minded. Anyone so mentally disabled as to be a permanent burden will be given a dignified death. This will also include those suffering from a dementia, a hellish condition with no cure. Doing this implies a complete rejection of Abrahamic morality (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Religion).

This approach of euthanising the hopeless cases, in order to free up money to spend on those with hope of a decent life, is similar to the alternative centrist approach to law and order. Herein it can be seen that alternative centrism is far from being a weak compromise position like establishment centrism. Alternative centrism actually achieves the goals of both the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left here (viz. order and freedom) specifically by avoiding the middle ground. This would not be considered cruel, and would not violate the Fourth Rejection, because it would be considered merciful.

This proposed massive expansion of the mental health apparatus would occur not so much in a clinical sense as an everyday spiritual sense.

Absent the Abrahamic influences, there is no need for the alternative centrist state to separate psychiatry from spirituality. Without the danger of mental healthcare practitioners trying to convert vulnerable patients to Abrahamism, the emphasis could fully be on the healing of the soul. The patients would be encouraged to see their conditions as primarily spiritual phenomena, and not personal failings.

The teaching would be that abuse, neglect and nihilism damage the soul. The ten major forms of adverse childhood experience would be learned and taught as part of the fundamentals of mental healthcare. This would extend to schooling: young students will be taught the basics of mental health and mental illness, so they can recognise it in themselves and others. They would also be taught not to see mental health as a taboo subject.

Healing of the soul, in the alternative centrist conception, is based on forming quality relationships. The first step is a relationship with the true self. Patients and students alike would be taught that the true self, more fundamental than either body or mind, is a fragment of God consciousness, and that each one of us is an expression of divinity (again, a complete rejection of the Abrahamic approach). From there, they would be encouraged to interact with the rest of society on that basis.

The alternative centrist psychiatrist would teach that consciousness is the prima materia and that its natural state is one of perfect bliss, and therefore there’s no reason to be afraid of anything, because all suffering is temporary. Healing trauma is, to a major extent, a matter of unlearning false ideas about oneself and about reality. The alternative centrist mental healthcare worker would encourage meditation, self-inquiry and other spiritual practices.

The alternative centrist state would put a lot of money into psychedelic research, recognising it as a trend of the future. At time of writing, there are regularly new breakthoughs in psychedelic medicine: the most recent is the potential for using LSD to treat anxiety. A 2024 Nature article wrote that “The clinical investigation of psychedelic medicines has blossomed over the last 5 years.” Less harmful alternatives to the common pharmaceuticals, which themselves often have horrendous side-effects, are desperately needed.

As per the alternative centrist approach to recreation, communities for mental health support could be expected to form naturally given the universal basic income. In situations where this was impossible, the Ministry of Mental Health would try to make it possible.

Because the alternative centrist approach to welfare involves a UBI, psychiatric patients would no longer need to see their psychiatrists as enemies. Under the existing system, psychiatric patients are dependent on psychiatrists to get approval for disability payments, and as such have to be extremely careful about what they say to them, suspicious that the psychiatrist is looking for reasons to deny the claim. The UBI would allow the patients to be more open with what they told the doctors, leading to better mental healthcare and a better society overall.

A UBI would also alleviate a great deal of work stress, the misery of which itself causes trauma, and so the alternative centrist approach to welfare has flow-on effects to mental health.

In short, mental health would be taken as seriously as physical health by alternative centrists. The taboos against talking about it would be shattered.

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

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

The Alt Centrist Approach To Recreation

‘Live, love, laugh and be happy’ goes the common refrain. Unfortunately for those of us in the West, our historical approaches to recreation have been coloured by a Christian philosophy of life-denial that considers all pleasures inherently sinful. The logic of the Abrahamic cults is that the world is evil, and that all pleasures are the province of the forces of evil, and so recreational pleasures are forbidden.

Complicating this are ruling class narratives about how the working class needs to be put to work or it becomes destructive. Capitalist dogma holds that if the working class is given too much opportunity for recreation it will stop wanting to work, leading to economic collapse, and therefore recreational opportunites must be restricted.

On top of this is a lingering workamania that makes people feel as if recreation is immoral.

All of these factors have drawn people away from what would be a rational approach to recreation. Great thinkers such as Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius advocated for a middle way between asceticism and indulgence. The alternative centrist prefers this to either the indulgence of the Satanist or the life-denial of the Christian.

Plato, in Laws, argued for the importance of drinking parties. His logic was that moderate alcohol use, by repeatedly inciting a small loss of self-control, trained people to exhibit greater self-control in times when it might otherwise have been lost (e.g. mass hysteria). A contemporary cynic might observe that a list of the countries that have banned alcohol overlaps heavily with a list of the countries whose citizens commit the most rapes and sex crimes per capita in the West.

Aristotle noted, in Politics, that tyrants prevent people from coming together in common cause, prohibiting common clubs and education so as to sabotage mutual confidence and high spirits. The idea is that preventing recreation will demoralise a population into submission. Adhering to the Second Acceptance would therefore involve doing the opposite of this. Thus an alternative centrist state would encourage any and all group recreational activity that was not degenerate or criminal. Even if outsiders could not see much value in some activities, the reasoning is that social bonds are developed in any case, and therefore the general health of the nation is strengthened.

All of this presents a clear picture to the alternative centrist.

The alternative centrist state has to promote recreation for the sake of the population’s mental health: the opposite approach to a tyranny. This is not just for the sake of the recreational activities themselves, but also for the social aspects of the recreational activities, which contribute to the solidarity necessary for a nation to function.

This will mostly require the government not to step in, but to get out of the way.

In particular, this means ending the War on Drugs. Existing drug law would be replaced with a model based on the work of actual drug scientists, such as Prof. David Nutt, whose works such as Drugs: Without The Hot Air would form the bedrock of future policy.

The alternative centrist looks to history and sees that Western societies have generally tolerated alcohol and the harms caused by alcohol. Experiments with prohibition have caused more harm than they prevented. The most intelligent way to balance order and freedom, therefore, is to tolerate alcohol and also every drug safer than alcohol. Because alcohol use is normalised, any less-harmful drug effectively becomes an exit drug for alcohol. The California Sober phenomenon reflects the will of people today to live a healthier lifestyle than is possible with an alcohol habit, and is proof that people will naturally use less harmful recreational alternatives to alcohol if given the choice.

California Sober is mostly about using cannabis instead of alcohol, but several other drugs meet the criteria of being safer than alcohol when used in a recreational setting.

Licensed venues for consuming several of the safer drugs would be a feature of alternative centrist recreation. Apart from bars there would also be cannabis cafes, MDMA lounges and magic mushroom grottos. Licensing would be a complicated and expensive process, so as to exclude clowns and cowboys from the market, but would not be substantially harder than getting an alcohol licence.

The alternative centrist state would generally have an extremely light touch when it came to sporting, cultural and spiritual organisations (although it might run a state religion: see The Alternative Centrist Approach To Religion). Sporting and cultural organisations would be heavily funded and promoted, and created if they didn’t already exist.

To a major extent, sporting recreation will be a function of the history of the nation and of the local geographical opportunities. In most scenarios this would be self-funded and self-organised. The role of the alternative centrist state would be to facilitate opportunities where they wouldn’t otherwise exist, such as maintaining a conservation estate for trampers and hikers, or subsidising sporting insurance through economies of scale. Maintaining facilities for racing, drag racing or drifting would have the bonus of justifying hard crackdowns on anti-social road use.

John Wanamaker’s famous quote “People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness” is relevant here. This suggests that workers ought to be able to make enough money in a 40-hour work week to own a home and raise a family (a point addressed at length in The Alternative Centrist Approach To Work And Employment). This should allow them sufficient time and energy for appropriate recreation.

For cases where recreation goes as far as addiction, see The Alternative Centrist Approach To Mental Health.

As alluded to above, a fair and reasonable approach to recreation, rejecting the tyranny of moralisers, would provide full and fair opportunity for any pro-social recreational desire, and would therefore justify crackdowns on anti-social elements. This is one of the reasons for the severity of The Alternative Centrist Approach To The Law.

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!

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