Category: government

The Second Acceptance Of Alternative Centrism

The Second Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Establishment Left is correct when they speak of the importance of freedom.

It may be true that no society can exist without order. Without freedom, however, life isn’t worth living. To exist without freedom is to exist in a state of slavery. It’s a humiliation that might well be worse than death. Countless works of popular culture place freedom at the centre: William Wallace fought for it in Braveheart, the American and South African national anthems proclaim the importance of it and books like Brave New World and 1984 evoke the horror of a world without it.

The Establishment Left isn’t so worried about order for order’s sake, as the Establishment Right is. Neither are they interested in some long-winded lecture about civilisation or immovable fences. They want fun, they want to party and they want to be free. They don’t want to be used as pawns in some feudal lord’s power games.

What concerns the Establishment Left is freedom for freedom’s sake. The American Revolutionaries are a good example of this kind of Establishment Left, as they rebelled against the Establishment Right in the form of the British Crown. For these revolutionaries, freedom and liberty were sufficient reasons to risk their lives against an extremely powerful authority.

The important thing for the Establishment Left is that people accept the importance of freedom, even if they don’t live up to it themselves. For people holding to this position, a lack of freedom is ugly. Excessive order is likened to suffocation and strangulation, impeding the natural flow of life. The Establishment Leftist will point to the workings of Nature and note that excessive order is quickly overcome and replaced with balance.

The Establishment Left, in asserting the Second Acceptance, implicitly makes the claim that they have the right to overthrow excessive order. This claim comes as an outrage to the Establishment Right, who believe that even unjust laws must still be obeyed. The tension between these two forces is what leads to the rise of the Establishment Centre and the Third Acceptance (see later chapters).

History records the development of many things, and one of those things is enslavement. The first enslavers were the Establishment Right, and the first slaves were everyone else. That seemed to be a natural state of affairs as long as the enslavers were stronger than the enslaved. But Nature abhors stasis as much as a vacuum. The enslavers can never maintain their position indefinitely. Sooner or later, the enslaved will find themselves in a stronger position than their enslavers. And when the realisation of the truth of this dawns, the enslaved find themselves wanting freedom.

A very similar phenomenon occurs in chimpanzee troops when younger males overthrow tyrannical older ones. The older males naturally form an Establishment Right; having monopolised all the mating opportunities, they want to maintain the status quo (i.e. order) above everything else. The younger males are tyrannised by this order, which distributes all the reproductive resources to older males. So they get angry, rise up, and overthrow the existing rulers.

In the human animal, younger males generally start adult life with few to no resources. This is mostly accepted, as long as there is an established path to resources, e.g. through working hard and saving money. When this becomes impossible – perhaps because wages are too low, or housing too expensive – the younger males are pushed towards enslavement. A corruption-free Establishment Right will not enslave their own younger people, but corrupt ones will. When the slavery gets humiliating enough, anger rises, and with it rises the left (which is, at least initially, the Establishment Left).

The Establishment Left defaults to freedom on almost all issues.

Free speech is perhaps the single most important freedom issue of them all. In the dark old days of the Establishment Right, criticising the king meant death. Even criticising his government could be met with harsh reprisals. The George Orwell line “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” sums up the Establishment Left attitude here.

The modern anti-free speech attitude coming from the left is because of the Alternative Left (see later chapters). This part of the left is more concerned with their very specific conceptions of justice, and don’t tolerate disagreement. They don’t care for natural expressions of exuberance, as the Establishment Left does.

This resolute support of freedom is why the Establishment Left believes in legal cannabis and other recreational alternatives to alcohol or spiritual sacraments. The Establishment Right is terrified of cannabis and psychedelics because both are deconditioning agents that facilitate free thought: it’s much more orderly if everyone is conditioned to think the same way. But the Establishment Left thinks – as it asserted strongly in the 1960s – that people ought to be free to explore their own minds and their own consciousness.

They have always been big supporters of LGBTQ rights for similar reasons. Even though a person might find LGBTQ activity disgusting, that person can still support it being legal on general freedom grounds.

The Second Acceptance evokes an anti-Chesterton’s Fence, asserting that everything should be legal unless there’s a clearly understood reason to make it illegal. This logic is often associated with the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke (who considered freedom a natural right inherent to all people), John Stuart Mill (whose “harm principle” suggested that people should be free to do what they like up until the point where it harms others) and Thomas Paine (who considered freedom the basis of a just society).

The Second Acceptance also asserts the Establishment Left has a point when they speak against conscription. Even if they don’t go as far as asserting anarcho-homicidalism, the Establishment Left belief is that people have the right to be free from getting used as cannon fodder in military adventures.

In all of these ways, the Establishment Left has clashed with the Establishment Right, particularly the religious part of it. The monarchy, and those it would send into battle, are closely analogous to the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left respectively (conscripted soldiers might not be part of the Establishment, but those who speak for them are).

Aside from legal freedoms, the Establishment Left is also concerned with fashion and fashions. They like to have the freedom to assert things that don’t matter, to be whimsical. They are horrified that Cromwell’s Roundheads banned singing and dancing, and that today’s Islamic State does the same.

The Establishment Left is, to a major extent, made up of those who are high agency but who were born into a low station. These are the ones who suffer most from excessive order, and are the ones who become resentful and revolutionary in the presence of it. The same high-thumos individuals who resist tyrannical chimpanzee chiefs also resist tyrannical kings and mobs.

There is a great deal of resentment in the Establishment Left’s insistence on freedom at all costs. This is their spiritual weakness. Other positions can see the focus on freedom as irresponsible, even childish. It has elements of a toddler asserting that his parents are not the boss of him. It’s for these reasons that the Establishment Left and its Second Acceptance are only accepted in modified form by the other positions.

The clash between the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left on the relative merits of order vs. freedom presages the Second Rejection, and the rise of the Establishment Centre.

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

The First Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The First Rejection of alternative centrism is rejection of excessive order. The First Rejection is the contention that excessive order leads to stagnation.

Order may be the basis of civilisation, as per the First Acceptance. But an excess of it is suffocating. Too much order calcifies the institutions that make up society and petrifies the central bureaucracy. It makes people brittle. This brittleness, as Lao Tzu warned, leads one to break instead of bend. Thus, an excess of order will destroy a society unless pre-empted by the revolutionary action of those suffocated by it. As a result, it is rejected in the First Rejection.

In history, excessively rigid societies tend to get shattered by more fluid ones. The Greeks under Alexander and the British in India and China both defeated much larger empires which had succumbed to stagnation. The same order that makes a polity strong makes it weak when pushed to excess. The First Rejection of Alternative Centrism is a rejection of that stagnation that leads to weakness.

The Dark Ages is the best historical example of excessive order. The Christian authoritarians responsible for the Dark Ages took control at the end of the 4th Century, and imposed an entirely new order. Instead of religious and philosophical freedom, there would now only be dogma. Free-thinkers, like Hypatia, were murdered. Books were banned. All truths could be found in the Bible – if it wasn’t in the Bible, you didn’t need to know it.

After 1,200 or so years of this order, Europeans had forgotten that the Earth rotates around the Sun. Aristarchus of Samos, born in 310 BCE, was the first man to present a heliocentric model of the Solar System. Almost two millennia later, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for promulgating much the same truth. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true: Europeans actually went backwards in the 1,900 years between 300 BCE and 1600 CE.

Stagnating so hard that one comes to forget basic science is a typical example of what inspires the First Rejection. To stagnate that hard is to die in spirit. It’s to live only as a zombie, a mockery of life. This stagnation is what makes young people angry, and what makes them burn down things. To that extent, it’s usually old people supporting the Establishment Right, and the younger generations eventually get sick of them lingering.

Notably, many of those in the Establishment Right will see the Dark Ages as a high point in European history. They see the stagnation as a time of peace and stability. The Feudal Era is another time that the Establishment Right looks back to fondly, being a time of great order. Everyone knew their place – from the king right down to the lowliest peasant. Most pleasing of all, this order was hardly ever challenged. There was the odd peasant’s revolt but they were usually put down quickly by the armoured knights.

The two main powers of the Feudal Era – the monarchy and the clergy – comprise the two main factions of the Establishment Right today. The monarchy represents how order is established over people physically; the clergy represents how order is established over people non-physically. This is why wealthy families during the Feudal Era sent their spare offspring into the clergy and the military – those offspring would then uphold the order of things.

In the 21st Century, the monarchy and the clergy are still the main factions of the Establishment Right. The monarchy’s biggest supporters are the Army and the Police, which are well-known for being conservative institutions. Even in America, which has no monarchy, Army and Police personnel support the idea of one more than anyone else. The clergy still has power because they own enormous amounts of land, and because people still willingly take moral and spiritual guidance from them.

This feudal system worked reasonably well back in the day, but for one fatal flaw – it was prone to stagnation.

A capacity for merit in human beings is mostly inherited – but it’s not inherited directly from the parents. It’s actually inherited from the ancestors through the parents. This is why children are not just mere clones of their parents, but are throwbacks to older generations in many ways. This is also why there is so much variation in merit within families and groups of families. Meritorious men have ordinary sons, and vice-versa, all the time.

The main problem with the Establishment Right is that it will demand that a talented or meritorious man of low birth submit to a mediocre man of high birth for the sake of order. This is the main way that it generates resentment. Although this is the most orderly way to run things, it’s not easy to get the talented and meritorious men to accept it. Invariably those men realise they could do a better job of running things than those who inherited the positions. And then one finds the presence of revolutionary sentiments.

The Establishment Right has been aware, since the beginning of history, that their natural enemy is the high thumos man of low birth. Such men are represented by Lucifer in Jewish mythology. In this mythology, Lucifer was commanded by Yahweh to submit to Adam, because Yahweh’s whims at the time favoured his most recent creation. Lucifer was unwilling to do so, and was cast into disfavour. This story is a lesson to the Establishment Right: the plebs are supposed to obey even your most arbitrary commands. Those not willing to do so are the enemies of order.

“Chesterton’s Fence” is the archetypal example of reasoning that leads to excessive order. The logic of Chesterton’s Fence is that nothing should be changed unless one understands exactly why it is the way it is. But because nothing is ever fully understood – especially not matters of history – this is effectively an argument to change nothing ever.

G.K. Chesterton also gave us other ideas popular with the Establishment Right, such as the idea that “tradition is the democracy of the dead”. Every declining power makes this same argument in order to cling to the throne a bit longer. In making the First Rejection, the alternative centrist says: tradition for its own sake is the virtue of the stagnant.

The Establishment Right has a very particular view of history, in which the status quo is always right. They tend to blame the Wars of Reformation on the Protestants, for example. If only they had kept submitting to the established order, there would have been no problems. These unrelenting demands for submission only increase the frustration that younger generations feel at the stagnation of their societies. Asserting the moral primacy of order becomes ever-harder the more a society stagnates. The First Rejection, then, rises with revolutionary forces: with the young, the vital, the courageous, perhaps also the idealistic and naive.

For all the above reasons, anti-Establishment Right movements are generally also anti-stagnation movements, i.e. freedom movements. Perhaps the most effective one since World War II was the anti-landlord campaign carried out by Chairman Mao (landlording being a major cause of economic stagnation). The antipathy towards the Establishment Right in 2025 is mostly a result of several decades of net zero wage growth.

The fatal flaw in the attitude of the Establishment Right is that they have little interest in the concept of freedom, which presages the Second Acceptance.

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

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For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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The First Acceptance Of Alternative Centrism

The First Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Establishment Right is correct when they speak of the importance of order.

Both forms of the right tend to take a more historical perspective than the left. As such, the right generally understands better than the left that the initial state of the human being is one of chaos. Early man had to contend not with rival kingdoms but with the predations of Nature, in particular the elements and wild animals.

This chaos was deadly. Nature seemed to will the death and dissolution of the bodies of early men. The first order, then, was imposed in a simple effort to survive.

At some point, an intelligent warrior among the early men would have figured out something profound: he was more likely to win battles if he had other men by his side. Through charm and threat, this intelligent early warrior would have marshalled other males in his tribe to form a war band, much like the ones seen today in places like the Amazon Basin or Papua New Guinea. The first war band whose leader commanded two dozen or so males would have quickly dominated the males of other tribes. The organisational structure of this war band would have spread, like a technology. Sooner or later various tribes would have united into a clan.

Thus began a process by which social order continued to increase – with temporary and localised setbacks – until it developed into the political world of today.

Perhaps the greatest imposition of order in human history was the establishment of law. The first full-scale lawgiving enterprise was that of Hammurabi of Babylonia, who gave us the Code of Hammurabi. The Code of Hammurabi was responsible for the order of Babylonian society – order sufficient to develop into a great empire.

Law and order are in many cases synonymous; one tends to follow the other. The Establishment Right represents the powers that imposed the initial order that created civilisation. In this sense it manifests as the warrior-king or the kshatriya class. In a modern context, the Establishment Right represents The Man, the Big Daddy who imposes order upon society.

A state of Nature is similar to a state of chaos in many respects – the most obvious being the absence of human civilisation. The Establishment Right exhorts us to accept order on the basis that, without it, there is nothing. And they’re right in the sense that, without order, humankind falls prey to the elements and to wild animals again.

Characteristic of the Establishment Right mindset is that order is to be imposed whether people like it or not. It’s too important to worry about whether others agree. The government has the right to run over people who resist the order. The Establishment Right values hierarchy, and therefore does not value consensus. This is why they also value law enforcement. The sort of person who has a “Back the Blue” bumper sticker is very likely a supporter of the Establishment Right.

This is why it’s usually members of the Establishment Right who have the least sympathy for people arrested for victimless crimes. Because order is its own good, people are obliged to obey unjust laws. This corresponds closely to the ‘Law and Order Morality’ that Lawrence Kohlberg considered to be the fourth stage in his six-stage model of moral development. This is also why it’s the Establishment Right who most strongly supports conscription.

This is also why the Establishment Right supports inheritance rights the hardest. The most orderly way to advance through the generations is for each man to inherit his father’s position. Any other sons can go into the military or the clergy. This was basically the feudal model of medieval Europe, a time that many in the Establishment Right look back upon fondly.

Related to all this, the Establishment Right likes to support any aspect of the status quo that maintains order, even if there are obvious flaws with that aspect, and even if that aspect causes immense harm to many. For example, the Establishment Right is the biggest supporter of Christianity in the West. They are also the strongest proponents of the divine right of kings.

The imperative to uphold order is why the armies of the world shoot deserters. If people are allowed to desert, order is lost, and when order is lost so is the battle. Part of the First Acceptance is accepting that the Establishment Right is correct when it says we need to shoot deserters. In fact, many unpleasant things have to be done to maintain social order.

Aristotle wrote in Politics that the purpose of politics was happiness, and that this was mostly achieved by justice. Justice, in turn, is mostly achieved by a well-ordered polis. This (like Aristotle in general) is an argument that the Establishment Right agrees with. Order is understood to be the basis of justice, and therefore of happiness. The alternative centrist is happy to accept that, without order, nothing political is possible.

The basis of the First Acceptance, then, is accepting that the imposition of order makes everything else in society possible. All the wealth and culture that exists is dependent entirely on the initial imposition of order by the first warrior-kings, and the maintenance of that order. Should that order ever be fully lost, so too would society be lost. Order is the great defensive line ensuring human survival against Nature.

To a major extent, order is imposed by fear. There’s a very strong correlation between suffering intense feelings of helplessness and trauma in childhood and growing up to become a control freak. By the same token, its often fear that creates the will to impose order. This is why populations that become afraid often react by putting the Establishment Right back in power.

The dark side of this fear-based will to impose order is, as mentioned above, control freakery. There is an element of the Establishment Right that will go into hysteria if anything changes at all, no matter how minor, believing this to be the first step on the slippery slope to chaos. This element has aspects of childishness and autism to it. The displeasure it causes is the basis of the First Rejection.

There are many historical examples of fear leading to too much order, causing unhappiness: the Inquisition, the War on Drugs, the Satanic Panic and burqas are just some. When this happens, it leads naturally to the First Rejection of Alternative Centrism.

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

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

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The Basic Logic Of Alternative Centrism

The basic logic of alternative centrism is that all other political positions have failed, but that they were tried for logical reasons, and that if those reasons are understood a composite political philosophy can be created that preserves the good aspects of all the previous positions, while avoiding the bad aspects.

The first part of alternative centrism is alternative. This means alternative to The Establishment: in this context the globalist political establishment that has ruled the world since 1945. According to this view, the mainstream left and right parties are just wings of one Establishment that co-operates with itself while creating the illusion of competing.

The reason why the Establishment is opposed is simply because it has failed. The standard of living inherited by the younger generations today is far, far lower than that enjoyed by the Boomers. As such, the younger generations feel no need to be grateful for the status quo. To the contrary – they seek to dismantle it. Sometimes this means to reduce the Establishment to zero; sometimes this means to reverse what the Establishment has done to the people. In either case it means seeking an alternative to how things are usually done.

The second part of alternative centrism is centrism. This means centrist in comparison to the left and the right.

This centrism is – and this must be understood – an alternative centrism, not an establishment centrism. In other words, it’s not an insipid compromise between two weak and irrational positions. The alternative centrist is happy to have left-wing attitudes more extreme than the leftists, or right-wing attitudes more extreme than the rightists. The most important thing is not whether an attitude is consistent with a position on a wing, but whether it is consistent with reason and with the logic of the situation at hand.

A person is an alternative centrist, then, if they can answer Yes to two questions: Do you think the political establishment has failed and needs to be replaced? Do you think the alternative left and alternative right are both dangerous extremists?

The existing political establishment is understood to be comprised of the winners of World War Two, i.e. mostly capitalists and communists. This means that the political establishment is understood to consist of right-wing elements and left-wing elements in roughly equal measure. A person cannot be an alternative centrist if their struggle is against one of rightism or leftism exclusively, or even predominately. It has to be appreciated that both sides contain evil. Alternative centrism embodies Solzhenitsyn when he wrote “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

The alternative centrist understanding of history is elaborated upon in other chapters. Here, it’s enough to say that the alternative centrist considers modern political history to have tried five political positions, all of which have failed: establishment right, establishment left, establishment centre, alternative right and alternative left. However, these positions have not been tried and failed because they were completely false, or because their proponents were stupid and evil.

Alternative centrism holds that each of the previous five positions has an internal logic suited for specific circumstances. The error lies in assuming that this logic applies to all circumstances.

The basic logic of alternative centrism is that one can apply the logic of any of the previous five positions, in whole or in part, in combination or individually, if the specific circumstances permit. Therefore, the alternative centrist seeks to understand the motivations, intentions and aspirations of those who promulgate the previous five positions. Knowing this, they can fluidly switch mindset to whatever is appropriate at the time.

Much of the rest of the first part of this book, then, examines the other five political positions from an alternative centrist point of view. This means from a point of view that sees both the strengths and the weaknesses of all five positions, and the psychology of the supporters of each of those positions.

The second part of this book examines the various policy areas that are influenced by political position, and the alternative centrist view on each of these. In principle, the details of every policy area vary depending on the underlying political position taken. As such, this second part of the book covers a wide range of topics.

The third part of the book deals with the realpolitik of alternative centrism, in particular who constitutes the ingroup and who the outgroup, and how to deal with both. This part explains that alternative centrism is necessarily a revolutionary libertarian nationalist movement, by virtue of its being anti-establishment, the establishment being a status-quo-supporting authoritarian globalist movement.

The ultimate aim of this book is to elucidate a political philosophy fit for the 21st Century and beyond. The belief is that alternative centrism can not only meet the political desires of the vast majority of the population, but also provide a methodology for managing society without the volatility of the previous five positions.

The approach detailed above ought to lead to order, freedom, peace, truth and justice and avoid stagnation, chaos, degeneracy, cruelty and stupidity more effectively than any of the five previous positions could ever hope to do.

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