How A Person From A Gang Family Would Deal With The Gang Problem

I come from a very rough family. At various points in my life, I have been the son of a gang member, the nephew of a gang member, the brother of a gang member and the cousin of a gang member. Both of my brothers have spent time in prison, both of my mother’s brothers have spent time in prison, and I had been struck in the head or face by four different adults by the time I was five years old. Despite all this, I managed to get a research degree in psychology. This is how I would deal with the gang problem.

Any effective program of behavioural modification has to have two elements: reinforcement of desired behaviours and punishment of undesired behaviours. This is popularly known as “the carrot and the stick approach”. Solving our gang problem requires such an approach.

My proposal for the carrot is universal basic income.

People in the upper and middle classes have great difficulty imagining what life is like in the bottom 5%. Only very rarely do they have the life experience to understand how being raised in an environment of abuse and fear causes a person’s brain to develop differently to normal. As such, they have great difficulty understanding why some people can’t hold down a full-time job.

Being raised in an abusive environment causes the brain to develop in a way that is highly optimised for war, and poorly optimised for peace. One consequence is that mild levels of stress can push a person so damaged into homicide mode. If a person’s brain is wired to react with instant and overwhelming aggression to threatening stimuli, they are very unlikely to be able to deal with the daily challenges of the workplace.

The solution to such mental problems isn’t being stuffed full of sedatives and told to get the fuck back to work, as per standard mental healthcare practice in New Zealand. The only effective treatment for the damaged person is to allow them to rest until they grow out of their condition. This requires time, and that’s where a universal basic income can play a role.

A small but guaranteed income would not only help practically by removing an enormous amount of financial stress, it would help morally by removing resentment. Many young people from difficult family environments deeply resent the fact that work is demanded of them before they’ve had a chance to develop a fully functioning brain. A UBI would take away one of the major reasons for people born into disadvantaged families to rage against the system.

My proposal for the stick is crating.

Psychopaths consider all kindness to be weakness. All. As such, lenient sentencing and political engagement merely encourages them to commit more crimes. Not all gang members are psychopaths, but the gang environment provides an excellent environment for them to hide. With the exception of entering Parliament, joining a gang is the optimal path for a psychopath who wants opportunities to abuse people and get away with it.

The key to solving the gang problem lies in accurately being able to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths. The single biggest flaw of the entire “Justice” system is that it makes no effort to distinguish between sadists and psychotics. As such, the former are penalised too lightly and the latter too harshly.

The non-psychopaths should be treated with patience. If someone is from a gang environment and isn’t a psychopath, despite having ample motive to become one, they must possess some measure of spiritual gold. They must possess the capacity to say ‘No’ to evil. People like this need to be cherished. Mental illness is not a reason to punish someone, as it’s often a good thing, because it’s often an alternative to psychopathy.

The psychopaths should be crated. The first step here is to introduce a new category of crime: those committed with malicious indifference to human suffering. A typical example of such crimes are coward punches like the recent ones in Auckland. Most murders and rapes will naturally fall into this category.

The second step is to subject every convicted criminal to a full psychological examination, with the goal of determining whether they have irreparable brain damage making them sadistic.

Modern psychological science can make such a distinction. The amygdalas of such people are less likely to activate in response to observing human suffering, making them callous, and their pre-frontal cortexes contain less grey matter, making them impulsive. Such unusual brain structures reveal that those people are dangerous.

If a person is found to have irreparable brain damage of the kind characteristic of psychopaths, and is later found guilty of a crime committed with malicious indifference to human suffering, then, upon being found guilty, they are immediately nailed into a crate instead of being taken back to the cells. This crate is then loaded into a helicopter, flown 20 kilometers out over the ocean, and jettisoned from a great height.

This carrot-and-stick approach will succeed because of the twofold benefits it offers.

The first benefit is that a more compassionate approach will neutralise resentment. Most young men who join gangs do so because they learn early in life that society hates them, and they reason that they might as well hate society back. A UBI would take away the most of the financial incentive to join a gang (this incentive is much bigger than most people realise). This will mean fewer gang members.

The second benefit is that, on account of the more compassionate approach, it’s justified to be extremely firm against the intractable criminal elements that remain in the population. People would no longer be forced by economic necessity to join gangs, so those who do can be assumed malicious. The widespread crating of known psychopaths will spread fear among the remainder.

The combination of these two effects would be a drastic reduction in both the number of gang members and the amount of suffering caused by gang activity.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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The Ruling Class Is Manufacturing Consent For A War With China

Anyone following the zeitgeist will have noticed a sharp rise in anti-China rhetoric lately. Some will also have noticed that the mainstream media recently switched narrative on the origins of the Covid virus. Until recently, one could get banned from FaceBook for suggesting that the virus was made in a Chinese lab. Now FaceBook encourages the idea. Why? This essay explains.

This BBC article from March is typical of the new rhetoric. The British Government’s main propaganda organ is now openly declaring that China is committing a genocide against their Uighur population in Xinjiang. The American Government has followed the British lead, with the Biden Administration now formally stating that China is guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity”.

Declaring China to be carrying out a genocide is a major step, because it means that many people will feel morally obliged to do something about it. It will also allow the Establishment to paint the Chinese Government as the moral successor to Nazism, and thereby to play on all the conditioned guilt around the Holocaust.

This sudden concern for the Uighurs seems extremely odd, as the Uighurs aren’t treated any worse than cannabis users are treated in most Western countries. Moreover, not even other Muslims care about the Uighurs, as demonstrated by the fact that Muslim trade delegations to China seldom raise the issue.

The plight of the Uighurs is being exploited for propaganda purposes. There will be a lot more mainstream media propaganda in this vein in coming years. The narrative will be Evil China. We will get daily reminders that China is oppressive and evil – because the Western Establishment is trying to manufacture popular consent for a war against them.

Although many Westerners consider their ruling classes to be omnipotent, the reality is that they still need popular consent for any major move. That popular consent lubricates the gears of the war machine; without it, those gears don’t turn. To that end, the ruling classes instruct their lackeys in the mainstream media to manufacture consent for those major moves in advance.

The next major move they wish to make is to smash China. The ruling class of the West intends to attack China now for the same reason it attacked Germany then: to stay on top of the pile.

Measured by PPP, the Chinese economy has already surpassed the American one. It’s apparent that China’s economic rise will soon give it the capacity to project power over Taiwan. The fear is that China will eventually gain the capacity to project power over Singapore, and thereby over the centre of the world.

Today, the Chinese economy is some 10% larger than the American one. By 2026, according to IMF estimates, the Chinese economy will be some 40% larger. It’s apparent to every Western military planner that, if they want to prevent China from becoming unmanagably powerful, they have to strike now. As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: wars cannot be avoided, they can only be postponed to the benefit of one or the other party.

The ruling elites of the West have been faced with a stark choice. Either strike now, and put the rising challenger back in its place, or wait, and risk that China becomes too strong to deal with. Given that China has an average IQ of 105, and is not near as wealthy as other populations with similar IQs, logic suggests that they have the potential to become a lot more powerful yet. More logic suggests that, if all that is true, the time to strike is now.

The Western ruling classes followed that same logic to its inevitable conclusion a while ago. They have decided that war is preferable to falling further behind. To that end, they will do everything they can to stoke conflict. This explains the sudden intense increase in anti-China rhetoric from the mainstream media.

The war imperative is why Western powers are sending flotillas to patrol the South China Sea. Everyone understands that the attack on China will be a multinational affair, with America, Japan, Britain, Australia and India all involved at a minimum. The strategy now is to increase the provocation and intimidation, and wait for China to make a mistake.

The great risk is of a false flag attack similar to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. It’s entirely plausible that the Western ruling class blows up one of its own warships and tells the plebs that the Chinese did it – this was how they successfully manufactured consent for the attack on Vietnam.

If such a thing did happen, the mainstream media would scream 24/7 about the need for revenge against murderous Chinese aggression before it was too late. The narrative would be that anyone unwilling to destroy China is dishonouring the victims of the false flag attack, is endangering the rest of us and is therefore a traitor to the West.

Westerners be warned: if the mainstream media informs us about a sudden and inexplicable act of deadly violence carried out by the Chinese against Western targets, we need to steadfastly remain sceptical. Freethinking people might not be able to stop the herd stampede to war, but we might be able to limit the carnage.

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Why Banning Social Media Won’t Fix Anything

Many of the world’s current social ills are blamed on social media. Some have the idea that FaceBook, Reddit, YouTube and similar websites are responsible for an increase in psychological abuse and a decrease in mental health. This has brought calls to ban them – but, as this essay will argue, banning social media won’t work out any better than banning anything else has.

With the hysteria around the killing of George Floyd, many have realised that social media found Derek Chauvin guilty before the trial. The pressure to convict Chauvin was so great that, had he been found innocent, riots were likely. U.S. Representative Maxine Waters even took to social media to call for a confrontation in case of acquittal.

Government representatives elsewhere are also using social media to destroy their own citizens. In New Zealand, Member of Parliament Debbie Ngarewa-Packer launched an online petition to ruin the life of podcaster Lee Williams, smearing him as a white supremacist and evil wrongthinker. This quickly received several thousand signatures after being shared by Maori supremacists.

That government representatives use social media to stir up hate against private citizens is deeply concerning. Lynchings are the obvious next step. In countries with weak rule of law, influential people regularly call for their followers to murder their political enemies. It isn’t hard to imagine a Maori Party MP using social media to form a physical mob that kills someone.

However, the idea of banning social media is a neo-Luddite delusion. It’s the same knee-jerk retardation that inspired alcohol and cannabis prohibition, both of which failed. Proof? Before social media, it was even worse than this.

The newspapers spread just as much fake news a century ago as they do now. But it was worse then, because there was no alternative media to ask questions. If the newspapers said that Germans were bayoneting Belgian babies, that was the truth and no discussion about it could be had. Everyone had to believe it or be shunned from society.

The radio and the television are just as bad as the newspapers. Like the newspapers, the radio and television dictate the truth to a passive audience, with no dissenting voice allowed. Although they claim to be objective speakers of fact, the reality is that each of these media has an owner, and that owner ultimately decides what gets said and how.

Newspapers, radio and television are all one-way media. None of them are superior to social media, which, despite its crapness, at least allows for a discussion. But it is precisely the possibility for discussion that has the ruling class upset about social media.

The ultimate reason why social media is now so heavily opposed by the Establishment, and its lackeys in the mainstream media, is that it allows for an alternative narrative. As Josef Goebbels outlined in his Principles of Propaganda, propaganda is most effective if it is executed by only one authority. As was true in Nazi times, the greatest enemy of the ruling class is the alternative media.

It’s imperative that we, the people, develop a better way to manage social media, lest our rulers find an excuse to ban it. The correct way to deal with the problems caused by social media is to ensure that its use does not lead to hysterical chimpouts, i.e. that its agitprop potential is neutralised.

This will involve a twofold process.

The first step is to educate people to reflexively disbelieve everything they’re told. Currently, our education system is set up in such a way that the most credulous students get the highest grades. This is a consequence of the fact that, when our education system was invented, information was extremely scarce.

But the information environment of today is much different to the past. Information is no longer scarce; in fact, we have far too much low-quality information. Our education system, therefore, needs to be re-tooled, so that students are taught to question everything – literally everything – that is said by an authority figure.

A properly sceptical culture would have no need to fear social media, because sceptical people don’t share news articles or videos unless they’re confident the information in them is accurate. Even if they did, any sceptical people reading or viewing that information wouldn’t chimp out like they do in today’s Clown World.

The second step is to run society in a way so that people have hope. Right now, the atmosphere of the Western World is thick with despair. This despair encourages people to spread hate and madness on social media. A great many people are in a great deal of pain, and this encourages them to share garbage.

A society with rectitude, one which the average person felt proud to belong to, would naturally encourage its members to share higher quality information. The main reason people are so drawn to conspiracy today is because they know something’s seriously wrong with our social environment. The quality of social media will always reflect the quality of the social environment, and improving the latter is the easiest way to improve the former.

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Why You Should Join A Gang Instead Of Working

New Zealand now has over 7,000 gang members, an increase of some 13% from a year previous. Many theories have been put forward to explain this sudden rise, but none of them are adequately grounded in economic psychology. This essay makes a seemingly preposterous argument: that it makes more sense to join a gang nowadays than to work.

According to the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, the average New Zealand house price is now $810,000, up 19% from a year earlier. According to interest.co.nz, the ratio of this average house price to the median household income is now 8.43.

This ratio was 5.87 as recently as July 2016. Even back then, it meant that a working couple able to save 25% of their total wage could expect to take over 23 years to pay for the average house. That was considered “severely unaffordable” by all honest commentators. But it’s now almost 50% worse than even that.

These are terrifying statistics for anyone at, or near, the bottom of the educational ladder. The average household income, according to the stats mentioned above, is $96,114. That means over 33 years for the average couple, saving 25% of their total wage, to pay for the average house. Any household with a minimum wage earner will likely have it much harder than this.

This means it’s now realistically impossible for a significant, and growing, proportion of New Zealand workers to ever own a home on their wage. It’s even more difficult for those who aren’t part of a steady couple.

Historically speaking, those at the bottom of society have always had one universal method of radically improving their position: crime. And the bigger the crime, the better. Many people say that crime doesn’t pay, but this is only true for the lower classes. Pull off a big enough heist and you can go up an entire league.

As Chuang Tzu once observed: “The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.” Petty thievery won’t get you into a house that you can raise a family in, but full-time drug running is another story.

A young New Zealander without an education might have no chance of ever owning a house by working for one, but there’s a ready alternative: to join a gang, and get $810,000 through crime.

It’s common for dedicated meth users to go through $1,000 of meth in a week. Someone supplying it need only have a dozen customers with this level of demand and they could sell $600,000 worth of meth in a single year. Assuming $400,000 of expenses in precursor/bulk wholesale costs, rip-offs and fees to one’s own gang so as to keep covering for your operations, this means an income of $200,000 per year – tax free.

The only major downside is a small risk of getting killed or imprisoned.

Gangbanging is relatively dangerous, but the vast majority of gang members manage to conduct their affairs without getting killed. In recent years, New Zealand has averaged about 61 homicides a year. Even assuming that the majority of those were gang-related, it means that a person in a gang has little more than a 0.5% chance of being killed in any given year.

Even if this risk is 50 times higher than the risk of being murdered if one isn’t in a gang, it’s still a fairly low risk. It means that, after four years of selling meth and saving $4,000 a week, one would have earned enough to buy the average house, with a mere 2% chance of getting killed (approximately).

The risk of being imprisoned is also relatively minor. Furthermore, as shit as prison might be, it’s not a whole lot worse than busting a gut for 40 hours a week and being left with nothing after taxes, bills and rents are paid. At least rent is free in prison, and while there you can easily make the contacts that will help you sell meth more discreetly once you get out.

In the cold light of day, a young New Zealand man, one with ambitions to own a home so that he can raise a family in it, is better off joining a gang and getting taxed at 0% than getting educated, earning a professional wage and getting taxed at 39%. He can actually own a house the first way, whereas the second demands decades of work for partial equity in one. Even if he does manage to own a house the second way, he likely won’t have enough spare energy to raise a family in it.

What many middle-class people – especially those who inherit wealth – don’t realise is that few people join gangs purely out of malice and spite. Some of them join gangs because, on balance, they can have a better life in one. The prospect of working for 50 years to merely own some equity in a cold, damp house is a miserable one. It’s not surprising that the more daring of the country’s young men are tempted to gamble for a better life.

The solution to New Zealand’s rising gang problem will inevitably be a multifaceted one, but the basis of it must be enabling even poorly-educated workers to own their own home and raise a family. As long as workers aren’t getting paid enough for this to be possible, they’re better off joining gangs.

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