Clown World Chronicles: Class Relations In Clown World

The West is proud of its egalitarian heritage. We derive a sense of moral superiority from being a culture in which even the lowest classes can, through hard work, determination and applied will, reach the highest positions. The example of Abraham Lincoln, born into poverty in a frontier log cabin, is archetypal. But class relations in Clown World are very different to those in the 19th century.

In Clown World, we’ve effectively gone back to feudal times.

It’s so hard to buy a house today that, if you aren’t born into money, you will need to be in the top segment of income earners to do it. In both America and Britain, the house price to income ratio is at highs not seen since the aftermath of World War II. In the case of Britain, things are so extreme that you’d have to go back to the Victorian Era to find a time when it was harder for the average person to own their home.

This has led to large proportions of entire generations becoming resigned to paying rent in perpetuity. Some have even labelled the lower classes Generation Rent. Class relations in Clown World are marked by the great distance between the landowning class and the renting class. Many landowners in Clown World make more profit from capital gains on property than they could working for a wage.

This state of class separation is maintained by a concerted effort on the part of the Establishment to destroy class consciousness, the only thing that could really threaten it. The mainstream media pushes any and all alternatives to class consciousness: race consciousness, gender consciousness, age cohort consciousness, any possible corporate brand consciousness. Anything but class consciousness.

These efforts keep class relations much less antagonistic than would otherwise be the case. There are no workers’ marches in Clown World, because the working class is divided along multiple lines of fracture. These lines of fracture prevent the solidarity that would be necessary for collective action.

These divisions are maintained by the control that the ruling class has over the apparatus of propaganda. This control allows them to set the agenda in every Western country, and this agenda is inevitably fighting racism, fighting sexism, fighting ageism – and never fighting classism.

Class relations in Clown World, then, are characterised by the relentless efforts of the ruling class to keep the lower classes divided and conquered. The masses are bedazzled by the 24/7 circus of flickering images coming through the television. They are demoralised by the relentless bombardment of bigotry accusations. They are disorientated by the contradictions coming from the government.

The net result of these efforts to keep poor people down is greater inequality, and less social mobility, than ever.

Inequality is now at historic levels. The American Gini Index sits at 41.4, meaning that America is even less equal than kleptocracies like Haiti, Iran and Turkmenistan. Even China and Russia – bywords in some circles for autocratic shitholes – have lower Gini Indexes than America.

It’s similar with homeownership. The homeownership rates in supposed poverty-stricken dumps like India and Mexico is higher than in supposed lands of opportunity like America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet the Western mainstream media bleats incessantly about how wonderful everything is and how we’ve never had it so good.

In Clown World, wealth equals the ability to suck productivity out of other people by controlling their labour. The commodification of some people means fat profits for others. The poorer a population is, the more readily they can be extorted out of rents. The class system in Clown World, then, is much like a food chain: energy is passed upwards.

Inequality has reached such levels that a person can be significantly wealthier than average and still be a long way from the upper economic strata. The result of this is a widespread absence of sympathy for those in the lower strata. They are so far below that they might as well be animals. In Clown World, your opinion only matters if you’re wealthy enough to buy media time.

The 2020 American Presidential Election was fought between the billionaire Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a man who had already spent 47 years in the upper levels of American governance. The previous election was fought between Trump and Hillary Clinton, who had also spent decades in the upper levels of American governance. The one before that involved Mitt Romney, whose net worth was $250 million, and Barack Obama, the descendant of slave owners.

An Abraham Lincoln is unthinkable today. Someone born into poverty in today’s America is born so far behind that even becoming a homeowner would be a herculean effort. That they might become President is just laughable. Today, the ownership class has a complete lock on positions of power.

Naturally, a situation like this is ripe for revolution.

Democracy is about the easy satisfaction of desires. When those desires can no longer easily be satisfied, dissatisfaction quickly turns into a will to cause chaos. The widespread rioting of 2020 is a foretaste of the inevitable suffering of the next decade. As it becomes harder and harder to meet desires for decent housing and decent pay, people’s willingness to riot will increase.

The real risk of Clown World is that class relations become so bad that a majority of people want to overthrow the system. That could lead to them putting all their energies in behind a tyrannical demagogue. A leader who promised to get revenge on those hoarding property could summon a hurricane of rage behind them.

For class relations to improve, the masses have to have hope again. This doesn’t mean hope of becoming multibillionaires, just hope of meaningfully improving the station into which they were born. It means that they suffer less drudgery and poverty as they get older, and not more. If economic forces or policies push the masses away from hope, they push them into the clutches of fear and hate.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 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 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: What is ‘Pathological Altruism’?

Altruism is the mortar holding together every community of social beings. In the biological past, groups of social beings that learned to be altruistic outcompeted those who were more selfish. This led to the range of pro-social behaviours that we see on display in the world today. But there’s an upper limit to how much altruism is appropriate. Too much of it, and it becomes pathological.

Pathological altruism arises when a population forgets how dangerous the world naturally is. It’s most common in populations where the crime rate has stayed low for an extended period of time. In populations like this, people can mistakenly come to believe that low rates of predatory behaviour are normal, and therefore precautions do not need to be taken.

In Clown World, pathological altruism manifests as kindess and tolerance towards people who show no inclination to reciprocate it. It can be seen everywhere people attempt to stop abuse by showering love on the abusers. It’s a phenomenon closely related to both narcissistic masochism and virtue signalling.

A kind but non-pathological person will withdraw their kindness once they see that it isn’t respected. A pathological altruist, by contrast, will keep making sacrifices for others even when those others clearly demonstrate that they aren’t grateful. This is a pathology because helping the ungrateful will quickly end up destroying the helper.

Pathological altruism might be summed up best by the Parable of the Woman and the Snake from the film Natural Born Killers:

Once upon a time, a woman was picking up firewood. She came upon a poisonous snake frozen in the snow. She took the snake home and nursed it back to health. One day the snake bit her on the cheek. As she lay dying, she asked the snake, “Why have you done this to me?” And the snake answered, “Look, bitch, you knew I was a snake.”

Some of the altruism being shown in Clown World today is much like the altruism of the woman in the above parable. It’s a reckless, quasi-suicidal mentality that is similar to that of the Dodo birds of Mauritius approaching the Portuguese sailors. Unfortunately, in Clown World, this pathological altruism affects many people, and the rest of us are in danger of being dragged down with them.

There is already ample evidence that allowing certain folk groups (in particular Muslims and Africans) into one’s country will lead to a decrease in the average person’s quality of life.

Most convicted rapists in Sweden are foreign-born. One Aftonbladet study found that 82 out of 112 gang rapists were foreign-born. In Scandinavia overall, immigrants commit rape at over 40 times the rate of natives. In Germany, North African immigrants commit crimes at some 17 times the rate of natives. In some parts of Britain, half of all rape and murder suspects are foreigners.

Yet, despite the ample and undeniable evidence that mass immigration of these groups leads to suffering, anyone who points this out is liable to have people turn on them like a pack of wild dogs. Clown World altruism is so pathological that anyone who questions its application is marked as a sadist. It’s become so absurd that those who question the value of the mass immigration of Muslims and Africans are now blamed for the consequences of it.

In Clown World, pathological altruism is not only displayed towards outsiders at the expense of oneself and one’s own kin. It can also be displayed towards moral reprobates at the expense of oneself and one’s own kin.

As demonstrated in the later chapter ‘Justice in Clown World‘, pathological altruism can arise in the courtroom, where it gives light penalties to unrepentant criminals who will predictably continue offending. Pathological altruism is to blame every time a judge gives a psychopath a sentence that will see them back out on the streets in short order.

Usually such moves are explained as kindness. However, this kind of altruism is pathological, because it increases the amount of suffering in the world by enabling patterns of abuse. When an unrepentant abuser finds someone who enables their behaviour, it can continue to extreme lengths. Being kind to abusers makes no more sense than the lamb being kind to the wolves.

This is not to argue that altruism itself is bad. Genuine kindness is very much the gold to the silver, iron and clay of all other sentiments. However, gold is soft, and as such it can be easily defeated. If kindness is applied without discrimination, it leads to more suffering than if kindness was reserved for the right targets.

Pathological altruism is different to the ruling class showing altruism to outsiders at the expense of the lower classes. The ruling class never invites refugees into their own neighbourhoods; they might invite them into the country, but inevitably dump them in working-class neighbourhoods. This isn’t pathological, because, by doing so, they manage to keep their class enemies divided and conquered.

The ruling class preys on existing pathological altruism, especially in the middle class, to manufacture consent for measures that harm the masses. The mass importation of cheap labour is the primary way this is done.

Pathological altruism is highly prevalent in Clown World because people have had it so easy for many decades. When people are wealthy, they treat each other more kindly. So when people are wealthy for a long time, it means they are kind for a long time. This leads to people thinking that kindness is normal, and that all humans are inherently kind if just given a chance.

This child-like naivety is pathological in adults. In its most extreme form it can lead to cases like the Norwegian politician Karsten Hauken, who felt guilt when the Somali immigrant who had raped him was deported. Having altruistic sentiments towards someone who raped you is deeply sick, practically suicidal. Yet in Clown World, such sentiments are common.

The presence of pathological altruism ensures that mass Third World immigration will keep happening, despite that a majority of Europeans want to stop further immigration from Muslim countries completely – only 20% of those surveyed wanted it to continue. Even famously pro-refugee Sweden wants to take in fewer refugees. But as long as the ruling class can get a vocal minority to scream about racism every time someone suggests border control, the cheap labour will keep flooding in.

Pathological altruism won’t go away until Clown World collapses and Westerners suffer for an extended period of time. That will teach us, like the generations that preceded the Boomers, to be more correctly discriminating with our compassion.

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Clown World Chronicles: The Future Of Clown World

Things are so bad today that they’ve been likened to a Clown World, a twisted circus where everything is a sick joke. They’re getting worse by the month. How bad can things ultimately become? If we look at the trends that have led us to where we are now, we can extrapolate them out to make an educated guess at where we’re going.

Anyone reading this book from the beginning will be aware of Plato’s theory of political decay. The contention of this book is that political decay has advanced to critical status. The last time an aristocracy ruled was in the 1890s and early 1900s, a time of immense cultural advancement. Timocracy gave us the World Wars, then oligarchy gave us the postwar economic boom, then finally democracy gave us the nihilistic permissiveness of today.

The future of Clown World is further decay and suffering, until such a point where philosopher-kings institute a new aristocracy. The only question is whether we have a tyranny and an Age of Terror first, or whether the philosopher-kings beat the tyrants to the punch.

Some degree of further decay and suffering is, unfortunately, baked in to the system. Clown World is so utterly decadent that it can only be compared to an alcoholic who is dying of liver disease, but who continues to drink a bottle of bourbon a day. The average Clown World denizen doesn’t give a shit any more. He will stand up for nothing.

In the same way that the extreme permissiveness of the Weimar Republic led to a widespread disgust that fueled the rise of tyranny, the extreme permissiveness of Clown World has also led to widespread disgust. The sight of 10-year old drag queens has made many people yearn for a tyrant to clean up the mess. The danger today is, being 75 years since World War II ended, we’ve forgotten how bad tyranny can be.

At time of writing, there are a great number of people who would be willing to support a tyranny if they believed that this tyranny would deal to their enemies. The alt left would love to put wrongthinkers in gulags and the alt right would love to put degenerates in concentration camps. Neither are worried about any such tyranny turning on them. The stage is set for something historically terrible to happen.

It’s apparent that things are getting worse all over the West and that the ruling class is either unwilling or unable to change course (or both). From this we can predict that suffering will continue to increase, and that tensions will keep rising. Eventually the suffering will get to the point where it’s no longer possible to be complacent about it. That’s when people become desperate, and start taking desperate measures.

The way to avoid widespread chaos and misery is for a brotherhood of philosopher-kings to stand up and provide a new direction for the world.

For this to be possible, the philosopher-kings will have to have some way of recognising each other as such.

One such mark of recognition may be the denial that the brain generates consciousness. If there’s any single belief that characterises the midwit, it’s the belief that the brain generates consciousness and that the death of the physical body means the extinguishing of that consciousness. Anyone who can persuasively argue against this belief might be the kind of philosopher-king who will bring an end to Clown World.

When a critical mass of philosopher-kings form, they will start to change the nature of the lesser men around them. The first measure of a new aristocracy will be a rectification of names. People who are bright but not brilliant – those whose IQs are between one and two standard deviations above the mean – will sense the beneficent presence of this new aristocracy, and will follow their direction.

Choosing to follow the direction of the philosopher-kings, these men and women of silver will be the administrators of the new order. With correct administration, the masses will have faith in their rulers, and so the new world will avoid most of the suffering that exists in Clown World.

Post-Clown World, new philosophies will arise, and new twists will be placed on old philosophies. A new spiritual order will drive out the empty materialism and dead superstitions of the previous age. This will pave the way for a new intellectual order to follow, one based around an honest search for truth instead of the weaponisation of information to serve political ends.

Following this will be a true Golden Age, an age of joy and merriment. With our spirits and minds in correct working order, our emotions, bodies and behaviours will naturally follow. This will realign our actions with the divine will, leading to a minimum of suffering.

Before we get to the point of an aristocratic revolution, however, chances are that there will be bloodshed. If either the alt left or the alt right get their way – and both are much more numerous than the alt centre – a great number of people will face persecution. Many young people today would be happy to see the present system overturned. The more they endure, the less they care how this might be achieved.

Right know, we are at the ‘It was at this moment he knew: he fucked up‘ stage. We’ve just come off the skateboard, and we’re floundering in midair, about to faceplant into the asphalt. We know it’s going to be bad, we just don’t know how bad, or for how long we’ll be suffering.

The future of Clown World will involve a great fall, and then a great rise. It will be immensely challenging, but, if we can pull through, equally rewarding.

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Clown World Chronicles: Everyday Life In Clown World

Nightmares are similar enough to normal life to trick you into thinking they are real, which is why they’re so horrifying. Clown World is also very similar to normal life, which is why it’s so horrifying. Unfortunately for us, Clown World is everyday life now.

In Clown World, everyday life revolves around work.

Even though it was easy for pre-Clown World adults to own a home and raise a family on their wages, it’s extremely difficult today. The price of housing has spiked in recent years, but wages have lagged far behind. Much of everyday life in Clown World is taken up with working extra hours to make up for the poverty that now exists.

In Clown World, working 40 hours a week is considered a part time job.

If you want a luxury such as owning a house, you’d better get used to working longer hours than that. Part of everyday life in Clown World is accepting that we don’t have the same standard of living that our parents had. Although trinkets and gadgets are cheaper than ever, the life essentials that take up most of one’s income – food and housing – are more expensive than ever.

Many are asking themselves how it’s possible that, if our parents could buy houses on their wages, and if we’ve had a few decades of relentless economic growth since then, it’s harder to buy a house on the average wage now? Shouldn’t it be easier than ever to buy a house, if we’re all much richer than 40 years ago?

The reality is that the masses have been conditioned into consenting to our production getting stolen from us by the ruling class. This happens in a number of ways.

The most obvious way is getting us to accept a smaller share of production. The wage share – the part of national income that is allocated to wage earners – has been steadily declining since the 1980s. Things are now so bad that workers see as little as ten cents of extra wages for every extra dollar their work produces.

It’s hard for an individual worker to notice this decline in the wage share, because they experience it as a balance of power that gradually shifts ever further towards the employer. What they would notice is employers bargaining from ever stronger positions, as the presence of gigantic pools of imported cheap labour give those employers highly profitable alternatives to hiring locals.

Everyday life in Clown World might revolve around working all the time for fuck all, but it’s not possible to win simply by avoiding work. The ruling class has a variety of methods to steal our saved wealth too.

There are more subtle ways to steal a person’s production than taking it all off them and giving them a fraction of it back. Some ways are so subtle that you can do it right in front of their face and they won’t even notice, much less complain.

One of the most subtle is inflation. The United States Dollar was trading at around 35 to an ounce of gold in the early 1970s. At this time, the average wage was about $3 an hour, so it took roughly 12 hours of labour to buy what an ounce of gold would get you.

Half a century later, the USD is trading at over 1,800 to an ounce of gold, while the average wage has only increased to $25 an hour. So now it takes roughly 72 hours of labour to buy what an ounce of gold would get you. Anyone holding dollars, or receiving a fixed income in dollars, has lost over 85% of their wealth over the last 50 years relative to someone holding gold.

Those who are holding the gold are the same ones printing the dollars, and they’re laughing their arses off. Everyday life, for the masses, involves running faster and faster on an employment treadmill to earn credits that the ruling class creates out of thin air.

A second subtle way to steal the wealth of the masses is through runaway house prices.

The ruling class already own most of the land. So every time house prices increase in value relative to wages, the ruling class gets wealthier and the masses get poorer. The problem is that house prices are dictated by actions of the ruling class. If they want house prices to go up, they simply import more immigrants and refuse to build new housing. Increasing demand while holding supply steady inevitably increases the price.

So the ruling class have got the workers leaping higher and higher to reach a benchmark that gets further and further away. What this had led to is an everyday life which isn’t much different to the everyday life of a medieval serf. You get worked to death and have bugger-all to show for it.

People are induced into accepting this by repeated, frequent humiliations. These humiliations sap the will of their victims and make them compliant to threats and mistreatment.

In Clown World, the plebs are humiliated everyday by a relentless mass media bombardment calling them racists. Anyone who turns on a television sees talking heads droning on about how racist white people are, or they see sportspeople kneeling to protest racism. The net result is a deep sense of shame and low self-esteem.

This shame and low self-esteem prevent the masses from asking for a fair wage, or for accessible housing, worthwhile healthcare or education etc. People will accept any shit deal if you can humiliate them into thinking they don’t deserve better.

Another major humiliation comes from laws such as those prohibiting cannabis or other spiritual sacraments. In most of the West, people get put in prison for producing or distributing cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT, even though there are stacks of evidence demonstrating that these substances can engender spiritual or mystic experiences.

In Clown World, you’re not allowed to seek out the divine. Our everyday lives are taken up with entirely material concerns, in particular accumulating resources (whether physical or social). If we express any yearning to reconnect with the divine, we are labelled mentally ill.

Such cruel and arbitrary laws serve a very deliberate and calculated purpose: to induce submission. Much like the hectoring about supposedly being racist, the enduring presence of injustice causes people to lose their will and become submissive. They feel so bad about themselves that they give up, and no longer feel that they deserve better.

In Clown World, drugs are limited to those that our corporate owners think make us more productive. Cannabis and the psychedelics are out, because they decondition people and serve to break down the effects of brainwashing. Caffeine and Adderall are in, because they induce people towards hyperfocus, which is the ideal mindstate for performing repetitive office tasks. If you’re lucky you can afford some tobacco or alcohol to numb the pain.

Everyday life in Clown World is marked by the fact that corporate interests can now lay claim to almost every waking moment of those they employ (and of many who they don’t). The presence of reliable Internet has made it standard for people to still work answering emails after they get home for the evening. You’re not even allowed to smoke weed on the weekends in case you fail a drug test.

For many in the Clown World of 2020, everyday life now resembles that of the humans who wake up in the pods in The Matrix. Our essential life energies are not put to use for our own betterment, but are instead drawn off by exploiters that most of us are barely aware of. The story of everyday life in Clown World is that we have gone from free people enjoying their lives to human livestock farmed by corporate interests for profit.

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