The Four Basic Political Subjects

Underneath all the talk about politics today lies a great confusion. People talk about what politics is supposed to achieve, but they have generally forgotten who it’s supposed to achieve it for. For our ancestors, the political subject was obvious, but for us it is not. This essay explains.

The first and original political subject was the tribe. In the biological past, humans had no conception of nations or kingdoms. One was born into a tribe of roughly 50-150 people, and these people were your blood kin. As such, their interests were your interests, in almost every case.

Every member of the tribe was in the ingroup, and everyone not in the tribe was in the outgroup. This made politics very simple. If you encountered a stranger, they were the enemy, and it was acceptable to do anything to that stranger if it furthered the interests of the tribe. This tribal mentality still exists today, only it has become much weaker than it used to be (in most cases).

The second political subject is the state. This came into being when civilisation did. With the advent of civilisation, it was possible to have two strangers share the same space without chimping out and attacking each other. This meant that it was possible to have towns and cities made up of people from different tribes, perhaps even competing ones.

With the advent of towns and cities, it was necessary to have an administrator class that dealt with any disagreements that arose. The bringing together of different tribes meant competing schedules of moral values. These administrators, employed to smooth over differences between tribes, became the state. Their different approaches for settling quarrels became ideologies.

One way of dealing with the tensions created by identification with the tribe was to identify with the state instead. In practice, this is much the same as identifying with an ideology. Thus, a judge who was from a particular tribe would not necessarily rule in favour of his own tribesman. This was a radical new way of thinking when compared to the tribal solidarity model. It required a new political subject.

Thinking in terms of the state provided this new subject. If people were able to abandon their previous allegiances to their tribes, they could band together and build a mighty state that challenged the world, such as Rome or America. The memetic hybrid vigour brought about by multiple tribes all agreeing to work together under a state banner proved to be immensely powerful.

Not every civilisation succeeded in making this transition, however. If a state was not capable of creating an egregore powerful enough to persuade people to abandon their tribal allegiances, the divided loyalties caused by those remaining allegiances would pull the state apart from the inside. Corruption reigns in every state where tribal allegiances continue to hold sway.

The third political subject is the individual. This political subject arose as a way of settling firstly the tensions between those who identified with the tribe and those who identified with the state, and secondly the tensions between those who identified with different states or ideologies. In the world of 2020, the individual is the default political subject.

The logic is that, by identifying with the individual ego, people would no longer be drawn into conflict on account of competing tribal or ideological loyalties. Only caring about oneself might seem selfish and egotistical, but it has the bonus effect of settling tensions between groups. If people only care about the next hit, they will not take collective action.

It is true that what Adam Curtis called the Century of the Self led to a great peace. In recent decades, Hitlers and Stalins have been impossible on account of that no-one would follow them. Collective efforts demand individual sacrifices, and people who identify with the individual ego will not make them. However, this identification brings its own problems.

The fourth political subject is the consciousness itself.

The limitations of identifying with the individual ego are now obvious. Although doing so was a logical move forwards from the horrors of state-worship, the human animal is still fundamentally a social one, and it has social needs. Identifying with the individual ego might make warfare between nations less likely, but it sharply increases the emotional and spiritual suffering of the people, who find that their lives no longer have any meaning.

Some philosophers, like Alexandr Dugin, have suggested a return to Dasein as the basic political subject (Dugin frequently refers to Heidegger’s Dasein in The Fourth Political Theory). This is much the same thing as having consciousness as the basic political subject. In either case, it solves most of the problems of the first three political subjects.

Identifying with the consciousness allows the best of all worlds. Not only can a person meet their social and spiritual needs through connection to other conscious beings, but they can also do so without necessarily getting set against them because of tribal or ideological loyalties. Identifying with consciousness means that one is automatically allied and opposed to every other person.

There’s one problem with this otherwise elegant solution: most people have never learned to distinguish between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. They don’t know the difference between the True Self and the False Self. As such, most people operate either on the level of crude instinct (and thus tend towards tribalism), the level of conditioned responses (and thus tend towards fetishising the state or an ideology) or on both levels at once (and thus tend towards soulless globohomo consumer whoring).

As is so often the case, it appears that our great challenge is primarily a spiritual challenge. Identification with the consciousness might prevent us from getting drawn into tribal or ideological conflicts, and it might prevent us from getting bogged down in mindless anomie. But it will only be an option for those with the spiritual acumen to meditate and perform self-inquiry.

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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Could We Abolish The Police In New Zealand?

Most people never imagined that, one day, we would seriously discuss the possibility of abolishing the Police in New Zealand. It’s usually just assumed that society would fall back into savagery without a police force to keep order. Yet, here we are. This essay outlines the considerations involved in disbanding the New Zealand Police.

The first thing is to distinguish between what we’re told the Police do, and what they really do.

What we’re told is the Police enforce law and order. The story we’re given is that the Police are another government service, like road construction or defence. It’s paid for out of general taxation like any other government service, and Police officers themselves are selected for the job on the basis of demonstrating a will to serve the people.

We’re told that the Police enforce law and order for the same reason that all other government officials do their jobs: a general will to end the suffering of all citizens. The predation of criminals causes a great deal of harm, especially when it goes unopposed. Thus, the suffering of the citizens can be minimised by raising a Police force to battle criminals.

What the Police really do is protect private property.

The Police originated with the first chieftain to horde more wealth than he could realistically defend himself. In the really old days, this would mean that other people teamed up to take his wealth off him. The civilised way to defend wealth is not to defend it oneself, but to pay gullible sycophants to do it.

Today, the Police protect the investments of alcohol company shareholders by attacking anyone who produces alternatives in the form of cannabis, MDMA, LSD or other substances. They protect the investments of the importers of cheap labour by harassing anyone who speaks out against mass immigration. They protect the investments of those who hold fiat currency by kneeling on the necks of people who try to pass counterfeit bills.

If you have no investments, the Police don’t care about protecting you. If you doubt this, try being working class and reporting a crime against yourself to them. They won’t give a fuck – they’re not there to protect people like you. They’re there to protect the property of those paying their wages from people like you.

The sad reality is that the New Zealand Police are a pack of dogs that the New Zealand ruling classes sic onto their enemies when they want them destroyed. Those enemies don’t have to be causing harm to anyone – they can be peaceful cannabis users or political dissidents. The Police will destroy them anyway because they are not taking orders from the people, but from their rulers.

Most adults understand now that the New Zealand Police, like Police forces everywhere, are waging a war against the people on behalf of their paymasters. The New Zealand Police see the New Zealand people as a common enemy and, as such, co-operate and conspire against them; it’s extremely rare that one Police officer testifies against another in court.

The grim facts about human nature show that if we abolished all peacekeeping and orderkeeping services, society would soon decay into a Lord of the Flies-style permanent chimpout. However, this doesn’t mean that abolishing the Police would lead to such an outcome. It would in the short-term, if we abolished the Police immediately, but with a bit of thought we could simply deprecate them instead.

What would happen if we gradually abolished the private property-protecting force that is the New Zealand Police, and replaced them with some kind of peacekeeping and orderkeeping force that operated with the consent of the people it kept in line? A community police force whose role was to keep peace and order with the consent of the policed?

We could base such a policing model on the example of the Commando used by the Boers in the Boer Wars.

This would involve all of the able-bodied men from a particular community or neighbourhood getting together on occasion to elect officers. Perhaps for every hundred able-bodied men, ten officers are elected, and these officers choose a sergeant from among themselves.

This sergeant would then be tasked with enforcing peace and order. His rights and responsibilities would be little different to that of a regular Police constable, but with one major difference. The sergeant would serve at the pleasure of his fellow officers for the sake of the community, and could be dismissed at any time by those officers. This would be very different to today’s model, where he serves at the pleasure of the ruling class for the sake of the ruling class.

As such, our hypothetical community sergeant would not enforce laws such as cannabis prohibition, or prohibition of psychedelic sacraments. Anyone who came into the community from the outside, however, and started selling something the community did not approve of, would get dealt to. So would anyone who broke any actual law, such as thieves, rapists, thugs and murderers.

These community sergeants could come together on a town level to vote for a captain of police, who could in turn come together on a regional level to vote for a regional inspector, who could in turn come together on a national level to vote for a national superintendent. The captains, inspectors and the superintendent would have their own separate budgets with which to hire detectives and other specialists.

Should the community sergeant require, he would be able to deputise the other officers previously elected by the community’s menfolk. This would occur in cases of public disorder, or if a violent criminal needed apprehending safely.

This is entirely different to today’s model, where the ruling class appoints a caste of political administrators through a sham process called democracy, who in turn appoint lackeys to the highest ranks in the Police Force, who in turn hire arse-licking dogs willing to enforce laws against the population without their consent.

This model has led to an unaccountable paramilitary who operate more like a horde of goons than a community peacekeeping force. It’s little wonder that the world is currently wracked by protests against police brutality. The time is perfect to replace today’s top-down model with a community policing model under which officers operate with the consent of the policed.

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Why One Should Be Sceptical Of Labour’s Recent High Polling

Recent opinion polls in New Zealand suggest that the Sixth Labour Government is utterly triumphant. Labour’s polling dominance is such that it has led directly to a change in Leader of the Opposition. However, as this article will show, Labour’s high polling numbers need to be taken with a massive pinch of salt.

Labour supporters have been effusive in their praise for Ardern, claiming that her excellent crisis leadership has been the reason for the polling rise. She has been the very model of calm, collected control, and her high polling is simply because people have come to realise how great she is. She has communicated clearly, listened to the scientists and oh isn’t she marvellous.

The reality is that sitting governments everywhere have received a significant polling boost in recent months as their populace has swung in behind them out of a wartime mindset.

The Social Democrats in Sweden, who had recently suffered the humiliation of falling behind the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats in the polls, have now leapt back into the lead. Since the coronavirus pandemic began in earnest, they have increased their share of expected voters from 23% to 31%. In other words, the sitting government’s vote share increased by about a third – as it did in New Zealand.

It’s worth noting here that the Swedish approach to the pandemic was almost the opposite of New Zealand’s. Sweden did not have lockdowns, choosing to rely on the inevitable herd immunity of the population. So it’s not simply a matter of sitting governments being rewarded for making the right move. No-one knows yet what the right move was.

A Labour supporter might interject here. They might claim that the Swedish Social Democrats are also a centre-left party, and so their success combined with New Zealand Labour’s success shows that the time has come for the politics of kindness. Regardless of how the coronavirus should have been dealt with, many voters now agree that the time of miserliness and keeping other people down is over.

These are lovely sentiments, but the reigning Union Government in Germany is conservative, and they have also seen a poll boost since the coronavirus pandemic started – in their case of some 12% (see image at top of page). So the populations of Western countries have fallen in behind centre-right governments as well as centre-left ones.

Final proof comes from the fact that the Scott Morrison Government in Australia, despite being mired in scandal and accusations of incompetence, has also climbed some 6-7% since the pandemic hit. Morrison had fallen behind Leader of the Opposition Anthony Albanese on the Preferred Prime Minister polls, but has now regained his lead.

There’s an obvious conclusion to draw from all this data. It’s apparent that the public of every Western nation has fallen in behind their leadership on account of anxiety from the coronavirus pandemic. This is clear from the fact that, despite handling the pandemic in very different ways, all sitting governments have seen massive boosts to their polling.

Kings have long known that their underlings plot and scheme against them less when the castle is under siege. Dictators have also long known that their position is never more secure than when the nation is under threat from an outside enemy. In fact, it’s a law of social psychology that group cohesion is a function of the group’s anxiety about external threats.

This is why criticising Jacinda Ardern has become a social misdemeanour. At a time of great need, such as this coronavirus pandemic, it’s almost seen as treason to criticise the leader. This is an emergency, and that demands that everyone put their grievances aside and work together for a greater goal.

The true measure of Labour’s polling will come after the siege mentality brought on by the coronavirus pandemic is lifted. There’s good reason to expect that Labour will fall back to within 5% of their pre-COVID mark of around 42%. If they do, and given that the ACT Party is now polling at 3.5%, then this September’s election could still be very close, despite how high Labour and Ardern are currently riding.

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Why The West Should Replace China With India

It’s apparent to all that the world is currently undergoing a strategic realignment. When the COVID-19 dramas have settled down, we will be left with a new set of alliances and global political arrangements. This essay will argue that the Western World should use this opportunity to replace the economic ties it currently has with China.

To a major extent, those who are powerful in the non-Western world are only so because of the favour of Western elites. China’s economic miracle is chiefly the result of the transfer of manufacturing capacity from the West since the early 1980s. After forty years of this, China has grown into a major world power.

In 1990, China had a smaller economy than Canada. Their GDP per capita was a pitiful $349 per year, putting them in the same class as Uganda, Mali and Rwanda. Today, China is second only to America by total economy size. Their GDP per capita is now in the same class as fringe Western nations such as Russia, Argentina and Bulgaria.

This development has brought with it great wealth, not only to China but also to their major trading partners. But with this wealth has come power, and with that power has come ambition.

China’s strategic goals in the South China Sea are evident: to take control of the entire region. As their economy continues to develop, their ability to actualise these goals increases. They are now wealthy enough to devote a vast sum of surplus capital to military outfitting and development. Some of this has been devoted to building artificial islands – rightly considered forward military bases – in the South China Sea.

Given that Chinese strategic goals often don’t align with ours, and that Indian strategic goals often do, it might be time for the West to make an immense pivot away from China and towards India. There are several reasons why this might be a good idea.

The most obvious strategic reason to replace China with India is the aforementioned military one. A close alliance with India would all but guarantee Western control over the Straits of Malacca, which is the jugular vein of Chinese shipping and trade. This would minimise the potential for China to get tempted into further expansionism.

Existing tensions on the shared border between India and China have flared in recent weeks. China has already moved a brigade’s strength of men into territory India claims as its own. This is an extreme provocation by any measure, if not an outright act of war. India’s response could lead to a wider conflagration.

If it does, it would be the perfect time for the West to throw our lot in behind India. Not only would it enable us to impose a collective will upon China in a weak moment for them, but giving assistance to India in their time of need would engender the greatest amount of long-term goodwill from their side.

More subtle are the economic reasons. China’s economy has advanced to the point where it is a competitor to the West in many ways, whereas India’s has not. Many Chinese firms have been able to drive Western ones out of certain markets by way of having a superior product. The general level of scientific knowledge in the Chinese population is now high enough that Chinese firms are likely to pose a consistent threat into the future.

It would be much better to co-operate with Indian firms, and to raise them to the level where they can compete with the Chinese ones, than to continue to raise Chinese firms so that they can compete with ours in the future. We can help India to adopt technology that both the West and China already have, at no strategic loss to ourselves.

As mentioned above, Chinese GDP per capita has increased sharply in recent decades. Today, it is over twice as high as the GDP per capita in India. This has brought with it increasing expectations of living standards, such that India now offers better opportunities to employ cheap labour. Factories could be set up in India at competitive prices.

The greatest reasons to pursue an alliance with India at the expense of China are cultural.

India is culturally superior to the West in several ways. Here we are not merely talking about lamb saagwalas. Their compassion for animals is such that India has more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together. This compassion is a feature of Dharmic religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism.

The sadistic Abrahamic religions have no such restrictions, and neither does Chinese culture with its hellish wet markets. As such, there is an opportunity for us in the West to learn from Indian culture and from the Indian approach to life, and to use its inspiration to better ourselves.

The Indian spiritual culture fills a need in the Western soul for answers about how to morally conduct ourselves in this life. This is not to claim that all Indians conduct themselves perfectly, or even better than Westerners do on average. It is merely to suggest that there is great value to Westerners in the spiritual traditions of the Indian people, in particular Buddhism and Hinduism.

Because India has cultural advancements that we in the West ought to learn from, there is the possibility of genuinely reciprocal trade. We have scientific, technological and commercial knowledge that they would benefit from learning, and they have spiritual knowledge that we would benefit from learning. It would be a two-way exchange.

A further point relating to culture is the shared love of cricket. That cricket is popular in India as well as in Britain, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand means that men from all of these places have a shared bond, and this naturally allows for some degree of solidarity. After all, it’s through sport that men learn to conduct themselves in wartime, and men bonded in such a fashion are bonded deeply.

No such bond is shared with China.

In summary, an entire spectrum of reasons suggests that the West ought to take the economic bonds that tie us to China, and to replace them with bonds that tie us to India. This would not only make a great deal of natural sense, but it would also strengthen the strategic position of the West deep into this century.

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