There's Nothing As Profitable As Human Suffering

There’s Nothing As Profitable As Human Suffering

Everyone’s trying to figure out quick ways to make a buck. The world today is so complicated, however, that it’s not easy to see where the potential for generating profits lies. As this essay will elucidate, there’s one easy rule that one can follow to find wealth: there’s nothing in the wide world as profitable as human misery and suffering.

Broadly speaking, there are four different kinds of suffering, and all of them are immensely profitable.

Physical suffering in the form of hunger is the basis for the profitability of the food industry. Travellers will be aware that almost every city on Earth has a McDonald’s. The suffering caused by being exposed to the elements creates the profitability of the accommodation industry. Travellers will also be aware of how much of their travel budget goes on accommodation.

The reason why medicine makes such immense profits (in America particularly, but also elsewhere) is because they know that people will pay any amount of money when the alternative is death. Colossal amounts of money are generated by prolonging the suffering of terminally ill people, especially in cases where there is no hope of recovery. Even people who aren’t dying will fork out huge sums to have their physical suffering ameliorated.

Emotional suffering in the form of mental ill health is the basis for the profitability of the pharmaceutical industry. The sale of anti-psychotic pills such as Olanzapine brings in billions of dollars every year. Anti-depressants and anti-anxiolytics bring in similar amounts, and all of this profit is made possible by the psychotogenic nature of modern society.

This emotional suffering also allows for great profits from alcohol and tobacco sales. In order to profit from a mentally ill person, it’s not necessary to prescribe them pharmaceuticals. One can still make heaps of money off them by selling them drugs at a supermarket or chemist. As long as they are suffering enough, they will pay hard cash just for a temporary journey into oblivion.

Intellectual suffering in the form of boredom is the basis for the profitability of the entertainment industry. The sheer tedium of modern life, which has made everything as predictable and safe as possible, has created a powerful desire for stimulation in any form possible. Sports, television, video games and music all depend for their profitability on people suffering from the dreary monotony of the everyday.

This intellectual suffering also exists in the form of an unslaked thirst for truth. Because our modern media is full of absolute garbage, and our Governments full of lying swine, it’s impossible to trust anything popular. Therefore, simply speaking the truth can be enough to generate profit – but only as long as enough ignorance exists to cause suffering.

Finally, spiritual suffering in the form of ignorance is the basis for the profitability of the religious industry. The vast majority of people can be induced into a state of terror at the thought of their inevitable physical death, and almost all consider this to be the natural state of the human animal. In reality, a fear of death only affects people who are unenlightened.

The material world is nothing more than ephemera, and this is understood by those who have seen beyond. Therefore, the death of the physical body does not impact consciousness. An enlightened person will understand, then, that death is nothing to be feared, and that only through attachment to these temporary ephemera do we suffer.

None of any of this would be too much of a problem, were it not for the fact that most human suffering today is artificially created, specifically for the purpose of generating greater profits.

Housing shortages are almost always artificially generated, for the simple reason that restricting the supply of a limited good inevitably increases its price. Therefore, the people who already own property have an interest in both restricting new builds (which would increase the supply of competitors) and increasing immigration (which increases demand for housing).

Most mental illnesses, likewise, are artificial creations. The suffering they cause is, of course, very real – but their creation is usually the result of the way that society is structured. Not every human being is naturally capable of coping with the demands of being chained to a desk all day from age five, and having to beg to be allowed to take a piss. Many of them crack.

The television, newspaper and radio industries literally make money by causing human suffering. This is because advertisers will pay these people money to run ads that cause suffering to their audience, in the hope that those audience members will be induced to spend money on the advertisers’ products. To that end, the advertisements’ ceaseless refrain is how ugly, fat, stupid, smelly and disgusting everyone is.

This grim reality is particularly true in the case of spiritual suffering. The Abrahamic cults have always had a policy of destroying and suppressing true spiritual practice. This is why Christians destroyed the Eleusinian Mysteries at the end of the fourth century, why they persecuted “witches” in the Middle Ages, and why they criminalised the use of spiritual sacraments such as magic mushrooms in the 20th century.

Christians have always known that the more suffering in the world, the more likely people are to turn to the Church, at which point their wealth can be leeched off them in exchange for a temporary feeling of absolution. To that end, they generally oppose any measure that would reduce the suffering of the people – New Zealand Christians are behind both the movement opposing the cannabis referendum and the movement opposing the euthanasia referendum.

The widespread conspiracy to create more human suffering for the sake of profits is nothing less than a crime against humanity, and perhaps the most atrocious one of all time. Unfortunately, those profits are so great that people will always be tempted to engage in this conspiracy. There’s nothing as profitable as human suffering, and if profits aren’t great enough then suffering will be created to generate them.

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

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VJMP Predicts The 2020s

Earlier this week, VJM Publishing paid homage to science fiction author J R Mooneyham and his outstanding website. Because Mooneyham’s website relates to science fiction and to predictions of the future, we at VJM Publishing decided to pay more homage by imitating it. Here are our predictions for the 2020s.

We predict that the current movement across the West towards right-wing populism will increase. This was foretold as early as 2012, when Vince McLeod wrote about a Great Right Shift in his cyberpunk novel The Verity Key. We are seeing the Great Right Shift come into play now, and it will continue for several decades.

Western capitalist economies are built on the belief that all human beings are the same, and therefore that it’s possible to boost economic growth indefinitely through immigration. The reality is that human groups are almost as different to each other as dog breeds are, and so our system is doomed to collapse. This is the fate of all systems built on falsehoods.

It’s possible to predict, then, that social cohesion will continue to decrease across the West. Diversity will continue to increase, and this will eat into solidarity like an acid. This decrease in solidarity will be the immediate cause of most of the phenomena listed below.

It’s hard to tell if Trump will win next year, on account of the vagaries of the Electoral College system. If he loses, America will continue to fracture culturally. Even if he wins, the demographic trends will force a sharp increase in white identity. By the end of the decade, it won’t be unusual for people to openly identify as white nationalists.

The Sweden Democrats are currently polling at around 25% – we predict that they will be close to 50% by the end of the decade. Other nationalist movements in Europe will also gain ground. Marine Le Pen will win in 2022, leading to change across Europe.

There is ample space for a similar nationalist movement in New Zealand, and the lure of power will pull someone into that space. Already it has become apparent that National and Labour are two wings of the Establishment Party, and ten years from now someone will have taken advantage of the sentiments this evokes. By 2030 they will be polling at 25% and the Establishment parties will refuse to work with them.

In the realm of religion, the 2020s will be marked by the further collapse of the Abrahamic cults. Islamic apostasy in particular will be extremely strong, driven by Internet exposure to other cultures and by a reaction to the horrific scriptures. By 2030, organised ex-Muslims will be powerful forces in many countries, including Western ones. This process will lead many Westerners to Satanism.

Nearing the end of the 2020s we will start to see the rise of an esoteric form of Luciferianism. In the same way that Buddha acted to reform Hinduism and Jesus acted to reform Judaism, so too will the common Western religion of Satanism get reformed into an advanced form of Luciferianism. This movement may or may not have a great leader, but an original literature will be composed.

Related to this is an end to the suppression of psychedelic spiritual sacraments. Both cannabis and the major psychedelics will be fully legal everywhere by the end of the 2020s. The War on Drugs will be widely seen as an embarrassment akin to the criminalisation of homosexuality. The suppression of psychedelic science has done 1,600 years worth of damage, but much of this will be repaired by 2030.

Popular intellectual culture will continue to decline in the West as the public discourse drifts ever-closer to its lowest common denominator. This will be exacerbated by Western leftists moving even further away from common sense. By the end of the 2020s, Western leftists will be openly agitating in favour of pedophila, and people who claim that pedophilia harms children will be branded as bigots.

Despite this, small pockets of extremely high intellectual culture will come into existence, guided by the Internet. Because the Internet makes it possible to overcome the tyranny of geography, it can bring together people who are interested in a particular topic from all over the world.

This will lead to extremely immersive online communities relating to all kinds of topics rising up. On the topic of politics, communities like /pol/ on the various chans will grow ever stronger as authoritarian crackdowns on free speech intensify. The Establishment will be aware that it is losing control of the narrative and will therefore crack down hard on alternative sources of propaganda.

The 2020s will see a pronounced rise in the number of hikikomoris and incels. Already the trend towards dropping out of society is worrisome, partially thanks to economic conditions that make it all but impossible to own a home while earning the average wage. In the 2020s it will become extreme. By 2030, many people will have come to see sex as a crude instinct best suppressed.

Interest rates will remain low, bordering on subterranean, until they don’t. The point at which they don’t will mark the point when the shit hits the fan for real. Once they start to rise, many enterprises will fall into bankruptcy. This will lead to panic, and the measures that Governments take to prop up the banking system will be ruthlessly authoritarian.

It’s uncertain what the climate will do over the next 10 years. What we can predict, however, is that climate hysteria will continue to increase. It’s never admitted, but one of the reasons why climate hysteria is pushed so hard is that it induces people to think globally, and to ignore local issues. Hence, climate hysteria is an integral part of manufacturing consent for United Nations dictates, and this will intensify.

The impact of technology on the organisation of human life will become ever stronger. Ted Kaczynski will continue to be vindicated. Some countries will ban personal ownership of motor vehicles as the entire fleet moves to self-driving cars and trucks. Others will force Internet users to declare their identity every time they use the Internet. Mass surveillance will become normalised, and anyone who objects to it will be dismissed as paranoid.

Another phenomenon that will reach fever pitch is spree killings and random murders, whether carried out by firearm or by blade. Mass shootings are already becoming common on account of the general social malaise, and mass stabbings/machete attacks aren’t far behind. In some places, stretches of the 2020s will be like the film Battle Royale. This will cause some very strange alliances and feuds.

By the end of the 2020s, the majority of the population will be on some kind of psychiatric medicine. The idea that people need it because we evolved to live in a different world will become normalised. Social pressures will become so intense that it will be hard to function without sedatives. Related to this, cannabis will replace alcohol as the first choice recreational drug among Western youth.

Culturally speaking, we agree with Rick Giles that the 2020s ought to see a return of physical Honour Culture. The increasing paranoia and worsening economic conditions will cause many to realise that a social collapse is eminently possible. Many have already taken measures to prepare for this by hoarding firearms and precious metals, but there will be a surge in those who prepare by getting fit.

In summary, the 2020s will be worse in most ways, and better in a small number of other ways. It will get worse in terms of society, which will become ever shittier and more soulless and authoritarian. It will get better in the sense that it become possible to reject the system and to carve one’s own niche in cyberspace or in the counterculture that will dominate this decade.

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A Tribute To J R Mooneyham

This is a tribute to American science fiction author J R Mooneyham, creator of one of the most excellent websites on the early Internet. The eponymous jrmooneyham.com was (and is) a treasure trove of hyperlinks to all kind of futuristic and scientific advances, as well as the superb Future History Timeline, which showcased Mooneyham’s predictions for the future.

I discovered this website around 1996. At that time, only people with a special interest in technology had a personal computer with Internet access. If you were friends with such a person, it was possible to access a world of information many times larger than your local town library. For any true nerd such as myself, this was a thousand birthdays all happening at once.

Because the early Internet was populated only by people who could get their heads around the new technology, it was full of the kind of niche interests held by those people. Serial killers and Satanism were favourite topics, one of the highlights being a Richard Ramirez tribute page that said “Hail Satan” through the speakers once per minute – a terrifying experience to anyone discovering the site at night!

Another favourite topic was science fiction. The sort of person who was an early adopter of the Internet was often a science fiction fan. After all, the Internet was clearly the technology of the future, and science fiction deals with the future. Many early Internet users were either science fiction fans or even writers. One of them was J R Mooneyham, who created the website that bears his name.

Mooneyham’s webpage was the first one to really instill in me a sense of awe at what the Internet was capable of. Not only did the page consist of a number of pages all hyperlinked together, but many paragraphs were backed up with hyperlinks to other parts of the Internet. For a young person who had only previously been exposed to books, both of these things were incredible, an entirely new dimension of information arrangement.

On the Signposts of the Future pages, Mooneyham made a number of predictions, some of which I agreed with, and some of which I thought ridiculous but which ended up coming true. Apart from the usual cyberpunk-style predictions about ever-increasing surveillance technology and an ever more precarious geopolitical situation, there were more specific predictions

I scoffed at his prediction that technology would lead to child millionaires, reasoning that the new technologies would be so complicated that it would take many years to study them long enough to have mastered them. Mooneyham had the last laugh, however, as shown by the 8-year old YouTube star Ryan Kaji, who made $26,000,000 this year.

Mooneyham predicted that a major terrorist event would strike New York City near the beginning of the 21st Century. This may have not been too hard to predict, given that there had already been a Muslim attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre in 1993. In any case, Mooneyham was proven correct in spectacular fashion by the events of 9/11.

He also predicted that America would, at some point in the 2010s, start using their military and economic advantage to spark a trade war. This came true with the ascension to power of Donald Trump and the start of the trade war against China. This was part of a wider trend, foreseen by Mooneyham and discussed at length, of hard power giving way to soft power.

My favourite Mooneyham prediction, though, was the “Bounty Economy“. Today we call this the gig economy, but Mooneyham predicted in the 1990s that we would end up with an economy characterised by precarious working conditions, suppressed wages, the mass importation of cheap labour – and tremendous profits for those best positioned to take advantage.

All of this was found in a website that was nothing more than HTML. For a young scholar in the 1990s, the simple genius of this was astonishing. Here was a glimpse of the future of life on Planet Earth, in more than one sense. Although websites such as Mooneyham’s are out of fashion today, thanks to fat data pipes shifting the focus from text to images and then to video, the elegance of the site appeals to the same sort of person that it appealed to in the 1990s.

There will always be a niche, in informational space, for someone targeting the high-IQ sort of forward thinker that actively seeks out information (and who reads, as opposed to passive information seekers who watch YouTube videos). VJM Publishing has targeted this niche, and to that end we have modelled the organisation of our site on jrmooneyham.com.

Some people have criticised the VJM Publishing company page on the grounds that it looks like a Geocities page from the early 2000s. It is our contention, however, that this is what a website ought to look like. It is the excellence of J R Mooneyham’s page, discovered over two decades ago, that inspired the clean, text-heavy and massively hyperlinked look of our own company page.

J R Mooneyham is a pioneering figure in Internet culture, especially in the high Internet culture that has avoided the televisionisation process that has occurred since the coming of FaceBook and YouTube. He ought to be more widely known. Thus, this article is in tribute to him, and to the minds he expanded thanks to reaching people with his excellent website.

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Has Firearms Confiscation Failed Like Cannabis Prohibition?

The amnesty period for the recent firearms confiscation in New Zealand has just ended. Early estimates suggest that fewer than half of the recently-banned firearms have been handed in, which means that some 100,000 Kiwis are now criminals. This essay asks: if the New Zealand people aren’t going to obey the new firearms law because they don’t consider it legitimate, is enforcing it even feasible?

No people are obliged to obey immoral laws.

Intuitive recognition of this natural law of morality is why cannabis prohibition has failed in New Zealand. The people of New Zealand feel that they have the inherent right to use cannabis, and therefore they don’t care about the manmade laws prohibiting it. The people who follow and enforce these laws, not the ones that break them, are the ones who shall incur the karmic debt.

This widespread refusal to submit to cannabis prohibition has made the law unenforceable. Not only do Kiwis continue to use cannabis, but they regularly collaborate to help each other evade law enforcement. Although people getting ratted out for cannabis offences is still very common, it’s not routine like it is for offences that actually harm people. So for every cannabis user arrested, a hundred more people become cannabis users.

In a system such as ours, our politicians are supposed to be representatives of the public will. Therefore, the New Zealand people feel that politicians who do not follow the public will are acting in bad faith, and that these politicians do not need to be respected. Overseas, such sentiments regularly lead to violence and civil unrest. Consequently, our politicians try to make sure that they’re seen respecting the public will.

This is part of the unwritten contract that prevents we, the people, from killing them. We have the right to kill anyone trying to enslave us, as per the Iron Tenet of anarcho-homicidalism, and anyone refusing to accept our legitimate will is trying to enslave us. The ruling class understand this, which is why they are now giving way on the question of cannabis prohibition.

The problem is that it’s starting to look as if the public will is against the new firearms prohibitions. The New Zealand Council of Licenced Firearms Owners estimates that, although some 56,000 weapons have been surrendered, there are still 100,000 that have not been. There are also suggestions that, of the 56,000 rifles surrendered, many were effectively useless anyway.

The question raised by the refusal to hand in the now-prohibited firearms is this: if the New Zealand people refuse to submit to the new firearms prohibitions, are these laws any more enforceable than the cannabis laws? In other words, is it possible that widespread defiance of the new firearms prohibitions could lead to their withdrawal in the future?

There are already counter-movements to the firearms crackdowns.

The New Conservatives have promised to repeal the recent changes to the firearms laws. VJM Publishing has declared the ownership of weapons to be an inherent human right granted by God, as part of the Sevenfold Conception of Human Rights. Predictably, a large proportion of rural dwellers are against tightening firearms prohibition, with many having stashed weapons away.

There is one major difference between the cannabis laws and the firearms laws. It’s much harder to prohibit something that grows in the ground from a seed than it is to prohibit precision instruments that have to be manufactured overseas in a dedicated factory and then imported.

The New Zealand Police might calculate, therefore, that if they smash a few Kiwis in high-profile firearms raids, and co-ordinate this with a mainstream media propaganda campaign calling the targets “white supremacists,” the remainder will submit.

After all, it took ninety years of utter futility, wasting billions of dollars and many millions of manhours, before it was admitted that cannabis prohibition was a failure. So there’s no reason to think that the New Zealand ruling class will lightly give up their ambitions to render the population harmless through firearms prohibition. Even if it has failed, they will not readily admit it.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what laws are forced on us by our ruling classes. The Police will attack any Kiwi that the ruling class tells them to attack, but if repeated attacks don’t change the people’s behaviour, then there’s good reason to think that it won’t ever change. This has already been proven true with the failed attempts to prohibit homosexuality, prostitution and cannabis use.

The next few years will see a battle between the will of the ruling class, expressed through the actions of the New Zealand Police, and the will of the Kiwi nation who will be targeted by those actions. If the New Zealand people utterly refuse to co-operate with the new firearms prohibitions, then the ruling class might be forced to concede that those prohibitions are unenforceable.

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