The Insanity At The Heart Of Western Culture In 2024

Mainstream media has made clear to every one of us that our current rates of material consumption are destroying the planet. If we don’t stop raping the limited resources of Planet Earth, we will induce a biosphere collapse that will probably kill us all. But there are very powerful forces preventing us from not pillaging the world.

Earth Overshoot Day is the day by when humans have used up all the resources that the planet can regenerate in a year. In 2024, that day was May 27. New Zealanders consume at such at rate that, if everyone consumed like us, we’d use up a year’s worth of resources by April 11.

The fact that an overshoot day even exists is proof that the world is insane. It means that we’re living in an unsustainable manner, much like a crackhead living on a giant ball of crack. We have to change course or we’re all going to die. But there are structural reasons why our global society can’t stop consuming the planet.

It’s not just a matter of resource depletion either. This March was the tenth straight month of record temperatures. The mainstream scientific consensus is that human activity has heated up the planet by almost 1.7 degrees Celcius since the late 1800s. If we don’t rein that activity in by reducing overconsumption, we will eventually cook the planet (and us with it).

The problem is that most of this consumption is motivated by the necessities of going to work and maintaining a state of work-readiness. A person must maintain a private vehicle, professional clothing and footwear, professional standards of grooming and body care, potentially all manner of tools and equipment, as well as pay for entertainment to destress from the demands of working. All of this costs resources – resources that are only used because of the obsession with working.

Realistically what we need is for a large number of people to go on something like a UBI, so that instead of driving to work every day and flying to meetings every week, and then spending the income they make from a forty-hour workweek on all kinds of consumer crap they don’t need, they can cut down both their work rate and their consumption rate.

The problem is that it’s simply not allowed to not work.

Our entire culture appears to be based on the logic that people not employed for wages are “not pulling their weight”, as if widespread starvation was imminent. There are dozens of words that can be employed to humiliate someone into working harder: bum, bludger, leech, moocher, parasite, lazy, shirker, grifter etc. To not be working for a wage is considered a great shame.

It could even be said that we live in a “workiarchy” where whoever works the most has the highest status. People brag about waking up extremely early in the morning to work, as if it was central to their moral value. This mentality has given us absurd humour like the “100 hours a week” meme, wherein it’s assumed that if you work less than 100 hours a week you’re taking it easy.

Mass abandonment of work is also not socially possible. The identities of most people are so closely bound with their work that they would suffer a catastrophic loss of personality structure if they were asked to give it up. In the same way that many people die shortly after they retire, because they no longer see a purpose to life, many people would lose the will to live if they were asked to stop working for the environment’s sake.

We’re killing the planet by consuming as much as we are. Yet it’s impossible to just simply not work. This irreconcilable conflict is causing immense levels of undiagnosed schizophrenia among Westerners, and especially younger ones, who are facing the existential dilemma of climate change head-on.

It is apparent from the widespread despair and malaise in Western society today that people want a change of direction. But who can change that direction, when most people are too busy working to pay rents to organise protest, and the people receiving the rents don’t want to change anything?

For the insanity at the heart of Western culture to be cured, we need to collectively come to the realisation that time spent in unpaid work can be just as valuable as time spent in paid work. We don’t need capitalists ordering us around for our lives to have value or meaning. We need to completely revalue the importance of work and industriousness in the light of the total ecological impact of humanity.

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The Cruelty Is The Point

Many have been surprised by the decisions made by the Sixth National Government. Taking food away from hungry children and giving the money to landlords seems pointlessly cruel. So does ticking up an eleven-figure debt that our grandchildren will labour to settle, just for tax cuts. Perhaps the most egregious is maintaining cannabis prohibition in the face of the mountain of international evidence that it doesn’t work.

What motivates these decisions?

A cursory examination of New Zealand political history shows that previous National governments have also been motivated by cruelty. The Fifth National Government slashed the mental health system and continued to withhold medicinal cannabis. The Fourth National Government slashed the welfare system and destroyed unions. All of these measures were blamed on Labour at the time, but in reality were motivated by simple cruelty.

Cruelty is, in fact, one of the major human motivations. The rush of sadism can be one of the most powerful of all. Ted Bundy once said “When you feel the last bit of breath leaving their body, you’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!” Similar feelings of grandeur flow through the National MP who cuts food programs for children.

It can be seen from the way that bullies abuse each other at school, psychopathic bosses abuse workers in the office and spouses abuse each other behind closed doors, cruelty and sadism are powerful motivators for action in many different times and places. People wired up this way readily find an outlet in National and ACT party politics.

Once the central motivating role of cruelty in National party psychology is realised, it’s much easier to understand National party policy.

This was seen most evidently during the cannabis referendum. National party supporters, who generally opposed law reform in this area, were not moved by arguments around the immense alleviation of human suffering that easy access to cannabis would allow. To the contrary – National voters, who seldom use cannabis themselves (preferring booze, painkillers and television), understood that cannabis prohibition usually destroyed Other People.

This also explains why National party voters were seldom moved by appeals to the fact that Maoris suffer more heavily than other races from cannabis prohibition. Given that National voters hate Maori people and want them to suffer, why would they then care about Maoris getting locked up because of cannabis prohibition? To the National mindset, that’s more of an argument to support prohibition.

John Ehrlichmann, Presidential Advisor under Richard Nixon, once said: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Same deal in New Zealand. Of course the National party and their lackeys like Mike Hosking and Bob McCoskrie know the science. The science has been established for decades: cannabis is medicinal, and any amount of misuse is less harmful than misuse of alcohol. But by lying about it, the National party can target their enemies. Not hippies and blacks, but hippies and Maoris.

National party policy cannot be understood unless it is appreciated that the intent of such policy is to destroy people the National party hates. This is primarily the poor. National hates Maori people more because they are poor than because they are Maori – proof for this assertion comes from the fact that National voters don’t seem to hate Asians.

The central motivating role of cruelty in National party policy can be seen in this year’s benefit cuts. The indexing of benefit increases to inflation instead of wages has cost the average beneficiary $6 per week, which saves the Government a pittance in comparison to what they’re paying out in landlord tax cuts. But it’s not the saving money that motivates such cuts – it’s tightening the stranglehold on beneficiaries.

Nietzsche wrote, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, to “distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful”. There was excellent reason for this. The impulse to punish is fuelled by resentment, which is the basis of slave morality. This impulse is referred to as a “justice boner” in modern Internet parlance, reflecting the fact that its ultimately motivated by pre-human, even reptilian, brain structure.

Unfortunately, the stupidity of Labour and the Greens means that the cruelty of National and ACT is something the rest of us must endure for as long as the two-party democratic system exists.

As long as democracy exists, it will appeal primarily to the lowest common denominator and thereby enable the most bestial and sadistic impulses of humanity. This is why the National and ACT parties have produced, and continue to produce, a parade of sadistic beasts: Shipley, Richardson, Prebble, Key, Brownlee, Bennett, Collins, van Velden et al., ad infinitum.

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The Working-Class White Question

Conventional political understanding is that the left wing is for the working class and the right wing is for the ruling class. But conventional understanding is in the process of being replaced by an alternative politics. In the politics of the 21st Century, the left wing is for browns and blacks. This has raised a number of, until now, unanswered questions.

Perhaps the foremost of those questions is: what is the position of working-class whites in the new paradigm?

The labour movements that formed in the West in the 19th and early 20th Centuries were almost entirely white. They formed in opposition to the capitalist interests that were also almost entirely white. But when globalists won World War Two, and began the mass importation of cheap Third World labour to the West, the white working class were put in a bind.

According to the Marxists, the white working class were obliged to embrace their replacements. The world’s working class were prophecised by Marx to come together across international borders, and so the destruction of national consciousness through mass cheap labour imports was a good thing. The white working class would have to recognise that they and the newcomers were of a shared mission: to destroy the capitalist system.

Working-class whites, however, didn’t feel like they had much in common with the newcomers. For one thing, the vast majority of working-class whites have at least some middle-class people in their extended family. For another, the newcomers usually hated the working-class whites and made that hatred obvious.

This caused working-class white sentiments to split: some embraced working-class culture, some embraced white culture, and others bunked down into an exclusivist working-class white culture that was hostile to outsiders. The net result was the shattering of working-class white solidarity and the neutralisation of working-class whites as a political force.

Today, we see working-class whites, on account of being white, forced to take a back seat to everyone else, even when those others are wealthier. Working-class whites are excluded from racial scholarships just as much as Bill Gates’s kids are. Working-class whites can also be, and often are, excluded from certain jobs under Diversity, Inclusion and Equity initiatives.

Naturally, this has led to immense resentment among working-class whites towards the Western political establishment. This resentment is strongest for those leftists who claim to be fighting for the white working class, but who in reality are fighting for an ideology that doesn’t care at all about working-class whites.

The working-class white question, then, is a way of distinguishing sane leftists from insane wokists.

If a person truly supports the underdog, they will support the working-class whites upon whose backs industrial civilisation was built, and who still bear the majority of the intergenerational trauma incurred through the various wars of the past 100 years: the same working-class whites who are currently getting squeezed out of housing all over the West.

If they are an insane wokist, by contrast, they might consider working-class whites traitors for their refusal to support the globalist revolution. Thus they will not care about the suffering of working-class whites from the mass importation of Third World cheap labour. That suffering is just a means to the end of globalist revolution.

Thus sane leftists can be distinguished from insane ones, simply by asking them what they think about working-class whites.

A leftist might make the argument that some particular racial group is disadvantaged because of colonisation, and therefore deserves special treatment by way of compensation. Very well. But what, then, explains the disadvantage of working-class whites?

If a left-wing politician makes the argument that browns and blacks are disadvantaged by colonisation, but working-class whites, who may be poorer than those browns and blacks, are advantaged by that same colonisation, and therefore are obliged to pay some of the reparations that are due from the whites to the browns and blacks, that politician is the enemy.

Likewise if a politician says that browns and blacks are poor because they have not had a chance yet, but working-class whites are poor because they have had a chance and have already blown it, that politician is the enemy. This is akin to saying that working-class whites are the only truly low-IQ faction of society, and therefore deserve a place at the very bottom of the ladder.

Working-class whites need to realise that, if a left-wing politician doesn’t support working-class whites explicitly, they will not support working-class whites at all. The fact that they are on the left cannot be taken to mean that they implicitly support working-class whites.

The working-class white question is a way for working-class whites to determine if a given leftist is a friend or a foe.

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Why Mainstream Conservatives Support Homosexuality But Not Cannabis Law Reform

Forty years ago, mainstream conservatives believed that both cannabis and homosexuality ought to be criminalised. Today, they still believe that cannabis use should be illegal – but they celebrate homosexuality, as shown by their attendance at the various pride parades. What is the reason for supporting the status quo on one moral issue, but making a complete flip on another? This article explains.

What it comes down to is a war on consciousness.

Homosexuality might be a threat to a certain kind of moral order, one based around the family and raising children. But it isn’t a threat to capitalism. In fact, the logic of nihilistic consumption is common to both homosexuals and capitalists. Both tend to live for today and for the pleasures of today, with little thought to posterity or to their legacy.

American marketers believe the “pink dollar” – the total consumption of LGBTQ people – to be worth over one trillion dollars per year in the United States. Yahoo Finance states: “there is a correlation between the growth of the pink economy and the increase in demand for luxury products and premium services, since it is estimated that this community spends 15% more than heterosexuals.”

This is the reason for the right-wing about-face on homosexuality over recent decades. By encouraging homosexuality, the conservatives encourage people onto a path of hedonistic, spendthrift materialism. Today’s conservatives no longer care about conserving anything, they only care about money. So for them, the ideal citizen is someone who just spends, spends and spends.

Cannabis is a different matter.

Cannabis has been used for thousands of years as a spiritual sacrament. As with other spiritual sacraments (such as psilocybin), cannabis inspires people to do things that our corporate overlords don’t like. Such as recycle, minimalise consumption and even drop out of capitalist society completely to devote one’s life to higher pursuits.

Unlike homosexuality, then, spirituality is a direct threat to the capitalist paradigm. Spirituality induces people to find pleasure in everyday things, such as the rise and fall of the Sun, the glow of the Moon, the caress of the wind. It causes people to assign merit to the good, not to those with the most expensive car or shoes.

Spirituality also causes people to take extreme long-term viewpoints. Because it inclines people to think about reincarnation and karma, it also inclines people to think about their wider family, clan, nation, race and species, and justice for those groups. This kind of thinking comes into direct conflict with the capitalist imperative to atomise every individual into a consumerist silo.

The National party’s biggest concern is keeping people on the employment-rent treadmill, whereupon they can be plundered for maximum profits. To this end, they want people taking the most short-term possible view. They want people obsessed with the crudest, most bestial pleasures. Understanding this, one can also understand how Judith Collins can march in a pride parade while campaigning to have cannabis users locked up.

In esoteric terms, the situation can (as so often) be best understood with an appeal to the Mithraic Ladder.

The mentality, and the spiritual frequency, of homosexuality is something that belongs to the lowest levels of the Mithraic Ladder. The energy of Saturn, or of lead, is an energy not concerned with reproduction. Saturn consumed his offspring, and, in the same way, homosexuals do not create a next generation. Homosexuality is the frequency of death, where pleasure is raised higher than life itself.

People on those low levels are not thinking about a revolution of philosopher-kings. As such, cocks going up arses are not, in any sense, a threat to the Government or to conservatism. In fact, in so far as it serves as a distraction from the development of the political consciousness necessary to challenge the ruling class, sodomy is a benefit to the Government and to conservatism.

The same phenomenon can be seen on /pol/, where the catalog is regularly flooded with porn and sex threads, distracting from the development of political consciousness. This is the result of a deliberate effort to destroy a space in which free political thought takes place.

The spiritual frequency of cannabis use, by contrast, is about higher vistas. Cannabis users tend to think about things like justice, God and their own karmic debts. This naturally leads them to think about political questions. A person whose mind is fixed on the eternal is the ultimate threat to tyrannical rulers. Such a person, like the Terminator, cannot be distracted by mere pleasures and they’re much harder to intimidate into submission.

Mainstream conservatives, in summary, support homosexuality and not cannabis law reform because homosexuality has the ultimate effect of upholding the status quo, whereas cannabis use does not.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World about a society in which no-one participated in intellectual pursuits, but were obsessed with sex. This culture was of great benefit to the rulers of that world, who thereby went unchallenged. Huxley was aware in the 1930s of that venal, money-grubbing tendency among conservatives. In our time, that tendency has fully bloomed.

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

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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