Category: politics

There are many competing theories of political spectrums. The best known is left-right, but libertarian-authoritarian and traditionalist-progressivist are two popular others. This essay contends that the most instructive way to look at the basic political division is to split it into what we call verticalists and horizontalists, based on crude biopolitical sentiments.

These terms refer not to a person’s ideal distribution of resources or land, or to the status quo or change, but to a person’s preferred form of social dominance hierarchy. In this sense, verticalists correspond to what has traditionally been called a “masculine” kind of politics while horizontalists correspond to what has traditionally been called “feminine”.

Verticalists also overlap heavily with what has hitherto been considered the right, and horizontalists with the left, but it isn’t as simple as this.

The basic belief of a horizontalist is that the dominance hierarchy ought to be flattened, or at least that the ideal dominance hierarchy is a relatively egalitarian one. This entails that no-one can exalt themselves too far above the others or above the average. The basic belief of a verticalist is that it is morally permissible for an individual to acquire many, many times more wealth or power than the average person.

Horizontalists are therefore much like mainstream leftists when they contend that CEOs should not be allowed to earn 500 times more than the most lowly-paid workers at their company, or when they express a dislike of feudal monarchy. Their core sentiment seems to be a belief that people should not be allowed to wield power over others, and that to do so is obscene.

Verticalists don’t feel the same sense of injustice that horizontalists do at the thought of a dominance hierarchy in which some positions carry much, much more power or prestige than others. They are much more comfortable with the thought of a person having exclusive control over an area, such as a fascist dictatorship.

There are essentially two types of verticalists.

The first are those who think that they themselves are the natural inheritors of the top of the dominance hierarchy. These people are the natural alphas. Usually they are distinguished from the others by being exceptionally vigorous, strong or intelligent. Sometimes their distinction is a matter of will.

The second are those who want to serve the first group, in the hope that some of the spoils of war fall to them. These are the natural betas. If one observes the natural dominance hierarchies that occur in chimpanzee troops, it is clear that this alpha-beta vertical distinction is a naturally occurring phenomenon in social creatures.

Horizontalism draws its power out of a discontentment with this primitive way of things. Some people naturally have a moral objection to others wielding great amounts of power. Horizontalists tend to think that such a thing is obscene, and that “the people” (i.e. the betas) need to work together to avoid being exploited out of their fair share of the proceeds of their labour.

Horizontalisation probably came about when some early primate realised that the alpha male of their tribe was preventing them from accessing reproductive opportunities by means of extreme jealousy and possessive violence over the tribe’s females, and that if our early primate teamed up with a like-minded they could collectively eliminate the alpha male and thus gain access to those females.

Over time, this created a selection pressure in favour of those males who reacted angrily to other males asserting dominance and control over large amounts of resources. In other words, there was a selective pressure in favour of those who believed in horizontalism.

There are also two types of horizontalists. The first are those who do not themselves think they are the natural inheritors of the top of the dominance hierarchy. These people are similar to the beta males who become verticalists, only they have chosen another strategy. Instead of trying to work with and for the alphas, they aim to supplant them and become the new alphas themselves.

The second are those who promote horizontalisation for idealistic reasons, despite being in the upper half of the dominance hierarchy themselves. These people are often very intelligent and have taken a particularly long-term view, because a long-term view will naturally suggest that one should focus on co-operation rather than competition. These people are the natural nation-builders and philosopher-kings, and are extremely rare.

A verticalist generally has no problem stating that one thing is more valuable than another. For example, they might be comfortable saying that Person A is a great man and that Person B is a piece of shit. A horizontalist, on the other hand, is disinclined to show great respect to Person A and is also disinclined to show great disrespect to Person B. In this sense the verticalists are more masculine and the horizontalists more feminine.

Verticalism differs from the popular conception of right wing in several ways. A verticalist has no problem with a person smoking cannabis, for example, because that doesn’t impact the individual verticalist’s ability to get ahead. Whether or not cannabis is legal doesn’t make it harder or easier for a verticalist to get ahead from their own effort, so they won’t support it for the sake of mere tradition like a conservative, or for the sake of destroying poor and non-white people like a right-winger.

Also, verticalists don’t tend to be either racist or misogynistic. A verticalist doesn’t have a problem with respecting a black man or a woman as long as those people are capable of distinguishing themselves from the plebs by their own merit. In this manner, there is an overlap between verticalism and Luciferianism.

Conversely, horizontalism differs from the popular conception of left wing in that it doesn’t need to posit a new ruling class in the form of any kind of global authority. A horizontalist feels absolutely no need to crate a global hierarchy in which an entity like the United Nations wielded great power over the peoples of the Earth. Horizontalists are fairly anarchistic in that sense.

Furthermore, a horizontalist would likely oppose mass immigration from poorer countries, for the reason that this tends to form an underclass of people who aren’t really a part of the nation, and an overclass of wealthy landowners who benefit handsomely from the cheap labour and increased demand for housing. Horizontalists might therefore have more in common with national socialists than with regular socialists or Marxists.

Alchemically, all of these positions relate to the four masculine elements. The basic verticalist dichotomy can be said to reflect the basic feminine-masculine distinction between clay and iron, between the passive, receptive yin and the active, outgoing yang. The horizontalists are themselves split into the false egalitarians of the silver and the true philosopher-kings of gold who intend to lead humanity out of the brutality of biological dominance hierarchies.

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