politics – Page 166

There is Only One Issue of Social Justice, and It’s One of Class

As long as the left acts as if the white working class man is the enemy, it will fail

The mass consciousness is full of social justice issues at the moment, with social justice warriors in the media and in the public both screaming to get attention to their issue of choice. What few realise is that all of these shrieking SJWs distract from the one and only real social justice issue, which is that the rich have all the power and the poor just get fucked. In a word – class.

Privilege does not come from race, or gender, or sexual orientation – it comes from wealth. All of these other categories are merely correlates with wealth. Being white, male and heterosexual are all qualities correlated with wealth – but none of them are wealth per se. The left has made its most grievous error by confusing genuine privilege with the correlates of privilege – and in doing so it has lost the white working class.

The whole concept of racism is a distraction – but it’s a well-chosen one. In fact, the decision to impose a taboo on so much as mentioning any racial differences was a stroke of genius (from the point of view of suppressing the peasantry). It has had a devastating impact on the ability of the working class to organise itself to resist class injustices. Like an axe through an enemy skull, it has cleaved them neatly in two.

For one thing, the simple fact that there are obvious racial differences in behaviour means that, if racism is the ultimate taboo, then honest people will be ostracised by the herd when they inevitably point them out.

This is not to argue that some ethnic groups are subhuman and should be exterminated – it’s merely to point out that the reason why different ethnic groups exist is because people have adapted to different environments, and those different environments reward various behaviours differently.

It will be centuries before black people in the West become as wealthy as whites (if it ever happens), for the simple reason that Western society has been set up to reflect the hardworking values that naturally evolve in the cultures of people who live in the cold environments that produce white people. So as long as a gap in economic performance exists, the ruling class can always browbeat the white working class about creating this state of affairs with their “racism”.

The second major reason is that it allows the ruling class to give the white working class – their number one enemies – another kick in the guts. If privilege is reduced to a matter of skin colour, instead of a matter of whether a child’s parents had the surplus time and money to properly invest in its education and raise it to be a functioning being, then the white working class can be blamed for their own poverty.

They can be given an extra kick in the guts with the justification that their white skin gave them great advantages that they only failed to take because of their own moral weakness.

The truth – that privilege is almost entirely a function of the quality of one’s upbringing – is ignored because it reveals that people are usually wealthy only if their own parents were themselves wealthy enough to have the spare time and energy to teach them how to behave in ways that capture wealth. In other words, all privilege is class privilege.

This makes the distraction effective because it immediately causes the left to eat itself. The left only has moral authority insofar as it represents the labouring classes that produce wealth instead of the capital-owning class that captures it. When it ceases to represent the labouring classes and instead becomes a disparate horde of disaffected misfits with grievances, it cedes that authority.

Other distractions such as the gender pay gap, gay adoption, funding gender reassignment surgery etc. (i.e. issues that are either entirely fictitious or which affect a very small number of people) all serve a similar purpose, but no method of distracting a Western population from its class issues has proven as effective as race.

These distractions are brought to us by the same people that have brought us all the other distractions – i.e. the very same people who currently occupy the top positions in the class hierarchy and who wish to remain there. This is the reason why wages have stagnated for 30 years and homelessness is on the increase, despite several decades of supposedly continuous economic growth.

The mainstream media won’t tell you this because its journalists work on the direction of the shareholders, who are themselves members of the plutocracy.

The solution to it all is for the left to accept, as it once did, that working class white people are not members of an oppressive enemy class simply because they have white skin. The class status of poor whites, and the financial and cultural poverty that frequently accompany it, is sufficient to mark them as unprivileged.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Palestinian Paradox

The more a person knows about certain political issues, the less likely they are to present information about those issues in an honest manner

When listening to people talk about the Israel-Palestine Conflict, it’s possible to observe the following pattern. The more knowledge a person has about the conflict, they less likely they are to present that knowledge objectively to a listener. This presents us with a curious paradox that makes it necessary to unlearn some of our educational conditioning.

In the educational system, it’s rare that a student considers the possibility that their teacher is lying to them. In the vast majority of cases they don’t need to do so, and paranoia about the teacher is not optimal from the perspective of learning efficiency, because the most efficient learning method is to accept everything unquestioningly.

The political world, however, is infinitely more cutthroat than any educational system could ever be, and one result of this is people constantly lying. The average politician will lie about absolutely anything if they perceive that it is somehow to their advantage to do so. Truth is not a goal in the way it is for an academic. To the average politician, honesty is a slave morality, fit only for simple-minded suckers.

In the political world, people don’t become experts, because that implies an honest effort to communicate truth. Politicians merely become effective manipulators of truth-like statements. Information is not learned because it has truth value; information is learned because data can be used to manipulate listeners into obeying one’s directives and working for one’s agendas.

The Palestianian Paradox arises in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, where there are rarely neutral observers for the reason that almost everyone hates at least one of either Jews or Arabs. The result of this is that people are usually only interested in learning about the history of the conflict in the first place if they have already committed to one side or the other.

Many people hate Jews and this leads to them learning about the conflict from a perspective that emphasises Palestinian rhetoric; many people hate Muslims and this leads to them learning about the conflict from a perspective that emphasises Israeli rhetoric. Indeed, the very choice of descriptor for the disputed area in question gives away a bias (I have chosen “Palestinian Paradox” for the sake of alliteration).

The paradox, then, is the more a person knows about the Israel-Palestine conflict the less likely they are to be motivated to tell the truth about it, because only a person with an established bias would be motivated to learn about the conflict in the first place.

If a person knows a lot about the history of the conflict and the major names involved, they are more likely to selectively omit some of this information when telling you about the conflict for the sake of supporting the objectives of their side. Finding a truly neutral observer is extremely difficult, which makes learning about the conflict difficult, because the more someone is an expert the more likely they are to be biased.

This is also true of many (if not most) other conflicts throughout the history of the world.

In terms of elementalism, the distinction described here corresponds to the distinction between the realm of gold and the realm of silver. In the realm of gold, truth is appreciated for its own value and is recognised as valuable in its own right. In the realm of silver, it is the appearance of truth that matters. The actual truth is hidden away behind the glare of the appearance of truth.

This reflects the distinction between the gold of honest truth-seeking for its own ideal reasons and the silver of educating oneself so that one might use one’s knowledge as a weapon to further material objectives.

VJMP Reads: Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger I

Having chosen a left-wing work (The Interregnum) for our previous reading, we now go to the right again and have a look at Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger. Subtitled “A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul”, it’s based on the premise that the fight against modernity has been lost and the only thing a thinking man can do is ride the tiger of modernity until it’s time to rebuild on the other side.

Part I of the eight parts of this book is called “Orientations” and divides into two essays.

The first of these is called ‘The Modern World and Traditional Man’. This opens outright with a declaration that this text isn’t for everyone. Like The Satanic Bible, Evola is explicit in that his book is only for a particular kind of person. Ride the Tiger is written for the outsider.

Evola’s style seems timeless in the sense that his complaints about the nature of society apply just as well to 2018 as they did to his time, and probably apply well to many times in the past. Things are collapsing, certainly in social terms if not yet physical ones, and so Evola advocates a return to traditional values.

These traditional values are not bourgeoisie ones, Evola is at pains to point out, but in fact “the very antithesis of them.” Indeed, he hints at evoking the perennial philosophy, such as when he writes “It is good to sever every link with all that which is destined sooner or later to collapse. The problem will then be to maintain one’s essential direction without leaning οn any given or transmitted form.”

Psychonauts such as the readership of VJM Publishing will commiserate with this feeling, as it’s a handy description of the ego death experience that comes with the peak of a psychedelic trip. One loses all touch with and memory of the fleeting forms of energy that make up the material world, and resides solely in pure consciousness, and thereby reunites with God.

Fittingly, then, Evola states that the Tradition that inspires him has “the character of an esoteric doctrine.”

The second essay, ‘The End of a Cycle – “Ride the Tiger”‘, continues in the same vein. Evola explains that the expression “to ride the tiger” is from the Far East and refers to the idea that it’s safer to ride on the tiger’s back than to try and flee and get pounced on, for the tiger will eventually tire out and then one can make an escape.

Essentially, the idea expressed here is this: great and terrible changes are sweeping the world, and will continue to do so. They will destroy much, if not all, of the existing order, regardless of whether this order is good or bad. There is no hope of resisting this process.

All of this sounds terribly pessimistic and nihilistic on the surface, but it’s clear that, like Nietzsche before him, Evola has anticipated the nihilism that follows the destruction of the incumbent value system, and is speaking of what must come beyond that. He writes of the “Four Ages” system famililar to readers of Plato’s Republic as well as to Hindus.

The warning of this chapter is that the forces of destruction and degeneracy are too powerful to be overcome; resisting them is as futile as resisting the tide. But in this there is still a message of hope: those destructive forces are too mindless, stupid and disorderly to hold sway for very long and so, like the storm, they will pass, and leave an opportunity to rebuild order in their wake.

And so, Evola mocks the “progressive” and “advanced” thinking of the West as little more than symptoms of a disease of the soul. This is apparently the context in which the book ought to be read.

The object of the book is summed up in the final paragraph of this essay: “defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today”. In other words, how do we deal with the fact that everything’s falling to bits?

The Political Paradox at the Heart of Cyberpunk

Science fiction has generally been considered a left-wing preoccupation. Not only is the readership of science fiction stories younger than average, but the nature of science fiction lends itself towards progressivism. Female characters such as Lieutenant Ripley of Alien had great appeal among the generation that had cast off the moral strictures of the 1950s, but a right-wing yang has always existed within the dark yin of the milieu.

The political atmosphere of science fiction reflects an old-school leftism that’s almost entirely different to the identity politics of the social justice warriors who dominate the media of today. The leftism of science fiction was always more libertarian than today’s culture would prefer, and was written without the need to shoehorn a moral lecture into the story.

Philip K Dick wrote his science fiction works, to a large extent, out of inspiration drawn from his hatred of authoritarianism and authoritarian systems. This is why his protagonists, like Bob Childan in Man in The High Castle, were usually everymen who lacked any aristocratic pretenses. Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War depicted a future world in which hedonistic homosexuality was standard practice and a kind of communism had taken over the resource distribution of the planet.

Realistically, it’s hard to imagine a high-tech society that hadn’t also managed to solve the vast majority of its social problems, for the simple reason that if a society has the resources to be high-tech it also has the resources to feed, clothe and house everyone. The essence of cyberpunk, however, is “high tech, low life”; Brave New World is not cyberpunk, and neither is 1984, for the reasons that these works deal with heroic and upstanding characters.

This essence lends itself to a conservative orientation for two reasons.

The first is that it suggests that “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” which is a deeply conservative sentiment. It’s a break with the easy utopias envisioned in atomic era works like Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man or Aldous Huxley’s The Island. These works portray future societies which, although they have their problems, have generally solved all the major survival challenges (although The Demolished Man has a cyberpunk vibe in that the protagonist is also the antagonist).

In cyberpunk, by contrast, it’s common that society has either collapsed or become dystopic. The America of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has disintegrated into a patchwork of city states, fiefdoms, armed enclaves and chaos zones, which goes against the common narrative of an easy ascent into becoming a space-faring civilisation common to most earlier science fiction.

Likewise in William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy, where society has rotted out from the inside, meaning that people have been forced to take on a hard edge to their personality and behaviour in order to survive. In Gibson’s stories, crime exists for the same reasons it exists in our own world; greed, fear, stupidity and cruelty cast their shadows on every chapter.

This is a conservative sentiment because it directly opposes the common leftist belief that it’s possible to build a utopia. Cyberpunk works warn us of the terrible possibilities that are likely to result from attempts to build a perfect world – Akira could be considered the modern Frankenstein.

The second reason is that “high tech, low life” reflects a cynical interpretation of human nature. The protagonist of the Altered Carbon series, Lieutenant Kovacs, never gets fooled or manipulated on account of automatically assuming the worst of everyone he encounters. He is particularly cynical, verging on paranoid, and this quality serves him well as it keeps him one step ahead of the criminals trying to kill him. Cyberpunk heroes are often like this – more antihero than good old boy.

Much like the first reason, this low-life element of cyberpunk reminds us that ideas of utopias are just dreams. Life finds a way, and so does crime. This is essentially conservative because it asserts that human nature cannot fundamentally be changed.

Humans have not been intrinsically good at any point in the past, and so there’s no reason to think they should be in the future. Therefore, we can assume that humans (especially young men) will aggressively push the boundaries just as much in times to come. As is the case today, these people will often go too far in asserting their wills, and this can lead to reprisals, and thereby the whole dark side of the human drama that cyberpunk is known for.

It is not the contention of this essay that this paradox detracts from the power of cyberpunk media. To the contrary, cyberpunk draws its power from the tension inherent in the juxtaposition between the desire for order and the desire for freedom.

Many of the protagonists in cyberpunk stories just want to be left alone to enjoy their lives, but violence and trouble finds them anyway, and they have to learn to become hard in order to cope. The protagonist of Metrophage is an everyman who could have been a protagonist in a Philip K Dick story, but instead of the mind-bending confusion of a PKD story he gets dragged into the noir of a cyberpunk one.

This sentiment of escaping an oppressive, totalitarian force is also a common sentiment for many intelligent, free-thinking people nowadays, who just want to be left alone to experiment with consciousness in the form of psychoactive substances without being attacked by law enforcement officers.

In this balance, cyberpunk appeals to a more intelligent kind of reader. The resolution of the cyberpunk paradox might be found in that punk is an expression of rebellion against those same human forces that create political dystopias and faceless corporate juggernauts. In this rebellion it is an affirmation of the human spirit, more libertarian than either left of right, and this is perhaps where cyberpunk gets most of its appeal.

Vince McLeod is the author of ANZAC cyberpunk work The Verity Key. If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of his and other VJMP essays in the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).