politics – Page 170

The Philosophy of Materialism is The Memetic Cancer of Our Age

The brain generates consciousness and therefore the death of the physical body means the extinction of all awareness – so buy buy buy!

Materialism – what is it good for? To give it its due, it’s a very useful paradigm to adopt if one wants to conduct an experiment in any of the physical sciences. The monkey who first realised that fire could be started from the friction of a hard wood on a soft one derived an enormous advantage over the monkeys who were still doing dances to try to please the lightning gods.

More recently, materialist science such as physics and chemistry led to Anglo-American dominance of the sea trade routes, as the adoption of first coal, then oil, then uranium allowed these powers to keep a naval force in operation that was orders of magnitude more powerful than what was possible under sail. Mastery of these sciences also allowed these same powers a decisive military advantage in terms of weaponry.

All well and good – but what is materialism bad for? Many, many, many things. Unfortunately, materialism has strengthened beyond being a mere scientific approach. It’s not even a worldview anymore. In our blind 21st century, materialism must be accorded the status of a legitimate religion. This has had profound effects on the political, scientific and intellectual discourse of all nations.

Like any dominant religion, the presuppositions of materialism can no longer be questioned in polite society. It’s possible to talk about “the” biological basis of consciousness as if it were already an established fact that consciousness has a biological basis. Asking how it is that it’s known that consciousness has a biological basis elicits, in materialist circles, a similar response to going into a church and demanding the priest prove his contention that the Bible is the Word of God.

It’s just not the done thing.

And so it’s possible for one of the world’s most prominent intellectuals, Sam Harris, to discuss consciousness with a supposed expert on the subject for over an hour without either of them questioning the dogma of the “biological basis of consciousness”. That the brain generates consciousness and not the other way around is assumed from the beginning, and all subsequent data has to be shoehorned into this framework or discarded.

Ironically, the podcast mentions that consciousness had hitherto been the purview of philosophers, in a passage exclaiming how good it was that other disciplines are now considering it. The reason why this had been the case is now obvious – because physicists, chemists and neurobiologists are incapable of the logical reasoning necessary to truly consider the question. This logical failure leads to errors like assuming right off the bat that the brain generates consciousness, the type of error that philosophers generally don’t make.

Listening to a supposed expert in neuroscience ramble on about the biological substrates of consciousness is every bit as depressing as listening to some old priest ramble on about whether or not we’re allowed to drink wine on Sundays. Both charades are dependent on one gimmick: take for granted the biological basis of consciousness and we can explain everything (says the neuroscientist), take for granted the eternal truth of the Bible and we can explain everything (says the theologian).

The worst part of it is that – just like Abrahamism, Nazism, Communism and Marxism – materialism has also rotted the minds of the people who have come to believe in it. Like a cancer, it has given rise to a number of bad things, all of them ultimately caused by the belief of materialist individuals that the death of their brain inevitably means the extinguishing of their consciousness.

Materialists are generally indifferent to the condition of the world after they die. Let’s just rape it now is their motto. After all, if their consciousness is extinguished upon the death of the brain, there is no logical reason to act in a manner custodial to the life that comes after you. There won’t be any way it affects you, so why bother?

Materialists are also easily manipulated by death anxiety. People who know that the consciousness survives the death of the physical body can laugh in the face of death, because they know that death will not occasion a traumatically significant change from the state of existence that pertained before death.

This latter point is why materialist cultures like the British fight wars all over the world while non-materialist ones such as the Indians do not. A Brit can easily be terrified into doing what you tell him because of the fear of invasion or economic disaster or God’s judgment or some other catastrophe; the Indian will just laugh.

For Western culture to survive, we have to cast off the spiritual sickness that we inherited even as we assumed scientific and military dominance. We have to move past materialism and the ludicrous contortions of reasoning that it forces people to undergo.

Psychedelic drugs and meditation are the cures for the memetic cancer that has been growing in the West for a few centuries.

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).

What Was Done To The Colonies Is Still Being Done – To Us

Nothing has really changed from 1860, except that the propagandising of the slave system has become more sophisticated

The herds of the West have been conditioned to react to the word “colonisation” with horror and guilt. From the late 1400s until the European empires were wound down after World War II, ghastly crimes were indeed committed by colonial invaders against the native peoples, all over the world. But what this focus on historical crimes overlooks is that these same crimes are still being committed, by the ruling classes against the middle and working ones, to this very day.

In 1860, shortly before the American Civil War, the total slave population in the United States stood at 3,953,761, or 12.6% of the total population. In the Gulag system at its height under Stalin, there were believed to have been up to 6 million people incarcerated.

Most people agree that slavery and Communism were two of history’s greatest evils. But in 2013, there were 6,899,000 Americans under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) – about 2.8% of the total population. Although smaller as a percentage of the national population, in absolute terms it still represents a greater number of unfree people than under either slavery or Communism.

In fact, it amounts to about 25% of the world’s population of prisoners, and not all of them are in there because of murders, rapes and armed robberies. Far from it. Because of the War on Drugs, the population of non-violent drug offenders in American state or federal prisons has increased twelvefold since 1980.

The same strategies that the colonial powers used to subjugate their client populations are being used today to subjugate the peoples who are still their client populations – only instead of being done to dark-skinned races by lighter-skinned ones, it’s done to the working and middle classes by the ruling ones.

Today’s system of convict labour achieves almost everything that was seen as desirable in a slavery system anyway. Some refer to this as the ‘prison-industrial complex‘, because the profit incentive seems to have led to people being imprisoned for the benefit of shareholders in private prisons. These prisoners are often paid less than 20c an hour for their labour, despite that their productivity is dozens of times higher.

So the mentality behind the great colonial enterprises of enslaving millions and extracting resources from them in the form of labour not only still exists but it still manages to enforce its will in the 21st century West. The only difference is that, this time, the people are enslaved through the prison-industrial complex, and mostly for arbitrary drug offences.

Some groups are hit harder than others by this approach. Black people are imprisoned at the rate of 2,306 per 100,000 people, which means almost 1 in every 40 American blacks are in prison at any one point in time, and for black males the rate is an incredible 4,347 per 100,000 people, about 1 in 21.

The mentally ill also suffer atrociously in American prisons, regularly being subjected to corporal punishment for reasons related to their condition, such as becoming confused or anxious or having difficulty following instructions.

The truth is this: the ruling classes only recognise each other as true human beings, and all lower classes are considered some kind of animal to be exploited. Emphasising the racial aspect of the crimes of colonialism, as is common today, only serves to shift the blame from the ruling classes who planned and designed it to the middle and working classes who were forced to help carry it out lest they become the next group of victims.

Colonisation was never a matter of race, and it didn’t stop happening after the European empires fell. It was always a matter of class, and it simply shifted from being done to them over there to being done to us over here.

All Of Us Carve A Niche Out Of Nature With Violence

Humans are part of Nature, and therefore human nature is also red in tooth and claw

The Internet is full of people trying to score points from each other in the eternal game of oneupmanship that all social species engage in. In the West, with our heavily Jesus-based culture of masochism, we demonstrate that we are better than other people by showing how much violence and injustice has been done to us in the past. The more we are like martyrs, the better.

Our cult of victimhood impels us to emphasise how badly our ancestors suffered at the hands of The Man, whether these ancestors be women, lower classes or other races. It also impels us to emphasise how our own ancestors did no wrong, unless they were misled by some enemy without or betrayed by an enemy within.

It’s as if each one of us holds the power to act as an instrument of karma, and past injustices done to us give us the right to do injustices to other people. And like so much of modern society, it’s absolute horseshit.

Native people often describe an idyllic past in which they all lived in peace and in perfect harmony with Nature, but the truth is infinitely more violent. Although many native peoples had sophisticated cultural strategies for minimising the carnage of warfare (such as ritualising it), it’s clear from any scientific perspective that all human groups are guilty of using violence, and must be.

This can be proven by simply looking around at the laws by which Nature operates. The price for being peaceful is not to suffer persecution – it’s to be dead. A will to engage in peaceful conduct is not necessarily going to be reciprocated by other people, and almost certainly will not be by wild animals, and if it isn’t, there might not be much one can do about it.

It is impossible to occupy any niche in Nature without violence, because for every niche one might occupy within Nature there is another organism willing to use violence to drive one out of it. This is true of whatever level of the Great Fractal one wants to look at it on.

There are no creatures out there that can survive without preying on either other creatures or on plants. Any creature that wishes to attend to its own basic metabolic needs is forced to conduct violence against other life to get energy or nutrients.

This is not only true in the immediate food-gathering sense but in the long term mating sense as well. Males of sexually reproducing species must attract their females through demonstrating a capacity for resource acquisition, and this is done through acquiring and defending a territory, which is almost impossible to do without violence.

In order to build a house, a person has to cut down trees in the forest to clear a space, destroying the habitat of all of the creatures that dwelt within. But more importantly, in order to defend that space against the forms of life that would occupy it, that person has to be ready to kill.

All manner of parasites, like bugs, spiders, weevils etc. have to be killed for the sake of food security and to avoid destruction of property; all vermin like mice and rats have to be killed for similar reasons; larger animals have to be killed lest they destroy the property; humans have to be killed lest they take over and try to enslave one.

Almost wherever the reader is sitting in the world right now, someone was killed for it at some point in the past. Someone will have died so that someone else could secure rights to that land, even if it was before recorded history. For your ancestors to have carved out a niche in this place, where food has to be hunted and agriculture demands the destruction of ecosystems, someone and (not or) somethings had to be killed.

All of us are descended from killers. Every single one of us. There’s simply no other way to occupy a niche within Nature in the first place. If being descended from peaceful people awards some sort of moral superiority when it comes to discussing political issues, there are none of us still living who can claim it.

Anyone claiming that their ancestors were peaceful by nature or that they are genetically disinclined towards violence is a liar.

Ethnomasochism

In abnormal psychology, masochism is known as a paraphilia that is characterised by “the derivation of sexual gratification from being subjected to physical pain or humiliation by oneself or another person” (Merriam-Webster). The depictions of masochism in films such as Secretary and books such as Fifty Shades of Gray are, while dramatised, essentially accurate.

Some masochistic individuals have displaced this ordinarily individualistic sentiment with a collective one. It’s common for Jewish men to engage in Nazi roleplay with hired dominatrices, for example. Central to this is the idea that an individual can derive pleasure from being called a “filthy Jew” or similar by a dominatrix, as long as they are able to identify with the race that is being derided.

Ethnomasochism is essentially masochism taken to the collective level of the race. Instead of begging to be whipped by a woman on account of personal transgressions, the ethnomasochist invites abuse on account of the collective transgressions of those sharing a skin colour with them.

It’s becoming common to encounter ethnomasochists on the Internet, especially on social media. They can be found wringing their hands about the past crimes of people of European descent, stereotyping all European colonists as rapists, thieves and murderers.

They will describe a world history in which all races lived in harmony until Europeans started spewing out of Europe like demons out of the mouth of Hell, bringing misery and suffering to all they encountered, for no other motivation than the pure malice their stony hearts held for all life. Usually this comes with a demand that white people collectively make up for the crimes of their race by means of some kind of reparations.

In other words, white people are bad boys that need to be punished.

One can almost guarantee that the sort of person who is an ethnomasochist is also privileged, middle-class and holds deep Marxist sympathies. Chances are high they have a micropenis or are impotent when unable to live out some race-based humiliation fantasy, such as getting cucked by a “black bull”, and chances are also high that they hold much contempt for white working-class people, who they are happy to stereotype as ignorant, violent and lazy (sound familiar?).

To this end, we can define ethnomasochism as “the derivation of sexual gratification from being subjected to physical pain or humiliation by oneself or another person on account of belonging to a particular, despised race.”

Ironically, this movement is actually more racist than normal people are. White people who have a fetish about seeing their girlfriends railed by black men are very, very similar to men who have a fetish about seeing their girlfriends railed by dogs. Part of the thrill comes from the degradation implied by having sex with a creature that’s less than human.

Moreover, a person can only feel shame on account of belonging to a particular race to the degree that they identify with being a member of that race (i.e. to the degree that their identity excludes other races). So it’s only possible to feel ethnomasochistic sentiments about the past crimes of the white race if one identifies strongly with one’s skin colour to the exclusion of other personal qualities – which is the definition of racist.

Curiously, it’s impossible to cure ethnomasochism by subjecting a person with it to hearing a non-white person talk about how they think there’s nothing wrong with white people, or how they were glad for European colonisation because it saved them from the vagaries of Nature, or from cannibalism or ceaseless tribal warfare, or because it gave them an opportunity to engage with the modern world and the wealth of accumulated wisdom going back to before Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius..

Because the ethnomasochist is racist, they will often assume that non-white people do not have the intelligence to reason their way to original conclusions, and thus their opinions are irrational and therefore can be rejected in favour of the anti-white narrative.

The cure for ethnomasochism is reading a history book, because an appreciation of history will tell you that the whole world is terrible and always has been, whether or not white people showed up. All non-white races have treated each other with horrific disregard at various points because that is human nature when exposed to the environmental challenges presented by planet Earth.