In this book, Aristotle reviews the existing forms of political constitution. Although he is not a fan of democracy, he believes that all groups of citizens must participate in office for there to be justice. The lower classes must get something if they are to support the constitution: “If the constitution is to survive, every part of the city must have a common desire for its existence.” Here also Aristotle emphasises the importance of friendship, which he calls philia, considering it the best defence against factional disputes.
This book contains one of the oldest arguments against communism. In criticising Plato’s proposal for the guardian class of Republic to keep all property in common, Aristotle writes “What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care.” and “those who do more work and get less of the produce will be bound to raise complaints against those who get a large reward and do little work.”
Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed the equalisation of property many centuries before Karl Marx. But equality doesn’t work, Aristotle contends, because the educated feel like they deserve more.
The best solution, according to Aristotle, is if property is private, but the owners are persuaded to share the proceeds of it through goodwill. This is primarily the job of the legislator, who achieves this by passing laws that create men disposed to sharing and not to stinginess. Correct regulation of property is also important to avoid factional conflict.
Also Aristotle only hints at this here (he assumes the reader is familiar with Nicomachean Ethics), but part of the solution to politics is spiritual: “It is more necessary to equalise people’s desires than their properties.”
The other leftist dogma to get skewered in this section is the one claiming that criminals commit crimes out of poverty and desperation. Aristotle correctly points out that many crimes are committed for fun: “The greatest crimes are committed not for the sake of necessities, but for the sake of superfluities.”
Those aren’t all of the typically right-wing arguments made herein. Aristotle also argues that changing laws in general is a tricky endeavour because people follow them out of habit. If you change the laws too much, people stop obeying the government.
As in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle agrees that selection by means is characteristic of oligarchy, whereas selection by merit is characteristic of aristocracy. There are several different ways of choosing kings and judges. In Carthage, kings were chosen by election from families that were already outstanding.
Next for the VJMP Reads column: Politics by Aristotle. This naturally follows on from Nicomachean Ethics, which I read earlier in the year. This reading is of Book I.
This section is from where we get the quote “man is a political animal”. Aristotle writes that people naturally form political associations for the sake of securing some good, usually ready access to the means of life. Surprisingly, if one considers how individualistic the West is, Aristotle considered the city-state to be the basic political unit. This is because smaller units are not self-sufficient.
Book I also gives us the banger “Man, when perfected, is the best of animals; but if he be isolated from law and justice he is the worst of all.” This is an incredibly deep insight into human and animal nature. The worst humans really are the worst beings imaginable.
Much of Book I is about slavery, which is hard to make sense of from a modern Western viewpoint.
For example, Aristotle writes “The element which is able, by virtue of its intelligence, to exercise fore-thought, is naturally a ruling and master element.” He goes to argue that those capable of reason are naturally masters, and those incapable naturally slaves. The argument that some people are naturally slaves is extremely unfashionable today.
He discusses the possibility that people are enslaved by war, i.e. by force, and considers it illegitimate. Slavery is good and natural when a rational element enslaves an irrational element, but when slavery merely rests on law and force it is not natural: “Just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.” Aristotle discusses and rejects the might makes right theory of justice.
This fact, when considered, shows that Aristotle was not as pro-slavery as is often believed. Aristotle would likely see a modern workplace, with a boss who presumably knew more about the subject than his employees, and consider it an example of successful slavery.
One idea in particular appears central to European culture. Aristotle considers the relationship between men and women, in barbarian culture, akin to the relationship between master and slave. The woman is subjugated as the slave. But for the Greek, the relationship between men and women is more akin to the relationship between statesman and his fellow citizens. Thus the woman is intermediate between man and slave.
Aristotle is certainly not a feminist. He writes “The male is naturally fitter to command than the female, except where there is some departure from nature.” But his philosophy is vastly more pro-feminine than equatorial culture.
Aristotle speaks out about usury in this section: “Of all modes of acquisition, usury is the most unnatural” and “The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason.” This is very interesting if one considers how totally commercialised life is today thanks to usury.
Being pro-slavery and anti-usury marks Aristotle as an utterly unmodern philosopher.
50 years ago, mental health was mostly ignored. Today, it’s a major issue. 50 years from now, mental health will be taken as seriously as physical health. The alternative centrist, approaching the midpoint of the 21st Century since the reign of Augustus, makes provisions for the mental health challenges of the future.
A point lost on most today is that ‘psychiatry’ is made up of two words, ‘psyche’ and ‘iatros’, which mean ‘soul’ and ‘healer’. A psychiatrist is supposed to be someone who heals the soul. They are not meant to be someone who prescribes pills and little more. Today’s psychiatrists are primarily concerned with preventing people from freaking out and damaging property. The vast majority of them don’t even believe in souls, let alone have any way to heal them.
As a result, some of those who have been through the mental health system, or who look at the rates of depression and anxiety today, ask if psychiatry has any value at all. One can readily concede it has value sedating people who might kill themselves or someone else in the next 24 hours. But it has much less value in taking the vast numbers of mentally ill people from outpatient treatment to good mental health.
The alternative centrist approach to mental health wouldn’t change much when it came to acute mental healthcare. When it came to chronic mental healthcare, however, a major change in attitude would be made. The approach of the past was that people can take care of themselves; psychological concerns are too subtle to be important anyway. This attitude reflects a grosser, cruder, more vulgar and more ignorant age.
In the time of the alternative centrist, it will be understood that the concept of health applies to all aspects of the human being, from the least subtle to the most. Thus, mental health is as important as physical.
Applying our Aristotelean maxim “the starting point is the fact”, the fact is that most mental health problems are caused by trauma. Another fact is that the chemical imbalance narrative was promoted by pharmaceutical companies who wanted people hooked on their products. The alternative centrist approach to mental health is fully trauma-informed.
The difficulty is that the three Establishment positions have created a system which is inherently traumatising. This has been by design – trauma breaks people, making them unwilling and/or unable to fight back, thereby securing the Establishment’s control. The alternative centrist system is necessarily anti-trauma.
Not creating more trauma is the purview of the other alternative centrist approaches. Fixing the trauma already created, however, is the basis of the alternative centrist approach to mental health.
According to this approach, mental healthcare is the equivalent of maintaining the psychological infrastructure of the nation. This makes it an essential spend, and not a luxury. Thus, the alternative centrist is happy to spend money sorting it out. This will mean, alongside the existing spend in training psychiatrists in acute mental healthcare, also training mental health practitioners about conditions like PTSD and C-PTSD. These traumatic stress-based conditions are rife in the Western World, and their accumulated effects over the past century are the chief reason why our society currently resembles a mental asylum.
The alternative centrist frees up money for healing trauma by not spending it on hopeless cases. This will involve euthanasia for the incurably feeble-minded. Anyone so mentally disabled as to be a permanent burden will be given a dignified death. This will also include those suffering from a dementia, a hellish condition with no cure. Doing this implies a complete rejection of Abrahamic morality (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Religion).
This approach of euthanising the hopeless cases, in order to free up money to spend on those with hope of a decent life, is similar to the alternative centrist approach to law and order. Herein it can be seen that alternative centrism is far from being a weak compromise position like establishment centrism. Alternative centrism actually achieves the goals of both the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left here (viz. order and freedom) specifically by avoiding the middle ground. This would not be considered cruel, and would not violate the Fourth Rejection, because it would be considered merciful.
This proposed massive expansion of the mental health apparatus would occur not so much in a clinical sense as an everyday spiritual sense.
Absent the Abrahamic influences, there is no need for the alternative centrist state to separate psychiatry from spirituality. Without the danger of mental healthcare practitioners trying to convert vulnerable patients to Abrahamism, the emphasis could fully be on the healing of the soul. The patients would be encouraged to see their conditions as primarily spiritual phenomena, and not personal failings.
The teaching would be that abuse, neglect and nihilism damage the soul. The ten major forms of adverse childhood experience would be learned and taught as part of the fundamentals of mental healthcare. This would extend to schooling: young students will be taught the basics of mental health and mental illness, so they can recognise it in themselves and others. They would also be taught not to see mental health as a taboo subject.
Healing of the soul, in the alternative centrist conception, is based on forming quality relationships. The first step is a relationship with the true self. Patients and students alike would be taught that the true self, more fundamental than either body or mind, is a fragment of God consciousness, and that each one of us is an expression of divinity (again, a complete rejection of the Abrahamic approach). From there, they would be encouraged to interact with the rest of society on that basis.
The alternative centrist psychiatrist would teach that consciousness is the prima materia and that its natural state is one of perfect bliss, and therefore there’s no reason to be afraid of anything, because all suffering is temporary. Healing trauma is, to a major extent, a matter of unlearning false ideas about oneself and about reality. The alternative centrist mental healthcare worker would encourage meditation, self-inquiry and other spiritual practices.
The alternative centrist state would put a lot of money into psychedelic research, recognising it as a trend of the future. At time of writing, there are regularly new breakthoughs in psychedelic medicine: the most recent is the potential for using LSD to treat anxiety. A 2024 Nature article wrote that “The clinical investigation of psychedelic medicines has blossomed over the last 5 years.” Less harmful alternatives to the common pharmaceuticals, which themselves often have horrendous side-effects, are desperately needed.
As per the alternative centrist approach to recreation, communities for mental health support could be expected to form naturally given the universal basic income. In situations where this was impossible, the Ministry of Mental Health would try to make it possible.
Because the alternative centrist approach to welfare involves a UBI, psychiatric patients would no longer need to see their psychiatrists as enemies. Under the existing system, psychiatric patients are dependent on psychiatrists to get approval for disability payments, and as such have to be extremely careful about what they say to them, suspicious that the psychiatrist is looking for reasons to deny the claim. The UBI would allow the patients to be more open with what they told the doctors, leading to better mental healthcare and a better society overall.
A UBI would also alleviate a great deal of work stress, the misery of which itself causes trauma, and so the alternative centrist approach to welfare has flow-on effects to mental health.
In short, mental health would be taken as seriously as physical health by alternative centrists. The taboos against talking about it would be shattered.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
‘Live, love, laugh and be happy’ goes the common refrain. Unfortunately for those of us in the West, our historical approaches to recreation have been coloured by a Christian philosophy of life-denial that considers all pleasures inherently sinful. The logic of the Abrahamic cults is that the world is evil, and that all pleasures are the province of the forces of evil, and so recreational pleasures are forbidden.
Complicating this are ruling class narratives about how the working class needs to be put to work or it becomes destructive. Capitalist dogma holds that if the working class is given too much opportunity for recreation it will stop wanting to work, leading to economic collapse, and therefore recreational opportunites must be restricted.
On top of this is a lingering workamania that makes people feel as if recreation is immoral.
All of these factors have drawn people away from what would be a rational approach to recreation. Great thinkers such as Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius advocated for a middle way between asceticism and indulgence. The alternative centrist prefers this to either the indulgence of the Satanist or the life-denial of the Christian.
Plato, in Laws, argued for the importance of drinking parties. His logic was that moderate alcohol use, by repeatedly inciting a small loss of self-control, trained people to exhibit greater self-control in times when it might otherwise have been lost (e.g. mass hysteria). A contemporary cynic might observe that a list of the countries that have banned alcohol overlaps heavily with a list of the countries whose citizens commit the most rapes and sex crimes per capita in the West.
Aristotle noted, in Politics, that tyrants prevent people from coming together in common cause, prohibiting common clubs and education so as to sabotage mutual confidence and high spirits. The idea is that preventing recreation will demoralise a population into submission. Adhering to the Second Acceptance would therefore involve doing the opposite of this. Thus an alternative centrist state would encourage any and all group recreational activity that was not degenerate or criminal. Even if outsiders could not see much value in some activities, the reasoning is that social bonds are developed in any case, and therefore the general health of the nation is strengthened.
All of this presents a clear picture to the alternative centrist.
The alternative centrist state has to promote recreation for the sake of the population’s mental health: the opposite approach to a tyranny. This is not just for the sake of the recreational activities themselves, but also for the social aspects of the recreational activities, which contribute to the solidarity necessary for a nation to function.
This will mostly require the government not to step in, but to get out of the way.
In particular, this means ending the War on Drugs. Existing drug law would be replaced with a model based on the work of actual drug scientists, such as Prof. David Nutt, whose works such as Drugs: Without The Hot Air would form the bedrock of future policy.
The alternative centrist looks to history and sees that Western societies have generally tolerated alcohol and the harms caused by alcohol. Experiments with prohibition have caused more harm than they prevented. The most intelligent way to balance order and freedom, therefore, is to tolerate alcohol and also every drug safer than alcohol. Because alcohol use is normalised, any less-harmful drug effectively becomes an exit drug for alcohol. The California Sober phenomenon reflects the will of people today to live a healthier lifestyle than is possible with an alcohol habit, and is proof that people will naturally use less harmful recreational alternatives to alcohol if given the choice.
California Sober is mostly about using cannabis instead of alcohol, but several other drugs meet the criteria of being safer than alcohol when used in a recreational setting.
Licensed venues for consuming several of the safer drugs would be a feature of alternative centrist recreation. Apart from bars there would also be cannabis cafes, MDMA lounges and magic mushroom grottos. Licensing would be a complicated and expensive process, so as to exclude clowns and cowboys from the market, but would not be substantially harder than getting an alcohol licence.
The alternative centrist state would generally have an extremely light touch when it came to sporting, cultural and spiritual organisations (although it might run a state religion: see The Alternative Centrist Approach To Religion). Sporting and cultural organisations would be heavily funded and promoted, and created if they didn’t already exist.
To a major extent, sporting recreation will be a function of the history of the nation and of the local geographical opportunities. In most scenarios this would be self-funded and self-organised. The role of the alternative centrist state would be to facilitate opportunities where they wouldn’t otherwise exist, such as maintaining a conservation estate for trampers and hikers, or subsidising sporting insurance through economies of scale. Maintaining facilities for racing, drag racing or drifting would have the bonus of justifying hard crackdowns on anti-social road use.
John Wanamaker’s famous quote “People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness” is relevant here. This suggests that workers ought to be able to make enough money in a 40-hour work week to own a home and raise a family (a point addressed at length in The Alternative Centrist Approach To Work And Employment). This should allow them sufficient time and energy for appropriate recreation.
For cases where recreation goes as far as addiction, see The Alternative Centrist Approach To Mental Health.
As alluded to above, a fair and reasonable approach to recreation, rejecting the tyranny of moralisers, would provide full and fair opportunity for any pro-social recreational desire, and would therefore justify crackdowns on anti-social elements. This is one of the reasons for the severity of The Alternative Centrist Approach To The Law.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
