The Spectrum Of Slavery

This essay claims that all people can be placed on a spectrum, wherein their point on that spectrum reflects how much of a slave they are. The totally enslaved are at the top, whereas the truly free are at the bottom. The exact position of any given person is primarily a matter of how much economic duress they are under.

Economic duress is a legal term, defined in such a way that the ruling class is almost never guilty of it. But, in practice, everyone not born into property ownership is subject to a kind of economic duress. The more extreme forms of it are slavery by another name – the term ‘wage slavery’ is not a complete exaggeration.

“Do this or I kill you” is maximum duress. This is the mainstream conception of slavery, inherited from the American plantation experience. It’s true that being forced to obey orders on pain of death is as extreme as duress can get. Someone at this level is at the very top of the spectrum of slavery.

Unbeknownst to many, slavery in other times and places wasn’t quite as awful thanks to the absence of the chattel aspect. There were often rules limiting the extent to which a slave owner could abuse their slaves (n.b. this is not a defence of slavery but an explication of the degrees of it).

“Do this or you will miss your rent, get kicked out into the street and die” is a high level of duress. Getting kicked out of your apartment is better than being killed, but it’s still a deeply unpleasant and stressful experience. If you have to keep working otherwise you get evicted, you don’t have a strong negotiating position.

Same with “Do this or I’ll replace you with some cheap labour”. The position of the employer in the West of 2023 might not be quite as strong as that of the plantation owner in the American South of 1850, but it’s almost as strong, for supply-side reasons. The Western worker of 2023 knows that he better not ask for raises to match inflation when there are a thousand Third Worlders lined up to replace him.

“Do this or you’ll have to look for another job” is no threat when the economy is humming and there are plenty of good employers willing to pay decent wages. When the economy is doing badly, it’s a significant level of duress. In a good economy looking for a new job is a mere hassle. In a bad economy, it raises the spectre of homelessness.

An actual free person, under no economic duress, can meet their needs for food, shelter and clothing without needing to obey an employer for money. This is the bottom of the spectrum of slavery, and surprisingly few people are here.

The simple rule is that anything improving the negotiating position of the worker decreases the extent of duress they are under, and moves them down the slavery spectrum towards free people.

Note that the more duress the worker is under, the greater the profits. This is why there is never a free market for labour. The ruling class will always try to put the working class under as much duress as possible, because this will suboptimalise the working class’s negotating position and optimalise the employer class’s negotiating position, thereby maximising ruling class profit and control.

If the worker needs the job or they will starve, it’s possible to negotiate them down to a minimum. Similar if they need to feed a family or pay a mortgage. Imagine, by contrast, that the worker wins $10 million in the lottery. Do they still need your job? Maybe not. If someone has $10 million sitting in the bank you can be sure that they only work because they want to.

Increasing the supply of labour weakens the negotiating position of the worker and thereby drives them towards slavery. Likewise, decreasing demand for labour (through e.g. raising interest rates) also drives the worker towards slavery.

Decreasing the supply of labour strengthens the negotiating position of the worker and thereby aids them towards freedom. Likewise, increasing demand for labour (through e.g. raising wages) also drives the worker towards freedom.

A sharp decrease in the supply of labour, such as through the Black Death or World War II, leads to unprecedented prosperity for the remaining workers. Employers are forced to pay a high wage because they have so few options.

Thus it can be seen that the intent of allowing mass immigration is not to create freedom for foreign workers but to deny it to domestic ones. It was to push the workers back down that Western countries opened their borders to cheap labour imports in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The end result, by 2023, is that workers in Western countries can’t own homes – slaves by any other name.

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Ambassadors Of Weed

The cannabis referendum in 2020 may have failed (even if non-Chinese voters voted in favour of it), but it was close enough that no-one has really complained about the liberal medicinal cannabis regime that the Sixth Labour Government introduced.

It’s now very, very easy to get hold of a medicinal cannabis prescription. There are now numerous outfits that will give you a prescription after a teleconsultation. Some of these might demand that you go through a multi-stage process of first trying CBD oil, then THC oil, before you can first get a prescription for THC flowers. But it’s not a difficult process.

Despite this ease, cannabis is not fully accepted in New Zealand. Decades of Drug War programming has brainwashed hordes of idiots into thinking that cannabis fries brains, causes violence and sexual assaults, and is a gateway to criminality. The truth about cannabis doesn’t matter. The perceptions are what lead to the opposition.

In almost every case where cannabis has become legal (excepting Thailand and a few other places) it only became so after a long struggle. The masses have been brainwashed for so many decades to see cannabis as something evil that changing mass perception is something that can only happen slowly.

Millions of conversations must be had before widespread acceptance of cannabis can exist. This must consist of millions of people hearing from multiple other people each how cannabis helped them, whether medicinally, recreationally or spiritually. And then millions of slow realisations that the government lied about it.

Not only must cannasceptics hear the arguments for cannabis law reform, they must hear them from people they respect if they are to change their opinions.

Whether people accept it or not, human society is status-based. This is how we have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years: in tribes where the higher your status, the higher your chance of surviving and reproducing. Status-seeking and status-judging are as hard-wired into us as sleeping.

Thus, people are more likely to become accepting of something if they see high-status people engaging in it. Status can be hard to judge, but most people realise that polite, happy, pro-social people are higher status than bitter, angry and resentful people.

This essay is an encouragement to all the new legal cannabis users to consider themselves ambassadors of weed.

Many people will not have met a medicinal cannabis user before. So if you can create a polite, happy, pro-social impression on such people, it will normalise in the public consciousness the idea that cannabis users are good people. Let’s not forget, most people who voted no in the cannabis referendum did so because they hated cannabis users.

Some political ambassadors end up representing civilisation among the savages. If you are a cannabis user, this is essentially what you are, among all the pissheads, screen zombies and painkiller addicts. So don’t forget it! Act like you are surrounded by ferals, because you are. Modern drug culture, with its belief in the harmlessness of alcohol and the absolute harm of everything else, is a mass psychosis.

This essay, then, is an encouragement for those with medicinal cannabis prescriptions to act as if they were early traders with cannibal tribes. Try not to shock the natives of Boozelandia too much. They’re superstitious and poorly educated. Try to act in a friendly and understanding manner.

This especially relates to doctors and other medical staff.

If you get a prescription for e.g. Tilray 10:10 oil, such that you are directed to take 1mg every day from a 40mg bottle, then take 1mg every day. Don’t drink half the bottle on the first day and then start hassling the doctor for refills. Holding to the prescribed dose will convince people that it’s possible to use cannabis responsibly without ending up like Trainspotting.

None of this is to say that anyone should use less cannabis or not enjoy it.

Modern Rockefeller medicine has been slow to realise it, but one of the main psychiatric benefits of cannabis is precisely that it gets you high. Being high is the opposite of being low, and being low for too long (so that you get stuck there) is commonly known as depression. Therefore, cannabis is a cure for depression.

I have personally found that cannabis can stop dead all manner of suicidal and/or homicidal ideation, and this is primarily achieved by making you feel good when you would otherwise have felt bad. This sounds straightforward to most people, but it’s still a shock to those who believe that people need to suffer for various reasons of character building/anti-degeneracy/religion/sadism.

Anyone who implies that cannabis is bad because it makes people happy is the sort of authoritarian who ought to be kept far from any decision-making. So, please, enjoy it to the max. As with so many other things, an intelligent balance is necessary.

If New Zealand is ever to step fully into the 21st Century and legalise cannabis, it will first require acceptance of cannabis users by the herd. This will require ambassadors of weed to create that acceptance through positive interactions.

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Five Aspects Of Masculinity

People are deeply confused today about what masculinity is. There are many differing thoughts, depending on the emotional maturity of the person thinking. Looking at masculinity from an alchemical point of view, there are five different aspects to be considered, corresponding to the top five steps of the Mithraic Ladder.

For young boys and emotionally retarded men, masculinity is about physical force, especially violence. The spiritually stunted tend to think of everything in terms of who could beat up who. These men represent the element of iron, at the third step of the Mithraic Ladder.

In pre-civilisational societies, or in societies of feral humans (such as criminal gangs), the dominance hierarchy is all about ferocity and physical strength. This sort of behaviour is masculine in a sense, but that’s only one very limited aspect of masculinity.

A higher kind of man grows out of the violence and learns how to make love. He represents the element of copper, which is the first of the precious metals on the Mithraic Ladder. Having realised, consciously or otherwise, that the point of fighting is to win women, the man of copper simplifies the procedure and simply works on making himself attractive to women.

Men who can readily attract women look down on brawlers as meatheads. If the meatheads take each other out, then the more women for the rest of us. In at least one major sense, men like this are far more masculine than the men of iron: they can attract women with less opposition.

A still higher kind of man grows out of cooming and learns social influence. The fifth step of the Mithraic Ladder is represented by silver, which is brilliant in comparison to the lowest four steps. This brilliance leads the man of silver to see a bigger picture, one that goes beyond mere dominance and pleasure to the creation of political structures.

Men at this level also look down on the brawler as a meathead, but on top of that they see the manwhore as a pointless coomer. The reasoning is that a man only needs one woman to have a family and children, so interacting with women beyond that is pointless unless one is seeking social influence.

A yet still higher kind of man judges his fellows on intelligence. Fighting, lovemaking and politics might entertain the gods to some extent, but they’re ultimately all mundane pleasures. Some rarer pleasures are only open to a few, no matter how hard they work. One of those pleasures is achieving a deep and accurate insight into the workings of Nature.

For men at this level, the level of mercury, mainstream interests no longer suffice. The aspect of mercury judges men on how far they have seen into the nature of reality. Fighting and lovemaking might be fun but they’re really for lower animals. Even gaining political power is barely respectworthy. The creative man, the one who can summon divine inspiration and transmute it into worldly forms, is higher than all of those.

The highest kind of man is spiritual. Men at this level are all but invisible to those who have not seen beyond. Despite this, their influence is the most powerful. These men of gold complete the divine calling begun by the men of mercury. The spiritual man has transcended the need to control the material world. Only the higher pleasures are still desired.

At the top level of the Mithraic Ladder, not even seeing beyond is enough. One must have fully integrated those visions, such that one’s own being radiates the divine. This is a conception of masculinity enormously far removed from the warrior at the level of iron. If the warrior imposes order upon the physical, the philosopher imposes order upon the metaphysical.

Complicating this admittedly one-dimensional view of masculinity are the great many bullshitters and bluffers. Because spiritual achievement is not something that can readily be measured, false gurus abound. The sour grapes of failing to assert oneself physically or sexually drives many a man to claim a spiritual acumen he doesn’t truly possess.

It must be emphasised that a man of true power is capable of representing all five of these aspects simultaneously, as per the needs of the situation. Plato may have been a superb philosopher, but he was also a superb wrestler. The completely masculine man is not limited to the level of gold, much less any other one of these five aspects.

These five conceptions of masculinity encompass the spectrum from most material to most spiritual. When times are tough, the men of iron will come to the fore. But when peace reigns, the men of gold start to shine through. The higher the proportion of men of gold in a society, the closer it is to divinity.

These five aspects of masculinity also correspond closely to Plato’s five stages of political decline, as described in Republic. Men of gold correspond to aristocracy, men of mercury to timocracy, men of silver to oligarchy, men of copper to democracy and men of iron to tyranny. Thus, the quality of any political system is primarily a reflection of the quality of the men who comprise it.

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The Great Resistance, Fully Realised

The Great Awakening appears to be going very slowly. The control system is very clever, and it knows that there are various ways to keep a population submissive. One of the tried-and-true methods is to work the population so hard that it doesn’t have time to organise an awakening or revolution. So before there can be a Great Awakening, there has to be a Great Resistance.

The Great Resistance has been described as a pushback from workers who want to keep working at home. The Coronavirus lockdowns led to a large number of workers working from home, and most of those workers decided that they preferred that to the daily grind of commuting for hours on top of a full day of work.

Many workers have been confused by their bosses’ demands for them to come back to the office post-Covid. It’s hard to see what, apart from a sadistic need for control, would motivate them to demand their workers commute when it isn’t necessary. This has led to some resentment, and that resentment has led to resistance.

Some have taken the Great Resistance concept further, to the point where it has become a Western version of the Chinese “lying flat movement“. After all, the reasoning goes, if you want to save on your commuting time because it’s wasted, why not save on other forms of wasted time as well? Such as working for a wage that you can never own a home and raise a family on?

There’s potentially much more to it than even that.

The Great Resistance has the potential to become an entirely new social movement towards resisting tyranny. If it can combine the right-wingers concerned about losing free speech and other freedoms, and the left-wingers concerned about unaffordable rents and housing, such a movement could have a major societal impact.

The Great Resistance could be a resistance of many things – not just of our material exploitation but also our spiritual exploitation.

Perhaps the most obvious and immediate cause for the Great Resistance relates to the share of wealth accrued by the bottom 99% of society. At the end of 2023, young and working-class people all over the West are in a state of deep malaise. The chance of owning a home that a family can be raised in seems remote for most of those people.

The first cause, then, is liberating wealth from the top 1%. Housing, especially, must be liberated so that people at an age to start families can afford it. This will involve shifting the entire balance of power back from the hoarders of land to the workers of it. Immigration must be stopped so that employers are forced to pay fair wages to locals.

The workday must be reduced so that Westerners have time for something other than work. Everything that sucks time from people unnecessarily, whether commuting, bullshit jobs, unpaid overtime, being always-on-call etc. must be abolished, by law. If the average worker today has become twice as productive as the average worker in the 1970s, they should see at least half of that benefit.

Resisting corporate propaganda is part of this. If any revolutionary social movement is to be successful, its members have to be ideologically clear. This means that they will have to resist the messaging of the mainstream media, the television in particular. Resist the corporate media’s tireless attempts to insert its advertising into your brain. Consume clean information.

Another part of the Great Resistance must also involve resisting shit food and drugs. Some Clown Worlders have coined the term ‘goyslop’ to describe the low-quality garbage food that pervades Western culture. The high goyslop consumption rates are partially because all the energy and time that would have been used for cooking is stolen by the employer. This must be resisted.

Naturally, this also involves getting fit. It’s not just about resisting slop but also resisting laziness. The Great Resistance will involve resistance training. Physical strength is a tangible sign of one’s refusal to collapse into the dirt. The attempts by the ruling class to drive the rest of us into the ground must be resisted.

Also, if any success is to be had, the members of the revolutionary social movement must resist spiritual lies intended to induce submission. The Great Resistance must continue the work and sacrifice made by those throughout history who have battled spiritual terrorism, in whichever form it has arisen. Death narratives must be rejected, and life narratives must be emphasised.

Fully realising the Great Resistance, then, will go far beyond merely working from home. It will involve a complete rebalancing of the relative powers of workers and capital owners, in both physical and metaphysical spheres. Previous attempts to achieve this rebalance have failed, mostly because working-class leaders were replaced by ruling-class lackeys. It’s time to try from a different angle.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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