Genetic Infrastructure

There are several components of the wealth of nations. As Adam Smith wrote, it’s primarily a function of natural resources, human resources and quality laws/leadership. Writing in the late 18th Century long before Darwin, Smith didn’t know about natural or sexual selection, much less genes and DNA. His conception of human resources was based around education, and missed out one crucial element.

The crucial missing element: genetic infrastructure. If education consists of those memetic qualities within that nation that lead to wealth and prosperity, genetic infrastructure consists of those genetic qualities within that nation that lead to wealth and prosperity. It is the value of having good DNA.

The primary component of genetic infrastructure is intelligence (or, more precisely, the presence of those genes that lead to high intelligence). Contrary to popular belief, intelligence is mostly hereditary in adults – indeed, as the linked paper states, “Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits”.

Intelligence is the most powerful predictor of several different social outcomes. It is the strongest predictor of lifetime educational achievement and of lifetime criminal convictions. It’s also the strongest predictor of future wealth. All other things being equal, a high-IQ person with an average education will earn more wealth during their lifetime than an average-IQ person with a high education.

Furthermore, intelligence is the single most powerful predictor of future wealth on the national level. Not even natural resources come close to intelligence when predicting future wealth, as evidenced by the wealth of high-intelligence, low-resource countries like Japan, Germany and England, and the poverty of low-intelligence, high-resource countries like Nigeria, the Congo and Brazil.

A nation’s genetic infrastructure, then, is mostly a matter of intelligence. Other factors include physical health and strength, the degree of inbreeding and whether the phenotype expressed by the genes is suited to the physical environment, but these are comparatively minor.

Because a nation’s fortunes are so closely tied to the quality of its genetic infrastructure, understanding the details of that infrastructure allows us to make accurate predictions about that nation’s fortunes. This is particularly relevant if we can also measure changes in that genetic infrastructure, whether ongoing or expected.

For instance, if low-IQ people are outbreeding high-IQ people in a given nation, thereby weakening that nation’s genetic infrastructure, we can predict that outcomes typical for low-IQ people will become typical for that nation. We can predict that poverty, ignorance, crime and violence will all increase as the genetic infrastructure deteriorates.

On the other hand, an influx of high-IQ people to an area will strengthen that area’s genetic infrastructure. As such, we can predict that outcomes typical for high-IQ people will become typical for that area. Most examples of European colonisation fit into this category – the colonisation of 65IQ Australian Aborigines by 100IQ mostly British settlers is probably the most notable.

Of course, the genetic basis of intelligence is one of the greatest taboo subjects in the West today. Even winning a Nobel Prize in Biology does not permit a person to suggest that evolution has created human subgroups of different intelligence levels, as James Watson discovered.

Consequently, many will deny the very concept of genetic infrastructure, particularly blank-slatists, globalists, open-borders capitalists, Marxists and other biology deniers.

The truth is hard for many to accept, but it’s revealed clearly in the scientific literature. Wealth is primarily a function of intelligence, and intelligence is primarily genetic. Therefore, wealth is primarily a function of those genes that facilitate intelligence. Those genes – plus a few other, much less important factors – are what is known as genetic infrastructure.

Nations with a high-quality genetic infrastructure can easily rebuild even after their physical infrastructure is destroyed, as Japan and Germany did after World War II. Nations with a low-quality genetic infrastructure will disintegrate into poverty even if they somehow achieve a high level of physical infrastructure, as Argentina did in the 20th Century and South Africa did after 1994.

*

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

*

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

Analysis Of A Media Hatchet Job: Nadine Porter’s Hit Piece On Hannah Spierer

As VJM Publishing readers will be aware, the Establishment is currently in a state of panic. Thanks to decade after decade of constant lying, the mainstream media is starting to lose control of the narrative, and with it the ability to manufacture consent for Establishment plans. This has led to them running a series of hit pieces against alternative media figures. One recent piece was so shamelessly biased that it’s worth examining it as an exemple of propaganda.

Nadine Porter is a propagandist for Stuff news. Her reporting appears to be little more than a series of hatchet jobs against anti-Establishment figures. She recently published an article smearing CounterSpin co-host Hannah Spierer. Porter’s piece is one of the most egregious examples of attack propaganda ever published outside of wartime. Because of this, this analysis will break it down line by line.

*

She was once Auckland University’s campus co-convenor of the Green Party who spoke out about Islamophobia – so what happened to Counterspin co-founder Hannah Spierer? NADINE PORTER investigates.

Porter sets the tone of this hatchet job from the opening sentence. There’s something wrong with Hannah Spierer, and Porter will now tell you what that is.

“Let’s raise our girls to be mothers,” the eloquently spoken voice says to a large crowd in Wellington.

“And to want to be homemakers and be family orientated,” the woman continues. “Because at the end of the day that’s what all this gender confusion is about.”

Here Porter is trying to associate Spierer with the Gloriavale stereotype of submissive breeding sow. This is the first of a slew of insinuations made in this piece.

The audience welcomes Hannah Spierer’s speech, especially the many middle-aged women.

“I personally think it’s time we stopped pushing feminism,” the 37-year-old proclaimed earlier in her speech, glancing over at her assenting partner Kelvyn Alp before going on to denounce Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as a toxic feminist.

Porter, like most hacks who have spent decades in the mainstream media bubble, evidently believes that feminists are the good guys fighting back against male supremacism. Spierer has sinned by daring to question this Establishment dogma. The reality – that feminism has done little to benefit actual women – is strenuously denied by Establishment voices.

Any mention of Ardern elicits the biggest applause, and prompts Alp to further denigrate the PM and suggest New Zealand’s “woke” military leaders should be decapitated. He then clarifies he meant this figuratively – due to the danger of being arrested.

At this stage in the piece, Porter slips from dealing in facts to dealing in assertions. Stating facts, such as that Spierer is 37 years old, creates the impression in the reader’s mind that this is an objective piece that deals in facts. So the reader is lured into accepting the unsupported assertions made here and later in the piece.

In all of it, Spierer stands beside her man, nodding as she has done on their Counterspin Media platform for over a year.

Here Porter is trying to create the impression that Spierer herself has been mindlessly sucked into a world of lies. As if a puppet, and not a free-thinking person like Nadine Porter, Spierer merely nods. This is an attempt to delegitimise an opponent of the Establishment.

There the pair have been vocal spreaders of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

This is the first blatant and outright lie in this piece. What constitutes misinformation is up to every person to decide for themselves. It’s not for Nadine Porter to dictate from her mainstream media pulpit. Moreover, conspiracy theories describe reality more accurately than their competition, coincidence theories.

Porter is a member of the same mainstream media that lied for decades about how cannabis causes mental illness and is not medicinal, happily running Family First ads during the cannabis referendum that were pure misinformation. Stuff itself runs a million times more propaganda than CounterSpin does, as this piece exemplifies.

It’s a disturbing departure from Spierer’s youth and the “excited bright” student she was described as by a former lecturer.

Why “disturbing”? A moment’s thought is enough to understand that, through using terms such as this here, Porter has abandoned any pretense at writing fairly and accurately. “Disturbing” is a loaded term intended to manipulate the reader into seeing danger where it doesn’t exist. Its use here reveals that this piece is simply a hatchet job (and it gets worse).

Studying politics at Auckland University, Spierer’s leadership ability came to the fore. In 2006, she became the International Affairs Officer for the university’s student association. A year later she began to make her mark as the association’s environmental affairs officer and the Green party’s co-convenor on campus.

In June 2007 she was vocal against Islamophobia and co-signed a letter to Investigate magazine criticising a piece by Ian Wishart alleging, without evidence, that some of the world’s most extreme Islamic preachers had infiltrated New Zealand’s Muslim community.

Again, Porter goes back to detailing some actual facts, in order to soften the reader up for the insinuations and lies that follow later.

Yet 16 years later, Spierer found herself in a Christchurch courtroom being dragged to the dock on charges believed to be related to Counterspin sharing “objectionable material”.

Realistically this should be a story about Spierer’s moral fortitude. From getting sucked into Establishment politics as a university student, Spierer wisened up and realised that the Establishment is actually the enemy of all honest, free-thinking people. It’s really a heroic story, but for Porter, Spierer is a slave who has escaped the plantation.

Every free-thinking person understands that a Government setting the legal system onto someone for sharing a link to a documentary video is a clear example of tyrannical evil. Yet Porter cheers for the tyrant, and excoriates Spierer for defying it.

It is unclear if the charges relate to Counterspin’s publication earlier this year of excerpts from the March 15 terrorist’s livestream as part of a documentary making false claims about the terror attack .

This was something a competent journalist would clear up beform writing a piece about someone. But Porter could well be getting money from the Public Interest Journalism Fund to write a quota of hit pieces on Establishment figures, and so she has to churn them out to a deadline. Hey, Nadine, can you do VJM Publishing next? We need the publicity!

Little is known of the intervening years between university and Spierer reemerging as Sarah Smith in 2019 except that she worked as an assistant at a Rudolf Steiner kindergarten.

Considered a special character school, Steiner practices anthroposophy​, a “spiritual science” in the education of children.

Here Porter is trying to smear Spierer as a kook, a crazy hippie. As VJM Publishing has previously discussed, mainstream media hatchet jobs smear their targets as either evil or insane. Porter’s approach is evidently to cast Alp as the evil one and Spierer as the crazy one.

Anthroposophy is indeed a spiritual science, and if Spierer knows about it she will be much better informed about the challenges facing humanity than the average person. Rudolf Steiner had incredible insight into the human condition, and his schools are vastly superior to the cruel Rockefeller model that New Zealand schools are based on.

However, Spierer’s transformation is most likely to have come at the hands of QAnon – an American conspiracy that began in 2017. Believers thought President Donald Trump was fighting a secret society that included Democratic politicians and Satan-worshipping paedophiles who trafficked children.

“Most likely” here is bullshit. Here, Porter is pushing the Deep State trope that “conspiracy theorists” are responsible for turning Western populations against their governments, and not decades of mismanagement and arrogance.

Anybody who doesn’t think that many Democratic politicians are in secret societies is a clown. Many of them flew on the Lolita Express, child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein‘s private plane, including none other than former President Bill Clinton. In 2019 the supposed “conspiracy theory” that Epstein was a child sex trafficker turned out to be 100% true. This is a matter of public record, and by denying it, Porter herself is pushing misinformation.

Note that Ghislane Maxwell’s client list of influential Westerners who purchased sex with trafficked children has not been made public.

The group was initially a far-right internet forum but grew in scope as it peddled disinformation including the nonsensical conspiracy theory that 5G towers were spreading coronavirus and that Covid-19 was pre-planned or a hoax.

Here Porter exaggerates for the sake of sensationalism. Very few people in any movement believed that 5G towers spread coronavirus. Some believe that Covid-19 was a hoax, but many believe (quite reasonably) that Western governments exaggerated the effects of Covid for the sake of increasing control over their populations.

Some New Zealanders starting heading down the QAnon tunnel of misinformation in 2018 and began adapting it on these shores. By 2020, and on the back of Covid-19 lockdowns, the movement adopted an anti-authority, anti-Government view.

Spierer appears to have been one of the early local adopters, judging by her Twitter social media posts. It almost certainly laid the path towards far-right activism for her and many other Kiwis.

The Western Establishment loves to push the trope that their management of society is flawless, and so any criticism of them must be astroturfed by foreign intelligence services. Hillary Clinton started this particular line of misinformation when she claimed that Russian troll farms were responsible for her loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 American Presidental Elections.

By complaining about an “anti-authority, anti-Government view” among wrongthinkers, Porter implies that the correct view is to be pro-authoritarianism. This reveals her intent in writing this piece – to protect the Establishment by attacking its detractors. “Almost certainly” is used here in the same sense as “most likely” above. Porter has no idea – she’s simply throwing shit and seeing what sticks.

“QAnon has always been an umbrella for all conspiracy theorists,” a Fighting Against Conspiracy Theories Aotearoa spokesperson told Stuff.

An unnamed spokesperson. Why is Porter quoting an organisation that doesn’t even have named spokespeople? The fact is that FACT is another Establishment-funded quango that was created to destroy freethinkers.

Spierer quickly became prominent under her alternative name Sarah Smith in the Mothers Who Stand For Freedom (MWSFF) group, as the pandemic wore on. Once a self-described “leftie” who had considered joining a feminist movement, Spierer may have carried her anti-vaccination views from her past.

There’s nothing nefarious about vaccine skepticism. The mainstream media tries to create the impression there is because the mainstream media is to the Establishment as the sheepdog is to the farmer: they earn their meal ticket from herding the masses wherever the farmers want them herded. At the moment, the farmers want their livestock vaccinated.

A decade ago, people against vaccinations were often left leaning, but the pandemic and QAnon quickly amalgamated them into a melting pot of conspiracies – and it seems Spierer suffered the same fate.

Writing from Nelson, I can tell you that many people against vaccinations are still left-leaning: the kind of natural-living organic food-eating, weed-smoking hippie that Nelson is known for is stridently anti-vaxx.

The rest of this paragraph is nonsense.

After this week’s Christchurch court appearance, Spierer’s QAnon based beliefs were evident. She told supporters the Great Awakening was coming – a conspiracy theory that incorrectly forecast that Joe Biden and other politicians would be arrested before his inauguration and Trump reinstated as US President. Then she claimed the real pandemic was child trafficking and child abuse – the initial QAnon conspiracy.

The Great Awakening is an occult concept that predates QAnon by centuries, which is why there’s an entire chapter about it in Clown World Chronicles. The idea is a variation of the common millenarian belief that the human race will awaken from delusion and finally come to terms with the true nature of reality. The hope is that this awakening would lead to justice for the child rapists on Ghislane Maxwell’s client list.

Pedophiles at the top of Western countries isn’t even a conspiracy theory – it’s an established and documented fact. The American Establishment protected Jeff Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell, the British Establishment protected Jimmy Savile and continues to protect Prince Andrew, the Australian Establishment protects Cardinal Pell (who is a free man despite that his lawyer admitted that Pell sexually penetrated a child), etc.

Porter is herself serving to protect these people by claiming that those who talk about them are conspiracy theorists.

In the MWSFF group that was heavily supportive of Voices for Freedom, Spierer openly shared her negative views on transgender issues, calling today’s reality “an insanity taking our children’s minds”.

Is Spierer wrong here? The transgender hysteria has every sign of being a social contagion and not a real thing, as evidence by the enormous numbers of detransitioners, most of who deeply regret having transitioned in the first place, and who wish someone would have stopped them. Porter is grasping at straws by trying to make Spierer look bad for opposing this.

The group also pushed the disproven satanic ritual abuse conspiracy that has lingered since the 1980s – and forms part of Spierer’s child trafficking views.

Spierer might be wrong to jump on the Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy bandwagon, but this is hardly cause for opprobrium. It’s just not a big deal.

In December 2020 Alp spoke to the group, but it is unclear if the pair met before that.

It’s unclear what Porter intends by mentioning this.

Two months earlier, Spierer, as Smith, posted an eight-part YouTube series on “the flaws of feminism”.

In it, she derides her mother and grandmother as being women who enjoyed “wearing the pants” in their relationships and claimed feminism was making men and young boys less like alpha males and “more like women”.

Again, is Spierer wrong here? The average Western woman is not any happier in the workforce, being dependent on an employer who hates her, than she is at home with a family, being dependent on a husband who loves her. And even if she was, surely it’s permissible to question it without getting a hit piece written about you in the mainstream media?

Men are more like women than they’ve ever been, that’s an easily-observed fact. Masculine qualities, such as the ability to impose order upon one’s own emotions, are not valued anywhere near as much as they should be. What’s wrong with pointing that out?

Spierer has also proclaimed herself a sovereign citizen – a fringe movement that began in the United States in the 1970s. It believes ultimate power is vested with individuals, and the state and its institutions are illegitimate. The pair tried to claim this status at their Christchurch District Court appearance, to no avail.

The State and its institutions are all predicated on violence, every single one. Many people, such as the thousands who have been imprisoned for growing medicinal cannabis, have very good reason to consider the State their enemy.

Sovereign citizens might be anti-social and dangerous as a general rule, but if Kate Hannah can openly admit to being a Cultural Marxist and still get paid by the Government to target wrongthinkers, then no-one should be having hit pieces written about them just for claiming to be a sovereign citizen.

In the early days of Counterspin – Alp’s far right platform – Spierer has connected and praised known white supremacists and racists including Lee Williams and Kyle Chapman.

This paragraph is just shameless smearing, using all the Marxist buzzwords – “far-right”, “white supremacists”, “racists”. Porter seems to think that it’s a crime to platform people that the Establishment doesn’t want platformed.

Spierer has been enthusiastic about Christchurch’s far-right fraternity and has termed the city an “inspiration” in a social media post. That welcoming audience may explain why the pair were in the city when they were arrested.

I earned two degrees in Christchurch and found the city an inspiration for being the place where Ernest Rutherford conducted his early experiments. Is it far-right to think that? Absurd. Here Porter is pushing the hoary old North Island narrative that Christchurch is a city full of rednecks.

Now bailed to a Woolston house that also hosts a commercial alternative medicine practice, Spierer will face her second court appearance on September 21 where she will enter her plea.

Another attempt to smear Spierer with the “crazy hippie” narrative that the mainstream media also uses on Voices For Freedom. Alternative medicine works out a lot better for people than allopathic medicine.

If found guilty she and Alp could face up to 14 years in jail and a significant fine.

Once upon a time, journalists saw them as freedom fighters against oppression. Back then, they would have been outraged that someone risked 14 years in jail for sharing information – an act that harmed no-one. But today, in the time of the Public Interest Journalism Fund, journalists bay for the blood of anyone the Establishment wants destroyed.

For well-known lecturer and former friend Paul Buchanan, the change from a bright young energetic student who looked likely to become an environmental activist, to the conspiracy theorist Spierer is today, is unfathomable.

“What happened to her?… It’s deeply disturbing.”

It’s hardly unfathomable that a bright young student, brainwashed into supporting globalist causes, would eventually wisen up and realise there was more to things than surface appearances. But this execrable hatchet job would imply that Spierer must have gone mad, or turned to the dark side somehow.

In summary, this propaganda piece is designed to do one thing: make the rest of the slaves too afraid to leave the plantation, as Spierer did. It reveals in ghastly detail how low the standards of modern journalism have fallen, and serves as a crystal-clear example of stochastic terrorism. That the political Establishment is using taxpayers’ money to fund hit pieces against their enemies should deeply concern everyone.

*

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

*

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

Dear FaceBook: A Break-Up Letter

Dear FaceBook,

we’ve had 15 years together and I feel that this is enough. It’s time to go our separate ways. I feel that a separation is the true desire of both of us. The way I see it is, I’m going up, and you’re going down, and the tension is too great to keep us together any longer.

When I opened my FaceBook account, in 2007, you were the coolest thing out there. One big problem with life before then: you could make great friends through, say, a mutual acquaintance, and then those friends would go back overseas and you’d lose contact with them. A network that a person could use to stay in touch with these people was the perfect thing for a then-university student.

I can still remember how much fun those early days were. Back then, everyone I met through you was cool. You seemed to only know cool and interesting people: the talented and the educated. In 2007, if some random commented on a friend’s post, that random was probably someone worth knowing too. A FaceBook account was a gateway to a world of great people.

But over the years, I saw your standards fall and fall.

The first sign was the televisionisation. The prospect of money from the advertising guys seemed like a drug for you – you were hooked instantly. Suddenly there were ads everywhere, in between the quality posts from intelligent people. Ads, ads, ads, ads. Everywhere.

Then the quality pages started to get throttled. The great awakening/conspiracy pages started to reach far fewer readers. And then the mainstream media started to muscle in. Soon there were “Recommended” posts that were all mainstream media content. Just the same mainstream media content that I stopped watching television in order to avoid!

The worst thing, though, was the bannings. Why ban me for making Hitler jokes? Were you worried about losing advertisers? Eventually a person could get banned for anything on FaceBook. It was a simple matter of making a joke that the Filipino moderators on $1/hr didn’t approve of, and wham – banned.

It seems to me like you care more about money now than information quality, which is the exact opposite of the spirit of the Internet. The old FaceBook, which was full of groups of subject matter enthusiasts sharing expert knowledge, is gone. The great meme pages have been censored into oblivion. Now it’s just ads and low-IQ drivel.

Now, every pissed-off loser is on FaceBook, crying about stupid shit that I don’t care about. All the scientists and philosophers are long gone. By today, 2022, you are filled up with trash, worse than television ever was. I’m more likely to get death threats through FaceBook than invites to a good party.

In fact, many of the worst people I know I have met through you.

This is a complete turnaround from 15 years ago. Back then, it was the people in my physical environment who were rough and trashy, and online life gave me a chance to get away from them, and to meet a higher quality of person. But now that I’m getting older, getting more accomplished, earning more respect, the people in my physical environment are fairly decent. The people I meet through you though… ‘rough and trashy’ only begins to describe it.

It seems like all the quality people no longer have FaceBook accounts and spend time elsewhere. And it’s not just me who thinks this. Your reputation is in tatters. People now call you ‘FaecesBook’ without any irony, and, worst of all, you show no sign of any intention to change the direction in which you’re going. That’s what tells me that we now have to go our separate ways.

I’ve enjoyed the entertainment you have given me. I have had some good laughs over the years, winding up tards and debating politics with normies. But you’ve shown me that you’re going downwards and have no wish to change course. So this letter is to give you notice that I am deleting my FaceBook account. Best of luck to you in sorting yourself out.

*

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

*

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

Why Parliament Is Full Of Abusers

This week the New Zealand mass consciousness has been obsessed with the issue of Parliamentary bullying. The cases of Sam Uffindell and Gaurav Sharma have revealed that there are some deeply abusive and sadistic people among our Parliamentarians. This essay explains why this is, and why we would be foolish to expect anything else.

Parliament is the top of the social dominance hierarchy in New Zealand. The people in there get to decide what the rest of us are allowed to do, and if we defy them they can set the Police onto us. Parliament are above laws. They can lie, they can slander, they can cheat, and no-one can touch them. This great power creates a great incentive for people to fight their way into Parliament, to the top of the social dominance hierarchy.

There are two ways to get to the top of any dominance hierarchy, whether it’s a family, tribe, country or empire: intimidation or inspiration.

In a state of Nature, there is only intimidation. The alpha chimpanzee is invariably the one with the greatest combination of strength and aggression. He rules by fear. Anyone who challenges him is liable to have his scrotum torn off or his eyes gouged out. A wide range of submissive behaviours evolved so that non-alphas could demonstrate their lack of threat, and thereby earn the alpha’s mercy.

Pre-civilisational human life was not much different to chimpanzee life today. The one at the top of the dominance hierarchy was also the one with the greatest combination of strength and aggression. But the advent of civilisation changed everything. Civilisation transformed the human being from a wild animal into something else.

In a state of civilisation, there is inspiration. It’s possible for individuals in possession of a divine spark to gain the allegiance of their fellows not through cruelty and fear, but through the promise of leading them to greatness. The greater the civilisation, the more inspirational the leaders are. The greatest of all civilisations give us leaders like Alexander, Marcus Aurelius and George Washington.

Inspiration is by far the best way to lead, because it provokes the least amount of blowback. Rule by intimidation makes people feel fear, which often calcifies into resentment. This resentment, as Machiavelli observed, is liable to spill over into unrest and violence. Much better, he concluded, to be loved than to be feared.

Intimidation is easy. It’s mostly a matter of what’s called social dominance orientation, or SDO. The will to dominate is the main quality that intimidates other people. Research has found that “higher SDO was associated with pursuit of hierarchy-enhancing jobs”. For the reasons mentioned above, politician is one of those jobs. So people who are naturally intimidating often strive to become politicians, creating a selection bias.

Inspiration is hard. No-one is really sure how to do it, or what’s necessary. A belief in God might be necessary in order to truly inspire, or fearlessness in the face of death, or high intelligence, great wealth or a favourable birth. No-one really knows. Good leaders don’t need to know the specifics, because they can intuit the way forwards.

It’s fair to say that good leaders rule by inspiration and bad leaders rule by intimidation.

Unfortunately, New Zealand is beset by bad leadership. Not only are we near the bottom of a historical nadir, but we are also crippled by democracy, the remnants of cultural Christianity and a peculiar resentment-fuelled anti-elitism, all of which combine to keep our best people down.

The end result is that there are no real leaders in Parliament. All they’ve been since the Third National Government is just a pack of scum-sucking grifters doing the bidding of international banking and finance interests. That doesn’t inspire anyone. So our Parliament is full of abusers because there are no good leaders to inspire people to follow them, leaving abusers to battle their way into the top positions.

Our political system selects for psychopaths because any dominance hierarchy without one or more psychopaths at the top of it is inherently unstable. If the person at the top of a dominance hierarchy is not a psychopath themselves, they are liable to get dislodged by more aggressive underlings. So, from the point of view of the Establishment, putting abusers into top positions promotes stability.

Almost everyone in Parliament is an abuser, and that goes triple for those at the top of Parliament. Can anyone listen to Jacinda Ardern or Andrew Little justify their continuation of cannabis prohibition, and not realise they are psychopaths? Can anyone listen to Christopher Luxon or Brooke van Velden bay for cutting the benefits of the poor, and not think likewise?

Given all this, it’s not hard to understand why National selected Sam Uffindell as a candidate despite his history of bullying: a history of bullying is a qualification for a job that requires grinding five million other people into submission. This is why National never disavowed Nick Smith, even though Smith regularly turned up to meetings drunk and abused his staff, or any of the countless other alcoholics, narcissists and sex pests that have floated through National’s ranks over the years.

In summary, our political system is full of abusers because we have no leaders good enough to inspire people to follow them.

*

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

*

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!