It's Time For A Global 'Lying Flat' Movement

It’s Time For A Global ‘Lying Flat’ Movement

A wave of young people in China, driven to exhaustion by the relentless demands of their industrial culture, have launched what they call the ‘Lying flat’ movement. They protest their workplace pressures by doing the absolute minimum amount of work possible. This essay will suggest that it’s time to bring the lying flat movement to the world stage.

The lying flat movement is inspired by the idea that a chive lying flat cannot be reaped. In this context, to lie flat is to refuse to be exploited, to disengage from the rat race. The usual path involves moving to the countryside and living as cheaply as possible. Someone lying flat might still work, but they’ll do it for themselves or their family or village instead of some corporate.

The lying flat movement began in China as a reaction to their onerous 996 culture, which insists on a 9am to 9pm, six day workweek. These 72-hour workweeks are incredibly profitable for those who own and run the factories and offices, but, for those supplying the labour component, they’re brutal.

Such long hours are tough even when well-remunerated. A 72-hour workweek leaves very little time or energy left over for recreation. It’s an extreme grind, and will drive a worker to exhaustion in short order.

Unfortunately, the post-nationalist capitalist mentality is that workers are just replaceable parts, and if one breaks down it’s a simple matter of chucking it out and replacing it with a new one. The Chinese industrialists, like the Western industrialists, import outside cheap labour to replace the native labour that they drive into the ground, only theirs comes from rural China instead of everywhere in the world.

The net result is the same, however. An oversupply of labour can only lead to one thing, and that’s a discounted labour price, which itself leads to the impoverishment of the working class. The mass importation of cheap labour has such a destructive effect on native wages that the inevitable end result is a shit life for everyone except for the employers of that cheap labour.

The Chinese have figured out that there’s no winning for workers under these conditions – so why don’t we?

Why don’t we take the lying flat movement to the whole world?

A global lying flat movement would firstly recruit the already rapidly-growing legions of NEETs in the West, and the hikikomoris in Japan. These groups have already dropped out of the industrial profit machine, and are essentially part of a global lying flat movement already. They were the first to realise that the equation of how much was being asked of them to how much they were rewarded did not add up, and their example can inspire others.

The movement would next recruit anyone who works full-time but can’t buy a home or raise a family on their wage. The individuals in this group have not yet suffered psychological collapse, unlike those in the first group, and are still able to labour. However, the equation doesn’t add up for them either. The difference is that this second group is now close to 50% of the working-age population, and higher in the younger demographics.

Before either group can be recruited, a canon of high-quality propaganda must be developed. This propaganda must suggest persuasively that industrialised hyper-capitalist society is in fact evil, and that refusing to power it with one’s life energy is a moral imperative. One example of such propaganda argues that a life on welfare is morally superior to a life as a worker, because the welfare beneficiary uses fewer resources, and resource conservation is now more important than production.

This propaganda will be effective because many who hear it will already be receptive to it. Many are already tempted to drop out of the system, having long ago calculated that their wages will never allow them to save enough to own their own home and raise a family. If they see that other people achieve a higher standard of living by dropping out of the system, they’ll become motivated to drop out as well.

That people will drop out of the system is inevitable at this stage of the cycle. Working hard in the city only makes sense during the boom times, because in the boom times the workers have the leverage, and so they can get a fair share of their own productivity. But capital always outpaces labour (link goes to .pdf), so when the bust part of the cycle hits, the people who own everything will maintain their share by reducing the share of the workers.

If you’re a worker and not an owner, then, you want to be living cheaply in the countryside when the bust hits. This is what great numbers of young Chinese have already figured out. It’s harder to do in New Zealand, because we don’t have villages everywhere, but it’s still possible. The basic leverage equation makes city life less and less worthwhile with every year that passes.

A global return to cheap, low-stress country living would cripple the industrial capital juggernaut, and shift the balance of wage negotiation leverage back towards the worker. Starved of cheap labour, the ruling class would be forced to pay a fair wage or go without producers. It’s time to go tang ping, and bring the lying flat movement to every corner of the industrialised world.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of 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.

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The South-Eastern Territorial Imperative

The South-Eastern Territorial Imperative is the name given to the strategy of protecting the high civilisation of the world from the coming catastrophe.

It’s apparent to all that the old order of the world is collapsing. After 20 years of disastrous Middle Eastern military adventurism and 40 years of equally disastrous neoliberalism, only a very few Westerners still have faith in their political rulers. The widespread despair felt today has caused many to drop out of society completely, a phenomenon akin to the behavioural sink of John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments.

Times like these often involve a massive loss of knowledge and culture. The great risk is of another Dark Age, when the forces of ignorance seize control, and the forces of science and wisdom are marginalised and silenced. Signs of this can already be seen in the New Authoritarianism that seeks to cancel or deplatform anyone who thinks wrongly, where wrongthink is anything that does not serve the interests of globohomo.

The proposal of the South-East Territorial Imperative is that all the K-selected peoples of the world pull back to the territories currently occupied by Australia and New Zealand, i.e. the Anzac Empire, in the Southeastern corner of the map. In practice, ‘K-selected’ refers to high-IQ people who have relatively few children and who look after them properly. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, Europeans and Far East Asians.

The South-East Territorial Imperative has a precedent in the settlement of America. The population of the United States in 1860 was around 30 million, or roughly the same as that of Australia and New Zealand combined in 2021. By 1890 this had expanded to 60 million, and by 1930 it had reached 120 million. These rates of growth were not surprising given the opportunities available in America compared to the moribund economies and cultures of Europe.

If the now-present peoples of the South-East would spend this decade winning the propaganda battle, we could spend the rest of the century fighting for the South-East Territorial Imperative. If we did so, then we could have as many K-selected people as Japan by the end of the century. With over 20 times as much land as Japan, our Anzac Empire could even potentially become a world force on the order of Russia by 2100.

There are two major advantages with calling the world’s K-selected peoples to gather in the Southeastern corner of the world.

The first is geographic. The Southeastern corner of the world is protected from the world’s r-selected hordes by vast distances. Whereas Europe and America have Africa and Latin America (respectively) on their doorsteps, the Anzac Empire shares no border with Asia or with anyone else. Europe and America appear to be getting slowly overrun by their rapidly-breeding Southern neighbours, but the Anzac Empire would have no border that could be crossed on foot or by dinghy.

Moreover, the geography encompassed by an Anzac Empire would be sufficient for future growth into a world superpower. Australia and New Zealand combined would already have the world’s 11th largest economy, the third largest amount of agricultural land, and the world’s single largest Exclusive Economic Zone. The only thing we’re missing, and which America, China, India, Japan and Russia possess, is 100 million or more K-selected individuals.

The second is pragmatic. The South-Eastern Territorial Imperative is inherently eugenic, and as such seeks to maximise the ratio of K-selected to r-selected people. There are very few r-selected people already in this Southeastern corner of the world. As such, it’s the closest that we can get to a blank canvas upon which to paint our high civilisation.

Our current rulers aren’t just going to step aside, though. They will have to be removed, and prevented from regaining power, by a concerted and determined effort of the Anzac nation.

A revolution that introduced an Anzac Empire to the world stage would inevitably take inspiration from the American Revolution. As such, it would be necessary for a hard-core of individuals, free from slave morality, to put forward a new and comprehensive system of human rights. The best candidate for any such system would be modelled on the Sevenfold Conception of Human Rights, which posits a spectrum of rights encompassing everything from the grossest aspect of life to the most subtle.

Now is the time to prepare for such a move. America was populated mostly by those who felt that Europe was lost; the Anzac Empire will be populated by those who feel that both America and Europe are lost. Any citizen of either civilisation, once they realise that the future of both places are grim, could be encouraged to pull back to the South-East. If we could attract enough high-quality people looking for a fair deal, we could become what America was 120 years ago.

The difference is that, with enough wit and will, we can prevent the mistakes the Americans made. The worst of their mistakes, and the most important for us to avoid, was the Hart-Celler Act, which opened American borders to the world’s r-selected. In the Anzac Empire of the future, it will be a crime punishable by 20 years imprisonment to agitate for the mass importation of r-selected cheap labour.

The ultimate goal of this nascent empire would be to terraform the Australian interior to the extent that a great inland sea occupied what is now empty desert. This would alter the climate of the desert such that it was habitable for modern Western civilisation. With this achieved, the population of an Anzac Empire could reach 500 million or more. And this would be 500 million of the world’s most K-selected people: the most intelligent, the most rectitudinous, the most industrious and long-sighted.

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They Would Go Back To Chattel Slavery If They Could

A number of wage subsidy scams are being reported right now, usually involving a worker being coerced into working for free or for discounted wages. Many people seem surprised that employers would be so brazen as to take advantage of a struggling person, especially in times when solidarity is needed. The reality is that employers would go back to chattel slavery if it wasn’t against the law.

The typical attitude of an employer in New Zealand is most accurately summarised by the Magic Talk caller known only as “Mark”. Mark called in to say that Kiwis were lazy and that immigrants made much better workers. This contempt for New Zealand workers is shared by most of the ruling class. John Key spoke for this ruling class when he said that we need to import foreign workers because Kiwis are lazy and on drugs.

As any Kiwi who has worked overseas knows, Kiwi workers are highly sought-after specifically because we are not lazy. If we had been lazy, we would never have survived the challenges put before us in our short history, because those challenges demanded that we shape an entire nation out of almost nothing, and we overcame them.

The truth, as is widely understood if not widely admitted, is that workers who are dependent on their employer for a visa will be much more submissive, and will accept much worse treatment, than those who are not dependent. This is why foreign workers are desired in New Zealand and New Zealand workers desired in foreign countries.

The mentality of the average employer, anywhere in the world, hasn’t changed much from 200 years ago. People from the working class are still considered cattle; their suffering is routinely ignored in the pursuit of profit. The mindset of today’s employer is still to put profit first and to discount human suffering, especially if those suffering are poor. It’s little different to the mindset of a cotton plantation owner.

Understanding the psychology of the employer – and, thereby, understanding why our economies are structured the way they are – requires the realisation that the ruling class would rather pay the workers nothing at all. If society was governed by an employers and landowners union, it would happily go back to chattel slavery.

Because the ruling class can’t get away with that, they can only push the worker as close to chattel slavery as the law allows. This is achieved by taking away as much of their productivity as legally possible. And so, most of the productivity of every worker is taken from them by the three lions of profits, taxes and rents.

The employer in a capitalist system is obsessed with profit. Profit is a matter of maximising incomes and minimising expenses, and the major expense is usually labour. It’s not cheap to get a person to work on your plantation all day when they’d rather be at home taking care of their family and community. So employers usually have to pay big. This has conditioned them to seek out any and all opportunity to maximise their access to cheap labour.

It can be said that cheap labour makes the world go around.

One of the first things that Brazil did after coming into existence was to import slaves – some 5 million were brought to Brazil before 1866, mostly to farm sugar cane. America, likewise, didn’t wait long before importing African slaves of their own. Even though only 300,000 were brought to the United States, it was enough to significantly depress wages in the Deep South. Much of colonial South and Central America operated on the slave plantation model pioneered by the Portuguese.

Australia and New Zealand never operated on this model. The Anzac ruling classes, however, have always been subject to the same temptations as the other colonial ruling classes. The temptation to maximise profit by minimising the cost of labour has always been present, sometimes intensely. We can see this from the fact that the Western ruling class have pushed the workers as close to slavery as possible without calling it slavery.

Rather than import slaves, and maintain them at the employer’s own expense on their plantations, it’s easier for those employers to import foreign cheap labour, and dump them into working-class neighbourhoods to fend for themselves. This is not only as profitable as chattel slavery, but it outsources the mental labour of arranging to feed, clothe and house the workers back to the workers themselves.

The importation and then naturalisation of cheap labour externalises the cost of diversity onto wider society, while keeping all the profits for the employer. The major negative consequence of diversity is lower wages. This occurs because diversity makes it more difficult for the working class to present the united front necessary to force the employer class to share the productivity of the workers.

The net result of 70 years of the mass importation of cheap labour: our wages have fallen so far that the average worker has no hope of owning their own home. The mainstream media screams ‘Racist!’ at anyone who draws the connection, but even high-school economics students understand that an oversupply of cheap labour will inevitably crash the price of working-class wages.

In 1992, the average Kiwi could buy the average house after about 7,000 hours of labour at the average wage. Today, so much of the average Kiwi’s productivity is sucked away in profits, taxes and rents that it takes over 25,000 hours of labour at the average wage to buy the average house. Vast numbers have completely given up hope. It’s already becoming the case that people are working just to stay alive, and some have to borrow money just to be able to do that!

All this was made possible by the working class getting pushed, closer and closer, over several decades, towards chattel slavery.

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COVID Derangement Syndrome

18 months into the COVID psy-op, and the fear has started to break people. The mere mention of coronavirus is enough to make some people go crazy. In their craziness, these people are lashing out at their fellows, castigating them for the tiniest of infractions. These rapidly-increasing hysterics are suffering from something known as COVID Derangement Syndrome.

COVID Derangement Syndrome is, fundamentally, a form of mass hysteria. Perhaps the closest analogy to this madness is the War on Drugs, which also involved an invisible enemy that only the authorities could see. Both COVID and the War on Drugs have involved the herd being whipped into a state of intense fear by the ruling class, who have then seized more power by promising to smash those responsible.

The most frightening signs of this hysteria involve the length to which people are willing to go to harm others in order to lower their anxiety. As the images show, people with COVID Derangement Syndrome are more than happy to destroy anyone who they feel is exposing them to the risk of the Coof. Anyone who refuses to wear a mask, or who questions the mainstream narrative, is a threat to be neutralised.

COVID Derangement Syndrome, like all hysterias, is fundamentally physiological. The relentless COVID-related doom porn, and the fear-based emotions that follow with it, has created a degree of physiological arousal that is traumatic. The deep sense of helplessness felt by many in the face of this merciless disease is the kind of helplessness that makes people behave irrationally. Part of that irrationality is a will to destroy those who they feel are causing them to suffer.

This mass hysteria has deliberately been provoked by governments, who, in conjunction with the mainstream media, have fomented a wartime mentality among the populations targeted by their propaganda. Normies in the Western World today feel the threat of death at any moment (or at least becoming terminally ill). This heavy blanket of fear has made the population extremely pliable and submissive.

The simplest and easiest way to dominate a person is to cause them suffering, and then to offer to stop causing them suffering in exchange for submission. The same strategy is used by the entire spectrum of dominators, from Prime Ministers and Presidents all the way down to school bullies and even alpha chimpanzees and gorillas. Cause pain, usually by physical violence but sometimes also by emotional or social violence, and then promise to stop if the victim bends the knee.

Unfortunately for decent people, who will be trampled, the herd is being whipped up into a frenzy for the sake of destruction. As with other herd phenomena, the individuals most vulnerable are the weakest and most compliant. The neurotics, hypochrondriacs, flaming homosexuals and others most concerned with threats to their precious hide are the ones most agitated, and thus the most keen to see their fellows forced to behave.

The reason why COVID Derangement Syndrome is spreading so rapidly today is that most people live in a reality dictated to them by the television and other mass media. Mostly urban-dwellers, with the odd suburbanite, these brainwashing victims know nothing other than what they’re told. They don’t question or examine the narratives they’re fed, let alone try to figure out who’s doing the feeding and what their motivations are.

COVID Derangement Syndrome might be artificially created, but the effects are very real. People with the syndrome are more than happy to destroy those who don’t submit to the instructions of the authorities. This makes it similar to all the other cases of herd mentality wreaking carnage.

Also like other mass hysterias, the solution is to remove oneself from the source of agitation. There are two major ways this can be achieved.

The first is to disconnect from mass media. If you have a television, chuck it out the window. Remove all mainstream media sites from your toolbar or bookmarks. Unfollow all mainstream media channels. If you want to know what’s going on, identify some intelligent, well-informed and independent people who you can rely on for calm truth – because you will never get anything other than hysterical lies from the mainstream media.

The second is to learn to meditate. Let your mind naturally drift to thoughts of things that make you anxious, and then practice the habit of not reacting emotionally to those thoughts. Practice this for long enough, and you’ll eventually be able to encounter hysterical people without becoming agitated yourself.

COVID Derangement Syndrome, like COVID itself, will eventually burn itself out. Unplugging from the mainstream media and learning to meditate are the best ways to keep yourself safe until it does.

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