Economic Zone Mentality

Social observers in places like New Zealand, America, Australia, South Africa, Argentina etc. have noticed that the mentality of the New World is different to the Old World when it comes to co-operation. Although individuals in the New World are at least as friendly as individuals in the Old, the societies of the New World are much nastier. How to explain?

The usual story is that people in the New World are rugged, pioneering settlers and homesteaders. Although they might be willing to lend a hand personally, they are suspicious of government assistance, which they see as a loss of independence. People in the Old World, in comparison, are a bit soft and lazy. Hence they vote for a generous safety net.

In truth, New Worlders vote for low levels of government assistance because they are afflicted with something known as Economic Zone Mentality.

This essay contends that Economic Zone Mentality is a manner of approaching politics and justice that is characteristic of economic zones and not true nations, and is particularly common in the New World. It’s not necessarily selfish, but usually is, reflecting an every-man-for-himself psychology that is anathema to true civilisation.

An actual nation is like an extended family. Examples are Japan or Finland. In an actual nation, the logic is that the Establishment exists to provide for the people. The people might have to pay into the Establishment in the form of taxes, but they can expect to get out more than they put in, because the Establishment will provide services at scale. Thanks to economies of scale, members of actual nations get to enjoy high standards of living, even if they’re poor.

An economic zone is like a plantation. The people who live in it aren’t family. Some of those people are the owners, and the others are there on the graces of the owners. In an economic zone, the Establishment exists to facilitate wealth extraction. The happiness of the people who live there is not an important factor.

In an economic zone, all that matters is economic production. The logic is that the Establishment exists to take, not to give. There may or may not be economies of scale, but it doesn’t matter if those living in economic zones enjoy high standards of living. They are there to work. As a result of all this, there is massive economic inequality.

In actual nations, governments do a lot more to take care of their own people in comparison to economic zones. Welfare support is much higher in Europe than in America, Australia or New Zealand. Higher education is usually free, and when it isn’t student loans are usually interest-free. Healthcare tends to be universal. The logic is that public goods benefit the nation, and therefore are universal goods.

Actual nations take measures that are unthinkable in economic zones, such as the upcoming Swiss referendum on whether to cap the population. In economic zones, it’s well understood that the size of the economy is primarily a function of the size of the population. To cap the population, in Economic Zone Mentality, is like throwing money away. Only people in actual nations could see the merit in it.

A particular characteristic of economic zones is that production of anything non-industrial is considered worthless. Cultural production is worthless; you can’t eat literature or music. Intellectual production likewise, unless it has direct industrial applications. Spiritual production has the least value. Anyone engaged in these three pastimes is considered a thief of actual production. This attitude is the main reason why New World countries are considered cultureless by Old World ones.

In Economic Zone Mentality, a person’s job is their identity. Engineers are the highest status, because they do the most resource extraction. Healthcare workers are the lowest status, because the well-being of people is not important. And without a job, you are no-one. To be unemployed is to be a criminal. It is a violation of the social contract. In a nation, the social contract is that sometimes you give, sometimes you take. In an economic zone, the social contract is that you work in exchange for being allowed to exist.

In Economic Zone Mentality, all criminals are forgiven as soon as they get jobs, and all decent people are criminals as soon as they stop working. Crying about one person on the dole, and ignoring landlords sucking out a hundred times more unearned income, is typical.

Much confusion arises when people expect natural, national mentality in an economic zone.

In all societies, your right to criticise society comes from your social status. In proper nations, many social critics are artists, who have high social status. But in Economic Zone Mentality, artists are low status. So when Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize, many expected that she would have earned a certain degree of respect for the achievement, and that this would have conferred some right to comment on society. But media maggots like Sean Plunket just called her a “traitor” and an “ungrateful hua” (ironically, Catton was criticising Economic Zone Mentality in New Zealand). She now lives overseas.

Economic Zone Mentality is to act as if a person’s net worth and their merit are the same thing. In proper nations, a person gets respect for being wealthy, but no more than they get for being honourable, or educated, or physically fit, or disciplined. In economic zones, a person’s portfolio value is like a scorecard. Honour, education etc. have no value in and of themselves, only to the extent that they enable resource extraction.

It’s becoming apparent to many Westerners that they live, not in actual nations, but in economic zones. Their countries are workplaces and not homes. This is why housing is severely unaffordable in New Zealand and Australia: rather than being homes for the Anzac people, these countries are workplaces for international banking and finance interests. Housing is becoming severely unaffordable in America and much of Europe for similar reasons (Europe didn’t start with Economic Zone Mentality, but is developing it as it becomes more multicultural).

The end result of Economic Zone Mentality is to turn everywhere into a pile of slag and garbage. The only solution is to develop and support genuine cultural initiatives.

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The Fifth Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Fifth Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of stupidity. The Fifth Rejection is the contention that an excessive focus on justice leads to stupidity.

The great justice debate in the Western World today is about equality. The Left insists that all human groups are equal in actual fact, which brings with it some conceptual difficulties. The Left reasons from this assumption of equality that all observed differences must be due to discrimination of some kind, usually structural discrimination by Big, Bad Whitey.

Some of the Alternative Left will insist that justice means exact equality of outcome, and so as long as there are disparities in e.g. academic achievement or income, then this is proof of injustice. Observers of the Alternative Left will have noted their uniform acceptance of Blank Slate Theory. These two are related: Blank Slate Theory claims that all human differences come down to how those humans have been treated earlier in life. Thus, poor outcomes are down to mistreatment.

To deny the equality of all human groups, we are told, is a great injustice. It’s unthinkable to say that some groups have poor outcomes because of innately lower intelligence. This is tantamount to saying that some groups are inferior to others – an attitude adjacent to Nazism. Anyone claiming that Australian Aborigines are any less intelligent than Singaporean Chinese is taking the first step on the slippery slope to gas chambers.

The stupidity of this insistence has led to people on the Alternative Left claiming that all immigration is good. Because all human groups are precisely equal on all intellectual measures, immigration cannot lower GDP per capita. It only makes the big line go up.

To the Alternative Centrist, the insistence that all human populations are exactly the same on all intellectual measures is stupid. To insist that everyone else must go along with this or face abuse is double stupid. To continue to insist on both of these things while refusing to look at any of the scientific evidence is triply stupid. The Alternative Centrist rejects all of this stupidity with the Fifth Rejection.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it: “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.” Forced uniformity might be incredibly stupid, not least because it contradicts other leftist aims such as maximising freedom, but the Alternative Left just can’t give up on the idea. For them, any disparity in outcome between two different groups is proof of discrimination, and they will not hear otherwise.

The Alternative Left, however, don’t realise how this attitude sabotages their own position. Anyone with a modicum of sense can see that letting hordes of Somalis into an area will have different outcomes to letting in large numbers of Japanese, because the two groups are extremely different. So when the Alternative Left (and the Left in general) act like all the murders and rapes committed by Somalis weren’t a predictable outcome, they make themselves look stupid to followers of the other positions.

Like most stupidities, there are all manner of moral justifications for claiming all populations are intellectually the same.

The usual justification is that it’s preventing another World War Two. The mainstream narrative is that the perception of differences between races led to the supremacist Nazis trying to take over the world for lebensraum. Therefore, if we concede that any difference between races exists, we risk the chance of the Nazis coming back and plunging the world into war again.

In actuality, the supposedly race-blind position enables a great deal of anti-working class prejudice, and is seldom less bigoted than the position of outright racists.

One notices plenty of this prejudice on the Alternative Left. This is because the Western working classes did not support the prophecised Marxist revolution. The Left, out of narcissism and resentment, interprets this refusal as a betrayal. It’s possible to detect enormous spite on the part of the Alternative Left with regards to its immigration policy and the harms caused by it. Many on the Alternative Left behave as if these harms punish the Western working classes for their betrayal.

The sneering indifference of the Alternative Left to the suffering of the Western working classes is a major factor in their rejection by the Alternative Centre. The Fourth Acceptance is the acceptance of truth, and the truth is that the Marxist prophecies of capitalism leading to the working class overthrowing the bourgeoisie failed. It’s time to acknowledge this and move on.

The stupidity of the Alternative Left is best summarised by the above quote from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This emphasis on moral rectitude rather than factual correctness is an extreme form of virtue signalling, especially when considering the near-complete absence of that rectitude among politicians like Ocasio-Cortez. It’s a grossly stupid approach borne of shallow and narcissistic thinking.

The Alternative Centre rejects all low IQ, unscientific, feel-good narratives.

Science is paramount. The Fourth Acceptance emphasises the value of truth, and the Fifth Rejection stands against all delusion and intellectual weakness likewise. Putting these two together gives us an unyielding commitment to learning and applying methods of truth determination. The truth is accepted and stupidity rejected.

The Establishment Left may be flawed in the sense they cause too much chaos, but they aren’t stupid. They understand that class solidarity is necessary to have any leverage over our rulers. The Alternative Left rejects this simple truth for a hodgepodge of incoherent ideologies that contradict each other at every turn. Because of their tendency to stupidity, they haven’t thought rationally about what they believe. Incoherence is the result.

The Alternative Left are so concerned with what makes them look morally superior that they have neglected what would have made them look intellectually superior. Or, at least, not inferior – a person who speaks to an Alternative Leftist is often struck by how poorly-educated they are in comparison to Establishment Leftists, who have always seen educational opportunities as the main way out of poverty. Many Alternative Leftists outright decry education as fascist, on the grounds that it suggests a will to self-improvement and therefore self-aggrandisement, which is considered unjust.

Everything downstream of stupidity – like shallow thinking, incoherence, anti-intellectualism – is all rejected under the Fifth Rejection.

Also rejected are all of the counter-productive stupidities the Alternative Left likes to engage in and call political activism, such as pointlessly antagonising people.

The Left gifts their opponents tremendous political capital by pushing diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives. The net effect of these initiatives is to stir up distrust between various demographics, rendering genuine solidarity impossible. Any working-class white person, upon hearing the word “inclusion”, knows they are being excluded. “Diversity”, likewise, seems to amount to fewer white people. But the Alternative Left, seemingly, can’t help itself from pushing this sort of rubbish. This has caused some to ask if the Alternative Left aren’t, in fact, working on behalf of the Establishment. But no, they’re just dumb.

In summary, the Alternative Centre rejects the stupidity of the Alternative Left, recognising that it makes all political objectives harder to achieve: it loses friends, it gains enemies, it saps internal cohesion, it emboldens the opposition and leads directly to stagnation, chaos, degeneracy and cruelty.

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.

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Paper Citizens And Roots Citizens

Because of mass immigration, and the propaganda to manufacture consent for mass immigration, there is now mass confusion when it comes to citizenship and nationality. Many people now don’t believe the words ‘citizenship’ or ‘nationality’ even mean anything. This essay clarifies the various misconceptions.

The mainstream conception is that citizenship confers membership of a nation-state.

In this mainstream conception, there are three ways to acquire citizenship. The first is ‘jus sanguinis’, which means ‘right of blood’ and refers to those who are born as children of existing citizens. The second is ‘jus soli’ which means ‘right of soil’ and refers to those who are born within a certain legal territory. The third is naturalisation and refers primarily to immigrants.

The problem with this conception is that nation-states are now so diverse that members of them often have little in common with each other. Thus the citizenship itself, regardless of how it was acquired, no longer means anything.

One sunny day in Spring many years ago, when returning home from working in Europe, I was waiting in line at the arrivals terminal at Auckland International Airport. In front of me was a woman in a burka. I couldn’t see her eyes or any part of her body except for – sticking out from under the black folds – one greasy hand clutching a New Zealand passport. In that moment, I realised that New Zealand citizenship was a meaningless concept. If people like this, who had nothing in common with me at all, also belonged to the category, then the category was meaningless.

The argument of this essay is that our existing citizenship system is an ad hoc mishmash of various ideas that needs to be redesigned, rationally, from the ground up.

When I immigrated to Sweden, it was made clear to me by everyone that, no matter my official citizenship status, I would only ever be a “paper Swede”. A paper citizen is someone who is not a member of the biological nation, but who has nevertheless been granted citizenship by the ruling class. In other words, their claim to be part of the nation only exists on a bit of paper.

A roots citizen, by contrast, is someone who did not need to be naturalised on account of that they already had roots in the soil of the country. In this sense, they are inseparable from the country itself.

Paper citizenship can be granted and taken away with the stroke of a pen. Roots citizenship, by contrast, is a biological fact. ‘Naturalisation’ is therefore, correctly understood, a nonsense term: there’s nothing less natural than a bureaucrat in a capital city deciding who is a member of the ingroup and who isn’t. A natural member is someone who is born into it.

If someone would ask me how to clean up the citizenship mess that has been made by decades of globalist immigration policy, here would be my suggestions.

All existing New Zealand citizenship would firstly be converted to paper citizenship. This paper citizenship would primarily confer residency rights and rights to vote in local body elections.

Then, the citizenship of anyone who has ancestors in New Zealand before September 1939 (i.e. before the globalists launched their war of domination that would lead to mass immigration) would be converted to roots citizenship. The logic is that these people are the descendants of those who built the country, and therefore constitute the New Zealand nation proper. It was for these people that the country was built in the first place, and so these people must remain the beneficiaries of it and in charge of it.

Roots citizenship would confer greater privileges than paper citizenship, in particular welfare and voting privileges. Roots citizens would be entitled to a universal basic income and to the right to vote for representatives of the New Zealand nation in the New Zealand Parliament. They would also be able to take on paper citizenships of other countries without losing roots citizenship of New Zealand.

From there, one of two options would be taken depending on national preference expressed at referendum. Either paper citizens would be converted to roots citizens after they could prove a hundred years of ancestry in New Zealand, or they wouldn’t. The logic of not converting them is that the descendants of paper citizens will eventually marry in to the nation of roots citizens anyway, therefore there is no need to naturalise them. And if they are unwilling to marry in to the New Zealand nation, they are obviously not our friends and therefore shouldn’t have citizenship.

This conception of roots citizenship would include 100% of Maoris but would exclude white immigrants, thus is in no way whatsoever a white supremacist policy. Foreigners would still be free to immigrate to New Zealand under the usual visa to residency to citizenship pathway, but only paper citizenship would ever be available (an exception could be made for foreign parents of roots citizens, i.e. those who have had children with a roots citizen, as such parents are committed to the success of the New Zealand nation through their offspring).

The main advantage of this policy is that it would realign the concepts of citizenship and nationality, bringing them back from the globalist free-for-all they have been since World War II. This would strengthen Kiwi identity, as we would once again know who we were: not the whole globe in microcosm, but those with roots in the New Zealand land.

Such a change would make an immediate improvement. If paper citizens did not have voting rights, the 2020 cannabis referendum would have passed, and freedom would have prevailed. New Zealand would be a better country if it was run by roots citizens for the benefit of all who live here.

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The Fifth Acceptance Of Alternative Centrism

The Fifth Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Alternative Left is correct when they speak of the importance of justice.

Aristotle considered justice, and the application of justice, the basis of civilisation. “Justice is the ordering of the political association,” he wrote in Politics I.2. His reasoning was that society comes together for the sake of securing and achieving justice. It’s with this aim that individuals form family households, families form village associations and villages become city-states. It’s in the bonds of justice that civilisation can develop.

The Alternative Leftist will claim that justice is the most important feature of society. Without it, no order, freedom, peace or truth is possible.

Injustice is the basis of all political dissent. Most other forms of suffering can be endured with little resentment, but the suffering of injustice tends to bring with it a particular form of humiliation that leads rapidly to political action. The Alternative Leftist would argue – and the Alternative Centrist would agree – that great levels of injustice are why the Western World is in so much chaos at the moment.

The logic of the Alternative Left, and the logic of the Fifth Acceptance, is that all of the previous four positions are unjust in their own way. Therefore, they are all insufficient in their own way.

Without justice, no order can be possible because people will fight incessantly. The Alternative Left argues that the Establishment Right errs on the side of excessive order when it refuses, stubbornly, to countenance the redistribution of property on the grounds that it would be destabilising. Aristotle’s concept of distributive justice suggests that injustice occurs when the wealthy end up with all of the resources, and the lower classes with nothing.

If one looks back at the times of extreme disorder in history, whether global or local, they were usually preceded by times of extreme injustice. Even if the winners of the wars arising from the disorder decide, post facto, that the losers had no legitimate grievance, the perception of one is enough to start a war over it. As David Icke would remind us, perception is reality. As long as the perception of injustice exists, there will be disorder.

Neither will there be any freedom without justice. Most obviously, this is because the unjust will take it away. Examples abound in the countless free speech abuses committed by various totalitarian governments. The injustice of the War on Drugs is a further example. If the unjust are allowed into power, they will inevitably strip freedoms from anyone they don’t like.

The absence of justice has a suppressive effect on freedom even without legislating it away. Just knowing that injustice is rife in a society is enough to make its members watch their backs, speak in hushed tones, stop trusting their neighbours and to withdraw from life. Injustice leads directly to hate and fear, which both restrict freedoms in the search for control.

Without justice, there is no peace for the same reason as there is no order. Injustice leads to resentments which lead to violence. The victims of injustice sometimes choose to not let their oppressors rest. The greater and more widespread the injustices, the more powerful this sentiment. If it gets powerful enough, revolutions or civil wars break out.

Finally, without justice there can be no truth. It might seem that the usual problem is a lack of truth leading to a lack of justice, but it can also be the other way around. As Basil Liddell-Hart wrote in ‘Why Don’t We Learn From History’, unjust people keep telling lies to gain unjust advantage over others. So wherever you have injustice you also have falsehood. Only just people can be relied upon to tell the truth.

As anyone who has studied psychology knows, finding the truth is often hard not because of the intelligence requirement, but because of the honesty one. As soon as people have political or religious loyalties, they also have an interest in telling lies. Invariably, one’s political or religious in-group will eventually commit some immoral deed, and then loyalty to that in-group will make one tell lies to save face. Injustice, then, directly destroys truth even more than it destroys order, freedom or peace.

Thus it can be seen that, from the perspective of the Alternative Leftist, justice is the ultimate value, and that, without the Fifth Acceptance, none of the others can be realised. The Fifth Acceptance accepts that holistic perspectives are sometimes necessary, particularly because they are broad enough to encompass everyone’s needs.

There is a lot of injustice in today’s world, for many reasons. Inherited privilege is one of those reasons. This inherited privilege, over generations, tends to replicate a feudal system, as the inheritors of property can charge rent on it, and then use the rent money to buy more property and so on. Unless there is a major readjustment, in the form of wealth redistribution or revolution, everyone else gets reduced to serfdom. This is why the Alternative Left pushes the idea of universal basic income so hard.

This motivation to push a universal basic income follows the observation that the Establishment Left have abandoned the poor. This abandonment is the essential aspect of the Establishment Left, and how they got to be part of the Establishment in the first place. But it vacated an empty space on the Left for an alternative movement. The Fifth Acceptance acknowledges that the Establishment Left have betrayed the truly disadvantaged, and that the Alternative Left are rightfully filling that empty niche.

The Alternative Left are, in the minds of many, synonymous with Social Justice Warriors. In this sense, they are the new moral puritans, challenging the Establishment Right for most disdain for sex and alcohol. This is one manner in which they are different to the Establishment Left, who have degenerated to the point where they care about freedom more than propriety. The wowserism of the Alternative Left, exemplified by their prudishness around age gaps in dating, reveals clearly that Communism is a religion.

One of the major social trends powering the Alternative Left (as with the other alternative positions) is the rapidly changing nature of information. However, awareness of this has yet to reach the people in power. The heavily-mocked conception of the Internet as “a series of tubes” has hardly been updated since first uttered in 2006; old people still don’t get the Internet or Internet culture. Hence the need for alternative conceptions of justice, fit for the Internet Age.

The Fifth Acceptance agrees that new thinking about justice is required. In some ways, this will require going back to Aristotle; in some ways, this will require a 21st Century perspective.

The obsession with justice goes too far when it becomes an obsession with equality. It’s obvious that people are different, whether individuals or groups. Even if it were true that, on some ultimate metaphysical level, all people have precisely the same spiritual value, this would not manifest as perfect equality by every material measure. To deny this is simply stupid.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.” Hence the Alternative Centrist believes that justice, just like order, freedom, peace and truth, also needs to be moderated, else it begins to destroy the other qualities.

This stupidity of insisting that justice must mean equality by every possible measure is what gives rise to the Fifth Rejection.

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.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

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