Spirituality Is Bad For The Economy

Many people feel that spirituality is a taboo topic. Part of the reason for this is because it reminds people of death – questions of God and life’s meaning go hand-in-hand with questions about the afterlife. Therefore, talking about spirituality is bad because it reminds people that they will die one day. As this essay will show, this is only part of the reason.

The purpose of spirituality is to reduce suffering.

The objective of the Buddhist path is to achieve nirvana, the objective of the Hindu path is to achieve moksha and the purpose of the Western esoteric traditions is to achieve ataraxia. In all cases, this state of ultimate enlightenment offers a liberated existence independent of material acquisition, status anxiety, social anxiety or attachment to food, sex or power – a state in which one no longer suffers.

Buddha was motivated to end the suffering of all sentient beings, and his conception of the Eightfold Path was an attempt to teach how an individual could achieve this for themselves. He taught that happiness could not be found in the material, which was an illusion. Every person had to look within themselves.

Buddha is famous for advocating meditation as an avenue to enlightenment, but all true spiritual traditions teach that happiness (or at least an end to suffering) is found within. Analects 15:20 quotes Confucius as saying “The Superior Man seeks within himself. The inferior man seeks within others.” The Tao Te Ching, likewise, is replete with admonitions to find satisfaction in everyday life and not to strive for it.

Looking within is the secret to ending suffering. From society’s perspective, however, a dilemma lies therein.

In our society, the most important thing of all is money, and getting money requires jobs. In order for a job to exist, there has to be demand for goods and services. This demand comes from only one place: human dissatisfaction. Without human suffering, there could not be money. Therefore there must be human suffering.

Many people have never comprehended the fact that other people exist, and that they are conscious, and that this consciousness suffers just like one’s own does. These people act as if the world was a virtual reality game that only they were playing, and everyone else was just an NPC. In life they are as hungry ghosts, their insatiable appetites causing them to lurch from one instinct-fueled lust to the next.

In our culture, the dissatisfaction of these unfortunates has been channelled towards buying stuff. New clothes, new cars, new toys, new foods – and all of it greases the wheels of commerce. Consumerism is therefore powered by this dissatisfaction, by suffering. It follows that anything that stops people consuming is bad.

Spirituality, though, tends to have a profound effect on people’s consumption habits. Once a person starts to look within, they start asking questions like: did that most recent purchase really increase my happiness? Or did I get more happiness from the chance social encounter I had in town last week? Once a person starts thinking like this, their lives start to change profoundly.

When a person becomes skilled at meditation, it’s easy for them to feel a more powerful sense of satisfaction from meditating than from buying new stuff. Meditating is the ultimate activity in many ways, and one of the main ways is that it is anti-consumerist. The dissatisfaction that people feel in everyday life is assuaged by meditation. So people who are into meditating are seldom the same people who line up overnight for the next iPhone release.

It follows from all of this that the engine of consumerism runs on godlessness. The further a person is from God, they more they suffer, and the more they suffer the greater the volume of goods and services they consume. The ruthless logic of the markets has led to a horrific outcome: genuine spirituality has deliberately been attacked in order to power the capitalist machine.

People with genuine spiritual insight have been persecuted for thousands of years, but this has intensified in recent centuries according to the demands of capitalism. Witches have been burned at the stake and hippies – their cultural descendants – have also been attacked. True spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and psilocybin have been criminalised, those who grow or gather them locked in cages.

Worse, false spiritual traditions have been promoted to distract people from the true ones that would help them. There are hundreds of different Christian churches who teach that wealth is evidence of God’s grace, and hundreds of millions of other Abrahamists who mutilate the genitals of their children, persecute homosexuals and who consider women and non-believers to be subhumans.

This combination has obliterated the spiritual wealth of the masses. In doing so, however, it has caused the material wealth of the elites to overflow. Thus, it is perpetuated. Spirituality is bad for the economy, and that’s why it’s been suppressed.

We can hope that, in the coming years, the economy will be considered less important, and human suffering more important. At the least, we can hope that it will be remembered that the economy is a means for ending human suffering, and that human suffering is not a fuel that should power the economy.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 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 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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They Want To Cause Suffering To People They Hate

The latest cannabis referendum poll suggests that 54% of New Zealanders will vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum on September 19. According to the poll, there are significant differences in levels of support for the referendum between supporters of the various parties. Some people have found this hard to explain. For their benefit, this essay elucidates.

Paul Manning, Chief Executive of Helius Therapeutics, asked the question “What do they want?” in response to the news that many elderly and conservative voters plan to vote against the cannabis referendum. He points out that these people understand that cannabis is widely available and that cannabis prohibition is not working. So why do they support it?

The reason why most elderly and conservative voters intend to vote ‘No’ is because they hate the sort of person who uses cannabis and they want to cause them suffering. This might sound uncharitable, or even cynical, but it has to be understood that most elderly and conservative Kiwis are twisted creatures of hate.

For their entire lives, this generation of New Zealanders has been exposed to propaganda inducing them to hate cannabis users. Ever since the 1930s, when Reefer Madness came out, popular culture has normalised the idea that cannabis users are depraved, anti-social maniacs. This propaganda has had the intended effect on the elderly of the West, who mostly swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

This anti-cannabis propaganda stems from two main sources, both of which hate cannabis for its ability to induce free thinking.

The first is the Church, who have always hated freethinkers because freethinkers question religious dogma. For centuries, the Church has relied on the acquiescence of its subjects in order to brainwash them. Freethinkers were the enemy because they threatened this acquiescence, and thereby Church control – this is why the Church has always persecuted them, going back to the murder of Hypatia and beyond.

The second is the Government, which wants a compliant population of submissive worker drones. Their ideal citizen is one with an IQ of 90, who goes to work everyday and produces widgets or basic services without ever complaining. As far as the Government is concerned, they are running a tax farm, and their chief concern is to milk the livestock as profitably as possible. The last thing that want is someone rocking the boat with free thought.

The elderly have internalised almost a century of this propaganda. As such, they genuinely believe that cannabis users are dangerous radicals who threaten to destroy the foundations of society itself, and who therefore deserve all the abuse they get. This hatred, in their minds, justifies cannabis prohibition.

In America, it was admitted that the purpose of the War on Drugs was to smash people they hated. John Ehrlichman, aide to Richard Nixon during the latter’s presidency, admitted that the purpose of the War on Drugs was to target anti-war hippies and black people. In an interview with Harper Magazine, Ehrlichman is quoted as saying:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Although it hasn’t been admitted, the same calculus applies in New Zealand.

There are almost no blacks in New Zealand, but elderly and conservative New Zealanders hate Maoris just as much as their American counterparts hate blacks. Elderly and conservative New Zealanders also hate hippies, who they associate with Communism and with the free and honest sex lives they wish they had had.

It’s well known that Maoris are strong supporters of cannabis law reform – the correlation between being Maori and voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2017 was a whopping 0.91. The reason for this immensely strong support is because Maoris are adversely affected by cannabis prohibition to a much greater degree than other New Zealanders.

However, this disproportionate harm is considered a good thing by many elderly and conservative New Zealanders. They see Maoris as the enemy anyway – a thieving, bludging, ungrateful, violent enemy – so if cannabis prohibition harms them, that’s a good thing.

These elderly and conservative New Zealanders also hate other cannabis using demographics, such as young people, artists, hippies and freethinkers. Elderly and conservative New Zealanders do plenty of drugs, but their drugs are sedatives, alcohol and opiates. Cannabis prohibition doesn’t target them.

This hate is why arguments appealing to the suffering caused by cannabis prohibition often have no effect. Most elderly or conservative voters think “Cannabis users are suffering? Good! Smash them, crush them, destroy them. Ruin their lives with a criminal conviction. Imprison them so their kids can’t see them. They are the enemy and should be obliterated!”

The psychiatric damage caused to cannabis users by arresting and imprisoning them is considered a bonus by these people. Appealing to the cruelty of it makes as much sense, to elderly and conservative voters, as appealing to the cruelty of shooting the enemy soldiers on the other side of the battlefield. Of course it’s cruel, that’s the point.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to the presence of this malicious streak in New Zealand’s elderly and conservative voters. Hatred is a deep emotion – usually too deep to be influenced by reason. The sight of intelligent young people like Chloe Swarbrick speaking eloquently merely aggravates the elderly and conservative, and further entrenches their prejudice.

At the end of the day, young Kiwis and Maoris can take solace in the fact that the old bastards who hate them are dying off. No amount of hate can stop the aging process, and the old bigots will lose their ability to influence the law once Time puts them in the ground. Absent measures such as forcing the elderly to surrender their voting rights in exchange for a pension, that will have to do.

Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for ending cannabis prohibition.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is ‘Weimarisation’?

Every history student knows that the Weimar Republic preceded the Nazi Era in Germany. Fewer understand that the process of historical decline goes through certain predictable stages, one of which is characterised by the Weimar Republic and its infamous successor. This article explains.

The process of political decline is so well established and so predictable that Plato, over 2,300 years ago, was already able to describe it at length in The Republic. A healthy political system begins with an aristocracy of philosopher-kings, and then degrades into a timocracy, then an oligarchy, then a democracy, and finally into a tyranny.

Plato’s description of democracy corresponds closely to how it is practiced today. He criticised it for being a stage in which every man was out for himself, and no-one thought of long-term considerations when making decisions. This leads to a lack of order and discipline, which leads to it becoming impossible to tell the truth. Eventually all kinds of crooked liars fill the vacuum and come to office.

The problem with democracy is that it makes men weak, as it panders to their crudest and most primitive desires, and does not encourage them to cultivate their higher moral senses. Being weak, they are then unable or unwilling to resist cruel men who come to oppress them. When the cruel are in charge, we are in a state of tyranny.

The most widely known example of this latter process occurred a century ago in Germany.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated at the end of World War I and the German Government collapsed, it was replaced by a republic whose first national assembly took place in Weimar. This short-lived experiment was a highlights reel of all of the worst things about democracy, and it caused so much distrust that it made Adolf Hitler start to look reasonable.

Few would argue that the worst thing about the Weimar Republic was that it led to the rise of the Nazis. This process occurred exactly as Plato had described over two millennia previously. It is this final stage of democracy, and the related phenomena that lead to the rise of tyranny, that could be described as Weimarisation.

Weimarisation involves the process of making the polity ever weaker and ever more decadent and degenerate until no-one is willing to stand up for anything. Most bonds of solidarity are broken by this increasing selfishness, because no-one cares about anything other than the next buzz. This ongoing disintegration of the social fabric leads to the most characteristic feature of Weimarisation: it precedes a tyrant coming to power.

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Weimar Republic itself were the child prostitutes. History recalls a relatively clean child prostitution trade in 1920s Berlin, but parts of it were much grottier than what is described in the linked article. At the most desperate, during the heights of the hyperinflation in 1923, it was possible to see children being pimped out on the streets.

The extreme levels of disgust induced in German men by the awareness that their children were being rented for sex was the emotional fuel for the rise of Hitler and everything that followed. Exposure to depravity on that scale tends to cause people to lose their moral compasses. If renting children for sex is permitted, then what could possibly be forbidden? Certainly not killing the people to blame – or so many millions of Germans reasoned.

From our current position in Clown World, there are two paths. The path recommended by Plato is a revolution of philosopher-kings who institute an aristocracy that justly governs. The other path is to decline into tyranny, wherein the average man becomes so pathetic and weak that he is unable to resist any injustice, whether physical, intellectual or spiritual.

If Clown World is to decline into tyranny, it will be the final result of the Weimarisation process. There’s an eerie parallel between the Weimar child prostitutes and the 19,000 young girls raped by grooming gang members in Britain alone last year. This ongoing mass sexual exploitation of Britain’s young children is the kind of dystopic horror show that makes people lose their humanity entirely, as it did in Germany.

In Rotherham, where one of the most prolific of these grooming gangs was based, the Police actively worked to cover up the rapes. Investigation of the rape gangs was made more difficult by the investigators’ fears of seeming racist (this is an outstanding example of what another chapter in this book calls race neurosis). There’s no way to understand such phenomena other than as the last gasps of a dying culture.

One of the reasons why Hitler was able to summon so much rage against Jews was because of the widespread belief in Germany that Jewish men had played a disproportionate role in the buying and selling of these child prostitutes. Those same grounds for murderous rage are also present in the case of Muslim men in Europe this century.

It’s entirely plausible that if a man would stand up in Britain or elsewhere in Europe and threaten to get revenge on the forces that had humiliated his nation, he would get widespread support. The neo-Nazi Sverigedemokraterna are already polling at close to 25% in Sweden, which is evidence of the deep anger that exists elsewhere in Europe over such issues.

The big problem with Weimarisation, of course, is that the original form of it ended with a war that left 60 million dead.

There’s little doubt that the existing tensions in Europe are sufficient to trigger a civil war that could kill similar numbers. One of the reasons why Western political authorities are so concerned about “Islamophobia” is that they are fully aware of the rage that their failures have caused. They are aware that great numbers of men feel deeply humiliated by the rape gangs and would very much like someone to give them the opportunity to get revenge.

The cure for Weimarisation can also be found in the philosophy of Plato. A new cultural movement of philosopher-kings must arise, and attract so many followers that it destroys the old order and replaces it with a just one. The alternative, as history has shown, is almost too terrible to contemplate.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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Why Is Rent-Seeking Legal?

Our legal system has many quirks and contradictions that defy easy explanation. It seems strange that doctors are allowed to mutilate the genitals of infant boys, yet they are not allowed to prescribe medicinal cannabis products that would save lives. This article will discuss another activity of questionable morality: rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking is an attempt to increase one’s personal wealth without creating or producing any. It is the use of resources, such as land, to extract economic benefits (known as rents) from others without making any contribution to the overall economic good.

The most common form of rent-seeking today is found in residential property. There are some 625,000 rented houses in New Zealand today, and the average weekly rent is $390 a week for small houses and $525 for larger ones. Assuming an average rent of $480 per week, rents on residential property bring in some $15,600,000,000 every year in New Zealand alone.

Rent-seeking is correctly understood to be a form of parasitism. As with other forms of parasitism, rent-seeking is a net negative for the overall health of the system. Not only does it suck money away from the productive and gift it to the unproductive, it also incentivises anti-social behaviour. Economically, it disrupts market efficiencies, limits competition and creates artificially high barriers to entry for market participants.

Despite being a form of parasitism, rent-seeking is a long and honoured tradition in New Zealand. Many a fortune has been built in this country by taking advantage of people’s need for shelter from the elements. As a previous essay here has discussed, there’s nothing as profitable as human suffering, and being exposed to the elements is one of the worst kinds of suffering.

The beauty of rent-seeking is that it carries little risk. All you need to do is to own property and the Police will keep people away from it unless those people pay you money. As long as there are men willing to enforce other people’s claims to property in exchange for a wage (and there always will be), then owning some of that property is effectively a licence to print money.

In reality, there’s little difference between a landlord charging someone rent on the threat of throwing that person out into the street, and an armed robber charging someone their wallet on the threat of stabbing them in the guts. In both cases, the power to charge a fee or levy comes from the power to cause extreme physical suffering. Both are a form of extortion.

Given the apparent net harm of trying to extract wealth from the system instead of creating it, the question has to be asked: why is rent-seeking legal?

The main reason why rent-seeking is legal is simply because the rent-seekers make the laws. It was they who, way back in the day, invented Government by paying some weak-minded arse-lickers to defend their property against outsiders (this is all that Government is). Those arse-lickers bifurcated into the Police and security services (whose prime directive is to protect and serve property owners) and the Government (whose prime directive is to organise the protection of property owners).

At the end of the day, the Government is there to manage the affairs of the rich, and they don’t care if the poor are impacted adversely. People too poor to own property don’t have a seat at the table. This is the same reason why businesses were compensated directly in the form of wage subsidies, rather than workers being given a universal basic income – the wealthy take the lion’s share, the poor get the scraps.

This arrangement has created a great deal of resentment, however. Those forced to pay rent on threat of being thrown into the street don’t feel much less resentful about it than those forced to give up their wallet on threat of being stabbed. The fact that rent-seeking is socially accepted in our culture barely softens the blow. It still feels like a robbery.

As is usually the case for such abuses of power, this resentment has built to the point where it threatens to spill over.

The Sixth Labour Government has made it illegal to evict tenants from residential property for the next three months at least. Some groups of tenants have realised that, if they collectively refused to pay rent until the end of the coronavirus crisis, they could pretty much get away with it. There’s no way to enforce an eviction during the lockdown, so anyone who refuses to pay rent from now on can get at least three months of living rent-free.

Other people and places overseas have already declared rent strikes on account of that the coronavirus has made earning their usual income, and therefore paying their usual expenses, impossible. Housing Minister Megan Woods has said “there was also an obligation on tenants not to abuse the situation,” but it’s hard to see why, other than the possible threat of being blacklisted in the future.

The only reason why property owners can get tenants to pay them rent in the first place is because they have the power to force them to on threat of eviction. If that power is taken away, there’s little reason for those who had been coerced into paying rent to continue playing ball.

Perhaps the fairest outcome would be to continue to allow the extraction of rents, but to levy a 90% tax on incomes derived from it. An outcome similar to this was discussed in a previous article here that proposed the introduction of Georgist-style taxes on rent-seeking activity.

In short, rent-seeking is legal because it always has been, and because we’ve never questioned it. We’ve never been able to, because not only did the rent-seekers control the law enforcement forces but they also controlled the apparatus of propaganda, and these combined to normalise the practice. The legitimacy of rent-seeking doesn’t survive scrutiny, and there is a very real chance that it will be as illegal as armed robbery later this century.

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