The Four Basic Political Subjects

Underneath all the talk about politics today lies a great confusion. People talk about what politics is supposed to achieve, but they have generally forgotten who it’s supposed to achieve it for. For our ancestors, the political subject was obvious, but for us it is not. This essay explains.

The first and original political subject was the tribe. In the biological past, humans had no conception of nations or kingdoms. One was born into a tribe of roughly 50-150 people, and these people were your blood kin. As such, their interests were your interests, in almost every case.

Every member of the tribe was in the ingroup, and everyone not in the tribe was in the outgroup. This made politics very simple. If you encountered a stranger, they were the enemy, and it was acceptable to do anything to that stranger if it furthered the interests of the tribe. This tribal mentality still exists today, only it has become much weaker than it used to be (in most cases).

The second political subject is the state. This came into being when civilisation did. With the advent of civilisation, it was possible to have two strangers share the same space without chimping out and attacking each other. This meant that it was possible to have towns and cities made up of people from different tribes, perhaps even competing ones.

With the advent of towns and cities, it was necessary to have an administrator class that dealt with any disagreements that arose. The bringing together of different tribes meant competing schedules of moral values. These administrators, employed to smooth over differences between tribes, became the state. Their different approaches for settling quarrels became ideologies.

One way of dealing with the tensions created by identification with the tribe was to identify with the state instead. In practice, this is much the same as identifying with an ideology. Thus, a judge who was from a particular tribe would not necessarily rule in favour of his own tribesman. This was a radical new way of thinking when compared to the tribal solidarity model. It required a new political subject.

Thinking in terms of the state provided this new subject. If people were able to abandon their previous allegiances to their tribes, they could band together and build a mighty state that challenged the world, such as Rome or America. The memetic hybrid vigour brought about by multiple tribes all agreeing to work together under a state banner proved to be immensely powerful.

Not every civilisation succeeded in making this transition, however. If a state was not capable of creating an egregore powerful enough to persuade people to abandon their tribal allegiances, the divided loyalties caused by those remaining allegiances would pull the state apart from the inside. Corruption reigns in every state where tribal allegiances continue to hold sway.

The third political subject is the individual. This political subject arose as a way of settling firstly the tensions between those who identified with the tribe and those who identified with the state, and secondly the tensions between those who identified with different states or ideologies. In the world of 2020, the individual is the default political subject.

The logic is that, by identifying with the individual ego, people would no longer be drawn into conflict on account of competing tribal or ideological loyalties. Only caring about oneself might seem selfish and egotistical, but it has the bonus effect of settling tensions between groups. If people only care about the next hit, they will not take collective action.

It is true that what Adam Curtis called the Century of the Self led to a great peace. In recent decades, Hitlers and Stalins have been impossible on account of that no-one would follow them. Collective efforts demand individual sacrifices, and people who identify with the individual ego will not make them. However, this identification brings its own problems.

The fourth political subject is the consciousness itself.

The limitations of identifying with the individual ego are now obvious. Although doing so was a logical move forwards from the horrors of state-worship, the human animal is still fundamentally a social one, and it has social needs. Identifying with the individual ego might make warfare between nations less likely, but it sharply increases the emotional and spiritual suffering of the people, who find that their lives no longer have any meaning.

Some philosophers, like Alexandr Dugin, have suggested a return to Dasein as the basic political subject (Dugin frequently refers to Heidegger’s Dasein in The Fourth Political Theory). This is much the same thing as having consciousness as the basic political subject. In either case, it solves most of the problems of the first three political subjects.

Identifying with the consciousness allows the best of all worlds. Not only can a person meet their social and spiritual needs through connection to other conscious beings, but they can also do so without necessarily getting set against them because of tribal or ideological loyalties. Identifying with consciousness means that one is automatically allied and opposed to every other person.

There’s one problem with this otherwise elegant solution: most people have never learned to distinguish between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. They don’t know the difference between the True Self and the False Self. As such, most people operate either on the level of crude instinct (and thus tend towards tribalism), the level of conditioned responses (and thus tend towards fetishising the state or an ideology) or on both levels at once (and thus tend towards soulless globohomo consumer whoring).

As is so often the case, it appears that our great challenge is primarily a spiritual challenge. Identification with the consciousness might prevent us from getting drawn into tribal or ideological conflicts, and it might prevent us from getting bogged down in mindless anomie. But it will only be an option for those with the spiritual acumen to meditate and perform self-inquiry.

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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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Chimpout’?

Some of the most graphic images of recent times have come from the rioting sparked by the killing of George Floyd. The sight of rocks and sticks smashing into human skulls evokes primal feelings of horror. These primal feelings are capable of evoking other primal feelings, and when there are enough of these, a total chimpout is possible.

Primatologists have long been aware of the propensity of chimpanzees and monkeys to become over-excited. Because primates are highly social animals, we are susceptible to emotional influence from others of our kind. When one of us feels an emotion, it’s common for others nearby to come to feel it as well. This is true of joy, of anxiety, of sociability – and of rage.

When enough mutual excitement goes through a group of primates, they can appear to lose their minds completely. Certain monkey troops, upon encountering human outsiders, will shriek loudly, retreat to the treetops, and begin to fling their feces at the intruders. Chimpanzee troops can also become extremely aggressive quickly when meeting others.

This mob mindset is biological. Primate troops that quickly became excited and aggressive when observing novel stimuli were better adapted to dealing with threats to their territory or safety. As such, they survived and reproduced more effectively. When in doubt, it’s much better to chimpout than to be caught passive and on the back foot.

It isn’t much different for us hairless primates.

Wise men love to point out that human civilisation is by no means a deeply-rooted institution. No-one can remember who said it first, but it’s often been stated that society is only nine meals away from a revolution. Machiavelli observed that human nature has never really changed from the beginning of history. It seems that, at the bottom of our hearts, few of us are fully convinced that civilisation is a good idea.

For one thing, the human animal is still a primate. Although human brain capacity has rapidly evolved since we split off from the other apes, the architecture of those brains is basically the same. As with the other primates, the human animal evolved to survive in a world where physical threats were common and often demanded immediate and extreme action.

Under enough stress, the brain circuitry that evolved to make us more effective pack fighters on the plains of Africa can spark to life again. Human history has been so violent that the old chimpout circuitry has never gone away. There has never been any real selective pressure against it, because those who could not chimp out kept getting killed by those who could.

Understanding this brain circuitry is the key to understanding when and why chimpouts happen.

The recipe for a chimpout begins with increased excitement on the part of an individual, perhaps because they have spotted or anticipate an enemy. If that individual’s increased excitement becomes contagious, and begins to heighten the excitement of the individuals around them, then it becomes a social phenomenon.

Should the excitement become so great that members of the group start to lose their composure, and then if no leader among them settles them down, a chimpout is underway.

The definition of a chimpout is when all pretence to civilisation is suddenly abandoned by a large group of people. In popular language, a chimpout is a term that describes the onset of mob mentality. It’s when a large number of people become a hooting, hollering horde, the higher functions of their brain having shut down.

Chimpouts tend to be destructive. The rioting that followed the George Floyd killing in May 2020 led to the destruction of dozens of American inner cities. The Parisian chimpouts of 2005 saw thousands of cars set on fire. That veneer of civilisation, thin though it may be, suppresses some very malicious impulses.

Implicit in the idea of chimping out is that one gives vent to one’s basest and most venal instincts. One takes the opportunity afforded by the cover of the crowd to indulge in temptations that one would otherwise resist. This involves actions like throwing bricks through windows, setting cars on fire, looting, robbing and beating people.

Psychologists consider chimping out to be an example of mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness. It’s a subset of what is known as herd mentality. Humans are not sheep, but much of the brain wiring that makes sheep behave the way they do is shared with other mammals. Most social animals are capable of chimping out in some sense, but in primates the potential for excitation is much greater.

The primal nature of the chimpout is evident from what triggers them. In Clown World, news of a pedophile gang that raped 1,000 young girls will not cause a chimpout, but if a white Police officer kills a black man in the process of making an arrest, then it’s time to park your car off the street.

The more depressed, desperate and nihilistic a population is, the more liable it is to chimp out. The simple rule is that the less a person has to lose, the more willing they will be to engage in mindless destruction. Young, disenfranchised males, especially low-IQ ones or ones with histories of childhood abuse and neglect, are the most prone to do so.

The nature of Clown World means that the threat of chimpout is ever-present. One lives in dread of the next act of Police brutality, because the social environment is tinder-dry and any spark could cause a flashfire. Worsening economic prospects raise the terrifying prospect of the Chimpout to End All Chimpouts.

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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New Conspiracy Theories That The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Generated

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the responses to it, have been the biggest thing to happen to the world since World War II. Like all major happenings, new conspiracy theories have abounded in its wake – some plausible, others absurd. This article provides an overview.

The first wave of conspiracy theories to achieve widespread acceptance suggested COVID-19 was a bioweapon.

When the initial outbreak happened in China three months ago, it was traced back to one particular wet market in Wuhan. This market happened to be close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory that studied extremely contagious and deadly viruses. That sparked rumours that the COVID-19 strain was a Chinese bioweapon that had escaped the lab.

Some people claimed to have proof that workers at the Institute had sold lab animals to local markets for meat, and that some of this meat had carried the virus that infected people. This assertion was demolished once it became understood that the virus had leaped to humans from eating undercooked bats, and not lab animals.

The next theory was that the strain was an American bioweapon, deliberately engineered to target Chinese people. Apparently the coronavirus targeted something in the lungs called ACE receptors, and apparently Far East Asians had seven times more of these receptors than other races. This theory was very popular when the pandemic was mostly affecting China, Japan and South Korea.

After the pandemic exploded in other countries, that theory became unpopular. It was replaced by a theory that claimed the strain really was a Chinese bioweapon after all, and that they deliberately infected themselves with it, knowing two things. One – the virus would spread to America and to the West anyway, and two – the Chinese model of government would allow them, unlike the West, to take the necessary measures to prevent it becoming a pandemic.

A second wave of conspiracy theories broke out when the world’s governments started to institute various lockdown and social control measures, ostensibly to stop the spread of the virus. One of the first of these held that the strain really was an American bioweapon after all, but it was not launched for military reasons. Rather, it was launched to stop climate change.

It has been observed that many climate experts had predicted an apocalyptic future for the human species, on account of that we appear to have cooked the planet. Some of them were saying that the world’s industrial output was such that, if we didn’t change course, our carbon emissions would raise the Earth’s temperature by five degrees Celcius by the end of the century, making human life impossible.

The first conspiracy theory of this second wave suggested that COVID-19 had been deliberately engineered to kill a large number of old people who would not be missed. This would caused world governments to shut their countries down to contain the spread, which would cause the world economy to collapse, which was the only thing that could have saved the world climate.

The next conspiracy theory claimed that COVID-19 was neither deliberately engineered nor even a truly big deal, but world governments had seized the pretext of a catastrophic pandemic as an excuse to carry out drastic social change. This theory developed out of the previous one, but suggested that the government was acting opportunistically rather than with forethought.

This theory stated that the world’s governments knew that a coronavirus pandemic was coming and that it would be reasonably bad, but that they co-operated in secret to overplay the severity of the threat, creating the impression that shutting down half of the economy was justified.

This conspiracy theory made extensive mention of something called UN Agenda 21, which apparently calls for much of the world’s urban and suburban area to be reclaimed by wilderness. This is given as one of the explanations for why the world’s governments want to cripple the global economy with lockdown measures. Forcing a shift to a cashless society is often a part of it.

A more sinister theory has it that the governments of the West will use these lockdowns to persecute critics.

In many places around the world, the ruling powers have given the police the power of warrantless entry to private property on the grounds that they need to look for gatherings of people indoors. It can be predicted, even without conspiracy theory, that the police will use this power to intimidate and harass dissidents.

With conspiracy theory, it’s easy to believe that it could go as far as kidnappings and extrajudicial murders. Right now, no-one could protest about police brutality as protests are banned while the lockdowns are in place. So the police could get away with disappearing a great number of government critics before any civil unrest could occur.

No doubt there will be more conspiracy theories as the COVID-19 pandemic worsens. The next wave of them may relate to which demographic categories are being left to die once the health system gets overwhelmed, or whether the police are able to see the entire population’s whereabouts in real time by using cellphone tracking. If a vaccine gets released, that will surely lead to another wave.

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Diversity Is A Strength In Times Of Plenty, And A Weakness In Times Of Shortage

The Establishment and the mainstream media like to say that diversity is a strength. This opinion is aggressively rejected by most of the working class, who consider it a great weakness. The reality, as this essay will discuss, is that both sides are right – but only in the appropriate context.

Since the end of World War II, the West has enjoyed great prosperity. Our stockmarkets, factories, airports and seaports have all boomed from the ever-increasing demand. Most people felt like they were getting a good deal, or that, if they weren’t, they soon would. During this great age of plenty, diversity has generally caused more pleasure than pain.

In times of plenty, diversity is a strength. When the economy is growing, and no-one has to worry about competing with each other, then diversity means an enrichment of the everyday experience of life. It means new foods, new cultural displays, new ideas. It means an exciting, vibrant increase in novelty.

In times of shortage, however, diversity means something else.

Every community is divided along fracture lines – lines of race, gender, religion, age, education and cultural affinity. In good times, these fracture lines are papered over by wealth – people don’t need to fight if everyone has enough to meet their own needs. In bad times, these fracture lines are exposed and aggravated.

When times are tough, the community needs to pull together. A given community’s ability to pull together depends mostly on its level of solidarity, and that in turn depends mostly on the number and degree of commonalities that members of the community have with each other. After all, ‘commonality’ and ‘community’ have a similar etymology.

The presence of commonality means co-operation. Where commonalities exist, people are happy to help each other, because they know that this help will benefit a person like them. This knowledge assures them that the help will be reciprocated, and not just taken. They can count on getting helped in the future, and so feel like part of a society, a wider kinship group.

A lack of commonality means exploitation. The rule is that people are willing to exploit others to the degree that those others are different from them. The greater the number of fracture lines in a community or society, the greater the degree of exploitation that exists. As mentioned above, this is no big deal when the economy is expanding, because this means new niches open up for people to move into.

In times of shortage, however, diversity means that helping other people is helping people who aren’t your kin. The natural inclination, then, is to keep for yourself, to not share. The problem here is that people get desperate in times of shortage. When people are desperate, a refusal to share with them often leads to violence.

Diversity makes it much harder to settle the tensions that arise from shortages. Two people of the same culture can use their shared moral values to come to a mutual agreement. If they have a common language, they can talk their way to a mutual understanding. Absent these things, misunderstandings lead to flaring tempers.

Arriving at a mutual agreement in times of scarcity is much easier between two natives than between a native and an immigrant. Between two immigrants, as we see in the Woolworths toilet paper fight video linked above, there is a minimum of commonality, and this regularly ends in actions that are not made from a place of empathy.

If the COVID-19 pandemic does have a severe enough economic impact to cause widespread shortages, some people are going to be forced into making some terrible decisions – and much more terrible than what brand of toilet paper to buy because their preferred one is sold out.

Faced with two patients who can’t breathe, and only one ventilator, the medical staff dealing with the pandemic are going to be forced to make decisions as to who lives and who dies. There are already reports that Italian doctors have been forced to leave old people to die on account of that there aren’t enough beds in intensive care units. Increasing diversity means that some Italian doctors will have to decide whether an elderly native Italian or a younger immigrant gets the ICU bed.

More relevant to the average person are the hundreds of small decisions that they will have to make about questions that test their loyalties. Some people have been stockpiling hand sanitiser on account of that the sudden shortage of it has spiked the price. These price gouging actions have been heavily criticised, on the grounds that not only are they shamelessly opportunistic but they also prevent needy people from getting supplies.

But in a highly diverse society, the balance of rewards is different to what it would be in a more homogenous one. The more diverse society is, the less likely such actions are to harm a person who has something in common with you. All the profit from such actions, however, you keep for yourself. So why not use a pandemic as an opportunity to price gouge? If no-one from your kin group loses out, you might as well take advantage.

Proof for these suppositions come from the fact that neither supermarket fighting nor price-gouging is happening in nations with low levels of diversity. There are no videos of people fighting over toilet paper in places like South Korea, Taiwan or Japan – and there may never be. The absence of diversity in these places means they have enough in common for people to work together instead of chimping out.

All of these problems are just part of the regular course of empires. Empires burgeon, rise, stagnate, decay and fall. The increase in diversity usually comes after the stagnation phase, as the ruling class tries to squeeze out the maximum possible expansion by opening the borders. The current iteration of the West is somewhere between the decay and the fall stages. The nations to successfully respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, like South Korea and Japan, will be the leading nations of this century.

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