Clown World Chronicles: Everyday Life In Clown World

Nightmares are similar enough to normal life to trick you into thinking they are real, which is why they’re so horrifying. Clown World is also very similar to normal life, which is why it’s so horrifying. Unfortunately for us, Clown World is everyday life now.

In Clown World, everyday life revolves around work.

Even though it was easy for pre-Clown World adults to own a home and raise a family on their wages, it’s extremely difficult today. The price of housing has spiked in recent years, but wages have lagged far behind. Much of everyday life in Clown World is taken up with working extra hours to make up for the poverty that now exists.

In Clown World, working 40 hours a week is considered a part time job.

If you want a luxury such as owning a house, you’d better get used to working longer hours than that. Part of everyday life in Clown World is accepting that we don’t have the same standard of living that our parents had. Although trinkets and gadgets are cheaper than ever, the life essentials that take up most of one’s income – food and housing – are more expensive than ever.

Many are asking themselves how it’s possible that, if our parents could buy houses on their wages, and if we’ve had a few decades of relentless economic growth since then, it’s harder to buy a house on the average wage now? Shouldn’t it be easier than ever to buy a house, if we’re all much richer than 40 years ago?

The reality is that the masses have been conditioned into consenting to our production getting stolen from us by the ruling class. This happens in a number of ways.

The most obvious way is getting us to accept a smaller share of production. The wage share – the part of national income that is allocated to wage earners – has been steadily declining since the 1980s. Things are now so bad that workers see as little as ten cents of extra wages for every extra dollar their work produces.

It’s hard for an individual worker to notice this decline in the wage share, because they experience it as a balance of power that gradually shifts ever further towards the employer. What they would notice is employers bargaining from ever stronger positions, as the presence of gigantic pools of imported cheap labour give those employers highly profitable alternatives to hiring locals.

Everyday life in Clown World might revolve around working all the time for fuck all, but it’s not possible to win simply by avoiding work. The ruling class has a variety of methods to steal our saved wealth too.

There are more subtle ways to steal a person’s production than taking it all off them and giving them a fraction of it back. Some ways are so subtle that you can do it right in front of their face and they won’t even notice, much less complain.

One of the most subtle is inflation. The United States Dollar was trading at around 35 to an ounce of gold in the early 1970s. At this time, the average wage was about $3 an hour, so it took roughly 12 hours of labour to buy what an ounce of gold would get you.

Half a century later, the USD is trading at over 1,800 to an ounce of gold, while the average wage has only increased to $25 an hour. So now it takes roughly 72 hours of labour to buy what an ounce of gold would get you. Anyone holding dollars, or receiving a fixed income in dollars, has lost over 85% of their wealth over the last 50 years relative to someone holding gold.

Those who are holding the gold are the same ones printing the dollars, and they’re laughing their arses off. Everyday life, for the masses, involves running faster and faster on an employment treadmill to earn credits that the ruling class creates out of thin air.

A second subtle way to steal the wealth of the masses is through runaway house prices.

The ruling class already own most of the land. So every time house prices increase in value relative to wages, the ruling class gets wealthier and the masses get poorer. The problem is that house prices are dictated by actions of the ruling class. If they want house prices to go up, they simply import more immigrants and refuse to build new housing. Increasing demand while holding supply steady inevitably increases the price.

So the ruling class have got the workers leaping higher and higher to reach a benchmark that gets further and further away. What this had led to is an everyday life which isn’t much different to the everyday life of a medieval serf. You get worked to death and have bugger-all to show for it.

People are induced into accepting this by repeated, frequent humiliations. These humiliations sap the will of their victims and make them compliant to threats and mistreatment.

In Clown World, the plebs are humiliated everyday by a relentless mass media bombardment calling them racists. Anyone who turns on a television sees talking heads droning on about how racist white people are, or they see sportspeople kneeling to protest racism. The net result is a deep sense of shame and low self-esteem.

This shame and low self-esteem prevent the masses from asking for a fair wage, or for accessible housing, worthwhile healthcare or education etc. People will accept any shit deal if you can humiliate them into thinking they don’t deserve better.

Another major humiliation comes from laws such as those prohibiting cannabis or other spiritual sacraments. In most of the West, people get put in prison for producing or distributing cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT, even though there are stacks of evidence demonstrating that these substances can engender spiritual or mystic experiences.

In Clown World, you’re not allowed to seek out the divine. Our everyday lives are taken up with entirely material concerns, in particular accumulating resources (whether physical or social). If we express any yearning to reconnect with the divine, we are labelled mentally ill.

Such cruel and arbitrary laws serve a very deliberate and calculated purpose: to induce submission. Much like the hectoring about supposedly being racist, the enduring presence of injustice causes people to lose their will and become submissive. They feel so bad about themselves that they give up, and no longer feel that they deserve better.

In Clown World, drugs are limited to those that our corporate owners think make us more productive. Cannabis and the psychedelics are out, because they decondition people and serve to break down the effects of brainwashing. Caffeine and Adderall are in, because they induce people towards hyperfocus, which is the ideal mindstate for performing repetitive office tasks. If you’re lucky you can afford some tobacco or alcohol to numb the pain.

Everyday life in Clown World is marked by the fact that corporate interests can now lay claim to almost every waking moment of those they employ (and of many who they don’t). The presence of reliable Internet has made it standard for people to still work answering emails after they get home for the evening. You’re not even allowed to smoke weed on the weekends in case you fail a drug test.

For many in the Clown World of 2020, everyday life now resembles that of the humans who wake up in the pods in The Matrix. Our essential life energies are not put to use for our own betterment, but are instead drawn off by exploiters that most of us are barely aware of. The story of everyday life in Clown World is that we have gone from free people enjoying their lives to human livestock farmed by corporate interests for profit.

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 January 2021.

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: Immigration In Clown World

Few political topics create as much frustration as immigration. The discussion seems to be intractably divided into liberal and conservative camps, both of which accuse the other of jeopardising the future security of the entire world. Nevertheless, some hard facts rise above the flood of lies on the subject.

Immigration to the West today is characterised, like so much of Clown World, by the exertion of two wills: that of the capitalists and that of the Communists.

The capitalists want cheap labour first and foremost. The cheaper the labour, the greater the profits. They know that importing workers from the Third World allows for enormous profits; not only are those workers willing to work for cheap, but their presence destroys the solidarity of the native working class, and thereby their ability to bargain collectively.

The Communists want the destruction of national borders so that the international working class can come together as a cohesive force. They hate nationalists, in part because of lingering sentiments from World War II, but mostly because they have been conditioned to think that anyone who opposes mass immigration is guilty of the dread crime of racism. Immigration is supported because one’s enemies oppose it.

What the average person wants is for their quality of life to stay the same or to go up. To that end, they don’t care so much about immigration in and of itself. Their primary concern is that the immigration system lets in the sort of person who makes the local quality of life go up, and that it keeps out the sort of person who makes the local quality of life go down.

Unfortunately for the average person, the rulers of Clown World don’t give a shit about that. They have gone full speed on the immigration throttle for the reasons mentioned above, and this has led to an intensification of Clown World in three major ways.

The first is that it has led to a lack of social cohesion.

Unfortunately for the multiculturalists, it has been shown empirically that increasing diversity leads to weakening bonds of solidarity. A paper in the Scandinavian Political Studies journal demonstrated that “immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital”. This is because the more diverse a society is, the less any randomly-chosen two people will have in common with each other. This makes them trust each other less.

A recent metaanalysis in the Annual Review of Political Science found “a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies”. The effect was particularly acute at the neighbourhood level; a diverse neighbourhood was a strong predictor of low neighbourly trust. This low trust has a number of consequences that reduce the quality of social life.

However, unfortunately for us, the capitalists have correctly observed that diversity increases economic growth. Because economic growth is readily measurable, and social cohesion is not, we have weighed economic considerations more heavily, and been more readily persuaded by them. Clown World is, in this sense as well as many others, the consequence of prioritising money higher than happiness.

The second way immigration has intensified Clown World is by inducing people to tell lies.

Some immigrant groups are great. The waves of Far East Asian immigration to Western countries – in particular America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – have brought with them cultural enrichment and no relative increase in crime. This is primarily because Far East Asians are generally high IQ, and as such are generally able to meet the cognitive demands placed on them by the Western workplace.

Some immigrant groups aren’t so good. It’s extremely rare to find a person who claims that his neighbourhood became a better place because Muslims or Africans moved in. All over the West, Muslims and Africans commit more crimes and perform less productive labour than other groups. This is primarily because Muslims and Africans are generally low IQ, and as such are generally unable to meet the cognitive demands placed on them by the Western workplace.

In Clown World, the above facts are denied more strenuously than any others. Many people feel fully justified in telling blatant lies in order to deny them. It’s even easier to speak of God than it is to speak of genetically-based differences in racial IQ.

If there is a Noble Lie in Clown World, it’s the lie that all human groups are precisely identical in all psychological measures. This lie is considered noble because it is believed that the alternative is a relentless descent into Nazi totalitarianism. Once we admit that the races as different, the logic goes, then we’re forced to admit that some are better than others, and this ends up in extermination camps.

The reality is that lying about the subject spreads confusion and suspicion, and helps no-one but the globohomo alliance.

The third way that mass immigration has intensified Clown World is that the people were never asked if they wanted it, and this has led to extreme resentment. The ruling class simply decided that it wanted mass immigration, and the people’s electoral choice was restricted to parties who also wanted it. There was never a referendum on the subject, in any country.

Mass immigration has been forced on the people of the West without their consent, and has forever changed the nature of life in all Western countries. This has led to a deep sense of betrayal, which has led to a sharp decline in support for the Establishment, which has led to an increase in support for the far right, which has led to an increase in support for the far left.

Immigration and Clown World, then, are two parts of a positive feedback loop. When one increases, the other does as well. Clown World makes people forget about the obvious drawbacks to the mass immigration of certain peoples, thereby enabling it, and the immigration itself weakens the social bonds that prevent Clown World from intensifying.

The peak confluence of immigration and Clown World may have come when the Scottish Justice Minister, Humza Yousaf, declared that dinner table conversations in private homes must be prosecuted if they incite hatred. This means that it would be a crime to speak out against mass Muslim or African immigration in one’s own home. It’s hard to imagine Clown World getting any more insane than this.

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Clown World Chronicles: Business In Clown World

A common proverb states that the business of America is business. Indeed, America has long been the place where fortunes were made. But now that the West has degenerated into Clown World, business works in a different way. Fortunes are still made – but at a cost.

Clown World commerce is not what we’re used to. The story we’re all told at school is that productivity is a function of capital and labour, which work happily together to create needed goods and services. The supply of needed goods and services ameliorates human suffering and therefore earns profits and is a moral good.

The reality is much more complicated.

Although most of this book blames varieties of Marxism, atheism and materialism for Clown World’s woes, a large amount of the blame must be placed on capitalism. The political demands made by Marxists may be obvious, but the demands made by capitalists are no less pressing. These demands have had the effect of making Western society more of a twisted circus.

Capitalism is to blame for the fact that the growth of low and middle-income wages has decoupled from productivity. Although productivity has increased several times over recent decades, wage growth has lagged a long way behind. This has occurred because capital has exploited its strengthening negotiating position to offer workers worse deals. This change is shown graphically on the website WTF Happened in 1971.

The major consequence of this decoupling is that most of the increase in wealth accrues to an ever-smaller section of the population. Some studies suggest that the top 1% of the American population has looted as much as 85% of the growth in wealth since the Global Financial Crisis. In Clown World business, the system does not work for the good of the population, but only for the people at the top.

Capitalism is also to blame for the mass importation of cheap labour, as well as the sentiment that bringing in cheap labour is necessary because the locals are unwilling to do those jobs. Major industrial interests lobby government representatives to open borders and to lift restrictions on the movement of cheap labour. They also instruct their propaganda organs to manufacture public approval for such measures.

The Clown World workplace operates on a model closer to that of West Indian sugar plantations: if you won’t work for nothing, we’ll find someone who will. Any demand for a fair wage is portrayed as a refusal to work. The Clown World media plays a crucial role, supporting the capitalists by running stories about how fruit and vegetables will rot in the fields if immigration restrictions are not relaxed.

Things are so badly tilted towards capital now that it has become extremely difficult to buy a home without using inherited money. In New Zealand, house prices have increased 7 times since 1992, but wages have only increased 2.25 times. It’s a similar grim story in other Western countries. In the United States things are so bad that it was possible for the Wall Street Journal to headline an article with “Millions of Young People Shut Out of the Housing Market.”

Clown World business is about maximising short-term profit at the expense of all other considerations.

Because labour is usually one of the largest costs of any business, Clown World has seen extreme measures taken to cut labour costs. The most popular of those has been to ship manufacturing and services overseas to cheap labour zones that don’t have expensive regulation relating to worker protection.

The result of this drive for cheap labour is a lower quality of goods and services. We might have more of everything, but that everything is worse. By today, it’s all but impossible to speak to a customer service representative who has English as a native language. The result is confusion and frustration.

The drive to cut costs doesn’t stop at being cheap. It can extend to living entirely off someone else’s credit.

In Clown World business, it’s possible to live off investor money as it keeps rolling in, rather than make a profit. It’s not actually necessary to turn a profit and live off that, as a traditional business would. Investor money will keep coming into a business as long as that business retains a positive reputation. This means public relations.

As recently as 2015, media giant YouTube had never turned a profit, and it’s not clear that they turn one now. Twitter still doesn’t turn a profit. It’s not necessary to ever turn a profit as long as investor money keeps coming in to finance operations. And this money will keep rolling in as long as the company has good public relations. In Clown World business, success is mostly a matter of politics.

That politics trumps profit in Clown World can be seen from the bizarre alliances that corporate titans make with various political movements. Before the body of George Floyd had cooled to room temperature, major corporations had hit the media with campaigns showing their support for Black Lives Matter. Even McDonald’s ran an advertisement hailing the memory of Floyd.

These alliances help secure government funding, which is often even better than investor funding because it can come in the form of grants. The Government is a major source of funding for Clown World business, whether in the form of business development grants or tax breaks. Elon Musk got $4,900,000,000 of it! If you can convince an important person that your business is likely to provide jobs in the future, chances are good that person will cut you some public cash.

A business model where people are paid low wages, and hence can’t buy the goods and services of other businesses, isn’t sustainable for long. Sooner or later the impoverished masses start counting every last dollar, and when they do the consumerist economy shudders to a halt. Clown World business is when all long-term considerations are abandoned in favour of the next quarterly report.

There are many questions around Clown World business in the post-coronavirus future. If consumption falls sharply, how will people stay employed? If they can’t stay employed, must we introduce a universal basic income? And if 50% of women under 30 supplement their income with OnlyFans payments, where does that leave young men?

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How Long Until Chinese Wages Surpass Kiwi Wages?

Most Kiwis take it for granted that they are much wealthier than the average Chinese. China is a place where people shit in the street, eat dogs and live in houses made of bamboo and polystyrene. The fact, however, is that China has made immense economic progress over the past 20 years, and if they continue at this rate they will soon catch up to New Zealand.

Most people vaguely understand that China has become richer recently. But most don’t appreciate how far this process has run. The general assumption is that China is no longer Africa poor, but is now Brazil poor. The reality is that the average Chinese is now wealthier than the average Argentinian and is getting wealthier fast.

Chinese wages have increased tenfold over the last 20 years. In 2000, the average Chinese wage was CNY9,371/year. By 2019, the average Chinese wage was CNY 93,383/year, which works out to $(NZD)20,910. The Chinese are well into the middle-income stage of development and are closing in fast on the rich world.

The average New Zealand wage is $33.37 per hour, and the average Kiwi works 1,762 hours per year. This gives an average Kiwi wage of $58,798. This means that Kiwi wages are, for now, 181% higher than Chinese ones. But the rate of increase of Chinese wages is much higher than that of Kiwi wages. Chinese wages will soon catch up.

As mentioned above, the average Chinese wage has increased from CNY9,371 in 2000 to CNY93,383 today, an increase of 997%. This is equivalent to a 12.2% increase every year since 2000, and means that Chinese wages double every six years or so.

The average Kiwi wage has increased from $17.50 in 2000 to $33.37 today, an increase of 91%. This is equivalent to a 3.3% increase every year since 2000. As this column has previously shown, this represents a drastic loss in living standards on account of that house prices have risen much faster than wages. But it’s set to get worse.

There is no guarantee that those rates of growth will maintain, but it’s apparent that the Law of Diminishing Returns has worked to increase Chinese wages much faster than Kiwi wages. Assuming that something like those rates of growth maintain, then it won’t be long before the average Chinese wage surpasses the average Kiwi one.

If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 10% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 3% (the high growth model), then it will take no more than 16 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones. At this point, both Chinese and Kiwi wages should be around $95,000.

If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 8% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 2.5% (the medium growth model), then it will take around 20 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones.

If we assume that Chinese wages increase at 6% hereafter, and Kiwi wages increase at 2% (the low growth model), then it will take around 27 years before Chinese wages are higher than Kiwi ones.

In any case, the maths suggest that it won’t be much more than one generation before the average wage-earner will earn more, in absolute terms, in China than in New Zealand. The average person reading this article should live to see a world in which Chinese wages are higher than New Zealand wages.

What that means for New Zealand is anyone’s guess. The real tricky questions will be faced by naturalised Chinese New Zealanders whose parents left China when there were much better opportunities in New Zealand. Some of those people might sit down, do the maths, and decide that there are now much better opportunities in China.

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