spirituality

The Alt Centrist Approach To Mental Health

50 years ago, mental health was mostly ignored. Today, it’s a major issue. 50 years from now, mental health will be taken as seriously as physical health. The alternative centrist, approaching the midpoint of the 21st Century since the reign of Augustus, makes provisions for the mental health challenges of the future.

A point lost on most today is that ‘psychiatry’ is made up of two words, ‘psyche’ and ‘iatros’, which mean ‘soul’ and ‘healer’. A psychiatrist is supposed to be someone who heals the soul. They are not meant to be someone who prescribes pills and little more. Today’s psychiatrists are primarily concerned with preventing people from freaking out and damaging property. The vast majority of them don’t even believe in souls, let alone have any way to heal them.

As a result, some of those who have been through the mental health system, or who look at the rates of depression and anxiety today, ask if psychiatry has any value at all. One can readily concede it has value sedating people who might kill themselves or someone else in the next 24 hours. But it has much less value in taking the vast numbers of mentally ill people from outpatient treatment to good mental health.

The alternative centrist approach to mental health wouldn’t change much when it came to acute mental healthcare. When it came to chronic mental healthcare, however, a major change in attitude would be made. The approach of the past was that people can take care of themselves; psychological concerns are too subtle to be important anyway. This attitude reflects a grosser, cruder, more vulgar and more ignorant age.

In the time of the alternative centrist, it will be understood that the concept of health applies to all aspects of the human being, from the least subtle to the most. Thus, mental health is as important as physical.

Applying our Aristotelean maxim “the starting point is the fact”, the fact is that most mental health problems are caused by trauma. Another fact is that the chemical imbalance narrative was promoted by pharmaceutical companies who wanted people hooked on their products. The alternative centrist approach to mental health is fully trauma-informed.

The difficulty is that the three Establishment positions have created a system which is inherently traumatising. This has been by design – trauma breaks people, making them unwilling and/or unable to fight back, thereby securing the Establishment’s control. The alternative centrist system is necessarily anti-trauma.

Not creating more trauma is the purview of the other alternative centrist approaches. Fixing the trauma already created, however, is the basis of the alternative centrist approach to mental health.

According to this approach, mental healthcare is the equivalent of maintaining the psychological infrastructure of the nation. This makes it an essential spend, and not a luxury. Thus, the alternative centrist is happy to spend money sorting it out. This will mean, alongside the existing spend in training psychiatrists in acute mental healthcare, also training mental health practitioners about conditions like PTSD and C-PTSD. These traumatic stress-based conditions are rife in the Western World, and their accumulated effects over the past century are the chief reason why our society currently resembles a mental asylum.

The alternative centrist frees up money for healing trauma by not spending it on hopeless cases. This will involve euthanasia for the incurably feeble-minded. Anyone so mentally disabled as to be a permanent burden will be given a dignified death. This will also include those suffering from a dementia, a hellish condition with no cure. Doing this implies a complete rejection of Abrahamic morality (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Religion).

This approach of euthanising the hopeless cases, in order to free up money to spend on those with hope of a decent life, is similar to the alternative centrist approach to law and order. Herein it can be seen that alternative centrism is far from being a weak compromise position like establishment centrism. Alternative centrism actually achieves the goals of both the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left here (viz. order and freedom) specifically by avoiding the middle ground. This would not be considered cruel, and would not violate the Fourth Rejection, because it would be considered merciful.

This proposed massive expansion of the mental health apparatus would occur not so much in a clinical sense as an everyday spiritual sense.

Absent the Abrahamic influences, there is no need for the alternative centrist state to separate psychiatry from spirituality. Without the danger of mental healthcare practitioners trying to convert vulnerable patients to Abrahamism, the emphasis could fully be on the healing of the soul. The patients would be encouraged to see their conditions as primarily spiritual phenomena, and not personal failings.

The teaching would be that abuse, neglect and nihilism damage the soul. The ten major forms of adverse childhood experience would be learned and taught as part of the fundamentals of mental healthcare. This would extend to schooling: young students will be taught the basics of mental health and mental illness, so they can recognise it in themselves and others. They would also be taught not to see mental health as a taboo subject.

Healing of the soul, in the alternative centrist conception, is based on forming quality relationships. The first step is a relationship with the true self. Patients and students alike would be taught that the true self, more fundamental than either body or mind, is a fragment of God consciousness, and that each one of us is an expression of divinity (again, a complete rejection of the Abrahamic approach). From there, they would be encouraged to interact with the rest of society on that basis.

The alternative centrist psychiatrist would teach that consciousness is the prima materia and that its natural state is one of perfect bliss, and therefore there’s no reason to be afraid of anything, because all suffering is temporary. Healing trauma is, to a major extent, a matter of unlearning false ideas about oneself and about reality. The alternative centrist mental healthcare worker would encourage meditation, self-inquiry and other spiritual practices.

The alternative centrist state would put a lot of money into psychedelic research, recognising it as a trend of the future. At time of writing, there are regularly new breakthoughs in psychedelic medicine: the most recent is the potential for using LSD to treat anxiety. A 2024 Nature article wrote that “The clinical investigation of psychedelic medicines has blossomed over the last 5 years.” Less harmful alternatives to the common pharmaceuticals, which themselves often have horrendous side-effects, are desperately needed.

As per the alternative centrist approach to recreation, communities for mental health support could be expected to form naturally given the universal basic income. In situations where this was impossible, the Ministry of Mental Health would try to make it possible.

Because the alternative centrist approach to welfare involves a UBI, psychiatric patients would no longer need to see their psychiatrists as enemies. Under the existing system, psychiatric patients are dependent on psychiatrists to get approval for disability payments, and as such have to be extremely careful about what they say to them, suspicious that the psychiatrist is looking for reasons to deny the claim. The UBI would allow the patients to be more open with what they told the doctors, leading to better mental healthcare and a better society overall.

A UBI would also alleviate a great deal of work stress, the misery of which itself causes trauma, and so the alternative centrist approach to welfare has flow-on effects to mental health.

In short, mental health would be taken as seriously as physical health by alternative centrists. The taboos against talking about it would be shattered.

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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The Third Occult Revival

Ever since Theodosius’s reign of terror in the 4th Century CE, Western spirituality has been an occult matter. With the coming of Abrahamic tyranny, anyone with an interest in the true nature of the divine was driven underground lest they be murdered. Between the murders of Hypatia in 415 CE and of Giordano Bruno in 1600, Westerners were subjected to the most psychopathic campaign of spiritual destruction in human history, with millions slaughtered for refusing to bow to an idol of the dead rabbi.

Occultism was the inevitable end result of these centuries of terror. Anyone interested in genuine spirituality, such as raising one’s frequency of consciousness above suffering, was forced to pursue that interest in secret. Those interested in science were forced into secrecy also. Thus occultism, genuine spirituality and true science came to overlap to a major degree (for an excellent history of the influence of this occultism on the history of science, see The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett).

Christianity started to die around the time of the murder of Bruno, perhaps because the centuries of atrocities had finally made the reputation of the religion unsalvagable. Since then, the knowledge pushed into the occult has undergone several waves of mass public interest. We are now in the third of such waves of occult revival.

The first wave came at the end of the 19th Century. Writing in 1883, Nietzsche was able to say “God is dead” in Thus Spake Zarathustra because his society had already abandoned Yahweh (he would have been murdered if he had written The Anti-Christ a few centuries earlier). Society at the time, desperate for meaning, was ready for a return to esoteric truths.

The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875, and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in the 1880s in England. Spiritualism, as a religious movement, also peaked around this time. All of these movements took an interest in subjects that were banned during the years of Christian tyranny. This first occult revival brought spiritual concepts and awareness back to popular consciousness for the first time in centuries.

This first revival was ended by the First World War. The need to overcome physical enemies forced the West into a drive for more shells, more bullets, more troops, a relentless focus on quantity to the exclusion of quality, and thereby forced it screaming back into materialism.

The second occult revival followed from the discovery of the psychoactive properties of LSD in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, and the rediscovery of sacramental magic mushroom use by New York investment banker R Gordon Wasson in the 1950s. Although this wave of psychedelic use did not last long, thanks to the War on Drugs, it had a powerful impact on popular consciousness. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception brought the idea of tripping to a wide audience, and the Summer of 1969 made it a reality.

This second occult revival encompassed the New Age movement that began in the 1970s. This movement was aware that we were living in a spiritual dark age, and that most genuine spirituality had been suppressed over the centuries. The War on Drugs prevented people from rediscovering this spirituality, and neoliberalism brought them back to profit and loss, quantity and production, and thereby back to materialism.

The mini-Dark Age caused by neoliberalism did not last. In the 2020s, we are going through a third occult revival. This third revival seems to be inspired by a combination of the Internet and the end of what Emmanuel Macron called the end of the era of abundance.

The Internet has made it easier than ever to share esoteric knowledge. Growing up in the Satanic Panic era of the 80s and early 90s, it was hard to even find an accurate and objective book about occultism. When covered in the media, it was mostly scare stories about murders, rapes and insanity. Thanks to the Internet, sane (or relatively sane) people have been able to contact each other and discuss occult subjects, bringing awareness of such subjects to new levels.

In terms of raw knowledge, people are much more advanced than they would have been at any time since the death of Yahweh. Every student of occultism has an esoteric lodge in their own home thanks to the Internet. Thanks to this technological advance, curious people everywhere are now deep into occult studies.

The end of the era of abundance is also driving people away from materialism. Materialism used to mean big houses, flash cars, rich food, abundant entertainment, easy travel and access to all kinds of gadgets. Today materialism means being trapped at work, paying rent, eating slop, watching brainrot: dying, like a battery drained of energy.

People are getting a much worse deal from materialism now than during the 20th Century. This is causing them to look for happiness in the metaphysical. Some of them shop around mainstream religious denominations, only to find that most of the adherents don’t even believe in God or in anything spiritual. The massive disappointment of both nihilistic atheistic materialism and of mainstream religion (a conundrum described as the Clown World Fork) is turning people back towards occultism.

As part of this third occult revival, we already see groups of those interested in genuine spirituality arising, and growing. These groups are forming outside of the purview of government or mainstream religious authorities, an actual folk movement. But, despite the lack of official oversight, they are thriving. God is more fundamental than the government, and people acting with God’s approval are more powerful than those acting with governmental approval.

This third wave might include both spiritualism and psychedelics, so that the first and second waves are both represented, combined into a new movement where all hidden qualities of the mind and consciousness are open to discovery and investigation. Perhaps modern advances in psychological science could contribute to this.

It’s impossible to say how long this third revival might last, or how far it might go. Eventually an occult revival will lead to a new spiritual order in Western Civilisation, but it’s too early to know if this one is it.

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The Alt Centrist Approach To Religion

In the West, religion and Christianity are closely intertwined. The Establishment Right, for instance, are heavily Christian. Much of the recent history of politics in the West is defined by the need to deal with the power of Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. To a major extent, the freedom desired by the Second Acceptance is freedom from religious dogma and strictures.

The Establishment Right’s obsession with order, at the expense of everything else, is the ultimate cause of hundreds of millions of deaths from religious terrorism throughout history. The belief that there is only one way to God, and that everyone rejecting that path is evil and God wants them destroyed, is psychopathic. There is no difference between Muslim jihadists, Christians demanding that “every knee shall bow” and Jews trying to subjugate humanity through tikkun olam. All are monsters.

If anything exemplified the excessive order of the First Rejection it is Abrahamism with its absolute refusal to tolerate other religions.

The Western World has not known a destroyer of freedom like Abrahamism. In the ancient European world, all manner of different cults to different gods existed. When the Christians came, they destroyed everything spiritual they could. The Eleusinian Mysteries, which Cicero called the greatest of all of Athens’s gifts to civilisation, were broken up by Christian fanatics over 1,600 years ago.

Atheism, however, is no solution.

Absent purpose, materialism has given us today’s mental health epidemic. The mainstream materialist narrative suggests that happiness comes from consumption. Television advertising shows us happy people buying alcohol, buying travel, buying fashion, buying, buying, buying.

The problem, as Buddha taught long ago, is that desire leads to misery. All the television advertising just implants desire that wouldn’t otherwise exist, thereby creating misery that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Mindless consumption, removed from existential meaning, doesn’t lead to anything close to happiness.

The truth is that people need religion. Materialists deny this, claiming that as long as people have food, shelter and work they will be satisfied. In reality, people have souls and those souls need purpose. Religion provides that. So people need religion to be happy.

For a religion to make someone happy, however, it needs to be true. The drawback of false religions, like the Abrahamic cults, is that people can intuitively sense they’re not true. People can tell, in their hearts, that it doesn’t matter if some rabbi claimed to have died for their sins or not. They can sense that God will judge them for their own karmic debt, not for what someone else may have done. Only the hopelessly degenerate are committed to a belief in no God. So people will always find their way back to religion in some form.

This yearning for religion can be seen everywhere in youth culture. The wokists and SJWs are really just another form of Abrahamist, as has been described at length elsewhere. These people are desperate for the order that true religion provides, and the reason why so many of them are going insane is because they’re not getting it from Marxism. It’s remarkable how similar woke culture, with its hundreds of unwritten rules about what opinions are permissible, is to the Abrahamic cults, which are also totalitarianisms.

A powerful desire for spiritual order can also be seen on the right, most obviously in the TradCath fad. It manifests in a variety of subtler forms also, such as Esoteric Hitlerism, which is everywhere on the non-mainstream Internet. The rising neopagan movement is a kind of European ghar wapsi, as white people seek to rediscover the beliefs and practices of their pre-Christian ancestors.

In the centre are practices such as Elementalism, which takes traditional spiritual practices like psychedelic sacrament use – something both left and right are generally indifferent towards – and blends it with a hierarchical priesthood and an admonition to overcome bestial impulses.

If the entire left-right spectrum exhibits religious or pseudo-religious behaviour, we can conclude that the religious impulse is universal, even if suppressed in some. Thus we can see that the order provided by religion is necessary. The Roman Empire was famous for its piety; heroic figures like Aeneas made a point of pious behaviour. The writings of the Greek Golden Age were replete with references to the gods. So it seems that civilisations wax and wane in correspondence with the strength of their religious belief.

Religion is therefore too precious to be left up to cowboys and clowns, as is the case in today’s West. The obvious solution is for the state to run its own religion, but for there to also be religious freedom, as per ancient Greece and Rome.

This means the state needs to promote a national religion. The precise form of these religions will vary from place to place. In New Zealand, for instance, there would be cults of Woden, Maui and Zealandia, reflecting British heritage, Maori heritage and the modern synthesis, respectively. Northern Europe could adopt elements of the Norse pantheon; Southern Europe could adopt elements of the Greco-Roman pantheon.

This solution has one major drawback: if you allow religious freedom for certain religions, as the Romans discovered, they will use that freedom to destroy the others.

The Theodosian Code records that, as soon as Christians took power in Rome, they worked to annihilate the European religions. Followers of these traditions were increasingly ostracised until the religions themselves were made illegal. Islam, also, has been responsible for the destruction of Buddhist and Hindu communities in countless places. The Mughal invasion of India is probably the single most murderous action in history (if measured by total body count). Neither have the Jews been much better. These three Abrahamic religions are characterised by their unceasing struggle for political power and control at the expense of truth, justice, freedom, peace and basic human decency.

The optimal solution, then, is a state religion plus freedom for all non-political religions. For maximum acceptance, this freedom ought to be extended as broadly as possible; only the Abrahamic religions are truly political enough to be worth of proscription. This could be taken even further, with a declaration that true justice would be the active destruction of the political religions, using all the powers of the state.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming masterwork 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 enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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!

Don’t Throw The Spiritual Baby Out With The Abrahamic Bathwater!

The Western World is atheist today. This is presented as a natural development, religion being considered a remnant of a by-gone age. But the development of religious belief in the West is anything but natural.

It’s not natural for anyone to be atheist. Atheism is, in fact, a degeneracy. Plato, in Laws, prescribed the death penalty for atheism, reasoning that it was a form of spiritual corruption that threatened to rot society. The more corrupt a nation’s spiritual practice is, the more atheists it has. In ancient Athens, there were so few atheists they could be put to death with little disruption. In the West of 2026, there are so many atheists that anyone who expresses a genuine belief in God is diagnosed with schizophrenia and medicated.

Historically considered, this is a highly unnatural situation. It has come about because atheism is a natural reaction to having spiritual lies forced on a people. If people grow up being told spiritual lies, a certain proportion of them will instinctively reject those lies, and, without finding spiritual fulfillment in something else, will regress into atheism.

The Western World had its own native religions before Christianity. The Greek, the Roman and the Nordic pantheons were the natural expressions of European spirituality for millennia. These pantheons served us well during the ages of Alexander and Trajan. Unfortunately, because of the degeneracy that inevitably follows success, Rome submitted to Abrahamic religion in the form of Christianity. The Dark Ages ensued.

After the Dark Ages, it proved impossible to shake off the remnants of Christianity. Superstition ensured that the cult survived and maintained its death grip over Europe. Eventually, with the Renaissance, Christianity began to weaken. People started to question it.

The horrors of Christianity led to an over-reaction against anything perceived to be religious. As the image at the top of this article suggests, many people are so disgusted by the violence and lying of Abrahamic religions that they have been turned off spirituality altogether. Many have concluded, understandably but in haste, that if Abrahamism is what religion is, then religion is evil.

The truth is that proper religion is a great and wonderful thing. It liberates beings from their suffering by returning them to God, the only true source of happiness. As such, it often makes life bearable in cases where it would not have been. It’s only the Abrahamic religions that have perverted this beauty, turning religion into a vehicle for political control.

Growing up in the West, people are presented with Christianity as if it were “their” religion. Then they grow up a bit more, and read about the Inquisition, the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War, then learn about Christian support for circumcision, the War on Drugs, endless Middle Eastern wars, and realise that Christianity is evil. Some people realise before then, as an instinctive reaction against the brainwashing and sadistic pressure to submit and conform. It’s true that Christianity is evil. But the problem is, when people realise this, they often reject spirituality full stop, and become atheists.

Many people in the West today are unable to think about morality or ethics at all, because they associate such things with Christian hectoring and badgering (not to mention Christian hypocrisy and lying). Having been told that all morality comes from Rabbi Yeshua, the tendency is for people, when they reject the Magic Rabbi, to reject morality also. The end result: they follow animal impulses instead. The societal consequences of throwing the spiritual baby out with the Abrahamic bathwater are obvious.

Abrahamism is evil, and must be eradicated for the human race to thrive. But, before this can be possible, people must understand that the Abrahamisms are political religions and not spiritual ones. Spiritual religions cannot be judged on the flaws of political religions. Spirituality existed before the Abrahamisms and will exist afterwards. It stands alone, sufficient.

The Abrahamisms may have conquered a large proportion of the world, and in doing so normalised themselves to billions of people, but that doesn’t make them honest depictions of spiritual truth. They are dying, all around the world, as the Internet has made truth freely available. As they disappear, and get replaced by atheism and other beliefs, the Dharmic religions will return.

The Dharmic religions include Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Elementalism and many others. These religions are variations on what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy: the eternal spiritual truth that has been passed down throughout history in many forms. In the future, the world will see the return of these religions. This is as inevitable as night turning back to day.

The most important lesson Westerners need to learn right now: spirituality is real, Abrahamism is false, and true spirituality will return as Abrahamism dies.

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 enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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!