The Scandinavians call it Jantelagen, Nietzsche called it slave morality, we call it the Tall Poppy Syndrome, but it all amounts to the same thing – a horizontalisation of social attitude that bitterly refuses to give credit where it’s due; a sneering, snivelling resentment that seeks to rip down anyone who distinguishes themselves for any reason.
Unlike us, the Scandinavians and the Continental Europeans are sophisticated enough to appreciate that this is a phenomenon of their culture and are able to consciously work against it. So too do the British recognise that their tolerance of eccentricity has enabled them to produce the geniuses necessary to remain a world power.
The gormless peasants that make up the bulk of the New Zealand populace are yet to comprehend such a thing, however, and so the lawnmower mows on.
So neglected are we down here in the world’s arsehole, so starved of genuine regard from those of other nations that we have gone blind in the darkness and turned on each other.
We should be ashamed for our Tall Poppy Syndrome. It really makes us look like a nation of cucks.
After all, it’s a classic expression of slave morality. Tall Poppy logic is even more resentful than Christianity.
Resentful Christians tell themselves that “the meek shall inherit the Earth” to make themselves feel better about how easily their massively egotistical selves can be made to feel fear and consequently how easily they can be intimidated away from conflict.
The modern Kiwi tells himself something very similar. His byword is “the mediocre shall inherit the Earth.”
In this environment, the worst insult of all is to be a “try-hard”. This is to commit the sin of putting an effort into something, as opposed to the socially approved method of doing a half-arsed job that soon has to be fixed.
The logic appears to be that if anyone did anything properly, then overall standards would soon rise and soon people would be demanding that we did everything properly. And that’s just a hassle.
Therefore it’s better to half-arse everything so that no-one has to feel bad for being incompetent.
This is how we arrived at the Orange Man animation that the television shows us to try and entice us into giving our consent to be ruled by the political class.
Whichever creative agency that invented the Orange Abortion no doubt would have paid due caution to ensuring that the image intended to represent the New Zealand voter didn’t exclude anyone.
Because if it did, they would have resented the shit out of it. We know this because that’s our culture.
Therefore, the New Zealand voter ends up being represented by an amorphous orange blob – one that stirs precisely zero national sentiment in the viewer.
This feeble absence of passion is the inevitable result of a national morality based on resentment. Nobody gets to have anything interesting or do anything interesting.
We have created a culture so boring that our young people would rather cheat death by smoking random chemicals sprayed on dried plant matter purchased from known criminal gangs than partake in society.
A nation so petty that the Government pissing $400,000,000 up the wall every year on the War on Cannabis goes without censure, but a future Green MP defrauding the same Government out of a few hundred dollars to feed a dependent child twenty years ago sparks a national outrage.
It’s time for a radical revaluation of values in New Zealand.
