History Is The Conflict Between Master And Slave Moralities

History Is The Patterns Of Conflict Between Master And Slave Moralities

Many historical theories view the world as an eternal struggle between two forces. The Christians call it good and evil, the Communists call it the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the Nazis call it the Aryan and the Jew. A previous essay here suggested it was between the K and r-selected. This essay takes a new approach: that Friedrich Nietzsche was more accurate than anyone else, and the true eternal struggle is between those with a master mentality and those with a slave mentality.

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche described two basic forms of morality.

Master morality judges actions on the basis of good or bad. Nietzsche defines master morality as the morality of the strong-willed: it is championed by the noble and the powerful. This doesn’t mean that master morality is mere domination – it also prizes honesty and an accurate appraisal of one’s own weaknesses. People with this mentality are not concerned with what the herd thinks. They prefer to pursue their own self-defined form of excellence.

Slave morality, by contrast, judges actions on the basis of good or evil. In slave morality, strong people are equated with evil. In slave morality, goodness is equated with passivity, timidity, agreeableness and an insipid kindness. Slave moralists aren’t concerned with accurate viewpoints – they simply believe whatever makes them feel good. Questioning the herd is a great sin, because it requires strength and therefore only someone evil would do it.

The masters are always fewer in number, and the slaves more numerous. In this regard, master and slave morality maps fairly closely to the mentality of the K-selected vs. the mentality of the r-selected. The major differences are that K-selected people are liable to suffer from pathological altruism, whereas the master morality (not feeling pity) does not, and that r-selected people do not lack vitality and are not prudish, whereas the slave morality is neurotic.

The true course of history has been the ebb and flow of these two different forms of morality.

Nietzsche himself wrote that the ancient Greco-Roman culture encapsulated master morality, but was subverted from the inside by Christianity, one of the original forms of slave morality. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 323 A.D., Westerners became slaves, our natural spiritual traditions having been thoroughly destroyed and replaced with superstition.

This victory of slave morality endured until the Renaissance (an event which a previous essay here called the Minor Renaissance). At this time, some of the old master morality returned in the form of the quest for scientific knowledge, previously hidden or taboo philosophy and exploring the world. Unfortunately, this didn’t last.

The 19th Century was a relative high point for master morality (of course, Nietzsche didn’t know this). During this decade, the European Empires reached their greatest extent. The British Empire had achieved such a state of dominance that it was able to settle Australia and New Zealand – lands on the other side of the planet – at the same time as providing most of the settlers to North America, and all this while keep the world’s shipping lanes open.

Unfortunately, there was no Major Renaissance, as the wider Western consciousness kept falling at the first three hurdles of dumb Abrahamism, blind Materialism or deaf Satanism. The West never managed to revive the master spirituality it had before being poisoned by Christianity some 1,700 years ago.

It has long been observed that empires tend to fall from the inside, rather than get smashed by any outside force. The reason for this is the internal rise of slave morality. The reason why the West has fallen into the decrepitude that it has is because slave morality has risen to the point where it is normal. Accordingly, we are weak.

It has also long been observed that good times lead to weak men, who then create hard times, which leads to strong men, who then create good times. This has been discussed here as the Red Pill-White Pill-Blue Pill-Black Pill sequence. New Zealand philosopher Rick Giles describes it as the Dignity Culture-Honour Culture-Victimhood Culture-Slave Culture quadrichotomy.

Hard times lead to strong men by process of selection. When times are hard, there’s not enough surplus to waste any of it. Therefore, the people in charge of resources have to be discriminating. Even more pressing is the fact that, when times are hard, people will fight over what little resources exist. This fighting, being in the realm of iron, rewards the hard and those who can do without.

This Spartan sense of miserliness leads to efficiency and a masterly mindset. When things operate efficiently, life is good. Everyone has their needs met and, as is usually the case when people’s needs are met, they become wealthy. When everyone is wealthy, everyone tends to be happy, and it is as if a Golden Age had descended upon the land.

When everyone has their needs met, they stop being hard. No-one with a full belly wants to fight – better to just wait until the problem goes away. If there’s no food in the cupboards, that’s when it’s time to worry. People in the “fat and happy” mindset tend to ignore challenges rather than respond to them.

This doesn’t only lead to physical softness but, more crucially, it leads to mental softness. This mental softness prevents people from being able to make sharp and accurate distinctions between the phenomena they encounter. Consequently, they become apathetic and indifferent, a malaise that they mistake for the virtue of tolerance.

This apathy and indifference leads to a failure to adequately deal with corruption. Either corruption is ignored, or the corrupt are not punished – a slave’s mindset. Because no-one is strong enough to challenge the corrupt, they come to positions of dominance. When corrupt people are in power, hard times are just around the corner. And so, the cycle repeats.

In today’s Clown World, slave morality has the total ascendancy. We are so apathetic that our politicians can kick us in the guts on a daily basis and we just roll over and take it. The total victory of slave morality is, perhaps, the fundamental explanation as to why Clown World is the way it is. This is a world without masters. The slaves have completely inverted natural morality.

What’s needed is the Major Renaissance. This would constitute a spiritual renaissance that would reconnect the people of the Western World to God. Being reconnected to God, we would then possess the necessary illumination to see the path forward in the darkness. We need a new set of masters for a new age.

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

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.

Could The Government Fund Itself With A Georgist Tax?

One of the great political problems is how to fund a government. Governments cannot realistically be funded by donations, so they have to levy taxes. No matter how you slice it, levying taxes on the people will always create discontentment, and not levying them is often no better. This essay discusses whether Georgism might work for New Zealand.

Georgism is a political philosophy named after American theorist Henry George. The essence of it is the belief that, while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land (often including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society. Income provided by things that are part of the natural world, and which do not depend on human activity to have value, should be the common property of the citizenry.

Georgist ideas were very popular a century ago, before the rentiers used their ownership of the apparatus of propaganda to persuade the population that government should be funded by taxes on labour and consumption. Since then, the mainstream media has normalised the idea of taxing labour and consumption, mostly by not allowing any discussion of Georgism, and by restricting discussion to a narrow range of pro-capitalist models.

Alt-centrism finds much in common with Georgist ideas. Georgism is a very alt-centrist approach to funding a Government, because it rejects the Establishment, and their focus on taxing labour. Georgism stands directly opposed to the Establishment because it is precisely the Establishment who profits the most heavily from charging rent. In taxing the Establishment the most heavily, Georgism accords with alt-centrism the most closely.

An Australian study suggested that heavy taxation of rents could provide up to 87% of the funding necessary to run the Australian Government. The remaining money could be raised according to a similar philosophy – i.e. it could tax other properties whose value did not depend on human labour inputs (such as oil and mineral royalties), or it could charge fees to use common property such as the electromagnetic spectrum and fishery stocks.

Georgism rejects the idea of levying taxes on economic activity that is the result of a direct human labour input. The idea is that tax on ground rents ought to be enough to fund the Government, and therefore that taxes on income would no longer be necessary. For a modern state like New Zealand, the numbers don’t quite add up, but a Georgist tax could be enough to slash income taxes.

According to the New Zealand Household Expenditure Statistics for 2016, rent costs comprised 31.8% of New Zealand’s total weekly housing costs, which were themselves 25.6% of the total weekly household expenditure of $1,300.

31.8% of 25.6% of $1,300 is $105, the average weekly household rent expenditure. Multiplying this by 52 weeks equals $5,460 every year per household on rent. Multiply this by the 1,500,000 households in New Zealand, and we arrive at a figure of $8,190,000,000 charged in rent money every year. This is just from household rents – it does not include commercial rent, rural rent, mineral royalties, banking license fees or fishing licenses.

The Australian study linked above found that the total resource rents of Australia were over two times the size of just the household rents – in fact, household rents are only about 40% of the total resource rents charged in Australia. $8.2 billion divided by 40% gives us a figure in the ballpark of $20 billion dollars every year.

The total operating costs of the New Zealand Government run at about $76 billion per year, so a Georgist tax of 90% on resource rents wouldn’t cover more than a quarter of this.

However, it’s notable that individual income taxes bring in about $37 billion every year to the New Zealand Treasury. A Georgist tax of 90% on all resource rents would therefore provide the leeway to slash individual income taxes by a half.

Another way to look at it is that New Zealanders pay tax of around $7,400 on income up to $48,000. So if there are 2,500,000 taxpayers in New Zealand, this suggests that a Georgist tax on resource rents in New Zealand could replace all income taxes up to $48,000 per annum.

Eco-Georgism is a variant of Georgism that gives special consideration to the environmental challenges facing humanity this century. This involves heavy emphasis on making polluters pay for the externalities that they introduce to the environment. This would combine the heavy tax on resource rents discussed above with e.g. carbon taxes.

21st century Georgism for New Zealand, then, would be the political philosophy of funding government activity through two primary means: heavy taxes on resource rents, and heavy taxes on all activities that cause environmental destruction.

In particular, ground rents on urban locations, such as city-centre shops and rental apartments, would be taxed the hardest. This is because such economic activity amounts to little more than parasitism. Shifting the burden of taxation to this kind of extortionate activity, and shifting it away from labour, will also make the economy not only more fair, but also more efficient.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.

The Minor Renaissance And The Major Renaissance

Renaissance means ‘rebirth’, and is the name given to the rebirth of the intellectual, philosophical and scientific culture of the West some 600 years ago. The Renaissance is understood to refer to a complete rebirth of higher awareness, as if we had awakened from a stupor, but a closer examination shows that only half of the job was done. As this essay will discuss, there are two great cultural rebirths – and one hasn’t happened yet.

There was much that was great about the Greco-Roman culture of the classical age. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle laid the intellectual and moral foundations for the entire Western world. The degree of moral insight they achieved has never been replicated, and works such as The Republic continue to inspire scholars and intellectuals around the world.

The Roman Empire that followed was one of the greatest feats of all of human civilisation. Its peak population was around 60-70 million, and the city of Rome had a million inhabitants at this time, about 1,900 years ago. Its great figures, like Julius Caesar, Augustus and Nero, are known to most today.

As this great culture was gradually destroyed by Christian and barbarian invaders, the West fell into the Dark Ages, where most knowledge and culture was lost. Europe regressed back into primitive superstition, and stayed there for almost a thousand years.

Beginning mostly in Italy, the Renaissance saw great minds such as da Vinci, Machiavelli, Galileo and Giordano Bruno restore much of the glory of those ancient days. Their contributions to mathematics, science and to the study of human nature lifted humanity out of the dark times and back to an age where reason triumphed. To the scholars and intellectuals of this new age, it felt very much like a rebirth of a higher order of consciousness.

This essay calls this the Minor Renaissance.

The Minor Renaissance, then, is the revival of the scientific and inquisitional culture that was championed by Greeks such as Archimedes, Eratosthenes and Aristotle. The Minor Renaissance gave us industrialisation, global empires, penicillin, spaceships, atomic bombs and computers. Its apogee may have come in 1969, with the first Moon landing.

But as glorious as the Minor Renaissance was, it’s still only a minor one.

Many of us have come to wonder what else there is in life. Somehow we don’t feel fulfilled buying big screen TVs, newer smartphones, bigger cars or bigger houses, and neither do we feel fulfilled flying or driving around the place. Career successes don’t bring any meaningful gratification and bringing children into a world like this is not easy to justify.

This sense of longing is compounded by the fact that our popular culture is overwhelmingly atheist. It’s very rare that the mainstream media expresses any spiritual wisdom, obsessed as it is with tawdry celebrity and crass consumerism. Our communities have decayed, our lives have become atomised, and our spiritual senses have become atrophied to the point where they barely still exist.

It’s little wonder, then, that suicide rates are rising across the West, along with anti-depressant and anti-psychotic prescriptions. The great process of learning and discovery that led to all the engineering and scientific achievements mentioned above, glorious as it was, did not leave us with the spiritual tools to confront the lack of inherent meaning in life on this planet. Bereft of such tools, we drift as if lost in space.

Because the Minor Renaissance was not a complete return to the glory of the Greco-Roman past, we await a Major Renaissance that will be. The Major Renaissance will see the rebirth of the Greco-Roman spiritual culture, some 600 years after the rebirth of the Greco-Roman intellectual and scientific culture.

This Major Renaissance will herald the spiritual rebirth of the soul of the Western people, which has remained dormant for some 1,600 years now.

Ever since the Eleusinian Mysteries were destroyed by Alaric and the Visigoths in 396, Westerners have lost their connection to the divine. The Eleusinian Mysteries had served to enlighten countless people during the thousand years they ran for. Today, however, spiritual truths that were once known by all are only known by society’s outcasts.

The Major Renaissance, therefore, would involve a rebirth of the Greco-Roman spiritual science that reached its highest expression in the rituals at Eleusis. This probably used some kind of psilocybin-based psychedelic sacrament, in conjunction with a ritualised and theatrical moral lecture, to shatter the false conceptions and false conditioning that befall all beings who manifest in the material plane.

A reinstatement of the Mysteries of Eleusis would involve the founding of a 21st century psilocybin mushroom cult. Eventually this would grow to become popular enough that most of the influential people in the world would want to be initiated. This collective enlightenment would provide the energy that sparked a spiritual renaissance that lifted the entire Western World – the Major Renaissance.

A spiritual renaissance would involve a widespread anamnesia, or unforgetting, of spiritual truths once widely understood. As this newspaper has argued before, a spiritual renaissance is happening right now. This is all but inevitable on account of that the truth, as Buddha observed, cannot be hidden for long. If this new spiritual age would come to define the age we lived in, we could be said to have gone through the Major Renaissance.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.

The Apparatus of Propaganda

There are many different ways of gaining power in the modern world: military, technology, politics, religion, media, among others. Some of these reins of power are held by people with malicious or narcissistic intent, and some are held by those who wish to end the suffering of all sentient beings. VJM Publishing is an attempt to gain control of the apparatus of propaganda for the good guys.

There’s good reason why people say “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Big muscles and powerful weapons are all but useless without a mind to guide them. Control the mind, control the body, as the silver magicians have been saying for thousands of years.

The powerful men of our time are not great warriors who can split skulls with single axe blows. The powerful men of our time are the psychologists who use the apparatus of propaganda to massage public opinion into accepting or rejecting whatever it is the psychologists desire (or, in any case, the powerful men hire these psychologists).

Control of the apparatus of propaganda means control of the very thoughts that course through the minds of the citizenry.

With sufficient control, you can get people to believe that war is peace, or that slavery is freedom – or that diversity is strength. You can get them to desire any product or political solution, even if such desires directly harm them. To control the apparatus of propaganda is to get the entire populace marching to the beat of your drum.

This brings with it multiple problems.

The most obvious today is the fact that the mainstream media is almost entirely owned by foreign banking and finance interests. Many people operate under the assumption that the mainstream media is owned by entities within the nation, and are therefore beholden by common national interests to a certain level of solidarity. This is not so.

Our mainstream media is owned by people who are indifferent to the suffering of the New Zealand nation, who they see as little more than a five million-strong herd of livestock. These people are concerned only with the profit that can be wrought from advertising sales, and from the propaganda value that control of the media confers.

These foreign banking and finance interests direct their employees in the mainstream media to manipulate public opinion, often in ways that do not benefit the public. They do this by propagandising in favour of issues that have the potential to increase the profits of those banking and finance interests. In practice, this amounts to propagandising in favour of issues that increase mortgage borrowing, which means anything that increases demand for housing.

This propagandising seeks to normalise ideals like opening borders to mass immigration, or children leaving home permanently at age 18, or ticking up overseas holidays on the mortgage, or getting divorced on a whim, or the idea of having multiple guest rooms or carports because normalising any of those things will cause mortgage spending to increase and therefore bank profits to increase.

This is also why the mainstream media relentlessly runs stories that encourage people to mindlessly consume – because the more indebted people are, the more mortgage profits are made. If they can get everyone wanting a bigger house or a flasher car, then at least some of those people will get mortgages to finance these wants, and that means greater banking profits.

Very often, the will of those banking and finance interests goes against the will of the people who are on the receiving end of the media. In such cases, the mainstream media has to shape the opinion of the public without that public’s knowledge or consent. The psychologists who operate the apparatus of propaganda know how to do this – the major unknown variable is the will of their owners.

The amount of damage that the apparatus of propaganda can do, if in the wrong hands, can be seen by the example of the Bonnier Group in Sweden.

Through maintaining control of most of Sweden’s apparatus of propaganda over several decades, the Bonnier family was able to induce the Swedish people to support immigration policies that were suicidal for Sweden, but which supported the Bonnier family’s ideological desire for open borders and cultural Marxism.

The Bonnier family instructed the Swedish mainstream media to normalise the mass immigration of Muslims and Africans, and they duly did so. Despite that the idea was never supported by a majority of the population, control of the apparatus of propaganda was able to create the impression that it was, and other influential figures such as politicians followed along out of fear of becoming unfashionable.

Control of the apparatus of propaganda enables the ruling class to threaten other people with ostracisation if they don’t go along with the values being normalised by the propaganda. This is a great power, because it plays on very deep and primal human fears. This enables the propagandists to have a powerful influence on people’s behaviour and speech, whether those people are conscious of it or not.

If the Western World is to survive the challenges of the 21st century, the apparatus of propaganda has to be reclaimed from global finance and banking interests, and from their ideological fellow travellers. Once the apparatus of propaganda is back in the hands of the people, and being used for the benefit of the people exclusively, it will naturally return to being an instrument that informs rather than one that confuses and misleads.

We at VJM Publishing, the Asylum at the Top of the Mountain, are propagandists for alt-centrism, and this we are without shame, believing it to be the Will of God. Our allies such as Anarkiwi, while they may disagree with us on a great many things, share a fundamental desire to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, and a fundamental belief that this can best be achieved by correctly informing people with the truth.

Alchemically speaking, the apparatus of propaganda can be represented by gold. The silver represents the mind, and this may be what guides the muscles, but the mind is itself guided by the will, and hence that which controls the will is the highest of all. Control of the apparatus of propaganda confers some degree of control over the will of the populace, which is where it gets its awesome power.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund.