Category: revolution

Chains of Clay and a Universal Basic Income

A universal basic income could be expected to drastically reduce the number of women forced into prostitution by poverty

Some forward-thinking people are starting to discuss the idea of a universal basic income. This is the idea that the Government would make a small but weekly payment to each adult resident citizen, just enough to keep them alive but not enough for any luxuries or even any decencies.

Predictably, the idea that the Government might help the poor in some new fashion has resulted in cries of communism from those who expect to inherit large amounts of property.

But there are reasons to believe that bringing in a universal basic income, even if it was as little as the current unemployment benefit, would significantly raise the standard of living of the average New Zealander.

For instance, a universal basic income would, at a stroke, remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of desperate poverty.

One might object here that they would not remove all the cruel things that people do to each other out of greed – and that’s true in some cases – but consider this.

Every great dictator or tyrant who convinced a mass of people to go against their better nature, and to later regret that they had done so, convinced those people by offering them money.

How?

They just looked for desperately poor people. Poverty is control. That’s the way it has to be understood for the psychological reactions of people to the question of a universal basic income to be understood.

Hitler could not have achieved what he did without the Great Depression and the economic restrictions imposed on Germany as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty.

People like to make a big deal about Hitler’s rhetoric and oratory skills, but the naked fact is that the NSDAP paid men to serve in the military, and they could pay a lot of men for not much money because those men were all as poor as shit.

This is why getting the rich to give up some of the money they have extorted out of the poor through their control of the Police and of private property is not a simple matter of appealing to the simple fact that it would reduce the sum total of human suffering.

One must also take into account the loss of power this entails.

Think of all the women in history who were forced to accept the sexual advances of a man they didn’t like because they needed the money.

Think of all the men in history who have wound up doing violence to strangers because they were forced to be obedient to someone violent for the sake of money.

Think of all the kings and queens who were able to raise an army to invade some other peaceful place because the peasants of their kingdom had no access to the commons on account of enclosure, and therefore were forced to take the monarch’s silver or starve.

Think of all the times a parent who, on account of stress from worry about where the next meal was coming from, took a short-sighted decision in the heat of the moment and came to regret it.

Go back as far in history as you like. How many robberies, how many burglaries, how many thefts, how many assaults and murders could have been prevented had we merely seen to it that people didn’t need to go hungry, and did so with a similar effort to what we already put into punishing and protecting ourselves from robbers, burglars, thieves and murderers?

We’re not talking about an equal distribution of luxuries, or even decencies. A person living merely on a universal basic income will be too poor to afford much beyond food and shelter – but at least they will not be so poor that they will take violent actions out of desperation.

One might raise an objection to this on the grounds that, if people were willing to look after each other enough to introduce a universal basic income, they would have done so already and would not need coercion through Government taxation.

This objection is only reasonable up to a certain historical point. When the productivity of the average citizen has advanced to such a degree that simply by pressing a button they can cause machines and computers to produce a million dollars worth of goods, there’s no reason barring a sadistic need for control to cut non-machine-owners out of this cornucopia.

Of course, much of this discussion is academic in the case of New Zealand, which is 20 years behind the rest of the world in progress on questions like this and getting worse. Medicinal cannabis was legalised in California in 1996 and we are yet to even have a proper discussion about it, so we will likely be several decades behind the rest of the world on the basic income question too.

The Need For Luciferianism in the Modern World

The symbol of Lucifer is of an angel who descends from some higher place to bring enlightenment to the beings in the darkness below. In some forms, like in his incarnation as Prometheus, this is done out of a love for humanity. In others, like his incarnation as Satan, this is entirely accidental. This essay will argue that – despite what appears to be commonly believed – there always will be a need for Luciferianism this century.

Asking what value Luciferianism has to the modern world can be answered by looking at the people who fear it. One can soon notice that they are the same kind of people who have always feared it.

They are the benighted, those who quiver in fear at the light because they know that it illuminates something within themselves that they are ashamed of, something that would make them appear undignified to those who look on and judge.

These people have a reason to oppose Lucifer because their power comes from the gossamer shadows of lies that they cast on the rest of humanity. Lies about God, about human nature, about the world, about the future. Politicians and priests.

Anyone who, like Lucifer, brings light to people is the enemy of anyone who controls those people with lies.

If one goes back far enough, it is possible to imagine a situation where there were a number of primitive ape-men watching a burning tree that had been struck by lightning or similar. The natural reaction of all animals, like it was for us, is to be afraid of fire, and so they would have kept back from it.

But one of those ape-men would have carried within him the spirit of Lucifer, and he would have gone forward (striding or creeping, it doesn’t matter) and approached the fire without fear, eventually learning to tame it. Such an ape-man (it could just as well have been an ape-woman) would have been responsible for the development of firecraft and therefore, eventually, of civilisation.

So it can be said that, were it not for Lucifer or one like him, we would all be eating raw meat still, cowering in the shadows.

So much for the past. Because the age we live in now is extremely materialistic, even a metaphor such as Lucifer will often be dismissed as a religious delusion. The very idea that Lucifer represents a courageous rejection of stagnant dogma is often itself considered part of the cultural baggage of religion.

The mastery of fire was so long ago that it’s almost irrelevant, says the materialist. Now, we have mastered almost all of reality: we have sent a man to the Moon, we have built atomic bombs and power plants, we have built computers powerful enough to simulate weather.

The truth is that our modern material advances are the yang to the yin of spiritual enfeeblement. As Tyler Durden told us in Fight Club: “Our great war is a spiritual war.”

Even if all of the problems in the world had been solved and we were living in utopia, there would still be a need for Lucifer to come in and to break up the lazy, complacent lies that we would be telling each other, lies that would risk us falling back into an animal state.

After all, we know that nothing lasts, that yang falls into yin before yang reasserts itself.

Lucifer represents the spirit of anyone who asks questions to authority. For example, who will question the cozy idea that our current time and place is the most morally and philosophically advanced of all times and of all places, and that our current crop of leaders have everything under control, and in doing so protect us from the stagnation that creeps in to every successful society? Only Lucifer.

Therefore, Luciferianism has the potential to protect us from the arrogance or hubris that inevitably destroys a culture once it has started to believe its own bullshit.

Lucifer will always live on in the spirit of anyone willing to give the middle finger to an authority figure spouting lies or fearmongering. It doesn’t matter if there lies come from the left or the right, or from anywhere else.

Go back far enough and there would have been a cowardly faux shaman telling someone else not to go too close to the fire under any circumstances, for it simply could not be mastered – and there would have been one who chose not to believe him.

Whenever lies and untruths start to act as chains weighing down the soul of a people – family, tribe, nation, race, species doesn’t matter – there will be a need for people to summon the spirit of Lucifer to burn them away.

Is this the Age of the Pleb?

There are many systems of thought that describe various times, epochs or ages that humanity appears to pass through on its collective historical journey through the Great Fractal. Plato’s Republic described it alchemically, the Hindu cosmology describes it in a similar fashion and many other traditions have a time of increasing disorder leading to a climactic revolution.

In Republic, Plato laid out how culture disintegrates over time. Society begins in a Golden Age, according to Socrates in Book VIII, and gradually deteriorates.

It begins with rulers who put virtue above all, and who accordingly cannot own property. Because of the errors that these good people inevitably make as a consequence of being fallible, they are replaced by an inferior and greedier set of rulers.

Eventually the greed of the society leads to money being lent out at high rates of interest, which inevitably concentrates wealth in the hands of a very few. Society degenerates further into the rule of the mob, when doing whatever one wishes to do is the only value.

Here there is little of the higher order that an alchemist would associate with gold, silver or iron. Indeed, the men of gold have vanished by the time it comes to democracy. The man of clay takes charge by convincing the man of iron that the man of silver wishes to enslave him, and by convincing the man of silver that the man of iron wishes to kill him, and so ensures that those two mutually destroy each other.

The Hindu timeline tells a fantastic – and weirdly similar – story. Each Great Year, or Age of Man, or Maha Yuga, itself consists of four smaller Yugas.

The first of these, the Satya Yuga, is also known as the Age of Truth, and it corresponds very closely to what an alchemist would call a Golden Age and what Plato would have called rule by aristocracy. Here it is the gods that are, rightly, in charge of their creation, and everyone knows their correct place.

In the next age, the Treta Yuga, righteousness gradually diminishes. An alchemist would call this an Age of Silver – spirituality begins to give way to materialism, and kings and rulers must use cunning to get their will through, no longer able to rely on the confidence that the ruled have in them.

The final stage is the Kali Yuga, which is known in Hinduism as a Dark Age.

Both of these systems of thought, like the Norse Ragnarok and the Abrahamist Armageddon, suggest that the human experience starts good and gradually gets worse until it has to be restarted in violent revolution. Before we get to this point, however, things have to become genuinely terrible.

An alchemist might point to the immense population surge of the last 150 years and declare that this must be the time of the man of clay, because it appears that no longer does anything other than sex matter. People breed mindlessly, with no thought to the long-term benefit of their actions or whether more offspring are desirable, and so the human population has exploded.

A consequence of this is a resurgence of lowest common denominator culture. American popular culture seems to have sunk to an almost childish level, with the people happy to accept any display of gross incompetence or unfitness for leadership from their ruling class.

In New Zealand it can be seen with the increasing media attention given to soccer, which is the McDonalds of world sports, at the expense of excellent sports such as rugby and cricket, and with the degeneration of the nation’s most popular media portals into click-baiting drivel.

Perhaps all of these systems of thought are all correct and we are currently living in the Age of the Pleb, ruled by the worst among us, and by the worst instincts within ourselves.

The good news is that, in all systems of thought that warn us of such a thing, the Age of the Pleb is always replaced by a new Golden Age.

To some extent, how this develops is inevitable. The man of gold, born into the age of the man of clay, finds himself impelled to take action. The degree of degeneration strikes him as obscene, and out of righteous anger he takes action.

This action usually has the effect of bringing fire into the world to burn away the rot and filth of the Age of the Pleb. Sometimes this means war – and with a massive and still-growing human population creating ever more pressure on ever depleting natural resources, this seems very possible.

The other way we might exit the Age of the Pleb is by a fiery revolution of thought, in which the mental cobwebs of long-decayed religions are burned away by righteous fire and the brutal monkey instincts at the bottom of our brains are tamed and sublimated into something valuable.