The Bread And Circuses Are Winding Up

Panem et circenses is an ancient Roman phrase, attributed to the poet Juvenal, that means “bread and circuses.” The idea is that a degenerate society, once it has abandoned all higher values, has nothing left but bread and circuses. Take that away, and the society will fall apart. Our bread and circuses are in the process of being taken away.

The Roman Empire discovered that paying for public circuses was a great way of preventing civil unrest. If the people had an upcoming gladiatorial games to look forward to, they were much more likely to be content. When they didn’t have anything to look forward to, they tended to entertain thoughts of rebellion.

Eventually, the Romans found themselves unable to pay for more games, and that was the tipping point. The cessation of the circuses meant that the citizens got their entertainment from wrecking society instead, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

The Western World appears to be going through a similar process.

Professional sports have replaced the circuses in the West, and most professional sports leagues have been severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. The English Premier League season lost three months, the Major League Baseball season lost 100 games, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, predicted that running the NFL later this year would be impossible.

In New Zealand, there hasn’t been a single All Blacks match so far in 2020, and it looks like there won’t be. There hasn’t been a Black Caps match since March, and there is no news of upcoming fixtures (although a tour to Bangladesh has supposedly been planned).

Even worse, the increasing politicisation of professional sport has seen many turn their televisions off. NBA viewership is down some 20% compared to this time last year. Although the linked article suggests injuries to star players may be the cause of the decline, the truth is that many viewers are sick of having political issues shoved in their faces.

People watch sport to be entertained. They don’t care about the political opinions of professional sportsmen, any more than they care to watch Donald Trump play basketball. They know the sportsmen are not educated intellectuals who study history and human nature. As such, their political opinions don’t need to be taken seriously.

Compounding the problem are blatant double standards when it comes to the political issues being pushed.

In an NBA match earlier this month, Los Angeles Clippers player Montrezl Harrell called Dallas Mavericks player Luka Doncic a “bitch ass white boy“. Although a white player calling a black player a “bitch ass black boy” would be a worldwide scandal, it appears that Harrell is going to avoid sanction entirely.

There might be an inherent demand for entertainment once a person’s basic survival needs are met, but it’s hard to be a white person and keep watching a sports league when you know that league explicitly endorses anti-white racial abuse. It’s a direct humiliation, and many sports fans have found themselves switching off instead.

As in ancient Rome, the lack of easily-available entertainment has led to people seeking it elsewhere, in more destructive ways. There is a direct link between the winding up of the American circuses and the widespread civil unrest there. Instead of finding entertainment in sport, people are finding it in other people getting shot and beaten to death.

More worryingly, the bread is also winding up.

When Juvenal spoke of “bread” he was referring to the grain dole, another Roman invention for defraying rebellious sentiments. Because of the psychological effect of starvation, hungry populations soon become violent. The Roman masses were pacified with free grain, then free bread, wine and pork.

When this food dole wound up, people started going hungry, and this led to even more trouble than the boredom. A bored person can get entertained quickly by setting something on fire; a hungry person won’t be satisfied until they kill someone. For the Roman ruling classes, to not dole out bread meant the collapse of their society.

The West doesn’t have a grain dole, but we do have a system of social welfare which has much the same effect. It’s also being scaled back.

In America, negotiations for a second stimulus check are in doubt, because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on terms. The first stimulus check was granted because the coronavirus pandemic had destroyed many American jobs, but those jobs are yet to return, and therefore the economic stress has not gone away.

In New Zealand, the COVID-19 Resurgence Wage Subsidy – designed to have a similar effect to the American stimulus checks – is expiring later this week. The likely outcome is a high volume of job losses. Already the New Zealand economy has been hit hard by the near-total annihilation of our international tourism sector; further major job losses would cause widespread despair.

It’s possible that Donald Trump and Jacinda Ardern will extend welfare benefits, at least for now. But the largesse cannot be continued indefinitely. The New Zealand national debt was $US 59.6 billion in March this year, but has already blown out to $US 81.1 billion by September. They can’t keep borrowing money to keep the party going forever.

When these special coronavirus payments are stopped, the inevitable result will be an increase in the number of people taking to the streets in protest. Given how ugly sentiments already are, with multiple protesters having been shot dead in America over the past week, a wider collapse of order is a very realistic prospect.

In summary, society is held together by bread and circuses, and both of those are winding up thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. This phenomenon is occurring across the Western World, which suggests that we’re all in for some difficult times over the next 12 months or so.

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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The Four Ages Of The Internet

A previous essay on this page recounted the life cycle of Internet forums. The Second Hermetic Principle teaches us that as below, so above. As this essay will describe, the Internet itself is running on a life cycle – and we’re moving into the less enjoyable part of it.

The Golden Age of the Internet began in August 1995, with the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95. This operating system took the Internet out of the hands of the technological elite, and put it in the hands of the masses. This was the beginning of the personal computing revolution.

At first, the Internet appealed mostly to nerds, who had been starved of information thanks to the relative inefficiency of the book-and-library system. These nerds did what came naturally, which was to use the Internet to share information. They created all kinds of websites, most of them on subjects appealing to young men, like science, technology and engineering.

In the Golden Age of the Internet, websites consisted of little other than pure information and hyperlinks to more. Being restricted by bandwidth, websites focussed almost entirely on sharing the greatest quality of this info. Search engines such as Metacrawler indexed it all for ease of access. It was like having a library in every house.

The peak of the peak may have been around 2002, when an enormous number of small websites were available on GeoCities (later known as “GeoShitties”). This was also the peak of websites such as SlashDot, which appealed specifically to the programmers who were building the infrastructure of the Internet.

By 2003, the seeds of the decline had become apparent. Google AdSense was launched that year, which changed the web publishing game permanently. AdSense offered something truly revolutionary: cold, hard cash. But as is usually the case when cash is on the table, there were conditions.

The Google AdSense program was funded by advertisers, and those advertisers expected a certain degree of influence. In the same way that advertisers in newspapers 100 years ago exerted influence over what those newspapers published, AdSense advertisers pressured Google to not show ads on sites that carried certain content.

That meant content relating to illicit drugs, erotic literature, serial killers, violent anarchy and political extremism (i.e. all the interesting stuff) was produced less. This was the start of the great decline. Once Google AdSense money got involved, website owners started self-censoring to keep the shekels flowing in. The Golden Age of the Internet ended, and the Silver Age began.

The Silver Age of the Internet began on the 26th of September 2006, when FaceBook became open to everyone, and not just university students. This was the point at which social media really began to take off, a big deal because it meant that users could generate their own content. This steady stream of content could then be exploited by inserting advertising slots in it.

With the arrival of FaceBook, the Internet became a true commercial venture. Now there were billions of dollars involved. This was a Silver Age because of advertising, which corrupted the purity of the information. Although there was a greater quantity of information than ever, it had advertisements all through it.

The advertisers demanded more and more influence over the content. Eventually, FaceBook and YouTube became televisionised, with an extensive list of content restrictions. People started to get banned for calling each other ‘faggot’ or ‘nigger’. But still the Internet grew, to the point where the government decided that they had to get involved.

Once Big Government started to take an interest in what was being said on social media, and making up laws over who was allowed to say what, the Silver Age ended. The Bronze Age of the Internet began in April 2016, when Count Dankula was arrested for a YouTube video of a dog giving a Nazi salute. The freewheeling, freespeaking Internet of free expression was gone.

By the time of the Bronze Age of the Internet, there were so many retards online that much of cyberspace became detrimental to mental health. As the IQ of the average Internet user continued to decline, the quality of the average Internet experience became lower and lower. During the Golden Age of the Internet, the world’s retards bullied people for using computers – in the Bronze Age, they bully people by using computers.

If the Golden Age of the Internet saw its realisation, and the Silver Age saw its commercialisation, the Bronze Age saw its weaponisation. It was realised that, in the 21st Century, wars would be fought with information rather than bullets. The politicisation of the Internet saw people act to restrict the platform access of their ideological enemies.

By the time of writing this article, wrongthinkers are getting purged left, right and centre. Even websites like Reddit, founded in the twilight of the Golden Age specifically as a free-speech platform, are banning entire subforums on a weekly basis. It’s forbidden to discuss any subject that displeases the advertisers.

This has seen the rise and rise of imageboard culture, especially the chans such as 4chan. The ‘anything goes’ nature of these sites appeals to those who appreciated the Golden Age. In the Bronze Age of the Internet, those parts of cyberspace that still uphold the values of the Golden Age are dismissed as “cesspits”. This merely causes the appeal of the chans to grow further.

The Iron Age of the Internet is yet to begin. We can predict what it will look like: a totalitarian surveillance network in which the activities and social interactions of every citizen are tracked to the finest detail. 5G networks offer the bandwidth to transmit high-definition video footage faster than it can be viewed, and the advent of facial recognition technology means that they will know exactly where you are in real time.

Free speech restrictions might be bad now, but they can get worse. Improving AI tech will make it possible for any social media comment to be analysed and, if necessary, shadowbanned before anyone can see it. Even more ominously, the governments of all Western nations appear willing to increase Police harassment of online wrongthinkers.

When the Iron Age of the Internet is fully upon us, the Internet will be unrecognisably different from its Golden Age, much like today’s religions are radically different to those practiced during the Western spiritual tradition’s Golden Age in ancient Greece. We will then, as per Plato’s Republic, have to wait for a movement of philosopher-kings to overthrow the old Internet and institute a new one.

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 the middle of 2020.

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Billy Te Kahika And The Donald Trump Effect

The rise of Billy Te Kahika continues to confound many. An article in E-tangata magazine described it as “The rise of Maori MAGA“. As this article will examine, what Te Kahika is trying to achieve with the New Zealand Public Party is not original. He is walking a similar path to that taken by American President Donald Trump.

The parallels between Te Kahika and Trump are many. The most obvious parallel is that both are despised by the mainstream media.

The mainstream media savaged Trump from the beginning. From the moment Trump won the Republican nomination they ripped into him, declaring him a menace to human civilisation. The major news shows became the Two Minutes’ Hate from 1984, only directed at Trump instead of Emmanuel Goldstein.

The reason for this mainstream media hate was that, being a nationalist, Trump was a genuine outsider. All nationalists are outsiders in today’s system, because today’s system represents the complete victory of globalist interests. Globalist narratives, especially around foreign investment, trade and mass immigration, are now standard.

In New Zealand, the mainstream media has turned its guns on Te Kahika. The New Zealand Herald wrote a hitpiece smearing him as a conspiracy theorist, The Spinoff wrote a hitpiece smearing him as a conspiracy theorist and Stuff called this “the conspiracists’ election“. Chris Trotter’s column for The Daily Blog this week howled for the Government to keep an eye on the maverick Maori.

Astute observers will have noted that Billy Te Kahika is hated by the same people who hate Donald Trump.

Vinny Eastwood is entirely correct when he says that the New Zealand mainstream media is owned by international banking and financial interests. These interests own almost every media outlet, apart from the independents like The Vinny Eastwood Show and VJM Publishing (who are, predictably, written off as “conspiracy theorists” by the mainstream).

Ownership of the mainstream media by international banking and financial interests is why those media are always pushing globalist narratives. The reason why they keep pushing mass immigration and refugee resettlement is because banking and finance interests profit from increased housing demand. The reason why they excoriate nationalists and freethinkers is because they threaten this extremely profitable arrangement.

Like Trump, Billy Te Kahika speaks honestly about how the mainstream media lies, and how it works with the Government to manipulate public opinion. Like Trump, the mainstream media treats the nationalist Te Kahika as a direct enemy. The international banking and financial interests hate nationalists above all.

All this explains why Te Kahika has so much support among Maoris. The E-tangata article linked at the top of this page, in its hysteria about white supremacists, neglects to mention the powerful nationalist sentiments held by Maori people. It is these sentiments that make people fall in behind Te Kahika.

Despite the relentless and enduring attempt made by mainstream political and media interests to divide the New Zealand people into a Maori part and a white part always at each other’s throats, the vast majority of Maoris have rejected separatist narratives. They think primarily in terms of roots. This means that they feel strong bonds of solidarity with white people who also have deep roots in New Zealand.

Dan McGlashan proved in Understanding New Zealand that Maoris are strong supporters of the nationalist New Zealand First party, more so than the supposed “old white racist” demographic (who tends to vote National). This, more than any other factor, explains why a nationalist like Te Kahika has so much support among Maoris.

At this point it could be countered that Te Kahika is a long way from winning, so it doesn’t matter anyway. His best result in any preferred Prime Minister poll so far was 1%, and even then he rounded up. But Trump was himself once a rank outsider.

Before he won the Republican nomination, Trump was priced at $100 to win the Presidential election on BetFair. To say he was an outsider is an understatement. He was an outsider among outsiders, perhaps even a joke candidate. But what he said resonated.

The public felt that Trump was brave enough to speak truths that had been kept from them by the corrupt political and media establishments. Although Trump was sometimes wrong – as when he accused Barack Obama of being born in Kenya – he was right enough of the time for people to see him as an alternative to the Establishment. In a time when the Establishment is hated, that was enough.

Every intelligent person knows that the political and media establishments lie all the time. The lies they told to justify the War on Drugs are exemplary. The lies they told to justify the Iraq War are obscene. The lies they continue to tell, in order to prop up a financial system that sees so many young people without hope of owning a home and raising a family, are murderous.

These lies are effective when the entire apparatus of propaganda is under globalist control. The problem today is that people like Trump and Te Kahika can use social media to evade that control. Josef Goebbels’s second principle of propaganda states that “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority”. Te Kahika’s livestreams, like Trump’s tweets, get around all the gatekeepers.

When a people deprived of truth finally gets to hear some, the effect is like rainfall on a parched landscape. It makes the entire world come to life. This is the main reason why Te Kahika has got so much traction: he offers truth to those who have been deprived of it by the mainstream media. Te Kahika could go as far as Trump did: all the way to the highest position in the land.

The real Trump Effect was that the mainstream media’s hatred for Trump increased his support. Because the mainstream media are a collection of the most wretched, most shameless liars to ever exist, it stands to reason that if they tell you someone is bad, that person is probably good. As the mainstream media now turns itself to destroying Te Kahika, they might find that they propel him to victory instead.

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Why Inequality Destroys Nations

One often hears the argument that inequality destroys societies, but it isn’t easy to understand why. The mainstream media tells us that a rising tide lifts all boats, and so people ought to enjoy the bounty of the modern day without worrying about how other people have more. But the economic psychology of inequality is complicated. This essay explains.

Casting an eye over a list of countries ordered by their degree of income inequality, one trend leaps out: unequal countries tend to be shitholes, and egalitarian countries tend to be decent.

Among the most unequal countries are places like Brazil, Mexico and the majority of African countries. Among the most equal countries are the European ones, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea. The pattern is obvious: a strong correlation exists between economic equality and overall quality of life.

The reasons for this can be understood if we compare the motivations of individuals in equal societies to individuals in unequal ones. The simple rule is that once inequality gets to the point where you no longer have a stake in society, then you no longer have a stake in society. This has behavioural consequences.

In an equal society, the members closer to the bottom of it still have enough of a stake to feel engaged. They are not so far from the decision-making level that their desires are ignored. Having a meaningful chunk of power, they are incentivised to work towards society’s betterment (or at least its upkeep).

In equal societies, all members feel a sense of ownership. A sense of pride at the quality of life offered by the society follows naturally. With ownership and pride, a person will take action to uphold that society. This is why people in countries like Sweden, Canada and Australia tend to perform prosocial behaviours like putting their shopping trolleys away and disposing of their litter in bins.

In an unequal society, the members closer to the bottom are without influence. Decisions are made so far above their heads that they aren’t consulted. As such, the people at the bottom are not incentivised towards prosocial behaviour. They perform antisocial behaviours, like aggressive panhandling, theft, robbery, sex crimes and murder.

In a society like this, not everyone feels a sense of ownership. Those who don’t tend to not contribute to society’s upkeep. In exactly the same way that rented cars and houses are treated much worse than personally owned cars and houses, a society in which people can only rent a stake (at best) will be treated much worse than a society in which people can own one.

The inevitable result of increasing inequality is a decline in prosocial behaviour and an increase in antisocial behaviour. You might as well throw that Coke can in the gutter, because it isn’t you that will have to pay to clean it up. In fact, the more damage you can do to society the better, because it will take the bastards who locked you out down a peg or two.

New Zealand might be in the middle of the inequality pack, but it’s still practically impossible to own a home here without inheritance. The average wage today has less than 40% of the housebuying power that it had 26 years ago. Our society is now so unequal that what used to be the elementary sign of having a stake in it – owning a home – is practically a dream unless you’re born rich.

This inequality has all but destroyed our society. It’s easy to see why if one imagines how it has affected people’s motivations.

As a non-landowner who will never own land while the average wage cannot buy the average house, I don’t care what happens to society. I have no stake in it and will never have one as long as the prevailing economic circumstances continue. New Zealand is someone else’s property, and as such I don’t feel motivated to defend it or to do any work to maintain it.

It’s said that if too many people drop out of society, then our economy would collapse, leading to New Zealand becoming ungovernable, perhaps even to civil war. I say: “Good!” If civil war means that I can afford a house in five years, then bring on civil war!

Many people will be appalled to hear such reasoning. But such reasoning is inescapable once a person has no stake in society. If the order of society as being maintained at my expense, then bring on the chaos! It’s irrational to reason otherwise unless one is content to be the slave of the rich, effectively a serf whose labour will never allow them to own land.

Given this psychological calculus, it’s apparent that increasing inequality will inevitably lead to society collapsing as fewer and fewer people feel like they have an interest in keeping it going. Prosocial behaviour will decline, and antisocial behaviour will rise, to the point where the fabric of society no longer exists, and we are back in Hobbes’s state of all against all.

Eventually, inequality will get so bad that intelligent people born poor will realise from early childhood that they never had a chance. These people will be hardened revoutionaries by the time they become adults, and will know nothing other than hate. They will be exceptionally dangerous and capable of ushering in a new order of the world.

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