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Clown World Chronicles: Who Is Doomer?

The horrifying and seemingly hopeless nature of Clown World can easily lead to despair. As suicide rates climb all around the world, one member of the Clown World pantheon grows ever stronger. He is the Doomer, and his presence can be felt everywhere.

The Doomer cuts a depressing figure. His very appearance is doom. Sunken eyes peer out from a pallid, unshaven face, the expression on which is one of dread. A smouldering cigarette juts from his mouth – it should have been ashed five minutes ago but he isn’t paying attention. He looks extremely tired, the sort of tired where one needs to sleep but can’t.

His clothing, like his beanie, is black and grey, the colours of depression. The Doomer fears and is anxious for the future, but at the same time he is tormented by the fact that he doesn’t know why. He understands that he lives in a time of great material wealth, and feels guilt that it doesn’t bring him happiness. But deep in his heart, he knows that Clown World isn’t normal.

Clown World is the Doomer, and the Doomer is Clown World. He feels the pain and fear of the world acutely. The Doomer manifests in the expectation that everything in the world is about to get worse. His time comes in the great autumns of the world cycle. When the nights are warm and dark, the Doomer stalks the streets.

The Doomer is one of the Elder Gods, occupying the position beyond the Virgin on the Negative Masculine Axis. The essential nature of this axis is passivity – but where the Virgin is physically and socially passive, the Doomer is spiritually passive.

This spiritual passivity is not only the key to understanding the Doomer, but understanding Clown World itself. The Doomer is very much Clown World in microcosm. His suffering might seem overwhelming, but the grim truth – which he is unwilling to accept – is that most of it is self-inflicted. His own habits and his own moral failures have led him here.

The spiritual passivity of the Doomer has made him indifferent to his spiritual needs. The Doomer doesn’t meditate, because he can’t stand the noise in his head. Either he doesn’t use spiritual sacraments or he uses them irresponsibly. Most of the time he’s under the influence of pharmaceuticals or alcohol, or smoking something. Anything to numb the longing for a better world.

Nightwalking is the closest that the Doomer gets to a spiritual practice. This he does compulsively, as if an automaton, driven by a desperate need to escape his suffering. But in nightwalking he finds peace. Perhaps it is from intuiting the lesson of the streetlight: it’s forever meaningful to shine in the darkness, because a new dawn always comes.

This is one important facet of the Doomer: he contains within himself the seed to grow into a Bloomer, his exact opposite. The Doomer might be in pain, but that’s only because he cares enough to keep going. In that sense, the Doomer represents a flicker of light in every spiritual darkness. His spirit is more than just suffering – it’s also that which endures it.

As mentioned above, the Doomer is what a Virgin becomes if they continue along the Negative Masculine Axis, of which the Virgin is the Younger God. The most common path to doomerhood isn’t an extended spell of involuntary celibacy (i.e. it’s not merely extended virginity). When men become Doomers, it’s usually because they succeed in attracting a woman and establishing a romantic relationship – and then it collapses.

The Doomer is not created from a man who can’t get what he wants, but the reverse. Once a man gets what he wants, and finds that it isn’t sufficient to make him happy, he can become a Doomer. If a Virgin makes love to a beautiful woman and then the next morning realises that it didn’t solve any of his existential problems, he’s taken the first step to transitioning into a Doomer.

Doomers became numerous after the Great Financial Crisis, which could be argued to herald the descent into Clown World. It was in 2008 that an entire generation of men became faced with the reality that they would not enjoy the same easy lives that their fathers did. A few years after that, the doom had become widespread and permanent.

The solution for the Doomer is to develop spiritual strength, which will enable his will to correctly guide his mind and body to make the right moves. In doing so, he transitions onto the Positive Masculine Axis and becomes a Chad.

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.

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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Understanding The New Definition Of “Crime”

Most of us are still getting our heads around the bizarre attempt to redefine racism as “prejudice plus power”. Well, hold on to your pants, because there’s about to be another effort to redefine a simple word to suit a political agenda. This essay has the details.

If you’re in Generation X, the definition of racism is simple enough. If you dislike someone because of their race, and not because of personal characteristics that are worthy of hate, then you are a racist. You have judged a person prematurely on account of your bigotry, which is prejudice. Prejudice is bad because it doesn’t give other people a fair deal.

We had just gotten our heads around how racism was a bad thing when the definition changed.

Now, or so we’re aggressively told, racism is defined as prejudice plus power. This new definition asserts that only structural and institutional racism counts as actual racism, and that racism that isn’t backed by institutional power is merely prejudice. In practice, this means that non-white people can’t be racist because their racism isn’t “backed by institutional power”.

This is clearly bullshit, but enough morons have fallen for it to make it possible for the next move to be made.

In recent months, keen observers have noticed another attempt at redefining language, this time relating to crime. Some criminal actions are made out to be horrific atrocities, whereas other criminal actions, much worse than in the first group, are made out to be perfectly and understandable courses of action that no reasonable person would complain about.

For instance, 472 people have been shot and killed by American Police officers in 2020 so far. At that rate, some 30 have been killed between the death of George Floyd and the writing of this article. The crucial difference between the death of Floyd and the hundreds of others is simple: Floyd was a black man killed by a white one. As such, the severity of the crime is much greater than if it had been different.

The new logic is that a criminal act isn’t really a criminal act unless it’s coming from a place of power. In the same way that racism isn’t real racism unless it’s committed by those deemed to have power, now crime isn’t really crime unless it’s committed by those deemed to have power.

This is why no-one cares about the fact that American blacks kill 4,000 other American blacks every year. These might be killings, but they’re not really murders because they’re not coming from a place of institutional power. As such, they’re not worthy of any outrage.

It’s also why no-one cares about children getting beaten to death. Children are almost always the same race as their parents, and consequently there is seldom a racial power differential between parent and child. Absent such a differential, crimes aren’t considered severe enough to warrant attention. No-one knows who Sofia Taueki-Jackson is, and no-one cares.

In the new paradigm, not having power means that you can basically do whatever the fuck you like for whatever reason. Someone else is always to blame. No matter how wretchedly unenlightened your conduct, someone else is always to blame. There will always be a chorus of slaves willing to make excuses.

The morality can be summed up thusly: to have power is to be immoral, to be powerless is to be moral.

This morality explains why the authorities of the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone have been filmed taking action to enforce the zone’s borders and immigration policy. The authorities of CHAZ are powerless, therefore they get to enforce immigration laws (in any case, if they are not weak then they represent those who are). This is why it’s moral for them to enforce borders but not moral for America to do it.

Enforcing immigration laws is only a bad thing if you have power. If you don’t have power, then it’s fair for you to violate other people’s boundaries. This is (of course) never explicitly stated, but it’s implied. Only the strong are obliged to hold to moral laws. The weak can do what they like, and all blame can be safely deflected onto the structure of society.

This logic is self-contradictory, because such a system does nothing to abolish hierarchies or power differentials – it merely grants ultimate authority to those who decide what power is. If power is defined as wealth, then the powerless are the poor. If power is defined as white privilege, then the powerless are the non-whites. If power is defined as social status, then the powerless are the degenerate and the outcast.

In reality, under such a system, all power lies in the hands of those who can most effectively claim to represent the powerless. And those people will be those who were powerful in the beginning, and who are powerful in all times and places: members of the ruling class who are able to persuade others to follow and obey them.

Understanding the new definition of crime requires the recognition that the Western World is now fully in the grips of slave mentality. We have given up on the concept of self-mastery entirely, and now indulge baser instincts in a manner little different from animals. This won’t change until the world goes through a revolution that reasserts master morality and an honour culture.

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The Four Basic Political Subjects

Underneath all the talk about politics today lies a great confusion. People talk about what politics is supposed to achieve, but they have generally forgotten who it’s supposed to achieve it for. For our ancestors, the political subject was obvious, but for us it is not. This essay explains.

The first and original political subject was the tribe. In the biological past, humans had no conception of nations or kingdoms. One was born into a tribe of roughly 50-150 people, and these people were your blood kin. As such, their interests were your interests, in almost every case.

Every member of the tribe was in the ingroup, and everyone not in the tribe was in the outgroup. This made politics very simple. If you encountered a stranger, they were the enemy, and it was acceptable to do anything to that stranger if it furthered the interests of the tribe. This tribal mentality still exists today, only it has become much weaker than it used to be (in most cases).

The second political subject is the state. This came into being when civilisation did. With the advent of civilisation, it was possible to have two strangers share the same space without chimping out and attacking each other. This meant that it was possible to have towns and cities made up of people from different tribes, perhaps even competing ones.

With the advent of towns and cities, it was necessary to have an administrator class that dealt with any disagreements that arose. The bringing together of different tribes meant competing schedules of moral values. These administrators, employed to smooth over differences between tribes, became the state. Their different approaches for settling quarrels became ideologies.

One way of dealing with the tensions created by identification with the tribe was to identify with the state instead. In practice, this is much the same as identifying with an ideology. Thus, a judge who was from a particular tribe would not necessarily rule in favour of his own tribesman. This was a radical new way of thinking when compared to the tribal solidarity model. It required a new political subject.

Thinking in terms of the state provided this new subject. If people were able to abandon their previous allegiances to their tribes, they could band together and build a mighty state that challenged the world, such as Rome or America. The memetic hybrid vigour brought about by multiple tribes all agreeing to work together under a state banner proved to be immensely powerful.

Not every civilisation succeeded in making this transition, however. If a state was not capable of creating an egregore powerful enough to persuade people to abandon their tribal allegiances, the divided loyalties caused by those remaining allegiances would pull the state apart from the inside. Corruption reigns in every state where tribal allegiances continue to hold sway.

The third political subject is the individual. This political subject arose as a way of settling firstly the tensions between those who identified with the tribe and those who identified with the state, and secondly the tensions between those who identified with different states or ideologies. In the world of 2020, the individual is the default political subject.

The logic is that, by identifying with the individual ego, people would no longer be drawn into conflict on account of competing tribal or ideological loyalties. Only caring about oneself might seem selfish and egotistical, but it has the bonus effect of settling tensions between groups. If people only care about the next hit, they will not take collective action.

It is true that what Adam Curtis called the Century of the Self led to a great peace. In recent decades, Hitlers and Stalins have been impossible on account of that no-one would follow them. Collective efforts demand individual sacrifices, and people who identify with the individual ego will not make them. However, this identification brings its own problems.

The fourth political subject is the consciousness itself.

The limitations of identifying with the individual ego are now obvious. Although doing so was a logical move forwards from the horrors of state-worship, the human animal is still fundamentally a social one, and it has social needs. Identifying with the individual ego might make warfare between nations less likely, but it sharply increases the emotional and spiritual suffering of the people, who find that their lives no longer have any meaning.

Some philosophers, like Alexandr Dugin, have suggested a return to Dasein as the basic political subject (Dugin frequently refers to Heidegger’s Dasein in The Fourth Political Theory). This is much the same thing as having consciousness as the basic political subject. In either case, it solves most of the problems of the first three political subjects.

Identifying with the consciousness allows the best of all worlds. Not only can a person meet their social and spiritual needs through connection to other conscious beings, but they can also do so without necessarily getting set against them because of tribal or ideological loyalties. Identifying with consciousness means that one is automatically allied and opposed to every other person.

There’s one problem with this otherwise elegant solution: most people have never learned to distinguish between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. They don’t know the difference between the True Self and the False Self. As such, most people operate either on the level of crude instinct (and thus tend towards tribalism), the level of conditioned responses (and thus tend towards fetishising the state or an ideology) or on both levels at once (and thus tend towards soulless globohomo consumer whoring).

As is so often the case, it appears that our great challenge is primarily a spiritual challenge. Identification with the consciousness might prevent us from getting drawn into tribal or ideological conflicts, and it might prevent us from getting bogged down in mindless anomie. But it will only be an option for those with the spiritual acumen to meditate and perform self-inquiry.

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Writing Characters Of Mercury

The second-highest element on the spiritual hierarchy is mercury. Being one level higher than silver, mercury is the realm a person enters when they are close to perfection. This is represented by the liquid nature of mercury, which reflects a great intensity of spiritual power. Metaphorically, this liquidity suggests that mercury is close to moving beyond the material.

The ancients considered Mercury to be the Messenger of the Gods. This reflects the fact that mercury is the closest to the divine element of gold. Mercury is the closet planet to the Sun, so the Sun shines on Mercury before it shines on anything else. Characters of mercury ought to be able to instill a sense of awe in the characters made of baser elements.

Like silver, mercury is lustrous. Unlike silver, mercury is a liquid at room temperature. This is why it was once known as quicksilver, or water-silver. Alchemically, this property of being a liquid suggests that silver has been quickened to reach the stage of mercury. It suggests that something extra has been added to mere silver, some invisible energy that has had visible effects, and which has transmuted that silver to a higher state.

This quickening is from where we get the term ‘mercurial’. The term mercurial is used to describe people whose behaviour is hard to predict. There’s a more precise meaning – people whose behaviour is hard to predict because they are more closely attuned to the Will of God than anyone else. The characters of mercury are semidivine.

The characteristic quality of mercury is genuine intelligence in the form of a divine spark. This is where it contrasts with silver. Although a character of silver might have a rudimentary intelligence, perhaps enough to give them an advantage over the characters of baser elements, characters of mercury are more intelligent still. They are easily able to perceive the weaknesses of characters of silver, let alone the lesser elements.

Characters of mercury are more intelligent than the others, but they are not always more humble. Although they can be megalomaniacal, they are not prone to the Conceit of Silver, on account of that they are too closely attuned to God’s will. A character of mercury will not resent someone greater than themselves, but will rather co-operate with that person as a way of drawing God’s energy into the world. This disinclination to fight presages the frequency of the characters of gold.

Reflecting this humility, characters of mercury have more compassion than characters of baser elements. They are rarely motivated by purely egoic concerns. Rather, they work to end the suffering of others around them, and as such serve as messengers of the gods by expressing the will of the divine.

However, not being perfect, characters of mercury are still vulnerable to any of the lusts, rages and arrogances of the baser elements. They are just much less likely to fall prey to such impulses, and, when they do, they make amends much more readily. As such, they are clearly more noble in nature than most other people, and they tend to get treated as such.

The big danger of the character of mercury is that their ambition can cause great suffering. Although a character of mercury would never torture someone like a character of iron would, and they wouldn’t steal from someone like a character of lead would, they are still capable of causing immense suffering. Alexander was a character of mercury, if anyone was – and his conquests left piles of bodies in their wake.

The example of Alexander mentioned above perhaps best exemplifies the essence of a character of mercury. Being so close to perfection, they are, in a sense, above being judged by normal men. Chararacters made of baser elements have trouble enough understanding characters of silver; characters of mercury are beyond their understanding. To these baser characters, the characters of mercury appear as forces of nature.

Hindu Yogis associate mercury with the third eye chakra. This chakra is itself associated with intuition and foresight. A character of mercury will have great foresight, being able to see into the metaphysical world. This grants them the ability to predict the future and to see into people’s souls. A character of mercury will have powers of perception that the baser elements may not even believe are possible.

These powers of perception distinguish them from characters of silver. Although a character of silver might be able to accumulate a great amount of knowledge and apply it to, for example, building a bridge, this knowledge is limited to knowledge of the physical world and the phenomena in it. The character of mercury can see into the metaphysical world – something that most other characters don’t even believe exists. As such, they are very much the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

The concept of a third eye relating to spiritual awakening gives away the essential nature of the character of mercury, which is someone who is almost enlightened. Although not perfect, their every action will be permeated with this greater illumination – which is precisely what makes them seem mercurial to the baser elements. Because the baser elements cannot see into the metaphysical world, they cannot understand why the characters of mercury make the decisions they do. Characters of mercury can easily appear mad to those of baser elements.

Characters of mercury are the sort of people who set the course of history. They can be found leading kingdoms and empires. A character of mercury is sufficiently impressive that even characters of silver feel awestruck in their presence. As such, they are capable of provoking immense resentment, as did Julius Caesar.

If your story involves a character of mercury, it’s feasible that resentment for them can provide the impetus for the plot. A character of silver might become envious and try to take them down, perhaps employing a character of iron to do so. A character of copper who serves as a priest, resenting the influence that a character of mercury has among the townsfolk, might assemble a mob to drive them out of town.

If not in politics, characters of mercury can be great artists or scientists. Here they distinguish themselves from characters of silver as genius distinguishes itself from mere brilliance. The characters of silver may be exceptionally skilled at applying methods and techniques to create a masterpiece, but only the characters of mercury have the power to create something truly original.

A modern representation of a character of mercury is William Shakespeare in the film Shakespeare in Love, or John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Such characters clearly stand out from those around them, even if those around them are of silver or copper.

It’s very tempting to have a character of mercury as the protagonist of your story. Being genuinely intelligent, it’s easy to write a story in which they overcome the challenges placed before them. However, being already of the second-highest element, this leaves little room for the character to develop over the course of your story.

If a character of mercury serves as a minor character, it may be to enlighten your protagonist. Your protagonist might work in their service, or they might engage the character of mercury to teach them about some important issue. In either case, the character of mercury will likely be fundamental to the plot.

This article is from Viktor Hellman’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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