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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Gutmensch’?

For Clown World to be possible, the people building it have to have popular support. It has plenty of support, of course, among the ruling elites and the great capital interests that profit from the alienation, despair and fragmentation of the people. But how does it get support from the common person, who doesn’t benefit from Clown World? This essay explains.

‘Gutmensch’ is a German term that literally means ‘good human’. It’s a pejorative term that means something akin to “do-gooder” or “goody two-shoes”.

The gutmensch is someone who tries very hard to be seen to be doing the right thing, but who lacks the intellect to actually discern what the right thing is. They are not intelligent enough for philosophy, and they are not intelligent enough to understand the material world and to extrapolate from that, and they do not have a natural moral sense. So they have to take cues from the social world.

The process of determining right from wrong by way of observing the social world is an error-strewn one that takes decades to become any good – and is inaccurate at the best of times. As such, the gutmensch learns right from wrong from learning what the authorities say it is. Their parents, the government, their church, the boss, doesn’t matter – the authorities are always right.

The great weakness of this approach, of course, is that the social world can easily be manipulated by malicious actors. Most people older than children understand that there are many malicious people out there, and that it’s common for these malicious people to seek power in institutions that give them authority over others.

By the time intelligent people are 15 years old, they have figured out that hierarchies of power attract evil people and therefore it’s unwise to ever trust police officers, politicians, psychiatrists or priests. These intelligent people naturally distrust anyone who appears motivated to exult themselves or to assert control over other people.

The gutmensch never figures this out. He will go on blindly parroting what these authority figures say as if it were the word of God. For him, social dominance hierarchies can only be climbed by competence, and people can only become authorities if they were better than others. This child-like naivety makes it possible for all kinds of malicious actors to get support from gutmenschen.

These malicious actors prey on the sheep-like nature of the gutmensch to induce him to support policies which are in the interests of those malicious actors, but not in the interests of the gutmensch. Mass immigration is the foremost example. As such, the gutmensch can be herded to his doom, like a deer driven over a cliff.

The big problem with that is that the gutmenschen take the rest of us down with them. Their overwhelming mass support for the status quo and for the established rulers of society means that, in order to effect positive change, one has to fight against society itself. The gutmensch serves as a mindless drone guarding the elites, something that has to be overcome if Clown World is to be overcome.

Another way that the gutmensch weakens society is from his fear of taboos. There are so many things that the gutmensch forbids themselves from speaking about that, sometimes, talking to them feels like talking to a religious fundamentalist. Topics of race, religion, sex and gender differences cannot be discussed, and if they can be, only the most blue-pilled, Government-approved opinions can be offered.

All these taboos have the final effect of destroying conversation and making communication more difficult. In the final analysis, the gutmensch is, despite his intentions, a destroyer.

Although the gutmensch thinks himself an upstanding citizen who wouldn’t harm anyone, he was on the front lines of the Nazi and Communist battles against their own people, comprising a large proportion of those who ratted out their neighbours. The gutmensch is capable of committing any atrocity while thinking that, because the Government approved of them, they were doing a good thing.

Fundamental to gutmensch psychology is a terror of being judged, especially of being found unworthy. This is because the gutmensch has no real self esteem, and must find it elsewhere. Because his social equals are also pathetic, the gutmensch must seek approval from authority figures. This is why he is so eager to please them.

Underneath it all, gutmenschen are massively egotistical losers, so incredibly precious that they’ll happily go along with any mob, no matter how destructive, rather than risk disapproval. In their hearts, they know they are pathetic, which is why they resent those who are not. Fundamentally, then, gutmensch mentality is a slave morality.

In most cases, gutmenschen turn out the way they do because they have lived extremely sheltered lives. The typical gutmensch will never have travelled outside of their comfort zone, much less backpacked through the third world or lived in countries where they speak another language. They have never been challenged, and as such remain men of clay.

These gutmenschen evoke plenty of hate on account of that their self-righteous moralising makes people want to punch them. These sentiments are well warranted, because it is the gutmensch who normalises every government abuse, from those of the Nazis and Communists to the War and Drugs and alcohol prohibition.

The difference between a gutmensch and a baizuo is subtle, and mostly a matter of age and education. Perhaps the best way to explain the difference is by analogy to the animal kingdom. The baizuo is like a peacock: it preens, it appears vain, and its elaborate virtue signalling does more harm than good. The gutmensch, by contrast, is a simple herd animal. It doesn’t care about anything other than fitting in.

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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Everything’s Legal If You Have Superior Firepower

The majority of New Zealanders wander the streets in a child-like stupor, thoughts of flickering television and cellphone screens like a safety blanket around their minds. So when reality intrudes, it can have a powerfully disturbing effect. Sometimes people realise that life is much different to what the screens say it is. This essay explains one recent example.

Much discussion has filled conscious space recently on the subject of whether the Level 4 coronavirus lockdowns were legal in New Zealand. Many people, including Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges, have questioned whether New Zealand law actually affords the Government the ability to shutdown the entire country and to force people to stay in their homes.

Even more discussion was created by the release of the Sixth Labour Government’s COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill recently. Section 20 gives the right to any “enforcement officer” (notably not “Police officer”) to enter private property without a warrant if they have “reasonable grounds to believe” that Section 11 of the bill is not being complied with.

This section of the bill has upset many people, because it seems to be doing away with a number of fundamental human rights. It seems like we New Zealanders have suddenly lost the right to free assembly and the right to unreasonable search and seizure. How, these people are asking, can such a thing be possible?

Many of the people commentating on these issues haven’t thought hard enough about how the world actually works.

There are five million of us stuck down here in the South Pacific, closer to the middle of nowhere than any other nation. The British Empire that created the order of New Zealand society is long, long, long gone, the rump state (the United Kingdom) now being a sad parody of its former glory. We have not been independent for long enough to have created a philosophical or spiritual tradition that we can fall back on for wisdom.

Our situation is very much like that of William Golding’s boys in Lord of the Flies. There is no higher power to which we can appeal. There is no wise and benevolent authority looking out for the goodwill of all people. There is no God here, just the Sixth Labour Government. We’re all alone – and this loneliness risks turning us feral.

In the situation we’re in, the ten thousand or so Police officers in the country are the law. If you doubt this assertion, ask yourself this – what happens when a Police officer breaks the law? The answer is: nothing. If you doubt that assertion, wait for something to come from today’s revelation that the Police trialled facial recognition technology on the populace without their knowledge, and without permission to do so.

Or wait for anything to come from the Operation Whakahumanu harassment campaign, where hundreds of Police officers were sent to the houses of various Internet commentators in an effort to intimidate them into silence. Using the Police to intimidate one’s political critics is illegal – but there is no-one to hold the perpetrators to account.

The reality is this: the Government of our country is a pack of pirates, who have arrogated to themselves the right to enslave the rest of us with laws that are enforced by arse-licking sycophants, who are themselves happy to destroy their fellow man in exchange for a full belly. This is true whether the Prime Minister is from Labour or National, because in either case they represent the piratical ruling class and not the New Zealand people.

The arse-licking sycophants don’t care what the Government tells them to do, as long as they get paid and get pats on the head for being good boys. As this column has previously discussed, the Police will kill to enforce any law, no matter how trivial. This follows inevitably from the fact, as this column as also previously discussed, that the psychology of Police officers and their relationship to the Government is analogous to that of dogs and their masters.

However, if you don’t like it, what can you do about it? They have all the guns, therefore there’s nothing you can do, in practice, to resist their will. As Mao Tse Tung realised, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. One man with a firearm can easily keep several dozen under control out of a fear of getting shot. Ten thousand men with firearms, like our current Police force, confers legitimacy.

New Zealanders mistakenly think that our votes confer legitimacy to the Government, who in turn delegate some legitimacy to the Police. The reality is that whoever has the guns, the organisation and the will to use them has the power, and in our current situation that’s the Police and the Army. Therefore, it is the loyalty of the Police and the Army that confers power – and they take orders from the ruling class, both the visible government and the invisible government.

If you disagree, ask yourself by what process New Zealand law came to be the law in the first place, or ask yourself what the law would be if New Zealand was invaded by a hostile foreign power and an occupation government installed. The fact is that all life on Earth operates under the law of the gun: everything is legal if you have the firepower to get away with making it so.

There is only one simple way out of this grim situation.

The first step is to rally around this sevenfold conception of inherent human rights. The Sevenfold Conception is an elementalist exposition of inherent, God-given human rights that are not to be violated by any government law or action. If all New Zealanders would rally around this conception, we would no longer allow the Government to divide and conquer us by playing off factions that support one right against factions that support another.

The second step is to normalise the recognition of this sevenfold conception of human rights until it becomes commonly accepted, in all instances, that it applies. This will involve the raising of a parallel Police force – one that is loyal to the soil, the water, the wind and the Sun of these isles, and to the people from them above all.

A Police force that has been made to swear to the Sevenfold Conception before becoming officers will not slavishly obey orders to violate the human rights of New Zealanders. Not before the Sevenfold Conception is widely understood, and is widely insisted upon, can we can expect that our rights to free assembly, to self-defence, to free speech, to unreasonable search and seizure and to access spiritual sacraments will go unviolated.

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The Political Alliance That Would Terrify The New Zealand Establishment

Four months out from a General Election, people start talking about potential political alliances. Once it becomes clear that certain parties are unlikely to clear the 5% threshold, teaming up becomes the obvious way forwards. Although most discussions of this nature are unfruitful, there’s one option that would upend the New Zealand political order.

The Establishment parties are National on the right, Labour on the left and New Zealand First in the centre. These parties are full of the old, mature people who want to maintain the status quo but with slight adjustments. These parties represent those who already have it good, so they most they want to do is tinker.

From this cozy arrangement came the Alliance Party, which provided an alternative on the left. This alternative left is now represented by the Green Party, who developed out of the Alliance (although the Greens are arguably now part of the neoliberal globalist establishment). The other alternative parties are ACT on the right and The Opportunities Party in the centre.

These three parties are the only ones to have consistently offered meaningful alternatives to the status quo over the past quarter century.

The basic logic of an ACT-TOP alliance is that the two parties share many sentiments, both moral and economic. Both parties oppose cannabis prohibition, both are in favour of euthanasia rights and abortion rights. Both appeal primarily to young and educated people. An alliance between the two might allow for them to come close to the 5% threshold on their own merits, without needing Seymour to win in Epsom.

This hints at the idea that gives National and Labour party strategists sleepless nights: a grand alliance between all of the anti-Establishment parties.

As it is, the anti-Establishment forces are so disorganised that the major parties can easily knock them out. All that Labour and the Greens have to do to keep the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party from threatening their position is to adopt ALCP policies as they become popular, and mainstream voters will vote for the established left parties so as to “not waste a vote”.

Likewise, National can keep ACT and the New Conservatives small by adopting the most popular of their policies. If either of them have a policy that attracts more than half a percent of votes on its own (which is about what the ALCP wins), National can and will simply adopt it themselves, leaving the smaller parties holding their dicks.

What would really put the shits up the Establishment would be if all of these minor parties, instead of letting themselves get divided and conquered, came together as a single bloc. This anti-Establishment bloc would unite on the basis that a new political order is of primary importance, with the precise details being secondary (note that the New Conservatives, not wanting change, are not part of this).

Many people want alternative politics, but are put off the Greens because they know that if the Greens get enough to get into Parliament, they will inevitably bring rubbish like Marama Davidson and Golriz Ghahraman in with them. They are also put off ACT because ACT’s unrepentant neoliberalism seems like a recipe for more of the suffering that we’re already enduring.

This alliance would assuage both concerns. Not only would the Greens be limited to a few members (or, better yet, excluded altogether), but the presence of centrist elements would help moderate Seymour’s soulless “show me the money” hypercapitalism. Mirroring this, Seymour would provide a sober restraint to the potential kookery from the other parties.

It’s worth noting here that, should it be decided the Greens really are an Establishment party, it’s possible to find an element of the alternative left elsewhere. Amanda Vickers is intelligent, has developed a respected social media profile and has done good work for the Social Credit Party, which once was strong enough to get over 20% in the 1981 General Election. Either she, the Social Credit Party leader Chris Leitch, or both, could combine with the best ACT and TOP candidates to create an Alternative A-Team.

Such an alliance would benefit from the leadership of Seymour, who is highly respected among Generation X and younger voters (some go as far as to declare him the true Leader of the Opposition). It could count on the current numbers of votes achieved by all the constituent parties (ACT got 13,075 votes in 2017, and TOP 63,260), plus two major groups of new voters.

The first are those put off from supporting alternative parties by the 5% threshold. This threshold is a hurdle so high that only three new parties have surmounted it in 24 years – the Alliance/Greens, New Zealand First and ACT, and the latter now relies on winning the Epsom electorate for any Parliamentary representation (1).

This division of alternative forces across three or more parties severely weakens them, and the 5% threshold, like a battlefield reaver, finishes them off. An ACT-TOP-Socred alliance would obviate any realistic fear of inducing wasted votes – even if they did not get 5%, they would still have Epsom, and so could realistically count on at least four or five seats to begin with.

The second major group of likely new voters are those who are put off by all the retards in the other parties. Characters like Davidson and Ghahraman, although they are idolised by Marxist malcontents, place a hard upper limit on how much support their parties can ever get from the public at large. The vast majority of voters listen to them and are repulsed.

A genuine Alternative Alliance with a top seven of David Seymour, Geoff Simmons, Amanda Vickers, some intelligent young candidates like TOP’s Joshua Love and Matthew Pottinger, and rounded off by ACT’s deputy Beth Houlbrooke, would have a minimum of objectionable weirdos while still maintaining a firm anti-Establishment line. The coming of such a movement would land tsunami-like upon the New Zealand Establishment.

This would not require the dismantling of the existing parties, merely their temporarily coming together for the sake of the General Election. Then the nature of the alliance could be revisited.

(1) This article initially stated that ACT has never cleared the 5% threshold. Credit to Stephen Berry for the correction.

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Writing Characters of Lead

A character of lead is one who is yet to be affected by the energy of your story. They might be a peasant, or the son of a blacksmith, or the daughter of any random family. In principle, such a character could be practically anything as long as they are not in any way enlightened.

Lead is a metaphor for the base condition of man. In this sense, the lead represents the lowest possible spiritual level. A character at this level is yet to hear the call to adventure, and has no concept of it. They will not believe in God, or in anything spiritual (although they might claim to). They will be a human being in their natural, material state.

Going back to the metaphor of light, a character of lead could be considered entirely unilluminated. There is no higher order in them; their daily lives are characterised by fear. Lead is sometimes represented by the planet Saturn, this being the furthest from the light of the Sun. As such, it is sometimes represented by an old man with a wooden leg and a scythe, all three components suggesting death.

A character of lead has no higher calling, or even any idea of what that would feel like. They have no great battle to win, whether external or internal. Their lives tend to be a string of battles against whichever adversary appears in the moment. This is usually whoever is preventing them from gratifying whichever impulse is currently gripping them.

Three of the most salient features of lead are that it is soft, dark and dense.

Characters of lead are soft because they are passive. This softness is not physical but spiritual. Lead is extremely easy to bend, and this is also true of characters of lead. Men and women of lead are not the ones that will stand up and lead a rebellion against a tyrannical king. Instead, they yield.

This softness doesn’t prevent passive aggression. Characters of lead are capable of all kinds of passive aggression, but they lack a conception of honour. Therefore, they are not hard enough for direct assaults, and must slink about in the shadows looking for the backstab.

Characters of lead are dark in the sense that they are of the soil and live close to it. It’s likely that such a character will be dressed in blacks and browns, perhaps of sackcloth. Their facial expressions are commonly “leaden-faced”, and their manner of walking can be described as “leaden-footed”.

In many cases, the emotions of characters of lead will also be dark. Because of the absence of spiritual enlightenment, characters of lead take offence easily and hold bitter grudges for a long time. Sometimes their low frequency will make them stand out in a room of people. They regularly appear sinister to characters of higher frequencies.

Lead is also dense. This reflects the way that characters of lead are often described as not very intelligent. A character of lead is one that has extreme difficulty learning from adversity or changing their behaviour to avoid future suffering, at least in the long term.

On a metaphorical level, this density means that they are not easily affected by light. A character of lead might find themselves in the presence of a highly spiritual individual and not appreciate it. Spiritual insight is to characters of lead as pearls before swine.

Characters of lead might be noteworthy for an advanced sense of smell. Being of lead, they tend to be very close to nature, and to the soil. This can give them certain advantages. Whereas the more refined characters might be precious on occasion, the characters of lead are perfectly happy wallowing in the mud.

A character of lead can be motivated by anything, usually whatever instinct happens to flow through their veins at any moment. Typically this is fear – having no spiritual sense, the character of lead has no reason to be brave about anything. A fear of death is perhaps the most salient feature of their mentality.

Despite being passive, a character of lead can provide an impetus to your story. Their fear of death may cause them to take a cowardly action that sets off a chain of reactions. Someone else may have entrusted them with the responsibility of standing firm, only to have them yield.

Characters of lead tend to be young, because lead represents the earliest stage in development. A callow youth who is yet to learn any major life lessons, and as such does not respect his betters, is archetypal. A middle-aged character of lead might be pitifully immature, having failed to learn from their mistakes. An elderly character of lead might be on death’s door, life’s spirit leaving them.

Characters of lead tend to cause a lot of strife. Although they don’t have the outright fondness for violence that marks out characters of iron, their lack of spiritual refinement makes them unforgiving. As such, they are prone to petty feuds and grievances. The tendency is for them to leave destruction in their wake.

Because characters of lead don’t tend to have any spiritual sense at all, it’s very rare for them to think about life after death, or even further ahead than the next winter. If another character tries to speak to them about spiritual subjects, they’ll probably get a shrug. They don’t share the contempt for the spiritual possessed by the characters of iron and silver – they’re simply indifferent.

Piss and fart jokes, on the other hand, are greatly amusing to characters of lead. In fact, the more crass and vulgar the better, because that will more vigorously stick it to the snotty characters of silver and mercury. Toilet humour is the perfect accompaniment to characters of lead.

It’s common for characters of lead to serve as thieves or rogues. This is because they have very little in the way of moral compunctions – at least not when it comes to other people’s suffering. When it comes to their own suffering, on the other hand, they can be just as precious as anyone else.

In summary, characters of lead occupy the bottom rung of spiritual development. As such, they represent humans in their unrefined state. Characters of lead are not necessarily evil, although they are certainly capable of evil acts. This level is often where the protagonist of your story will start, and will only transform once the magic of your story begins.

This is an excerpt from The Alchemy of Character Development by Viktor Hellman, the sixth book in the Writing With Psychology series.

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