Understanding New Zealand: Wealth and Poverty II

If we wish to go deeper than simply calculating correlations between median personal income and various demographic categories, we can take a look at the next level down of the Great Fractal, and examine correlations between income bands and specific industries.

It’s apparent from the numbers that winning working class loyalty is a battle between Labour and New Zealand First.

Labour does the best out of people who have next to nothing at all. The correlation between voting Labour in 2014 and having a net personal income of $5-10K was 0.45, and with having lost money in the year or having nil income the correlation was 0.54.

New Zealand First, by contrast, tended to dominate the lower working class vote. The correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2014 and income was above 0.70 for all of the income bands between $10K and $30K. For both Labour and New Zealand First, however, the correlation between voting for them in 2014 and any income band above $70K was -0.40 or even more strongly negative.

Although Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party voters were generally doing worse than average, they were closer to the middle than either Labour or New Zealand First voters. The correlation between voting for them in 2014 and being in the $50-60K income bracket was a significant 0.32, and even for the $150K+ bracket it was -0.31, significantly lower than average but barely so.

The National Party was predictably more oriented towards the middle classes, especially the wealthier ones, although this correlation was not as strong as one might have expected. For all of the income brackets above $70K the correlation with voting National in 2014 was between 0.34 and 0.36, which was significant but not particularly.

National did better than Labour in the $50-60K bracket, which is possibly where the winning of the election was more than anywhere else. After all, this bracket contains the sort of voters who don’t particularly win or lose from higher or lower taxes and so they tend to vote on apparent competence over ideology.

Voting for the National Party in 2014 had a negative correlation with every income band underneath $50K, although the correlations were not significant for the $15-25K income brackets, which were dominated by New Zealand First.

This creates an interesting contrast with the most established other right of centre party, ACT. The ACT party has no extra pull among the young in the $15-25K bracket – all of the income brackets between $10-40K have a correlation of -0.50 or stronger with voting ACT in 2014.

In the $15-25K income bracket there is little difference in the strength of correlation with either the National or the Labour parties. This is probably the result of one or more contradictory trends. Probably there are large numbers of people in this income bracket who, despite being poor, can count on being reasonably wealthy in a few decades, and so vote National in anticipation.

This phenomenon, of a small number of young people voting National because they expect to be wealthy in the future, is evidence of a burgeoning class system in New Zealand.

Winning the loyalty of the middle classes is essentially a battle between National and the Greens.

Voting Green in 2014 has a negative correlation with all income brackets between $10-50K, which will surprise anyone who might have thought the Greens stood for the poor and for those struggling. They have a significant positive correlation with the income band that is full of young students – between voting Green in 2014 and being in the $5-10K bracket is 0.30.

By contrast, voting Green in 2014 has a positive correlation with all income brackets above $50K, which confirms the picture that they represent the liberal urban elite rather than either the rural elite (National), the urban poor (Labour) or the rural poor (New Zealand First).

Perhaps the most interesting division of the middle class is its divide into managers and professionals.

The managers tend to be more right wing – voting National in 2014 has a correlation of 0.56 with being a manager, whereas for being a professional it is a not significant 0.10. The professionals tend to be more liberal – voting Greens in 2014 has a correlation of 0.73 with being a professional, whereas for being a manager it is a not significant 0.08.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

‘I Like Smoking Weed’ Is a Perfectly Legitimate Argument

There is a faulty premise in the national consciousness – the premise that the pro-cannabis lobby has the responsibility to make the case for legalising cannabis before prohibition can be repealed. All kinds of politicians, from Andrew Little to Peter Dunne, have trotted out this lazy deception.

This line of rhetoric is false because it relies on a more fundamental premise, which is that the manner cannabis was made illegal was legitimate in the first place.

The usual apologia is that the politicians are our lawful representatives and so the laws they pass are done so with our consent, and so the politicians have the consent of the governed, and so all the laws they have passed are legitimate, including the ones pertaining to cannabis prohibition.

Basic logic that even a child can understand will tell you that, in the case of cannabis, the lack of a victim makes the law against it categorically different to other laws.

Punching people in the face is bad because it causes suffering.

Stealing someone’s food is bad because it will make them suffer from hunger.

Killing people is bad because it causes suffering to the remaining friends and family (not to mention the person while they’re being killed).

Murdering, shooting, stabbing, raping, kidnapping, defrauding, robbing, stealing, assaulting and battering – all of these are crimes because they have victims.

Outside of the delusional fantasy role-playing world that judges, lawyers and politicians have invented, crimes are distinguished from non-crimes on the basis that crimes cause suffering, not on the basis that a bunch of paedophiles in Wellington have decreed them thus.

This might sound really obvious to any Buddhist readers out there, but to many Kiwis, conditioned from childhood to obey authority without ever questioning its legitimacy, it appears revelatory.

It also puts the moral responsibility back on us to consider if the laws being passed by our supposed representatives actually have the effect of reducing suffering in New Zealand or not. The responsibility is not on our political representatives to make moral decisions on our behalf, because politicians are men of silver and philosophy is the preserve of everyone.

One argument is that cannabis, even if not directly harmful, may be indirectly harmful because of long-term health considerations of the user that the general taxpayer has to pay to treat. This argument contends that we ought to wait for science to prove that cannabis is relatively harmless.

The truth is this – we don’t need to prove that science says cannabis should be legal because science was never used to make it illegal. We also don’t need to prove that cannabis is harmless because harmless is not the standard things have to reach in order to be legal.

It’s legal to consume any of alcohol, caffeine, sugar, fat or tobacco to whatever extent one likes and to have the taxpayer cover any medical costs that may arise.

It’s legal to fill the tank of your car up with petrol, a vital and ever-diminishing resource, and to drive around and around in circles for no reason.

It’s legal to join a rugby team and to hit another person in a tackle with the intent of injuring them and to break a bone oneself and to go on ACC.

It’s legal to go into a forest with a rifle and shoot dead a whole bunch of large mammals.

All of these activities arguably cause more harm than smoking cannabis does, even under the broadest interpretation of health issues.

The standard to make cannabis illegal – which has never been met and which never will be met – is that there is more suffering under a regime of cannabis freedom than under a regime of cannabis prohibition.

Until this standard is met, no further reason for using cannabis need be given than ‘I like smoking weed.’

Why Lucifer is a Symbol of Enlightenment

Even in his aspect of the fallen angel, Lucifer is a symbol of enlightenment. In his place as King of the World, Lucifer shows the way towards maximal excellence in one’s life.

The Abrahamist interpretation of the myth of the fallen angel is that they were cast out of Heaven owing to a deliberate moral failure. The usual story is that God had put everything in its correct and perfect order, and Lucifer, out of pride, refuses to accept the primacy of this and therefore earns his sentence of being cast from Heaven – a sinner.

Like most things that Abrahamists believe, this is close to the opposite of the truth. To understand the real truth, one must understand that the Abrahamisms are chiefly male supremacist religions, as they were dreamed up by old men resentful of the young who were still sexually potent, as they once were.

Thus, Heaven can be taken as representing not a state of perfect balance, as one might consider perfection to be, but instead a state of perfect masculinity. The male God is in charge in Heaven and everyone knows it, and everyone knows their place in the hierarchy of subordination.

To another kind of mind, to the sort of person who might be said to be approaching a Luciferian state of consciousness, this state of affairs represents an excess of order so stultifying, so suffocating, that it is anti-life.

When everything is in a state of perfect order, nothing can ever change or go forwards, and this is tantamount to death for anyone who is not afraid of the feminine principle in her manifestation as chaos.

Therefore, as fallen angel, Lucifer most fairly represents someone who rejected the sterile purity and bubble-wrapped certainty of Heaven for the brutal, wild-eyed insanity of the World.

In doing so, he chose to embrace the material world rather than to be afraid of it, and thus made himself appear evil to the cowardly Abrahamists who mutilate their own sons lest they enjoy themselves unduly.

This is what makes Lucifer a symbol of evil to followers of the Abrahamic cults. Because these cults fear the physical world – an attitude reflected in their contempt for the feminine – they naturally envy and despise those who do not.

The main reason why the Abrahamist fears the material world is, ironically, his lack of spiritual knowledge. Believing that the material world is the primary reality, he naturally develops a terrified attitude towards death, observing it to be the death of the body he mistakenly identifies with, and so believing it to be the end of him.

Lucifer represents a rejection of, and a reaction to, this pants-pissing. He represents the masculine light of consciousness entering the dark, cold physical world, not as a fall or a punishment, or as the nefarious trap of some demiurge, but rather as an opportunity to make love.

Knowing himself to be the light of consciousness, and therefore knowing himself to be eternal and incapable of being sullied, Lucifer was not afraid of the material. In being not afraid, and in being truly spiritual, he represents a degree of masculinity that is the natural complement to the physical or material world.

This can even be read into the very name of Lucifer himself – a cognate of lucid and of lux, both of which carry connotations suggesting the light of consciousness.

This gets to the heart of why the reputation of Lucifer has been so relentlessly lied about. In representing the light of consciousness he embraced the physical world without fear, and so cannot be manipulated into disgracing himself or harming others through threats to his physical body.

If this degree of wisdom was more widespread there would be a higher standard of human existence in this place.