The 2023 NZ election will be a competition between competing cults & wounds
New poll shows high expectations of civil war
The end of optimism
I don’t think we have comprehended the psychological carnage social media and alienation have combined to become a threat to democracy.
The unique universal experience of lockdown is causing internal ructions and currents through the political, social, economic and cultural landscape of NZ.
The algorithms of social media Hate has amplified polarization of debate in ways we are barely comprehending.
Into this vortex fault lines are rupturing.
A chunk of white society being asked to curtail their financial agency & freedom to protect Maori & Pacifica who they feel resentment from.
Vulnerable communities angry that their well being is collateral damage for the rich.
A distrust of Authority while being utterly dependent upon them.
Social isolation and a growing sense of dislocation.
Qanon lunatics who are impossible to be reasoned with alongside Woke lynch mobs on never ending cancellation purges.
The poor whose poverty has become survival level subsistence.
Renters locked into debt servitude.
Micro aggression policing trigger thresholds where the quickest to take offence wins in a never ending grim roulette of intersectionist grievance where a cacophony of wounds jockey for social hierarchy.
All have become building blocks towards barriers that divide while cocooning us all into echo chambers.
We have run out of patience with one another.
Social media algorithms have allowed for a toxicity of debate that is easily manipulated. A symphony of sweaty truths all screaming for attention and no one listening. Woke Identity Politics activists have seized the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate white men while alt right Incel Nazi’s have seized upon the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate everyone else.
Millennial woke culture sees macro violence coming from micro aggressions and piously police those micro aggressions with virtue signalling purity mantras.
Alt Right Incel Nazis see white persecution and create some bullshit replacement narrative to justify their powerlessness and feed that resentment online.
Most people are on social media and most people have a woke activist or Counterspin Qanon fanatic in their social media feed screaming their feverish truths. While these activists certainly think they are speaking truth to power by endlessly calling people out for breaches of woke mantra or fake news anti Trump lies, to everyone else they are simply toxic.
People stop seeing the political party and only see the activist and in the end proxification means the activist becomes the proxy representation of the Party, and seeing as people have negative feelings towards the proxy, they turn from the Party.
Voters aren’t voting on policy, they are voting on who made them feel resentful on social media!
The political is the personal now means what hurts me personally becomes political.
Before social media activists could only face each other off at protests or through letters to the editor or talkback radio. There were constraints of interaction but with social media there are none and it turns out the freedom to insult and dehumanise others is more addictive than nicotine, alcohol and meth combined.
Wokeness has become a puritanical religion with none of the beauty – it’s not so much the personal virtue signal, we are all dicks at times, it’s the weaponization by algorithms that make it so dangerous and damaging.
The danger of identity politics is that it locks people intellectually into only defining the world through their skin colour, genitalia or sexual orientation – it also becomes toxically subjective and tribal where the only solidarity is with other people who share the skin colour or genitalia or sexual orientation- without shared truths and values, the 1% and their 9% enablers continue to divide the rest of us 90%.
The Left has lurched into woke ‘Social Justice’ territory which alienates more than it attracts.
Economic Justice does more than banning Gay Conversion, criminalising speech or gerrymandering the legal system to ensure anyone accused is found guilty, it redistributes wealth and makes direct provision to the cost of every day living. Beneficiaries and working class people care less about pronouns and the correct pronunciation of te Reo than they do about how to pay next weeks rent and power bill!
Pure temple doctrine divides & alienates. Broadchurch universals build solidarity.
I’m not interested in social justice wokedom any more, it is a minefield of competing schisms throwing vitriol at one another.
Twitter outrage is woke righteousness porn for the Professional Managerial Classes. A puritanical razoring where the self elected morality police publicly shame and cancel anyone for not using the language protocols of the conclave.
I am interested in Economic Justice and the immediate welfare of the poorest amongst us while providing immediate life condition upgrades.
In this age of subjective rage where there is no objective truth, there is only your measurement of triggered micro aggressions to decide what is innocuous and what is a hate crime.
We are now a cult of wounds, all so quick to expose our scars in the intersectionist roulette of victimhood, a social media ocean of cacophony that screams our pain for cultural hierarchy
The ever shifting Rubik’s cube of woke identity politics dogma endlessly gazing at ones naval to expose the next thought criminal builds little.
Currently we have a compulsory mass group therapy session where people’s feelings are the only currency.
While we unforgivingly tie ourselves endlessly into the next cancellation noose, National intend to throw disabled young people off welfare, the ASB posted a $1.4billion profit and the planet continues to burn.
The 2023 NZ election will be a competition between competing cults & wounds.
Our brittle weakness is collectively beneath the challenge of our times.
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“Our brittle weakness is collectively beneath the challenge of our times”
While Van Morrison – like a Clapton and one or two others have turned out to be prima dona pratts, he asks some good questions:
Why are you on Facebook?
Why do you need second-hand friends?
Why do you really care who’s trending?
Or is there something you’re defending?
Get a life, is it that empty and sad?
Or are you after something you can’t have?
You kiss the girls and run away
Now you won’t come out to play
Did you miss your 15 minutes of fame?
Or do you not have any shame?
Or is it some kind of twisted game?
Put yourself in the frame
For what some people work very hard to attain
Or are you looking for a scapegoat to blame?
‘Cause you’re a failure again
Fair points Martyn. The USA is a bellweather of social trends. As I see it:
> Both have performative governments that pretend to care about the poor and minority groups, but simply don’t. By every measure life has gotten worse for the poor and working class under their rule.
> Both have released dangerous criminals into their communities instead of locking them up. The resultant crime wave and social destabilization is largely visited upon the poor communities they came from. Meanwhile in both countries, life the leafy suburbs carries on unaffected. There are no drive by shootings in Martha’s Vinyard, the Hamptons, Herne Bay or Seatoun.
> The main route of escape from poverty has historically been through education, but both governments have allowed their state education systems to rot and fail. Oh, everyone gets a certificate, but they’re not worth shit.
> Both governments are running highly corrosive racial narratives. Not one individual in either nation has ever owned a slave or stolen native land. Neither have their fathers or grandfathers (unless they’re immigrants from North Africa or the Middle East LOL).
> In the USA, Latinos are now moving to the Republican Party in large numbers. Who can blame them! That is an interesting trend that may also be mirrored here in due course…
By every measure?
Incomes (MW up, more workers receiving wage increases, base benefits higher, more after tax income if working part-time). With the income power supplements energy is more affordable. The standard of private rentals is higher and more live in either new state housing or recently renovated state housing.
Are Latinos moving to the GOP in large numbers?
New York Times/Siena College polling.
Democrats lead among Hispanic voters 56 percent to 32 percent – 24 points. Biden beat Trump by only 20 points in this group.
That said before 2020 Democrats would lead by 40 points. And thus the GOP is holding Florida and is secure in Texas despite influx of Democrat voters from the West Coast.
The issue is Latinos are concentrated in larger American cities where as the cities that areost important are in the region’s. Still not getting the distribution correct.
Winston Peters has summarized the only issue that will decide next years election in one of his best ever speeches.
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2022/09/a_speech_by_winston.html#comments
God help us all.
Steve Bannon and The National Party are writing Winston’s speeches. …and Winston will be wanting Foreign Minister in a National, ACT and DUMB (Destiny and the 4 Umbrellas of the Freedumb Right-Wing, Apocalypse)
Expect to see 20% GST 20% Personal Income Tax and 20% Business Tax. Kiwisaver contribution back to 1%.
Did i miss anything?
Peters has two party coalition policy. It would be either a Nat/NZF coalition supported by ACT or a Lab/NZF one supported by Greens. This time more likely the first.
So would the right continue to call Winston a traitor if he went with Nact?
Shit 20% GST are you serious????
Well John key increased Gst from 12.5% to 15% to pay for his tax cuts and spun the bullshit it will be tax neutral so expect the same from luxon/willis after all the 1% don’t want to pay tax they avoid it anyway they can through bullshit trusts and the likes ..
Yep
like socialism vs capitalism?
One of your better pieces for a while. Sadly, profoundly accurate as it is depressing.
Thanks Andrew and Frank the Tank.
Agree wholeheartedly with the comments made.
Indubitably, Bomber.
Alas.
1000 people out of 300 million or so? I think you would have found 400 people thinking there will be a civil war in the US 25 years ago.
I think I am generally a pessimist but some of these stories just seem to be designed to stoke fear to an unreasonable degree.
Not a Seymour fan but I am glad he has pointed out several times how reasonable debate is getting harder because of sensationalism, GST on super fees being a classic example.
The people are rumbling. Some of this is manipulated, i.e, wokeness and identity palarva, but most of this, most of the discontent of the people is due to policy failure. It all starts and ends here, the rest is rubbish.
We need government that serves the people. We need government that says no to war. We need government that addresses the greatest indicator of policy failure there is – rising economic inequality. We need this type of government. The people are rumbling because they know that we don’t have this type of government. Government for the people folks – this is what elections should be about.
Agree re: Govt for the people. Unfortunately our system no longer aligns with this. Time to throw it out and forge a new path.
I prefer solid ground, meaning fixing what we have via waking the masses up to the people unfriendly actions of both government and media. Enough ‘awake’ people, rising up, can challenge the hold that money has over both politics and the media. We can work things out from there.
As for forging a new path, I don’t know what that means. Perhaps a visionary of some sort will come along and enlighten me. Why knows! But for now, solid ground, concentrating on what I do know is where I am at, bearing in mind that I grew up in good times, the 60’s/70’s so I believe that government can serve us well as long as we the people hold them to account. Right now though, we are in servitude to them rather than the other way around.
Precisely. Now a mainstream party is accepting the American practice of ‘hazing’ in addition to misogynistic bullying, as appropriate behaviour for its MPs.
We are seeing the end, but its a controlled demolition of the West, in my view, in order to ‘build back better’ or usher in a new, ruling class friendly, social/economic system known as, Agenda 2030, I believe…Jacinda referenced it earlier in the year. Dunno what its about but if it is not a system or way of life, that we the people had any say in creating or agreeing to, then I am pretty damn sure that it ain’t going to be good for us.
Totally agree, pessimistic as it is. Cyclic – “Without a vision, the people perish” – No more shared understanding and collective vision. A better world for me rather than A better world for all.
Australian RBA has decided that lower property prices are BETTER for the country. Holy shit!!! The neoliberal slumlord class war may be over (at least in OZ). Must watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQtO-xrjGoA