Jacinda Ardern’s politics is the politics of optics. That is to say, from the outside at least, it is principally concerned with the way in which an event or course of action is perceived. It is also an aesthetic politics, meaning that words are conveyed as objects of desire to recipients who have been disarmed, and whose perception is sensory and uninhibited.
Ardern’s presentation style is very much akin to that of her one-time mentor Anthony Blair, in that it appears to invest heavily in neuro-linguistic programming. NLP is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy created by a pair of self-help gurus in California in the 1970s.
Based upon social constructionist thinking and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, NLP techniques focus on addressing what people wish to achieve without exploring the history and provenance of problems. Because of this, opponents of NLP see it as a system without values and as an abdication of personal responsibility. The NLP maxim is, in essence, narcissistic, self-centred and divorced from notions of morality.
The BFD. Photoshopped image credit Luke
Ardern has harnessed NLP-type techniques to place the population in a trance-like state. By using words as triggers, she invokes hysterical responses in her listeners, just as Blair did, inviting them to abandon ‘old’ values, as well as logic. As Freud observed, the mourning for loss that transformation brings can be brought to an end when the subject severs its emotional attachment to the thing which was lost and reinvests the ‘free libido’ in a new object.
As we saw on Saturday night, that object is the Labour party.
There has been a great deal of debate in these pages as to whether Ardern is a Marxist of principle, or not; or competent, or not. But neither of these things is relevant. Helen Clark served as Prime Minister for three terms, and the same machinery which supported Clark now sustains Ardern. This machinery is globalist, elitist and self-serving; its corrosive influence and output hugely popular.
The reason for its popularity is that over the past sixty years New Zealand society, and that of most of the West, has become purposeless, secular, vacuous and atheist, measuring success only in terms of personal gratification and worshipping the primacy of self. As a result, since at least the early twentieth century, we have been a society in decline.
More recently we have become feverishly addicted to advanced decline. We get a rush by pulling things apart. We loathe anything to do with duty, family or social fabric. There isn’t an alien culture or belief system that we wouldn’t, in the blink of an eye, substitute for our own, so long as the long-term goal is reached – and the ‘patriarchy’ of enlightenment liberalism abandoned.
We have replaced the eighteenth-century notion of inner virtue, which was a deeply sustaining and properly spiritual one, with a superficial outer mantle of ‘virtue’ based on spurious concepts and illusory words – communications smattered with Maori, worship of the ‘earth mother’, climate religion and the never-ending search for equity (a term much loved by the Greens) which means, of course, that everyone must end up the same – socially bereft, psychologically crippled and economically destitute.
Whether you like it or not, friends, this is what we now are, and what we will remain, because today’s mentally unstable activist children, cast in the image of Greta, are the grandchildren of the raging 1960s activists who first embraced the lie that a better society could be born based on ego and the psyche. Their embittered legacy of failure, which had its genesis in the protesting of rugby tours, drives today’s imperatives for ‘freedom’ around drugs, amorphous sexual relationships, abortion/infanticide, geronticide, social dislocation and welfare dependency.
Freud would probably have attributed the wilful violence with which we seek to tear down a society, which for centuries has succoured us, to a pathology of melancholia. Replacing it is a social reformation in the image of those ubiquitous elderly matriarchs of the political left, who can be seen smiling presciently at the ‘new normal’ in the background of most Labour/Green television interviews.
Emma Espiner, wife of Guyon, represented ‘the left’ on TV One’s election night coverage. The daughter of an activist who spent her own childhood demonstrating and protesting, there can be no doubt that she is both a radical and a Maori separatist, who was drafted in to represent the ‘everyday’ face of that side of the political spectrum.
Here’s what she had to say, in a different forum, on abortion:
“I had an abortion when I was 16. It was one of the pivotal life-changing decisions of my life and it was an entirely positive one. […] I’ve thought very little about my abortion and I have no grief, shame or regret about it.”
If this isn’t a radical view, then I have no idea what is; but it is, apparently, the everyday language which we all now speak.
Sitting opposite her, representing ‘the right’, was Liam Hehir, a National party supporter from Palmerston North. Hehir has written articles in The Spinoff claiming that Ardern is a conservative. His reaction to Saturday night’s bloodbath was to say he’s pleased with Labour’s agenda because it is “moderate”. The near alignment of Hehir with Espiner placed the ‘centre’ of the election debate much further to the left than most people would realise.
That’s fine, and all is well, apparently. Even the farmers have started voting Labour. Go and have a lie down, chaps: it won’t happen this term, but when the next UN faux crisis strikes – and it will probably be to do with climate – the zealots will nationalise your farms and redistribute them to black lesbian refugees, who will produce our new vegan diet to wild adulation. Don’t worry about compensation. We’re printing loads of money and will pay you in our new dollars – pegged to the Venezuelan bolívar.
Yes, Ardern’s agenda is ‘moderate’. She managed to implement a full communist dry run in her last term, under the guise of COVID – and everyone loved it so much they are clamouring for more. She withdrew almost all civil rights, including the rights to freedom of association and movement, she closed all churches, she arrested and then heavily regulated almost all business activity, paid most workers directly out of a central government fund, and, ruling by decree, decided which commercial sectors may continue operating and which should fail.
I wrote in these pages at the time of my horror at the public’s credulity, complacency and indolence – along with its adulation for Ardern – and concluded that we no longer deserve to live in a free society. Freedom is earned; it is not a right. And yet, preferring the wage subsidy to actual work, a morally bankrupt populace succumbed to bribes. It is little wonder that more than half our population is on a government benefit of one sort or another, and that more than half our population will continue to vote for the left. Don’t be surprised, then, when the government reaches for your business – and the percentage of those on the government chit heads towards 100.
Ardern said on election night that she will “govern for every New Zealander”. Yet she failed to mention Judith Collins in her speech, as protocol requires, and while acknowledging those who voted Labour for the first time, she failed to reach out to those who didn’t. ‘Governance for every New Zealander’ clearly isn’t about reaching across the divide. There is no divide because opposite views are not permitted to exist. ‘Governance for every New Zealander’ can only equal an all-embracing form of communism.
Ardern is dangerous. Far more dangerous than Helen Clark. It would pay you to shake off your hypnotic state and look beyond the optics.
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