Should We All Now Be Accelerationists?

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Accelerationism.

In case you haven’t noticed, America, and the West more generally, are falling to pieces. How so? Here’s a brief, but far from exhaustive, list:

— Public confidence in the government and media are at all-time lows;

— The printing of money in order to support government spending at an astronomical rate has triggered dangerous inflation, and has driven public debt to unsustainable levels;

— The death of meritocracy in favor of race- and sex-based “equity” has forced an abandonment of standards and qualifications in every institution;

— Our borders are effectively nonexistent, with aliens and lethal drugs flowing freely across them;

— Our foreign policy has descended into hubristic madness as we cling to the idea of America as the world’s policeman and “redeemer nation”, with the effect that we have driven our most powerful rivals into each others’ arms, and are now even endangering the dollar’s critical status as the world’s reserve currency;

— Our pernicious mismanagement of the COVID outbreak has ad a catastrophic effect on small businesses, commercial real-estate markets, education, trust in government, and social and psychological health, while massively strengthening and enriching oligarchic corporate power;

— Crime, suicide, anomie, depression, nihilism, social isolation, and deaths of despair have all skyrocketed, while comity, trust, and social cohesion have plummeted;

— Our great cities have become so tolerant of crime and disorder that people and businesses are fleeing;

— The idea of a binding American commonality that trumps other differences has been replaced by a sullen and resentful identitarianism that assigns every person membership in one or more racial or sexual interest groups, and pits them ruthlessly against one another, with white males being the one group that everyone can agree to blame and hate;

— The founding European stock and cultural heritage of the American nation is kicked to the curb, despised, and is being displaced as swiftly and methodically as possible;

— The aggressive feminization of every aspect of American civil and political life has led to the denunciation of healthy natural masculinity as “toxic”;

— Dissent and debate are crushed, whether by the shouting down and cancellation of impermissible opinion, or by the weaponization of government agencies and the unequal prosecution of law;

— Easily half of Americans have lost all faith in the integrity of our elections, while attempts to impose minimal standards of election security are blocked and denounced as “racist”;

— In every aspect of American life we see the exaltation of the perverse and unnatural, the chaotic and the abnormal, over those norms and behaviors that have always been seen as good, wholesome, and conducive to human flourishing; in every direction we see the enthusiastic promotion of the lowest, the basest, and the ugliest, in the name of “equity”. Whatever is grotesque, bizarre, licentious, degraded and decadent is given pride of place over everything healthy, vigorous, virile, virtuous, and beautiful — and we are commanded not only to tolerate this, but to assent with enthusiasm, and call it “progress”.

Why has all this happened? Because an aggressive, secular pseudoreligion, which denies all transcendent order and natural categories, has seized control of the minds of scores of millions of Americans, and of the levers of political power and information dissemination. This ersatz religion holds as its highest principle the flattening of every natural distinction, and all social hierarchies, except of course the hierarchy that places itself in the position of commanding power over every institution, and over all of civil society.

Among the obvious, essential truths that the stifling orthodoxy of this belief-system condemns as heresy are:

— Innately unequal distributions of natural talents, abilities, cognitive capacities, and behavioral dispositions among individuals and populations;

— The reality of sexual dimorphism, and of natural sexual differences in aptitudes and life preferences;

— That differences in life outcomes of individuals and groups can be due to any causes other than racism, sexism, nepotism, and other forms of willful and malevolent oppression and malfeasance;

— That the American founding was a noble and innovative experiment in self-rule, and that the Founding Fathers deserve respect and gratitude;

— That the past has anything to teach us other than as a racist and blood-drenched catalogue of moral and philosophical errors;

— That there is such a thing as “human nature”, and that it is not infinitely malleable;

— That excellence should be fostered for the sake of all;

— That the life of mankind might have a higher dimension than maximizing the gratification of the stomach and the genitals;

— That what optimizes a civilization’s well-being is for people to find the role in life, and the place in social hierarchy, for which they are best-suited, and best-qualified, by their nature;

— That unborn children might be living human beings, and therefore might be morally entitled to protection against lethal violence;

— That serving the interests of America and its citizens should be the basis of American immigration policy;

— That no person or group of persons knows enough about the organic complexity of human societies to significantly re-engineer them without causing unforeseeable harm;

— That democracy in itself is simply one form of government among many, with conspicuous liabilities of its own;

— That the right measure of any government is whether or not it governs well;

— That Western civilization has produced towering, sublime achievements of art, literature, science, mathematics, philosophy, discovery, prosperity, and human happiness, and has bequeathed all of this to us as a priceless heritage—and that as stewards of this incomparable legacy we have a duty, perhaps above all other duties, to cherish and preserve it for our children, and for our children’s children.

I could, as you might imagine, go on and on.

I think it should be clear that this course is plainly destructive; the question, then, for anyone standing on the outside of this mass psychosis, is: what can be done?

There are various options. The most “conservative” and “traditional” response, of course, is some sort of organized political resistance. But how? I doubt that any intelligent observer can at this point honestly imagine that we’re going to vote ourselves out of this mess. Not only does it seem that half the country is already in the grip of this madness, but even if that weren’t so, there are monotonic trends that go in the wrong direction: the steady flow of new Democratic voters pouring in across the border; the relentless push by the Left to expand the franchise, even to felons and illegal aliens; and the increasing strength of the “top-and-bottom-against-the-middle” coalition that buys votes by fostering an infantilizing dependence upon the State for every material need, comfort, and blessing, and is happy to pay for it all by printing money and redistributing the wealth of productive citizens. If, on top of all that, we add the steady erosion of election integrity, and the blithe insouciance with which vote-manipulating shenanigans are committed and then screened from accountability, then resistance at the ballot-box seems increasingly futile.

It should also be clear that the great Leviathan in our nation’s capital is immensely, monstrously powerful, and, far from the being the modest apparatus of minimal necessity conceived by the Founders, it now has a life, and interests, of its own — and that, like any living thing, it will fight for its survival with everything it has. Any attempt to redistribute its power back to state and local governments, or to curtail its arbitrary authority, will provoke a ruthless defense — as we have seen again and again in these last years.

What about armed revolt? This may very well come to pass, and if it does, millions will join the cause — but as I wrote eight years ago, civil war is not a thing to wish for, and a hot 21st-century American civil war would be as gruesome as any in history.

This brings us to acceleration. If things really are as bad as they seem — and mark my words, they’re even worse — this whole rotten system may be so far gone, so diseased, and so at odds with the nature of human flourishing, that it must eventually collapse and die of its own accord. If that’s so, then it’s best, for the sake of our children and children’s children, if it happens sooner rather than later: the sooner we can plow Leviathan’s decomposing corpse into the ground, the sooner we can begin the process of organic regrowth. We’ve already seen the sickness beginning to peak, since the ascension of the doddering grifter Joseph Biden to the Presidency, along with the Left’s total control of Congress for the first two years of his term. We see it in the ever-increasing emphasis on sexual lunacy and perversion in government, media, and academia; we see it in the blazing prominence of outright morons in our ruling classes; we see it in our insane energy policy and increasing subjection of private and economic life to climate hysteria; we see it in the coddling of criminals at the expense of the freedom and safety of decent citizens; we see it in the sacralization of transgenderism, and the hallucinatory insanity of allowing men to compete in womens’ sports; and we see it in all the obvious lies about objectively existing reality that we are forced to put into our own mouths every day just to keep our jobs and privileges.

Perhaps, then, it is best in the long run not to slow this process by incremental and ineffective political resistance. It may be that such an approach, by making the decay more gradual, will also make it somehow more bearable, day by day, and might turn it from an acute and intolerable affliction to a slow and chronic decline — a creeping Brazilification, a great national frog-boiling. Perhaps we would be wiser simply to let the cleansing fire of fever run its course, and burn itself out. It will be painful, and surely debilitating for a while, but then it will be over. And then, at last, we can awaken, blink our eyes, and get back on our feet.

Another term for the Big Guy might be all it takes. Four more years!!

11 Comments

  1. Whitewall says

    Malcolm, I can’t think of many writers who have been more dead on right over the last few years than you. The occasions where I have disagreed….well, I take them back.

    Since we are going through Hell, I say pick up the pace and be done with it. I am keeping old books and even old college text books I’ve had since the 1960s. Probably will buy more to have for ‘reemergence’. If I’m around my memory may not be so good.

    Posted April 25, 2023 at 5:44 pm | Permalink
  2. Malcolm says

    Thanks, Robert, and keep your powder dry.

    Posted April 25, 2023 at 6:02 pm | Permalink
  3. De Jong says

    Re “I think it should be clear that this course is plainly destructive; the question … is: what can be done?”

    Perhaps the better or deeper question one should ask is WHY did it come to this terrible point in time, how did we end up here at this most fraudulent criminal state of affairs? Because the recognition of the underlying cause(s) would be instructive in terms of HOW we should tackle it to potentially manifest real change, right?

    A coherent theory of how we got to this dismal point has been proposed:

    The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room

    A problem can only get solved/cured if cause(s) are dealt with.

    Posted April 27, 2023 at 2:32 am | Permalink
  4. Dr. Bennell says

    I’ve amassed an impressive engineering library myself over the years. I’ll help you guys restart civilization. I’ll be ready.

    Posted April 27, 2023 at 10:34 am | Permalink
  5. Christopher McCartney says

    I think the history of the Soviet Union shows that a horrific diseased system at odds with human nature can keep going for quite a long time before it topples of its own accord. And the history of Communist China shows that the system can draw back enough from its own ideology to avoid total collapse, while remaining a stifling despotism indefinitely. Pressing down on the gas pedal doesn’t seem to me like a wise move. Might I suggest another possible solution: religious awakening. Not the sort of emotional fluff that passes for revival these days, but a real Spirit-wrought conversion. True religion drives out pseudo-religion. Something to pray for.

    Posted April 29, 2023 at 5:12 pm | Permalink
  6. jank willie says

    “the sooner we can plow Leviathan’s decomposing corpse into the ground, the sooner we can begin the process of organic regrowth. ”

    Well, the same “international” forces that have collapsed this country will be the same forces that will prevent its ‘regrowth’

    but you do have a point, in that stupid people, with stupid ideas like yours, certainly aren’t worth saving.

    Posted April 30, 2023 at 5:03 pm | Permalink
  7. Malcolm says

    Christopher McCartney,

    I agree that a real religion is better than an ersatz one, in providing a vision of the truly transcendent (as opposed to the truncated metaphysics and soteriology of this ersatz one, and all the horrifying consequences).

    But there are (at least) two problems. One is that religions such as Christianity are no guarantee of any particular level of civilization, or style of government. Another is that religious awakenings are not so easy to bring about; the forces that secularized America (even after the fervor of the first two Great Awakenings) are still very much in effect; indeed more so than ever.

    Posted April 30, 2023 at 10:43 pm | Permalink
  8. Malcolm says

    “jack wille”,

    Nice to meet you too, and thanks for your polite and brilliantly argued comment.

    Posted April 30, 2023 at 10:45 pm | Permalink
  9. Christopher McCartney says

    “Religions such as Christianity are no guarantee of any particular level of civilization, or style of government.”

    I don’t quite see how that’s a problem for the point I was making. Doctor 1: here’s a treatment that could put the patient’s otherwise deadly cancer into remission. Doctor 2: the problem with that is it doesn’t guarantee that he won’t ever contract COVID.

    Perhaps we’re talking past one another because we have different ideas about the nature of the affliction. I see the problem as a looming totalitarianism, and I regard totalitarianism as something thoroughly demonic and of a different nature than … well, it’s sometimes called authoritarianism, but it’s not really an “ism” of any kind. It’s simply the typical regime in human history. Some being worse than others. I’ve been reading the Gulag Archipelago. Several times Solzhenitsyn compares the horrific injustice of the Soviet regime with the injustices occurring under the Tzars: what happened under Communism was orders of magnitude worse. I certainly would prefer not to live under the rule of a Russian Tzar, but I don’t see any current threat of that sort of thing: our current disease does not trend in that direction. The Marxist pseudo-religion (or a variant of it) is what threatens to bring us a new version of the Soviet terror.

    “Religious awakenings are not so easy to bring about.” Yes. Impossible for us. With God all things are possible. That’s why I’m recommending prayer.

    I’m also in favor of doing what we can to resist the evil where we have opportunity. I agree that the small acts of resistance that are within our power are not going to turn the tide: if no higher power lends His aid, those actions will be ineffective in regard to the large-scale goal (but not without honor — I see nobility in each small resistance to evil, even those that are part of a war that evil wins). And it’s not as if there have been no encouraging victories for truth. I was born in 1977. My whole life Roe v. Wade seemed unassailable. The fervor of early opposition died down quickly to what seemed an ineffective murmur. Yet it has been overturned. And many states are moving in the right direction protecting the unborn, though there’s a long way to go before that battle is over. The good that has been done would not have been done if it weren’t for the mostly conservative-Christian pro-lifers who were not pursing an accelerationist strategy of supporting Leftists for the Supreme Court.

    There are many other things that convince me the recent increase in nastiness and insanity on the Left is partly due to their perception that there are real forces at work turning the West back to older ways, not merely the dying struggles of a doomed old order. They think of their movement as being the vanguard of the arc of history. But they are noticing that their eventual success is not a sure thing: they might actually lose. I don’t deny that the forces that that support them are real and powerful. But we don’t need to have more faith in the irresistibility of those forces than they do.

    Posted May 4, 2023 at 5:41 pm | Permalink
  10. Malcolm says

    Christopher,

    I quite agree that the clamant threat is totalitarianism. In 2012 I wrote:

    We like to think that we are much freer, in the modern liberal West, than our forebears were under the monarchies, autocracies, and dictatorships of the past. But the truth is that even under the most capricious and unenlightened despots, the lives of ordinary subjects long ago were rarely if ever affected directly by the sovereign, who lived in some far-off keep and was entirely unable to monitor or control the day-to-day activities of his people. But the advent of modern communication and transportation in the twentieth century, followed by electronic-record-keeping of financial transactions and other interactions, has made possible a far greater degree of interference by the government in the minutiae of everyday life — and the development in the twenty-first century of small, ubiquitous sensors, connected in real time to intelligent and adaptive monitoring systems, will carry this trend to its logical endpoint: enabling the continuous monitoring of everything any of us does, anywhere, anytime.

    I agree also that a reawakening of genuine religion would have an enormously positive and bracing effect; the grotesque pseudoreligion currently ascendant is a soul-crushing poison.

    We are at war; the question in this post’s title seeks to know what strategy gives us the best chance of winning.

    It may even be that the accelerationist approach aligns more closely with your own than you imagine: letting the Devil show his face even more clearly, for a little while longer, might be just what it takes to bring about the awakening we’re both hoping for.

    Posted May 4, 2023 at 6:58 pm | Permalink
  11. Whitewall says

    Yes and faster.
    : “letting the Devil show his face even more clearly, for a little while longer, might be just what it takes to bring about the awakening we’re both hoping for.”

    Posted May 5, 2023 at 2:05 pm | Permalink

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