I'm a scary far-right NRX guy, and the accelerationist idea has obviously been raised in the circles I frequent.
But it generally leaves me cold. This keeps coming to mind:
"Wo unto the world because of offences! For offenses must come, but wo to him by whom the offence cometh!"
You have to be pretty damn sure you can build a better new world before you burn down the old one.
Would-be revolutionists would do better to focus their energies on things that:
- even the "evil other side" could never convince themselves to call a war crime
- are resilient to and helpful after whatever collapse is foreseen
- will have some benefit if the collapse does not occur
- don't make things worse.
It is, in fact, possible to find these things.
The worst-case scenario is that there's a collapse and it brings neither a worker's paradise nor the return of kings, but pointless gang wars. You can build that worker's paradise, or aristocratic character, before the collapse, and if you're right that the system is unsustainable, you'll "start" the collapse in a much better position. Sure, there are likely entrenched obstacles in your way, but making an omelette does not justify killing a few people.
> The worst-case scenario is that there's a collapse and it brings ... nor the return of kings, but pointless gang wars.
You do realize that the history of kings around the world has been one of pointless gang wars, right? The great literature of those times (In Europe alone from the The Aeneid to Henry VI to the European empires) is all about battles between the aristocratic gangs at the top of the hierarchy fighting each other and laying waste to territory in the process. Urban II preached the crusade to export the surplus males in the aristocracy who were causing problems fighting for territory in Europe and get them to go beat up someone else instead.
Anybody who wants to return to such a state has to be a loony.
NRX is all about romanticizing the history of kings around the world as if their history wasn't one of pointless gang wars. (So is a fair bit of fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction, and so is the Aeneid, really; it's a pre-medieval narcocorrido.) So it's no surprise that neoreactionaries would talk as if these were opposite ends of a spectrum.
Tribes, gangs, kingdoms, mafias, mobs, all the same thing. Centralized authority, including the power to end the life of another human inside or outside of your authority without consequence from within.
What is the natural state of human kind? Is it war? At the very least, it's obedient service to your group. Groups are forming more along ideological boundaries now, rather than racial or ethnic (at least in the developed world).
There's no singular state of humankind, any more than there is a specific "goal" to evolution. But I think Haidt is right about human nature when he calls us "groupish" (or, "part ape, part beehive").
I'm philosophically individualist, yet even that value system can't escape tribalism entirely: in practice, we'll happily form tribes that value individualism to complete against outsider tribes that don't, with no trace of contradiction or irony.
What we can strive for, and I think history has proven successful (or at least capable of being successful), is groups based on voluntary association and/or merit, and inter-group competition that is net-positive, or at least minimally destructive.
It's a good question. The very concept of social contract theory doesn't really jibe with a purely voluntarist ethic. If somehow, every single member of a polity wants to secede, it's hard to find anything wrong with that; while if 50%+1 want to, that seems unjust to the remaining ~49%.
But suffice to say, it's an open question what threshold of popular support justifies something on the order of California seceding the union. Voluntary association (and disassociation) is merely an ideal to strive for, and we will always fall short of that ideal in the real world.
You and almost everybody else in this thread are missing the core of the idea, which stems from Land, and tries to hammer in the fact that humanity has no agency. Rather than being a philosophy of our continued evolution - things we do - , it speaks about our imminent transformation/extinction - things being done to us -.
Under that light, accelerationism is nothing else but our collective acceptance we're as powerless against the technocapital positive feedback loop as against the movement of tectonic plates. It's this separation from and casting out of the "human security system", that allows one to look at the phenomenon with objectivity, and it's this separation that most critics and readers that look at accelerationism from the prism of conventional human-centered philosophy are missing.
I can't emphasize this enough. Land had two stages of thought. The first is what's described by armitron in the parent here, and was developed at Warwick University in the 90s. During his time at Warwick, Land developed some substance issues (amphetamines, mostly) and from what I've gathered ended up having a breakdown and moving to China. A few years after that he started writing his Neoreactionary work.
While you could probably draw some links between the two phases of his work if you wanted to, they're at odds with one another. In the Accelerationist framework layed out by Land in the 90s, neoreactionary thought would have been futile - everything, including reactionary social mores, would be deterritorialized by capital.
I don't think it's universally accepted in accelerationist circles that humanity strictly has no agency. Jehu[1], a left-accelerationist, advocates for decreased working hours as that will apply pressure on the capitalist system to drive down labor value even more. This will lead to capitalism's collapse as that will disrupt capitalism's reliance on surplus value (profit) of goods and services produced from labor (based on the labor theory of value). The capitalists will eliminate each other through competition until only state capitalism is left, and then the nation state will be overthrown under the weight of its own contradictions. (This is in opposition to Marxists usually citing the state as a necessity for socialism.) Granted, this tendency will happen whether or not people push for it, but there is collective agency to accelerate towards the next phase of society.
I don't think I have missed the point. I think you're more versed in Land's thinking than I am, but I have been reading his blog for years, and I've had a good deal of mental anguish over the humanity-has-no-agency problem.
I get it, capitalism is an alien AI and we're just the hardware, and if not capitalism substitute in something like sexual selection instead. And our coordination problems are such that we cut any tall reeds that try to stand against this. Moloch! Nightmare in Moloch! So, OK, "humanity" has no agency.
But I think individuals do. At the very least, they can not make things worse. They can become the kind of people who, if dropped into a perfect society, wouldn't drag it down. And then they can (a harder task, in computation as well as effort!) become the kind that soften the blows of the elder gods, even while paying them proper respect.
And then there’s us. Man has his own telos, when he is allowed the security to act and the clarity to reason out the consequences of his actions. When unafflicted by coordination problems and unthreatened by superior forces, able to act as a gardener rather than just another subject of the law of the jungle, he tends to build and guide a wonderful world for himself. He tends to favor good things and avoid bad, to create secure civilizations with polished sidewalks, beautiful art, happy families, and glorious adventures...The project of civilization being for man to graduate from the metaphorical savage, subject to the law of the jungle, to the civilized gardener who, while theoretically still subject to the law of the jungle, is so dominant as to limit the usefulness of that model.
Individuals may or may not have agency, but it doesn't amount to much. Climate change is but the tiniest and most benign of the forces Land is evoking. We're dealing with an emergent runaway overseer: globe-spanning positive feedback in all its doom and glory. Look at the multiplicity of hairless apes around you and subsequently the apes-in-charge of this shrewdness. Do we stand a chance? It is a joke even to joke.
> You have to be pretty damn sure you can build a better new world before you burn down the old one.
Isn't that just a social version of the precautionary principle?
You can never be damn sure you can build a better world without trying unless you are sure you can simulate that world ahead of time, and you can't be sure of that without validating your simulation. I personally suspect this sort of simulation is simply impossible because of well known "chaos theory" type phenomena like feedback loops in real systems. There is no way to A/B test history.
We now know that Marxist type systems of the sorts deployed by Lenin and Mao don't actually result in a better world and in many cases result in a worse one, but I don't think anyone could have proven such a thing ahead of time had the systems never been tried.
In practice the precautionary principle would lead to a world of absolute stasis since if the burden of proof is 100% on the actor then no action can be taken.
My personal view is that the ideal situation is a stable society with a frontier. That way you can go to the frontier and try new things and then the stable society can import the things that work. This isn't unique to me, and a version of it is called the Frontier Thesis. We once had this in the American West, but no more, so we should hurry up and build more rockets.
This is the first thing you learn as a Political Science student in university. The "science" half of the name is somewhat lacking when you can't experiment.
> We now know that Marxist type systems of the sorts deployed by Lenin and Mao don't actually result in a better world and in many cases result in a worse one
We don't know this. There's a lot more to economic security and human rights than private vs state control of production.
> We once had this in the American West, but no more, so we should hurry up and build more rockets.
While a frontier can provide some space for experimentation, redundancy is the real cure.
We haven't done this as a society though since there is an advantage to large scale when securing a nation's economy and currency with armed force.
The interesting new technology doesn't seem to be cheaper rockets but instead a new way to make sure our money is valued as we wish. Cryptocurrency's method of securing transactions against counterfeiters using math enables small-scale economies to operate without wasting too much resource on keeping order.
A system where cities/towns have more sovereignty would enable greater diversity and experimentation because a failure would be much easier to deal with.
Thousands of cities with each their own policies of how wealth spreads is the diverse dream I wish for as the world shrinks into fewer languages, customs, and ideas.
That's a nice dream, but I don't see how "keeping order" results from cryptocurrency ? Especially preventing cities from attacking other cities to take their resources...
> > We now know that Marxist type systems of the sorts deployed by Lenin and Mao don't actually result in a better world and in many cases result in a worse one
> We don't know this. There's a lot more to economic security and human rights than private vs state control of production.
We know that Marxism-Leninism didn't result in human rights, either. Neither did Maoism.
Sorry if that point was hazy. I'm in agreement with your comment but those implementations of national economies operating on Marxist principles were stifled greatly. WW2 caused much greater destruction of the USSR than the US. The US' anti-communist military actions, and economic blockades all existed because of a belief that allowing any communism ultimately leads its spreading everywhere.
A rephrasing would be: We don't know for sure that a Marxist type system does not work because we have so few examples. Maybe we just haven't tried enough variations to find a version that compiles cleanly.
Both Lenin and Mao didn't deploy a Marxist system. They did deploy an autocratic system under the guise of Marxism. At best, we can speculate that autocracy is a failure mode of attempts to install Marxism.
That's the problem with all social theories - running experiments on them takes darn long, usually results in piles of disenfranchised and/or dead people, and is in no way repeatable. (Frontier Thesis kind of addresses that by insulating the core of society from the experiments harsh results, but... you still have harsh results)
The Dark Enlightenment, sometimes abbreviated NRx, is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, reactionary philosophy founded by English philosopher Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, an American software engineer and blogger. The ideology generally rejects whig historiography[1] — the concept that history shows an inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy — in favor of a return to traditional societal constructs and forms of government, including monarchism and other archaic forms of leadership such as a cameralism. [1]
I'm not NRx but I'll answer your question as best I can.
The main thing I think is that we are in an era of profound disillusionment with current systems, some of which is justified. For this reason many people have gone into things like NRx, alt-right / neo-fascism (they are not quite the same), and also into hard left ideologies like Neo-Marxism or even a revival of old school Marxism. People are looking for alternatives. The answer someone might have for "why did you go NRx" probably overlaps a lot with someone else's answer to "why did you go Leninist?"
NRx is particularly appealing to the hacker crowd because its popularizers successfully packaged it as transgressive and rebellious, a packaging that is paradoxically modern. It's also unapologetically elitist. There's always been a strain of that in the hacker world, so it fits that nicely.
As far as why there's so much elitism in the hacker world I could write a treatise on that. Maybe I should. Short short version: many people with these interests were socially excluded as children while simultaneously being told they were super-intelligent, resulting in a pretty serious mind-fuck. If someone asked me to design a brainwashing program to turn kids into sociopaths I'd basically describe my childhood, and I know for a fact that many others in the hacker world have similar experiences. I've worked hard to deprogram myself but I have sympathy for those who haven't as few human beings ever recognize that their youthful neurological imprints are maybe not optimal.
Thank you. It still would be interesting to see how much it resonates with @dropit_sphere personal path.
On a "rising elitists" - you actually made me thinking how much of my own childhood contributes to what I am, albeit from polar experience of "shut up already, be like everybody, why do you always have to ask questions etc". I still have these barriers , for better or for worse - I don't know. Probably kept me "out of sight, out of trouble" more than once, but also prevented me from going faster in life too.
I tend, as policy, not to answer these questions. The fora in which they're asked are often not conducive to actually, you know, thinking about them. Somewhere in this thread someone linked the Atlantic article, wherein you can see greater minds than I refusing to speak with the author.
The answer to your question: how did I get such beliefs---is pretty boring: I read, and I thought. Some things I read I agreed with, others I didn't.
The much more interesting question is: what are those beliefs?
You'll notice that many in this thread are eager to tell you, but the only person who's actually identified themselves as NRX is being cagey. This is not a coincidence.
Outside observers tend to see NRX through their own lens, while one of the chief goals of NRX is changing the lens in the first place.
So someone might ask: "NRX huh? What do you think about <political issue?>" A fully enlightened (tm) neoreactionary will answer, "Why, am I in charge of it?"
Neophyte neoreactionaries see this as a front to hide their plotting. Experienced ones see it as an eminently sensible answer to an insane (though common) question. Who cares what I think? Am I paid, expected, or empowered to run a society? Why do people keep asking me what I'd do if I did?
There's a whole life out there outside of politics.
The nice thing about civilization is that it's built on failure. One of the things that blew my mind recently is that at one point in the distant past, before ancient Greece and even Egypt, there was a global society that all shared very similar ideas regarding religion.
That society fell apart collectively resulting in the sort of gang world that you're describing. Out of those ashes emerged individual city-states, which then aggregated using the tool of conquest into empire, which got big then fell apart forming the current status quo of nation-states, which technology, sophisticated forms of organization, and plain geopolitical luck allowed some nations to leapfrog the rest.
There really does seem to be some kind of collective human wisdom regarding societal organization. If there wasn't, then we'd oscillate back and forth between two kinds of social organization, likely war bands and empire. We'd reach a point at which no innovation could move the needle and that would be the end of progress.
> at one point in the distant past, before ancient Greece and even Egypt, there was a global society that all shared very similar ideas regarding religion
Do you mean a single global human culture? We don't even know whether religion came before agriculture or the other way round. Citation really needed here.
Excavations at Göbekli Tepe indicate that religion may have predated agriculture, perhaps dating back to the end of the Pleistocene. If a neurological basis for religion exists, such structures would hint at an evolutionary selection which made religion advantageous for survival.
I don't know anything about a single founding culture, but reading about Indo-European root words fires up one's imagination.
I really wish I did. This came from an interaction with a Quora user I highly respect. At some point I'm going to be motivated to research this more.
I can say that the context of the discussion was an assertion that I made that the Egypt-Greece-Hebrew civilization is what collectively invented the idea of good and evil. He corrected me saying that it was a major feature of this collective civilization.
Just now I tried going through Wikipedia, and I'm fairly certain what he was referring to is generally called Neolithic civilization. It was much more sophisticated than is commonly understood.
The idea that there was a uniform neolithic culture is... well... sailing against established knowledge. I'd really like to see a citation or two.
Especially since Neolithic civilization spans ~6K years, and appears at very different times in different regions, with cultural artifacts appearing in different order.
As for "good and evil", evidence so far says it probably started with Zoroastrianism, which is really at the tail end of the neolithic. Your Quora user either has access to not commonly available research or is misremembering.
I never said it was uniform. Just that it looked the same all over the world. The same sorts of religions, the same kinds of political structures. It shouldn't be that weird to contemplate. All agrarian empires looked roughly the same. This is because humans have roughly the same capabilities, the math is really hard to overcome to produce something different. It takes the collective weight of thousands of years to specialize so that one civ can leapfrog another.
RE: good and evil, his specific point was that societies were organized around the broad principles of a grand fight of one set of deities imbued with good traits fighting against another set of deities working against the good ones. Zoroastrianism is notable not because it invented good and evil, but because it was the first stab towards monotheism.
"there was a global society that all shared very similar ideas regarding religion."
That's very different from "over a span of 6K years, there were a bunch of local societies at different times and places that all looked somewhat similar"
A difference in degree, not of kind. The societies probably informed each other through trade. Horses were domesticated around this time and were used as pack animals even if they weren't yet being ridden. Aristocracies would have traded ideas along with goods. Advances in governing might have communicated themselves across the whole globe in a few hundred years, maybe even shorter. This is a blink of an eye on the historical time frame.
We really shouldn't underestimate the capabilities of Neolithic peoples.
But it generally leaves me cold. This keeps coming to mind:
"Wo unto the world because of offences! For offenses must come, but wo to him by whom the offence cometh!"
You have to be pretty damn sure you can build a better new world before you burn down the old one.
Would-be revolutionists would do better to focus their energies on things that:
- even the "evil other side" could never convince themselves to call a war crime
- are resilient to and helpful after whatever collapse is foreseen
- will have some benefit if the collapse does not occur
- don't make things worse.
It is, in fact, possible to find these things.
The worst-case scenario is that there's a collapse and it brings neither a worker's paradise nor the return of kings, but pointless gang wars. You can build that worker's paradise, or aristocratic character, before the collapse, and if you're right that the system is unsustainable, you'll "start" the collapse in a much better position. Sure, there are likely entrenched obstacles in your way, but making an omelette does not justify killing a few people.
Get to know your neighbors!