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Accelerating Towards What?
On Daily Skeptic they say that “Britain is Accelerating Towards Crisis”, invoking Nick Land’s accelerationism. It’s not just the Brits. The Frogs and the Yanks are just letting the system continue towards disaster because. Yes, obviously we can’t go on spending and borrowing, and we can’t go on importing radical Muslims, and we can’t go on with sub-replacement child-bearing. But nobody does anything to change course.
Accelerationism? Grok interprets Land’s idea thusly:
Capitalism is a positive feedback circuit in which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process. It is the primary engine of modernity’s “line of deterritorialization”—dissolving hereditary social forms, traditions, and fixed codes faster than they can be rebuilt.
Hello AI.
But I tend to the S-curve analysis in Carlota Perez book The Five Technological Revolutions. In her analysis new technologies trace an S-curve. The first half is a crazy exponential curve where the new idea is going to transform the economy. It ends in a financial bubble and crash, and then goes logarithmic as the new technology settles down and just becomes a part of the furniture.
By the way, look at this S-curve of real per-capita income in the US going back to 1800.
I’d say that growth has been declining in recent decades, and that means that Land’s accelerationism ends up decelerating. Unless AI picks up speed.
And really that makes sense, especially considering Stein’s Law: if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
And that, I believe, explains the current political and economic situation in the West. We should contract the size of government and do a lot more things with the market, from pensions to healthcare, but we don’t, because every politician knows that you can’t ever reduce the handouts. Until the regime collapses.
For instance, I wonder what will happen in Iran with its Next Regime. It’s an interesting question, because the one time a government can do something different is when it comes into power just after the rubble has stopped bouncing.
But whatabout the US?
Right now the doomsters are all agreed that Trump will lose the House and probably the Senate in the midterms on November 3. And I must say that, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I don’t like it.
The DSA kiddies of which you’ve heard tell say they are going to pack the Supreme Court, add a few states, and abolish the Senate. And all will be well.
What they are trying to do, like the governments across the West, is act to stop the revolution that is coming. When the governments all run out of other peoples’ money.
The fact that the DSA kiddies have decided to demolish the entire US political system and replace it with their own single political will demonstrates that they don’t have a clue. They think that the problems of society today arise from hard-right insurrectionists maintaining their domination of society.
In fact our problems issue from the impossibility of continuing the current panoply of government programs and benefits and the impossibility of directing the economy from the political sector. This was pointed out over a century ago by Ludwig von Mises and backed up in 1945 by Hayek in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. Hayek means the knowledge possessed by millions of individuals in the economy that is transmitted to them through the price system. He asks us to imagine a change in the supply of tin. Doesn’t matter why or how: the price communicates to all the actors in the world that they need to adapt to the change. Notice that the price system doesn’t tell anyone what to do. It just makes them all think about whether to adapt, how to adapt, and when to adapt. And get on with it.
The whole point of politics is really to tell us that there is no need to adapt. Adaptation is hard, and all of us would prefer to keep on same-old-same-old instead of doing the work to deal with the problem. And politicians are in the business of telling us what we want to hear.
What the DSA kiddies want to believe right now is that, by blowing up all the political institutions in the US, they can then step in and fix everything.
What the average person wants to believe is that they can continue to live and work as at present and consume the same government benefits and services, and nothing need change.
Reality is that we need to change, to respond to price signals, every day, or else things will get worse and the needed change will be bigger and more painful.
But as long as government can print and borrow money, it can put off decisions into the future. And that’s the way we like it. For now.
| Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:55:53 GMT |
I Prophesy a New Religion Based on Thumos
As we watch the collapse of our educated ruling class, all across the western world and especially right now in France and Germany, we are bound to wonder: how do we get out of here?
How do we fix the politics? The overspending, the corruption, the fraud?
Of course, politics isn’t really the problem, because politics is downstream from culture, as the late American philosopher Andrew Breitbart taught us.
What do we do about culture? Culture is about what we do and what we don’t do; what we approve of and what we disapprove of. We’ve had the culture of the oppressor/oppressed binary rammed down our throats for decades, not to mention the cults of feminism, LGBT, and climate change. Yet most Americans, probably, just want to live ordinary lives, working and marrying, raising a family and looking after the old folks. How come that’s marginalized as patriarchy and whiteness?
The problem is, I believe, that culture is downstream from religion. Down the ages, I’d say, the political elite has been religion-adjacent, meaning that the rulers got to have an inside track with the priests. I’m reading right now about Alexander stopping by the temple in Siwah, on the border between Egypt and Libya, to get some advice from the oracle before heading east to take care of the Persians.
Today, ordinary people in the US are Christian-adjacent, but the educated elite is, shall we say, Marx-adjacent. Their religious belief is that they are called by history to create a just and prosperous society, using all the best science and philosophy. And this requires them to rule the world with absolute political power to fight for the oppressed against the white male oppressor.
Only guess what: only the ruling class gets to be real oppressors.
About all that science and philosophy: I’d say that our elite is rather picky about which science and which philosophy to adopt as regime science and regime philosophy.
In fact, I’d say that science and philosophy have pretty well demonstrated that our ruling elite is on the wrong track, and leading us to disaster. We have learned that the three faiths of our leaders, in collectivism, in government administration, in government regulation, are false faiths that don’t work.
So what do we do now? In the words of Douglas Adams, what is the meaning of life, the universe, everything, right here and now in the 21st century?
I suggest that Marco Rubio — of all people — is trying to help us in his October 7 speech in front of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. He asked us to revive the Greek notion of “thumos.” His description of thumos was very masculine.
But I am more enlightened than that, so I asked Grok to “describe how thumos applies to the feminine” and this is what it said.
A hard thumos (firm, tight, unyielding) supports masculine-coded traits: martial courage, boldness, competitive honor-seeking, anger, and public assertiveness.
A soft thumos (yielding, flexible, pliant) supports feminine-coded traits: tenderness, affection, gentleness, moderation (sōphrosynē), shame, and protective care within the household (oikos).
Nowhere in this can I find the faith and values of our present ruling class. Indeed, I proclaim that the rise of the tech lords and their culture of business startups in the last half century is nothing less than a revival of masculine thumos: courage, boldness, competition, but without the swords and pistols at dawn. Instead the masculine has been recoded into courage, boldness, and competition in business and sports.
And I proclaim that the diversion of feminism from “the independent woman” of Simone de Beauvoir to “safetyism” and the “unwelcome behavior” issue shows that women are still feminine and “expect to be protected” from danger and male aggression as in the olden time. So the feminine thumos applies.
The recoding of masculine thumos into sports and business is already a done deal. Only our liberal friends didn’t get the message, bless their hearts.
The great question is how the reality of thumos gets encoded in a new religion for women and then works its way “downstream” into modern culture as a valid and valuable expression of the feminine in the modern world where women are not confined at home doing domestic tasks. Clearly, women do not want to “break free from traditional subordination and achieve authentic self-determination.” They still expect to be protected as in the olden time, and that means that they have to subordinate themselves to the men that protect them. It’s all because the feminine thumos is not a product of male power and the patriarchy. The feminine thumos is in the jeans.
Frankly, I don’t know how we create a new religion, a new understanding of life, the universe, everything, in terms of masculine and feminine thumos recoded for the modern age. It’s above my pay grade. For one thing, I believe that the educated class, the business class, the middle class, and the lower class all need different religions.
But I do know that once we have created the new religion then the culture and the politics will fall into line. Because it is religion that defines our understanding of reality.
| Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:18:31 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Reynolds’ Laws: 1. Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them. 2. The more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government. 3. Whatever politicians control, they will use against you to get what they want. 4. Longevity of political service does not make a politician more qualified; it only ensures they are more corrupt 5. Proposed legislation will fail if there is not enough opportunity for graft or control.
Government is force. Politics is violence. Government is injustice. System is domination. Politics is civil war by other means.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Communism: An Analysis
