I think it’s fair to declare left accelerationism a failed project and pure wishful thinking. Only the og Nick Land right accelerationism is coherent, and Yuk Hui called it… it’s coherent mainly as an unhappy consciousness. And that’s now endemic in SV.
Conversation
This 2017 guardian long read remains the best general outsider introduction to this current of thought. Feels like this thing peaked in 2017 in the exhilaration of Trump’s ascent, and it’s been a steady descent into growing unhappiness since for believers
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This stuff has been growing so dominant in my social graph neighborhood, I suspect that the only thing that kept me basically immune is that I’m fundamentally not a westerner in some essential way. There’s Asian echoes of this but it’s basically a western end-of-history malaise.
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I’d even say it’s a malaise that’s specific to Christian heritage cf Holland’s Dominion hypothesis, which feels like the Christian-west strand of the end-of-history story.
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Hmm. Did a second close read of piece today and it strikes me as actually a sort of delayed-schedule alt-end-of-history thesis. Still in a Hegelian spirit but not the Fukuyama version.
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This line of thought is actually more interesting than the psychoanalysis of NRx. In the process of showing that NRx notion of a world process universalism is ill-posed rather than merely incomplete/derailed-by-PC, the piece effectively argues there is history left in the tank 🤔
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The kinda throwaway conclusion about a post-globalized world process based on difference and divergence rather than universalism tracks closely with my own conclusion (divergentism) hmm
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A good tldr of this broad argument is that the decline of the west is a kind of regional arrested development that’s been mistaken for the end of history because the coercive universalizing tendency that started with colonialism was mistaken for an actual viable universalism
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Replying to
Back in the 30s, Gerald Heard identified Western religion as being sick with (i) crude Apocalypticism, (ii) ignoring psychology and body/mind matters, and (iii) relying on authoritarianism over empiricism. Ironically, he recommended Vedanta as an antidote. Maybe your inoculated?
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(It is very funny to see Vedic stuff as being anti-authoritarian, because that’s silly, but I think the Western mind *is* still in a bit of a hissy fit about God Not Being What The Stories Said, and NRx and Western leftists are uselessly trying to fill voids)
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Replying to
Born in Texas, and most my experiences around the world have been with religious conservatives in the Middle East, Africa, or Europe, so those colors my analyses. Traveled/moved enough to be anti-romantic about everywhere, I suppose.
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