Acceleration

When the Left keeps on truckin', they really keep on truckin'...

Acceleration, in the power political sense, is one of those concepts that for a long time languished in the ghetto of NRx theorycel circles. However, over the past couple of years, it has broken out into the mainstream and even normies largely understand what it describes now. Much of this is because they’re getting to see it take place in realtime as we watch the Regime continue to start fires everywhere and then spray gasoline on them. The Left in general has been rapidly accelerating the rate at which it foists off ever more radical social changes and political strictures onto the rest of the country. Contrary to what common sense and political truism from earlier times should have told them, rather than going for measured change that acclimatises people to their agenda, the Left is now flying full steam ahead on all fronts, regardless of what backlash and pushback they receive.

Why might this be? It’s because of the Iron Law of Acceleration - the more you accelerate changes in a sociopolitical system (especially unpopular changes, as most of the Left’s social agenda really are), the more you have to keep accelerating to prevent it from all falling apart. The train has to keep going faster at a faster rate because if someone pulls the air brake, the whole thing will derail. If you give the political opposition (in this case us) time and space to organise resistance, they might just find a way to stop everything. This has been the rule for most sociopolitical revolutions since 1789 - if you’re gonna go, go all out as fast as you can and effect the changes you want before anyone can mount a credible defence.

A few years ago, I was on this kick where I was drawing analogies between physical and social phenomena. I did this in some pieces I wrote about social inertia, social entropy, social turbulence, and one that related tradition versus modernism in light of energy states. I think this same approach can be taken to understand the effects of sociopolitical acceleration and social “kinetic energy.”

In physics, it’s fairly easy to relate the acceleration of a mass with the change in its kinetic energy, which is done through its change in momentum. Whenever a force is applied to a mass, this changes the momentum of that body with respect to a change in time (Newton’s 2nd Law, F=Δρ/Δt). Momentum (ρ), in turn, is related to kinetic energy via the equation KE=ρ^2/2m. From these, it follows that the kinetic energy of a system is proportional to the square of momentum, so as the momentum increases, the kinetic energy greatly increases for any non-trivial value of ρ.

I will often refer to The Powers That Be (TPTB) as “pumping energy into the system,” or something along that line, and this is the basic sense in which I mean it. Drawing the analogy with a physical system, when you accelerate the rate of changes, when you introduce distortions into the social fabric and overturn norms and traditions, especially ones long held, you create social “energy” that manifests itself as resentment, anger, disorder, and even potentially as revolt. As they ever increase the force which they apply to our sociopolitical system and against those who disagree with them, this acceleration is translating into an exponential increase in energy that greatly destabilises the entire system.

The thing about high energy systems which can be characterised as complex and non-linear is that (via a definitional understanding of chaos) they are both sensitive to initial conditions but also have dense periodic orbits. What this basically means is that a social system with a huge multitude of moving parts can be greatly affected by even small changes at any particular and arbitrary point, but also tends to be restrained within a fairly small field of pathways (something which the cyclic nature of Turchin’s demographic-structural theory of the rise and fall and rise of large polities demonstrates). When you alter a feedback mechanism in such a social system, the response will most likely be non-linear (i.e. not directly proportional) and difficult to predict in detail (though restrained within a field of broad, macroscale responses).

Or, to put it into layman’s terms, the more energy you put into a social system, the more difficult it will be to know what’s eventually going to happen to it. You make turbulence. You introduce a chaotic system state. You lose control of the system you’re trying to change to be the way you want it to be. And you’re just going to be more likely to lose control the more you accelerate and pump energy into the system.

Understand that the Left’s acceleration - and they know they can’t slow down - is purposeful. Gone are the days when progressives operated by introducing a couple of radical changes but then backed off and let society “dissipate” the energy that was introduced. Having seen the goal of total societal takeover come within reach, they no longer see a reason to slowroll it. The brakes are off and they want to finish this thing before they lose control. As a result, the acceleration is designed to provoke a response. They want to goad the Right into a violent response because they think they’ll be able to deal with it and because they want to get it over with. I’ve noted before that one of the characteristic traits of American progressives over the past few decades is their impatience, their complete inability to check themselves for long. They want to “achieve” in 40 years what took the European Left over a century to obtain.

Which means they are pouring gas on the fire at a prodigious rate.

The thing is that eventually, there will most likely be a “national divorce” of some type that results from the continued acceleration. We’re already seeing signs of political decentralisation on the horizon - not least of which is today’s confirmation that Roe v. Wade has been overturned - and those are only going to grow more frequent and more persistent as time goes by. In the near future, at least, any true political violence is likely to come from the Left, however, because the Left is supported by the current institutional power structure. As such, the Left can do anything - up to and including trying to assassinate sitting Supreme Court justices - and face few if any consequences. If the Right tried anything close to comparable, it’d get rolled up quickly. Even the farce of the “J6 insurrection” has seen a ridiculously disproportionate response from Democrats frightened that their acceleration almost caused the plan to go awry.

Of course, as noted previously, there are always the blackpillers out there who have made it their mission to convince the Right that there is simply no way out and that the Left’s rise to total dominance is inevitable. They’re always going to control the institutions and the institutions will always be totally relevant to every facet of life. The Left will always have a handle on things and there’s no possible way the Right can ever mount an effective challenge to them. Despite all evidences to the contrary, these folks attribute some kind of machine-like hypercompetency to the Left that simply is not there. Yes, while they have great institutional power, the Left is neither unassailable nor even particularly proficient at running the things they do control. Their only real area of capability is in destroying what came before them - the competency of the wrecker and the bomb-thrower. Providing competent administration to what you’ve captured is much more difficult - and becomes even more so once you start destabilising your entire society via acceleration.

Indeed, these folks who naysay a possible “national divorce” and decentralisation have a diametrically wrong read on the room. They think that TPTB have an all-powerful, 1984-like control over the system - but that’s not at all what is actually happening. In 1984, the Party was able to establish an equilibrium of total power by doing precisely the opposite of what the American Left is currently doing. The Party in Orwell’s book intentionally created a social system dominated entirely by as nearly perfect a social stasis as it was possible to create. The world of 1984 sees no real change. Yes, there may be alternating war with Eurasia or Eastasia, but the life of the Outer Party member, at least, is total monotony and unassailable routine. There is no roiling of acceleration to create anything more than token - and easily crushable - internal mental resistance to the Party’s established order. Anyone thinking that the progressive Left has anything close to this - even with their federal agencies and media control and the rest - is simply off their rocker.

Another argument these folks keep making is essentially “Why don’t we see all the hillbillies out in the sticks revolting if we’re going to have a national divorce??” The answer, of course, is that we’re not in a binary situation. We don’t either have perfect contentment with the present sociopolitical order or else full-on armed rebellion. There’s that whole “long train of abuses and usurpations” thing which the colonists endured for a couple of decades (but which, notably, did eventually result in a successful war of secession). Hithertofore, many of the threats which America’s own government presented to her people were existential in nature. The government might try to confiscate your guns. They might start repressing their political enemies. They may eventually start trying to take your kids away from you. That sort of thing. And there was always the release valve of ostensibly having one party that “represents” the Heritage American middle and working classes.

As acceleration continues and this existential situation becomes more and more reified, that will begin to change. The Left is actively coming after your kids now. The Left is planning to set up a system where they can red flag everybody who dissents from them as “mentally ill” and disarm them. The Left is actively prosecuting rightist political dissenters and using officially sanctioned riots and mobs to try to intimidate their opponents. They’re using their power over corporations and government to doxx, debank, and deperson anyone who steps out of line. Their accelerationist tendencies merely mean that more and more people will eventually start to qualify as being “out of line” in their eyes. In response to Roe v. Wade being overturned, they’re already contemplating violence against all the “hillbilly Trump voters” who made it possible.

This *does* sound like a good way to get yourself shot…

And topping this all off is the fact that a good chunk of the Republican Party is in on the game and more and more people are becoming aware of this. As a result, that particular way of bleeding off energy from our overcharged social system is rapidly being closed off. People are starting to figure out that folks like Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell, and the rest aren’t really on our team and never have been.

Don’t count on the situation remaining passive for very long as the Left’s acceleration continues to ramp up. What if FedGov really does start trying to make mass arrests of dissenters? What if the Left really does whack a SCOTUS justice and faces no substantive retribution? What if the Left really does try swatting every gun owner they can find? It’s highly doubtful that kind of thing will just be taken lying down (nor should it). This whole “derp derp tha hillbillies ain’t doin’ nuffin’” routine that the blackpillers trot out isn’t likely to remain viable for long.

Obviously, official responses from friendly state governments would be the optimal choice in response to drastic acceleration. What if Florida decided to put some BATFE agents on trial and throw them in prison for a few decades for killing a Florida resident while trying to enforce gun laws that Florida has rejected as unconstitutional? And decides to enforce it by threatening to call out the state National Guard? The Left’s accelerationist tendencies could not allow them to do anything but escalate the situation, possibly into a full-scale shooting war. As I noted above, the Left is at the point where they cannot roll themselves back without a good possibility that everything they’ve accomplished could fall apart.

But as my hypotheticals above suggest, the Left’s accelerationism is creating the sort of situation where acceleration breeds more acceleration. It can’t stop. The momentum is already there and the velocity is only increasing. The Overton Window in this country continues to move left while actual, genuine Americans are increasingly moving right in reaction to the Left’s elevatingly wild excesses. This is because the Overton Window is not a measure of demotically acceptable discourse, but officially acceptable. As the gap between them widens, the Left’s response will be increasing repression which will only produce increasing resistance.

However, every cloud has a silver lining, as they say. One benefit to come out of all of this is that the Left’s acceleration is creating the conditions necessary for the Right to build its own asabiyya, social cohesion that helps to counteract the disorganising, socially atomising tendencies of modern society. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, progressive Leftists and normal Americans are quickly becoming two widely separated cultural entities, and thus are essentially becoming two distinct nations in the genuinely classical sense of the term. This is a tendency that is aided by the Left’s acceleration since it forces the issue. This makes any future national divorce not only more likely, but also more justifiable in the same way that the American colonists breaking away from their English brethren had become by 1775. The blackpillers may not like this and are - unwittingly or wittingly - acting to try to counteract this, to the point it makes you wonder if some of them are being paid to do so. Nevertheless, if the present course holds, their efforts will not be successful in the long run.

As I’ve taken pains to note elsewhere, because the social system we are dealing with (as indeed all are) is a chaotic-complex system, there can really be no specific predictions made about this, that, or the other happening. But the periodic orbit, so to speak, of our system is not really that much different from other historic systems which dealt with revolutionary subversions such as we see from today’s Left. One thing that we can be sure of - if we don’t manage to find a peaceful resolution to the coming sociopolitical conflicts by finding a way to short circuit their accelerationism, the Left is going to drag us all into a very unpleasant future. It’s been caused by the Left, and the breaking point will almost assuredly be provoked by them, but that’ll be small consolation for all those who have to go through it.