Accelerationism and the "four turnings": absolute horseshit

The BBQ Pit
1

Just saw this on Nebula.tv (actually a rare example a really interesting video that is a available in Nebula only and not YouTube):
Why Some Billionaires Are Actively Trying To Destroy The World | Nebula

It’s about accelerationism and its theoretical underpinnings, namely the theory of “four turnings”. While I think the guy who made the video does a fairly good job describing it (I had no idea this was a thing before I watched his video) but despite the fact he’s clearly skeptical of the ideas he’s describing, I’d say he’s actually being quite generous, the whole thing is utter horse shit with no redeeming features.

So accelerationism is the idea that the collapse of society if inevitable, so that rather than attempting to prevent it the logical thing to do is to actually accelerate that collapse so that then (by some magical mechanism that is never really explained in any detail) you get to control what happens after the collapse to some degree and mitigate the worse effects of it. What that “mitigating” looks like depends on whether you are on the left or right wing of the accelarationist movement. This is clearly horse shit on many levels, but is a beloved theory of both neo-nazi terrrorists and billionaires, but we haven’t got to the really fucking dumb bit yet. But to dwell on this bit for a while, there are huge problems with this:

  • Collapse is not inevitable, its a strong possibilty I’d agree, but the only thing that will make it inevitable is if people go out of their way to make it happen.
  • Even if I’m wrong there is no way in which attempting to accelarate the collapse will improve things. If you think its inevitable, try and make the agricultral system more reliable and diverse, make sure knowledge is spread in a more equitable, distributed manner, literally anything is more helpful than actively trying to make society collapse.
  • This is not a hollywood post-apocalytic movie there isn’t just “a collapse” and then boom we are all driving round the desert in super-charged V8s fighting mauraders in S&M gear. There are various things that could be called a collapse, and trying to make them happen won’t help anyone.
  • There is no sense that the people who make the collapse happen will have some control over what happens afterwards. Really mr Billionaire? You think your highly paid security team is going to carry on taking your orders when the shit hits the fan and your billions are just so much imaginary numbers on a now crashed computer? Good luck with that.

Another aspect of this that they touch on but I think serious underplay is how “accelerationism” is a fundamental part of the Marxist-Leninist theory. This isn’t some obscure little known aspect of marxist theory, a fundamental part of it Marxism/Leninism the idea that the progression from feudalism to capitalism to communism is inevitable, and the true revolutionaries should be encouraging capitalism to collapse and bring about communist utopia, rather than doing anything to try an improve capitalism (i.e. anything that might actually help the downtrodden workers of the world).

OK so that’s accelerationism, but thats not the really fucking ridiculous stupid horse shit part. The theoretical justification for this is a thing called “the four turnings” or “strass-howe generational theory”. This is the idea that all of the history of society is based 80 year cycles, where you have:

  • a crisis/collapse with massive wars and violence (the first turning)
  • a “high period” where society comes together after the crisis and everything is great (the second turning)
  • an “awakening”. Where there is the reaction against the conformity of the high period, and people start to value individualism over social cohesion (third turning)
  • an “unraveling” Where the that individualism causes social cohesion to break down triggering a crisis and the cycle begins again (the fourth turning which we are allegedly undergoing right now)

What the actual fuck! This idea that this is some kind of deep wisdom that universally describes all the history of human society to the point that you can use it to predict the future (and justify collapsing society, as it just another turn of the wheel and we want to get to that “high period” that will inevitably follow) is so so fucking dumb. The absolute best you can say about that that its a vaguely plausible way of describing the last 80 years of US history, if you attempt to apply it to older US history or the last 80 years outside the US it completely breaks down. What about WW1? What about the “social cohesion” of people who were not white cishet males during the “high period”?

Generally the most you can say about it is “yes, societies tend to do well for a while, and then they don’t, usually because of internal social pressures”. Even the idea that collapse is cyclical is bullshit. Sure it is sometimes, but far more common is they collapse and they stay collapsed, the geographic and human entity that made up the society never comes back to the “high period” (e.g.: did most of the population of the Ottoman empire return to the golden age of the Ottomans after the collapse? No. The modern state of Turkey only represents a small percentage of the Ottoman empire and even that was a poor under-developed nation, not close to being the dominant superpower it was in its high period. The high period also happening far fucking longer than 80 years earlier of course). And in cases where the society survives a crisis without completely collapsing, it is more likely to fundamentally weakened it rather than strengthen it and trigger a “golden age”. The only reason WW2 is viewed that way in the US (as a terrible catastrophic crisis, that did trigger a “golden age”, for certain members of society at least) is that WW2 was not fought on US soil, so the US had all the advantage of war spending and industry, without the whole “cities being raised to the ground” thing, that is the exception not the rule.

If this theory is the thing that triggers the collapse of human society I would be genuinely embarrassed for the human race. Say what you want about marxism but it least it was a well thought out and researched theory. This is like something a stoned 18 year old came up with after half paying attention to modern US history 101.

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The person who came up with this four turning nonsense apparently never heard of (a) the Roman empire; (b) the Dark Ages; (c) the Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations; (d) any Chinese or Japanese history; or, well, just about any period in human history that doesn’t fit into that neat little rhetorical package.

3

Yeah Its just so dumb. But apparently beloved by many academics and other who are not apparently completely dumb. Steve Bannon was mentioned as a proponent, who while a terrible human being is not actually particularly stupid AFAIK. I guess its just a moral fig leaf for the terrible things he’s done and plans to do? He didn’t mention which Billionaires are signed on to this bullshit, but Elon excepted they aren’t that dumb (not that they are galaxy brain geniuses who deserve all their money because they are so intelligent and skillful, but they do tend to be a bit more intelligent than Elon IMO)

4

I agree that flaming bigots have hoped to incite “race wars” to bring about their apocalyptic visions. But what billionaires like the idea of accelerating society’s collapse (not going to subscribe to Nebula TV to see what’s being claimed)?

It sounds very much like what conspiracy loons say, that Bill Gates and Big Pharma are engineering mass depopulation through vaccination and other nefarious means, though how that outcome would benefit them remains a mystery.

5

It seems the Accelerationists are the ones who watched James Bond movies and got the mistaken idea that the villain was actually the hero.

6

Lots of people who are “smart” in one area fall for pseudoscience in another. Especially fascists (which Steve Bannon definitely is).

Nah, they all just think they’re Harry Seldon (The Foundation series)

7

^^^ That was my thought. “If we encourage it, we have more control over its trajectory!”

Neat story. Not reality.

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< A Musical Interlude While We Think About It >

9

This also occurred to me. But didn’t want Issac Azimov associated with these fuckwads :slight_smile:

10

This reminds me of an essay Jerry Pournelle wrote a few decades back. Back in the 80s, he was heavily involved in the Cold War, and doing a lot of thinking about how to preserve a functioning society post-nuclear war. Hey, it was the 80s, this was actually something we thought about!

He made the point that, it becomes kind of alluring: You have this plan for fixing everything that’s wrong, setting up your new, perfect society, and you start to think, “Maybe an apocalypse wouldn’t be such a bad thing…”

Of course, he had the realization: Anything we could do after having the world turned to shit, we could do even better in a non-shit world. So, if you think you’ve got a viable plan for a new, perfect society? Put up or shut up; tell us the plan now and see if we can poke holes in it.

11

I think individualism can be a good thing as long as it is accompanied by values. We are in the midst of a societal collapse. Accelerating the cause would probably make it more recoverable but a very nasty painful thought. I like to believe that societies should change slowly, if something doesn’t work you simply back up and go a different direction. A lot of this happens within a family unit, when that breaks down collapse is almost inevitable. If we can address the need for individual to self-actualize in a positive way, we have a chance.

12

Well, at least one of them does: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/14/tech/elon-musk-funding-new-austin-school/index.html

Members of Musk’s inner circle — including Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office — are named as leaders of The Foundation, a new school planning to teach “STEM subjects and other topics,” in an application to the Internal Revenue Service asking for tax-exempt status last year. Birchall is also a director of Musk’s own charitable arm, Musk Foundation.

Of course, the two viewpoints are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

“I’m here to announce on my X media platform about my new X-Raker Spaceplane equipped with the world’s most powerful X-ray later platform which I will use to simultaneously irradiate all of the bullion in the Gold Depository at Fort Knox, wipe all of the banking systems in London of their financial data, and flood Silicon Valley while crashing the stock market and shorting Tesla stock to make billions. Wait, does that cover all the bases? I think I also need an underwater city to survive the nuclear apocalypse and something about a voodoo cult running heroin in Harlem.”

Stranger

13

Don’t know if some hard leftists still think this way, but in times past I remember some uber-progressive types insisting that things were so screwed up, the only way to achieve their dream society was to burn it all down and rebuild from the ashes.

Among other things, they never seemed to contemplate the reality that most of the heavily armed survival types who were most likely to come out in control were not interested in their vision for the future.

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You’ve mistaken them for current moderate conservatives.

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No, no, you have to cast your memory back to the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras (yes, I’m that old). I also encountered those sort of sentiments during the Clinton administration when CHANGE DAMMIT wasn’t happening fast enough to right all the wrongs of the world. It wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is on the right now, but it existed.

16

It’s a pretty fundamental part of traditional marxist-leninist thinking. The idea that that fall of capitalism was an inevitable product of the evolution of human society, and rather than try and reform capitalist society the best thing for everyone was encourage that fall, so the new communist society could be created from the ashes. There was actually a great debate among the bolsheviks prior to the October revolution as it was generally considered Russia had not actually properly progressed into the industrial capitalist phase of society’s evolution, and was still stuck in the feudalist phase, so they (or at least some of them) thought they shouldn’t encouraging society to collapse just yet, as it wasn’t ready for the inevitable transition to communism.

IMO even nowadays the defining opinion of the “far left” is no amount of reform, no matter how radical to the current system is good enough, the only way to solve the oppression and inequality in the world is to completely tear down the entire economic system and start again (which conveniently absolves them from doing anything actually meaningful to help oppression and inequality in the world).

Though at least Marxism is, for all of its faults, a meticulously researched system with historical precedent to back it up. It turns out Marx wasted all those years he spent in the British library pouring over production figures, he would have been better off skimming a high school history text book and coming up with some bullshit like “the four turnings” :angry:

17

I’m old enough. You missed my point. That was the extreme left back then. It’s the center of the conservative wing now.

18

It’s Hari Seldon in books written by Isaac Asimov.

Although there is a good essay to write about the way that memes from science fiction are now assumed to be part of larger world’s store of common knowledge rather than idiocies from an uncool niche genre considered to be for illiterates until WWII technology made it seem predictive, the truth is that the world’s intellectuals got exactly zero percent of their intellectual armament from Asimov.

Just the opposite. Asimov, barely out of his teens, announced proudly that he drew directly on Gibson’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and mashed it up with Toynbee’s notion that all empires follow a similar path of cycles. I’d add that the revival in the 1930s of Technocracy, in which engineers take over from politicians, also played a large part.

Accelerationism is not anything I know much about, probably because a quick search shows that since the word was coined in 2010 its been co-opted by the slimiest underbelly of right-wing humanity. The original theory, cast in philosophical arguments of other philosophical arguments, and probably unreadable and unknowable by 99+% of humanity - exactly as science fiction was in the early 1940s, has now been pureed into simplistic and therefore comprehensible assertions about fantasy future worlds to form a modern version of science fiction for those who are susceptible to surface-level visions. Not buying it in any of its forms.

19

The closest thing I’ve ever seen to accelerationism on the left (I think on this very message board) was strong progressives hoping for the election of Donald Trump in 2016 under the assumption that he would be such a bad president that the backlash would make people demand radical progressive policies.

They were correct on the awful part, unfortunately not on the massive backlash ushering in a new progressive age.

20

Spot on. I remember such blatherings on the left-leaning blogs I was reading back then, and how fiercely the burn it all down crew insisted that mere reform would never be good enough. Come to think of it, they were the same folks who rejected supporting Obamacare because the only true path forward was univeral healthcare, a/k/a Medicare for all, and never mind what was politically possible – all or nothing for them.