The Coming Apocalypse?

I have been doing a deep dive on Dark Enlightenment and Accelerationists like Peter Thiel. Something I began in July before getting distracted by the Flubbed Assassination Attempt and then Thiel, Vance, Musk, RFK Jr hopping on his bandwagon.   

Trump is only a tool of the Accelerationists so I will leave him out of this post. Its bigger than him.

I started out trying to do a piece on Thiels Dark Enlightenment ideology but after reading his essays and listening to a bunch of interviews I am not sure he has a coherent ideology. It could just be a collection of random contrarian impulses, or he is just very good at concealment.

I have come to the conclusion Peter Thiel is basically just a front for the BLOB’s Military-Intelligence Industrial Complex faction, and perhaps Musk and other Silicon Valley Tech Billionaires are as well.

Thiel is Philosophy Major/ Law School graduate who becomes a Venture Capitalist following a short stint at CIA linked Sullivan and Cromwell,  now a multi billionaire with a number of corporations servicing governments intelligence and defense agencies surveillance activities. I am not going to rehash his Corporate history and Epstein tied, thats been done by others.

Not a tech guy, not very articulate (man that Joe Rogan interview was brutal), probably very bright but more of a Philosopher and Math whiz that has been deemed trust worthy enough to hold the keys to the Intelligence and Defense Communities Toys

Since the 1980’s the USG has moved many activities to the private sector to avoid Congressional Oversight and guys like Thiel provide a cover for the fact some of these companies are operated on behalf of the government,  and they are duly rewarded

Before I begin I should probably explain that Accelerationists exist on both the Left and Right as well as the Centric BLOB which is neither Left nor Right.

They use the threat of existential civilizational cataclysm due to Climate, Nuclear, World War, Disease or Financial Armageddon  to get support for policies which will end Democracy as we know it, or at least the illusion of a Democracy and put Corporations or Technocrats in control.

The main difference between the Left and Right is the Right are Warp Speed Accelerationists who  don’t mind engineering disasters such as 9/11, Anthrax, Global Financial Crisis, COVID to speed things up while the Left mostly react to events and spin them in a way to make their case. Examples are Hurricanes, Fires, COVID, etc which are all attributed to mans effect on Climate (One Health) so as to enact Malthusian Policies concerning Food, Energy, Vaccines, Drugs, etc.

Disasters and Catastrophes are accelerants for change

You might say the New Right are like the Bolsheviks while the Pretend Left are the Mensheviks.

Since I am convinced the Right Faction of the BLOB prevails I will focus more on the Rights Dark Enlightenment Faction, also called neoreactionairies or NRx.

Thiels interviews, speeches and interviews are relatively benign given they are couched in a Straussian manner of communicating which is not easily translated.  He expresses views on Apocalypse, Totalitarianism Catastrophe, lack of Technological and Scientific Progress beyond bits which translates to economic stagnation and regression, expresses a loathing for Politics and Competition in Capitalism and discounts Democracy while offering a scapegoat for this. That scapegoat is the Identity Politics on the Left

This is mostly BS but before explaining why lets look at what people he seems aligned with  have been saying.  Here is an excerpt from an Ian Davis article that puts it simply

In 2012, Nick Land, opined that, while people may benefit from the associated "progress", the destination of the process of enlightenment is "a new dark age".

The "neoreactionary" (NRx) has to pursue the lessons of the Dark Enlightenment in the hope of breaking free from the inexorable path towards "totalitarian catastrophe". Picking up on Thiel's ideas, and calling their expression a "milestone", Land writes:

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries [NRxs], democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself.. In 2013, Yarvin (alias Moldbug) received start-up funding from Peter Thiel for Urbit, his decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) network technology company.

Thiel, Yarvin and Land are among many who believe that "sovereignty" is solely defined by political power exerted over others. Consequently, Land claims that such sovereignty "cannot be eliminated, caged, or controlled". The monetary power of supreme capitalists is also an unavoidable reality, and therefore the task is to identify "who[m] capitalists pay for political favours". This so-called "mapping" of real power will enable clarification of the "ruling entity" that comprises the "truly dominant instance of the democratic polity".

The "dominant instance" is therefore considered by those of the neoreactionary persuasion to be an amalgam of a malleable "democratic" polity with a corrupting element of private capital.

Yarvin declared that this socio-political structure expressed itself through "the Media-Academic complex", creating an invincible "ruling entity" he called "the Cathedral".

Yarvin suggested that an account of the Cathedral should be made by quantifying its "administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges". These elements could then each be given a monetary value and subsequently "converted into fungible shares". He named the process "neo-cameralisation” (meaning reorganising the chambers).

Thus understood, the Cathedral could eventually be transformed into a corporate structure called "gov-corp". This would be owned by capitalist stakeholders and run as a business:

Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp, the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance.

The technological capacity "accelerating development" does provide the necessary growth, but it is then almost entirely consumed by "the rent-seeking special interests" of the extant Cathedral. The fruits of that growth are swallowed by the stakeholders before anyone else gets a taste.

Land wrote:

Postmodernity. Amounting essentially to a new dark age, in which Malthusian limits brutally re-impose themselves, this scenario assumes that Modernity 1.0 has so radically globalized its own morbidity that the entire future of the world collapses around it. If the Cathedral ‘wins’ this is what we have coming.

Land identified the opening-up of China as key to preserving the stakeholders’ feeding frenzy. In 2012, he predicted that Modernity 2.0 would be based upon the necessary dissolution of the pax Americana world order, thereby inviting other states to the dining table. This would defuse Anglo-American power but would also transmit demosclerosis to others:

For the accelerationists, the Dark Enlightenment offers a would-be solution. As Modernity 1.0 and 2.0 are understood only to be heading towards the same point of annihilation, with the 2.0 iteration simply kicking the can further down the road, Schumpeter's creative destruction (a term also bandied about in Britain's misnamed Conservative Party) should be accelerated and propelled to brutal heights in order to smash the Cathedral to pieces.

Like the short, sharp shock of the 1920 financial crash as set against the prolonged agony of the post-1929 Depression, this, it is held, will be preferable to the slow, drawn-out suffocation of Modernity 2.0.

According to Land, a subsequent "Western Renaissance" will then be born:

Western Renaissance. To be reborn it is first necessary to die, so the harder the ‘hard reboot’ the better.

Comprehensive crisis and disintegration offers the best odds.

The darkly enlightened accelerationists acknowledge that the deeply entrenched self-interest of the Cathedral stakeholders renders the "vector" immovable. Only the Cathedral's final implosion enables gov-corp to facilitate Western Renaissance:

[I]t’s already absolutely clear that none of this is going to happen short of an existential civilizational cataclysm.

Thus, the only part of Western civilisation that the neoreactionary considers worthy is its "scientific, technological, and business innovation".

The Dark Enlightenment logically advocates that the "owners of the state" are those who already have sufficient means to "buy out" the Cathedral's "stakeholders". While Land stops short of saying so, this implies that the current "stakeholders", through neo-cameralisation—the "formalization of political powers"—will simply become the major "shareholders" of the Western Renaissance delivered by gov-corp.

Thiel's "unthinking dēmos", who aren't worth bribing because their share of sovereignty is derisory, simply become the "not very bright" customers of gov-corp. Land asserts that gov-corp would be an improvement upon destructive democracy because the primary business of this corporate state would be to maximise collection of "sovereign-rent" (taxation) from gov-corp's dullard customers (the population):

Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers.

The customer, then, is an NPC (non-playing character) whose only purpose is to act as a cash cow—although money won't exist—for the neoreactionary shareholders (stakeholders) of global gov-corp.

As "technoplastic beings" (meaning entities capable of being reformed by technology), in a world where "biology and medicine co-evolve", we can all prostrate our children before gov-corp as we collectively undergo "precise, scientifically-informed transformations".

The Accelerationist Pragmatists

. Both advocate the extreme application of Schumpeter's "creative destruction" as the only viable solution to approaching catastrophe. For the Left, it is the alleged climate disaster and the associated societal collapse; for the Right, it is the economic and financial implosion, and accompanying moral decay, that is held to be hardwired into modern democracy.

right-leaning accelerationists conclude that "democracy" is the source of economic, social and moral collapse. What they really mean is that representative democracy is the alleged culprit. They assume inevitability without even knowing what the available solutions are.

Conversely, the accelerationist leftists believe that democracy—meaning representative democracy—has been corrupted and needs to be fixed.

Neither the Left nor the Right are going to get what they want. Accelerationism is firmly in the hands of the globalist accelerationist pragmatists: the stakeholders.

While the "post-capitalist" utopia of the "sociotechnical hegemony" is avidly reprogramming "production, finance, logistics, and consumption", what is emerging from the transformation is gov-corp, ushering in a new form of extreme predatory capitalism.

Using the accelerationist tactic of claiming an existential threat, the argument for caution was thrown aside to be replaced by disruptive accelerationism:

The accelerationist pragmatists have learned from the pseudopandemic, because Covid-19 was a test of social responsibility. We performed well, jumping through all the required hoops on command, readying ourselves to receive our conditional rewards.

https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/accelerating-toward-dark-enlightenment

Here is a bit more on Yarvin

Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.

“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote in Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.

Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity.

For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.

The realm, having sovereign power, can compel the resident to comply with all promises. Since San Francisco is not an Islamic state, it does not ask its residents to agree that their hand will be cut off if they steal. But it could. And San Francisco, likewise, can promise not to cut off its residents’ hands until it is blue in the face—but, since it is a sovereign state, no one can enforce this promise against it.

In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas

There are a few interesting concepts expressed here.

Most interesting is the Cathedral . The “Cathedral,” is an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press. This is that part of the BLOB excluding Global Corporations and the Military and Intelligence Agencies and Organizations like the Atlantic Council.

Sounds like they want to excise or buy out portions of the BLOB they don’t like but Media is a big part of selling Propaganda and Academia is part of a Military Academia Industrial Complex and a a big part of Science.

Now lets look at JD Vance who as you know is Thiels protege

Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine—that our system will either fall apart naturally, or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.

“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,”

Vance said. Murphy chortled knowingly.

“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,”

Vance went on.

“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

He said he thought this was pessimistic.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:

Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

“We are in a late republican period,”

Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets

That was written is 2022 before JD Vance signed on as VP. Funny how it never came up during the election (at least I didnt see it)

Lets get back to Peter Thiel

As a Christian Libertarian he doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of Democracy or Politics and blames the lack of Technical and Scientific progress beyond bits and Information Technology on Identity Politics, which is also the source of our Economic Woes, so he says.  There are aspects of Thiel’s politics that aren’t libertarian at all; they’re closer to authoritarianism.

In Thiel’s book "Zero to One". Ideas like: Founders are gods. The best companies are dictatorships. Competition is bad. Monopolies are good.

He is not shy about saying how Government can play a big role by referencing the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program. They also played a big role in inventing and Internet and Chip Technology. Heck, our railroads, highways, electrical , power and water infrastructure all required significant government involvement.

What changed?  For one thing we decided we needed to spend our money on building an Empire so we spend most of the discretionary spending on the Military.  We could have high speed railways and large efficient airports like China but we wont spend the money.  Our old bridges collapse, our outdated highways are clogged and we rely on foreigners to deliver our goods and get the containers off the ships so we can move the goods into warehouses.

Another big part is Peer Review and Government dominant role in Funding on Science that Eisenhower warned us about in 1961, all of which contributes to censoring those whose ideas challenge the existing paradigm.  Both of these came into force after World War II

Thiel himself is a Straussian so his writing and speech are rather opaque. As a Bilderberger he defended the lack of transparency over their meetings so it seems likely his position is the less the “demos” know the better.

He is also a fan of the scapegoat theory by some French guy named Girard whom he met at Stanford, author of the 1972 book “Violence and the Sacred.”

According to Girard mimetic theory, we borrow our desires from others. All conflict therefore originates in mimetic desire, which eventually reaches destructive stages when social groups tend to blame someone or something in order to defuse conflict through the scapegoat mechanism, an idea he borrowed from James Frazer’s concept of the killing of the sacred king.

Another guy he talks about is Schmitt. Schmitt published The Concept of the Political, defending the view that all true politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy.  Though Schmitt had not been a supporter of National Socialism before Hitler came to power, he sided with the Nazis after 1933. Schmitt quickly obtained an influential position in the legal profession and came to be perceived as the ‘Crown Jurist’ of National Socialism.

According to Thiel, adopting Schmitt’s rejection of the Enlightenment, 9/11 “called into question… the entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and indeed of the modern age.” Effectively, Thiel believes that the West has become squeamish about violence, as a legacy of the Enlightenment and its search for rational alternatives. Instead, Thiel proposes, Schmitt’s the Concept of the Political, helps us to realize that the dichotomy of us versus an enemy is inevitable.

Thiel quotes Strauss as saying that “[i]nstead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates… we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” Thiel saw Palantir as a “mission-oriented company” which could apply software similar to PayPal’s fraud recognition systems to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.”

https://ordoabchao.ca/volume-six/techno-libertarianism

His writings and interviews reinforce general  dissatisfaction with technical and scientific progress which in turn limits Economic progress and has prevented the Jetson future that was envisioned in the late 60’s and 70’s.

His fascination with Lord the Rings along with some of his statements on Kings suggests he would like to see a Return of the Kings in this world

One of his more interesting quotes is from a 2009 essay

“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

…..we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

In his Straussian way of writing here Thiel is suggesting a Techno-Uberman may save freedom and capitalism if we can eliminate the politics of a Democratic or Constitutional Republican government and replace it with a new machine called Gov-corp whose CEO drives it to a corporate utopian dream.  The enemy is defined as Politics which is code for a Democratic Government

As an aside Thiel frequently mentions the roaring twenties which he attributes as a credit to non-interventionist policies during the depression of 1920-1921. The forgotten depression.  The recession of 1920–1921 was characterized by extreme deflation, the largest one-year percentage decline in around 140 years of data.  This was blamed on high interest rates imposed by Fed which shrank the money supply and Hardings aggressive policy of rapid government downsizing. The Department of Commerce estimates 18% deflation, Balke and Gordon estimate 13% deflation, and Romer estimates 14.8% deflation. Wholesale prices fell 36.8%, the most severe drop since the American Revolutionary War. This is worse than any year during the Great Depression (although adding all the years of the Great Depression together yields more cumulative deflation).

He fails to mention President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street. Nor does he mention the resulting Great Depression that began in 1929. The Depression was exacerbated by Hoovers Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which increased Tariffs across the board like Trump is planning to do

Thiel is also a Globalist as his thoughts in this 2007 Essay suggest, albeit he tries to appear reluctant

In contrast to the divergent future worlds of globalization, all versions of anti-globalization are incoherent. Of course, one can imagine various details: less trade and travel; more robust boundaries; the elimination of ngos; and a turning back of the clock, so as to restore cultural institutions that are in the process of breaking down. But the pieces do not add up, at least not on the level of the whole world.

By its very nature, anti-globalization cannot be a global political agenda. Every worldwide conference or gathering of anti-globalization activists or politicians necessarily dissolves into self-contradiction — or worse, becomes a deceptive cover for some bad version of globalization, such as a worldwide communist revolution.

While it is theoretically possible for individuals and small communities to opt out of globalization and its benefits, in practice this is not an option that all people in all countries will choose, at least not based on their own free will. The momentum towards globalization is hard to resist or to reverse.

Although the trend towards globalization will not end by individual choice and cannot end by coordinated global action, one other possibility does remain. Globalization may end by accident or by terrible miscalculation: It may end by world war.

Because there would be no winners in a new world war, every path away from globalization will end in catastrophe.

Thus, in spite of the many uncertainties surrounding the costs and benefits of a more globally integrated world, investors have no choice but to bet on globalization. There are no good investments in a twenty-first century where globalization fails

He is also a promoter of a Coming Apocalypse or a Totalitarian Disaster if things don’t change, and his Foundation recently suggested that maybe we should hope for an Apocalypse .  Thiels Founders Fund had a 3 day party to discuss the Apocolypse in late October. There were a few statements which give you a hint of where they are coming from

https://foundersfund.com/2024/02/hereticon-2024/

This October, ….we’d like to introduce a frame for your consideration: the end of the world.

For years, Americans have obsessed with the question of our impending doom, captured especially by the role of technology in humanity’s looming final chapter, though here perspectives tend to bifurcate. First, from our nascent class of celebrity safetyists, we’re told mankind’s technological destruction is certain unless we halt interrogation and development of every field from synthetic biology to advanced computing, reducing the imagined existential risk of novel technologies to something close to zero. Concurrently, from the accelerating techno-optimists, we’re told only good has ever come, and can ever come, of technological advance. Both positions are wrong.

Amidst the lingering consequences of what was probably a lab made pandemic, heightened political turmoil in a world of nuclear weapons…the truth is we are clearly at risk of cataclysm.

But that is the corollary of life in an age of wonder, a precious gift impossible without the natural dangers inherent of tremendous progress. In other words: yes, we are at risk of the apocalypse, and that is good. 

But then we’d like to pose another question, almost never considered in our ostensibly progressing society: what are the elements of our world actually worth saving?”

Consider the world as it stands today, not as you’d like it to stand, but as it really presents. How much of this should be preserved?

Maybe if you aren’t trying to destroy the world, you aren’t trying hard enough.

https://foundersfund.com/2024/02/hereticon-2024/

Spooky, right?

So anyways, this post has me thinking a New World Order is coming soon.   Its going to be painful for a lot of people but the Billionaires will make out fine.

To Build Back Better they need to Demolish the structure first.   I think they are going to “Pull It” soon.   This will be backed by the Military and Intelligence Agencies and Billionaires/CEO’s of Global Corporations.

How exactly the go about it probably involves something pretty big. Maybe multiple big events in succession. Apocalyptic maybe.

I could be wrong of course. Optimists might say Trump would see through this and save the day. Maybe he will. Nothing wrong with having a little Hopium, its not like there is anything to be done at this point.