Don’t help your enemy kill you (and your children)

Accelerationism is a really, really bad idea. The appeal is clear, of course. We see the world building up its Jenga block tower of bad ideas and bad decisions and outright evil. There’s a temptation to laugh and jump in headfirst, seeking the destruction of this conglomeration from within by pressing its suicidal tendencies to the limit. Yet the policy is still wrong-headed and actually wrong, no matter that its target may well deserve downfall.

First, the accelerationist must recognize that helping the enemy is a facially bad idea. The other guy usually isn’t as stupid as you’d like, and helping him with his goals may push his work towards collapse, he might be able to save it, even just for a time. For a particularly harsh example, imagine the accelerationist who sees the instability of Communism in 1915 and decide to press it to collapse in order to come out the other end the faster. So this Russian helps Lenin get in power, followed by Stalin, and the grandchildren of some of his friends see communism collapse 70 years later. He died in the middle and his children with him. Communism wasn’t stable, but it wasn’t farcically unstable either.

Second, the accelerationist must recognize that the world is a chaos system. No man can really predict where all the chips will fall on a normal day, not every time, and accelerationism is predicated on causing chaos, on throwing the whole affair up in the air. When the Bad Thing tumbles down, what will it take with it? What damage also will it do in the meantime? Accelerationism’s expectation of victory-through-aiding-my-opponent forgets that the game generally has at least three players, and quite probably the side that does help its enemy will come out on top when the Bad Thing tumbles. Any accelerationist who saw in Weimar Germany an opportunity to bring down liberalism’s degeneracy accomplished only National Socialism, millions dead, and another liberal democracy (less openly degenerate, for a time).

Third, accelerationism assumes that the Bad Thing is going to win regardless, in the short term. It’s as if a Jew in Jerusalem looked out upon the army of Senacharib halfway through 2 Kings 19 and decided that he might as well get the whole Assyrian invasion over with by opening the gates (treachery, by the bye). He looked at the world with eyes that doubt God, even if he professed a certainty that eventually the Assyrian dominion would pass in order to allow Israel to finish its covenantal role, and he ignored that the Lord can work victory in any circumstance, for in one night 185000 died.

Fourth, accelerationism’s essence is to say, “Let us do evil that good may come.” Paul gives that nonsense short shrift indeed in Romans 3:8, and the rest of Scripture offers no more leeway. Ephesians 5:1 calls us to imitate the Lord; Deuteronomy 32:4 tells us of a God who does not compromise in righteousness. Necessity is no excuse for evildoing, not in the hands of men who do not know the future or even the present or the past.

Accelerationism may be tempting, but it is wrong. Being wrong, it is naturally also counter-productive, myopic, and foolish. We are much better occupied in steady faithfulness to righteousness and the sanctification of the world (Is. 65:20-25).

God bless.