Accelerationism is off the menu
As the conference amply displayed, ordinary is good and that might be enough common ground to stand on while we fight against the inhumanity of technocracy.
Attending last weekend’s conference of right-leaning dissidents was a heartening experience. I had been invited as a speaker to the event held at a Midlands university, my topic being opposing the leftist dominance of public culture. I did not know quite what the crowd would be. I suspect the organisers themselves did not know. Like any group which congregates online in chatrooms, forums, social media and YouTube comment sections, we only half-recognised individuals from their humorous pseudonyms and doomer-style profile avatars. We had no way of knowing what we thought we knew about their real lives was true or accurate. So, when the attendees arrived in suits, ties and polished shoes, we were impressed with their seriousness and later by their friendliness.
They turned out to be a both surprisingly mixed but also homogenous crowd. Ninety-five percent male is perhaps an underestimate of the event’s composition. (We calculated that there were more attendees called “Alexander” than there were female attendees.) There were people from all faiths and none, different races and so forth. There were some overseas attendees, who braved the costs and stresses of COVID-era international travel, but there was an expected skew towards the young, male, employed and British, many of them local.
Everyone found the predominant politically correct official culture absurd and repulsive and had no trust in the present government or any major political party. There did not seem to be anyone advocating for nationalist or far-right parties. There was more talk of twisting arms of local Tory MPs than supporting parties whose manifestoes better reflected views of attendees. There was more talk of localism, community action and pub meet-ups than revolution, even as an abstract.
The constant message was to form bonds with other attendees and neighbours. One speaker said that the best thing these young men (most of the attendees were aged thirty-five or under) could do was to get married and have children. With all the talk of returning to faith, family values and community outreach, a casual observer might have thought – looking across a lecture theatre populated by young men in jackets and waistcoats – that they had encountered a Christian symposium.
One noticeable absence was talk of accelerationism. Accelerationism (that is, encouraging everything to get worse and collapse before rebuilding a more positive and stable society) is a libertarian survivalist fantasy. The truth is that accelerationism is an idle coping fantasy for bedroom warriors in a stable and prosperous society. I have never heard a combat veteran come back to his home and advocate collapse of his own society. Accelerationism is the pessimistic bravado of someone who longs to be part of a community of like-minded people but cannot bring himself to expose his honest feelings- lest they make him look soft or ordinary.
The very act of attending (in person) a (paid-for) conference on the subject of the future, means at least entertaining the possibility that there are things worth preserving and celebrating. The warmth of a family hearth was the aspiration, not prospective arson of buildings. As the conference amply displayed, ordinary is good and that might be enough common ground to stand on while we fight against the inhumanity of technocracy.
