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There can be a wider sense to being destructive. Example mindset: if we as a society have too much inertia to steer away from tragedy, it's better to hasten its

by dmos62 7y ago

There can be a wider sense to being destructive. Example mindset: if we as a society have too much inertia to steer away from tragedy, it's better to hasten its arrival, rather than slow it, because the later it comes, the more destructive it will be. Constructive destruction. In that vein, populism is good, identity politics is good, culture of greed is good, growing inequality is good, etc. I don't share that viewpoint, but, I do think that many of these destructive trends are an unconscious civilization-level self-regulation, which has the purpose of dropping inertia by gradually destroying self.

castratikron 7y ago
So basically their answer to the trolley problem is to flip the switch and have it run over one person instead of five. It only makes sense to act that way if you absolutely know a tragedy will occur. Of course, in the real world, the future is not so certain. You can't know for sure if the damage you do in the short term is any less than the damage that would have happened.
- dmos62 7y ago
  I think there's a fair amount of people who think that status quo is untenable. That, and a sense of overwhelming inertia is all it takes.
phs318u 7y ago
Sounds like self-serving, "ends justify the means" bullshit to me.
- dmos62 7y ago
  Like a villain in a movie, right? Where you're setup to despise him, but also sympathize with him just a bit. I think that people who are genuinely destructive might have rationalizations about why they're doing what they're doing, but the rationalization is just a distraction. Ultimately they don't really know, because it's bigger than them.
- crocodiletears 7y ago
  There's a sizable minority of the younger generation with a sense that the world as is offers them no purpose or worthwhile future, and no control over the institutions that have guided it to this point. Increasingly large numbers of them seem determined to topple the Apple cart, if only for the opportunity to experience anything else. Certainly, it's self-serving. But with enough momentum, it may end up working.
  - phs318u 7y ago
    > it may end up working Said every revolutionary ever, just before the new tyrants take over* from the old tyrants. * with incredibly few exceptions (before you quote the American revolution at me; and please don't equate trolls with the American revolutionaries).
    - crocodiletears 7y ago
      I was referring to their attempt to tip the apple cart. Not create a new world. Nowhere in this thread has anybody come close to proposing this as a net good, or even really what the world would look like after such an acceleration. My comment was strictly observational in nature. I'll grant that I could have done better in clarifying that. However, even in the event that I was attempting to advocate on behalf of an accelerationist mindset, there was no need for you to respond combatively, or condescendingly cut off some weak (albeit common) argument that you've wargamed out in your head. Believe it or not, not everybody's as stupid or predictable as you seem to think they are, and you should ask someone for details before you decide what they think for them.
  - dmos62 7y ago
    In compliment to your point, I think it's important to remember that the "toppling of the cart", doesn't aim, as an express purpose, to put the cart where you want it to be, but rather to destroy the cart. The phenomenon, I argue, is more base than revolution, and it doesn't have a focus on the future (or even a sense of it). It's exclusively about the now. So it's a mistake to evoke revolutions as examples. I called it constructive destruction in my original commnent, but a more accurate expression would be ultimately-maybe-inadvertently-constructive destruction.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  The same is true about the status quo. People who don't find that the prevailing system works for them have little motivation to uphold it, although different groups may oppose the status quo for very different reasons.
pjc50 7y ago
Marxists call this "accelerationism": making things worse to hasten the revolution.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Marxists call this "accelerationism" No they don't; most Marxists (of whom I am not one) dislike the term and have little truck with accelerationist philosophy, such as it is - best summarized here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationis... You may be thinking of Marx's phrase about 'sharpening the contradictions' between capital and labor to hasten what Marx believed to be an inevitable conflict between them, but accelerationism is rooted in an idea of amoral Darwinian fitness whereas Marx's anxiety was that industrialists would capture the productive capacity of society and extract economic rents from it much as feudal lords had captured agricultural land and done likewise.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    Although it's true that Marxists and accelerationists aren't the same group of people, they have made strange bedfellows recently, especially with the birth of xenofeminism. The disagreements in accelerationist circles stretch far beyond "amoral Darwinian fitness". Marx was in some ways ahead of his time in recognizing that the productive capacity of society had already been captured (and had been so at least two hundred years before Capital was published), and the novel demystification of rent, profit and interest into surplus value. Despite the hints that Marx thought "things should get worse before they get better", there is stronger textual evidence for his belief in engaging in parliamentary politics. Whether that advice can ring true in today's 'democracies' remains to be seen.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      Xenofeminism is a new one on me. Just when I thought it was safe to forget about theory, too. I'll check it out!

by dmos62 7y ago

castratikron 7y ago

So basically their answer to the trolley problem is to flip the switch and have it run over one person instead of five. It only makes sense to act that way if you absolutely know a tragedy will occur. Of course, in the real world, the future is not so certain. You can't know for sure if the damage you do in the short term is any less than the damage that would have happened.

dmos62 7y ago
I think there's a fair amount of people who think that status quo is untenable. That, and a sense of overwhelming inertia is all it takes.

phs318u 7y ago

Sounds like self-serving, "ends justify the means" bullshit to me.

dmos62 7y ago
Like a villain in a movie, right? Where you're setup to despise him, but also sympathize with him just a bit. I think that people who are genuinely destructive might have rationalizations about why they're doing what they're doing, but the rationalization is just a distraction. Ultimately they don't really know, because it's bigger than them.
crocodiletears 7y ago
There's a sizable minority of the younger generation with a sense that the world as is offers them no purpose or worthwhile future, and no control over the institutions that have guided it to this point. Increasingly large numbers of them seem determined to topple the Apple cart, if only for the opportunity to experience anything else. Certainly, it's self-serving. But with enough momentum, it may end up working.
- phs318u 7y ago
  > it may end up working Said every revolutionary ever, just before the new tyrants take over* from the old tyrants. * with incredibly few exceptions (before you quote the American revolution at me; and please don't equate trolls with the American revolutionaries).
  - crocodiletears 7y ago
    I was referring to their attempt to tip the apple cart. Not create a new world. Nowhere in this thread has anybody come close to proposing this as a net good, or even really what the world would look like after such an acceleration. My comment was strictly observational in nature. I'll grant that I could have done better in clarifying that. However, even in the event that I was attempting to advocate on behalf of an accelerationist mindset, there was no need for you to respond combatively, or condescendingly cut off some weak (albeit common) argument that you've wargamed out in your head. Believe it or not, not everybody's as stupid or predictable as you seem to think they are, and you should ask someone for details before you decide what they think for them.
- dmos62 7y ago
  In compliment to your point, I think it's important to remember that the "toppling of the cart", doesn't aim, as an express purpose, to put the cart where you want it to be, but rather to destroy the cart. The phenomenon, I argue, is more base than revolution, and it doesn't have a focus on the future (or even a sense of it). It's exclusively about the now. So it's a mistake to evoke revolutions as examples. I called it constructive destruction in my original commnent, but a more accurate expression would be ultimately-maybe-inadvertently-constructive destruction.
anigbrowl 7y ago
The same is true about the status quo. People who don't find that the prevailing system works for them have little motivation to uphold it, although different groups may oppose the status quo for very different reasons.

pjc50 7y ago

Marxists call this "accelerationism": making things worse to hasten the revolution.

anigbrowl 7y ago
Marxists call this "accelerationism" No they don't; most Marxists (of whom I am not one) dislike the term and have little truck with accelerationist philosophy, such as it is - best summarized here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationis... You may be thinking of Marx's phrase about 'sharpening the contradictions' between capital and labor to hasten what Marx believed to be an inevitable conflict between them, but accelerationism is rooted in an idea of amoral Darwinian fitness whereas Marx's anxiety was that industrialists would capture the productive capacity of society and extract economic rents from it much as feudal lords had captured agricultural land and done likewise.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  Although it's true that Marxists and accelerationists aren't the same group of people, they have made strange bedfellows recently, especially with the birth of xenofeminism. The disagreements in accelerationist circles stretch far beyond "amoral Darwinian fitness". Marx was in some ways ahead of his time in recognizing that the productive capacity of society had already been captured (and had been so at least two hundred years before Capital was published), and the novel demystification of rent, profit and interest into surplus value. Despite the hints that Marx thought "things should get worse before they get better", there is stronger textual evidence for his belief in engaging in parliamentary politics. Whether that advice can ring true in today's 'democracies' remains to be seen.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Xenofeminism is a new one on me. Just when I thought it was safe to forget about theory, too. I'll check it out!