If you are a gamer, you must have noticed that some players, rather than buying items they can afford whenever they are near the shop, save up resources until they can buy a big shiny and expensive item that they have set their eyes on. Accumulationism is essentially that idea taken to politics. The basic idea is that achieving any big change in society requires a certain amount of resources. At the very least, it requires the time of activists and pundits. I couldn’t find any document that fully encompasses all aspects of this ideology, so I will attempt to make this document the go-to for any accumulationists who are trying to share their views with their peers. For historical context, around the time when biological men started competing in female sports, and the gender industry started going after children, the phrase “conservatives never conserved anything” became a platitude in dissident circles. That’s when ideas about a somewhat cyclical view of history regained popularity. Two terms came along with it. One is the term “decelerationist” to describe the mainstream conservatism, which was by this point a bankrupt ideology that only appeals to people who aren’t spending much time on politics. And the other is its opposite, the term “accelerationist”. Accelerationists make two points against decelerationism. 1. If a sick person is suffering constant and gruesome pain, and his illness is irreversible, it makes no sense to give him medications that would prolong his suffering. 2. The intelligence and quality of character of the population are falling, so if our civilization is on its sunset and the direction in which it is going is irreversible, then it’s better to have it collapse sooner rather than later. The term “accelerationism” became quite popular, but ideology itself never got off the ground. The main argument that critics make against accelerationism can be summarized as follows - It’s unclear what exactly we are headed towards, so rather than wasting our precious and limited resources on accelerating, we should use our resources to try to stir away from the more catastrophic outcomes. With people arguing against both decelerationism and accelerationism, accumulationism emerged as a third position. Accumulationism can best be understood as advice “You have to pick your battles carefully” taken seriously. If you are having a face-to-face conversation with your elected representative, and you start giving him a list of all the things that you would prefer to be different, he will likely hurry to leave the conversation. In contrast, if you spend a lot of time talking to him about one issue that’s important to you, he is likely to keep it in mind. If you have a lot of people following your social media account, pinning one post makes people less likely to read your other posts. If you donate to one cause, that is money not spent on another cause. There are 5 ideas commonly associated with this ideology: 1. Any political system is only as good as the character of people in power. The attempt which American Founding Fathers made to create a system of “checks and balances” prescribed by Machiavelli, was a complete failure, in the sense that it did not achieve what it was designed to do. Any efforts wasted on trying to achieve a better form of government could have been used on empowering good people. 2. Extreme problems often require extreme solutions. Ignorant masses will never support extreme solutions. Ignorant masses will always support solutions that sound good but don’t work. The road to hell is paved with good intentions of people who lack knowledge, and knowledgeable people who are trying to keep us away from hell will always be seen as evil by the ignorant. As a person is learning about politics, there will be a point where they will realize that they have to choose between getting problems actually solved and receiving thanks from people who lack knowledge. 3. Only reforms that are possible, are reforms that are in direction of better representing the interests of groups that are underrepresented relative to their power. If a person wants to enact change in a different direction, then the revolution is the only viable option. Reform and revolution are both forms of social change, and the difference between them is that reform has for its goal the change of rules, and revolution has for its goal the change of rulers. Revolution doesn’t need to be violent, but it needs to be a redistribution of power. 4. For any group to accumulate resources, its members need to make themselves useful in some capacity, to some of the people who have money or power. 5. Technological progress is the main driving force behind the centralization of power, but not the guarantee of it. People gain power by organizing, so by having a lot of competent people organize and practice accumulationism, it is possible for power to decentralize.