With how the world has been going since 2020 and prior, it’s safe to say we may be in an age of crisis right now. This new year of 2026 started with a bang, and all we can do is hang on and hopefully not fall off the wagon too badly. It seems too easy to lose hope as we’re being drained of our worth and well-being by the urgency of our needs and wants. We need to shield ourselves from the hopelessness of this time by learning from both the past and the present.
This brought me to the subjects of psychological warfare and defense. I will write more about the former in the near future, tackling brainwashing and psyops. For now, we must work on our mental defenses by understanding how the current era of crisis breaks down the walls of the mind to then destroy what’s in the heart and soul.
That is where antidemoralization comes in.
Antidemoralization
Antidemoralization (ADML) is a term coined by American psychiatrist J.D. Frank in a 1985 paper which proposes how psychotherapy can help fight distress due to feelings of subjective incompetence or loss of meaning instead of just specific symptoms. All patients struggle with nihilism, and effective therapy can help restore hope, purpose, and self-belief. Even if it’s a placebo, it’s still better than being bereft of hope in life.
Demoralization comes from feeling like you have no agency in your life due to everything that has been happening in the world all at once, reducing your sense of agency. You feel subjective incompetence, or being unable to cope or find your path; loss of purpose or meaning; overwhelming feelings of distress and helplessness; and impact on action, which makes it difficult to act or change one’s views, even with evidence.
If you’re overwhelmed and unsure what to do next, like you’ve lost your inner compass, you may need help through antidemoralization. But how can you fight demoralization?
First, we must know what’s actually going on in the world. We can get an explanation from Hindu cosmology through a concept called the Kali Yuga.
What is the Kali Yuga?
I’m slowly getting into Buddhist and Hindu cosmology in recent years, and it’s fascinating how these things were described through the language and understanding of ancient times. These ideas were already present long before we were born, yet we’re still trying to make sense of them through our own modern perspectives.
Trying to redefine them by translating and interpreting the language of that time can make for misunderstandings. However, how it’s understood now should not be inferior to how it may have been understood back then, lest we forget them altogether due to giving up on them entirely just because we supposedly “can’t get it right”.
The Kali Yuga is basically the Hindu version of a crisis age. In Hindu cosmology, time is not linear, but cyclical. History runs in mahayuga, or repeating “great ages” with a pattern of declining cultural harmony.
- Satya Yuga, a golden age.
- Treta Yuga, still pretty good, but things are starting to go downhill.
- Dvapara Yuga, more conflict and moral ambiguity.
- Kali Yuga, a crisis period when all hell breaks loose.
The Kali Yuga sees a decline of truth (satya); collapse of virtue (dharma); rise of greed, ego, conflict, and confusion; and material success replacing wisdom as status.
You can say that our current age as of this writing in the mid-to-late 2020s sees all four of these things, thus we are now in a Kali Yuga. It’s not the end of the world per se, but the end of the world being safe and sane. It certainly felt a lot more idyllic 30 years ago after the end of the Cold War, then it started going downward again when 9/11 happened.
The Kali Yuga is a fucked-up timeline, and we’re all forced to ride that wave.
There are some similarities to another four-era model I’ve talked about in a previous blog post, the Strauss-Howe generational theory, detailed in the 1997 book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe.
- The High is like the Satya Yuga, which is a golden age.
- The Awakening is like the Treta Yuga, when things are still good, but there’s unrest.
- The Unraveling is like the Dvapara Yuga, when institutions are weak and conflicts arise.
- The Crisis is like the Kali Yuga, when everything becomes fucked up.
During a Kali Yuga, material wealth is the primary measure of worth, so most people value appearance over essence. Billionaires have become gods among men, sucking up the fat of the land and practically teleporting elsewhere when they’re made to give back their share. Leaders are chosen for power and not wisdom. They’re now able to do heinous things despite mass opposition, like invade other countries and commit war crimes without consequences.
Truth has become flexible, negotiable, and carefully managed. We previously discussed this in Kayfabe and Hypernormalization. Kayfabe is the system of stratified fiction that upholds the world of professional wrestling, and hypernormalization is when those lies become widely known and accepted while the system continues to be upheld regardless. In an age of Kali Yuga, kayfabe and hypernormalization are the standard conditions in society.
Another condition in the Kali Yuga is how spirituality has become performative and commercialized. People still cling to religion not as their core pillar of their morality, but merely a performance of their morality. Hypocrisy is the norm and pointing it out is moot. Religions and cults have become financially lucrative ventures, from mainstream faiths, to their off-shoots, to even completely ridiculous ones.
Political mudslinging is a constant reality, as you may observe both online and offline. However, for all the anger and indignation on frequent display, very little ever changes. There’s only outrage, no transformation, even after years of butting heads and trading barbs behind each other’s backs. While they’re supposed to represent the people’s best interests, they only care for their own personal agendas while wasting tax money.
Most people now have become addicted to stimulation, constantly glued to their phones, scrolling through social media for quick dopamine fixes while also having their mental health damaged by negativity on their feeds. They’ve become confused with their identity and self-image, making them chronically dissatisfied.
The world is in a constant state of urgency, prioritizing short-term gain at the cost of long-term substance. There’s tons of information, but with little to no wisdom. The Internet, the so-called “Information Superhighway”, is now full of fake news, brainrot content, and AI-generated garbage. Whatever else is still precious and informative is locked behind paywalls.
The Kali Yuga isn’t just about the world in crisis, but also how it has become unreliable. You can’t rely on outside sources to learn and grow, so transformation has to come from within. Earlier ages saw wisdom and moral virtue supported by the culture at large. In the Kali Yuga, culture has decayed to the point that it fosters corruption.
It seems foolish to try to fix the Kali Yuga on your own, going up against an entire culture and civilization that’s gone mad. Can we achieve enlightenment by merely conforming to society? Or do we quietly rebel against it? Perhaps the only way we can go about the Kali Yuga is to not conform so we can remain uncorrupted by it and help those who are willing to be helped.
To not be products of the time, but be antitheses.
K/Acc: Kali Yuga Accelerationism
Now for an idea that was put forth by a couple of terminally online racist trolls. I found this in a podcast recorded over five years ago and posted in a SoundCloud account. Hints on how seriously you should take this are in the comments. I don’t condone their beliefs (or lack of seriousness thereof), but I did get curious about this particular idea of accelerating the crisis.
The essence of Kali Yuga Accelerationism (Kali/Acc or K/Acc) is chilling out in the midst of all the crises. It’s anti-demoralization against right-wing grifting, neofascist propaganda, and ragebaiting — an esoteric red pill, combining Landian accelerationism and cyberfuturism with hypertraditional culture.
K/Acc sounds a lot like kek, which makes sense for a couple of trolls.
This idea acknowledges the ongoing decline of the current age and advocates for localized independence while the rest of the world burns. Then again, having read a bit about their other beliefs, I think they would find my explanation to be a misinterpretation. That’s fine since if so, I’m hijacking it for my own purposes.
The conclusion here is to let the Kali Yuga manifest so it can soon end.
Julius Evola
The phrase “esoteric red pill” may remind some of the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who was a piece of work. Whenever you see the word “esoteric” in the context of western philosophy, that usually means a turn towards the hypertraditional — Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Theosophy, and other forms of western mysticism.
The Kali Yuga is technically “eastern”, but it’s becoming more embraced in the west.
Whenever it’s brought up that modernity was a mistake, the past was better than the present, and egalitarianism and democracy are symptoms of decay, a lot of that can be attributed to Julius Evola. According to him, the goal of the “awakened few” is not to save the world, but to remain standing as everything else falls apart.
That sounds a lot like K/Acc. He reframes alienation as superiority, powerlessness as nobility, disengagement as heroism. That’s very attractive in this late modern age to disillusioned men who are educated but underemployed.
While it seems to make sense, it’s more like consolation than a real solution. It makes you think that you don’t need to help anyone because the world is unworthy of your help; you’re not disengaged but transcendent; you don’t participate because you’re above being complicit with today’s society at large.
I’m guilty of this as well. We’re losers who think of ourselves as enlightened. This is not antidemoralization, it’s intellectual and spiritual dishonesty.
Evola (1898-1974) was not an accelerationist, but a reactionary transcendentalist. He was also a fascist, so you have to take his ideas with several grains of salt. He was traditionalist, aristocratic, and imperialist. He was as far-right as you could get for a philosopher.
Before we had the likes of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, we had this monocle-wearing loon.
Again, What is Accelerationism?
A brief recap on accelerationism. It’s a concept put together by two main thinkers — Karl Marx and Nick Land. It’s way more associated with the latter, but the former’s ideas can be interpreted as proto-accelerationism in how he described how crises accelerate revolution.
Accelerationism is basically speeding up the decay and destruction of a society to reach the next level as soon as possible. It rests on the idea that whatever may be facilitating that destruction — technology and capitalism — also hold the keys to our salvation.
Therefore, instead of fearing them, by developing them as quickly as possible, we fully press on the gas pedal and see where it takes us. We can then fix the world with those very things and bring about the new age. At least, that’s how I understand accelerationism.
The guy who popularized acceleration, the British philosopher Nick Land, is a wacky one. He’s eccentric, loves Nietzsche, and has an affinity for both climbing chairs and doing drugs. His specialty subject is “The Collapse of Western Civilization” — citing the works of Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari.
Through Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), he pushed further the idea that the left had failed. The book is a hard read, but it does posit that the left needs to acknowledge capitalism’s ability to both liberate and oppress instead of fighting against it at every turn. They say we must embrace the anarchic tendencies of the free market to “go still further… in the movement of the market… to accelerate the process.”
In 1992, he suggested that capitalism had never been fully unleashed, having been held back by the primitive tendencies of politics — which he called “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind.”
He would found the CCRU, do a bunch of drugs with its members, split up, then go dark, move to China to find a wife, and aged ungracefully. He’s still kicking around.
Through it all, his ideas have been embraced by many, including billionaires who are now putting accelerationism into practice through unbridled capitalism and rapidly advancing technology. And now, we’re here.
Another idea he brought about was hyperstition, a play on the word “superstition” which describes the ideas, narratives, or fictions that become cultural beliefs, which then become self-fulfilling prophecies that create their own reality as people believe and act upon them.
This also ties in with the older idea of the egregore.
The Egregore
While I was racking my brain on how to finish this crummy blog post, I watched this video on egregore — a western esoteric concept for the group consciousness that forms in human groups. Think of it as the zeitgeist made manifest, a collective’s spirit given form. You can even call it a “god” if the group is big enough, like human civilization as a whole.
Hyperstition is the process of a fictional idea manifesting as reality, while egregore is the entity created by that collective energy. The egregore is like when a hyperstition gains a life of its own over a long period of time and spreads throughout a large population, creating its own reality.
Money, a major religion, a political system — they’re all egregores that started from hyperstition, which then became their own things. Collective belief can become so powerful that things which did not exist or were relevant before can become major driving forces in human lives.
Before the proliferation of fiat currency and the fractional reserve banking system became the world’s standard medium of trade and commerce, the very idea of paper money was ludicrous.
Fast forward to modernity, past the Industrial Revolution, if a guy saw a particular piece of paper with Benjamin Franklin’s face on it along the street and picked it up, he’d immediately put it in their pocket and believe it was their lucky day. If someone who owned that piece of paper caught him doing that, they’d call the police on him.
What used to be inconceivable became the norm simply through collective belief.
With how money is nowadays, it seems like complaining about inflation is similar to whining about water being wet — a moot point. And yet, with the money printers cranking out faster than wages being able to keep up, our standard of living only goes down over time.
And now, the majority of people have to work long hours and not get enough free time just to earn their keep, and it’s being made worse as time goes by. Even if they live in “free” countries, they’re not truly free as neofeudalism is becoming more of a reality, with the elites employing a modern class of “serfs” to do their bidding in exchange for wages.
Meanwhile, unable to have enough free time to further develop themselves, be present for their children, attend to their lives, the majority languish and even devolve. Over time, it does look like that infamous 2006 article on BBC.com about the human race splitting into “elite” and “underclass” species in thousands of years may not be that far off, after all.
All this through a money system that derives value from our belief and toil. That’s an egregore.
Conclusion
I started writing this as an exploration of how disengagement can counter nihilism, riding out the current era of crisis without losing one’s mind. I finished it with an admission of my intellectual and spiritual dishonesty. Writing this has been a journey, and I’m glad I took it.
On one hand, antidemoralization is a valuable thing to learn in order to protect oneself from the insanity of this late modern world. On the other hand, it’s tempting to become cynical. After all, living our lives is already hard enough. But is that the right thing to do?
We have to admit that these things are bigger than we are. However, we must also maintain that our souls are in our own keeping. Someday, when we’re made to face God, we can’t just excuse ourselves for not following moral principles. We can’t just say, “I was told to do thus,” or that virtue was not convenient at the time. That will not suffice.
There’s something to using irony as a weapon, but it can easily destroy hope and foster fear. It’s easy to mistake desensitization for clarity and awareness. That can then dig into the limbic system and warp your mind, turning you into an unthinking zombie who parrots propaganda and mistakes reactionary instinct for logic and reason. Survival is crucial, but not at the cost of others’ lives or one’s own integrity.
The danger is not that the world is broken, but that the world being broken becomes an excuse to also break ourselves.
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