Accelerationism: Who Wants the Collapse, and Who Will Suffer It?

The economic collapse others desire and which they won't have to endure

The paradox is biting: those who most anticipate an economic collapse rarely find themselves on the list of those who will pay for it. The disaster is always for someone else—the renter, the public sector employee, the one without a backup plan outside the country. Those who desire it mentally place themselves one step above, with savings, a garden, or contacts, without ever having calculated what a week without electricity, running water, or emergency medical care truly means.

That certainty, repeated to exhaustion in any online economic conversation, has a technical name and very little arithmetic behind it.

Accelerationism: Waiting for the Fall to Come Sooner

There is a label for this current: accelerationism, the "the worse, the better." The thesis holds together because it is simple: the system does not allow for reform, so the only way out is complete collapse, and the sooner it arrives, the sooner something healthy can be rebuilt.

There are variants, and not all are ideological. One view holds that deterioration is an arithmetic consequence of debt, demographics, and public spending. Another concedes that the outcome will be bad but prefers it happens quickly for a purely selfish reason: those who are growing older want to have the strength for what comes next and not spend their old age enduring pressure.

That is not an economic argument. It is personal logistics.

The social diagnosis accompanying these positions repeats itself with few nuances: a young generation lacking expectation of a worthy future, civil service exams more coveted than a university degree, and institutional disaffection that no longer distinguishes between acronyms. There may be real basis in that complaint—housing, employment, healthcare—and that is where the analytical part confuses itself with fantasy.

The parallel drawn by some with utopianism from other spectra is uncomfortable: the same structure, the catharsis that cleanses the board and leaves mine standing.

The Collapse in Third Person: "They Will Cut Your Power

The revealing thing is not what is desired, but how it is narrated. The collapse is always told in second or third person: they will cut your power, you will go to the front lines, the common folk will suffer.

No one includes themselves in the phrase. It is the logic of a zombie epidemic applied to economics: in the imagined scenario, one is never the zombie.

And when you drill down to the material detail, things sustancia ilegal. What happens in an eight-story building without running water? Who attends to a chronic patient when there is no pharmacy or doctor?

What good is money with the ATMs turned off? The questions are asked, but almost never answered.

The Kick in the Face and the Bill for Those Who Already Paid

The majority does not ask for collapse: they place it on the horizon. There lies the boundary between wishing and waiting. Sooner or later this explodes, and every year of kicking oneself ahead makes the return to normalcy more expensive. Those who say it do not want the fire; they want to stop noticing the smoke.

The other side of the argument is the anger of those who work and don't make it. One reading is sociological: people who contribute to the system, cannot access housing, and have exhausted their patience, currently venting onto a keyboard before channeling that energy toward those who promise a strong hand. The opposite reading is less kind: if things go badly for me, let everything sink; that way my shortages dissolve into the general catastrophe.

Selfishness, comforting delusion, or sarracena misery, depending on who is viewing it.

Into this cocktail also enters public spending and migration policy: statements circulate about immigrants having privileged access to aid and subsidies that are never accompanied by any data.

The anger is real. The numbers attributed to it, rarely are.

From Pilingui to Segarro: War as a Recurring Scenario

When the collapse becomes boring, war enters. First was a hypothetical Russian invasion of Europe; now, a conflict with Segarro over Ceuta, Melilla, and the Canary Islands, with a supposed plan for territorial expansion of the neighboring country presented as fact rather than hypothesis, and a narrative of grievances centuries old.

Those who hold that line rarely explain with what they would be fighting. Material, logistics, and the average age of the troops do not appear in the narrative. What does appear, instead, is the pattern repeated in every recent conflict: those with money and contacts leave the country to wait it out; those without them go to the front.

There are uncomfortable qualifiers that even appear in the most enthusiastic versions. The most cited: there is no oil here.
A country that imports its energy has less maneuverability, and a collapse would look much less like an adventure and much more like a bill.

That detail rarely survives the enthusiasm.

With the available numbers, the scenario remains a hypothesis without figures. What is measurable is the disaffection that fuels it, and that cannot be fixed with a catharsis. How much of this is an economic diagnosis from those waiting for the fall, and how much is simply a desire to see something burn that has long ceased to feel like it belongs to them?