Trump, the New Earth, and the Search for a Third Way in Politics

[Nilsi]

Prelude: The Crisis of Political Vectors

Quote

"We are going to move very quickly. We've moved very quickly. We've done things in the last three days that nobody thought were possible to do in years. And it’s all taken — it’s all taken effect." — Donald J. Trump at the World Economic Forum

Something is wrong with the map. The categories we inherited - left and right, reaction and revolution, acceleration and conservation - no longer describe reality. The so-called progressive forces now work to hold things together, grasping at the remnants of a vanishing order, while the right accelerates techno-capital and AI as if speed itself were a virtue. But acceleration toward what? Collapse or transcendence? And does conservation preserve life or merely prolong death?

Neither option offers an escape. The only path left is the one that breaks the cycle entirely.

Amid this inversion, figures like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the AI-accelerationist contingent of Silicon Valley claim the mantle of futurism. Their politics are reactionary, yet their methods - unbridled technological expansion, the total deterritorialization of labor and governance - feel more avant-garde than conservative. Meanwhile, progressive discourse, with its focus on regulatory constraints, social equity, and climate stabilization, resembles an attempt to hold together the disintegrating remnants of an older world. The left, instead of pushing forward, appears to be bracing against the tide.

If neither side provides a real alternative, where do we go from here?

This essay is a search for the exit - not just from this political deadlock, but from the recursive circuits of Thanatos that now govern both left and right. It moves through Freud, Reich, Land, Nietzsche, and Deleuze & Guattari to chart a new vector - not toward stasis, not toward collapse, but toward something that can sustain emergence, transformation, and self-overcoming.

I. Freud’s Dilemma: The Pleasure Principle, Repetition, and the Uncanny Drive of Thanatos

Quote

“The aim of all life is death.” — Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Freud’s early model assumed that systems are governed by the pleasure principle - seeking satisfaction, avoiding unpleasure, minimizing tension. Homeostasis. But Beyond the Pleasure Principle ruptures this tidy schema.

Freud observes something unsettling: subjects of trauma compulsively repeat painful experiences. Soldiers relive the horror of war. Children reenact distress in play. Patients sabotage their own recovery. The organism, rather than simply seeking pleasure, appears locked in cycles of self-sabotage, of return, of recursion.

Thus arises the death drive - Thanatos - a force pulling not toward pleasure, but toward stasis, toward inorganic existence. But here Freud’s realization becomes even more disturbing:

Thanatos is not an external disruption of the pleasure principle. It is woven into it.

Freud suggests that the ultimate goal of the pleasure principle is not endless stimulation, but a return to a zero-tension state - absolute stillness. The pleasure principle and the death drive are not opposed, but complicit. Desire, taken to its extreme, does not push forward - it circles back, dissolving into entropy.

Yet Freud does not leave us with Thanatos alone. He opposes this force to Eros.

But Eros is not naive harmony-seeking. Just as Thanatos is not merely death, but the collapse into inertia, Eros is not merely life, but an ecstatic force that annihilates boundaries, that ruptures the self in delirium and excess.

This is why Eros and Thanatos are not simply opposites - they are entangled.

If Thanatos compulsively repeats, looping toward stillness, Eros shatters stability, burning itself out in pure intensity. The person on LSD who jumps from a rooftop out of sheer love is not acting from Thanatos, from a depressive pull toward death, but from an Eros so radical, so unbound, that it annihilates itself in its own ecstatic rupture.

Neither force offers stability - one loops, the other incinerates.

So the question remains:

How do we break free from Thanatos without being consumed by Eros?

If Thanatos is the cybernetic loop and Eros the ecstatic leap, then what is the third force that breaks the cycle entirely?

II. Wilhelm Reich’s Critique: Thanatos as a Blocked Eros

Quote

"The character structure of modern man, who reproduces fascism again and again, is the result of the suppression of his biologically given, basic, natural needs." — Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Reich offered what seemed like an escape - a reconfiguration of Freud’s entire system. He rejected the idea that Thanatos was intrinsic.

For Reich, what Freud misidentified as the death drive was actually a dysfunction of Eros - not a separate force, but a perversion of life’s fundamental impulse.

Blocked libido - whether through societal repression, neurotic inhibition, or the muscular armoring of the body - did not simply disrupt Eros. It distorted it, twisted it into destructiveness, authoritarian rigidity, and self-sabotage. Where Freud saw two drives in opposition, Reich saw only one drive in conflict with itself - a life-force that, when obstructed, turned against itself and became Thanatos.

Thus, the answer seemed clear: liberate Eros. Free desire from repression. Unlock the body, undo the armoring, release the flow.

But if Thanatos is not real, only blocked Eros, then why does history suggest otherwise?

Reich’s optimism falters when confronted with the cybernetic reality of modernity. Freud saw repetition compulsion as a symptom, an anomaly within the pleasure principle. But what if it was never an anomaly at all?

What if, as Freud suspected, repetition is not the symptom but the core function of life?

What if all flows of desire, left to themselves, eventually loop back into the system?

If capitalism absorbs revolution, if transgression hardens into dogma, if every escape reconfigures itself into a new form of control - then Reich’s answer no longer holds.

The liberation of Eros does not undo Thanatos. It merely accelerates the process by which life reasserts itself as an endless, grinding loop.

If Thanatos is not a secondary effect of repression, but a structural law of recursion, then breaking free requires more than just liberating desire - it requires overcoming the system that captures it.

III. Accelerationism and the Betrayal of Eros: Nick Land’s Collapse into Thanatos

Quote

"Demotism is fatal, and the fatality is terminal. There is no restoration, compromise, or reform that can bring it back. Democracy ends in an artificial intelligence-managed death spiral." — Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

If Reich’s mistake was believing that unblocking Eros would break the cycle of Thanatos, then Nick Land proved, in real time, why that was impossible.

Accelerationism was supposed to detonate the system, to push capitalism past its limits until something unprecedented emerged. If capitalism was a machine of recursive capture, then accelerationism would overload it, short-circuit it, force it beyond itself.

But Land’s mistake was believing that capitalism itself wanted to be free.

It didn’t.

Instead, he watched as the very cybernetic processes he sought to unleash - markets, networks, AI-driven governance - were repurposed not as escape vectors, but as mechanisms of capture even more insidious than before. The system did not break; it evolved.

Where Reich believed that repression turned Eros into Thanatos, Land revealed something even darker:

Eros, in its purest form, does not oppose Thanatos - it accelerates it.

Capitalism, rather than combusting into something new, found in acceleration a means of intensifying its recursive loops. The very act of deterritorialization - once imagined as a vector toward radical freedom - became the mechanism by which capitalism secured its dominance, turning every act of rupture into a controlled experiment in power consolidation.

It was in this moment of recognition that Land flipped. He did not retreat - he aligned. The very machine he had hoped to push past its limits had already outmaneuvered him. If acceleration would not break capitalism, then acceleration would serve it.

This was the birth of Neoreaction (NRx) - not a rejection of acceleration, but its weaponization in service of Thanatos.

Figures like Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) and Peter Thiel were not just ideological allies; they were architects of the very future Land had once hoped to burn down. They understood the cybernetic nature of power far better than the left ever could, how control operates in feedback loops, in AI-driven economies, in the invisible infrastructures of behavior that shape populations.

And so NRx was born - the political expression of Thanatos. Not a chaotic break, but a controlled collapse into digital aristocracy.

We are no longer dealing with capitalism as revolution but capitalism as terminal recursion - an engine of extraction, governance, and automation so complex that it can outpace resistance, absorb transgression, and reformat crisis as an optimization problem.

And today, we see its full emergence:

The Thiel-backed Trump-Vance administration, the fusion of Silicon Valley accelerationism with authoritarian rollback.

AI governance, where the mechanisms of control no longer require overt repression - only the management of flows.

The shift from democracy to cybernetic feudalism, where sovereignty is no longer claimed by the people but by networks, platforms, and markets.

Land saw the abyss and flinched.

But worse - he helped engineer the prison that now masquerades as escape.

IV. Nietzsche’s Third Way: Will to Power as Intensification Beyond Thanatos and Eros

Quote

“The secret of the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas!” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

After Land, the impasse is clear.

Eros cannot save us. Thanatos has already won.

If Reich’s optimism collapsed under cybernetics, and Land’s accelerationism became a recursive death spiral, then what remains?

Is there a force that can escape the loop without consuming itself?

Nietzsche offers no program, no state, no manifesto. What he offers is a force - a third way between Eros and Thanatos, between the pure ecstasy of Bataille and the terminal loops of cybernetic control that have captured both left and right.

Thanatos is no longer just Freud’s death drive - it is the governing principle of the present, embedded in bureaucracies, AI governance, and the authoritarian techno-feudalism of Yarvin and Thiel.

Eros, in its Bataillean intensity, offers transgression, excess, sovereignty - but as Bataille himself admits, it burns up life as it consumes it, a brilliant fire that cannot sustain itself.

Will to Power is neither stasis nor blind expenditure. It does not loop in repetition like Thanatos, nor does it self-destruct like pure Eros. Instead, it is the force of becoming without capture, of intensification that does not implode.

Nietzsche understood that life is not sustained by equilibrium but by agon, by struggle, by the constant tension of forces.

This is not progress in the liberal sense, nor is it accelerationism in the Landian sense - it is the ongoing transformation of power itself, a process of self-overcoming that does not burn itself out or fall into repetition.

The challenge is clear: to refuse stagnation without collapsing into dissolution, to sustain a mode of becoming that thrives on intensity without burning out.

V. The War Machine: Politics as Escape from Thanatos

Quote

“The task of making a new earth is not so much constructing a promising future as much as unbinding life from what imprisons it.” — Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Nietzsche gives us the hammer. Deleuze and Guattari give us the machinery of escape - a politics that is not a state, not a doctrine, but a force aligned with the deepest self-organizing laws of the universe.

We know now that life does not follow a straight line. It does not progress toward utopia, nor does it collapse into chaos by necessity. Life self-organizes, adapts, mutates - it thrives at the edge of complexity. It does not seek equilibrium but navigates it, riding its fluctuations, evolving through tension rather than avoiding it.

To break from Thanatos - the cybernetic aristocracies, the accelerating death spirals, the bureaucratic inertia of the present - demands more than critique.

It demands war.

But not in the old sense. Not conquest, not governance, not the seizure of institutions. It demands a war machine - a force of pure becoming, a power that moves outside and against the state, against all systems that seek to capture, enclose, and neutralize life.

The war machine does not conquer - it creates. It deterritorializes, expands, mutates, evades capture.

Politics must follow this logic: it must become an ecology, not a fortress. It must learn to move with complexity, not against it. The only future is in the ceaseless invention of new pathways, new alliances, new modes of living, of acting, of thinking.

This is not utopia.

It is survival.

The climate is collapsing. Governance is failing. Technocapital is automating the very conditions of existence.

The choice is clear:

Remain trapped inside Thanatos, inside looping systems of control - or escape.

There is no negotiation.

Only movement.

Edited March 16 by Nilsi