The Great Entropy Debate: Why the Left Became the Party of Limits and the Right the Party of Denial

And how a Third Narrative based on the commons might transcend both

1. Two Visions of the Future

Here is my thesis:

< Behind the current political struggles of the Anthropocene, what is at stake is a struggle between what I call Entropy-First and Extropy-First forces. >

Let me recall the evolution of human extraction, which shows increasingly scale, both of the benefits and of the damages:

• Indigenous, kinship-based peoples are relatively “light” in their footprint. They can have damaging impacts on ecosystems, but these are slow-burning effects.

• Imperial systems—extractive-oriented civilizations before the machine age—were already quite damaging to ecosystems in their heartlands, systematically leading to environmental catastrophes over the course of a few centuries.

• Industrial modernity created the hegemonic idea of “Progress” within a dualistic and separatist mindset concerning the relations between humanity and the natural world. And it is this system that created global overshoot.

2. The Lost Consensus on Abundance

James Townsend, in his interesting work The Singularity and Socialism, stresses that the idea of emancipating humanity from natural constraints—from material scarcity—toward an emancipatory future of Abundance through scientific and technological development was actually common to the political factions that emerged with modernity.

(The world of Star Trek is the epitome of this vision: a future without markets—replicators make all that is needed—yet beloved by conservatives and free-market liberals alike.)

Here is how Townsend describes his illumination:

“Suddenly I saw the entire stream of economic ideas, Marxist and classical liberal, unite into one stream leading to the same Omega Point, the event horizon of a coming economic singularity where all prices drop down an asymptote toward zero as technology advances exponentially.”

(http://www.seriouswonder.com/singularity-socialism-interview-author-c-james-townsend/ )

This is the attitude we could call Extropian—the anti-entropic social contingent. It rejects the “dictatorship” of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics and believes science and technology can surpass these natural limits. This vision was initially shared between the left and the right, between socialists and liberals, between socialist progressives and “capitalist” conservatives. Marx was definitely an “extropian” in this sense. Technology would free humanity from drudgery and recreate the idealized lifestyle of the artisans.

3. The Great Inversion

Then, something started changing in the left field of politics. The knowledge of ecological disruptions, dispatched from the world of science, coupled with the nascent ecological movement, started becoming hegemonic in the 1970s, moving the left toward political ecology while at the same the link with labor and its class struggles gradually weakened. Perhaps more importantly, “really existing socialism” largely collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. The synthesis of a “politics of paradise”—the hallmark of left-wing oriented utopianism that had successfully complemented the “politics of grievance” linked to the working class—collapsed, being replaced by identity-based grievances. Especially after the Great Awokening, identity politics became a zero sum game, based on the struggle between oppressed and oppressive group identities. Redemption and common ground are no longer on offer.

So here then is my thesis: as the result of combined and complex causation, and because it largely lost its linkage to the working class, the post-1968 left instead became the expression of the educated urbanized middle classes—those who live from the fruits of the material production of farmers, industrial workers, and the service class, but do not themselves perform physical labor. Especially after 1989-91, and the ensuing loss of any belief in a utopia, the left became the Party of Entropy. The focus became “Degrowth,” climate change adaptation, and the politics of limits. The relative “freezing” of the idea of technological progress became hegemonic amongst most intellectuals on the left of the spectrum. Of course, I am not arguing that these entropic concerns are not justified, nor that all people on the left had the same reaction, see for example Aaron Bastani’s book on Fully-Automated Luxury Communism.

On the right, the opposite happened. They became more and more the party who denied ecological realities. Elon Musk is the epitome of the ‘extropic’ attitude that Townsend describes in his book,, and so is Peter Thiel in his campaign against the “degrowth-oriented” Antichrist, and Marc Andreessen with his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.

4. UpWingers and DownWingers

Steve Fuller describes the current political struggle as one between UpWingers, who believe we can move toward ecological transcendence through new technology, in other words, his characterization for the Extropian Party, and the DownWingers, who want to adapt to accepted limitations.

UpWingers (or “Blacks”), above all, anticipate futures of greater energy consumption. They tend toward technological solutionism, their view of the future is in the accelerationism/singularitarian spectrum. Politically, UpWingers tend to follow the American Right’s libertarian view of freedom, and the Left’s view of transcendent humanity. Human potential is unlimited and chaos can be tamed. Black is the sky.

DownWingers (or “Greens”), broadly, anticipate futures of reduced energy consumption. They tend toward localization/resilience oriented forms of thought and practice. Politically, DownWingers tend to follow the Left’s view of communitarianism and the Right’s sense of natural order.

On the left side of the spectrum, we have a widespread but often uncritical and ahistorical admiration for Indigenous lifestyles suggests a nostalgia for a more static form of society that adapts to material scarcities and no longer focuses on technological development. In the techno-abundance movement on the right, these limitations are dismissed because they are deemed solvable through further technical and scientific knowledge and tools.

5. The Third Narrative

What I am ultimately suggesting is that there is a place for a newly integrative narrative that recognizes both the entropic constraints and the extropic nature of natural and social evolution over the long and deep time of Big History.

This “Third Narrative” has been spreading in recent years. First, there were specific, spiritually oriented authors who were also scientists and rationalists, attempting a fusion between their spiritual-civilizational understandings and the findings of evolutionary science. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, reconciled Darwin and Christ in The Phenomenon of Man. Almost simultaneously, Sri Aurobindo attempted a similar synthesis between the Vedic tradition and scientific evolutionism. In these formulations, matter is not an inferior fall from grace, but both spirit and matter represent ascending and descending logics of a unified reality, moving toward ever-more integration into spiritualized matter. This is the famous Omega Point theorized by Teilhard de Chardin. But don’t equate this with transhumanism!! Transhumanists want to change matter through science alone, creating an equivalent material paradise to equate the dreams of the spiritualists; but scientifically oriented spiritualists want to change the world of matter through spiritual transformation of both the individual (the Adamic impulse) and collectively (the Edenic impulse).

Teilhardian insights were taken up by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in The Universe Story, and more recently by the Human Energy project—a fusion of evolutionary science that takes Teilhard’s notion of the noosphere seriously, linked to the Principia Cybernetica project. One of its participants, David Sloan Wilson, has even attempted an integration of the evolutionary “Multi-Level Group Selection” theory with Elinor Ostrom’s theory of the commons into a “Pro-Social” theory of social evolution centered around ever-increasing cooperation and integration.

6. The Pre-Modern Synthesis

Certain authors, like Marcus Lindholm, stress that before modernity, humanity was largely a biophilic species, with activities that were largely life-preserving and enhancing, creating more biodiversity, not less:

“Humans are biophilious, as well. Use of flowers for ornaments, or animals as pets, are known from cultures across the world. People make nesting boxes for birds, plant trees, and dig flowerbeds, too. Biophilic behavior is universally human, known from Babylonia and ancient China to today’s suburban balconies.”

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004)

Lindholm equally stresses the role of the commons as a self-regulation mechanism to maintain the balance between human communities and surrounding nature:

“Self-regulation has historically characterized common resource use... Most premodern communities managed to establish sustainable solutions to local resource use (Ostrom 1990). The Sami of the Arctic share limited grazing areas for reindeers, with agreements encompassing benefits and responsibilities in order to maintain common pastures... Through such agreements, sustainable use of common resources has been successfully maintained over centuries, without resource deterioration. A ‘tragedy of the commons’ is an exception rather than the rule.”

In a similar manner to Loren Goldner (cited in the longer version of this essay), Lindholm stresses how the human-nature synthesis, based on a meaningful living world, started to break down in the Renaissance with the Cartesian split:

“In Europe, the bio-cultural interfaces began to break up during the Renaissance... The object-meaning distinction allowed nature to be conceived as assemblages of neutral, dumb ‘things’.“

7. The Accelerationist Debate Within Crypto

This same debate between entropically oriented and negentropically oriented preferences is taking place within the world of crypto technology. The discussion around the nihilistically oriented accelerationist ideology of Nick Land—which proposes to accelerate capitalism and its destructive processes in order to overcome it—has also been waged within blockchain-enabled communities.

Benjamin Life explains the context:

“Peter Thiel and Nick Land saw capitalism as an alien intelligence accelerating toward posthuman singularity. Marc Andreessen dressed this vision in optimism and called it progress. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, recognized the danger and asked what technologies might preserve freedom against technocapitalist authoritarianism. D/acc was his answer: defensive accelerationism. Build tools that protect rather than control. This was necessary but incomplete. Regenerative accelerationism, r/acc, is the complement and completion of Vitalik’s d/acc.“

Life concludes:

“This is the aikido of r/acc: we take the massive energy of the wave that is coming, the acceleration that cannot be stopped, and redirect it into feedback loops that sink and store value back into relational substrates. Not resistance against acceleration, which is futile. Not surrender to the trajectory of techno-capital, which is monstrous. But a redirection of extractive dynamics toward what Karl Polanyi called re-embedding, returning economic activity to its proper place within social and ecological relationships.”

(

A Regenerative Accelerationist Manifesto

)

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8. Berdyaev’s Five Periods

Nicolai Berdyaev has historized the path we are on in his distinction between five historical periods, each characterized by a different relation between the human and the technological:

1. Period one: Submersion to cosmic life—human life depended on the natural world; personality not fully developed.

2. Period two: Humans freed from cosmic forces, from spirits and demons attributed to nature—emergence of elementary forms of economics and serfdom.

3. Period three: Mechanization of nature through scientific and technical control—development of industry, capitalism, wage labor.

4. Period four: Disruption of cosmic order, dissolution of organic forms of human organization, autonomous spheres claiming totalitarian recognition—humans gain terrible power over nature but become enslaved to their own discoveries.

5. Period five: An eschatological revolution—decline of the realm of Caesar, dissolution of state power, labor emancipation, spiritual transmutation.

Alexei Anisin explains:

“The first three periods precede the twentieth century, whereas the fourth period begins with the era of WWII and spans into the twenty-first century—a time which Berdyaev believed would feature the rise of an all-powerful state that would stake a total claim of objectivity over all of social and natural phenomena. Berdyaev describes this meta-historical trajectory succinctly: where once man feared the demons of nature and Christ freed him from demonolatry, now man is in terror before the world-wide mechanization of nature. The power of technics is the final metamorphosis of the realm of Caesar.”

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/916/1646)

This shift from epoch four to epoch five illustrates the grounding intuition of our work at the P2P Foundation: the aim of a re-integration of the human and the non-human. In our view, both re-sacralisation/re-spiritualization, and AI, have their role to play. We aim for an integrative understanding of the material, spiritual, natural, and technological world.

9. Three Paths Forward

We see before us three distinct possibilities:

1. The Ideate path, as described by Pitirum Sorokin, the master thinker on societal bifurcations: The material plane is neglected, and the focus is on interior development of a connection with the divine—the path of the Axial religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity (though Christianity also carries within it the integrative capacity through its vision of a sacralized nature).

2. The Sensate path of transhumanism: An abandonment of the sacred and the spirit, and a systematic attempt to develop the aims of spiritual movements—i.e., transcendence—exclusively as a technical manipulation of matter.

3. The integrative path: Both nature and spirit are respected as aspects of an integrated whole. This is perhaps the path indicated by authors such as Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo, and expressed nowadays in multiple versions of the Third Narrative discussed above.

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10. Conclusion

I have argued that the left largely became the Party of Entropy after 1989, abandoning the “politics of paradise” for a politics of limits and grievance. The right largely became the Party of Denial, embracing an atavistic extropianism that refuses to acknowledge ecological realities. Both are insufficient and represent, in my humble opinion, wrong turns for humanity.

What is needed is a Third Narrative that recognizes both the entropic constraints of thermodynamics but just as much the extropic nature of social and natural evolution. Indeed, there is no doubt that there is a complexification going on in the universe, from a world of matter, which became the world of life, and which, through human culture, became a world of consciousness, to which in time, more and more complex technological artefacts were added.

The narrative that we propose must recover the pre-modern wisdom of commons-based self-regulation while embracing the technological capacities of the digital age, and everything in between. It must integrate the insights of Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo with the practical governance insights of Elinor Ostrom and the stigmergic coordination mechanisms of peer production. But also the insights of Kojin Karatani in the civilizing Mode D counter-processes. The first expression in Mode D , we are amending Karatani here, were animism and shamanism, the second model were the axial ‘ethical’ religions, and the third one, reacting to the industrial modality of extraction, where the ideological mass movements such as socialism. But today, the reaction to cognitive and AI-based extraction must be the translocal ‘constructive networks’.

The P2P Foundation’s work on cosmo-local production, regenerative accelerationism (r/acc), and the Archipelago of Regenerative Projects is a practical contribution to this integrative path. We do not claim to have all the answers. But we believe that the choice is not between barbarism and extinction, nor between blind acceleration and nostalgic retreat. There is a third way: regenerative acceleration—redirecting the wave of technological change toward re-embedding economic activity within social and ecological relationships.

Between entropy and negentropy, stands the mutualizing capacity of the commons. In the coming, integrative, fourth civilization, or post-civilization if you like, the central integrative institution will be the cosmo-local network of commons and productive communities, who have learned to live in balance with the natural world, but have not given up on the stewardship of the human.

As Berdyaev saw, we are living through the final metamorphosis of the “realm of Caesar.” What comes next depends on whether we can imagine—and build—a new integration of human, technology, and nature.

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Selected Bibliography

• Anisin, A. (2021). Humanity and the disruption of the cosmos. Cosmos and History, 17(3).

• Andreessen, M. (2025). Manifesto: The techno-optimist manifesto. Substack.

• Berry, T., & Swimme, B. (1992). The universe story. HarperSanFrancisco.

• Fuller, S. (2013, October 23). Left and right are over: The future is up and down. Aeon.

• Land, N. (2011). Fanged noumena. Urbanomic.

• Life, B. (n.d.). A regenerative accelerationist manifesto. Omniharmonic Substack.

• Lindholm, M. (2022). The earth has become the garden of mankind. Cosmos and History, 18(1).

• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons. Cambridge University Press.

• Sorokin, P. (1985). Social and cultural dynamics. Transaction Books.

• Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1961). The phenomenon of man. Torch Books.

• Townsend, C. J. (2015). The singularity & socialism. CreateSpace.

• Whitaker, M. D. (2009). Ecological revolution. Lambert Academic Publishing.