Growth and acceleration are now justified by threat rather than promise.

Evidence

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the semantics of progress that accompanied all earlier phases of modernization almost completely disappears behind the rhetoric of objective forces: technological and social changes are no longer pushed through in the name of progress; they are justified by a threatened loss of competitiveness. In this context growth and acceleration go completely unquestioned as the prescribed goals of societal development, though the basis of their legitimacy correspondingly shifts from promise to necessity or even threat. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 719

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay: the rhetorical shift from justified-by-progress to justified-by-competitiveness-threat as a marker of acceleration spinning free of democratic steering.
• XREF: connects to: Society’s growth profits from perpetuating the danger it claims to defend against — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 83