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what is /his/ opinion on Oswald Spengler?

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he was right on everything
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Is that hank from breaking bad
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I still gotta read him and other philosophers of history such as:

Hegel
Toynbee
Jaspers
Voegelin
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He was the original sperglord.
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>>1756501
care to elaborate?
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http://avery.morrow.name/blog/2014/10/oswald-spenglers-decline-of-the-west-the-100th-anniversary-update/
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>>1756709
Amazing.
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>>1756709
>the narrative is essentially poetic, and you can either grasp some deeper layers of the poetry or you can’t
>great Western conceit that theories should make testable predictions
lol
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>>1756250
Jesus Christ Marie! They're minerals!
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>>1756709
>2020: All remaining sciences will become extensions of understanding human behavior. (1.III.5, 1.XI.15)

>The intellects of the late West will recognize that the attempt to systematize or categorize anything is more of a reflection of the psychological and socio-historical paradigms that engender the imagination of such systems than it is something that really exists “out there” in Nature. Interpreting the signs and symbols of past centuries is in fact the “last Faustian philosophy” and the only possibility remaining to the Western mind (1.IV.12). [Tangent: Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game describes a post-collapse society where such interpretation has become the highest and only art-form left in the world.]

>Prediction came true: Yes. By the late 1960s, the “objective” status of the scientific observer in sociology and anthropology was already subject to some doubts. In the 1980s, the social sciences and philosophy were thoroughly wrecked by the work of Jacques Derrida. These two categories of study never recovered from this Copernican revolution but are basically running on steam. Since roughly 2005, the humanities have also made a definite turn towards what Spengler calls “physiognomical” analysis, and it is fair to assume that the hard sciences will begin to turn inward in a similar way in the coming years, especially after the failure of ITER and other mammoth experimental projects.

>For those who think Spengler ultra-conservative, it is interesting to note that he is eager to promote (in 1.IV.12) what basically amounts to cultural relativism.

what did he mean by this?
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based
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So we still have about 3 centuries of Western Civilization left? I wish it'd come crashing down sooner. The Caesars cannot come fast enough
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He's pretty good but Plato had already said all of that. He only added historical flesh to Plato's theoretical bones.
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>>1759154
source
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>>1759127
>The Caesars cannot come fast enough
When they do come they'll make the west of tomorrow look like the middle east of today: a war-torn hellhole dominated by religious demagogues and unscrupulous power-brokers and strongmen.
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>>1759979
better then the liberal trash society we have today
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>>1760050
If you really hate it that much, there's nothing stopping you from traveling to the middle east to go be somebody's body in a ditch
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>>1756709
Thanks for the link!
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>>1759242
Book VIII of the Republic
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Anyone able to recommend some good secondary literature on spengler and his ideas?
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>>1760618
Use google, there's dozens of essays on Spengler and his works on the Internet and they're pretty much all worth reading
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>>1760450
but the middle east is full of sandniggers.
If europe got rid of liberalism we could easely get rid of the muslim plauge
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>>1760737
If we got rid of liberalism there'd be no difference
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>>1756709
>archdruid report.

Haven't read him since he went full Trumptard.
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>>1760625
Link?
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>>1760749
>Le all races are equal, it's just cultural differences meme.
Come on it's 2016!
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>>1760749
>pre-19th century Europe was the same as modern Middle East
This is what libtards actually believe
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>>1761089
>retarded sociopaths from /pol/ are a scientific authority
No one takes racial theory serious besides lonely neckbeards on 4chan
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>>1760795
how is he a Trumptard? I'm just reading his blogs for the first time, and I don't see any blind fanaticism, just reasonable explanations for the appeal of Trump
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>>1760618
for a total layman like myself - there's a great podcast that goes by the name of his most famous work. First few are more current events (show began in July - the most fuck-all month of 2016), but they get around to his writing eventually. Highly recommended

http://www.declinecast.com/
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>>1756709
shit like this makes me wonder why Marxists still exist. why do people still cling to Marx when people like Spengler and Toynbee obviously have deeper and more accurate philosophies of history?
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>>1761644
Marxism preaches the idea of eventual utopia. Spenglerism only preaches eventual doom, and his ideas are antithetical to the popular conception that humanity is on a linear path to greatness. It's much easier to want the former than accept the latter.
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Here's a funny thing: I'm surprised Spengler hasn't been picked up more by third worlders. Marx holds out the promise that the revolution, and justice will still be Eurocentric. Even for Maoists, the third world is the battlefront to overthrow western imperialism, so that we can have Communism in the west.

Spengler holds out the possibility of the third world being the future. In the Spenglerian sense, I think Africa is the home of the only vital civilization.

The west is dying. The Eastern and Muslim worlds have entered into voluntary suicide in response: The East by hollowing itself out to pursue western Materialism, a Pyrrhic victory even if they achieve it. The Islamic world knows it has no future, and responds with futile, suicidal gestures.

Africa may seem 'barbarous' to late western sensibilities, but so would the Western Golden age. They are 'barbarians' of the modern age the way the Germans were to the dying Roman culture.
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>>1761711

Russians should pick it up, because he went on about how Russia is a young High Culture and how it will abandon communism in the foreseeable future in order to reach its own adulthood ( in which he was more than just correct ):

"All bolshevism contains something of the dismal bitterness of the Maccabees, as well as of the much later insurrection that led to the destruction of Jerusalem. Its rigid dogmatism alone could never have supplied the impetus that sustains the movement even to the present day. The subliminal anti-Western instincts of Russia, at first directed against Petrinism, have lent strength to bolshevism. But since bolshevism is itself an outgrowth of Petrinism it will in time be destroyed in order to complete Russia’s liberation from “Europe.”

Yet the future of the unconscious forces of Russia lies not in the solution of political and social quandaries but in the imminent birth of a new religion, the third to emerge from the matrix of Christianity, just as Germanic-Western culture unconsciously conceived the second form of Christianity around 100 A.D. Dostoyevsky is one of the prophets of this new faith; it is as yet nameless, but it has already begun to enter with quiet, infinitely tender power."
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>>1761089
>>1761114
Neither of you have actually read Spengler, have you?
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>>1758052
I am sure cultural relativism in this case means respecting other cultures while adhering to your own. Honorable but violent competition is a plus.
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>tfw you took the iron pill and now there is no turning back
>tfw you ride the tiger
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>>1762091
welcome brother
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>>1761780
>Russians should pick it up, because he went on about how Russia is a young High Culture and how it will abandon communism in the foreseeable future in order to reach its own adulthood ( in which he was more than just correct ):

Decline of The West comes with a Nikolai Berdyaev essay on him in my country. Also Dugin uses much of Spengler.
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>>1760737
You missed the point entirely.

it could be argued that middle eastern culture is currently going through its Caesarist phase as we speak, as it is a place where the rule of ideas and money have broken down completely and all that is left are blood politics, and that when the West enters this phase then it, too, will be a place ruled by shameless religious demagogues who tyrannize and repress their constituents and leave no lasting legacy other than human suffering, and a wretched, bloody waste of human talent and ingenuity.
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He's proven pretty handy in providing a bright red flag for when I should stop listening to someone, because the only people I've ever seen give a shit about him are Alt-Right sperglords attempting to turn their sense of anomy into a coherent ideology and symptom of wide-spread societal decline.
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>>1756034
I can never decide if his is a work of consummate genius or the barking of a grifter trying to sell books.

>>1762172
The irony is that he was utterly dismissive of what you and I would call the "alt-right", at several instances speaking favorably of cultural relativism and he had a dim view of Nazi Germany and everything it represented, successfully predicting that it would implode in the mid 1940's
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>>1762172
>Oh no please keep listening to me anon!
I like how the above poster assumes this would matter to anyone. Absurdly amusing.
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>>1762172

And maybe you should read him then, because I'm not Alt Right at all and I consider him quite elucidating.

If they actually read him properly and not a cursory reading or countercurrents.com quotes, they'd abandon him.
The only thing the Alt Right likes about him is the Cassandra tier title.
Then they go on about how "iz imperium tiem, Trumpenreich 2016", but Spengler would describe empire as the final stage of a civilization, the ultimate sign of its decline.
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>>1762193
>The irony is that he was utterly dismissive of what you and I would call the "alt-right", at several instances speaking favorably of cultural relativism and he had a dim view of Nazi Germany and everything it represented, successfully predicting that it would implode in the mid 1940's

Did he have a favoured political system? I've never personally read him (although, despite my flippant attitude towards people I've seen touting him, he is on my to-read list), but as I recall he believed history to be cyclical, without an end-point as Hegel or Marx would have had it. So what would he have favoured under those conditions?
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>>1762217
To be completely honest I'm not sure, maybe there's another anon who's studied him in greater detail than I have who could answer that question with greater clarity, but IIRC he took a very meta-approach to ideology: he didn't identify as a capitalist or a socialist, he saw them as two parts of the same conversation, and that the philosophy of the future would be a totally different conversation in a totally different language.
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>>1762201
>If they actually read him properly and not a cursory reading or countercurrents.com quotes, they'd abandon him.
Yeah but in fairness if alt-right people did that for everything they read, they probably wouldn't be alt-right any more.

I'm pretty sure that's like, their defining feature. Most serious academics consider Hitler's philosophy to be an incoherent hodgepodge of ideas meant to galvanize people than actually provide an argument of substance.
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>>1762217

I only read his Decline of The West. I find his magnum opus to be quite apolitical. It's not written to offer a solution or a 'way out' of our predicament. He isn't a 'moderate' Evola or something. He is a true historian in this sense. He goes through the seasons of worlds and describes it in some of the best prose I've found in historical tomes. But nowhere do you feel
He even says Socialism is the very essence of Faustian/Western culture. So I don't get why leftists who claim to have read him get so butthurt.

He closes the book with a Stoic phrase, so that tells you something.
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>>1762240

That's what every fascistoid movement does: it thieves other ideologies and makes a pastiche of whatever it can salvage.

But what I don't get is how the left is willing to admit this for a number of things, like how 20th century fascism basically mimicked socialist movements.
But when a thinker gets appropriated by them, he is guilty by association.
This is what happens all too often in Antifa circles and it just undermines the intellectual credibility of the left when they start witch hunting like this.
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>>1762267
In fact I'm pretty sure at one point he considered socialism as the pinnacle of western ethical development, a sort of final exhaustion of form, pushing an idea like the golden rule to its logical conclusion.

Correct me if I'm wrong
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>>1762297

No, you're exactly right.
I have made some annotations in the book but I can't find the exact page where he said this.
But yes. He basically says what Zizek is now saying about Christianity.
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>>1762294
>20th century fascism basically mimicked socialist movements.
interesting observation. A similar thought struck me the other night when I was having a conversation with a conservative about a hypothetical civil war between urbanized leftists against rural right-wingers, and I asked him how he expected to fund his war when the urban centers were the places where all the wealth and industry was concentrated. His argument in a nutshell was that working class people (the proletariat) would rise up en masse depending on a moneyless system (because conservatives supposedly have all the farms, guns, and oil) to aid them in seizing industry (the means of production) from the liberal elite (the bourgeoisie)

>But when a thinker gets appropriated by them, he is guilty by association.
I know a lot of liberals who are perfectly fine reading Martin Heideggar, a man who went to his grave an unapologetic national socialist
What the conservatives have a hard time admitting is that the liberals have become the new Moral Majority, which means that they "own" the mechanism for producing shame culture, and just like the devout protestants before them, swing that shame bat at anyone who doesn't conform ideologically.

>>1762316
>Zizek is now saying about Christianity.
I confess that I don't follow Zizek that much. Care to elaborate?
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>>1762350

See, this is what I don't get. Heidegger was indeed unapologetic and still is perfectly fine for them to read and extract ideas. But they don't wanna touch Spengler with a 10 foot pole because "he seems kinda fashy"...

From a Spenglerian perspective, liberals are secularized Faustian Christians. Not only the factionalism is on par with Reformed Christianity, but also the whole egalitarian New Jerusalem they aspire, at all costs. The pacificsm of some branches is very much a Christian remnant as well. And people like Peter Lamborn Wilson, an anarchist, refer to baptists as examples for anarchist communities.
Disagree as much as one wants, but they can't be blamed for being 'un-Western', if anything, they are indeed as Western as a Westerner could be in this late stage.
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>>1761780
What are the first and second forms of Christianity?
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>>1763331

Magian Christianity ( Middle Eastern/Byzantine ) and Faustian Christianity ( Western European )
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>>1763507
What could Russia possibly spawn that would be comparable to Catholicism or Orthodoxy?
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>>1763574

We'll have to wait and see.
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>>1761258
Checking that out,
Thx m80
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Has anybody ever wondered that maybe The Decline of the West is the actual psychohistory Asimov meant in his Foundation books?
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>>1763507
But those belong to separate civilizations, according to Spengler.
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>>1764487
Cont.
He even went as far as saying that the adoption of christianity by the West was a historical error that only concealed the true form of it.
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>>1764467
hard to say. foundation definitely touched on those kinds of things thematically, but only as lightly as possible, and never in detail. aasimov wrote pretty politically neutral fiction, and his stuff is from a pretty realist lens, going so far as to basically write things that expounded extremely right wing ideas because it was just more reaistic, but the dude was pretty left wing politically despite it all

>>1763574
russia is very much a culture built in order to survive the fringes of civilization and raids from pastoral peoples.

with sufficient time and suppression of sand niggers, they could either evolve into western europe or an extremely harsh reactionary polity. either of which would basically fulfill the role of "comparability."

I don't think anyone says actual civilizations are fixed. democracy was fixed, and therefore reasonably easy to predict because democracy is the lack of the civilization, and it runs where institutions consume social capital and burn the remaining monetary/cultural reserves, therefore there is only one way forward: consumption and exploitation of cultural assets
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A great visionary and redpiller
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>>1764467
There is some overlap and the concept of psychohistory certainly seems inspired by the musings of people like Spengler and Tonybee, but the single hugest difference is that psychohistory was envisioned as being a true science: just plug the numbers into your hand-held calculator (hey, it was written in the 1940's, a hand-held calculator was considered one of those insanely powerful gadgets that people will invent in the distant future) and you get your testable, falsifiable proofs.
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>>1764835
I think he's more of a brownpill than a redpill
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Iron pill = Evola
Brown pill = Spengler
Blue pill = Netflix
White pill = Pornhub
Green pill = ???
Kek pill = /pol/
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>>1758052
>In the 1980s, the social sciences and philosophy were thoroughly wrecked by the work of Jacques Derrida.
What the hell? A good chunk of academia doesn't even acknowledge him.
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>>1765510
Green Pill is Robert Anton Wilson or Carl Jung
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>>1764496
Too bad when won't live to see a development of higher Russian Culture forms.

When it happens it will involve a war with Turkey and an expanding of influence through Eastern Europe
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>>1756034
Don't we have this same thread over and over again?
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>>1762217
>>1762297

He advocated for Prussian styled "Socialism" ,and had a pretty good short book about it.
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>>1762846
>See, this is what I don't get. Heidegger was indeed unapologetic and still is perfectly fine for them to read and extract ideas. But they don't wanna touch Spengler with a 10 foot pole because "he seems kinda fashy"...

Look at it this way: if you see a swastika spray painted on an overpass do you think "Buddhist peace symbol"?
So when liberals hear "muh degeneracy" do they think "Spenglerian social cyclic theory"?

I think most lay liberals are willing to hear you out if you make the distinction that you're not just pushing alt-right bullshit. It's the academics who are dismissive of Spengler, for various reasons.

Martin Heideggar was a respected academician with a long, illustrious career while Spengler never made it to the ranks, having failed his dissertation due to insufficient citations, so there's a lingering feeling among academics that Spengler "couldn't hack it as a real historian". And most historians take a more evolutionary view towards history, that it is a gradual progression from simpler to more complex forms which adapt to environment, making grand historical narratives superfluous or misleading. And he said some pretty racist shit in Man and Technics, which basically renders him ash in the mouths of pretty much the entire liberal establishment.

An intellectual equivalent might be like Origen or Thomas Hobbes: the splash that they made had less to do with their own body of work and more to do with the reaction that they provoked among learned people, who felt the need to respond in an articulate fashion why their work might be a load of Bullshit
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>>1767076
Discrediting him for not rising in te academic ranks or not having sufficient citations isn't valid. His ideas are consistent as far as I can see
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>>1767301
>isn't valid.
except it is if you want to be respected by the academic establishment who subject their own beliefs and the beliefs of other professionals to rigorous, quantifiable analysis

And lots of ideas are consistent. Doesn't make them factually correct
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>>1759154
thats a bit of a stretch

The only viable similitude is in the evolution of political systems, namely from democracy towards despotism, but even then, the details are all messed up
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>>1761258
damn, is Spenglerianism having a comeback?
Not surprising, but still, nice.
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>>1762172
I'm not alt-right and find him one of the most influential thinkers of history that I got the chance to read

And like others anons have already said, anything more than a very cursory reading would make any alt-righter abandon Spengler.
His radical cultural relativism and his views on race would be enough to disappoint any alt-righter cliche /pol/lack
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>>1762172
Dude the nazis and /pol/tacks who have actually read his works, hate him.
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>>1756034
An even more joyless and fatalistic version of Evola.
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>>1767329
>>1767076

>And most historians take a more evolutionary view towards history, that it is a gradual progression from simpler to more complex forms which adapt to environment, making grand historical narratives superfluous or misleading. And he said some pretty racist shit in Man and Technics, which basically renders him ash in the mouths of pretty much the entire liberal establishment.

During my time as a student, we deconstructed that myth of progress.I don't know many people taking this linear model of history seriously.
4chan really seems like a bunch of people from the 1950's who haven't even seen the rise of the Annales or the linguistic turn. Are your textbooks in high school really that dated?

You might have a hard on for authority, but many historians nowadays look, on purpose, for fringe figures like these in order to challenge the ideas you would probably consider 'more true' because they fit the general consensus. You don't make any strides by just sticking with your grand narratives. You need to pry and see what else is afloat out there.
The irony of studying a guy like Spengler is that we can look at one of those 'grand history' type figures who didn't quite 'made it' in the establishment and ask ourselves why he remained fringe, why he didn't become an established voice in historiography. Why didn't Toynbee get as much following either? Is it just a matter of right/wrong? What does that tell us about us historians?

But, what the hell, this is 4chan, where life is reduced to a prestige race, scoring at least 50 chicks in life, getting a job with 500k and reading /fit/'s sticky.
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>>1762172
I am what many would call "alt-right" and i like his works. moral absolutism is cancer.
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>>1768389
>moral absolutism is cancer.
I was under the impression that in so far as alt-right is anything beyond memes this is opposed their narrative.
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>>1767958
There are other flavours of degeneracy in the other boards.
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>>1767958
>, we deconstructed that myth of progress
That's what I meant by evolutionary: that it is adaptation to circumstance and environment without any clear "direction", just like biological evolution. By progression from simpler to more complex forms I'm talking about a modern industrial economy with hundreds of millions of people being more complex than an agrarian bronze-age society of a few hundred thousand people, which itself is more complex than a paleolithic society of a few hundred breeding pairs.

>You might have a hard on for authority
If the doctor tells me the dark spot on my skin is Melanoma I'm going to take him seriously because I respect the fact that he went through the rigorous process of acquiring his medical license. You might have a problem with authority.

>but many historians nowadays look, on purpose, for fringe figures like these in order to challenge the ideas you would probably consider 'more true' because they fit the general consensus
In my experience they don't care about fringe theories if they lack rigor, and instead prefer cross-disciplinary studies incorporating fields like psychology, evolutionary biology, sociology, economics, linguistics, among others.

>But, what the hell, this is 4chan, where life is reduced to a prestige race, scoring at least 50 chicks in life, getting a job with 500k and reading /fit/'s sticky.
You bitch, and yet you stay here wallowing in the filth. Nobody's making you stay here so who's worse, the fools, or the person who follow the fools trying to earn their approval?
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I like his system of ceremonial magic.
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>>1769009
the actual reason historians discard Spengler is because they're deeply indoctrinated Marxists and they don't want to face the facts that history is cyclical and western civilization will collapse within the next century
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>>1769061
spoken like somebody who doesn't actually know any historians
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>>1768839
well first off i don't really consider myself alt right. But i think there is a difference betwen using moral relativism as excuses for what for example muslim immigrants and extremists are doing or using moral relativism in a historical/anthropological sense.
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>>1769061

The next century?

By Spengler's reckoning, we have two and a half centuries. Has there even been a Caesar figure yet?

Do you think tapping out oil will affect how long Western civilization lasts?
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>>1769115
The last century at least should be a time of chaos anyway, as it happened to Rome.

We're way past our prime already.
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I read Decline of the West, though honestly I was skimming by the end because it struck me as a bunch of bunk.
It reads like some Jungian psychology crap (except, of course, Jung and Freud's works were regarded seriously until psychology either disproved or showed most of their theories to have no real basis). It's no coincidence authors like Spengler, Toynbee and even Baudrillard make these unfalsifiable ideas about how history is supposed to work and what humanity and western civilization are heading to and contradict each other in the process. Each of their methodologies, but most remarkably and blatantly Spengler's, requires a vague searching of a pattern in civilization rise and collapse and the use of a bit too many tablespoons of confirmation bias. When something vaguely fits into the pattern Spengler wants to make it fit into, it's a success, and the similarities between this "evolution" are highlighted while the equally or more numerous differences in each case are downplayed.
The obvious criticism, then, is that history like most disciplines that deal with the behavior of humans, follows somewhat a Bonini's paradox pattern where there are too many nuances and localized mechanisms changing history for someone to just "see the big picture" and encompass the "stages" common to every human civilization. This isn't to say culture and ideas are never common to many civilizations or that formulating any general pattern is outrageous, but it does mean that the patterns you come up with won't necessarily have predictability (as should be painfully obvious in Spengler) and that the more grandiose ones are more distanced from the complexity of reality.
At best, I'd agree with the Oxford edition intro, that Spengler is a "seismograph" of his time rather than of all times and civilizations, be they "Magian," "Apollonian," or "Faustian."
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>>1756034

he was great in Breaking Bad
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>>1769115
>By Spengler's reckoning, we have two and a half centuries. Has there even been a Caesar figure yet?

The Romans themselves never made the distinction between Republic and Empire, and thought of the Caesars as preservers of the Republic even as the Emperor took on ever more monarchical trappings and their democracy had degraded into a hypocritical farce.

For all we know the first Caesar already exists or has existed, and if someone were to point him out to us we'd think it was nonsense.
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>>1769115
>>1769570
It's too early. The first Caesar of our civilization will only be born around now. Maybe that's too early still. Augustus referred to himself as the First Citizen, or Princeps, of the Republic. The first among equals. In the Roman constitution he wasn't even allowed to call himself a monarch and there would have been outrage if he had. He wanted everyone to know/think that he was not a monarch or dictator (even though he was), but rather an extension of the people. There's nobody like that in our civilization yet.
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>>1769570
>The Romans themselves never made the distinction between Republic and Empire
Caesar was declared dictator in perpetuity and Augustus ruled for fucking life with power unseen by a single individual since the time of the Roman monarchy.

The Roman emperors made a big attempt at being preservers of the Republic but they sure as shit weren't when it came to the actual institutions and regulations of the Republic, and everyone could see it.

It'd be like Obama getting declared President for life. And then some bumfuck relative of his takes over after Obama gets assassinated, declares himself First Citizen through an enormous military conflict and says that he inherits Obama's position as President for life, oh and he takes a ton of power from Congress and says he can tell the Supreme Court what to do.

Every last one of us would know something was going on, we wouldn't wake up one day and say "GASP! WE'VE BEEN LIVING IN AN AUTOCRATIC REGIME! HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN?!".

We haven't even had our Sulla yet, Caesar is still a long away off and that's assuming we've had our Punic Wars.
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>>1758052
>>The intellects of the late West will recognize that the attempt to systematize or categorize anything is more of a reflection of the psychological and socio-historical paradigms that engender the imagination of such systems than it is something that really exists “out there” in Nature. Interpreting the signs and symbols of past centuries is in fact the “last Faustian philosophy” and the only possibility remaining to the Western mind (1.IV.12). [Tangent: Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game describes a post-collapse society where such interpretation has become the highest and only art-form left in the world.]

This is unironically true though.
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>>1769621
>Punic Wars.
Are they historicaly inevitable in the same sense as ceasarism is?
I would consider our faustian civilisation to be about the long period of unrest leadin up to the rise of Julius Ceasar. In that sense, the world wars are analogues to the civil wars before the Ceasars.
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>>1769009

>If the doctor tells me the dark spot on my skin is Melanoma I'm going to take him seriously because I respect the fact that he went through the rigorous process of acquiring his medical license. You might have a problem with authority.

Bad analogy.
You can't compare the study of history to the study of the human body. In the case of the latter it's relatively easy, and necessary, to achieve a great sense of objectivity.
To study the human past is a whole other deal. Since the human past is a chaos of events we can only make sense of when we tell it in the form of a story, it's not only the craft of the historian to render it meaningful, but also, and more importantly, to develop a sense of identification with the story as worlds told and tell themselves without becoming its propagandist.

This is what makes Spengler more interesting than Marxism, because Marxism pretended the study of history is a science, and not an art. Which historiography very much is. And it shouldn't be ashamed of 'losing' its scientific status, because if seen as an almost literary activity, we can achieve so much more in terms of understanding than we do when we reduce history to the collecting of data and then propagating an ideology. If we want to understand the human past and the humans from the past, we need to learn the ways of novellists, poets and playwrights, not of engineers, physicians and geologists.

Spengler was able to identify the 'world-feeling' Weltanschauung of each of these High Cultures to a degree a Marxist can't, because to them they're all just ant hills that spew cultural artefacts and ideas in relation to their production methods, not storytelling creatures from the get-go.

>>1769062

Well, he's correct. The amount of Marxists in historiography is still disproportional compared to other fields.
It's because it wanted to desperately be an exact science, a 19th century desire if anything. And Marxism pretends to fulfill that need.
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>>1769009

>adaptation to circumstance and environment without any clear "direction"

How come you fuck it up giving a a perfectly sound definition of evolution and then go on ranting about progression again all of the sudden?

Evolution has nothing to do with progression, nor is it that which is taking place. It is not complexification.
We, life and history is evolutionary alright, but not in the sense you talk about complexification of societies, where we are just meant to go from hunter-gatherer to post-industrial astronaut in a matter of time.
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>>1769621
>Caesar was declared dictator in perpetuity
And they murdered him for it.

Augustus never took the title Dictator Perpetuus for himself and only assumed the relatively tame title of Princeps, which is where we get the word "prince" but in Latin means "first citizen" or "first among equals". And knowing deadly well the dangers of flaunting your authority, Augustus made sure to keep his power low key and maintain the outward facade of Republican control. Senat

>It'd be like Obama getting declared President for life....
You're impressing ancient behavior onto present values. It would be more like if there was a crippling economic depression and the President responded by privatizing vast swathes of the economy which was all purchased up by the Great-great grandson of J.D Rockefeller, whose tenure of CEO of America, Inc. makes him a far more important person to the economy than any elected official, including the president, an office for which he periodically runs and gets elected to, and the process for nominating a new CEO of America, Inc becomes more important than the presidential election

>We haven't even had our Sulla yet,
It's totally arbitrary, you could make the argument that Ronald Reagan was our Sulla and the Two World wars were our punic wars
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>>1769610

>leans in closer to the mic

Wrong.
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>>1770531
My point is that the transition of Empire to Republic, while taking several hundred years to complete, occurred after a sudden period of instability and was the result of a multitude of things that had not been done before.

The Roman people knew that the rule of Augustus was going to be a change and after Tiberius they knew things were going to be much different than what they used to be. They certainly didn't know where it would end up but it's not like one day they woke up and realized they'd been hoodwinked or something. There were warning signs and Caesar's rise to power was one of them.
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>>1770743
Trump is not a Caesar, he's just a sign that we're finally moving away from the war weariness left by WW2. He doesn't have a military background nor is he illegally trying to take power. He's not particularly special aside from his popularity showing that more and more people are getting tired of how weak our society has been since WW2.
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>>1769570
>>1769610
>>1769621
we've been in a proto-caesarism period since WW2

The distribution of state powers and the workings of the state in the US before Roosevelt was fundamentally different than after his tenure.

this is not to say that there is a caesar like figure already, but we're closer than you people think
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>>1769621

Stop being so autistic. You agreed with him. The only thing you sperg out about is the fact that Romans supposedly didn't see a difference.
Of course they did, but words matter. There's a reason cultures don't choose to call themselves this or that, contrary to the actual reality.
Interests work in weird and illogical ways. So for the Roman emperors to not call themselves kings was in their interest. They could uphold the idea that people still were considered the source of power in the Republic.
It's a bit like Taiwan. Technically it's a country by all standards, just not in name. And everyone, even Taiwan ( for the moment ) benefits from not calling it as such.
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>>1770263

It would seem so.
The Warring States Period in Chinese history is very much the same. Within a civilizational sphere, a period of great unrest and wars as the civilization stiffens its resolve to remould the world, eventually leading to the establishment of a 'world encompassing' empire, "Tianxia".
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Very underrated historian and even more underrated philosopher.
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>>1770379
>If we want to understand the human past and the humans from the past, we need to learn the ways of novellists, poets and playwrights, not of engineers, physicians and geologists.

This approach is dismissed by Spengler in his own introduction to the Decline of the West. Both "engineering" (materialism) and "poetry" (idealism) are to be considered. They are both expressions of the Ursymbol, like flowers on a plant, all stemming from the same seed. See introduction XI. I am on my phone so I was unable to copy the text, but the reference should do it.
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>Mankind’s downfall will not be decided by "cosmic souls." If man is ever to come to shape his own destinies more effectively, it is not Spenglerian appeals to the "weakness of the self" which will help. Sympathising as he did with the alleged cosmic laws which rule mankind, he brought philosophy down to the level of astrology and responded to the horror which he had so keenly sensed with a superstition which could only facilitate it. It is this which has to be resisted, the will and urge, as in Wagner’s Wotan, to end all things.

-T.W. Adorno, "Was Spengler Right?", 1966
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>>1772306

Adorno has the most shittiest of read of Spengler. I doubt he even did anything more than a cursory read.
He thought Spengler's prediction was one of impending doom, while he never claimed such a thing.
And then Adorno goes on to say "durrr so much technology n capitalism moves furrward so spengler 0 - 1 west"
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>>1772306

He doesn't say anything here either. Just "it's not true, it looks like mumbo jumbo hocum lol."
Fucking shitpost tier if anything.
>>
Great poetry but BTFO by Chesterton:

http://gkcdaily.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-decline-of-west.html
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>>1773674
>He chopped ordinary Christian history in two in the middle, in order to deny that either part of it was Christian. So far as I remember, he attributed the first half of it to entirely to the Moslem Arabs, because they were not Christians; and the second half of it to people of the type of Faust, because they were rather fishy sort of Christians, and Germans as well.
I don't think he read the book.
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>>1762172
>sperglords attempting to turn their sense of anomy into a coherent ideology and symptom of wide-spread societal decline.

ouch, anon
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>>1762846
>From a Spenglerian perspective, liberals are secularized Faustian Christians.
How can one man be so right?
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>>1772260
It stems from math, doesn't it?
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>>1773724
Read your suffixes lad, it stems from a bear.
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>>1761780
>Russians should pick it up

>who is Aleksandr Dugin, "Putin's Rasputin"
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>>1773724
English is not my first language. I meant to say that they are all expressions of the potential contained within the Ursymbol, and that Spengler specifically denounced the idea you proposed.
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>>1771104
We are closer to the formation of a world empire for sure, but I see caesarism as still too far away. The liberal democracies we have now are characterized precisely for having weak leaders supported by a bureaucracy. A Caesar is never going to spawn from this environment
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>>1756034

he stinks and I dont like him
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>>1772306
Disapproval by the Jew Adorno is actually validation.
>>
Would a retaking of Constantinople by Russia mark their birth as a free, independent High Culture / civilization? That could only happen after the West has fallen or is close to falling of course.
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>>1756034
He's a sane, coherent Evola
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>>1766616
Didn't even know this guy existed before this thread dickhead so contribute or fuck off
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>>1776158
I disagree. Evola's vision of history is a continual, transcontinental descent from greatness.

Spengler is usualy depicted as the ultimate cynic, but his theory of organic decline of civilizations also holds in it the fact that civilizations can be born as well as die.

And the one thing Evola holds onto no matter is that certain truths are always truths, no matter what, and that just about every notion of real religion points to that.

Spengler's theories though, says that the Tao Te Ching, the Vedas, and Plato are all pointing in wildly divergent directions, and civilizations have followed them to different logical conclusions.
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>>1776198
I'm talking more about his personal beliefs. Evola has some pretty far out there ideas and he's much more about 'mug degeneracy' than Spengler is.
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>>1771444
i thelemalol'd
>>
so John Michael Greer is the new Spengler, right? I've been reading his blog and some of this stuff is mindblowing
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca/2012/05/democracys-arc.html
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>>1758052
He was right, but he also understood that we as Westerners must adhere to our own culture, otherwise we are nothing.
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>>1758052
>>The intellects of the late West will recognize that the attempt to systematize or categorize anything is more of a reflection of the psychological and socio-historical paradigms that engender the imagination of such systems than it is something that really exists “out there” in Nature. Interpreting the signs and symbols of past centuries is in fact the “last Faustian philosophy” and the only possibility remaining to the Western mind (1.IV.12). [Tangent: Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game describes a post-collapse society where such interpretation has become the highest and only art-form left in the world.]
But every scientist has always known that everything but maths is just a rough system of prediction applied to emergent systems that no one can truly understand.
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>>1773674
I think Chesterton is usually amazing and in fact I agree with everything I've seen him say about history, but like most English people he only understands the superficial, and is incapable of seeing beyond labels. This is why he completely fails to understand Spengler. He thinks we're the same as the first Christians because we call ourselves that. He thinks we're the same as ancient Greeks and Romans because we use Latin words and learn about the Trojan War in school. He sees only form, not essence.
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>>1779559
No, this only started to become a common view during the 20th century. Before that I only know of some isolated Christian thinkers making that argument.
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>>1779625
>No, this only started to become a common view during the 20th century. Before that I only know of some isolated Christian thinkers making that argument.

The blog dude and Spengler both live(d) in the paradigm I described.
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>>1777413
no he isn't, you are making imaginary distinctions based on your lack of knowledge
>>
One of the greatest redpillers that ever lived
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>>1756034
He was a genius and it is a travesty that he is so disregarded and unknown both in academia and by the general public.
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>>1761711
>In the Spenglerian sense, I think Africa is the home of the only vital civilization.
>The west is dying. The Eastern and Muslim worlds have entered into voluntary suicide in response: The East by hollowing itself out to pursue western Materialism, a Pyrrhic victory even if they achieve it. The Islamic world knows it has no future, and responds with futile, suicidal gestures.
>Africa may seem 'barbarous' to late western sensibilities, but so would the Western Golden age. They are 'barbarians' of the modern age the way the Germans were to the dying Roman culture.
You're wrong. Islam is already dead and Africa is a hodgepodge of the Arabic, the Western and the primitive.

The future lies in Russia, I believe the bolshevik revolution was ironically the first step towards casting off the chains of the Arabian and Western influence on them and I believe the authentic Russian (or Eurasian if you prefer) is emerging before our very eyes. Stalin was in many ways the Mohammad of the Russians.
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>>1781856
lol wtf, more like the Charlemagne of the Russians or some shit. Religious reform like Islam is something that comes when a civilisation is already old and starting to go downhill.
>>
Well it's nice that there are at least some people here who know about Spengler now, and this threads gets more than just hilarious Breaking Bad jokes.
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>>1781874
Islam was not religious reform but an emancipation of the Arabian from the Classical.

Stalin was the man who began the emancipation of the Russian/Eurasian from the Western and Arabian.
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>>1781883
Read Spengler. Islam is a religious reform that happened within Eastern (what he calls "magian") civilisation, which at that point was about 600 years old. It's analogous to Protestantism (in particular Calvinism) in the West. The fact that the East had been until then a victim of what Spengler calls "pseudomorphosis" doesn't change the chronology, it just explains the rapid success of Islam.

Russia is not at that stage at all, it's a civilisation still waiting to be born, with only hints of a soul, but no coherent expression of it yet. Spengler even explicitly places it at the "Merovingian" stage in analogy to the West.
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>>1781856
what about China?
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>>1781929
Chinese civilisation has been dead for 2000 years, and now China has become full Westernised.

It's hard to predict where a new civilisation will be born but there's no indication of it happening in China as far as I can tell.
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>>1781929

China and India really are living dead. They're only animated when taken over by barbarians. But nothing really new emerges from the cradle.
Visiting China recently, it's like seeing how easy late Rome got swayed into the Magian form language and mentality.

The lack of creativity has little to do with 'durr hurr asians r robots', but with, as Spengler says, their civilization being long exhausted.
I think somewhere he says the imperial stage can go on perpetually ( so it isn't really cyclical, his model ), but it'll never return to that springtime which characterizes and made unique that particular world.

Empire, which the alt right gets a hard-on for, is the terminal stage of a civilization, not its height.
And this is why most neo-Spenglerians are such retards. They completely miss the point when they long for the imperium.
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>>1782462
And that point being?

I guess you're gonna tell me that there is something intrinsically negative about the "decline" and thus longing for it is erroneous.
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>>1760749
t. Franz Boas
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>>1781929
He already addressed China
Their attempts at imitating the West's contemporary success will only lead to a hollow victory. Civilizations that cannot further expand their energies inwards are already "declining"
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>>1782470

It's erroneous to claim Spengler longed for it.
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>>1782541
Yes but that's irrelevant. I can desire it even if Spengler didn't. I was told i was being a retard for liking the Imperium stage because it constitutes the "decline" part of the cycle. And i don't see anything contradictory with that. Every mighty empire falls, even the sun burns out some day, i've already come to terms with this as everyone must. As we can admire a healthy young man in his physical prime we can also admire a culture in it's prime (civilization).
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>>1782549

If you desire old age, that's up to you.
What bothers me is that neo-Spenglerians do because they think it means a return of glory.
Empires aren't particularly glorious. They're a return of the primitive inside the megalopolis. It's a zoological struggle up high and down below.
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>>1781899
i saw some interesting video arguing that ISIS/Wahabists are actually the early stages of a new civilization forming from the remains of the Magian one
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>>1782723
I don't really see it, they seem to be about as Magian as it gets.
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>>1782723
"The Islamic community, like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the whole of the worldcavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good angels and spirits, and within this community the State only formed a smaller unit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations were governed by the major whole. In the Magian world, consequently, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the battle of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions logical, necessary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are simply identical. Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood the Patriarch, by the Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch the Gaon, by the Caliph the Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and subjects. "

Wahhabis are like that, Magian purism.
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>>1782913
>by the Exilarch the Gaon
???
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>>1784060
Geonim (Hebrew: [ɡeʔoˈnim]; Hebrew: גאונים; also transliterated Gaonim- singular Gaon) were the presidents of the two great Babylonian, Talmudic Academies of Sura and Pumbedita, in the Abbasid Caliphate, and were the generally accepted spiritual leaders of the Jewish community worldwide in the early medieval era, in contrast to the Resh Galuta (Exilarch) who wielded secular authority over the Jews in Islamic lands.
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>>1784072
Thanks.
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>>1781883
>Stalin was the man who began the emancipation of the Russian/Eurasian from the Western and Arabian.
If that's true then that emancipation failed after the fall of the USSR, as even now with Putin they depend on the West on many aspects.

What about their unique architectural styles and art, are those considered "embryonic" by Spengler?
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>>1784790
Localised variations of Eastern art/architecture along with some Western elements mixed in. Like Carolingian was to Byzantine. Nothing actually original yet.
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Once the West collapses, how will other parts of the world that got culturally westernized over the years function?
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>>1787550
Spengler doesn't predict the collapse of the West any time soon, civilisations can continue to exist for thousands of years in their static state after having died internally.
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>>1759127
>>1759979
>>1769115
>>1769570
>>1769610
>>1769621
If you examine facts, quite a lot arguments can be made that we have already entered the empire era. Demographic decline is hitting since 20-30 years at least. (Note that Augustus was the forst who had to worry about the declining demographic trends of Roman citizens and old-fashioned manus-marriages in his era.) Culture is in steady decline, all the arts are not capable of producing any novelty. It's just degenerating in a downward spiral and recycling past ideas and forms. Spengler labeled the era of the empire as an economic age. This is pretty hard not to see, the past 30 years since globalization started was all about multinational companies, aquisitions, monopolization and forming a global consumer society. The global markets ruined local communities everywhere, urabanizations skyrocketed and the harsh and primitive American pop culture took over everything.

As for the Punic wars for the West, those wars were about to decide who will be the hegemon in the mediterranian which was the known and reachable world for Antic people. So the Punic Wars desided who will be the top dog inside the civilization. I'm pretty sure that the top dog and soon to be empire of the Western Civilization is the United States and the historical event that decideed that was the two World Wars. Politically the three most important economic centres of the world are entirely or partly under US control, refering to Europe, The Gulf and Japan/Far-East. The countries here can be considered client states of the US, just like some Hellenistic monarchies like Pergamon were to Rome.

And now with the Middle East erupting in chaos it seems like we have entered the phase of the Great Migration Period again.

http://www.declinecast.com/
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>>1790870
>I'm pretty sure that the top dog and soon to be empire of the Western Civilization is the United States
You mean the country that is on the verge of both economic and societal collapse? Your entire post is riddled with a poor understanding of everything going on in the world today. The age of absolute politics and unlimited imperialism is marked by the REJECTION of money and economics. (The embracing of ethical socialism and the Prussian-German soldier-knight idea) What Spengler predicts is not a disgusting non-western democracy like the US, but a European autocratic empire based on culture that literally rules over all of the planet. That is the destiny of the West, after they fulfill their life task of creating a culture-nation-people-state-race. America's culture is not truly Western, bottom line.
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I think Peter Turchin has a better foundation for the cycles of rise and fall.
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>>1779495
I used to read his blog. He is highly intelligent, erudite, and can write excellently.
But it felt like I was hooked on the daily doom porn, so I quit.

It feels as almost he WANTS the decline to happen and then proceeds to use arguments - which are good - that it will. Even tho I think he will be proven right in much occassions.

And one time he spoke of outdated concepts in ecology, but he doesn't make much mistakes it seems so I forgive him for that.
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>>1761154
Welcome to 2016, where anything short of an unequivocal denunciation is considered a full throated endorsement.

You fucking bigot.
>>
An interesting conversation with Bowden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAY9OlphRok
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>>1790882
>The age of absolute politics and unlimited imperialism is marked by the REJECTION of money and economics.
This sounds utterly nonsensensical to me. On the contrary, the empire phase has no redeeming qualities other than economical.
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>>1791091
He does seem to want the decline to happen, since he's so invested in his lifestyle and religious beliefs, but his arguments seem rock-solid regardless. The only way out is to have faith in some miraculous energy breakthrough, but even that only solves the energy problem, not the decline of the American empire, or the problems of climate change.

His blog does get old sometimes because he tends to just rewrite the same entry about peak oil over and over, but it's fascinating when he delves into certain topics in-depth over a series of posts, like when he explains how empires work and the history of America's empire.
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>>1791339
I agree with everything you said.
Personally, I think the only thing that can prolong our current state is nuclear energy.
I do not believe that a declining population will be that helpful since it seems that consumption levels always rise.

And consumption levels can be either just that - an increase of it - or think of the newest technological gadget.
>not the decline of the American empire, or the problems of climate change.
May I add:
>depletion of a few resources, including phosphorus, helium (I think), and a few rare metals
>soil related issues

I base this on the book: Wasted World - Rob Hengeveld
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>>1769406
>Faustian detected
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>>1756034
I was planning on reading his book. Whenever I see summaries of his ideas, I always see these terms like Faustian and Dionysian. I understand the literary references, but what do they mean within Spengler's theories?
>>
reading Spengler/Evola/Guenon/etc, is like reading someone that takes Dungeons and Dragons far to seriously.
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>>1793702
>I don't understand, so it's a bunch of fantasy
And you probably believe marxist or whig (lol) shit makes more sense.
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>>1793661
Each culture in Spengler's theory has its own "soul", basically what that culture values and its characteristics. He named Western culture after Faust, meaning that we as a culture believe anything is possible and we'll stop at nothing to achieve it. The classical Romano-Greek Apollonian culture was obsessed with form and rigidity, quite the opposite of our own obsession with boundless space. A prime example of this is the fact that the Romans and Greeks did not have the concept of zero, because to them, nothing could not be something.
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>>1791188
The empire comes when blood triumphs over money once again.
>>
I fail to see future of Russia, for they are failing on fertility aspect just like pretty much entire West is.

India is a giant bloated corpse, its potential long since spend.

East Asia will have a victory, but by that point they will be more close to West than their cultural foundations.

Islam is a interesting situation, I would not dismiss it so easily as other here have.
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>>1795683
All those you listed are long dead civilisations. The question is where will the next one be born, and Russia shows all the signs of a latent soul and an impending spiritual awakening.
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>>1795698
Russia shows all the signs?
I am truly curious, where do you see those signs?
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>>1795714
The Russian soul. Read Dostoevsky.
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>>1795698
I think Islam has potential if sufism replaces wahhabism somehow.
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>>1795917
>Dostoevsky
Islam has been dead as a civilization since the Mongol conquests.
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>>1756034
MINERALS
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>>1756034
Pffft. Like Ballsack has any opinion worth listening to.
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>>1782560
>Empires aren't particularly glorious. They're a return of the primitive inside the megalopolis. It's a zoological struggle up high and down below.
And from a Spenglerian perspective, they dont need to be the ebin lebensraum type of empire either. Its hard to actually predict what form of empire the west would give birth to. Probably some transnational federation a la EU, where rival political parties held together by caesar-like figures struggle through indirect types of warfare. I'm guessing it wouldnt be something that the Alt-Right would actually like at all. They would still be complaining about the joos. More than ever actually

Its yet another group of people who misread Spengler and apply a very limited notion to a concept that is much larger than they want it to be.
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>>1793661
its loosely what they mean in the works of Nechee and Goethe
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>>1798145

That's why I'm disappointed by most, if not all, neo-Spenglerians.
I see Spengler having a bit of a comeback and I hope some people do more than discuss his ideas and bring some new Spenglerian takes (i.e. works) on our current predicament.
That podcast mentioned here is doing a good job.

John David Ebert has an interesting series on the Decline of the West. It's mostly a summary of the book with some notes of his.
In any case, there needs to be more of this and I'm doing my part. Hopefully in the future I'll have something to deliver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzwfs3DjSJg&list=PLA7E2840B724C6695

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzwfs3DjSJg
>>
How the hell can Russia have any potential for a future civilization. They even had an empire twice already and it collapsed. There is no future there. The future for humanity is eventual global unification and the conquest of space
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>>1798223

It's not because someone calls an "empire" an empire that it is what Spengler defines as an empire.

The Karolingian empire for example, which emerged when Faustian civilization began, is in no way the type of empire Spengler imagines as "Imperium" or "Weltreich".

Your argument is also very presentist. I think the Abbasids had the same perception of Europe as being this peripheral and uncivilized neighbour with little to no chance of development.
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>>1756034

A nationalist who didn't believe in racial supremacism, and turned out to be right on that front.

In a sense, I'm sad that I don't see nationalists like him any more.
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>>1770263
The Punic Wars are supossed to be between rival states of comparable strength. WW2 was nothing like that. If anything the Cold War represented our Punic Wars better
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>>1757857
nice one bro
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>>1798242
To me it seems the Russians are quite incapable of offering something really new as a culture. I guess we would have to wait for the death of Western Europe and a decline in the international influence of America before they can assert themselves with their real soul. I think Spengler also predicted a crusade to take Constantinopla. That could even happen in this century the way things are going.
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>>1798670

At the moment. Europe during the Merovingian era was rather pathetic. The Karolingian Renaissance ( their 19th century, imo ) was a spark, but nothing compared to what the 14th and 15th centuries had to offer. Laughable really.
And especially with what 18th century meant for our civilization.

Civilizations in their infant stage all look quite naive and they resort to aping neighbours and predecessors with occassionally a little flavour of their own. It looks like they'll never be able to properly execute something of their own.
Like how we borrowed heavily from Middle Eastern and Greco-Roman culture... they pretty much did the same with early and modern culture, but you just see how Russia feels very uncomfortable with it. Petrinism was hated. Communism didn't even last a century and will never return.

I think slowly but gradually they'll be defining themselves. But that will take VERY long.
We are only getting rid of the Christian pseudomorphosis now. And that isn't even fully done yet.
>>
What did Spengler think of Latin America?
>>
>>1798772

I've often thought about Latin America.

I have a suspicion they might come after Russia.
Because a lot of civilizations start out with an exodus of its people from a distant native land. The subsequent settling than results in it taking off.

And the spiritualities spawning there like crazy ( quimbanda, palo, umbanda, santeria ) suggest to me they're in their proto-historical stage really.
>>
>>1798799
What the fuck are you smoking?
>>
>>1798816

What's happening? Did I think too out of the box there? Should I stick to the modern narrative of ever increasing western progress?
>>
His work on the west essentially points to anacyclosis. It isn't an original theory but he has had some resounding success in his predictions.
>>
>>1798177
i saw those videos when I started reading The Decline of the West, as a sort of accompanying intro, they're ok

I would be interested to see an interpretation of Neo-Liberalism and the current state of politics in the US from the perspective of what Spengler predicted, not really an attempt at predicting anything, thats honestly pointless , just interpretation of this past century from the perspective of Spenglers work
>>
>>1798799
Latin America is an interesting case.
Both Latin America and Russia are situations were you had severe cases of pseudomorphosis, in both situations, forced pseudomorphosis, in Latin America it was particularly bloody.

I dont really see any nascent high-culture anywhere in the world now.

The future is relegated to western culture in the imperial stage, spreading and encompassing all the world. Maybe some form of cultural group of people will be born in the future, and they'll form some sort of resistance to global western influence, but thats unlikely.
In the past, dying high cultures in the Imperial stage could only spread so far, limited as they were by technological constraints. Western culture has no such constraints.

Russia has the best potential to be a resisting force right now, but they seem to be too much corrupted by western influence. But it takes more than geopolitical strongarming to form a serious nascent particular culture.

The only serious place where a High Culture can actually develop seems to be africa, where there is a multitude of cultures, though no High Culture. The underdevelopment of so many african countries allows them to naturally resist western influence too, something that Latin America is incapable.
>>
>>1799019
>His work on the west essentially points to anacyclosis
Yes obviously. But more than his historical and political analysis, his readings and catalogations of cultures and cultural differentiation is what makes Spengler so damn interesting.
(at least for me)
>>
>>1801551
Latin America is part of the West.
>>
>>1757857
Le XDD Reference XDDD Funny XDDDD

Stop being controlled by pop culture redditor faggot
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