Opinions on this book?

>he uses the words Russian and Slav interchangeably

>created by Jews
Stop. Please. Don't let this thread go into pol shitposting mode.

Jesus Christ fuck off already, are you really so hopelessly fucked in the head that you think calling a Jew a Jew makes someone a nazi?

It's not compatible with any civilization that's why it failed everywhere. People in Russia still mourn the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So much for Russian soul.
This metaphysical nonsense is good for philosophers. People want to eat and enjoy life. It's really all about economy.

Spengler's concept of decline is like an unseen termite colony eating away at the foundations. On the outside it can look as good ever, but it can't weather a storm as well as an ugly house with solid foundations.

it's so original and almost unfalsifiable
spengler is a con artist who wants to make money off alex jones fans and other similar types

>it's so original and almost unfalsifiable
it's not supposed to be a scientific theory you turbofaggot. it's philosophy

You never read the book, not even acquainted yourself with the theory. Guess how I know.

>Guess how I know.
because i strongly implied it?
>it's not supposed to be a scientific theory you turbofaggot. it's philosophy
id rather be a turbofaggot than write the post you wrote

It's funny how people are still falling for this meme. Every civilization is different and all this crap about stages of civilization is full of shit.

It's interesting as a historical source, not as something that can be truly applied to our society.

i guess you can compare, but making decisions based on those comparisons instead of actually looking at the current situation and deciding based on the facts on the ground and in the moment is just being confused

Are Russian Jews not part of Russian culture to you, then?

>Golden Age – The Golden Age is the only age that falls within the rule of Cronus. Created by the immortals who live on Olympus, these humans were said to live among the gods, and freely mingled with them. Peace and harmony prevailed during this age. Humans did not have to work to feed themselves, for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to a very old age but with a youthful appearance and eventually died peacefully. Their spirits live on as "guardians".

>Iron Age – Hesiod finds himself in the Iron Age. During this age humans live an existence of toil and misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights with brother and the social contract between guest and host (xenia) is forgotten. During this age might makes right, and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing
This "we live in the end times and the past was so much better" idea is as old as humanity.

They absolutely aren't considering how mutually hostile those two cultures are. Before Hitler, Russian empire was used as the standard for anti-semetism.

>some ancient writer said his civilization was going to shit
>retards take this to mean Spengler was wrong

Never got this.

If anything it supports his theory as an universal axiom that he wasn't the first to take notice of

Jews are perpetually foreign everywhere despite living everywhere. History proves this.

Doesn't consider the importance of fossil fuels.

>people like this browse a history board

I like it even if I don't agree with everything in it. Not that I've read it, just a lot about it. I bought volume II in a bookstore but still haven't gotten to reading it.

Which translator is the best to get for this work? It's so risky these days to get translated works as there are many translators who are completely willing to begin injecting their political opinions through their translations, making it unreliable to read.

I want as close to the original as possible.

The failure of the West is a failure of nerve.

The more people believe we're in decline, the more it will be so. Whether it needs to be true or not. What we have is a crisis of faith, not of anything substantial.

Short-sighted and outdated.

The impact of technological progress and capitalist globalism changed everything.

>What about slav civilization? Spengler predicted that Russia will get rid of communism by the end of the century because it's not natural for them and it actually happened.
sure, not because communism is unworkable shit, it just doesn't look good on slavs

pure unadulterated shite. It takes a complete mental degenerate to be this reductionist and/or retarded. Civilisation is not like civilisation the game. It is not on rails.

technological progress was only made possible thanks to the exploitation of finite energy resources for which we have no viable replacement.

You strongly implied that a book you never read and aren't even familiar with is shit because whatever. You're not even a philistine, you're just a retard.

Why are people too lazy to read even the Wikipedia page of this book?

Spengler is NOT saying there is a universal model of prosperity->stagnation->decline

In fact his whole analysis is uncharacteristically a-temporal, he does not beleive in a universal progression of time. Each particular civilization is unique in its evolution.

What is universal is that all civilizations end, and Spengler sets out to find the reasons why Western "Faustian" civilization is on decline.

This book is more prescient than ever , it only took WWII and the fall of Communism for us to take notice of it.

Spengler takes account of both of those things, and sees them as part of the decline, the rule of the money principle is for him the moment Western civilization were it will hit an inevitable contradiction and crisis, which will lead to the rise of Caesarism and the paving of the final collapse.

I think what I really loved about Spengler was the notion that Rome and western civilizationare are separate civilizational cureents and not a part of the same continuum. It kind of blew my mind and made me reconsider many things, is there any other author who shares this view?

>thoughts of citizen of romanised barbarien hole

The crisis he describes is not one of faith, it's one of poor leadership.

The state balances out failures to increase successes. At a certain point, this becomes more than a safety net for the poor, it allows it so the ruling class cannot lose when they make bad decisions, and they make bad decisions until society is destroyed.

For western Rome, they made the mistake of trying to conquer new land rather than develop peaceful land. This tactic was eventually used at home, and it destroyed the peaceful land.

For the West (which is not Christendom, or Greco-Roman, or Judeo-Islamic), the end will be one of a lack of foresight regarding fossil fuels. The decision makers will not be affected by it until it's too late to do anything.

And in every case it's the lack of democracy that causes the ultimate problem, while in every case too much democracy is blamed for it!

Yes he explicitly stated that the West has been an admirer of Rome but Rome and West are two separate things. Even mny of the things we think we know about Rome are just medieval inaccurate approximations.

To my knowledge no, except Goethe of course. Spengler sees himself as disciple of Goette, and he got that idea from non other than him, in the play of Faust.

In the play Faust and Helen of Troy have a son, Euphorion, who is the most charming child and skilled in music, but who also falls to his death. By this Goethe meant a very simple thing, Faustian western civilization born out of Christianity, and classical civilization can never come together harmoniously.

Pop quiz: Christianity is the second religiosity of Rome, or the first religiosity of the West?

Both. The great schism happened in the 10th century, when Spengler claims Western civilization began.

Nice one!

How about the effect of fossil fuels on Western civilization? Nobody else had free energy like that to spend. Will we last longer or shorter than average because of that?

Interesting

I'd imagine shorter.

Spengler isn't a historical materialist so I'd say it's irrelevant

I'm surprised his categorizing Judaism and Islam together is not more commonly discussed.

Christianity is the odd one out of the three, but we have the term 'Judeo-Christian'.

There is no reason to believe the west in declining.

Its a term developed in the 1950s for Christian Zionist. Before than no had heard nor cared about a concept as ridiculous as "Judeo-Christian"

Spengler disagrees. If you want to know the various reasons, read the book.

Spengler says it's normal for civilizations to decline (except China), and he never says if we're IN the decline.

If we're like Rome, we aren't a Caesar yet.

Almost immediately after the end of the Great War a German named Oswald Spengler wrote a highly successful or widely boomed book called “The Decline of the West.” The most human inference (in the opinion of many) was that the German, having assisted at the spectacle of the Decline and Fall of the German Empire, naturally wanted all the rest of us to decline and fall with him. He felt it would be obviously a breach of taste and tact for any nation to flourish if Germany had declined; if indeed, he was even aware of the existence of such fringes of his Empire as France or Flanders or England.

Anyhow, he applied his doctrine to all that is most active in our civilisation, whether we are so constituted as to call it the Indo-Germanic race or prefer to call it Christendom. But there was more in this theory of his about a general collapse; which was also a theory of a recurrent collapse. In this, indeed, and in his general idea of a modern phase of decline, his view was quite reasonable and very persuasively stated. But there was bound up with it another set of ideas which are not necessarily any part of the theory, either that civilisations periodically weaken or that our civilisation has weakened in our period. Those two theses may quite well be true; but the thesis of the book was false.

For me, at least, it was false because it was fatalist; false because it was unhistoric; and false because it involved a particular falsity about the very spirit of the great culture which the critic criticised. It is the whole point of that culture that it has been continuous; it was the whole point of the critic that it have been discontinuous and disconnected. He was not content to say that civilisations revolve in separate cycles, in the sense in which we might be said to belong to a different civilisation from the Druids.

...

He cut up ordinary European history into chunks, that were supposed to have no more to do with each other than Chinese history and Aztec history. 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. And he talked about these divisions as they were like the abysses that might separate a stratum full of primordial crystals from a stratum, aeons afterwards, containing the first fantastic traces of marsupial life.

Now, I am quite certain, as a matter of mere common sense, that the history of Christendom, or even the history of Europe, was never so fragmentary as that. We are much more connected with the ancient Greeks than the German writer would allow us to be with the later mediaevals, or even the earlier moderns. The sort of distinction he suggested only happens when a cycle of civilisation really dies, and then fossilises and remains as inscrutable as an ammonite. We have no idea what was the religion of the Cro-Magnons, though we infer from certain pictures of ritual dances (as well as from our own common sense) that they had one.

We do not know the significance of the Cup and Ring Stones, though the fortunate and civilised of us still use rings, as in the case of wedding-rings, or cups even in the sense of wine-cups. We do not even know if we interpret the signs rightly, or whether they are signs at all. Now, the Greek gods have never died in that fashion; and the Roman Empire has never dies at all. Of the most modern industrial cities in England, many have in their very names the title of the Roman Camp; and wherever there stood the Roman Camp, there stood afterwards the Christian Cathedral.

There was never one moment, in the long history from Herodotus to Herr Spengler, when all the men who counted in any age did not count The Fall of Troy; there was never a generation when young poets did not make that old tale a topic for new poems. I wonder whether a poem by Heredia about Antony, or a poem by Morris about Arthur, belongs to the dead Greek period or the dead Arabic period? There was never a generation of poets that did not invoke Virgil, if only to imitate him. There was never a generation in which philosophers did not refer to Aristotle, if only to contradict him. The thread of our cultural continuity has never been broken.

I think the fact worth recording at the moment for two reasons. The first is that the same energetic German author has just launched another book, of much less dignity and of much more dogmatism, reaffirming his theory, and especially the most gloomy and barbaric parts of it. The other is that there is a horrible possibility that what he says falsely about our past may be said truly about our future. I mean that, hitherto, the men of our ancient tradition have done everything except forget. Whatever might be fanatical or ill-balanced about their religions or their revolutions, they have each, in turn, taken particular care to remember the deeds of their fathers.

Even when they poisoned the purer Paganism if Homer and Pindar, they did not destroy it; they left it standing for ever against them as a reproach. Even when they dethroned the Greek gods they did not dismiss them; in the first just fury they denounced them as devils, but in the long run they let them remain as elves. They let them remain as fanciful and fabulous figures, for literary metaphor or plastic decoration, so that Christendom has left the nymph in poetry or the cupid in sculpture. It is true that now, for the first time, the race that always remembered is invited on every side to forget.

Is this a critique from the right? Interesting. Sauce please.

Yes; it is true that to-day, for the first time, our newspapers and our new politicians have asked us to forget, not what happened a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago, but what happened twenty years ago. When it is a question of shifting a policy or rehabilitating a politician, they will ask us to forget what happened two years ago or two months ago. Here, indeed, we have the great Spengler System, of total separation of one historical episode from another. Here is the true trick of regarding ourselves as divided by aeons and abysses not only from our fathers, but from ourselves.

Thus, by reading the daily paper every day, and forgetting everything that it said on the previous day, we can divide human history into self-contained cycles; each consisting, not of five hundred years, but of twenty-four hours. By this means we can consider the slogans and swaggering policies which we ourselves cheered only recently, as if they were hieroglyphics as unintelligible as the Cup and Ring of Stones. This new quality of forgetfulness, in our current culture, does give some justification to the pessimism of the German professor; and if we accept such oblivion, then doubtless our “cycle” will really curl up like a worm on the floor and lie still for ever.

Chesterton, 1932.

thanks senpai.

Here is Chesterton's original review of Decline Of The West from 1920. I can only find it on Google Books so I gotta post screencaps.

I adore Chesterton's writing.

...

>Ibsen
NORWAY MENTIONED

Indeed.

But that chart leaves out China, with it's renewal.

And none of it considers the very real impact of fossil fuels on the world. The west would have been in decline since 1850 if we didn't get free energy. Before that we got it the way all empires get it, by slavery.

funny, he writes like a fat blowhard

>free from tradition

REEEEEEEEEE

He's the ultimate traditionalist.

Yes, but based as fuck, and also really funny at times.

>the west isn't declining
dumb shit people say 101

"Useful Idiots"

t. Yuri Bezmenov

It's not a book of history. It's more a poetic interpretation of cultural forms. If you're reading as a piece of historiography then you're reading it with entirely the wrong mindset.