What are some good arguments against the "Strong man - Bad times" hypothesis?

A nationalist meme invented in the 19th century?

Stalin was the ultimate Strong man, shame that created some hard times...

spengler was even more wrong

Saying "wrong" without explaining why is it wrong is a good example of a non-argument.

But they are back senpai.

Cultural decline and political collapse aren't particularly well correlated

A basic study of history or even contemporary times.

You have hundreds of groups like Aboriginals and Native Americans have been suffering hard times for up to 400 years without any of these strong men creating good times emerging from them.

Not only that but you often get strong men creating bad times - think of the ancient socities like the Assyrians or even the military regime of Japan dragging itself into war with the US.

At a more abstract level it has tunnel vision when it comes to human capacity. For instance it doesnt account for civilisations which were wiped up or thrown into decline due to natural events like plauges and earthquakes.

Not only that but it ignores the ability for strong and weak men in more powerful socities to trigger bad times in weaker ones - think of settled socities crushing nomadic warrior ones.

not him, but it's true.

Spengler literally couldn't hack it as a professional historian. He failed his doctoral thesis on grounds that it wasn't cited well enough, and had to write a secondary thesis just to get his high school teaching license.

He wrote beautiful romantic poetry, but his work is basically correlation =/= causation: the history. He ascribes to teleology what is better understood as a function of material sciences.

>ad hominem

That's not an ad hominen you dunce.

An ad hominen would be "Spengler was wrong because he was bald, and all bald people are stupid looking!"

If you were going in for surgery, would you prefer a licensed doctor with a licensed anesthesiologist, or would you be okay with some random shlub performing both of those tasks for you with no way of proving his competency? Or maybe you'd be okay with some college student who doesn't actually know what they're talking about but they have the same political beliefs as you do?

You're comparing history to medicine when you should really compare it to arts. The argument from authority doesn't work, and the degree of accuracy Spengler's work demonstrated is more important than whether he had a doctorate or not.

>the degree of accuracy
which is low
not to mention that "accuracy" when it comes to historical narratives is incredibly poorly defined

I always see this comment and the irony is that the picture is completely on point in this case, as it is in most cases.

>which is low
Nope.

Yep

>should really compare it to arts.
That's totally specious. In art it doesn't matter what your painting looks like, what its subject matter is, as long as the person you are selling it too likes it that way. Art is the science of the subjective and the emotionally resonate. The fact that you equate it with history speaks volumes about your concern for actual accuracy.

History is not subjective. You can go back into the historiographical, archaeological, numismatic, and/or forensic record and piece together what actually happened and what didn't. You can use cross-disciplinary exercises to fill in gaps of human knowledge. All this takes a rigorous environment, which is something you don't get in the book-selling world that Spengler profited from.

Feel free to list the things he was wrong about.

Compared Alexander to Napoleon, which shows how cursory his knowledge is

Talking about his predictions.

>n-no that doesn't count

I should've been more specific, my bad. But that's what I meant.

Well for one, trying to shoehorn world civilizations into predictable life spans of equal lengths of time. That line of thinking is exactly where the "strong men=strong times/weak men=weak times" argument comes from.

History is not cyclical, at best it is dialectical, messily lurching from one extreme to the next, learning by trial and error, with no real pattern that repeats itself, only occasionally do things line up due to convergent consequences in things like economics, and even that is hugely contextual

Even if he somehow made accurate predictions it doesn't matter if it was done on bullshit magical thinking. Even if I won the lottery ten times in a row betting on astrological symbolism it wouldn't make astrology legit, and Spengler's "accuracy" is far more mundane than that.

There isn't really, all civilizations give way to new ones , which is what the whole hypothesis is about
>long term Success eventually ends due to incompetence inevitably

Give me a prediction and I'll see if it's accurate

One I do remember, though, is his belief that France and England would be the Greece to Germany's Rome, which was ridiculous on many levels (France and England are in no way unified, they totally failed to dominate culture, and Greek influence in Rome was something quite variable)

That's its due to widespread incompetence is a rather questionable assertion

>won the lottery ten times
Considering the low odds of winning the lottery even once, winning it ten times would definitely give your methodology a significant degree of credibility.
>strong men=strong times/weak men=weak times
That's not Spengler's argument, though. Spengler's historical model is not cyclical.

No that is essentially ad hominem, user is right.
>Dude here are a list of his failures, are you really going to believe a guy with all these failures?

Your analogy would work but people are also kind of dying and being reborn all the time. I mean within your own values and moral development. That's what's taught biblically too.

Not him, but Spengler's "accuracy" is through appeals to heuristics. His arguments are designed to incorporate every day rule of thumbs in order to construct an argument which, on the surface, seems compelling, but really are only hiding their lack of accuracy by appealing to people's intuition, which is something that forms on its own regardless of a person's grip on the bigger picture

Depends on the civilization, but here is asserting that ate and pride eventually leads to the internal collapse of a succesful or dominant society. Obviously many factors go into the fall of a success culture but when it comes to those who collapse internally it's usually through incompetence.

I'd probably have to agree with the hypothesis in that regard

>winning it ten times would definitely give your methodology a significant degree of credibility
The entire point is that even in this miraculous hypothetical it doesn't make astrology legit.
I already pointed Spengler hasn't made any relatively impressive predictions, but even if he had...

It's often due to some level of incompetence at the top but that in no way can be generalized to the entire society, not to mention freak events like Alexander the Great or the Mongol explosion

Then you picked the shittiest possible example ever to demonstrate your point, but what can I expect from a brainlet? If you employed a method that would win you the lottery TEN times in a row, this goes way beyond correlation=causation statistical probability.

Ad hominen is attacking a person's individual identity, things they can't control like what they look like in a tweed professor's jacket, or whether their skin pigmentation is uncomfortably dark.

Nobody made Oswald Spengler fail to properly source his arguments in his doctoral thesis, that's something he could have helped if he had actually applied himself.

Pointing out that a person was a failure in the field in which they are being taken as experts in is a perfectly valid way of reminding people that Spengler was a bookseller, not a historian, especially when people who actually are in the field dismiss him as junk pseudohistory. He chose (through inaction) not to compete in a rigorous environment, only to cash out on what he thought he knew about the world by selling books. These are facts which need to be considered when considering the validity (or lack thereof) of his works

That's your ape brain misleading you to believe that a sufficiently impressive series of coincidences means a literal miracle occurred according to my baseless explanation, you idiot. "Durr, a eclipse occurred right when we stopped sacrificing people and it disappeared as soon we started sacrificing people again, what are the odds? We have to keep sacrificing people or the sun goes out forever!"

>he needs to imagine a literal divine miracle to make himself appear correct
>he's unable to construct an argument without using analogies (the idiot's go-to argumentative method)
>picks nonsensical analogies to begin with
>can't criticize Spengler's theory without attacking his academic credentials, as if models of history were hard science and not philosophical constructs
>has the nerve to call ANYBODY ELSE a brainless ape
You're a sad existence.

>he still can't fucking understand my point even after I used and reformulated an explanation for brainlets
Jesus Christ. Even if you saw what can be interpreted as a miraculous sequence of events unfold before your eyes, you still shouldn't take a particular explanation for it unless it has a strong basis. No, even if some guy said "hmmm, I saw in the tea leaves that a meteorite will fall on the white house tomorrow" and a meteorite falls on the white house tomorrow and everyone but him was taken by surprise, it still doesn't fucking mean you can predict anything by looking at tea leaves, no matter how incredible the coincidence or how amazingly accurate its predictory power seems. This instinct to prostate yourself and accept magical thinking when faced with impressive coincidences is an embarrassing atavism.

And if I would tell you to stop bowing even in front of a dude who predicted that a meteorite would fall on the White House the next day because his reasoning was unsatisfactory, you bet your ass I don't believe that you should be bowing to Spengler, who never made any prediction anywhere that impressive, simply for having a decent track record at foretelling based on magical thinking.

>prostate
Prostrate, for fuck's sake.

>still keep doing analogies because he's incapable of abstract thinking

>That's not Spengler's argument, though. Spengler's historical model is not cyclical.
Spengler's model is that civilizations are like living superorganisms which go through their own predictable lifespans. He states that all civilizations go through the same process according to similar time scales.

The problem is that all of his evidence is total corollary

also

you seem to think that it's only one person piling in on you, when in fact you are addressing multiple people

And you seem to think I'm the only one defending Spengler.

Germany is the head of the EU after accepting liberalism tho?

I keep giving you analogies because you're clearly incapable of comprehending abstract thinking. I already summed up everything I had to say in short sentences outside of the analogies, which I added because I sensed you were particularly slow, but you can't understand even with the help of illustrative examples and analogies.

This is why they need to bring thread IDs to Veeky Forums...

That's called being an American vassal

Ad hominem is an an appeal to character , this goes beyond aesthetic. That's like saying
>Scientist so and so failed to answer all of these questions on this test
>And you're going to believe him when he says 2+2=4?
What you're saying isn't dialectical, it's an attack on Spengler's assertions based on calling him incompetent. That doesn't make every assertion he makes false and is ad hominem

>Ad hominem is an an appeal to character
and guess what? character matters, especially when we start talking about a field of expertise. How do you know that somebody isn't just bullshitting you in order to peddle books, enriching himself at the expense of the rubes who buy into his drivel?

Ad hominem only applies if it's unrelated, like if I was attacking him for being German, or listening to Wagner.

>>Scientist so and so
it's a poor analogy. It would be more like
>chemist so and so got his pharmacology degree at a diploma mill, didn't actually put in the hard work of understanding the nuances of how different drugs affect the body, and isn't recognized as having this authority by anyone qualified to recognize him as an authority on drugs and medication
>and now you're going to buy painkillers from him because the legit guy tells you that you don't need them and they'll do you harm.

This is totally different from, say, Albert Einstein, who did go through the motions and did put in his time, and even when he was denied an academic post he still kept active in the field, publishing papers which would go on to earn him the respect and admiration of his peers when he won them over the hard way.

>What you're saying isn't dialectical, it's an attack on Spengler's assertions based on calling him incompetent. That doesn't make every assertion he makes false and is ad hominem
No, what I'm saying is that the exact reason he failed the single most important work of his career, for a lack of sources, is exactly the reason why you should take everything he wrote afterwards with a grain of salt.

>Ad hominem only applies if it's unrelated, like if I was attacking him for being German, or listening to Wagner.
That's not true.

Yes, that's what makes it a logical fallacy, and an attempt to bypass a point.

The main problem with all of Spengler's works is that they aren't properly sourced. He invents his own language to justify positions and doesn't fortify them with enough physical evidence to make them stand up in the face of rigorous scrutiny.

The fact that this is a pattern which recurs throughout Spengler's career reinforces that point., even when he was writing the one document that would make or break his career (it broke his career, which is why he got into the business of selling books)

Crying that the guy made an ad-hom against Spengler is itself kind of a fallacy. Unless there is some review out there that goes over how historical accurate it is (or isn't) move on to talking about specific stuff from it.

Fucking prove on a philosophical basis that either your argument just now, or Spengler's arguments make sense. Don't just call in other concepts, actually utilize them.

>look at spengler's wiki page
>click a citation
>takes you to holocaust denial website

>Character matters
Not when discussing theory, it might make you suspect of his theories but that does not disprove them at all.

>Ad hominem only applies if it's unrelated
Yes, what you are saying is completely unrelated to his theories , especially the ones he is asserting in Decline of the West. So because he failed a bit in uni he therefore can never make a true statement?

No
>It's a poor analogy
>Proceeds to compare historical theory to pharmaceuticals
Wew. Lad. You're just intellectualizing ad hominem assertions hardcore at this point. Now even in your analogy you are using logical fallacies, which is ad verecundium.

>Yes, that's what makes it a logical fallacy, and an attempt to bypass a point.
Which you are doing, blatantly to anyone with self awareness on how proper discourse works.

Everything you are saying is bypassing anything Spengler has to say based purely on ad hominem

>You have hundreds of groups like Aboriginals and Native Americans have been suffering hard times for up to 400 years without any of these strong men creating good times emerging from them.
So you're honestly claiming that strong chieftains never created never created times of relative peace and prosperity for their tribes?

>Not only that but it ignores the ability for strong and weak men in more powerful socities to trigger bad times in weaker ones - think of settled socities crushing nomadic warrior ones.

It actually doesn't. I don't understand why people have hard time grasping that weak and strong in the context ofthis ohrase are relative terms and not absolue ones.

>Not when discussing theory, it might make you suspect of his theories but that does not disprove them at all.
You're divorcing the abstract from the concrete. That sort of idealism is exactly why nobody takes Spengler seriously.

>Yes, what you are saying is completely unrelated to his theories
I literally told you exactly what the problem is with Decline of the West: it's lack of proper sourcing. I even fortified that point with examples from his entire body of work. History without sources is literature, no matter how badly you don't want it to be.

>>Proceeds to compare historical theory to pharmaceuticals
Nigga, right after you compared it to a scientist doing simple arithmetic.

>Which you are doing, blatantly to anyone with self awareness on how proper discourse works.
Nonsense. I'm pointing out the proper reasons why rigorous history doesn't take Spengler seriously, and I'm reinforcing that point with examples of the way that he handled himself throughout his life.

Anyone with self awareness on how proper discourse works knows that it's generally better to take the expert's advice, and don't have this weird phobias and attitude problems regarding figures in positions of authority.

>You're divorcing the abstract from the concrete. That sort of idealism is exactly why nobody takes Spengler seriously.
No, what you are saying is that because someone was wrong in the past they are therefore wrong in the future. Idealism has nothing to do with this *at all*

Meanwhile your assertions of *how* Spengler's sources are lacking I itself unsourced and based on ad hominem, the irony here is intense.
>Nigga
An hero
>Not understanding how logical assertions work in historical theory
An hero twice ,

>So you're honestly claiming that strong chieftains never created never created times of relative peace and prosperity for their tribes?
That's a fucking meme. Not even that guy, big-men in tribal areas are either gangster-tier or flashy showmen. The only reason you need one is to protect you from some other tribe's big-man, and even then there's no guarantee that you didn't pick a flashy showman who was all style and no substance and got you and your tribe totally fucked

>I'm pointing out the proper reasons why rigorous history doesn't take Spengler seriously,
>Wittgenstein
>not taken seriously and not rigorious
Pffttt it's time to stop talking kid

>>Wittgenstein
>historian

>No, what you are saying is that because someone was wrong in the past they are therefore wrong in the future.
Absolutely incorrect. What I am doing is pointing out a pattern of inadequacy
>Idealism has nothing to do with this *at all*
You are trying to dismiss reality and take refuge in his ideas rather than the sources from where he draws his conclusion. That is what makes it idealism

>Meanwhile your assertions of *how* Spengler's sources are lacking I itself unsourced and based on ad hominem, the irony here is intense.
Well aren't you the ironic hipster.

Ask any professional historian what they think of Spengler

>An hero
Now who's the one dodging points and making ad hominems?

Wittgenstein was not a historian.

And I won't even deny that he wasn't influential... as a bookseller. As a historian, his work doesn't stand up to scrutiny because it isn't designed to, it's designed to be appealing and consistent body of work.

>Ask any professional historian what they think of Spengler
argumentum ad verecundiam

>I literally told you exactly what the problem is with Decline of the West: it's lack of proper sourcing.
Not him, but provide specific examples for the discussion. Or, better yet, provide what you believe to be a better interpretation of history to refute Spengler.

>better interpretation of history to refute Spengler.
Every narrative interpretation of history will be less accurate then just history

>Not him, but provide specific examples for the discussion.
Max Weber described Spengler as a "very ingenious and learned dilettante". Karl Popper described his thesis as “pointless".

altright.com/2014/09/20/the-revolutionary-conservative-critique-of-oswald-spengler/
From an academic who devotes himself to the study of right-wing movements
archive.org/stream/AlfredRosenbergsCriticismOfOswaldSpengler/RosenbergCriticismOfSpengler_djvu.txt
>Spengler regards the rise and fall of cultures as an occurrence similar to the life and death of a
plant, but forgets in the adducement of this richly superficial comparison that races of plants as
such do not die out if they are not destroyed, crippled, mixed with inimical types. The "race" of
the fir tree persists although the single fir dies. The "race" of the linden tree is still the same as
many thousands of years ago. And the races of men as such could remain just as eternally young,
if hostile blood is not mixed with them, if unassimilable spiritual opposites do not clash and mix
with them, without being able to be blended.

Just from a quick search.

Spengler wasn't a narrative historian, he was interpreting historical events as mostly being the result of High Cultural morphologies. He even admits that history ultimately has no meaning. "Strong man - Bad times", is a narrative completely alien to Spengler's thought. A botanist studies the morphology of plant life, but doesn't add a story to it.

Spengler was hardly any type of historian. He was a philosopher of history

I've read Rosenberg's critique. I'm not sure why he is conflating culture with race, as Spengler's ideas were not really fixated with the fate of peoples. Spengler saw cultures as being like unique plants that undergo morphologies similar to other living organisms. As in, they have a spring time, summer, winter, and during this last phase begin to atrophy and die. Spengler did not believe High Cultures belonged to a race of like cultures, he viewed them as unique, never recurring phenomena. The NSDAP didn't approve of Spengler's cultural pessimism, and likely sent Rosenberg to attack him, who likely never read his work thoroughly anyhow.

There are no metrics for weak, strong, hard times, or good times. Most hard to good times are created by factors beyond man's control.

>altright.com
dropped

>Ask any professional historian what they think of Spengler
Ad verecundium, and an incorrect one at that
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Benoist

Fucks sake, most reactionary or conservative professors cite Spengler's as an influence
>Idealists dismiss reality
Brainlet.jpg

>Oh no , linking a right wing website when you are discussing the views of the right wing
Brainlet.jpg

Alt Right is a bunch of homosexual cuckolds criticizing Spengler because they view him as a defeatist.
And Spengler is not right wing.

>The fact civilizations are not cyclical,
True. One should not treat the histories of specific places in a single mold-
>their course is more Spenglerian in nature blablablabla
You absolutely fucked up, you piece of shit.

>So you're honestly claiming that strong chieftains never created never created times of relative peace and prosperity for their tribes?

No it was that by this understanding of history these peoples should have been producing a large amounts of strong men and corresponding good times uniformly.

Likewise is there a reason you left out the issue with strong men creating bad times? Looking at your response to mine would you feel it fair if I made a theory about strong men ruining the world based on this matter alone?

Saying that strong men create have at some times created good times does not create a foundation strong enough to justify this large and drawn out theory.

>I don't understand why people have hard time grasping that weak and strong in the context ofthis ohrase are relative terms and not absolue ones.

Its because you ignored the context of the sentence before it. It ignores the the very real and external historical absolutes that transcend internal states.

Leave, American.

Watching this idiot go on about how every argument is valid and how academic reputation doesn't matter because ad hominem is hilarious.

Spengler is like a contractor who has fucked up every contract he was given. Then he says "but this time I'll legit do a good job, trust me" and the rest of the competent contractors just laugh at him.

>It's actually more like a spiral
Is the ultimate goal of humanity really to overcome the anti spirals and fight da powa

>Wittgenstein
>historian
bro what?

...