Oswald Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’
by Europakreuz
Europakreuz, channeling Spengler, delivers a fierce warning that Western civilization, having severed itself from cosmic energies and its life-giving roots, is plunging into disintegration, demanding immediate and decisive action to reclaim vitality and stave off the total collapse into materialism and spiritual ruin.
The article was originally published in the magazine Europakreuz, no. 20, June 1997.
Introduction
As any thinking person has noticed, life in Germany has become increasingly unsettling and irrational. The lines in banks and post offices are constantly growing, even though we are always told that the number of Germans is declining. This and other serious misinformation cause great confusion, even among people who are only concerned with their bank’s opening hours. Despite the repeated assurances from our leaders that “things” will soon improve, many are already beginning to sense that something isn’t quite right. The desire to find out “what the hell is really going on” (as an American physicist once defined science) is entirely incompatible with the circulation of hopeful messages. We should all have at least a rough understanding of what the hell is really going on if we don’t want to stumble around like blind robots.
The Decline of the West, this book title by Oswald Spengler, can be understood as a prophecy, a threat, or even a glimmer of hope. People may take it personally in whichever way they like, but we all, collectively, are in the midst of this decline. It is becoming evident everywhere that the materialistic-capitalist system is in its final stage. State-sanctioned criminal gangs with democratic party platforms are plundering our country. The new tax increases are nothing more than state-sponsored robbery. Large corporations are destroying the environment. A worldwide unculture is annihilating all human values. The scum of the entire world loiters in the cities of the West, twitching to ape-like rhythms in a drug-induced haze. And there is war in the cities. Organized crime, gangs, and vandalism are steadily increasing. These are the signs of what intellectuals and other unnecessary figures call the “postmodern society.”
One is fooling oneself if one believes that there is peace and freedom in our country just because we can still go and get our bread rolls without being gunned down by a sniper!
We are in the midst of the decline and cannot analyze it from a comfortable armchair. From the outset, we must familiarize ourselves with the idea that it is we who are experiencing the decline of the West, and it is we who must survive it. The system, with its politicians and business leaders whose greed for power cannot be excused by intellectual deficiency — not even a lack of brains — this system ensures its own demise. But for the time after the decline, for the new aeon, we must be prepared. And it helps if we take a closer look at some of Spengler’s thoughts.
“There will be no Western European culture, no Germans, English, or French left in a few centuries,” Spengler writes. This sentence, which seems to seal the fate of the West, is perhaps the most famous from his monumental work. But Spengler did not want his work to be known only as a prophecy of doom; he also intended it to provoke a shift in thinking. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked. Bad luck, it seems. After all, it’s not surprising given the title of the book. And the high page count, with no pictures. Spengler, known as a sharp critic of democratic-decadent civilization, had another, lesser-known concern: his cosmic-energetic view of history.
First, as a kind of prelude, two details from the life of Oswald Spengler: As a youth, Spengler already had a vivid imagination and devised enormous dream worlds. At the age of 16, he created the realms of Africasia and Greater Germany. For pages on end, Spengler noted population densities and industrial production in his school notebooks, drafted constitutions, and issued guidelines for trade, banking, and transportation. For his realms, he also conceived world-historical dramas about the decisive struggle of the double continent against the old colonial powers. Allied with Germany, Africasia defeated its adversaries and proceeded to reorganize Europe and the rest of the world.
Spengler wrote his doctoral thesis on “Heraclitus” — a study of the energetic foundations of his philosophy.
In these early creations of Spengler’s mind, everything is already present that would later be laid out in his Decline in unprecedented completeness: the rise and fall of world empires, the connection between history, economy, and culture, and an energetic view of history.
Spengler’s Cosmic-Energetic View of History
All events in the cosmos and on this Earth are dependent on energy cycles. The rise and fall of stars, life and death, the weather, and a person’s psychological state — all of these are driven and influenced by omnipresent life energy. This life energy has been known by various names throughout the ages: od, prana, orgone, free energy, or Vril. Those who understand these connections also understand cosmic connections and the eternal cycle of history.
“History has a sacred double meaning: it is either cosmic or political. It is existence or it preserves existence ... From this follows that history is not cultural history in the sense as it is popular today, but racial history ... the fate of streams of existence ... Politics in the highest sense is life, and life is politics. Every person, whether he likes it or not, is a part of this struggling event, either as an object or subject; there is no third option ...” and “Life is hard if it wants to be great. It allows only defeat between victory and defeat, not between peace and war...”
These sentences represent Spengler’s core idea: History is a cosmic current, a constant struggle, and every person is an unconditional part of this struggle, and thereby inseparably connected to the cosmic event. Politics is life and can only make sense if it remembers the cosmic event.
The whole of life is politics, in every instinctual impulse, down to the innermost core. What we today call life energy, that ‘it’ within us that wants to move forward and upward at any cost, the cosmic, longing urge for validation and power, which remains tied to the homeland, this directedness is what everywhere among higher humans seeks and must seek great decisions as political life, to either be a fate or suffer one. There is no third option.
With this passage, it becomes clear that for Spengler, life and humans are driven by life energy, by Vril. Life is politics, so life energy, Vril, is the motor of politics. Spengler always sees this political activity of life energy in conjunction with people, race, and homeland. The cultural landscapes are the land in which the people are rooted, and “to the energy of the blood and the power of the land...is added that...cosmic force of the same rhythm of closely connected communities.” This community is the people. “Peoples are spiritual entities..., in which the man of a culture fulfills his destiny.” Culture, land, and people form an animated unity for Spengler, much like what is seen today in bioregionalism. People must once again have an inner relationship with the place where they live.
Thus, the basic concepts of Spengler’s energetic view of history are all laid out: culture, people, land — from all of them springs forward-moving politics, life itself, in which life energy reveals itself as a “cosmic flow.” In life energy lies our becoming and striving; it is the originator of the “cosmic floods that we call life.”
Culture, then, can be regarded as the fulfilled work of cosmic life energy.
But Spengler would have titled his book differently if he did not oppose this hopeful energetic existence with a force: “Every culture is in a mystical relationship with the space in which it seeks to realize itself. Once this goal is reached, the culture suddenly petrifies, dies off, its blood clots, its forces break down — it becomes civilization. Civilization is the inevitable fate of a culture... Civilizations are an end, irrevocably...” Civilization, however, is not the glorious peak but the nadir of human existence. The connection of man with cosmic life energy is destroyed: “…civilization with its giant cities despises the roots...and detaches itself from them.” For Spengler, the symbol of civilization is the cosmopolitan world city: “A dreadful misery, a savagery of all living habits, dwells in each of these...mass cities.” The world city-civilization detaches itself from the three foundations of cosmic energetic activity, consumes the cultural landscape and its inhabitants, and becomes “rootless, dead to the cosmic, and irreversibly fallen prey to existence and the spirit.” In the world city-civilization, a new humanity arises: “timeless, history-less, literary people, people of reasons and causes, not of fate, who, internally alienated from blood and existence, entirely thinking beings, can no longer find any reasonable content in the concept of the people.”
City dwellers no longer belong to the people and culture; they are “unwarlike and raceless,” they are “intellectual fellahs.” “It is the formless mass flooding through the metropolises in place of peoples, the rootless urban mass instead of mankind intertwined with nature... It is...the modern newspaper reader, the educated one, that follower of a cult of intellectual mediocrity and public life as a cult site..., it is the...Western man of theaters and places of entertainment, of sports and day-to-day literature.” Their leaders — the politicians, journalists, intellectuals — are, according to Spengler, “from the standpoint of real history, inferior.” These, as mentioned, are Spengler’s words. One could express it even more insultingly.
Everything in this spectacle detaches itself from the cultural land and becomes alien to it. “Democracy, the parliament, is the form in which the...urban spirit informs the land what it has to want and what it has to die for.” In the end, the “withdrawal of the cosmic rhythm from existence” occurs, and with it, the departure from the energetic foundations of life. Instead, there emerges a “mutual understanding,” a cultural rapprochement, and a blending. “With this mutual understanding, mankind has ceased to live in nations; it has ceased to be historical.” In place of the people, “the dregs, the mob” arises as a sign of “worthless and superfluous life,” which stands outside the historical world and thus outside of life.
Spengler shows, as the second significant conclusion, that civilization separates man from land, people, and culture, thereby depriving life energy of the opportunity to manifest itself.
Through Civilization into Decline
The modern man of civilization no longer acts within the cosmic flow of life but is driven by the mundane monotony of trivial trends and ever more refined sensory titillation. The individual is detached from the framework of the people and the cosmic cycles, loses any sense of larger connections, and his life is marked by the frantic chase between earning money and spending money, between being there and catching up. The mob, the rabble, the broad mass, is selfish, stupid, and lazy — not because man is naturally lazy but because the globally dominant and influencing urban civilization makes him so.
Since the days of the Neolithic, cultures have risen and passed into civilization, but biologically, man has changed little. In terms of behavior, body reactions, and sensory organ structure, we are Stone Age hunters living in a late-capitalist civilization. A few brief examples: Our visual system is designed for speeds that correspond to those of a walking or running person — when driving at much higher speeds, the senses are overwhelmed, leading to accidents. Or: The Neanderthals’ diet was unbalanced and irregular, so when there was a lot of food, they gorged, and their bodies stored fat reserves for leaner times. We still gorge and accumulate fat today. And finally: In the Stone Age, it was important to be able to recognize animals from a distance. Tiger or zebra — each had a different significance for one’s role in the food chain. Nowadays, we can distinguish car brands from afar. Even television, as a final example, with its flickering, serves as a substitute for the central fire around which people gathered, and its stories replace the elders who passed on their experiences.
If people remain connected to their land and cosmic energies, the resulting culture stays within biological possibilities. But eventually, every culture develops beyond these biological limits and turns into civilization. This happens when materialism takes over. What happens then was described by the Medical Councilor Bachmann, editor of the Blätter für Biologische Medizin (Journal of Biological Medicine) in 1922, as follows:
The threads come together here: intellectualism and monism — unbiological science — international Freemasonry — the dissolution of religious and moral thought as well as of the family spirit — the cultivation of social democracy through urban liberalism and so-called progressive enlightenment — pseudo-scientific heresies and a low level of public health..., mismanagement, and finally, the collapse of the state apparatus.
Instead of a cosmic-energetic destiny, a self-serving drive takes center stage: progress for the sake of progress, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, without a deeper meaning or higher goal. In place of cosmic life force, there emerges the pull of the relentless drive to go ever further. Always more, always more refined, always faster. Civilization becomes a self-perpetuating force, detached from people who can no longer understand its development, uprooting and degrading them. Through this massification and blending of everything with everything, the differences between peoples, between city and countryside, and between man and woman are eventually blurred. A uniform global mob emerges.
This global mob, which Spengler aptly described as the degradation of the individual into a member of a historyless mass, is accompanied by decadence, agony, and decline. One term best encapsulates this process: degeneration. Throughout history, there have been clear signs signaling the downfall, even the collapse, of entire peoples — visible both in Spengler’s era and today.
The following list, with some contemporary remarks, was published in 1926 in the Zeitschrift für Volksaufklärung und Erbkunde (Journal for Public Education and Heredity Studies) by the Swedish professor Lundborg:
The growth of cities and towns. Think about how cities and towns today devour more and more farmland for buildings and roads.
Longer life expectancy accompanied by an increase in chronic and degenerative diseases. The keywords alcoholism, cancer, and allergies suffice here.
Immorality, brutality, crime, as well as the number of suicides, increase. Even liberal minds are already lamenting the decline of all values, so there must be something to it.
Excessive individualism, egoism, and the service of Mammon prevail, even in the lower classes of society. This society calls itself pluralistic. According to philosophy textbooks, pluralism means nothing more than the doctrine that a state consists of many independent groups that do not form a unified whole.
In the equally renowned Zeitschrift für Neurologie und Psychiatrie (Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry) — incidentally founded by a man named Alzheimer, whose name today designates a disease — the Viennese professor Erwin Stransky wrote an article in 1920 with the telling title “On the Spiritual Reconstruction of the German People.” Stransky laments that the German people have become culturally impoverished, desensitized, and mired in the depths of daily necessity. There is a lack of enlightened figures to lead the German people out of this swamp to solid ground. Instead, pseudo-intellectuals have an undesirably large influence. Spiritually degeneracy and decadent luxury have become role models. Stransky concludes: “Extreme individualism... along with its offshoots, doctrinarism..., have proven to be disastrous... A people as constantly endangered in its very existence as the Germans should only allow itself the luxury of individualistic eccentricity in the most modest of measures...” Only psychologically grounded enlightenment about these degenerations will bring about the spiritual reconstruction of the desecrated national soul and national consciousness and can lead Germany from delusion back to truth.
These two examples show that at the time when Spengler wrote and published his Decline, quite capable scientists in Europe shared a similar assessment of the threat civilization posed to culture.
At this point, the list of degenerations mentioned should be enriched by a modern one: television! Sitting in front of the television is by far the most common leisure activity of Germans! For hours on end, over 90% of our population lets themselves be bombarded with commercials, talk shows, crime series, even more commercials, soap operas, news, and even more commercials every day.
It’s quite unclear what makes all these programs so appealing. Either the so-called “sophisticated” films are a dry reworking of some filmmaker’s life crisis, or we are presented with “progressive” content. Vulgarities on an ongoing basis, all superiors and cops are idiots and vulgar, and the rest is sleazy and extremely tolerant — the red-green scene and the 68ers say hello. The soap operas have a bit of everything. It gets worse in talk shows, where child molesters, feces-eaters, and other scum join hands — this is the piss culture lovingly cultivated in the studios of the TV stations.
With few exceptions, all TV shows are utterly unnecessary and useless. Most viewers forget more than two-thirds of the news shortly after watching, and learning from TV shows, even when they present something worth remembering, hardly ever happens. The only thing TV is good for is pushing trendy topics wrapped in chic, fashionable Anglicisms onto the public. After all, you want to be able to participate in the conversation and have an opinion on all important topics like sadomasochism, Juhnke’s1 drinking sprees, or the latest Hollywood movie.
Nowadays, everyone believes they must form an opinion about everything, whether they know anything about the subject or not. Unfortunately, very few people understand the difference between opinion and proven knowledge. Even worse: On television, hardly any event is reported anymore; instead, they report the opinion you’re supposed to have about it. And to avoid thinking for themselves, the German citizen takes the convenient route and sits in front of the box. This sitting turns into an addiction. Worldwide, people sit in front of the box, let themselves be bombarded, and devolve into a formless mass that buys the same mass-produced goods without protest. That is the One World of the future.
With this One World, the end of human history is reached. Spengler writes: “If all life were a uniform stream of existence, we would not know the words people, state, war, or politics. But the eternal and powerful diversity of life, which is heightened to the utmost by the creative force of cultures, is a fact that is simply historically given with all its consequences.” A multicultural society will destroy these differences because there is no longer any culture in which a people can develop uninfluenced.
The idea of the “One World,” that year-round multicultural street festival, does not serve culture or humanity, but solely the multinational corporations, which need a will-less mass of globally uniform consumers to unload their products. Here, pure profit-seeking hides behind the perfidious mask of cosmopolitan lifestyle and comprehensive world knowledge. Sure, in a world where no people can or should live in isolation, it is necessary to know something about global ecological, climatic, and economic relationships. And certainly, it serves a holistic awareness to know how colorful and diverse our Earth still is. But knowledge is only one side of the coin.
Thousands of years ago, people didn’t know much about their world, but they could and were allowed to feel part of something greater. The mass of humanity today knows a little more, perhaps is aware of more, but it lacks the feeling for cosmic and energetic connections. No longer are feeling and meaningfulness in demand in civilization, but knowledge and the desire to understand everything. To use Spengler’s terms: In place of myth and intuition comes theory and explanation.
Modern scientific theories are rejected by Spengler; instead, he demands the “dogma of force... Force is a mythical entity that does not come from scientific experience...” Its treatment in modern science is fiction. If science and technology want to exist in the cosmic flow, they must orient themselves to this myth of force. Navigating the world through pure knowledge or familiarity is like a driver speeding down a winding, rain-soaked mountain road at 100 km/h while guessing where the cliff edge is through a fogged-up windshield. A culturally aware person would have already realized it’s time to stop, while a knowledgeable person keeps searching for a cloth to clear the glass, until they, the car, and the cloth plunge into the abyss. This analogy, though blunt, helps explain Spengler’s view of civilization’s destructive power from both an energetic and anthropological perspective.
Detached from all origins and consumed by its own internal decay, every civilization eventually falls — and so too will our Western materialistic civilization. The moment has not yet arrived, but it will. And when it does, we must act before the West collapses. If we want to help the world, we must get involved personally — reading a few articles or books and agreeing with them is not enough. It’s up to each individual whether something changes. Only those who free themselves from today’s banal thought and existence constraints can think freely. Above all, help defeat the ignorance in this land: worry less and think more!
The materialism of the present is, of course, not very conducive to such action, but now the time must finally begin where we are no longer the ones retreating step by step. For us, who have been placed by fate in this civilization and this moment of its becoming, in which money and materialism celebrate their final victories, the direction of our will and necessity is thus given in a narrowly defined circle. We do not have the freedom to do this or that. We only have the freedom to do what is necessary for the new aeon, or to do nothing. And the task that the necessity of history has set will be solved, with or without the individual!
Let’s hope that everyone knows what needs to be done!!!
(Translated from the German by Constantin von Hoffmeister)
Translator’s note: Harald Juhnke (1929–2005) was a German actor, comedian, and singer, widely known for his talent but also infamous for his struggles with alcoholism, which overshadowed much of his later career.