Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    HyperHumanity
    HyperHumanity
    HyperHumanity
    Ebook833 pages19 hours

    HyperHumanity

    By Mike Hockney

    2.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Humanity is a single biological species but has split into two different mental species labelled Mythos and Logos. The Mythos species is driven by emotional stories, not by facts, evidence or rational arguments. Christians believe that the all-powerful Creator of the universe, rather than simply sort out Earth’s problems, chose to be born of a 14-year-old Jewish “virgin”, have himself arrested by the Romans and crucified, then resurrect himself, while taking great care to be seen only by his most fanatical supporters and not by anyone who didn’t believe in him. The Jews believe that Moses went up a mountain and received two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, written by God’s fiery finger. The Muslims believe that the illiterate “prophet” Mohammed went into a cave and had the Word of God dictated to him by the Angel Gabriel.

    These are all staggeringly far-fetched claims, more or less comically absurd, that would surely require the strongest possible evidence before anyone could take them seriously. Yet they are not supported by any facts or evidence at all, and they wholly contradict reason. You are required to have “faith” in them.

    The Enlightenment – the Age of Reason – was when a new human mental species came to the fore – Logos humanity. It was born in ancient Greece but proved unable to beat the endarkened forces of faith. Its hour finally came when reason gained traction in the world through the unarguable success of science. However, only a fraction of the human race benefited from the Enlightenment. Most of the world is as benighted as ever, locked into Mythos and faith. Islam has had no Enlightenment and continues to reject more or less all knowledge generated since the appearance of the Koran. Who needs knowledge when you have the “infallible truth” written by God himself?

    Another force of irrationalism has now conquered the world. It’s not a religious Mythos but an economic Mythos – free-market capitalism. Its advocates have absolute faith that irrational markets reflecting ineradicable selfishness and self-interest generate an “invisible hand” (i.e. God or, more accurately, Mammon) that miraculously resolves all of the problems of the world.

    Even scientific materialism is a Mythos – the sensory Mythos – which asserts that “rational unobservables”, undetectable by the senses, simply cannot exist. Thus science, though it's based on mathematics, irrationally accepts only the “positive real numbers” subset of mathematics while rejecting imaginary numbers entirely, barely tolerating negative real numbers and absolutely forbidding zero and infinity. Scientists provide no sufficient reason why reality should miraculously choose to be expressed only through positive real numbers, and that all other numbers are somehow unreal and fantastical.

    HyperHumanity is the upgrade of Logos humanity that advocates Hyperrationalism. The next Great Age will be that of Hyperreason when Mythos is finally cast down. Abrahamism and free-market capitalism will both fall. Moreover, the half-baked, incomplete, irrational subset of mathematics known as scientific materialism will also perish, and be replaced by ontological mathematics.

    The Ultimate Enlightenment – the Age of Hyperreason – led by higher humanity (the HyperHumans) will power humanity ahead to a Star Trek future where we travel the physical galaxies in starships, and thence to mental galaxies that we traverse in vessels of the purest light.

    “Old” Humanity, stuck in its irrational Mythos past, will become extinct. The future is about the new human race – HyperHumanity. Do you belong to the Illuminated Ones, the Shining Ones, the Divine Ones, or are you on your knees to some story-book God, an irrational market or irrational devotion to your physical senses?

    HyperHumanity is not here to help Old Humanity. It is here to replace it! We are the true human race, that which seeks to claim its rightful prize – divinity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMike Hockney
    Release dateMay 2, 2016
    ISBN9781310995743
    HyperHumanity
    Author

    Mike Hockney

    Mike Hockney invites you to play the God Game. Are you ready to transform yourself? Are you ready to be one of the Special Ones, the Illuminated Ones? Are you ready to play the Ultimate Game? Only the strongest, the smartest, the boldest, can play. This is not a drill. This is your life. Stop being what you have been. Become what you were meant to be. See the Light. Join the Hyperboreans. Become a HyperHuman, an UltraHuman. Only the highest, only the noblest, only the most courageous are called. A new dawn is coming... the birth of Hyperreason. It's time for HyperHumanity to enter HyperReality.

    Read more from Mike Hockney

    Related to HyperHumanity

    Related ebooks

    Self-Improvement For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      From Isaac Newton to the Genius Bar: Why it’s time to retire the concept of genius.

      Oct 16, 2014

      Geniuses are a dying breed. And yet, they seem to be all around us. We live at a time when commentators speak without irony of “ordinary genius” and claim to find it everywhere. From the “genius bar” at the local Apple Store to bestselling books that

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

      Oct 2, 2014

      I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel roo

      11 min read

    • Article

      Nature

      Jun 19, 2023

      In an article published last year in the Scientific American, contemplating developments in our search for extraterrestrial life, Andrea Gawrylewski writes, “Given the math, it seems impossible that we humans would be the only living things in the co

      3 min read

    • Article

      Errant Thought

      Mar 1, 2023

      If brown rats spoke a human language, they would coin the term rodentism to affirm their conviction that the world is their trash can. Homo sapiens, however, is convinced, with Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things,” and so we invented h

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Myth of Rationality

      Mar 17, 2021

      Many years ago, I worked as a counsellor on a program that provided support to the families of sex offenders. In practice, that usually meant working with the wives of men convicted of child sexual offences. You might expect that my job would have co

      8 min read

    • Article

      Deep Dives Into The Unknown

      Apr 20, 2023

      Jack Hunter, ed. August Night Press 2023 Pb, 409pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781786772244 August Night Press is an imprint of White Crow Books, the publisher of a substantial catalogue of titles arguing, generally, that we are more than “animated meat”. These i

      3 min read

    • Article

      Reassessing The Miraculous

      Nov 5, 2020

      Miracles in an Age of Disbelief Michael Grosso Anomalist Books 2020 Pb, £12, 228pp, ISBN 9781949501131 A new book about miracles might seem a throwback, conjuring up a boringly predictable debate about why God is willing to annoy rationalist material

      3 min read

    • Article

      The End Is Only the Beginning

      Dec 1, 2022

      The End Is Only the Beginning
      14 min read

    • Article

      Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas: A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

      Apr 30, 2015

      In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Return Of The Pagans

      Dec 25, 2023

      The Return Of The Pagans
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Pink Plague

      Aug 13, 2020

      Last month, we saw how the foul-mouthed, Trump-imitating Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo argued against implementing a full lockdown against the coronavirus epidemic on the grounds that it was just “a little

      10 min read

    • Article

      Building A Fortean Library

      Dec 3, 2020

      It wasn’t just the Beatles, you know. On Merseyside in the 1960s another group of irreverent young men coalesced around an iconoclastic idea, and with rather more intellectual heft than the admittedly slightly better-known, and better-earning, moptop

      7 min read

    • Article

      If You Think You’re a Genius, You’re Crazy

      Mar 9, 2017

      When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supe

      4 min read

    • Article

      Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics: Meet the philosopher who revived anti-realism.

      Sep 8, 2016

      Philosophers of science are not known for agreeing with each other—contrariness is part of the job description. But for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, those who study what science is have roughly categorized themselves into two ba

      11 min read

    • Article

      Think Yourself Better: 10 Rules Of Philosophy To Live By

      Feb 4, 2023

      The thing that separates human beings from other animals is our extraordinary capacity for complex, abstract thought. This is what has given rise to our diverse cultures, our scientific achievements, our ability to envisage the future and, hopefully,

      9 min read

    • Article

      Out There

      Apr 21, 2022

      Out There
      14 min read

    • Article

      Grappling With Evil

      Oct 28, 2021

      Grappling With Evil
      6 min read

    • Article

      Evolution The Big Liee

      Oct 2, 2020

      Evolution The Big Liee
      4 min read

    • Article

      If You Think You’re a Genius, You’re Crazy: Both geniuses and madmen pay attention to what others ignore.

      Oct 30, 2014

      When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supe

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for HyperHumanity

    2.5/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      HyperHumanity - Mike Hockney

      Worm Gods

      O senseless man who cannot make a worm, and yet makes gods by dozens. – Michel de Montaigne

      Becoming Human; Becoming Superhuman

      How did humans come to be as they are? Can they be radically different? Can they become something newer, better, higher? Can they become HyperHumans?

      Humanity is a single biological species but has split into two different mental species labelled Mythos and Logos. The Mythos species is driven by emotional stories, not by facts, evidence or rational arguments. Christians believe that the all-powerful Creator of the universe, rather than simply sort out Earth’s problems, chose to be born of a 14-year-old Jewish virgin, have himself arrested by the Romans and crucified to death for committing treason by calling himself King of the Jews, then resurrect himself, while taking great care to be seen only by his most fanatical supporters and not by anyone who didn’t believe in him. The Jews believe that Moses went up a mountain and received two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, written by God’s fiery finger. The Muslims believe that the illiterate prophet Mohammed went into a cave and had the Word of God (the Koran) dictated to him by the Angel Gabriel on behalf of the Creator of the Universe, Allah.

      These are all staggeringly far-fetched claims, more or less comically absurd, that would surely require the strongest possible evidence before anyone could take them seriously. Yet they are not supported by any facts or evidence at all, and they wholly contradict reason. You are required to have faith in them. It’s apparent that faith is the antidote to reason, allowing the believers to ignore all rational objections.

      The Enlightenment – the Age of Reason – was when a new human mental species came to the fore – Logos humanity. It was born in ancient Greece but proved unable to beat the endarkened forces of faith. Its hour finally came when reason gained traction in the world through the unarguable success of science. However, only a fraction of the human race benefited from the Enlightenment. Most of the world is as benighted as ever, locked into Mythos and faith. Islam has had no Enlightenment and continues to reject more or less all knowledge generated since the appearance of the Koran. Who needs knowledge when you have the infallible truth written by God himself?

      Another force of absolute irrationalism has now conquered the world. It’s not a religious Mythos but an economic Mythos – free-market capitalism. Its advocates have absolute faith that irrational markets reflecting ineradicable selfishness and self-interest generate an invisible hand (i.e. God or, more accurately, Mammon) that miraculously resolves all of the problems of the world.

      Even scientific materialism is a Mythos – the sensory Mythos – which asserts that rational unobservables, undetectable by the senses, simply cannot exist. Thus science, though it is based on mathematics, irrationally accepts only the positive real numbers subset of mathematics, while rejecting imaginary numbers entirely, barely tolerating negative real numbers and absolutely forbidding zero and infinity. Scientists provide no sufficient reason why reality should miraculously choose to be expressed only through positive real numbers, and that all other numbers are somehow unreal and fantastical.

      HyperHumanity is the upgrade of Logos humanity. It advocates Hyperrationalism and calls for the replacement of science by hyperrational ontological mathematics, whereby all numbers are accepted as having reality. Where science is based on real numbers, ontological mathematics is based on complex numbers. Where science rejects zero and infinity (dimensionless existence), these are the defining numbers of ontological mathematics, from which all other numbers (the dimensional numbers) originate.

      As soon as you accept dimensionless existence, you have accepted the existence of the dimensionless soul. The soul is simply a mathematical information system – a singularity – defined by zero and infinity. The Big Bang Super Singularity – from which the physical world came – was comprised of infinite singularities (souls). Thus, it was a Soul Collective that gave rise to the universe! It did so mathematically, not physically. Real numbers define space and imaginary numbers define time, so spacetime is defined by complex numbers.

      Ontological mathematics explains everything and does so via mathematical points – singularities – that are also thinking souls, as per Descartes’ definition that the thinking substance is unextended, i.e. dimensionless.

      The next Great Age will be that of Hyperreason when Mythos is finally cast down. Abrahamism and free-market capitalism will both fall. Moreover, the half-baked, incomplete, irrational subset of applied mathematics known as scientific materialism will also perish.

      Humanity’s immediate future will be determined by how well it understands the past. The past is studied by historians and typically involves lists of dates of great events and the names and biographies of those great figures involved with these memorable events. However, history is inadequate to the task of understanding the human past. History unfolds within the context of a great war of ideas, and these ideas are all about religion, philosophy, ideology, psychology, sociology, science, technology and economics. Therefore, the philosophy of history is the key subject, not mere history. By the same token, science would be enormously improved if all scientists understood the philosophy of science and realized the incredible extent to which their work is dictated by Meta Paradigms that are all about philosophy and nothing to do with science.

      The great philosophers of history are Hegel, Marx and Oswald Spengler – all Germans, and it’s notable that the Germans have replaced the Jews as the world’s most historical and fateful people.

      Hegel saw human history unfolding as a great dialectic in which events are inevitably shaped according to the triadic process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Hegel (an idealist) viewed the dialectic in terms of the development of mind. Marx (a materialist) turned Hegel’s system on its head and made the dialectic all about the development of matter. He viewed economics as the subject which determines the material conditions of human beings, and these conditions then shape the consciousness of human beings: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

      Economics dictates the social being of people and creates what we recognize as the class system where economic wealth and power place everyone in particular classes. So, economics gave rise to class struggle, and the whole of history can be viewed through this prism. Everything that happens in history arises from the upper class seeking to maintain their power, the middle class seeking to rise to the upper class and avoid falling to the lower class, and the lower class seeking to become middle class and avoid plunging into the hell of the underclass. The upper class always seek to give those below them a bad deal and those below them are always striving to get a better deal. Given these facts, the history of humanity is unsurprising.

      Oscar Spengler adopted a biological and seasonal view of history. He thought in terms of cultures being born (spring), maturing (summer), decaying (autumn) and dying (winter), and competing with other cultures for their survival. He rejected the dialectical convergence on a final omega point of human development (the End of History) that Hegel and Marx foresaw. Spengler was a purposeless Darwinist in this regard. He saw natural selection rather than teleology driving history.

      *****

      According to the Book of Genesis, neither natural selection nor dialectics are real. God made a grown, adult man called Adam, then gave him an adult female companion called Eve, fashioned from one of Adam’s ribs (so women are spare ribs).

      This is a Creationist, fixed nature view of humanity. It excludes the possibility of evolving minds, morals, attitudes and truths. It says that humans haven’t changed at all since Adam and Eve (since God hasn’t changed the template in any way). There’s no dialectical progress in this worldview, no natural selection, no mutation, no change at all. Everything remains exactly as God designed it.

      The Decline of the West

      The Decline of the West (1918) is the title of Oswald Spengler’s controversial masterwork, and much of its fatalistic tone reflects the horrors of World War I. Wikipedia provides a serviceable summary of this immensely influential work:

      "The book introduces itself as a ‘Copernican overturning’ and rejects the Euro-centric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear ‘ancient-medieval-modern’ rubric. According to Spengler the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. He acknowledges eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican (Mayan/ Aztec), Classical (Greek/ Roman), Arabian, Western or ‘European-American’. Cultures have a limited lifespan of some thousand years. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a ‘civilization’.

      "The book also presents the idea of Muslims, Jews and Christians, as well as their Persian and Semitic forebears, being Magian; Mediterranean cultures of the antiquity such as Ancient Greece and Rome being Apollonian; and the modern Westerners being Faustian.

      According to the theory, the Western world is actually ending and we are witnessing the last season – ‘winter time’ – of the Faustian civilization. In Spengler’s depiction Western Man is a proud but tragic figure, for, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached. – Wikipedia

      Spengler’s pessimistic worldview accorded with the post-WWI German mood, and, in many ways, psychologically paved the way for the ascent of Hitler. The book presented democracy as enfeebled and as the type of government chosen by declining civilizations, which can no longer generate great leaders and take on challenges. Spengler, an admirer of Nietzsche, shared the philosopher’s contempt for democracy and Nietzsche’s belief that it breeds weak, sly, last men intent on petty comforts and as easy a life as possible.

      Spengler argued that the real driver of democracy was money (i.e. it was hard-wired to capitalist interests), and that it spurned glory and achievement. He wrote, As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations of class-representatives, have become the battle-ground of party candidates, an area ready for the intervention of money, and . . . of ever bigger and bigger money. The greater became the wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals, the more the fight for political power developed into a question of money.

      All that any democrat cares about is his financial well-being. With money at the core of everything, everything is susceptible to corruption. Look around you. Hasn’t Spengler been proved spectacularly right? Consider the Rupert Murdoch scandal in the UK. An enormously wealthy, powerful and bullying media mogul became the de facto leader of Britain, with the political class in his pocket, along with the police and the law. Everyone was too scared to challenge him for fear of Murdoch’s media attack dogs being turned on them. The national media dutifully promoted his ideology and served his agenda. His tastes and ideas came to define the culture of the UK – one of utter sleaze, corruption, trivia, junk and the lowest common denominator. Murdoch did nothing but lead a race to the bottom, and capitalist democracy was his surest friend in dragging down a once-great nation and empire into the gutter; an immensely profitable gutter for Murdoch and his cronies.

      Spengler predicted the collapse of democracy and its replacement by dictatorship: government by a strong-willed, non-democratic leader – a modern-day Caesar. This, of course, was exactly what happened in Germany, Italy and Spain in the decades after WWI. Russia turned to communism rather than capitalist democracy, with Lenin and then Stalin as dictators. Japan became an imperial war machine with the Emperor regarded as an all-powerful leader and almost a human God. America became ultra capitalist, with Mammon as its true leader, and the super rich elite class pulling all of the strings of this so-called democracy. The UK remained a monarchy with a rich nobility that continued to control everything.

      The fact is that true democracy (based on the ancient Athenian model but extending the vote to everyone and abolishing slavery) never happened at all, and was never allowed to happen. Modern democracy is just a dishonest cloak used by elites to create the illusion in the minds of the ordinary people that they are in charge (hence have no one to blame for bad government except themselves), while the elite get on with doing what they have always done – running the country in their own interests. This type of hypocritical, deceitful politics – a kind of Wizard of Oz political system where the real power is hidden behind a curtain that no one’s allowed to pull back – was a clear sign of complete Western degeneration, and remains so to this day. Democracy cannot survive. All democracies are decadent and degenerate, with inept, enfeebled leaders lacking any vision or real power. They are a modern echo of the lack of strong leadership of the Roman Empire as it entered its phase of terminal decline and inevitable collapse.

      Spengler’s world-historical view was shaped above all by the radical outlook of the towering genius Goethe, followed by the devastating critique of modernity provided by Nietzsche (who also revered Goethe). Spengler complained that Goethe’s supremely life-enhancing philosophy was never taken seriously by the philosophical establishment because it wasn’t presented in the dry, academic, systematic style professional philosophers demanded (and Nietzsche was of course loathed by many academic philosophers because of his extraordinary aphoristic style, and the same was true to a lesser extent of Nietzsche’s early hero, Schopenhauer.)

      Spengler said that his approach was driven by Goethe’s statement of the superiority of becoming over being: The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast. Spengler declared, "This sentence comprises my entire philosophy." In other words, anything that had become stagnant and weak was doomed. A vital coming force was sure to topple it.

      Spengler stressed that that the downfall of the West would not involve any sudden catastrophe, but rather a long, drawn-out decline: a twilight or sunset. The West would become an evening land rather than a land of bright, energetic day. Great Britain provides a classic example. Once a vital, ambitious, grand imperial power, it has shrunk to a minor and rather irrelevant nation state. It claims to be a democracy while actually being a constitutional monarchy. America now shows every sign of going the same way as Britain. Everywhere, its control and power are slipping. Challengers are appearing everywhere. America lacks any direction and leadership. It’s the puppet of an economic system – free-market capitalism – that does not even acknowledge the nation state and is instead nakedly globalist.

      Free-market capitalists will go anywhere in the world where they can maximize their profits. They have no loyalty to America and no interest in the American people. To surrender power to an economic system that doesn’t care about your welfare – as the Americans have eagerly done – is to court inevitable disaster. That disaster is now arriving. The chickens have well and truly come home to roost. Americans thought that free-market capitalism would allow them, as the most powerful capitalist nation, to rule the world. Instead, it’s free-market capitalism itself, not America, that rules the world.

      America is just one node of a globalist system and the ruling capitalists have no particular interest in it. If China, Brazil, India, Russia and the nations of Africa offer higher returns than America then that’s where the capitalists will invest their money, regardless of what that means for America. America, through its greatest treasure (capitalism) has destroyed itself, and, moreover, that was always the inherent logic of free-market capitalism. Only a degenerate nation cannot see when it’s drinking poison.

      Part of Spengler’s point was that the West had more or less accomplished everything implicit in its cultural values. There was little more to achieve within this Western paradigm. For the world to move on, a new paradigm was needed and it would come, Spengler thought, from the East. The West would slip away into oblivion, before being resurrected in the future, with a radically new paradigm separating it from what had gone before in the West. Are we in that precise position now? The West has failed and the star of the East (especially China) is rising rapidly. The West, at best, will slip slowly into the shadows, but now a cataclysm looks just as likely.

      We are in a phase where the West is reaching the end of the tracks laid by the axioms on which it was founded. We in the West must either find new axioms and reinvent ourselves (and lay new tracks) – or perish. Abrahamic capitalist democracy has run its course. To persevere with this zombie system is madness. As Nietzsche understood, degenerate cultures are those that actively select what is harmful to them. They choose sickness over health because they are themselves sick. The West is now in that position.

      Consider the movie Olympus Has Fallen, the catchline for which portentously declares: The White House Under Siege. A Nation Under Attack. Imdb.com provides a synopsis: When the White House (Secret Service Code: ‘Olympus’) is captured by a terrorist mastermind and the President is kidnapped, disgraced former Presidential guard Mike Banning finds himself trapped within the building. As our national security team scrambles to respond, they are forced to rely on Banning’s inside knowledge to help retake the White House, save the President and avert an even bigger disaster.

      The title of the movie literally references the fall of the home of the gods – as if the White House were some sort of divine location on Earth. All such Apocalyptic themes – of which Hollywood has been full for the last few years – convey the irresistible feeling that Ragnarok is coming and we are entering the twilight of the Gods, followed by their complete annihilation. The End is being presaged. Everyone can sense it coming. The Old Order is rotten and is collapsing.

      The Democratic Smokescreen

      Spengler talks of the devices many of which to us would be repellent and almost intolerable in relation to the rhetoric and manipulation routinely used by politicians ... such as rehearsed sob-effects and the rending of garments; by shameless flattery of the audience, fantastic lies about opponents; by the employment of brilliant phrases and resounding cadenzas... by games and presents; by threats and money; but, above all, by money. We have its beginnings in the Athens of 400, and its appalling culmination in the Rome of Caesar and Cicero.

      Spengler was talking about the Classical world, but everything he mentioned could be as validly said about modern politics. Democracy does nothing but breed hypocrisy and corruption. How can anyone stomach this nauseating system?

      Civilization versus Culture

      Spengler defined civilization as what a culture becomes once its creative energy has subsided. When it loses its direction and force, it succumbs to skepticism, cynicism, factionalism, nostalgia, sentimentality, over-moralising and analysis paralysis. Culture is becoming while civilization is the thing become (being).

      Civilization is petrified or reified culture, divorced from the soul. It’s the twilight, the dying embers, rather than the zenith of a culture’s development. Civilization is the end of the line, the culmination of a particular culture, but also its death sentence. It will have to commit civilization suicide if it wishes to reinvigorate itself. Spengler said, Civilization is the ultimate destiny of the Culture… Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion… petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood.

      Spengler believed that rationality destroyed spirituality (which is certainly true in the case of scientific materialism). He was thus reflecting Nietzsche’s famous Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy. Nietzsche argued that Greek culture started to decline as soon as it turned its back on wild Dionysian forces and replaced them with tame Apollonian rationalism.

      Spengler made the claim that intellect rules when the soul has abdicated. We might say that he was warning against excess Logos, and pleading for a space for Mythos to be retained. Mythos must be subordinate to Logos, but it must not be eradicated by Logos. Scientific materialism has delivered exactly what Spengler feared – a soulless, nihilistic ideology where people are transformed into deterministic robots directed by inevitable causality rather than living beings that can exercise free will. Science is the Apollonian gone out of control. It has utterly detached itself from the Dionysian. It has killed religion, spirituality and Mythos. It has denied the efficacy of consciousness, it has denied the unconscious domain, it has denied free will, the independent existence of mind ... and it comes remarkably close to asserting that there’s no real difference between living human beings and dead androids. Many scientists believe that machines could one day be as human as we are. The Replicants (biorobots; skin-jobs) of the movie Blade Runner are more or less indistinguishable from humans.

      In reality, no humanly constructed being could ever emulate a real human because all real humans have living, dimensionless souls – something that no human engineer could ever provide!

      Pseudomorphosis

      Pseudomorphosis: from ancient Greek pseudomorphos meaning false form; disguising one’s form. In mineralogy pseudomorphosis describes conversion into a false or deceptive form; being forced into an abnormal state.

      Spengler introduced a fascinating concept of pseudomorphosis, appropriated from the vocabulary of mineralogy, and used it to express how old, ingrained forms can prevent the proper formation of new forms. Some cultures, like some new minerals, are only half-developed, half-expressed, half-manifested, half-actualised in their true form. They have been inhibited and curtailed by the old form from which they grew, but from which they did not break free (like children who never rebel against their parents and are condemned to live someone else’s life – that of their parents – rather their own; just look at Islam and Judaism).

      Old cultures, no matter how deeply ingrained, must be eradicated. In fact, the more ingrained they are, the more essential it is to dig up their roots and destroy them, to burn every trace so that not one particle remains. The true Faustian West will never come into being until the Magian past of Abrahamism has been obliterated. You cannot have an authentic Faustian culture arising from Magian soil. You need brand new soil. Logos cannot emerge from Mythos, nor Mythos from Logos. Mythos simply sprouts more Mythos. By the same token, Logos – pure mathematics, for example – does not suddenly deviate into, Once upon a time, there was a great being in the sky...

      Nothing is more important than destroying the Abrahamic brainwashing system that corrupts the minds of children from birth and irredeemably contaminates the soil of the mind. People claim that it’s harmless for parents to teach their children Abrahamism. On the contrary, it pollutes their minds and makes it enormously more difficult for them to think properly (in Logos rather than Mythos terms). The minds of children must be protected from Mythos pollution just as their bodies have to be protected from disease.

      Spengler said that the failure to comprehensively cast off the old caused the young soul to be cast in the old moulds. That’s exactly right. Young feelings are rendered old, and creative energy is killed off, made senile and conservative by the dead hand of the past. Islam is the perfect example of how old, dead, idiotic ideas keep destroying new generations. Islam is like an ancient death star, pointing a deadly ray at all people born into Islam and wrecking their potential forever. Islam is an ancient system for making people stupid, and is almost perfect at achieving its objective. Every Muslim prays five times a day, every day for life. No one who does that can ever be intelligent!

      We must create brand new forms in brand new soil, and actively prevent rotten, rancid old soil from corrupting, distorting and inhibiting the new forms, and making them grow wrongly, strangely and falsely.

      The Blood Contract

      Spengler argued that blood (or we might say spirit, vitality, or life force) was the only power strong enough to overthrow money, the dominant, dehumanising, objectifying power of human history and especially of the modern age. Free-market capitalism literally turns everything – especially people – into commodities. Everything has a price. Everything is being bought and sold. The world is a marketplace. The profit principle is all that matters and as soon as you are no longer profitable you’re on the scrapheap: you are powerless and irrelevant, an object that no longer has a purpose, fit only for the trash.

      Capitalism is Protestantism’s great gift to the world, making this arguably the most evil religion of all time, the Devil’s own creed.

      Spengler spoke of a final struggle between Capitalism and Socialism, but with Socialism defined as the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty sense. In this respect, National Socialism (extreme right wing socialism!) is as valid a form of socialism as Communism (extreme left wing socialism). The Nazis did not like free markets and rich capitalists dominating a nation any more than Communists did.

      Capitalism is a system that nakedly serves the interests of those with the most capital or control of capital. It therefore has a class system built into it. Socialism in its broadest sense means getting rid of this economic class system. Traditionally, this is seen as a left wing enterprise, but the Nazis showed that it can also be right wing. Capitalism is about private power while socialism is about public power. Someone such as Hitler believed that he should be the leader of a united, classless people. He did not want an upper class, middle class, working class and underclass – which is what contemporary capitalism gives us. In capitalist nations, private elites wield more power than elected governments, thus subverting the whole political process. The rich allowed democracy to become the dominant political system in the modern world precisely because it posed no threat at all to their power. You can be certain the rich would denounce democracy as the quintessence of evil and fight to get rid of it if the people ever democratically voted to impose 100% inheritance tax on them.

      The anarcho-capitalist libertarian movement in America is essentially a capitalist backlash against democracy: against, community, society and, especially, the Big State. It seeks to remove all State controls and regulation and have completely unrestrained capitalism (with effectively zero taxation), which is of course in the absolute interests of the rich, but not of anyone else.

      Frank Zappa said, The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre. Here, the word freedom could just as easily be replaced by democracy. Democracy is endorsed by the rich because it does not get in their way. The rich would never accept the democracy of ancient Athens where the power of rich elites was genuinely enormously constrained and inhibited. Free-market capitalism was the ingenious economic system that allowed the rich to bypass democracy without anyone noticing. When democracies based their economies on free-market capitalism, they effectively surrendered political control to the super rich private players who shape the markets. In Nazi Germany, the rich were not allowed to dictate to the State. Instead, a totalitarian Party exerted complete control. Modern Communist China is likewise ruled by a totalitarian political Party.

      The ideal is to have neither private factions nor totalitarian political parties in charge of a nation. Only the people themselves can be allowed to be in charge. The private rich must be deposed, and so must oppressive parties. Publicly elected meritocrats, who belong to no political party at all, are the rightful guardians and guides of the State. These independents are completely accountable to those who elected them and can be replaced without compensation if they fail to perform well.

      Spengler wrote, "A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and only one power that can confront money is left. Money is overthrown and abolished by blood. Life is alpha and omega ... It is the fact of facts ... Before the irresistible rhythm on the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last."

      Apollonians, Magians and Faustians

      Spengler described Classical (Greek and Roman) culture as Apollonian, Middle-Eastern culture as Magian and Western culture as Faustian.

      Magian Culture embraces Abrahamism (Jews, Christians and Muslims) and Persian Zoroastrianism (the religion of the Magi, which was a huge influence on Judaism). Magian culture is all about Mythos and magic, and utterly resistant to Logos.

      Ancient Greece was once Magian, under the intoxicating influence of the irrational Dionysian Mythos. However, it became responsible for humanity’s greatest boon – the birth of Logos. With Logos, Apollo began to dominate Dionysus and the ancient Greek pagans became the most philosophical people there have ever been on this planet.

      When the Romans conquered Greece, they came under the spell of Greek culture and allied it to their own incredible practicality and superb engineering skills. With this potent mix, they established one of the greatest empires in history. What brought it down? In many ways, it was simply exhausted, but the final toxic element was Magian Christianity, an alien and deadly Jewish-born disease that wiped out paganism and Logos. Apollonian culture didn’t revert to its Dionysian forebear. Instead, Apollo and Dionysus were both overcome by magic – Jewish monotheism.

      Faustian civilization began in Western Europe with, Spengler said, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire (the reincarnation of the Roman Empire). Although nominally Catholic, this new Empire in many ways reflected ancient Rome’s pagan values. The Pope and the Emperor were often in conflict, and the Empire was keen on military technology and engineering, just as ancient Rome was.

      By the 20th century, Western Faustianism dominated the world. By the end of that century, America had reached its zenith and best exemplified the Faustian lust for power and technology.

      The Classical world was all about the finite and tangible (the Greeks even had their gods living on Earth, potentially reachable by the most intrepid adventurers). The Magian world was all about the infinite gap between men and God, and, in this belief system, God became invisible, intangible and unreachable (although, via the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Word became flesh). In the Magian worldview, God created the Earth, and humanity was central to God’s cosmic plan. As for the Faustian world, it was all about infinity and the Faustians began to speculate that God simply wasn’t out there at all, meaning that we were on our own ... and we might transform ourselves into gods!

      Brilliant though his ideas are, Spengler was unquestionably wrong to emphasize the Faustian nature of the West. In fact, it has historically been ferociously Magian (Judaeo-Christian), with only a small number of Logos thinkers promoting Apollonian and Faustian values. This minority gained traction only with the Renaissance and then, especially, the Enlightenment. In truth, we in the West live in a Magian culture to this day and the Faustian culture has barely begun.

      There has been no crisis of Western Faustianism, but, in fact, of Western Magian civilization. The death of God , as pronounced by Nietzsche, has occurred. The Magians know it, but are in extreme denial. However, all of their energy has dissipated. They are mere shadows and echoes now, fading away in front of us. To understand how enfeebled Western Magians are, one need only look at Muslim Magians – as fanatical as the Christians of 600 years ago! Islam is of course 600 younger than Christianity.

      Humanity must kill off Magian influence everywhere other than in the sphere of entertainment. Humanity must become overtly Apollonian and Faustian in its working mode – with Magian and Dionysian forces reserved for humanity at play when the day’s work is finished. Humanity’s greatest error was to allow stories – fiction and fantasy – to be treated as fact. The Torah, Bible and Koran are pure Mythos. They have no Logos content, hence zero truth content.

      Humanity can never make proper progress until it can immediately distinguish between Mythos and Logos, and never let either intrude into the other’s territory.

      The Eight Cultures

      According to Spengler, eight High Cultures have existed:

      Sumerian/Babylonian.

      Egyptian.

      Chinese.

      Indian.

      Mexican (Mayan/Aztec).

      Classical (Greek/Roman).

      Arabian.

      Western or European-American.

      Each culture has an active lifespan of about 1,000 years ... and it’s time up for Western culture.

      Using Spengler’s vocabulary but not his analysis, we would say that Western classical, pagan culture – a superb platform for human development – was infected and destroyed by Magian Judaeo-Christianity with its grotesque cosmic magician called Jehovah, credited with pulling a whole universe out of a hat.

      With the fall of Rome, the West immediately entered the Dark Ages, and, to make things worse, a new Magian power appeared on the scene – the backward monstrosity of Islam (Arab Judaism, in effect, since Islam simply replaced the Jewish religion based on Isaac with an equivalent Arab version based on Ishmael).

      The true Faustian West did not begin to take shape until the time of Copernicus (1473 – 1543), Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Galileo (1564 – 1642), Hobbes (1588 – 1679) and Descartes (1596 – 1650). This was the first widespread reappearance of Logos since Aristotle.

      Ever since, the Faustians (Logos thinkers) have been engaged in a bitter war with the Magians (Mythos magic thinkers). The war rages to this day and still the Magians make up 90% of the world.

      The Magian system has wholly failed in terms of anything worthwhile, but, because of the astounding success of its tried and tested, culturally embedded brainwashing techniques, it’s ferociously difficult to defeat. It’s now just a zombie, staggering on despite being long dead, and continuing to infect countless new victims. That’s all it does: spread its disease. It’s a plague, the ultimate contagion. It’s time quarantine was imposed and the fatal, Satanic infection eliminated from humanity once and for all.

      We call for the unconditional victory of the Faustian forces. To the extent that Mythos is accepted at all, it will be the pagan Mythos of the Classical period – the gods of Greece and Rome, the Celtic gods, the Egyptian and Babylonian pagan gods, and all compatible ancient gods. The Magian Monotheistic God must be banished from human consciousness. Only then will we be truly free from the Devil, the Demiurge, the Satan who has tormented humanity for so long.

      The Devil’s greatest trick was to have himself declared God by the Magians, the people of black magic.

      The Spenglerian Seasons

      Spengler compared the rise and fall of a culture to the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter. Wikipedia provides this summary of Spengler’s account of the rise and decline of Western culture and civilization:

      Spring

      Intuition, powerful cultural creation from awakening souls, unity and abundance.

      Religion: Birth of a grand myth signifying a new conception of God. Fear and longing for the world. Earliest metaphysical organization of the world. High scholasticism.

      Art: Religious art considered as an integrated part of religious devotion. Gothic cathedrals, Doric temples. Development of Ornamental art as against the persistent, ahistorical type of Imitative art.

      Politics: Feudalism, warrior aristocracies. Division between two primary Estates: Nobility, which is the estate proper, contains within itself the highest aspirations of its race and is therefore symbolic of the particular people in question, as well as being representative of Time in the sense of Directedness and Destiny; and Priesthood, which is the anti-Estate, pursuing eternal Truth and attempting to subordinate Blood to Intellect primarily through asceticism, but also through scholasticism.

      Summer

      Maturing consciousness. Earliest urban-civil society and critical thought.

      Religion: Reformation: revolt of the religious moderates against the early religion. Beginnings of a purely philosophical movement. Contrasting idealistic and realistic systems. Mathematical breakthroughs leading to a new conception of the world. Rationalism. The depletion of mysticism from religion.

      Art: Development of high artistic traditions. Both artistic medium and style express the fundamental nature of the soul of the culture. Struggle between different artistic mediums, representing the culture’s striving to discover its proper mode of self-representation.

      Politics: Absolutist states. Conflicts between aristocracy and monarchy. The political centre shifts from castles and estates to the cities.

      Autumn

      Urban rise. High point of disciplined organizational strength.

      Religion: Faith in the omnipotence of rationality. Cult of Nature. The height of mathematical thought. The last idealists. Theories of knowledge and logic.

      Art: Fulfilment of high artistic potentials of culture- sculpture in Greece, contrapuntal music in the West. At the beginning of Autumn, art possesses complete freedom to manifest the Destiny-vision of a people through its particular perfected formal technique. However, the end of Autumn witnesses the exhaustion of the possibilities of that technique, leading to craft-art in imitation of the great style as well as artistic revolt.

      Politics: Struggles between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Revolutions. Napoleonism.

      Winter

      Coming fissure in the world-urban civilization. Exhaustion of mental organization strength. Irreligiousness rises.

      Religion: Materialism: Cults of science, utility, and luck. Ethical-social ideals: philosophy without mathematics, skepticism. The last mathematical thinkers. Decline of abstract thinkers, and the rise of specialized academic philosophy. Spread of the last ideas.

      Art: End of symbolic art. All art becomes meaningless subjects of fashion.

      Politics: Democracy, the rule of the rich, followed by Caesarism and bureaucracy.

      *****

      There’s certainly a great deal of this analysis with which we agree – Spengler, despite being long dead, uncannily describes today’s world – but he has failed to highlight the central problem: the cataclysmic effect of Magian Abrahamism in the West. Science has taken on an absolutely atheistic and materialistic form precisely because of its understandable and legitimate hatred of Abrahamism. Had the insanity of Abrahamism been absent, science would have developed along spiritual lines such as those envisaged by the three great rationalist philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza and, above all, Leibniz.

      Pythagoras, 2,500 years ago, made a religion out of mathematics and reason while Abrahamism made a religion out of unreason, non-science, anti-philosophy and anti-mathematics ... out of pure Mythos and magic. Abrahamism succeeded spectacularly because it was religion for dummies, without a shred of rationality. It was all about feelings. It made virtues out of superstition, ignorance and blind faith in lunatic assertions that people wished and hoped were true.

      Religion never needed to be that way. Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Alchemy, Rationalism, and the Eastern enlightenment religions all showed how it was possible to have spirituality in a rational – even hyper-rational – form without any mumbo jumbo, woo woo, Mythos or magic.

      That’s the track to which humanity must return. Science and religion can be reunited via mathematics – the true language of divinity – and give rise to an astounding spiritual renaissance. Humanity can at last embark on becoming gods, rather than being on their knees to the Abrahamic Devil God – Yahweh (aka Allah/ Christ).

      Humanity can never be free until it has removed the two supreme shackles: Abrahamism (Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the three world religions of absolute evil; the Devil’s tools for torturing humanity), and Mammon (free-market capitalism, monarchy, nobility and feudalism). Mammon is the gospel of profit, objectification and commodification. It turns human beings into walking financial transactions; it makes them depersonalised, dehumanised objects to be sold to the highest bidder, and the winning bid is usually extremely low to ensure the highest profit. When they have served their financial purpose, people are literally useless: broken-down toys that can never be repaired and must be tossed in the garbage can.

      Mammon, the cult of the dollar, turns persons into unpersons. It’s an assault on everything that makes us human. It objectifies us. It expresses hatred of humanity. The Old World Order despise people – that’s why they’re Satan’s finest and most loyal servants. The super rich are the Devil’s disease. They are the plague we must exterminate.

      As for the cult of Jehovah (Abrahamism), this also seeks to turn us into objects – the degraded, debased slaves of God, on our knees in abject fear and submission. We are 100% alienated from our inner selves, our divine Higher Selves.

      Liberation of humanity necessitates the wholesale and irrevocable eradication of Mammon and Jehovah, the twin Satanic ideologies that want to make objects and slaves of us, ruled over by the rich on one hand, and the Torture God on the other. This is the most horrific vision of human life that there could possibly be – yet it’s the one under which we still live.

      Future humanity will never tire of despising the memory of the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, the monarchists, the nobles, and super rich capitalists for all the damage they did to our world. Their pictures will be hung in the eternal gallery of shame as the uttermost human criminals, for whom there can never be any forgiveness. Above them all, will hang a picture of their Lord and God – the Devil himself!

      The real Faustian Age is only five hundred years old, and hasn’t yet taken on its proper form thanks to the interference of the Magians. What’s the Faustian Age all about? It concerns the supreme quest for knowledge. It’s all about the Philosopher’s Stone and the transformation of lower forms (base metals) into their ultimate, perfect form (gold). It’s about the attainment of the Holy Grail that makes us gods.

      The supreme Faustian religion is Illumination, the religion of the Illuminati. It’s about building heaven on this Earth and making every one of us gods. There will be no human objects, and no alienated slaves worshipping a cosmic Terrorist who fills them with fear and dread through his threats of infinite and eternal pain in hell. How on earth could any sane person imagine that a God who issued the most diabolical, blood-curdling ultimatums of pure intimidation could be a loving Creator?

      Faust was the genius who would do anything for ultimate knowledge, to know the final secrets and mysteries of existence, to enjoy a single moment of divine perfection. He was willing to pay any price – metaphorically described as selling his soul to the Devil. What this refers to, of course, is not some diabolical transaction but the willingness to endure hell to get to heaven, to undergo the most horrendous suffering and pain if, on the other side, heaven and divinity lie.

      Last men would never tolerate any discomfort. They’d sacrifice nothing and take on no arduous tests, trials or quests. They want the easy life, the path of least resistance, a world where they always have their feet up, and all the petty and trivial comforts all around them, within easy rich. That, for them, is the good life. These people are spiritually dead. They are the human undead, an insult to humanity, a disgrace and abomination.

      The Faustian religion demands that we never shirk the greatest challenges. We must embrace them, seek them out, glorify them. In the Faustian Age, science, religion, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics and economics become one grand Faustian synthesis, the full expression of the Faustian Man: the Superman. We’ll build an Earth fit for gods. We’ll build bridges to the heavens. We’ll travel to the stars and beyond. We’ll acknowledge no limits. We won’t stop until we are actual gods, know everything and have infinite power.

      Is that not the only legitimate dream of strong, intelligent human beings? Who cares what the pathetic, weak, ignorant, superstitious masses think? Only the gods count. If you subscribe to the Faustian Pact then you are one of the gods-in-the-making. You have embarked on your own divine alchemical transformation.

      The future is ours and ours alone – because we are the illuminated ones, the divine ones, the gods themselves, and we shall have no other gods. Humanity is made in the image of God only insofar as humans have it within themselves to be Gods.

      Ancient cultures all had a notion of decline and fall. They imagined a Golden Age of the Gods, followed by a Silver Age, a Bronze Age, a Heroic Age (a brief echo of the Golden Age), and then a ghastly Iron Age of violence, greed and selfishness (the current age).

      The Faustian project represents the opposite trajectory: we will go from this nightmare time to the only, true Golden Age – the one where we are gods ourselves and not at the mercy of any alien gods.

      In Time Or Out Of Time?

      Spengler distinguishes between ahistorical peoples and peoples caught up in world-history. While he recognizes that all people are a part of history, he argues that only certain cultures imbue a wider sense of historical involvement. Thus some people see themselves as part of a grand historical design or tradition, while others view themselves in a self-contained manner. For the latter, there is no world-historical consciousness. – Wikipedia

      Greeks and Romans did not seem themselves as particularly in time, with a great clock ticking down on them. However, the Persians, Jews, Christians and Muslims were all obsessed with the concept of an imminent Apocalypse. For the Magians, the clock was most certainly ticking down. The Faustians, thanks to the Hegelian dialectic, were in time too. In this case, the passage of time was associated with inevitable improvement, not with approaching cataclysm. This was an idea seized upon by Marx in an economic, political, social and even quasi-scientific sense where he regarded communism as the dialectical culmination of human progress. There was an Apocalypse in Marx’s worldview – but only for the old, ruling elite. Their demise was everyone else’s liberation.

      Darwinian evolution also pointed to a better adapted future, and the scientific method promised more and more reliable knowledge. All of this has made the West highly aware of time and progress.

      As for the capitalists, they say, Time is money. They have even objectified and commoditized time itself!

      Spengler adopts an organic conception of culture. Primitive Culture is simply a collection, a sum, of its constituent and incoherent parts (individuals, tribes, clans, etc.). Higher Culture, in its maturity and coherence, becomes an organism in its own right, according to Spengler. The Culture is capable of sublimating the various customs, myths, techniques, arts, peoples, and classes into a single strong undiffused historical tendency. – Wikipedia

      Nietzsche was the champion of the sublimated Will to Power, but he was interested in the individual rather than society. Yet a society strong enough and smart enough to sublimate its Will to Power is exactly what we need.

      Spengler divides the concepts of culture and civilization, the former focused inward and growing, the latter outward and merely expanding. However, he sees Civilization as the destiny of every Culture. The transition is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, classes, or peoples that decides. Whereas Cultures are things-becoming, Civilizations are the thing-become. As the conclusion of a Culture’s arc of growth, Civilizations are outwardly focused, and in that sense artificial or insincere. Civilizations are what Cultures become when they are no longer creative and growing. For example, Spengler points to the Greeks and Romans, saying that the imaginative Greek culture declined into wholly practical Roman civilization. – Wikipedia

      If Islam, Christianity, Judaism are now in their civilised state, imagine how horrific things must have been five or six hundred years ago!

      Auto-Immune Disease

      Spengler believed in a four-stage development of religion within a culture. Religion starts out with a strong identity but gradually falters and generates opposition. A reformation is provoked, followed by a period of rationalism, which then gives way to a rebirth of the original religious impulse but at a lower and less tenable level of fervour.

      Spengler believed that Enlightenment rationalism would inevitably undermine and destroy itself, with its own skepticism and rationalism attacking itself, like an auto-immune disease.

      The Cartesian self-centred rationalism leads to schools of thought that do not cognize outside of their own constructed worlds, ignoring actual every-day life experience. It applies criticism to its own artificial world until it exhausts itself in meaninglessness. In reaction to the educated elites, the masses give rise to the Second Religiousness, which manifests as deeply suspicious of academia and science. – Wikipedia

      The philosophical school of postmodernism certainly applies criticism to its own artificial world until it exhausts itself in meaninglessness. Baudrillard’s hyperreality characterizes the world as turning into a simulacrum of reality where fact and fiction cannot be distinguished. Modern art has become entirely self-referential and no longer says anything of significance. Enlightenment rationalism self-destructs – if it can’t elevate itself to a spiritual level.

      The Media Monster

      Spengler mounted a devastating attack on democracy and the free press, and can anyone deny that he was right? Wikipedia provides an excellent summary of his position:

      "Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. The thorough penetration of money’s power throughout a society is yet another marker of the shift from Culture to Civilization.

      "Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler’s argument. The ‘tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers’ is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective. The principles of equality, natural rights, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war (the bourgeois against the aristocracy). Freedom, to Spengler, is a negative concept, simply entailing the repudiation of any tradition. In reality, freedom of the press requires money, and entails ownership, thus serving money at the end. Suffrage involves electioneering, in which the donations rule the day. The ideologies espoused by candidates, whether Socialism or Liberalism, are set in motion by, and ultimately serve, only money. ‘Free’ press does not spread free opinion—it generates opinion, Spengler maintains.

      "Spengler admits that in his era money has already won, in the form of democracy. But in destroying the old elements of the Culture, it prepares the way for the rise of a new and overpowering figure: the Caesar. Before such a leader, money collapses, and in the Imperial Age the politics of money fades away.

      "Spengler’s analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one’s own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever.

      "Spengler notes that the greater the concentration of wealth in individuals, the more the fight for political power revolves around questions of money. One cannot even call this corruption or degeneracy, because this is in fact the necessary end of mature democratic systems.

      "On the subject of the press, Spengler is equally as contemptuous. Instead of conversations between men, the press and the ‘electrical news-service keep the waking-consciousness of whole people and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year.’ Through the media, money is turned into force—the more spent, the more intense its influence.

      "For the press to function, universal education is necessary. Along with schooling comes a demand for the shepherding of the masses, as an object of party politics. Those that originally believed education to be solely for the enlightenment of each individual prepared the way for the power of the press, and eventually for the rise of the Caesar. There is no longer a need for leaders to impose military service, because the press will stir the public into a frenzy, clamour for weapons, and force their leaders into a conflict.

      "The only force which can counter money, in Spengler’s estimation, is blood. As for Marx, his critique of capitalism is put forth in the same language and on the same assumptions as those of Adam Smith. His protest is more a recognition of capitalism’s veracity, than a refutation. The only aim is to ‘confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.’

      The Second Religiousness appears as a harbinger of the decline of mature Civilization into an ahistorical state. The Second Religiousness occurs concurrently with Caesarism, the final political constitution of Late Civilization. Both the Second Religiousness and Caesarism demonstrate the lack of youthful strength or creativity that the Early Culture once possessed. The Second Religiousness is simply a rehashing of the original religious trend of the Culture.

      Nazi Germany, arising several years after the publication of Spengler’s book provides a classic illustration of his ideas. Hitler was the new Caesar, and the religious fervour that greeted Nazism was like a rebirth of fanatical Judaeo-Christianity, with Hitler talking the role of both Jehovah (the God of justice and wrath) and Christ (the incarnated Messiah).

      In the great conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the Nazis represented blood while the Soviets were what Spengler describes as human objects seeking to be subjects. Although the Soviets won, there’s no question that their triumph was brought about by their vastly greater manpower. On a one to one basis, the Nazis – the bloods – were enormously superior: much better educated and better trained.

      Spengler talks of people ceasing to participate in elections, and the most qualified people refusing to engage with the political process until it’s dominated by second-rate bureaucrats and middle managers, universally held in contempt. This is the end of great politics. Is that not precisely the phase we are in now?

      Mathematics

      Spengler was fascinated by mathematics, seeing it as once of humanity’s greatest achievements. He wrote:

      "The brilliant period of the Baroque mathematics lies substantially in the 18th century and extends from the decisive discoveries of Newton and Leibniz through Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and D’Alembert to Gauss. Once this immense creation found wings, its rise was miraculous. Men hardly dared believe their senses. The age of refined scepticism witnessed the emergence of one seemingly impossible truth after another. Regarding the theory of the differential coefficient, D’Alembert had to say: ‘Go forward, and faith will come to you.’ Logic itself seemed to raise objections and to prove foundations fallacious. But the goal was reached. This century was a very carnival of abstract and immaterial thinking, in which the great masters of analysis and, with them, Bach, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart – a small group of rare and deep intellects – revelled in the most refined discoveries and speculations, from which Goethe and Kant remained aloof. …

      Descartes and Leibniz stand beside Newton and Gauss at the summit of mathematical development. But already in Kant the philosopher has become, as mathematician, negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the last subtleties of the calculus as it stood in his own day than he absorbed the axiomatic of Leibniz. And thenceforward there is no philosopher who is counted as a mathematician. Fichte, Hegel and the Romantics were entirely unmathematical. Schopenhauer in this field is weak to the point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said the better.

      Regarding Hegel, while he was certainly no Leibniz, he was mathematically literate and wrote about infinity to great effect and with superb insight. While the headmaster of a high school, he taught mathematics, as well as religion and philosophy, writing in a letter, You know that I have been too involved, not only with ancient literature, but also with mathematics, and of late with higher analysis, differential calculus, physics, natural history and chemistry for me to be deluded by the fraud of natural philosophy, namely to philosophize by imagination without hard facts or to take the empty fantasies of folly itself for genuine ideas.

      Spengler, despite his reservations about Hegel’s mathematical abilities, admired Hegel and indeed his book is highly Hegelian in tone and attitude. Spengler wrote, Hegel stands above, Marx below the level of historical actuality. Take away Hegel’s metaphysics and you will discover a political thinker with a sense of reality unequalled in modern philosophy. As a ‘Prussian’ by intellectual choice he placed the state at the centre of his extraordinarily profound, well-nigh Goethean vision of historical development, whereas Marx, the Englishman by choice, assigned to the economic life the central role in his Darwinian and mechanistic theory of historical ‘evolution’ (he would call it ‘progress’).

      Hegel’s Philosophy of History had a tremendously powerful effect on Spengler, but whereas Hegel saw a single sweep of dialectical history, reflecting the Absolute Idea as it was transformed into the Absolute Spirit, and converging on an inevitable End of History, Spengler’s view was, we might say, of many separate cultures, each dialectically evolving to its own natural end, but not all tied together in the unifying Hegelian system.

      For Hegel, all cultures were harnessed together as aspects of a single evolving global culture while Spengler saw them as separately evolving cultures with no necessary connections. While Hegel predicted an End of History where human culture has attained a final form that, from then on, will never significantly change, Spengler predicted that an individual culture will reach its end and die off, to be replaced by a new culture, and this process will go on indefinitely. The birth, rise and fall of cultures and civilizations resemble the birth, maturing, waning and death of human beings. There’s no absolute end, no final convergence on a single global culture and civilization.

      When Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man, he adopted the Hegelian worldview, and proposed that capitalist democracy was the final cultural system of humanity that would absorb all other cultures. The final cultural form will in fact be Meritocracy.

      Star Trek already provides a vision of what the human future will be like. In Star Trek, there’s no money and Earth is ruled by a supreme meritocratic council. Starships are crewed by strictly meritocratic teams. There are no cruel, fanatical and fantastical religions, no celebrity culture, and the super rich elite have long since vanished. Humanity is intent on travelling across the universe and learning all of its secrets. Is that not what we ought to be doing rather than getting on our knees to Allah, or wailing in front of the Wailing Wall, or rolling on the floor and proclaiming that Jesus will save us, or worshipping celebrities and the super rich?

      *****

      If we look at the whole picture—the expansion of the Copernican world into that aspect of stellar space that we possess today; the development of Columbus’s discovery into a worldwide command of the earth’s surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and the theatre; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks—we see, emerging everywhere, the prime symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially Western creations of the soul-myth called ‘Will,’ ‘Force,’ and ‘Deed’ must be regarded as derivatives of this prime symbol. – Spengler

      *****

      Spengler asserted that every Culture has its own mathematics. Illuminism has ontological mathematics – the complete, consistent mathematics of existence itself.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1