Prophets Of Doom Quotes

Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives. The vision of your true destiny does not reside within the blinkered outlook of the naysayers and the doom prophets. Judge not by their words, but accept advice based on the evidence of actual results. Do not be surprised should you find a complete absence of anything mystical or miraculous in the manifested reality of those who are so eager to advise you. Friends and family who suffer the lack of abundance, joy, love, fulfillment and prosperity in their own lives really have no business imposing their self-limiting beliefs on your reality experience.

I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the greensmelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

Now, it's a fact well known to those who know it well that prophets of doom only attain popularity when they get the drinks in all around.

Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

The heroic is a genuinely terrifying idea to the liberal mind which must seek to make everything petty and small.

When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the people that I love, and all that I proclaim is words of doom and judgement.' And yet if I say "I will shut up", I can't.

Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah.

Yet can the economic pie grow indefinitely? Every pie requires raw material and energy. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo Sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

Yet can the economic pie grow indefinitely? Every pie requires raw materials and energy. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

The prophet knew that religion could distort what the Lord demanded of man, that priests themselves had committed perjury by bearing false witness, condoning violence, tolerating hatred, calling for ceremonies instead of bursting forth with wrath and indignation at cruelty, deceit, idolatry, and violence. To the people, religion was Temple, priesthood, incense: "This is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord" (Jer. 7:4). Such piety Jeremiah brands as fraud and illusion. "Behold you trust in deceptive words to no avail," he calls (Jer. 7 : 8 ). Worship preceded o r followed by evil acts becomes a n absurdity. The holy place is doomed when people indulge in unholy deeds.

This time of contrast shall separate the wheat from the chaff. The wise will strive to manifest a brave new world, while the foolish and unkind will suffer for their lack of common sense. And when the storm finally subsides, many will wake up on the wrong side of history.

Testimony in new age writing affirms the way in which embracing a love ethic transforms life for the good. Yet a lot of this information only reaches those of us who have class privilege. And often, individuals whose lives are rich in spiritual and material well-being, who have diverse friends from all walks of life who nurture their personal integrity, tell the rest of the world these things are impossible to come by. I am talking here about the many prophets of doom who tell us that racism will never end, sexism is here to stay the rich will never share their resources. We would all be surprised if we could enter their lives for a day. Much of what they are telling us cannot be had, they have. But in keeping with a capitalist-based notion of well-being, they really believe there is not enough to go around, that the good life can only be had by a few.

In trials of ir'n and silver fain “The dead will rise and walk again “The blesséd few that touch the light “Will aid the war against the night. “But one by one they all will die “Without a cause to rule them by “As Darkness spreads across the land “He'll wield the oceans in his hand. “Five warriors will oppose his reign “And overthrow the Shadow Thane “They come from sides both dark and light “The realm the mortals call “twilight.” “A magus crowned with boughs of fire “Will rise like Phoenix from his pyre “A beast of shadows touched with sight “Will claim a Dark One as her knight “The next, a prophet doomed to fail “Will find her powers to avail “The final: one mere mortal man “Who bears the mark upon his hand “The circle closes round these few “Made sacred by the bonds they hew “But if one fails then so shall all “Bring death to those of Evenfall.

When you're a kid, you don't get to do anything. When you're a grown-up, you don't want to do anything.

A church that does not keep step with modern scientific knowledge is doomed.

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things...

By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford, published The Population Bomb (1968), which foresaw the starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s if population growth were not controlled.

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes: And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

…For many years now, that way of living has been scorned, and over the last 40 or 50 years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent to some extent on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably – could even have improved it. Now, we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress. Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world, in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world. And that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable. An economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature, or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it. The world I knew as a boy was flawed surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.

Like some translucen latterday Cassandra, the prophetess of doom, (Heila the Comptesse von Westarp, the former secretary of the Thule Gesellschaff) rose up from the bosom of the limp and slumbering medium (Dr. Nemirovitch-Dantchanko) to give a warning that the man who was even now preparing to assume the leadership of Thule would prove himself to be a false prophet. Assuming total power over the nation, he would be responsible one day for reducing the whole of Germany to rubble and its people to a defeat and moreal degradation hitherto unknown to history.

Rejection has value. It teaches us when our work or our skillset is not good enough and must be made better. This is a powerful revelation, like the burning UFO wheel seen by the prophet Ezekiel, or like the McRib sandwich shaped like the Virgin Mary seen by the prophet Steve Jenkins. Rejection refines us. Those who fall prey to its enervating soul-sucking tentacles are doomed. Those who persist past it are survivors. Best ask yourself the question: what kind of writer are you? The kind who survives? Or the kind who gets asphyxiated by the tentacles of woe?

Mia's mother, Nonna Celia, is to blame for that, because she's a prophet of doom. Every time I'd ask her if we could go someplace the next day or next week, her reply would be, "We might not live that long." If I'd say, "See you tomorrow," her answer would be, "If that's what God wants." Leaving so much to fate has kept me an insomniac for most of my life...

Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead...

As the Apocalyptic woman has in her hand a CUP, wherewith she intoxicates the nations, so was it with the Babylon of old. Of that Babylon, while in all its glory, the Lord thus spake, in denouncing its doom by the prophet Jeremiah: "Babylon hath been a GOLDEN CUP in the Lord's hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the nations are mad" (Jer. ii. 7).

it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever. The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

Said the True Witness to the church at Ephesus: “I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.” Revelation 2:4, 5. The Saviour watches for a response to his offers of love and forgiveness, with a more tender compassion than that which moves the heart of an earthly parent to forgive a wayward, suffering son. He cries after the wanderer, “Return unto Me, and I will return unto you.” Malachi 3:7. But if the erring one persistently refuses to heed the voice that calls him with pitying, tender love, he will at last be left in darkness. The heart that has long slighted God’s mercy, becomes hardened in sin, and is no longer susceptible to the influence of the grace of God. Fearful will be the doom of that soul of whom the pleading Saviour shall finally declare, he “is joined to idols: let him alone.” Hosea 4:17. It will be more tolerable in the day of judgment for the cities of the plain than for those who have known the love of Christ, and yet have turned away to choose the pleasures of a world of sin.

You’re my child. My beloved. My pleasure.” This is the heart of the matter. This is the message that blows quietly, sweetly through the whole Bible. It’s easy to lose it in the strictures of law, the violent stories of the people of Israel, the doom-laden pronouncements of the prophets, or the near-psychedelic foretelling of future events. It’s so tender, so gentle, that it’s easy to miss it blowing through my own little life story, with all its dramas and distractions. There are a thousand other voices, most of them much louder and more insistent, that have other things to say about who I am. They say things that are demeaning or discouraging.

If anything, the current state of the world is already a testament to our inability to either imagine a possible world different to ours or to abandon the raft of the medusa that is our present. The reality of this world seems to have bottomed out into a Hobbesian jungle in which we are stuck and which constantly grows and is cut back in vain. In the Hobbesian or game-theoretic jungle, no matter how drastically your social and political convictions differ from those of your supposed adversary, no matter how much your experience of the world seems truer or more authentic, auto-cannibalization is unavoidable. In the Hobbesian jungle, all groups not only gnaw at one another, but will also end up eating their own kin alive. We as either Hobbesians or as Platonic Universalists ought to pay attention to the truth of particularity. Universalists think that the commensuration between human experiential or local particularities is an easy path. The true enemies of universalists—the neoreactionaries—think what is universalist is misguided but they nevertheless go on and build island-utopias. The problem of both factions is that the real issue is not the universal which both camps to different degrees endorse, but the specific and discrete particularities of the human experience. Not paying attention to the problems of the latter is a sure recipe for failure, not just for rationalist universalism but also for the neoreactionary craft of methodological individualism. Without the proper attention to the depth of particularities or local conditions, we are all doomed to the cannabalistic jungle for which Hobbes is a prophet.

I want to share three warnings. First, to stand up for human goodness is to stand up against a hydra–that mythological seven-headed monster that grew back two heads for every one Hercules lopped off. Cynicism works a lot like that. For every misanthropic argument you deflate, two more will pop up in its place. Veneer theory is a zombie that just keeps coming back. Second, to stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians. Third, to stand up for human goodness means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic. The pessimistic professor who preaches the doctrine of human depravity can predict anything he wants, for if his prophecies don’t come true now, just wait: failure could always be just around the corner, or else his voice of reason has prevented the worst. The prophets of doom sound oh so profound, whatever they spout. The reasons for hope, by contrast, are always provisional. Nothing has gone wrong–yet. You haven’t been cheated–yet. An idealist can be right her whole life and still be dismissed as naive. This book is intended to change that. Because what seems unreasonable, unrealistic and impossible today can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. The time has come for a new view of human nature. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.

To speak evil' is to speak this fateful, paradoxical situation that is the reversible concatenation of good and evil. That is to say that the irresistible pursuit of good, the movement of Integral Reality - for this is what good is: it is the movement towards integrality, towards an integral order of the world - is immoral. The eschatological perspective of a better world is in itself immoral. For the reason that our technical mastery of the world, our technical approach to good, having become an automatic and irresistible mechanism, none of this is any longer of the order of morality or of any kind of finality. Nor is to speak and read evil the same thing as vulgar nihilism, the nihilism of a denunciation of all values, that of the prophets of doom. To denounce the reality contract or the reality 'conspiracy' is not at all nihilistic. It is not in any sense to deny an obvious fact, in the style of 'All is sign, nothing is real - nothing is true, everything is simulacrum' - an absurd proposition since it is also a realist one! It is one thing to note the vanishing of the real into the Virtual, another to deny it so as to pass beyond the real and the Virtual. It is one thing to reject morality in the name of a vulgar immoralism, another to do so, like Nietzsche so as to pass beyond good and evil. To be 'nihilistic' is to deny things at their greatest degree of intensity, not in their lowest versions. Now, existence and self-evidence have always been the lowest forms. If there is nihilism, then, it is not a nihilism of value, but a nihilism of form. It is to speak the world in its radicality, in its dual, reversible form, and this has never meant banking on catastrophe, any more than on violence. No finality, either positive or negative, is ever the last word in the story. And the Apocalypse itself is a facile solution.

Noah had grown tired of being a prophet of doom, forever announcing a catastrophe that never came and that no one took seriously. One day, he clothed himself in sackcloth and covered his head with ashes. Only a man who was mourning [the death of] a beloved child or his wife was allowed to do this. Clothed in the garb of truth, bearer of sorrow, he went back to the city, resolved to turn the curiosity, spitefulness, and superstition of its inhabitants to his advantage. Soon a small crowd of curious people had gathered around him. They asked him questions. They asked if someone had died, and who the dead person was. Noah replied to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: “Tomorrow.” Profiting from their attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words: “The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that will have been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed. When the flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And so there will no longer be any difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be too late.” With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That evening a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: “Let me help you build the ark, so that it may become false.” Later a roofer joined them, saying: “It is raining over the mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false.”14

Man is an irrational creature...for he seeks pleasure instead of abstinence, lies and deceit, instead of counsel and advice, violence and war, instead of withhold and peace, and easy wanton ignorance and gluttony, instead of hard sought after wisdom and moderation...man has grown indifferent to the sufferings of his fellow man and neighbor, for he only cares as to whether there is any monetary gain or financial reward, for his immediate and erstwhile assistance...man, in this current age, has completely lost the ability to engage in disciplined learning and fair and honest debate, for instead he would rather believe in lies and falsehoods, for it only confirms his prejudicial beliefs and irrational fears, all fed to him by the so-called, "fair and balanced" news media...he is a patriot for all the wrong reasons, for his patriotism is one of selfish jingoism, instead of an objective and unadulterated, "universal brotherhood", that seeks to find common ground and common solutions across the diplomatic table, instead of blind "sabre rattling" and childish and superficial flag waving...man's blind and puerile barbarism is what will ultimately do him in, in the very end, for the prophets of the present who tried to warn him as he stood at the edge of a moral and spiritual precipice, will be the ones who will wear a quiet and confirming smile, as man and his erstwhile shadow of ignorance, will be cast into the bottomless pit, of eternal damnation and doom...

malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defence as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the green-smelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. All my life, I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.

The Spark, the animating spirit of the early warrior caste, is distinct from the religion that comes to predominate and maintain the later multiethnic empire, which I will call The Imperial Altar. Civilisational successes—such as conquest, wealth, and education—generate their own loss conditions. The Barbarism of Reflection destroys the foundations of the Imperial Altar and successfully kills any last remnants of The Spark. The castes of the lion archetype (warriors and peasants) have mutual antagonisms with the castes of the fox archetype (priests or intellectuals and merchants). Where the lion archetype predominates either as monarchism (warriors) or as Caesarism (peasants) ‘civilisational successes’ can be held in check for a period. They tend to create strong regimes through ruthlessness but such strength, ironically, leads to the managerial need for administration generated by growth and complexity, which in turn leads to the rise of elites of the fox archetype taking over. When the fox archetype predominates, either as theocracy (priests/intellectuals) or plutarchy (merchants), ‘civilisational success’ may accelerate but, in the process, the very foundations that facilitated such success in the first place (i.e. the strong regime maintained by the lion’s ruthlessness) are eroded, eventually leading to collapse. Quantity has a quality all of its own, which manifests as all that is ‘mass’: democracy, utilitarianism, standardisation, and the destruction of quality and distinction. This is a feature of the late, pre-collapse cycle. Individuals of one civilisational season cannot embody the spirit of another: the Children of Winter, for example, cannot embody the Spring. Civilisation is incommunicable. The ‘world-feeling’ of a people as Spengler says is ‘not transferable’. ‘What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring feeling—is a name, dress, and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other.’[1] Ethnicity is a constant reality which promotes ingroup solidarity in the early cycle and becomes a problem for the ruling class to manage in the late cycle.

Prophetic ministers and believers in Christ’s return are continually mocked as doom and gloom prognosticators whose messages only spread fear and anxiety.

Every day, experts bombard us with predictions, but how reliable are they? Until a few years ago, no one bothered to check. Then along came Philip Tetlock. Over a period of ten years, he evaluated 28,361 predictions from 284 self-appointed professionals. The result: In terms of accuracy, the experts fared only marginally better than a random forecast generator. Ironically, the media darlings were among the poorest performers; and of those, the worst were the prophets of doom and disintegration.

The false prophets trust in flesh, even if that flesh is the temple in Jerusalem, the promised land, the chosen people itself, or even God’s promise to the chosen people (if that promise is taken to be an unconditional promise and not as a part of a covenant). The true prophets, regardless of whether they predict doom or salvation, predict the unexpected, the humanly unforeseeable—what would not occur to men, left to themselves, to fear or to hope.

Less mysterious was the obituary of Cardinal Siri, delivered shortly after John's death: "It will take forty years to repair the damage this Pope inflicted in four years." Siri was one of those "prophets of doom" Pope John shook his head over. In hindsight, however, Siri sounds like a raving optimist, for as of this writing the damage caused by his Council continues to metastasize, and fragments of restoration are as chimerical as John's "new Pentecost".

Tradition is a timeless, sacred and transcendent source of values that are unchanging, an expression of an absolute being that exists outside time, that ancient societies understood intuitively and by whose values they lived their everyday lives in all its aspects.

for Evola ‘Tradition’ means an orientation ‘upwards’, towards the metaphysical Transcendent, which leads meaningfully to the ‘differentiated’ hierarchical life, a world of distinction and quality, in juxtaposition to the ‘profane’ materialist world which can comprehend only matter and reduces life downwards in a flattening democratic utilitarianism which understands only quantity—

Here ‘democracy and communism proceeded from widespread contempt for the past and a corresponding faith in progress; where politics focused on economics, where the global population was darkening due to northward migration from the global south, and where feminism and secularism forged a culture that celebrates sexual hedonism and chaotic disregard for boundaries of all kinds.

Gobineau understands ‘blood’ to be the common bond that unifies a civilization, a substance that is best studied historically and discursively rather than biologically. In this context, blood refers to the common values, spirit, and history Gobineau feels are essential to any civilization. … in Gobineau’s work the blood is definitively not an inanimate liquid but rather signifies the basic values, common discourse, and spirit of a civilization.

When Caesar became a German warlord, Christians became warlike and somehow found justifications for murderous conquest; when Caesar became a conniving merchant, Christians found arguments to justify commerce; and when Caesar became an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion officer, the church dutifully flew the rainbow flag.

As economic, technological, military, and political concerns and prowess supplant philosophical and aesthetic endeavours, a culture can be said to have entered its “winter” or civilization phase.

Spengler foresaw the rise of Caesarism as an antidote to the dominance of the merchants who use liberal democracy to mask their dominance.

The dictatorship of money had used democracy as its political weapon.

A simpler way of putting it might be to say that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’ across both time and space, historically and, in the present, geographically. ‘No value can survive beyond the civilisation that produced it. Values are perishable, there are no absolute truths; every truth is relative to the context of the civilisation that posits it, and when the latter is exhausted, the concept of truth also crumbles, shatters.

The members of one culture cannot understand the basic ideas of another and when they think they are doing so, they are actually translating totally alien concepts into concepts they have developed on their own.

In looking backward over human history we find that it comprises various cultures, as the Egyptian, Indian, Classical, and Western. Each of these cultures is a vast, living, human organism, endowed with an ego, a personality, with a metaphysical structure, a culture-soul. The culture soul expresses itself in all the phenomena of its history, in peoples and nations, in language and literature, in government, science, the arts, and all other conceivable human manifestations. These are the expression forms of the soul and together constitute the culture. Through them the soul actualizes itself and history is thus a culture-soul in process of becoming.

The Crusades represent the final expulsion of Magian influence from Europe and the birth of the Faustian culture.

Spengler’s theory of the state is rooted in an analysis of the four estates. The first estate is the nobility, the second estate is the priesthood, the third estate is the burgher class or bourgeoisie, and the fourth estate is the mass. Note that the ‘mass’ is not the peasant.

The abstractions of the remote city have replaced the rootedness in the soil of the familial castle.

A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle’, ‘money is overthrown and abolished only by blood’, and thus ‘the conflict between money and blood’ is inevitable.

What we do know is that since 1945, and especially since the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the unchecked twin forces of unconstrained money-power and unconstrained rationalistic intellectualism have greatly accelerated the unravelling of Western civilisation to an extent that might have surprised even the man who told us that ‘optimism is cowardice’.[60]

The most important though was logico-meaningful integration. Sorokin argued that cultural systems are organized around a central value or principle that gives them order and unity. The sociologist discovers it with the logico-meaningful method.

First, civilisations come about—which is to say develop from primitive societies into civilisations—through challenge and response, a concept ‘probably derived from J.C. Smuts’ Holism and Evolution’.[11] For example, Egypt can be said to have developed from successfully responding to the challenge of how to live in an area surrounded by harsh desert.

Thus, the Hellenistic civilisation (Toynbee’s name for Classical or what Spengler calls Apollonian civilisation) apparented the Western (Faustian) civilisation.

The responses to challenges come from an elite creative minority, which enjoys a moral and social unity with the majority through mimesis so long as they remain creative and successfully respond to challenges.

Each society is wholly self-contained. It is for Toynbee a very important question whether Western Christendom is a continuation of Hellenic society or a different society related to it by way of affiliation. The right answer, according to him, is the second. … Toynbee’s principle is that if a civilization changes it ceases to be itself and a new civilization comes into being. … We must be able to say exactly where one society leaves off and another begins. We are not allowed to say that one shades off into the next.

To summarise the above, Toynbee’s cycle has the following seven-stage pattern: Heroic Age/Time of Troubles. Challenge and Response. Growth. Breakdown. Disintegration. Universal State. Universal Church.

Toynbee locates the central issue as a breakdown in the relations between the elites and the masses, or in his terminology, the creative minority and the uncreative majority.

In the creative minority, it manifests itself in two ways: the first is homo economicus, a worship of utilitarianism—and here we are on very familiar territory in the mould of Carlyle—and the second is in a withdrawal of artistic types into snobbishness, obscure high-brow tastes, art for art’s sake, and other such affected attitudes that cut them off from the plebs.

For Turchin, the crucial factor that precipitates this will is group unity among the elites, or asabiya.

In Pareto’s terms, warriors and peasants are both lion types while priests and merchants are both fox types. Note that in practice, as pointed out as far back as Polybius’s Anacyclosis, the peasants can never rule themselves and elect instead a Caesar.

The first variable is the degree to which the environment of a group is pacified. Because the primary source of intergroup variation is conflict between groups, location in a stateless environment should promote asabiya increase, while location near the center of a large polity (far from boundaries where warfare mainly occurs) should promote asabiya decrease.

The second variable is population density in relation to the carrying capacity. Density pushing at the subsistence limits promotes intragroup competition, and causes asabiya to decline. Low population density implies low intragroup competition, and conditions favoring the increase of asabiya.

In other words, universal moralising religions, what Toynbee called ‘universal churches’—which recall, for him, was a late-civilisation development—are a product of more complex societies. This is contrary to what has been claimed by many scholars, which is that universalising social technologies are the engines driving civilisations.

Civilisation begins with a set of particularisms (such as ethnicity, a local god, local customs and rituals) and only later does the complexity of society enable and call for universalism and the ‘Big Gods’ follow; they do not create complex societies.

Western leaders simply ignore the grim on-the-ground realities of multiculturalism: whether it is mass-grooming gangs in the UK, fire in the streets of Paris, or out-of-control crime in American cities, the political class still bury their ostrich-heads in the sand and pretend that there is no qualitative difference between peoples. Won’t someone think of the curry houses.

However, it is worth stressing that our study has shown that empire is a completely inescapable reality of human life. The independent nation-state is an anomaly, little more than a political fiction. This is relevant because much political chatter since 2016 has cast ‘globalists’ versus ‘nationalists’, but it strikes me that ‘nationalism’ is only ever a short-run phenomenon which takes place in specific circumstances such as during Toynbee’s ‘withdrawal’.

We tend to think of any decline as catastrophic, but ‘collapse’ never means ‘the end’. A people who starts to understand itself in civilisational terms, rather than in terms of graphs and spreadsheets, may be better built to endure. The alternative to what I have outlined in this book, which is the belief that things as we have known them since 1945 will continue indefinitely into the future, for 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, as GDP goes ‘up and up’ and Progress marches on, should be recognised by all but the most hopelessly utopian reader as being at best wishful thinking, and at worst stupidity.

During the pre-eminence of each culture, its distinctive characteristics are carried by it far and wide across the world.

Spengler’s notion of pseudomorphosis finds its parallel when he says, ‘Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but … they will often be less willing to sacrifice their lives and their property than will be the original descendants of the founder race.

Gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Age of Affluence silences the voice of duty. The object of the young and ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash. … No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to service their country. Parents and students alike seek educational qualifications which will command the highest salaries.

In Britain and in America today, and in most of Europe, any such ability for self-defence seems a rapidly fading memory. Furthermore, any response to the ever-accelerating demographic transformation of our major cities that does not loudly celebrate this fact is increasingly treated as a ‘hate crime’ —such is the Age of Decadence.

Consider the situation of a hierarchy that must invest in legitimizing activities among a politically potent but minimally compliant segment of the population. Once this population segment has become accustomed to any pattern of increasing investment in legitimization, continuance of this trajectory is necessary to maintain the compliance status quo.

Increased investment in legitimizing activities brings little or no increased compliance, and the marginal return on investment in legitimization correspondingly declines. The appeasement of urban mobs presents the classic illustration of this principle. Any level of activities undertaken to appease such populations—the bread and circuses syndrome—eventually becomes the expected minimum. An increase in the cost of bread and circuses, which seems to have been required in Imperial Rome to legitimize such things as the accession of a new ruler or his continued reign, may bring no increased return beyond a state of non-revolt.[17]

A new energy subsidy is necessary if a declining standard of living and a future global collapse are to be averted.

Carlyle’s vision is such that one is always looking for the next Odinic Great Man who might trigger a new ‘poetic’ age.

If our population decreases; if we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain above national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life; then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.’[17

I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike.

However, once safety produces enough prosperity, or as he puts it ‘stored energy’,[26] the civilisational process centralises and gives way to a different type of spirit marked by money-making, usury, and, above all, greed. This increased centralisation exhausts energy rather than accumulates it, and once that energy is all used up, the husk that is left can no longer sustain the civilisation and so collapse and a return to barbarism beckons.

The relative birth rates between Asia and Europe would ensure that Europe would ‘run out of energy’ first—a fascinating prediction given the meteoric rise of China over the past half a century and, at the time of writing, the USA’s increasingly desperate inability to maintain a unipolar world as global hegemon.

Today, the world waits for new men of courage amid of a sea of abject cowardice and greed, although it is difficult to see any on the horizon.

All things considered, it is difficult to see Julius Evola as any kind of fascist at all. … Evola never was any kind of fascist. He was neither a ‘cryptofascist,’ a ‘parafascist,’ a ‘superfascist,’ nor a ‘neofascist.’ He was and always remained an occultist, a pagan ‘magus’. … The fact is that because fascism is considered so reprehensible, Anglo-American academics do not feel themselves obliged to treat the subject with any professional detachment. Cavalier and irresponsible claims can and have been made. … Since Fascism is almost universally held to be an unmitigated evil, no one really expects to be held accountable for their treatment of its ideas. The results are apparent. Very few academics would tolerate similar treatment of Marxist, or Marxist-Leninist, ideas. The consequence is that, more often than not, we are treated to a caricature of Fascist thought. Few academics bother to read the primary literature. That is held to be an unconscionable waste of time, since everyone knows, intuitively, that Fascists never entertained any real ideas. It is a common judgment among many that Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro had real ideas, but Fascists never did. As a result, we have no idea what to expect of the thought of ‘neofascists.’ As we have suggested, some see ‘neofascism’ in the political thought of Reagan Republicans, tax protesters, soccer thugs, skinheads, graveyard vandals, militia members, antisocialists, anti-egalitarians, and anyone who refuses to conform to the strictures of ‘political correctness.’ The results have been intellectually embarrassing. The nonfascist thought of an occultist such as Evola is conceived fascist, while ideas having unmistakable fascist properties often fail to be so considered. This is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of patterns of thought that are somehow insulated from criticism. In the United States, an abundance of revolutionary political thought is just so insulated. Black protest thought is hardly ever considered in a comparative context. More often than not, it is treated as though it were sui generis, a unique product reflecting incomparable experience. Actually, more fascism is to be found in black protest literature than in all the works of Julius Evola —and yet, one is at a loss to find any of it, or any mention of it, in the anthologies of neofascist reflection

Carl Schmitt said, the essence of politics is in the distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, the word ‘fascism’ has simply come to stand in for anyone who opposes liberal or left-wing orthodoxy for any reason.

His methodology differs radically from most historians in two fundamental ways: first, in his perrenialist or universalist conception of Tradition, and second, in his treatment of myth as ‘truer’ than historical fact.

Tradition exists independently of any culture, as a Platonic ideal:

Glubb nonetheless in the final analysis agrees with the Gobineau-Spengler thesis that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’.

In Tainter’s view, a similar situation is faced by the rulers of complex societies beyond a certain point of complexity—we might say they become supra-marginal societies. Here such a society reaches a point where ‘at increased cost it is able to do little more than maintain the status quo.

Tainter essentially denies concepts such as the metaphysical, human spirit, social zeitgeists, governing philosophies, attitudes about the relationship between humans and their environment, ideologies, because they cannot be measured by the tools of science.

It is a profound and repeated finding that the mere facts of poverty and inequality or even increases in these conditions, do not lead to political or ethnic violence. In order for popular discontent or distress to create large-scale conflicts, there must be some elite leadership to mobilize popular groups and to create linkages between them. There must also be some vulnerability of the state in the form of internal divisions and economic or political reverses. Otherwise, popular discontent is unvoiced, and popular opposition is simply suppressed.

in most times and places, the bulk of the population simply do not matter in the determination of history, which is to say that—whether broadly contented or discontented—they represent the ruled and not the rulers. This runs directly counter to democratic or populist or even Marxist notions of history, which are, to put it bluntly, merely wrong.

Second, the key factor which differentiates a successful ruling class from an unsuccessful one is their will to hold onto power as against the will of counter-elites to take power from them.

The Age of Decadence marks the near total loss of the sense of duty that had marked the empire in its period of growth, as expansion turns to defensiveness and a holding onto what one already possesses. Optimism turns to pessimism. This coincides with an ‘intensification of internal political hatreds’—of which no one who lived through the Brexit and Trump eras needs to be reminded. Interestingly, Glubb argues this intensification of hatred is exacerbated by a two-party parliamentary democracy.

For example, consider a coffee shop which has three workers who can serve 18 coffees an hour; the average unit product, which is the total output (coffees) divided by the number of input units (workers), is 6 customers per worker. Let us say adding a fourth worker takes coffee output up to 30, a fifth increases output to 40, a sixth to 45, and a seventh to 49. We can see that the average unit product with 4 workers is 7.5, with 5 workers is 8, with 6 workers is 7.5, and with 7 workers is 7.

It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve … After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.

A group with high [collective solidarity] will generally win when pitched against a group of lesser [collective solidarity].

Cyclical Models The pattern of rise and fall: this is the general shape of history outlined by both Herodotus and Thucydides that is generically common to practically all the other cyclical models. The degenerative cycle of the four ages: this is the Gold–Silver–Bronze–Iron model of Hesiod, the Zoroastrians, and the Hindu Yuga cycles in which a state of initial perfection degenerates by ages to a final barbarism before the cycle starts again. The Anacyclosis: this is the political pattern of constitutional cycles outlined by Polybius which follows the sequence monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy before a period of barbarianism resets the cycle. The providential cycle (judgement–retribution–restoration): this follows the pattern of the Book of Jeremiah and the ‘alternative’ Christian tradition of the Venerable Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Phoenix cycle (birth–death–rebirth): this is Petrarch’s model which posits a Dark Age between two better periods and in which the New Age will look to Antiquity for inspiration.

Linear Models The Six Ages of Man: this is Augustine’s model that plots human history from the Biblical Genesis to the Apocalypse. The first five ages comprise the events of the Bible, while the expansive sixth age, which includes the present time, stretches from the first coming of Jesus Christ until the last judgement and gets older and more decayed over time. In this view of history, things will only get worse until the second coming. The progressive vision of history: this is the notion that humans, through reason and knowledge, and their mastery of science and their environment, can harness an unlimited perfectibility—materially, morally, and socially.