The Fall of the West: The Last Man
Nation First explores Spengler's Age of Caesars and Neitzsche's Last Man.
Dear friend,
Nation First continues it’s series on The Fall of the West, looking at the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Frederich Neitzsche, specifically the notions of the Age of Caesars and the Last Man.
When we look at our post-post-modern world in the light of these two concepts, things start to make sense.
With rising technocracy, it may just be that we are not only deep in the Age of Caesars but, considering the fact that we have let this happen, it may be that — sadly — we are the Last Men.
For Nation First readers who have not yet become paid subscribers, I encourage you to take out a free 7-day trial (which you can cancel before the seven days is up, without costing a cent) to have a look at the articles we’ve published last week and those to come this week on The Fall of the West.
It certainly puts the challenges before us into perspective.
Until tomorrow, God bless you, your family and our nation.
Take care,
George Christensen
And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people: It is time for man to fix his goal.
It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope.
His soil is still rich enough for it.
But this soil will one day be poor and exhausted; no lofty tree will be able to grow from it.
Alas! The time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond mankind— and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang!
I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.
I tell you: you have still chaos in you.
Alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars.
Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Civilisation could described as a super-organism: consuming resources, growing, and doing just about anything it can do to survive.
Yet, just like any organism, it, too, is vulnerable to disease, predation, or natural calamity.
We, in the modern West, take our civilisation for granted but it was borne of very specific historical circumstances that gave it its exceptional characters.
However, like mighty civilisations of the past, it, too, will fade and be discarded into the annals of history, for such is the indifferent nature of time.
Perhaps, no one understood this better than the German historian and philosopher, Oswald Spengler.
At the time when the West felt secure in its dominance, he discussed its downfall.
Ridiculed and thought of as ‘unoriginal’ and inane during his time, his predictions about the state of Western society would come to ring true decades after his death.
Spengler hypothesised that by around the year 2000, the West would enter the period of its pre-death (which he, in direct comparison to Rome, called the age of Caesars).
Just as a living being panics and seeks to undo or delay its impending death, he predicted that the West, too, would enter a state of emergency, trading its liberty for perceived security.
Thus, the age of Caesars, with an increasingly authoritarian government and militarism.
And it just so happened that Spengler was a year off with his prediction.
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