By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
In spite of my Freudo-Marxian syndicalist roots I pride myself on being something of a cafeteria philosopher, taking a little influence here, there, and everywhere, even from the fringes. Fuck, who am I kidding, especially from the fringes. Wack-jobs make the best visionaries. But as far as the far right is concerned you’ll be hard pressed to find any work of philosophy with anything resembling intellectual depth. Even the non-racial shit (few and far between) is plagued with the kind of half-baked mysticism that’s only fascinating to a pre-teen metal-head (been there, done that). I make an acception, however, for the work of German Conservative Revolutionary Oswald Spengler, in particular his World War era magnum opus Decline of the West, which is more than worth thumbing through, even for a genderfuck anarchist derelict like me.
The basic thesis is that the world is broken up into distinct cultures (Greco-Roman, Persian, etc.) that tend to have a shelf life of roughly two thousand years. Every culture rises, stagnates, and develops into a civilization once its creative impulse wanes. And every civilization falls into a murky abyss of cultural decadence (people like me) and monetary greed (people like Trump) from which a new culture springs, starting the cycle over again. The focus of Spengler’s theory was that at the dawn of the First World War, Western Civilization had reached it’s winter time. The Faustian Civilization, as Oswald referred to the stagnant West was bleeding out. It’s organic aristocracy of philosophers and prophets had been replaced by a plastic plutocratic elite. It’s spirituality had been replaced by the paper god of money. It’s temples had become transformed into veritable piggy banks for greedy heretics. And most foreboding of all, the West had entered into a final state of militant Caesarism with it’s increasingly desperate populace looking to enigmatic strongmen for guidance in the turbulence.
