Was Spengler Right After All?

According to Spengler, writing during the Great War, one should not see Europe or the West in ‘Ptolemaic’ terms as being the centre of history, and other cultures as orbiting around it. As Copernicus had done in astronomy, removing the centrality of the earth, the same had to be done with Western culture.

Moreover, he claimed, every culture has a unique ‘destiny,’ and all of them display developmental phases of life and death, just like living beings. Nor did he see European culture as being anything exceptional; in fact, at the time it was already in the declining phase of ‘civilization,’ instead of the earlier, vigorously creative stage of ‘culture’ that reached its apogee during the Enlightenment, and like all other cultures, would eventually perish.

Interestingly, Spengler noted that, during the creative ‘cultural’ phase, ‘spirituality’ occupied a prominent place, while the time of decay was marked by rootlessness and world-weariness among people, and by the dominance of machine organisation – the latter feature echoed by Max Weber, who famously wrote about humanity being imprisoned in an ‘iron cage’ of mechanisation.

It is not difficult to perceive in contemporary world (and not only Western) culture similar characteristics of cultural alienation and the predominance of machine culture, increasingly manifesting itself as the valorisation of AI. But instead of the cultural forces highlighted by Spengler, just over a hundred years after the publication of his epochal work it would turn out that a comparatively small group of individuals, motivated largely by financial and economic considerations pertaining to the possibility that they might lose their grip on power, would be instrumental in precipitating a catastrophic, controlled collapse of Western society, but also the rest of the world. Should their attempt be successful, a global collapse would be unavoidable.