[annatar1914]

However...

If the West does not take advantage of mercy and grace, will it return to what it was at it's zenith, minus Christianity?

I think not. For the Western culture arose around 1000 AD after incubating for almost as long a time from roughly the time of the battle of Actium decades before the Incarnation to 1000 AD in Western Europe. Before that, was the Pagan Greco-Roman Civilization, the ''Apollonian'' civilization/culture of Neitzsche and Spengler.

In my opinion, this Pagan Apollonian world was reborn around 1500 AD and slowly grew in strength, (enervating the previous/and post Greco-Roman!) displacing from within the Faustian Civilization to a great degree as more and more people in the Western world ''defected'' from the Western mindset to the gradual building of a society that would be recognizable to Homer or Alexander the Great or even Julius Caesar. And Neitzsche and Cesere Borgia and Donald Trump. To say that this Apollonian culture is ''materialistic'', or ''shallow'' is to say both too little and too much, for in truth Apollonian culture is quite Alien to anyone with even the slightest vestiges of Abrahamic religious thought. Reality to the Apollonian is simply no more than the bounded Euclidian patterns, and accessible to the sensual surfaces of life; otherwise there is no inner ''there'' there. What you see is what you get, but this is not to say that greatness of a sort is not valuable or talent not cultivated.

With my next post, I'll go into more detail about how and why this culture is returning to the fore of it's lands of birth and beyond, and what it means for the rest of us.

[Potemkin]

In my opinion, this Pagan Apollonian world was reborn around 1500 AD and slowly grew in strength, (enervating the previous/and post Greco-Roman!) displacing from within the Faustian Civilization to a great degree as more and more people in the Western world ''defected'' from the Western mindset to the gradual building of a society that would be recognizable to Homer or Alexander the Great or even Julius Caesar. And Neitzsche and Cesere Borgia and Donald Trump. To say that this Apollonian culture is ''materialistic'', or ''shallow'' is to say both too little and too much, for in truth Apollonian culture is quite Alien to anyone with even the slightest vestiges of Abrahamic religious thought. Reality to the Apollonian is simply no more than the bounded Euclidian patterns, and accessible to the sensual surfaces of life; otherwise there is no inner ''there'' there. What you see is what you get, but this is not to say that greatness of a sort is not valuable or talent not cultivated.

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." - Oscar Wilde

[annatar1914]

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." - Oscar Wilde

@Potemkin

I had to give you props, if only for the very quotable Oscar Wilde's quote

But you know what I mean. The Libertarianism, the Amarcho-capitalism and rugged Individualism can only have one outcome, just speaking to the political aspect of all this.

It produces a culture and individual worldview in which vainglory, avarice, and strife are the main motivators of the Elites, where they are limited and parochial, concerned only with the particular and immediate present, neither the past nor the future hold any great meaning. Strength and cunning and self-serving survivalism, revenge, raids and strikes against one's enemies, a search for personal glory by feats of various kinds...Being strong enough and smart enough to get everything one wants.

Chaos for Cosmology. Fortune and Fate, Chance and Necessity being the ''Gods'' of this sort of world. Is this not the world that is returning?

[Cookie Monster]

This is simply another way of saying that we live in a world without God, a society which has rejected any and all transcendent or spiritual values. The people no longer have even what Marx called their spiritual "opium". Instead, consumerism is their new opium, and is an opium which is more consistent with the capitalist mode of production rather than that relic of the feudal mode of production, Christianity. Which is fine when times are good, but leaves these Modern people with nothing if they can no longer be happy consumers when times are hard. If they can no longer be consumers, then they are literally nothing and there is simply no point even drawing breath. Take away their accumulated consumer goods with which they surround themselves and form their sense of identity, take away their ability to consume, and they will find a tall building and jump off it....

This is true, but one has to keep in mind that identities, even religious ones, have become part of the consumption spectrum. Hence the strong lift of tribalism and zealotry.

[Potemkin]

@Potemkin

I had to give you props, if only for the very quotable Oscar Wilde's quote

But you know what I mean. The Libertarianism, the Amarcho-capitalism and rugged Individualism can only have one outcome, just speaking to the political aspect of all this.

It produces a culture and individual worldview in which vainglory, avarice, and strife are the main motivators of the Elites, where they are limited and parochial, concerned only with the particular and immediate present, neither the past nor the future hold any great meaning. Strength and cunning and self-serving survivalism, revenge, raids and strikes against one's enemies, a search for personal glory by feats of various kinds...Being strong enough and smart enough to get everything one wants.

Chaos for Cosmology. Fortune and Fate, Chance and Necessity being the ''Gods'' of this sort of world. Is this not the world that is returning?

It is; but in truth it never really went away. Almost all of the West's ruling elites have always lived by those pagan values, even while professing to be the most devout Christians. Machiavelli merely pointed this out, and in that respect was more virtuous than his contemporaries, because unlike them he was not a hypocrite.

All that has changed is that the West's elites have discarded the mask of Christian virtue as being no longer necessary to their purposes. It never really fitted them anyway. The people have, for the most part, become docile consumers who no longer demand Christian virtue from their masters, since they have none themselves. And so the wheel turns....

[annatar1914]

It is; but in truth it never really went away. Almost all of the West's ruling elites have always lived by those pagan values, even while professing to be the most devout Christians. Machiavelli merely pointed this out, and in that respect was more virtuous than his contemporaries, because unlike them he was not a hypocrite.

Yes, our rusticated philosopher of reality, Machiavelli, was definitely on to something with ''The Prince'' and other writings, although one need not be a Straussian to legitimately impart an esoteric interpretation to what he was saying. It's not even contested anymore that that is what Machiavelli was saying; ''Bring back the Pagan past'', which is why he was on the Index for so long-for all the good that did to stop his ideas.

But anyway, of course you're right, and it solves little either to lament or deny it. After all, what this thread has partly been about is the question of what is to replace the Christianity of the West in the future; Mormonism or Islam... Either can be made congenial to the Elite worldview we have touched upon.

But of course it's possible that there will indeed be a full return to outright Paganism. It's not like the myth making for a new Pagan era is too farfetched to happen, because one need only look at the recent immense output of Hollywood entertainment based on comic-book heroes and villains and science fiction and fantasy stories to see that it's not only possible, but actual... People now can be made to believe again from childhood in realms like Olympus or Asgard.

I'm open to the possibility of that, as long as it's understood that to me, ''Paganism'' is a much broader term in my worldview that has at all times and places had an influence on all peoples as a basic default setting for dealing with reality. For many people. So a somewhat ''Christian'' sect that is really another religion could step into the vacuum.

All that has changed is that the West's elites have discarded the mask of Christian virtue as being no longer necessary to their purposes. It never really fitted them anyway. The people have, for the most part, become docile consumers who no longer demand Christian virtue from their masters, since they have none themselves. And so the wheel turns....

This is true also, in my opinion subject to my earlier provisions concerning the possibility of a sect filling the spiritual void successfully for a time.

[Potemkin]

Yes, our rusticated philosopher of reality, Machiavelli, was definitely on to something with ''The Prince'' and other writings, although one need not be a Straussian to legitimately impart an esoteric interpretation to what he was saying. It's not even contested anymore that that is what Machiavelli was saying; ''Bring back the Pagan past'', which is why he was on the Index for so long-for all the good that did to stop his ideas.

It could be argued that the entire Renaissance was an attempt to bring back the pagan past, to return to the pre-Christian 'virtue' of ancient Greece and Rome (and let us not forget that the very word 'virtue' itself has the pagan values inscribed within it, being derived from the Latin word for 'man'; to the pagans, 'virtue' meant courage, fortitude, endurance, the will to power - in a word, manliness - not the soft, yielding, feminised 'virtue' of Christianity). Many of the Renaissance thinkers, writers and artists were outright self-declared pagans, who would have recognised Friedrich Nietzsche as a fellow spirit.

But anyway, of course you're right, and it solves little either to lament or deny it. After all, what this thread has partly been about is the question of what is to replace the Christianity of the West in the future; Mormonism or Islam... Either can be made congenial to the Elite worldview we have touched upon.

But of course it's possible that there will indeed be a full return to outright Paganism. It's not like the myth making for a new Pagan era is too farfetched to happen, because one need only look at the recent immense output of Hollywood entertainment based on comic-book heroes and villains and science fiction and fantasy stories to see that it's not only possible, but actual... People now can be made to believe again from childhood in realms like Olympus or Asgard.

The most likely replacement for Christianity (assuming it needs to be replaced by a single unifying religion at all rather than a mashup of western paganism and eastern mysticism) is probably the Jedi religion from Star Wars. Some Westerners have even started writing it as their religion in offical forms. What starts as a joke could end in all seriousness....

I'm open to the possibility of that, as long as it's understood that to me, ''Paganism'' is a much broader term in my worldview that has at all times and places had an influence on all peoples as a basic default setting for dealing with reality. For many people. So a somewhat ''Christian'' sect that is really another religion could step into the vacuum.

I would submit that the 'Christianity' which exists in the USA is already performing that role. It is a mashup of paganism and Phariseeism dressed up as Christianity, which evolved to make 'Christianity' fully compatible with the capitalist mode of production.

[annatar1914]

It could be argued that the entire Renaissance was an attempt to bring back the pagan past, to return to the pre-Christian 'virtue' of ancient Greece and Rome (and let us not forget that the very word 'virtue' itself has the pagan values inscribed within it, being derived from the Latin word for 'man'; to the pagans, 'virtue' meant courage, fortitude, endurance, the will to power - in a word, manliness - not the soft, yielding, feminised 'virtue' of Christianity).

I may be assuming that you do not buy into the Classical Greco-Roman concept of what ''virtue'' is, but not to put too fine a point on it, the Christianity I regard as the ''Right-Believing'' has in it's Canon of Scripture the books of the Septuagint, including the Books of the Maccabees with their stories of both resolute martyrdom and martial courage against those very Hellenic forces which we have mentioned in our discussion.

That being said, I agree with your characterization of how the Pagan Apollonian/Hellenic Civilization viewed ''virtue'', tied up as it was-and is?-with their notions of both Shame and Honor. Again, alien to some of a more Christian cultural remnant, who look askance at Pagan ideas on suicide and infanticide (and those ideas are returning, by the way)

Many of the Renaissance thinkers, writers and artists were outright self-declared pagans, who would have recognised Friedrich Nietzsche as a fellow spirit.

Sure, and he with them. Funny then to me how Savonarola strikes me as more contemporary to Nietzsche's era as a kind of Marx or Lenin in clerical garb, while his contemporaries were looking backwards and forwards to Caesars and Alexanders both old and new.

The most likely replacement for Christianity (assuming it needs to be replaced by a single unifying religion at all rather than a mashup of western paganism and eastern mysticism) is probably the Jedi religion from Star Wars. Some Westerners have even started writing it as their religion in offical forms. What starts as a joke could end in all seriousness....

I get what you're saying, but given the ''Americanization'' of the West there is a grouping with a more favorable and well established pedigree for upholding the Capitalist world order and limiting government-the Mormons. Mormonism will adapt the ''Space Opera'' feel soon enough, as Orson Scott Card's ''Ender's Game'' novels hint at embryonically.

I would submit that the 'Christianity' which exists in the USA is already performing that role. It is a mashup of paganism and Phariseeism dressed up as Christianity, which evolved to make 'Christianity' fully compatible with the capitalist mode of production.

What results, again, is Mormonism. I have a book I have had for a long time by a famous conservative figure in America, W. Cleon Skousen;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Cleon_Skousen

Man had a tremendous influence well beyond the LDS circles he moved in initially, and a most fervent Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist.

The book is called; ''the 5000 year leap; a miracle that changed the world''

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_ ... _Year_Leap

Which might be further enlightening on why I believe Americanism, Mormonism, and Capitalism, with limited Libertarian government, are converging in the West.

Not that this is something I'm looking forwards to of course, but it is what it is. Elsewhere, the Christian faith is already preserved, and perhaps shall see a revival that in human terms is probably impossible now in the West.

[Potemkin]

I may be assuming that you do not buy into the Classical Greco-Roman concept of what ''virtue'' is, but not to put too fine a point on it, the Christianity I regard as the ''Right-Believing'' has in it's Canon of Scripture the books of the Septuagint, including the Books of the Maccabees with their stories of both resolute martyrdom and martial courage against those very Hellenic forces which we have mentioned in our discussion.

The Jewish religion, while relatively more 'civilised' than most religions of the Middle East and Mediterranean at the time, glorified war and shedding the blood of their tribe's enemies. I am referring specifically to Christian morality, which even by Jewish standards was and is unusually soft-hearted (the pagan Romans would probably have called it "soft-headed". Lol).

And at this stage of my life the only thing I "buy into" is Marxism, and even that is contingent on its historical context. After all, Marxism is a critique of the capitalist mode of production, and if that mode of production is ever overturned or replaced (as I believe it will be) then Marxism itself would lose its meaning and its relevance to the real world. And just like the capitalist mode of production and the state apparatus and all the accoutrements of capitalist oppression, copies of Capital would be stored, unread and likely unremembered, in museums. Lol.

No "truth" about this world is eternal. Reality corrodes every fantasy it touches, and the historical process turns every monument and every ideology to dust and ashes. Which is as it should be.

Sure, and he with them. Funny then to me how Savonarola strikes me as more contemporary to Nietzsche's era as a kind of Marx or Lenin in clerical garb, while his contemporaries were looking backwards and forwards to Caesars and Alexanders both old and new.

Indeed. What strikes me about Savonarola and others like him, is how modern they look now. His contemporaries seem quaint and old-fashioned, while Savonarola's ideological purity and his fanatical belief that human society can be reformed into a perfect utopia seem up-to-the-minute. Even his art- and book-burnings look modern. Lol.

I get what you're saying, but given the ''Americanization'' of the West there is a grouping with a more favorable and well established pedigree for upholding the Capitalist world order and limiting government-the Mormons. Mormonism will adapt the ''Space Opera'' feel soon enough, as Orson Scott Card's ''Ender's Game'' novels hint at embryonically.

Lol. I still think a mashup of paganism and eastern mysticism dressed up as whatever mainstream religion is traditional to that society is the most likely outcome. After all, there were hundreds of petty religions and sects in ancient Rome, and nobody minded. The pagan mind-set is, after all, characterised by religious tolerance. If nothing is true, then everything is true. Lol.

Which might be further enlightening on why I believe Americanism, Mormonism, and Capitalism, with limited Libertarian government, are converging in the West.

Converging in the USA perhaps, but not really elsewhere in the West.

Not that this is something I'm looking forwards to of course, but it is what it is. Elsewhere, the Christian faith is already preserved, and perhaps shall see a revival that in human terms is probably impossible now in the West.

It is most likely to be preserved in the peripheries of the Western sphere of influence - in places like Africa, Russia or the like.

[annatar1914]

@Potemkin , Thank you for your thoughtful replies in this discussion of ours;

The Jewish religion, while relatively more 'civilised' than most religions of the Middle East and Mediterranean at the time, glorified war and shedding the blood of their tribe's enemies.

I'm not one to characterize the Faith of the Old Testament Jews as something different than that of Orthodox Christianity, save that one period of the people of God was under the Law and the new is under grace. But fundamentally it's a different conversation.

I am referring specifically to Christian morality, which even by Jewish standards was and is unusually soft-hearted (the pagan Romans would probably have called it "soft-headed". Lol).

Perhaps if one looked at Leo Tolstoy for the comparison, lol. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I don't see a huge radical difference in Judeo-Christian morality, while there is that break in contrast with Gentile and Pagan morality for sure.

And at this stage of my life the only thing I "buy into" is Marxism, and even that is contingent on its historical context. After all, Marxism is a critique of the capitalist mode of production, and if that mode of production is ever overturned or replaced (as I believe it will be) then Marxism itself would lose its meaning and its relevance to the real world. And just like the capitalist mode of production and the state apparatus and all the accoutrements of capitalist oppression, copies of Capital would be stored, unread and likely unremembered, in museums. Lol.

It's hard to say. Marx (and Marxists) might have changed Capitalism somewhat by their very critique, in reaction to that critique, dialectically speaking. This is why I think that Ayn Rand arose when and how she did, as a kind of ''Counter-Marx''.

No "truth" about this world is eternal. Reality corrodes every fantasy it touches, and the historical process turns every monument and every ideology to dust and ashes. Which is as it should be.

I'd say, no ''truth'' that is ''from'' this World is eternal. We see and experience it naturally as strife and conflict for sure.

Indeed. What strikes me about Savonarola and others like him, is how modern they look now. His contemporaries seem quaint and old-fashioned, while Savonarola's ideological purity and his fanatical belief that human society can be reformed into a perfect utopia seem up-to-the-minute. Even his art- and book-burnings look modern. Lol.

It's a nagging curiousity for me, more than a mere historical oddity, Savonarola dismissed by historians as an relic of a bygone era when I see him as anything but.

Lol. I still think a mashup of paganism and eastern mysticism dressed up as whatever mainstream religion is traditional to that society is the most likely outcome. After all, there were hundreds of petty religions and sects in ancient Rome, and nobody minded. The pagan mind-set is, after all, characterised by religious tolerance. If nothing is true, then everything is true. Lol.

You've got a point, Paganism is markedly tolerant except towards anything that threatens the Pagan order itself. And re; Mormonism and Roman Catholicism, i'm still debating and researching whether or not the 'ship has already sailed' towards a stopgap measure by the Western Elites using those entities or whether we'll be dealing with full-on Greco-Roman type Paganism, similar perhaps to the period of Syncretism after Alexander the Great's empire broke apart.

Converging in the USA perhaps, but not really elsewhere in the West.

Well, there may not be much of a West otherwise, elsewhere.

It is most likely to be preserved in the peripheries of the Western sphere of influence - in places like Africa, Russia or the like.

It's funny that you should say that, because given my life with Russia and Orthodoxy, and also the Coptic and Ethiopian friends and co-workers I've had over the years, I'd say that it will definitely be preserved along the ''peripheries'' of the Western cultural hegemony.

[annatar1914]

It's funny that you should say that, because given my life with Russia and Orthodoxy, and also the Coptic and Ethiopian friends and co-workers I've had over the years, I'd say that it will definitely be preserved along the ''peripheries'' of the Western cultural hegemony.

And this comment I made earlier in response to @Potemkin leads to a pattern in this thread that I've been wanting to touch upon.

I've been speaking of the West, of Race, and the role of the Other in Western thought. Many in the West have now elevated the Other almost to an object of worship these days, the more antithetical to previously held Western beliefs the ''better''.

This is why some peoples that no doubt fill the archetypal role of the Other to Westerners are rejected as a model of emulation, because the beliefs of these people are anathema precisely because they bear some familial relation to what the West formerly believed centuries ago;

So they too have to be undermined, absorbed, or destroyed if needs be in the thinking of these Western and Westernized Elites, speaking of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian peoples of the Horn of Africa specifically;

https://thesaker.is/the-shift-to-ethiop ... ying-west/

So obviously, it's not entirely about Race as a concept, but alienation from what it means to be fully and integrally human, within oneself.

[annatar1914]

If America is the quintessentially ''Modern'' society, in the very vanguard of the West's dynamic development and it's primary prop and engine in the World, then it appears that the rest of the World is only reluctantly ''Modern'' in the Western sense, given the differences between America and the rest of the World.

Is America's divided and minimalist political system more Modernist than people are prepared to admit, even though it was written over 200 years ago, precisely because it is so Minarchist and almost misses the entire tried-and-true point of having a State at all?

My earlier cogitations on what the actual political spectrum is and why, essentially agreeing with the Libertarians as to placement on the Spectrum but not agreeing on the relative goodness of what is placed where (i.e.; if the State or the weakness or absence of a State is evil or not). But what I did not yet relate to this train of thought is it's relation to Modernity and traditional pre-modern political and philosophical thought.

Bastiat is more radical and more Modern than Marx or Engels, in this way of looking at things. Bastiat, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Von Mises and Hayek and above all, Ayn Rand, are genuine unique trailblazers in relation to politics and economics and philosophy compared to Marx or Engels or Lenin. After all, the Marxist thinkers are merely ''commenting on Plato'' after a fashion, along with the rest, and have no real desire to do away with the State or weaken it in it's role with regard to people's lives.

And Fascists and Nazis? They are both not true Statists nor significantly traditional or pre-modern when compared to the Libertarians, the Anarcho-Capitalists, the Objectivists and so forth. With privatization and personalization of both leadership and the military/police functions of the State, the Fascist political spectrum all but abolishes the State as it has always been known for thousands of years. In this, the Marxist Leninists and other true Leftists are a good deal more conservative and quite sane when it comes to political matters.

Besides, the concerns of the Fascists, especially the Nazis, and the concerns of the Minarchist to Anarcho-Capitalist end of the political spectrum, are almost suspiciously the same; the upholding of the Modernist world order.

[annatar1914]

Here we are at the Orthodox second week after Pentecost, and during the ''Apostles Fast'', and while the world goes on as it always has, a remnant lives by faith in Christ Jesus, the True Hope of the World. Living a joyful and true Christian life is an entire way of life, personal and social.

The Muslims who are faithful to what they believe as established truth shame us in the West, for living out fully what they believe (even as I believe them to be generally wrong) and insisting that God is Sovereign. We Christians pray the ''Our Father'' Christ Himself taught us to pray, and say; ''...Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven...'' but how many seek to see that happen?

The West is unique, abnormal even, in making a clear divide between spirituality/religion and the secularized zone of modern everyday existence. God perceptually is at best to the moderns a ''Constitutional Monarch'' much like Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, to many modern western bourgeoisie ''Christians'', vaguely ruling but not governing collectively or personally in everyday lives. Now appearing to be at best a Watchmaker who wound everything up and let it go to run itself once started. Religion to many these days is like stamp collecting or football or a video game; a hobby or diversion to take up a little bit of time to keep up appearances and have an established routine, because such a God doesn't seem real or personal in any significant way.

This is why I spoke earlier in previous posts of living as a fully integral human person, and how the West's hyper-individualism runs counter to that innate possibility. In true Christianity, there is no ''Other'' from which to project our own disordered passions upon, no idolatry of, nor hatred of, the distant and unfamiliar human relative who we are confronted with seeing, made as we are in the Image and Likeness of God.

[annatar1914]

Modern man is as I've expressed before, a Westerner in spirit; ''Faustian'' to use Spengler's apt descriptive, a traveler in a straight line of infinite space in infinite time, progressing ever forwards better and better in comparison with his predecessors. Quite the conceit, quite the self-idolatry.

Every Westerner is eventually a Socialist of sorts, again at least in the Spenglerian sense of being would-be ''World-Improvers'' as he puts it, because the wellspring of Western desire coaxes out of the Modern heart a compulsive need to constantly ''improve'' and ''renew'' and ''reform'' and carry out ''revolutions'', or to follow those who preach the same. Real Socialism if it were ever to work, would be the result of organic developments over time and within the context of a culture that would never exactly see It as what we have known it as.

Fortunately in my opinion there are fewer and fewer Westerners in the West, leaving as I've mentioned in previous posts a European Man recrudescence of the Gentile Greco-Roman type of Heathen classical world, Neitzsche and Spengler's ''Apollonian''/''Dionysian'' culture, and the ''Magian'' of which I've also related in this thread.

It's not the end of the world, but it's the end of ''a'' world, really having ended beyond living memory during the Renaissance say about 1492 AD. Western man would afterwards start some new convulsion, and in the wake of the turmoil the Pagan would set up his alien city. One would sow but the other would reap, until finally it's all but over for the Faustian as I see now. Only, they just don't know it just yet. There is no final Imperium, there is no ''Second Religiousness'' for the West, as Spengler failed to see I believe. Faustian man ensured that there will be no lasting monument, except the void left by his absence being filled by others.

So I'll be talking about those who will inherit. I'll discuss the Heathen, and the Magian, especially those embedded within the Western world at this time.

[Wellsy]

@annatar1914
This is interesting to see your post just as it feels most relevant to me as I was thinking along some similar points.

https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=178749

And then I think this helps me clarify the pessimism of our times where there is frustration with the sense of having not progressed. The optimism which I suspect resides largely in the split of natural science from values based in capitalist productions need to revolutionize production technology and is indifferent to the value of such except of increasing the singular value of profit. Progress is identified with the expansion of production and then its corresponding values of equality in the abstract (whilst inequality in content/actuality). And the world has never changed so rapidly as upon capitalist production, ways of life radically thrown around, unlike the times where you know ones lot in life. Here there is a lack of that stability of meaning and even a human self.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=178757
And I think your point about the end of a world is apt in that we let an old self die and the pain of both the destruction of cutting off and distancing from that self or world and the pain of being born into a new one.
And true to your sense I am someone who aspires to a communist position and whilst seeing it as far off in actually, see the basis of its realization in today as important against the stagnation of “progress”.

Although in such an imagining the progress is to fundamentally change to one of human values and relationships that somehow grow out of modernity. Which assumes we don't just collapse our present state. Values that are particularly born in modernity but yet lack dominance like the working class’ solidarity. The ability to organize relative strangers into working together because if the intrinsic value of a thing rather than shared ideology or perceived self interest (alliance politics).

[annatar1914]

Thanks @Wellsy , I'll try to address your points and discuss further along the lines you have presented here. You said;

This is interesting to see your post just as it feels most relevant to me as I was thinking along some similar points.

https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=178749

Excellent thread!

And then I think this helps me clarify the pessimism of our times where there is frustration with the sense of having not progressed. The optimism which I suspect resides largely in the split of natural science from values based in capitalist productions need to revolutionize production technology and is indifferent to the value of such except of increasing the singular value of profit. Progress is identified with the expansion of production and then its corresponding values of equality in the abstract (whilst inequality in content/actuality). And the world has never changed so rapidly as upon capitalist production, ways of life radically thrown around, unlike the times where you know ones lot in life. Here there is a lack of that stability of meaning and even a human self.

True, very true. That's why I was pleased to read the articles in English of the ''Essence of Time'' Movement, and perhaps you can give me your impressions on it? Sergei Kurginyan touches on this very problem of ''ways of life radically thrown around'' by Capitalism, in the ''Essence of Time'' Manifesto;

http://eu.eot.su/about/manifesto/

And you might like this short pithy article;

http://eu.eot.su/2019/11/07/kurginyan-c ... e-freedom/

And I think your point about the end of a world is apt in that we let an old self die and the pain of both the destruction of cutting off and distancing from that self or world and the pain of being born into a new one.

It's not as if I do not have compassion even for the wealthy who live under the present system; it's inhuman to us all and warps all human relations. But some pain is perhaps inevitable as a new era in human civilization dawns. It may be a better time that is coming in some ways, maybe worse or about the same in others, but nonetheless anyone with a sense of justice is working towards it in their own ways, whether they realize it or not.

And true to your sense I am someone who aspires to a communist position and whilst seeing it as far off in actually, see the basis of its realization in today as important against the stagnation of “progress”.

Personally, my sense of Teleological purpose has only increased since I managed to square the circle (as some would have a person believe, that it's impossible to do) of perception regarding Socialism and Christianity.

Although in such an imagining the progress is to fundamentally change to one of human values and relationships that somehow grow out of modernity. Which assumes we don't just collapse our present state. Values that are particularly born in modernity but yet lack dominance like the working class’ solidarity. The ability to organize relative strangers into working together because if the intrinsic value of a thing rather than shared ideology or perceived self interest (alliance politics).

Human nature isn't going to change, even under Socialism. But I think it'll be important as with any other civilizational advance to have, to make lives better, much as more mundane things we take for granted like the toothbrush, running water, vaccines, and electricity. Socialism in my mind is a ''social technology'' that can and should be in use likewise, and should be as uncontroversial as those things i've mentioned. That it is controversial, and is resisted a great deal, is at least as interesting as the motivations for and against on either side of the debate, don't you think?

[annatar1914]

So, short break from the narrative of the past couple of posts on this thread. I hate racists. I especially hate covert racists and crypto-fascists who masquerade as anti-racists and ''progressive'' and humanist persons and organizations.

So I'm going to be real frank. When slavery and serfdom was over, it was over because Capitalism found slaves and serfs to be unprofitable and too high maintenance in upkeep. Besides, Capitalists have found the ''lesser breeds'' to be a revolutionary threat as well. At it's core, Capitalism is ''Social Darwinist'' and deeply Eugenicist, and so ''lesser breeds'' of mankind that inhabit the core societies of the Western world, descended in large part from those in various conditions of servitude, simply have to go, one way or another. Population control was then instituted, among other covert forms of genocide such as mass marketed and organized substance abuse and gun violence against the ''unfit'' of various ethnic, cultural, and religious origins. All of this still remains and is in place today, just that the Elites cued to this effort are more sophisticated in carrying out this agenda than their predecessors.

[annatar1914]

Modern man is as I've expressed before, a Westerner in spirit; ''Faustian'' to use Spengler's apt descriptive, a traveler in a straight line of infinite space in infinite time, progressing ever forwards better and better in comparison with his predecessors. Quite the conceit, quite the self-idolatry.

Every Westerner is eventually a Socialist of sorts, again at least in the Spenglerian sense of being would-be ''World-Improvers'' as he puts it, because the wellspring of Western desire coaxes out of the Modern heart a compulsive need to constantly ''improve'' and ''renew'' and ''reform'' and carry out ''revolutions'', or to follow those who preach the same. Real Socialism if it were ever to work, would be the result of organic developments over time and within the context of a culture that would never exactly see It as what we have known it as.

Fortunately in my opinion there are fewer and fewer Westerners in the West, leaving as I've mentioned in previous posts a European Man recrudescence of the Gentile Greco-Roman type of Heathen classical world, Neitzsche and Spengler's ''Apollonian''/''Dionysian'' culture, and the ''Magian'' of which I've also related in this thread.

It's not the end of the world, but it's the end of ''a'' world, really having ended beyond living memory during the Renaissance say about 1492 AD. Western man would afterwards start some new convulsion, and in the wake of the turmoil the Pagan would set up his alien city. One would sow but the other would reap, until finally it's all but over for the Faustian as I see now. Only, they just don't know it just yet. There is no final Imperium, there is no ''Second Religiousness'' for the West, as Spengler failed to see I believe. Faustian man ensured that there will be no lasting monument, except the void left by his absence being filled by others.

So I'll be talking about those who will inherit. I'll discuss the Heathen, and the Magian, especially those embedded within the Western world at this time.

So, to start with, I'll make a slight critique of Oswald Spengler from whom I have drawn many of my attempted insights. Spengler states that Western civilization has ''carried the dead weight of the classical civilization'' on it's back from the very beginning.

What I suggest is that Classical civilization, or rather the type of mankind that produces such a civilization, was itself an example of what Spengler himself describes as a victim of what he called ''Pseudomorphisis'', in which a culture is engulfed by another and forced to carry on with inner thoughts not corresponding to external and alien forms. And that with the Renaissance period in the West you had a rebirth not only of Classical forms but also the Pagan culture and mindset which produced those forms. So in the West, you have two broad cultures after 1492 AD within one geographic region of the World-Western Europe and North America, with two broad types of person; Faustian and Apollonian. For now, I will not yet renew a discussion of the ''Magian'' complex of culture posited by Spengler, also somewhat embedded within the West.

Faustian man believes in ''Progress'' and development. Apollonian man believes the cosmos is static, and development and progress are not only not desired, but literally unthinkable.

Faustian man imagines an infinite cornucopia of goods showering upon mankind from the economic system he dreams of and sets into motion. Apollonian man believes wealth is a zero-sum game of Fortune and Fate, a blessing from the gods, and thinks in terms only of primitive accumulation and magnitude.

Faustian Man regards God in terms of infinite mystery, Apollonian man regards the gods in earthly terms, in a kind of business type relations of mutual ''you get something and I get something''.

Faustian man is always full of ideas to ''fix'' the problem of inequality and hierarchy. Classical/Apollonian man believes relative inequality and hierarchy, servitude or a master's domination, is built into the very nature of things.

Faustian man is mesmerized by the figure of the ''Other'', as Enemy or desired figure. Classical/Apollonian man does not regard the Other as anything other than an Enemy or as a servant, presently or in the future.

Faustian man regards Time very seriously, almost obsessively. Classical man regards only the ever present Present, past and future are not objects of any real focus. Nor is Place anything truly abstract to Classical man, it's the locality, the City-State, ''patriotism'' only extends thus far and no further.

[annatar1914]

Been thinking about this story;

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/army ... nazi-group

Satanist Fascism striving to break the remnant of Christian feeling and humanism in the West by aiding Islamist terror. Reminded somehow of this guy, the model for ''Klingsor'';

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landulf_II_of_Capua

I generally try to read in the news, if anything, stories that aren't getting front page coverage by the media that are more interesting and/or important than the overly political and propagandized ones we all love getting hysterical about. Civilizational treason isn't always on the ''Left'', it's on the ''Right'' too.

So how does this relate in my mind to what I've said earlier? Recall that I originally saw a schism in the Western mind, with two cultures embedded in the West more or less uncomfortably cohabitating...The reborn Pagan and the dying ''Faustian''?

Oswald Spengler was wrong. They are the same in essence, Spengler not seeing it because he was too close to the political and philosophical movements in that direction himself. One engages in Titanic striving for a purpose, one that ultimately entails a rejection and negation of the Christian worldview.

Fascism/Nazism always was Satanic/Luciferian, issuing forth from esoteric and occult groups that shared an essentially Anti-Christian, Anti-Semitic, Heathen ethos, and always related more to the future Christ-denying Objectivism of Ayn Rand and the Libertarianism of a Ludwig von Mises than some might be prepared to admit.

The Post-Christian West cannot then be said to anything different in substance than what it was before Christ, operating on principles that are alien to those who have at the very least a vestigial mooring in Christian categories of thought and feeling. It's a different world now for some;

Same as an older world.

[annatar1914]

At least for now, this new Pagan world in the West needs a transposed sacred cosmology out there in the ''Faustian'' infinite universe, not just ''long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...", but all around us. I'm thinking of it's roots in the Hermeticism revealed by Giordano Bruno, extending to the UFO/Ancient Astronaut/New Age religion of today, Bigfoot, Cryptids, Paranormal, etc...

The Pagan world is numinous, full of ghosts and wizards and monsters and magical beasts, heroes and strange things that defy easy explanation. And perhaps this is indeed more of the real world than that of the secular materialists, from a certain point of view, Arthur C. Clarke having famously said that beyond a certain point ''technology is indistinguishable from magic''.

So really, there's just this more or less Pagan world, with it's gods and strange forces, mysteries and myth, crude and amoral and earthy and yet evoking some concealed truths (read ''Hamlet's Mill'' by Georgio Santanilla sometime). Are we, collectively speaking anyway, under some kind of spell that distorts our perceptions of reality?

Everyone should know by now what my answer to that question is. So of Spengler and Neitzsche's cultures, there is only the Classical and the ''Magian'' that truly can be said to exist today, broadly speaking. And with these two as lenses through which to view reality, I'll examine the modern world in the next post, What it means. For now suffice it to say that it's roots are entirely in a very specific philosophical stance within Classical philosophy and the Mystery Schools of the Greco-Roman period.