I Reject, I Affirm. ''Raising the Black Flag'' in an Age of Devilry. - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14992666
Continuing my musings on Spengler's work in relation to my own hostility to today's Money Power and it's hold over people's minds and souls, I found this excerpt to reflect on;


Quote from: Spengler vol II p.98

With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities the "money-markets" it is ignored.

Money has now become a power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely figured in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides in the waking-consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically active population, a power that makes those concerned with it just as dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil.

[...] Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures.

But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.


I made some breaks there for ease of reading. He says firstly that;

With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities the "money-markets" it is ignored.


This, despite the fact that Spengler is a Traditionalist and considered ''Right Wing'', is the same thing as Marx's 'Commodity Fetishism', with Money itself as the ultimate abstracted and reified good to be traded and multiplied, created out of nothing like God with Creation itself. He goes further and speaks to absolute indifference with which the Money Power looks at the Land and the People of the Land, as nothing more than a resource to be exploited.

Then he goes on to say;

... Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures.


Spengler talks about how in the Urban life of a Civilization, people are characterized by being often in a state of high active consciousness, brains working at a higher rate of speed and complexity a great deal of the time. And a large proportion of that time activity revolves around money and questions and answers about what money can and/or must do for the individual. This is not a good state of being to be in, not for very long anyway.

But then;
But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.


Being an abstracted thing, Money, that really is nothing more than a placeholder for value, not value itself, people regain a sense of it's unreality and Civilization starts to lose it's power over people, with the defeat of the Money Power.
#14992671
Continuing this conversation with Spengler, and knowing that probably at least 9/10ths of us here are Urbanites, I offer some of what Spengler has to say about cities during the Civilization phase of a culture, with my emphasis in bold and breaks made for easier viewing;

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.100-101

And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city-architect. In all Civilizations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of soullessness.

Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of "abstra ct" cities begins with Thurii, which was "planned" by Hippodamus of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 761, and the giant city of Samarra a century later, according to plan. In the West-European and American world the lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big example. There can be no doubt that the world-cities of the Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in India possessed this same geometrical pattern.

Even now the world-cities of the Western Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development. I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of to-day's and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.101-102

Consequently these city-bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula Feliculas, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet] to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level of the hill-saddle.

But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.102-103

What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous.

It must be remembered that in a microcosm the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of being, and not vice versa. Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension.

The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every Culture these heads are the types of its final men one has only to compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in the swirl of the great city's street-life. The advance, too, from peasant wisdom "slimness," mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.103-104

And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama the sterility of civilised man.

This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood a s an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.

That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.


Some of us Urbane and Bourgeoisie types might mock the vulgar Rube, Hick, or Laborer for acting instead of thinking, for having ''too many kids'' without ''sufficient reflection or reason'' to have them. For following instinct and peasant folksy wisdom and ways instead of ''Science''. But such types ''reason'' themselves out of existence throughout history, and would then rather ''eat, drink, and be merry'' for tomorrow they surely die...
#14992812
@Potemkin , @Victoribus Spolia, @Political Interest, and others of course;

Our opinions do not matter, except to ourselves perhaps. Facts alone matter, and the fact is, this coming era is the beginning of the end of politics as such, only a brutal and pragmatic will to make the decisions they will make. What we think of various figures personal morality that will characterize this coming era is irrelevant. Spengler wrote of these men and this situation, that;

The mighty ones of the future may possess the earth as their private property for the great political form of the Culture is irremediably in ruin but it matters not, for, formless and limitless as their power may be, it has a task. And this task is the unwearying care for this world as it is, which is the very opposite of the interestedness of the money-power age, and demands high honour and conscientiousness. But for this very reason there now sets in the final battle between Democracy and Caesarism, between the leading forces of dictatorial money-economics and the purely political will-to-order of the Caesars.


They will manage the decline, or accelerate it, given the propensity of this particular Civilization to accelerate anything to it's logical conclusion, it's denouement. They will depending on the persons take up the mantle of Revolution perhaps, or of Counter-Revolution, but no matter. They will rule informally and accrue titles like jewelry, and rule like kings.... And become Kings in name as well as reality.
#14992996
@Victoribus Spolia, @Potemkin ;

So, preparatory to expanding on my opposition to this Western/Faustian Age of Devilry, of the Machine which replaces God, I quote from Spengler again to indicate with what sort of culture my loyalties lie;


Quote from: Spengler vol II p.233-234

The world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses a kind of extension that may be called cavern-like, though it is difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian "space." For "space" has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of the two Cultures.

The world -as-cavern is just as different from the world-as-extent of the passionate, far-thrusting Faustian as it is from the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the worldfeeling of Jesus, and the Chaldean cavern-astronomy, which was wholly natural and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space.


The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical with the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man's sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical the opposition that universa lly dominates the waking-consciousness is the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of work.

In the World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that "Semitic" primary-dualism which, ever the same under its thousand forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances. Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding, like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the possession of man.

But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul (Hebrew Ruach and nephesh, Persian ahu and urvan, Mandaean monuhmed and gyan, Greek pneuma and psyche) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world-contemplations of the awakened Culture Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandaeans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah. Ruach means originally "wind" and nephesh "breath." The nephesh is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the "upward." The ruach belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment, ) and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out. 3 From Isaiah xi, x, the Messiah becomes the incarnation of the ruach. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the "elect," a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet).


Paragraph breaks for easier reading.

In generalities this is all true, although with my own specific theological position there are points of different emphasis and opinions on errors in religions within this cultural zone. But an affinity is there for the whole.

Instead of a progressive upward evolution, a battle between the Darkness and the Light, within me a striving and swaying about as forces seen and unseen fight within me and outside me, and I am only a part of the whole struggle.

Instead of looking out on an Infinite Space, I see a Enclosing Vault of darkness and lights, for signs and seasons which give the meaning behind Astrology. Instead of an Infinite or Near-Infinite Time, I find a non-progressive Beginning, Middle, and End of the Whole, whereupon the Cavern will be recreated, made perfect and new, and not entirely long in duration, a blink of an eye, really.

Magic, and Alchemy.... Cabala. Shining Lights and Deep Darknesses emblazoned on Eldritch Numbers and Letters. Rosicrucianism and the Philosopher's Stone. I find meanings there even if again on specifics there are mistakes and errors.

Instead of a God bound, a God Who is free and Who can do anything He Wills, miracles and wonders. A God of Saints Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not of the Philosophers and Savants.


Quote from: Spengler vol II p.239

World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world-feeling.

The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as "the Golden Age." This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind "thereabouts," an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or "Time."

The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world that is also the beginning and the end of man. Acts of God of mighty magic and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved.

The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. [...] The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even to-day the view over a given time. The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts world-beginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe.


This is my historical periodic view of Time; ''World-Beginning/World-Development/World-Catastrophe, contrasted with the Western/Faustian ''Ancient/Medieval/Modern''. But what's more, we have signs and wonders and mighty magic, as the Magian finds the Faustian mind under the spell of the Evil One, as Spengler writes;

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.235

Whereas the Faustian man is an "I" that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one soma among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a part of a pneumatic "We" that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers.

As body and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us.

All our epistemological methods, resting upon the individual judgment, are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes.


Emphasis in bold. ''Epistemology'' being of course; '' how we come to know things''. So, how then could I belief otherwise, then to think that our reason, our individual judgement, is blinded and deficient? And yet this new society born in roughly the year 1000 AD give or take a century or so, is entirely a creation of this individual will to power delusion.

Under a wicked spell... With that in mind, I shall speak of the Machine. What it is, and what it is not, and what influence it has on Western mankind, in my next post.
#14993084
The Machine.

The Machine is what I am against, not Technology in and of itself, tools by which man can lighten his burdens and make practical use of in daily existence. No, I'll enlighten what I mean by a series of quotes from Oswald Spengler which will help illustrate the nature of the problem with the Machine;

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.501-502

The Classical investigator "contemplated" like Aristotle's deity, the Arabian sought as alchemist for magical means (such as the Philosophers' Stone) whereby to possess himself of Nature's treasures without effort, but the Western strives to direct the world according to his will.

The Faustian inventor and discoverer is a unique type. The primitive force of his will, the brilliance of his visions, the steely energy of his practical ponderings, must appear queer and incomprehensible to anyone at the standpoint of another Culture, but for us they are in the blood. Our whole Culture has a discoverer's soul. To dis-cover that which is not seen, to draw it into the light-world of the inner eye so as to master it that was its stubborn passion from the first days on. All its great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps, to emerge at last with the necessity of a Destiny. All of them were very nearly approached by the high-hearted, happy research of the early Gothic monks. Here, if anywhere, the religious origins of all technical thought are manifested. These meditative discoverers in their cells, who with prayers and fastings wrung God's secret out of him, felt that they were serving God thereby.

Here is the Faust-figure, th e grand symbol of a true discovering Culture. The ''Scientia Experimentalis'', as Roger Bacon was the first to call nature-research, the insistent questioning of Nature with levers and screws, began that of which the issue lies under our eyes as a countryside sprouting factory-chimneys and conveyor towers.

But for all of them, too, there was the truly Faustian danger of the Devil's having a hand in the game, the risk that he was leading them in spirit to that mountain on which he promises all the power of the earth. This is the significance of the perpetuum mobile dreamed of by those strange Dominicans like Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest the almightiness from God. Again and again they succumbed to this ambition; they forced this secret out of God in order themselves to be God. They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they created the idea of the machine as a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone. But with that they overpassed the slender border-line whereat the reverent piety of others saw the beginning of sin, and on it, from Roger Bacon to Giordano Bruno, they came to grief. Ever and ever again, true belief has regarded the machine as of the Devil.


The Machine as a means for the Westerner to become as God Himself;

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.503-504

And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers, and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.


A hint even of ''Artificial Intelligence'', or the illusion of it.


Quote from: Spengler vol II p.504-505

Never save here has a microcosm felt itself superior to its macrocosm, but here the little life-units have by the sheer force of their intellect made the unliving dependent upon themselves. It is a triumph, so far as we can see, unparalleled. Only this our Culture has achieved i t, and perhaps only for a few centuries. But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it, have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no standing still and no turning back.

The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factory worker. Out of a quite small branch of manual work namely, the preparation economy there has grown up (in this one Culture alone) a mighty tree that casts its shadow over all the other vocations namely, the economy of the machine industry. It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedience. Both become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, that now for the first time develops its devilish and occult power.

But although the Socialistic theory of the present day has insisted upon looking only at the latter's contribution and has claimed the word "work" for him alone, it has all become possible only through the sovereign and decisive achievement of the former. The famous phrase concerning the "strong arm" that bids every wheel cease from running is a piece of wrong-headedness. To stop them yes ! but it does not need a worker to do that. To keep them running no ! The centre of this artificial and complicated realm of the Machine is the organizer and manager. The mind, not the hand, holds it together. But, for that very reason, to preserve the ever endangered structure, one figure is even more important than all the energy of enterprising master-men that make cities to grow out of the ground and alter the picture of the landscape; it is a figure that is apt to be forgotten in this conflict of politics the engineer, the priest of the machine, the man who knows it. Not merely the importance, but the very existence of the industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigorously school ed brains that command the technique and develop it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine's master and destiny. His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality.

There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails this army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the machine the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy and the workers can do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul's health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism to-day, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.


The Western industry has diverted the ancient traditions of the other Cultures. The streams of economic life move towards the seats of King Coal and the great regions of raw material. Nature becomes exhausted, the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking in energies. The working earth is the Faustian aspect of her, the aspect contemplated by the Faust of Part II, the supreme transfiguration of enterprising work and contemplating, he dies. Nothing is so utterly antipodal to the motionless satiate being of the Classical Empire. It is the engineer who is remotest from the Classical law-thought, and he will see to it that his economy has its own law, wherein forces and efficiencies will take the place of Person and Thing.


Emphasis in bold.

We have the ability to break the spell, walk away from this illusion of power and personal control which paradoxically enslaves us. But if we do not, The Sorceror will be overcome by his creation, and It will rise up and threaten to destroy us all. We have often enough discussed transhumanism and ''artificial intelligence'', robotics transforming human life, and here I see the lurking Devil.
#14993166
annatar1914 wrote:The Machine.

The Machine is what I am against, not Technology in and of itself, tools by which man can lighten his burdens and make practical use of in daily existence. No, I'll enlighten what I mean by a series of quotes from Oswald Spengler which will help illustrate the nature of the problem with the Machine;



The Machine as a means for the Westerner to become as God Himself;



A hint even of ''Artificial Intelligence'', or the illusion of it.




Emphasis in bold.

We have the ability to break the spell, walk away from this illusion of power and personal control which paradoxically enslaves us. But if we do not, The Sorceror will be overcome by his creation, and It will rise up and threaten to destroy us all. We have often enough discussed transhumanism and ''artificial intelligence'', robotics transforming human life, and here I see the lurking Devil.


It's not this has not been discussed among the Moderns, although they do not have a solution:

viewtopic.php?f=50&p=14993161#p14993161

Perhaps it is because either way, millions if not billions will die, either by the Machine or the attempt to break free from the Machine's embrace.

This is how Faustian man was always going to end, like the fictional ''Darth Vader'' (''Dark Father''?); Machine, Man, and Devil.
#14993900
@Potemkin , @Victoribus Spolia;

So, if Spengler is in any ways correct, and we are presently entering into the analogue of the ''Age of the Caesars'' in our own Faustian/Western History, are we also entering into his ''Second Religiousness''?

What does this mean, even?

The ''Second Religiousness'' of a particular Culture/Civilization is exactly that, a return to the forms traditional to the Culture/Civilization's prime religion, which in the Faustian case would be traditional medieval Roman Catholicism.

The ''Second Religiousness'' is a phenomenon which is more rational, a thing of formal adhesion and assent of the mind than a heartfelt piety. This does not mean it's followers will be lacking in zeal, far from that, but it is a dry and coldly rationalistic desire for religion as a social glue and support for the then-present order of things.

If I am correct, before 2024 AD, you will likely see a obvious return to traditional forms within the Roman Catholic Church, and thereafter, an obvious alliance between the Vatican and certain political powers in the world.
#14994220
The Kantian ''Ought/Is'' distinction, that of the categorical ethical Imperative, and that universally applied, holds little weight with me. My ''Socialism'' is despite a veneer of phrases borrowed from Western Left tropes and memes, takes it's driving force from what I believe to be the command of God. It's really just anti-capitalism and anti-modernity, closely linked.

I do believe that people will work closer together collectively once modernity is extinguished, but ''Socialism'' as a utopian vision can never be attained. We are generally too wicked for anything closely resembling it, for very long. We fight, we overthrow, and after a while the evil and the exploitation resumes.

The thread I had earlier posted upon Barbarism;

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=175928


Had some insights into this matter, but was predicated upon a slight misreading of the present situation.

It's later than we think. Not for happiness and all the joys which exist on a personal level, with a truly fulfilling life, but in expecting the modern era's politics to help fulfill our happiness and joys on that personal level. Those who rule, rule to fulfill their happiness and joys, and given their job is Rulership over the rest of us, it seems a tad naive to expect them to work too hard in fulfilling ours.

In fact, I worry more about modern politicians dedicated to making all our lives better, than the other kind.

All of which is to say that this throwback, this barbarian, this Iron Age relic of an obscure and reactionary faith, is no longer intent on helping improving and positively modifying the modern era. No, politics is over, and I'm jumping ship with my loot and sword in hand as the ship is burning to the waterline with only a few lifeboats making for the distant shore.

I'm with the Bikers and Horsemen, Cossacks and Cowboys, the Chechen Warriors who swear feudal oaths to Presidents, Mercenaries, Special Forces, Gangsters and Criminals, Outlaws and Rebels. The Common and downtrodden. The Religious and the Spiritual. The Feral and the Rural too. Patriarchs. Iron Men and Saints....Not all are bad men but they all to a man are free men prepping in their guts and their brains for the new Dark Age, which Lo! Has been with us for a few decades now I think, if not a century or two. I saw it when I saw ISIS explode onto the scene, and even if they are destroyed themselves, what they and those like them destroyed cannot be remade.

Goodbye Socialism, you were a weapon in my hand to wield against the Modernity at one time. But now I see that Socialism in it's modern iterations takes too much from the Modernity and the Bourgeoisie it attacks.

No, I'm going to embrace my ''anachronism'', and laugh as the whole rotten pile lands on the heads of the wicked.
#14994492
@Victoribus Spolia, and others;


My conclusions about Spengler and his insights are that while he is incorrect in my opinion concerning the lifespan of a Higher Culture, at least one in particular, he is correct on his basic details concerning Being and Becoming, Microcosm and Macrocosm, Time and Space, etc... And the Prime Symbols and forms each culture takes, that we are collectively conditioned to a remarkable degree by these thought forms.

One culture stands out, as it has become Worldwide in scope, as it was bound to do, and has all but absorbed and engulfed all other cultures in it's extensive and expansive drive. ''Collapsing'', it is yet entering, not leaving, it's Imperial phase that Lenin and so many others talked about 100 years ago. That may be a bitter pill for some, as we just went through a catastrophic war from 1914 to 1945 to crush Fascism, but the fact is that it is reviving and will be a problem once more very soon.

I also do not abide by Oswald Spengler's reactionary politics, which colored his approach to his study deeply. I believe that his ''Russian'' civilization and the ''Magian'' civilization are basically synonymous, and that Socialism is part of both of their foundations which are in Christianity (Islam being in my opinion a Christian heresy as much as Mormonism is, and my personal belief that Zoroasterianism is an offshoot of the Israelite religion of the Old Testament also). Socialism however, which is not the same as that of Marx in important respects, so much so that I hesitate to describe myself anymore as a Socialist or Communist because Marxism is a Christian heresy as well, a Christless and Godless one.
#14995121
In light of what I have said in this thread, it might be productive then to go back over what I had stated in the origin of this thread, and comment upon that;



I reject the Modern credos and manifestos which hallmark this rotten era.


There are elements of many 'modern credos and manifestos' which are correct and insightful, but not in their novelty, their modernity, but a remnant of truths retained.

I affirm the Symbol of Faith, the Nicene Creed, and all the Canons and Decrees of the Seven Ecumenical Councils and subsequent Councils and Synods of the Ancient Orthodox Church, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and the canons and decrees of the same.


So it must be doubly important that I reject all that contradicts this Orthodox faith.

I reject the Modern State, even if out of prudence and human respect for earthly authority I submit in all things except sin.


After all, I need take no action personally, the Modern State is collapsing of it's own accord, under it's own weight.

I affirm the rightful rule of Right-Believing Kings and Queens, of the God anointed and enlightened Orthodox Tsar, even though I know that today we are in an Interregnum with no Tsar, and possibly Antichrist will be shortly revealed as such unto the Elect of God.


Monarchist and yet for the People? If a Monarch were to rule by Christian teaching, absolutely this is no contradiction. A Monarch is needed to defend the People against any would be Oligarchs.

I reject all of the modern ideologies as being corrupt and delusional fruits of the same wicked tree, which is rebellion against God, and the division and mutual slaughter of mankind.


Pretty simple statement, and true.

I affirm the righteous ways of life rather than these ways of death, and so I regard the insight of the Scripture and other Holy Tradition as the rule of proper and peaceful Christian society and of the Christian person, as it was yesterday, today, and tomorrow, ever-young and salvific.


As this is the goal of the Church, the ingathering of the People into the Ark of Salvation.

I regard and reject sin as sin, and to be party to or condone sin is to be as if one was committing the evil itself. They may kill me, but they will not get me to admit that theft and murder and envy and fornication, are not those things.


And this truth of moral responsibility whether one does a wrong or not, but merely condones a wrong, is devastating to the whole of world society in these times.

I reject the hatred and fear of other peoples, or attempts and enslavement and extermination of other peoples.


Easy to say, but this opposes racism. And yet, one can be anti-racist and celebrate the reality of Ethnos, of heritage.

I affirm the right of every tribe, clan, and kingdom to live as they see fit with whom they see fit, or set limits to whom they will associate with, and defend their culture and society from invasion.


Not absolute of course, but good as a general rule.

I reject the theory of evolution as presently understood by many in the modern age, and the commonly accepted cosmology of this modern age.


Explained below.

I affirm the creation by God of the Universe in six days, and that the Earth is the center of the Universe, which rotates around it. This same Earth is a little more than 7000 years old, and more years it may well have although it s hard to see how much longer we can endure without the Lord's intervention.


That's right; young earth creationist and geocentrist, anti-evolutionary and anti-heliocentric. It is what it is and I won't even debate it.

I expect mockery and misunderstanding, hatred and venom and ridicule. Even icy silence. It has always been thus, and it is what true Christians can expect, to be regarded as insane, reactionary, foolish, and the enemies of humanity and it's ''progress''.

For those I expect to believe as I have laid out, your ''progress'' and ideologies all are one with the proud Giants who perished in the Flood, and the wicked of Sodom and Gommorah who perished in the fires cast upon the Cities of the Plain. One with the Rebellion of Korah and Dathan and fated like they were to be cast into the eternal fires of an everlasting Hell.


And so, as my subtitle suggests, in this Age of Devilry, science divorced from truth, from spirit. Flesh divorced from reason and enslaved to the disordered passions, one must (to borrow an analogy or symbol) from the pirates of old; ''raise the black flag''. Not of the Demoniac Muhammad to be sure, not his black flag, but one in which no quarter is given to the sinful structures of this filthy and decaying era.

We will escape you if we must, hide in the wildernesses literal and figurative out in the world. Where we are still strong we will do battle and oppose you, if nowhere else than in the recesses of our own hearts.

You know that this era is crashing down; this even explains your doubling down, ye Moderns, on your lunacies and your lusts, you know that your time is short.

I wrote this because I've had enough, i've had way too much consideration for mere human respect and consideration, in ''feelings'' instead of bearing witness to the truth. It may well be that from me the rest you will hear is Silence, but that silence will speak louder than my years here of multiplication of words.

A war is coming soon, very soon, in which global modern civilization will collapse and the greater part of mankind in many parts of the world will die, of the coming war and the attendant implosion of the world economy. Judgement is not delayed forever, the balance will once again be restored that favors the natural, the organic, the traditional development of existence. Those already closer to that and not to Civilization, those not cut off by an artificial, superfluous, and over-specialized existence, will survive. And even know a renewed measure of happiness and thrive under these changed conditions. The Righteous man is persecuted like Lot was in the midst of Sodom, living amidst the spiritual darkness of the Urban Petrifact. And like him we will be called to come out of the city of the wicked, someday.


So what must one's politics be, living and believing along these lines? This is what I want to discuss in the next posts.
#14995134
@Victoribus Spolia, @Political Interest, and others;

One thing that I reject, regretfully, is Socialism. I affirm that Capitalism in the modern sense is evil, and that the Rich are Wicked almost by definition and always have been, but business can be carried out via the free enterprise of the market, in a thrifty, industrious and productive manner, that is non-usurious and parasitic, that is good and useful to all and for all. That as an Orthodox saying I have learned of goes; “honestly earned and properly used property cannot be sinful”.

It's all in the concept of Stewardship. One does not ''own'' what one has, one has the gift of what one has and uses it to improve the lives and well-being of those around him, particularly the less fortunate, the Poor who have no superfluity of goods. It is a life of duty not ''rights'', of obligations and service, not greed and self indulgence. The goal is to be Poor to the World but have Treasure with Christ.

Indeed then, this is not to deny that it is indeed better and more holy, perfect in fact, to live the religious life of discipleship, to let go of all worldly goods and to live in common together, to share all with the community of the faithful in a prayerful life of battle for salvation, but all of that common sharing in this sinful world is voluntary, and in accord with the wisdom and canons of the Holy Church.

I know when I have been incorrect and own up to it. There is much to attack in modern life, because there is much sin that is enabled to thrive by the seductions of modern technology, but the solutions lie in the Apostolic teachings of those faithful to Christ.
#14995300
When people say ''we need to get back to the land'', they're saying ''I need to get back to the land''. But what they might as well be saying is that many people are going to have to die, and quite a few are going to have to work for the owners of arable land in exchange for a share of the food. As always, people simply are dependent on each other to survive, and ironically many of the ''rugged individualists', the 'preppers', the 'survivalists', will not survive unless they learn to team up and compliment each other's strengths and weaknesses.

I'm not going to sugar coat this. It is unthinkable to many, a collapse, simple because most of us reading this will not make it through any but a pretty slow transitional 'decline'. And for most of us this is alright; ''After me, the Flood''.... But let's get real here, many of us are quite aware of the unsustainable nature of the environment we live in, this artificial precarious web of more and more complicated systems that are so delicately balanced that almost anything could collapse the whole thing.

At the very least, find a community of people who can help each other and believe in having a future no matter what may come.
#14995696
@Potemkin , @Victoribus Spolia, @Political Interest;


Much of the evils of Wealth and of the Rich would be mitigated by the banning of usury. Now in modern times the ''churches'' have ceased to consider usury as a mortal sin, and they have changed the definition of usury as well. But, a wrong remains a wrong.

Originally the taking of any interest on a loan was considered a heinous sin and social evil, period. Today it is the very engine that drives modern life, and the acceptable charged rate of interest today varies with regard to it being considered ''usurious''. Now many pre-modern states banned Usury, but today it is a question as to whether it is the State that enforces this arrangement, or whether it is a integral feature of Capitalism which would obtain whether a State existed in Capitalist society or not.

Certainly, without the State to enforce contracts and business law, it would be hard to enforce such thievery on free parties, I'll admit. But again, is it even possible to have Capitalism without interest-bearing loans to persons and businesses? I suspect not.
#14995715
Hindsite wrote:Black Flag of Islam



@Hindsite

As I mentioned in my original post, this ''flag'' I mention ''raising'' is not the flag of the demoniac Muhammad, but calls to mind the saying; ''raising the black flag''. In the early days of exploration and piracy on the seven seas, ''raising the black flag' meant; ''no quarter given or expected''. We Christians are in a very real combat in this life, and it's good to be reminded about that I think. Not only that, but to be reminded of the battlegrounds ''Christians'' have given up to the Enemy over the centuries.

But since you do speak of the Jihadis, I think it's important to consider their very traditional Islamic eschatology and worldview. They have two existential enemies aside from the Jews in their end times beliefs. One are the ''Franj'' or ''Franks'', the Faustian or Western Civilization. The second is ''Rum'', or Rome, and that is not considered by many to be the Rome in Italy, but the ''Romaioi'', the Christians of Orthodoxy, Middle Eastern and East European mostly. However, there is some confusion about whether the Franks are also Romans by Islamists.

The Jihadis believe that the ''Romans'' are prophesied to almost destroy them in battle, before ''Dabiq'', and then the Mahdi and Islamic Jesus will defeat the ''Romans'' and the Dajjal al Mastih, the ''Lying Christ''. All of this is from that Magian cultural mindset I've discussed earlier, with both the false and the true Monotheist religions being Magian.

Geopolitically, ISIS has as I have discussed for many years here on PoFo, has permanently destroyed the map of the world, of the Middle East, and has not been defeated. The coalition of it's enemies fear and detest each other more than they fear and detest ISIS. That is a very bad mistake.

The Godless do not understand the Jihadis like committed Christians can and should.
#14995722
Hindsite wrote:Barbary Pirates: America's 1st Encounter with Islam



Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates - Past is Present



Yes, not a lot has changed either. Faustian/Western/Frankish Culture was born when Western Europe was cut off from the Christian Civilization in the East by the Islamic invasions, and became different in being from that cut off. The Islamic piracy and slaver trade and raids continued, really to this very day. It's no surprise that America, the distillation of Western Civilization, is in the forefront of the Crusader battle and always has been.
#14995884
Now, my friends, recall what I have said or referenced about Usury, and Money, and the Faustian concept of the Machine.

Money is as Oswald Spengler says;

With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities the "money-markets" it is ignored.


Entirely abstract to the modern mind, and for all that, a very real perpetual-motion machine, money is. And yet, entirely real as the blood and sweat and tears of the Poor, of suffering mankind. Money is as Leon Bloy once said, the ''blood of the poor man'', endlessly sucked from him in the cannibalistic feasts of the vampire Rich....
#14996207
annatar1914 wrote:Now, my friends, recall what I have said or referenced about Usury, and Money, and the Faustian concept of the Machine.

[...]

Entirely abstract to the modern mind, and for all that, a very real perpetual-motion machine, money is. And yet, entirely real as the blood and sweat and tears of the Poor, of suffering mankind. Money is as Leon Bloy once said, the ''blood of the poor man'', endlessly sucked from him in the cannibalistic feasts of the vampire Rich....

Money is essentially congealed human labour-power. In that sense, it is the congealed blood and sweat and tears of the labouring poor, the life-blood which has been extracted from them by the vampires who rule over us.
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