/lit/ - Literature

>At the end of the First World War, a German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, attempted a universal explanation of the facts that we are now confronting, in a book that prophesied, not without a certain sadistic elation, the downfall of the Western World. Spengler divided the development of every culture into two phases: first, a humane organic phase, the springtime of culture, when man’s powers ripen and the arts flourish as a natural expression of his inner life and creativity; and, second, an arid mechanical phase, with life on the downward curve, a phase in which men become extraverted and externalized, given to organization and to the creation of hardened forms of life, creating a shell of empty custom and habit that prevents any further growth, so that, if the civilization that so takes form continues for any length of time, it is given over merely to vain repetitions, with no fresh content or meaning.

>Our failure so far to regain the initiative for the human spirit, our inability, in general, to produce symbols that would help restore our inner composure and confirm our hidden desires and give buoyancy to sunken hopes, our inability to pull ourselves out of a Bunyan-like Slough of Despond in which we are struggling—all these failures are not peculiar to the arts: they afflict in similar ways almost every other activity. In a world whose need for peace and brotherhood and planetary cooperation is now close to absolute—since a false move here may bring about a swift downfall of civilization—most of our deliberate collective actions on both sides of the Iron Curtain are in the direction of isolation, non communication, and destruction. We have submitted even in democratic countries to an unconditional surrender of the higher aspects of human life, justice, art, love, truth, fellow feeling, and have elevated into a position of command all the lower aspects of group existence— tribalism, irrational hatred, brutality, pathological self assertion and self-adoration—all piously masked as a patriotic obligation. The automaton and the id, the uncontrolled machine and the unconditioned brute, have captured the normal sphere of the personality. In a desperate effort at compensation we bestow the attributes of personality upon a single dictatorial figure: the modern equivalent of the Saviour Emperor who first appeared in the third century BC in Greece, a time of similar disintegration. The Leader alone then becomes a real person.

-- LM/AaT

lacan ofc got Epically Served by D&G. adorno had a garland of flowers draped over his head by a topless naiad. mumford likes thoreau, emerson, and william james. that's his feeling: withdraw from the megamachine.

>I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. - Étienne de La Boétie