/lit/ - Literature

>>16389974
>post scarcity

>>15498779
They were all retroactively BTFO by Spengler. Seriously, Spengler makes 99% of philosophy obsolete.

>>15264979
transhumanism is self-defeating

>tfw when christians didn't destroy all ancient greek and roman poetry, thereby freeing the west from classicism and humanism
ugh... what could've been

>>13956952
if tolstoi was the past of russia in 1920, then we can now say dostoevsky was the past of russia and nabokov its future in 2019

With his insight into the tremendous obstacles frustrating the irrepressible dream of humankind to transcend interstate conflict, his pathbreaking appreciation of the significance of non-Western cultures, his impassioned advocacy of the universality and inexorability of the phenomenon of civilizational decline, and his intriguing argument of the insurmountable irrationality and uncontrollable dynamism of modern Western capitalism, Spengler sketches a compelling vision of the future of Western civilization, one that demands renewed attention in the twilight of the second millennium A.D.

There is a disturbing element of truth in Erich Heller's witty observation that "the history of the West since 1917 looks like the work of children clumsily filling in with lurid colors a design drawn in outlines by Oswald Spengler."52 For history has validated as largely realistic Spengler's cyclorama of the crisis of the West - the violent reorganization of the nation-states of the West under the international hegemony of one power; the increasingly destructive role of money and interest groups in Western democratic polities, the propensity to political apathy among their citizenry, and the mediocrity of their political leadership; the widespread quasi-pacifism of Western populaces; the erosion in moral values; irreversible urban decay; the downward-sloping birth rate of the nations of the West; the revolt of the non-Western world against their former, imperial masters; the intensifying challenge of economic competition from the non-West; and mounting, international economic crisis. Regrettably, the future will probably not hold for us the fervently desired progress of modern civilization. Alternatively, and contrary to the expectations of various historical optimists, modern civilization may quite possibly not even demonstrate the ability to retain the gains of civilizational advance already made and ward off catastrophe on an overpopulated, ecologically overstressed, and economically, politically, and culturally divided planet undergoing extremely rapid change. The tragic decline of the West with the catastrophic end to civilization as we know it is the provocative, alarming, and eminently plausible conclusion arrived at in the historical reflections of Spengler, the master historical pessimist of the modern West.

>>13066717
If only someone told us 100 years ago this would eventually happen, oh wait someone did, and nobody listened to him

and some oc

yes

ITT we discuss Laocoon and the fall of Troy

>>11765200
Decline alone is over 1000 pages. You think /pol/eddit's reading that?

pretty much everyone before ww2 was jwoke