Rise of the Decadents: Notes From a Spenglerian Faggot

In spite of my Freudo-Marxian syndicalist roots I pride myself on being something of a cafeteria philosopher, taking a little influence here, there, and everywhere, even from the fringes. Fuck, who am I kidding, especially from the fringes. Wack-jobs make the best visionaries. But as far as the far right is concerned you'll be hard pressed to find any work of philosophy with anything resembling intellectual depth. Even the non-racial shit (few and far between) is plagued with the kind of half-baked mysticism that's only fascinating to a pre-teen metal-head (been there, done that). I make an acception, however, for the work of German Conservative Revolutionary Oswald Spengler, in particular his World War era magnum opus Decline of the West, which is more than worth thumbing through, even for a genderfuck anarchist derelict like me.

The basic thesis is that the world is broken up into distinct cultures (Greco-Roman, Persian, etc.) that tend to have a shelf life of roughly two thousand years. Every culture rises, stagnates, and develops into a civilization once its creative impulse wanes. And every civilization falls into a murky abyss of cultural decadence (people like me) and monetary greed (people like Trump) from which a new culture springs, starting the cycle over again. The focus of Spengler's theory was that at the dawn of the First World War, Western Civilization had reached it's winter time. The Faustian Civilization, as Oswald referred to the stagnant West was bleeding out. It's organic aristocracy of philosophers and prophets had been replaced by a plastic plutocratic elite. It's spirituality had been replaced by the paper god of money. It's temples had become transformed into veritable piggy banks for greedy heretics. And most foreboding of all, the West had entered into a final state of militant Caesarism with it's increasingly desperate populace looking to enigmatic strongmen for guidance in the turbulence.

Sounds familiar, right? Much like his fellow Teutonic doomer, Karl Marx, Spengler's philosophy seemed a bit presumptuous at the time but with each passing generation it seemed to become more and more relevant. It seems downright prophetic in today's crumbling American Century. We as a society have lost all meaning in an era of total technological isolation and savage environmental devastation. While the already damned American Empire makes it's dogmatic death march to World War 3 with the rising culture of Eurasia and the oceans begin to boil like Satan's cauldrons, our directionless citizenry can't seem to be bothered to so much as look up from their flickering devices to see the growing mushroom clouds on the horizon. The few who do look to uber-statist demagogues like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to save them from themselves. As the Mountain Goats once sang, the warning signs all bright and garish, too far in number to ignore.

On one hand, as a stalwart anti-imperialist, I'm tempted to welcome the destruction of this violent civilization with arms wide open. On the other hand, being an openly perverted genderless heretic, I have to ask, where do I stand in this Faustian winter time. According to many figures on the Splenglerian right, it's people like me who represent the decadence that is drowning what remains of civilization in a slurry of iconoclasm and sin. I'm gonna just rip the fucking needle off the record right now and take the dangerously contrarian position of agreeing with my enemies. Sinners like me are gutting this rotting civilization like a goddamn jack-o-lantern and I say good riddance. In fact I would argue that this controlled cultural demolition is precisely the cure that Doctor Spengler ordered.

What so many people on the right and the left fail to recognize is that Spengler was not an ideologue or even a pessimist. He was an analyst and a decidedly pragmatic one at that. Spengler didn't view the observations in Decline as inherently bad or inherently good but rather as inherently inevitable. To Spengler cultures were complex organisms and, like all organisms, They're born, they live, and they die. My personal spin on this theory is that decadents like myself are a necessary part of this life cycle and that the rise in queer identity can be directly traced to it. When a culture stagnates into a civilization the only right thing to do is to put it out of its misery. That's where we come in.

The unholy decadents achieve this end by upending everything that the prisoners of the collapsing West hold near and dear. Dated notions of gender, race, government, and religion, all must be purged in the fires of a cultural revolution that only freaks like us can wage. Think of us as Faustian lumberjacks, chopping down the dead trees of a derelict society to make room for a new forest. Radical traditionalists shouldn't look upon us as a historical aberration but rather as a nomadic tribe like that of the Mongol hordes, laying the ground work for a new dynasty with our acts of constructive vandalism. However, I say it's high time the decadents take it a step further and form a Spenglerian race all our own.

According to Spengler, the only power stronger than the opium of capital is blood aka race. Counter to the standard biological interpretation of race popular with the poseurs of the Third Reich and the alt-right, Spengler defined race as a people united in outlook. If this doesn't describe the queer community and our more radical allies then I don't know what does. And who better to construct a new culture than the wreckers of the last, a ragtag stateless tribe of faggots, trannies, dykes, witches, doms, power bottoms, anarchists, libertarians, whores, Gnostics, occultists and other assorted liberated radicals. Together we can create our own civilization, the anti-civilization of post-modern stateless tribalism. A new spiritual awakening beyond the tired trappings of stagnant puritanical dogma. A new pantheistic religiosity that defies the boundaries of the last. No color. No gender. No gods. No masters. Maybe this wasn't quite what Spengler and Marx had in mind but they taught me that a proper understanding of the patterns of the past can help us define our future. Call me their bastard dauphin and quiver.

This is a call to arms, dearest motherfuckers. As the West crumbles beneath our stilettos let us form a new culture of unfettered liberty. Let the queer age begin and let it begin with me. After all, every new beginning comes from some other new beginnings end....



Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH



Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

* Closing Time by Semisonic
* Man-Size by PJ Harvey
* Fake Empire by the National
* Old College Try by the Mountain Goats
* Geyser by Mitski
* Rise by Public Image Ltd.
* Honey Bunny by Girls
* Turn It On by Flaming Lips



P.S. I'll be going to the shore next week to get my head straight. It's a yearly necessity. So there'll be no post next week. But never fear, my crazy faggot ass should be back in fine form two weeks from today. PEACE- you know who.