1933, 2002, University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii, pages ix-xvi

My gonzo patron Mescaline Franklin mailed this small tome to me last week with a suggestion that I review it:

“Spengler is, I think, what you’ve been calling a distant mirror, but for the disaffected person. On almost every page he brings up themes that are core to your work—the horror and the nonfiction. These leftist academics claim on the back of the book that Spengler’s views had a strong effect on Hitler’s racial politics. These people piss me off—that our universities are so devoted to the lie…”

I responded, “Look, anybody that has studied Hitler knows that his racial hatred and rage at the Jews was not even original, but merely taken whole from pre-World War One political pamphlets. Hitler sells, and even though this is a university press, there is always an attempt to sell. The publishing arm of the college wants to stay relevant just like the football coach. Like most supposed conspiracies I think we can chalk up this misrepresentation as another symptom of a greed-based society.”

Little did I know, upon making that statement that Spengler was not writing about racism, racial superiority, or even German hegemony, but about the altered state of mankind’s collective mind in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. I found Spengler immediately to be an anti-materialistic thinker that found himself—like some few postmodern writers—reconsidering a material-based world during an economic depression.

The Hour of Decision is written in four parts, and will be reviewed in four sections according to the author’s scheme, as an appendix to Of Lions and Men, as I would now clearly be negligent in pursuing the completion of that book without drawing on Spengler.

Oswald Spengler is a figure that for me, dropped unexpectedly from a supposedly empty sky. He comes off as a cross between Evola ‘A Higher Dimension Of Life’ and Stoddard Overflowing The Cup Of Wrath, ‘The Curse Of Heaven’ and Alain Locke And Lothrop Stoddard, and his work, thankfully preserved by some academia press whose parent institution would most likely horrify him, has much to offer those who would consider the plight of postmodern man in a less cluttered light than is usual.

To set Spengler, the man, in context consider that for the thinking person* educated before the First World War, to find himself alive and lucid during the 1930s was a challenge to his very sanity. Such people typically adopted a willful ignorance, falling into line with some ideology, withdrew into poetry ‘Challengers Of Oblivion’ or fiction ‘Keep Your Bounty For Your City-Bred Dogs’, or spit into the intellectual wind, as did Oswald Spengler.

To be Spengler in 1933 was to be a man of 2015 who came of age in a nuclear family just before society plunged into a frenzy of divorce, in a house wired with a phone, now looking out on a world where such small intact families are a fading exception and where every aimlessly engaged person is wired with a mass communication device. Spengler, for this author, offers through a distant mirror, the view to the birth of a world that I suspect is now in its death-throws.

If your interest lies in fascism, as does the interest of a select portion of our readership here at HopelessCrackpot.slum, or if you are of the opposite persuasion and are averse to reading anything that might seem to promote Nazi ideology, let me offer a quote from Oswald Spengler, from page 7 of The Hour of Decision:

“And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.”

Spengler wrote at a time when men around the world wondered if the very means to raise a family would ever again be a possibility. Men 40 and older recalled a much richer, much simpler time, just as middle-aged people of today recall a time dominated by the nuclear family which now hurdles rapidly toward extinction; a time before instant worldwide mass communication; a time when people thought, wrongly or not; a time before the world became a clusterfuck of hypercommunicative consumer organisms vacuuming the bilge of their betters and believing it food.

*I define a thinking person as one that uses their mind to examine the foundations of the society they find themselves in; who are willing to question their own framework for social existence. These people constitute a tiny slice of any population but represent a significant portion of writers.