Posted by
Boris Tiraspolsky on Sunday, May 17, 2009 2:23:06 AM
"As Oswald Spengler predicted, we are passing from capitalism to Caesarism. There is something natural in the logic of this passage. The reversion to the armed man as supreme arbiter is not preferable, but merely inevitable given that human nature becomes spoiled by too much success. We should be reminded that nations are born in blood and renewed in blood. We do not like this. We don’t want it. But everything we are doing plays to this tragic passage."
The Post-American Apocalypse
by J. R. Nyquist
In Fareed Zakaria’s book,
The Post American World, we find some apt criticisms of American behavior (and Western behavior in general). “In past crises,” he wrote, “the West played the part of the stern schoolteacher rebuking a wayward classroom. The lessons they imparted now seem discredited. Recall that during the Asian financial crisis the United States and other Western countries demanded that the Asians take three steps – let bad banks fail, keep spending under control, and keep interest rates high. In its own crisis, the West has done exactly the opposite on all three fronts.” Here Zakaria brilliantly exposes our unwillingness to face the music. We think somehow that we are the exception to the rule. This is because our collective character has been spoiled. It has long been my contention, that because we are “spoiled,” our culture has become a process of leveling as described in Søren Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age.”
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