Morgoth joins me to talk about Man and Technics and why it's one of the most important books in the Spengler canon. We talk about the tactics of all life and how they relate to the modern world.
00:02:28.940And so a lot of people who might otherwise be interested in Spengler are a little intimidated to just kind of pick up a thousand pages over two books and just dive deep in, especially when the second chapter is nothing but math.
00:02:42.880So I guess the first thing I want to ask you, Morgoth, is what about men and Technics?
00:02:49.280Where does this fit in Spengler's kind of canon?
00:02:52.540Yeah, thankfully, Spengler tells us himself a little foreword that he's written to the book.
00:02:59.080And he seems to be frustrated because Decline was so huge and a kind of meandered over all kinds of culture and architecture and art and music.
00:03:12.860I think he was kind of like thinking, wait a minute, I've got some feedback from Decline and people don't get it.
00:04:00.440What's that definition or what is that process for him?
00:04:03.060So in the beginning of the book, he makes a lot of analogies with the natural world, with herbivores and predators.
00:04:15.160And he's saying that man is a predator.
00:04:16.880And if you think, which is what he uses, a lion chasing a gazelle, like the actual tools that he has, that he's using are his teeth and his claws and his legs.
00:04:31.280There's ability to chase or the lionesses to be more accurate, I suppose.
00:04:35.760But the, so then you've got the tools, but what he's, what the Technics is actually the strategy.
00:04:43.520So he says the Technics is the tactics of all life.
00:04:47.780A lion chasing a gazelle is one, or a shark preying upon a fish.
00:04:52.100The way they do is the Technics, it's just, it's just, it isn't just the machine or the tools.
00:05:02.460And this seems kind of a bit out there and a bit like, you know, where, what does this have to do with sort of what we expect from Spangler and machines?
00:05:11.640And then he moves on and he spends quite a bit of time.
00:05:16.920What he's doing is setting up the real basics of his worldview with this.
00:05:25.640So the lion exists in such a way that he has a tactic of life.
00:05:31.940He has a mode of actually existing in the world, which is automatic to him, beyond just having claws or big teeth.
00:05:48.960And then he goes on and says that man, man is a beast of prey.
00:05:53.300And when you, to push it along a little bit, he also brings in man himself and then he splits it in two.
00:06:01.780And I think this is very important because it's, he talks about the eye and the eye represents vision.
00:06:08.360And then you will get the visionary and the eye is the man, is the man of truth, basically.
00:06:16.200So the man of truth is looking for the causality of things, mainly looking in the past.
00:06:21.200But this is also where you will find the priest.
00:06:23.560You'll find the shaman, you'll find the philosopher and there's the unspiritualism.
00:06:30.520The deeper questions are represented by the man of the eye.
00:06:34.060And then you get the man of the hand, which is the fact man.
00:06:39.460And so when to move on to what we were saying earlier about the lion, this now comes back into play.
00:06:46.160And you, so if you think the hand and the hand holds an axe or a saw or something like that, and then you can begin to see, well, that's the tool.
00:06:59.360What then is the technique of the man of the hand?
00:07:03.500And that is actually, whereas the techniques, if you could even call it that, of the visionary man, the religious man, would be spiritualism.
00:07:13.720It would be the quest for a metaphysical truth, for example, or truth.
00:07:18.920The man of the hand, and a good way to sort of think of it, is that if you have an axe and you've got a log,
00:07:25.700it's easier to chop the log downwards, going with the grain, rather than crossways where you're going against the grain.
00:07:35.960And this is a basic kind of introduction to the techniques that he's going to talk about in terms of man.
00:07:41.680And then he's going to be more specific when it comes to the Western Faustian man.
00:07:46.100And that what you're doing is, if you have a piece of a log, and then you stand it on its end, and you bring the axe down from above, you go with the grain.
00:07:59.020That's the most efficient way to chop up your firewood or whatever, over going crossways.
00:08:07.480So the technique is then not just the tool, and not just the way of the tool, but there's something else higher guiding it,
00:08:17.080which in this case would be a drive towards efficiency and making things easier.
00:08:23.340So we get at the very most basic level, a kind of introduction into the use of technology and what it actually is,
00:08:34.700what the actual technique is, is to make things easier.
00:08:40.700Even at the, like, this is the most basic level, but he's going to expand upon that quite a bit.
00:08:46.740There's a third bit that I would sort of, where you can bring in the more Faustian aspect to this is the use of the word weird.
00:08:58.940And I had to ask one of the pagan bros how you actually said that, because it's an ancient Anglo-Saxon word.
00:09:07.140There's a recurring theme when you, when we're talking about the Faustian civilization in the earliest potleg stages.
00:09:15.820In this embryonic form, Spengler usually paints a sort of mystical scenario of a man of the north, of Vikings,
00:09:26.680sort of roaming around under empty skies and across Vikings on their boats.
00:09:33.480And he actually lists out at great length, like how far and how early the Vikings discovered places as far away as Morocco and Ukraine.
00:09:45.820And so the word weird is interesting when you see where this is going, because it's a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture,
00:09:55.960roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny.
00:10:00.980And the same word, so it's a very ancient Nordic word, and the same word weird,
00:10:08.260which eventually we would know as weird today.
00:10:11.100But it also has something very similar in Dutch, in the Nordic languages, in German,
00:10:19.040in all of the, what he would regard as the Faustian civilizations, which, what would become.
00:10:26.420And in actual fact, the real meaning of it is to become.
00:10:32.520And it connotes fate or personal destiny.
00:10:37.040And so we have here in the earlier stages quite a, sort of like a primordial brew from which something unique in all of world history is going to come.
00:10:48.140So if we have the other civilizations, I did a video on them, it's like an hour long on my YouTube channel,
00:10:57.160and I've got a podcast of it on Substack, where I actually explore a little bit the other,
00:11:02.780like a brief guide to the other civilizations who all have their own prime symbol and sort of metaphysical impulse.
00:11:10.840And what you'll find, whether it's the Greeks or the Magians or the Chinese,
00:11:18.880they are sort of contained, and mostly they would, their destiny is in the hands of the gods.
00:11:26.120And they are mainly, especially in the Greek and Roman civilization,
00:11:29.940they are kind of like the playthings of the gods.
00:11:32.460And so it's important when the weird concept, which is sort of the to become and the open destiny of the Faustian North,
00:11:46.240because it means they're unbound, their destiny is open to infinity.
00:11:53.840And this is eventually going to matter, it's going to matter a lot when you begin to bring in the technic side of it,
00:12:03.160because the driving technic is, it's always been a little bit unhinged.
00:12:10.100And the gist of the technic in the book of Marlon Technics is that the hand,
00:12:16.620which is to say the pragmatism and just doing things for the sake of it, is then unbound also.
00:12:22.520And so it slips the noose of, and Spengler's view is the grand tragedy of the visionary man, of the spiritual man.
00:12:36.780And like in the primordial symbol, like in we had, the destiny is open to do, which he will dictate himself.
00:12:44.940And the general arc of the book is that he, this is exactly what's happened,
00:12:49.280that Western civilization has slipped the leash and gone rogue entirely, like against nature in total on earth.
00:12:57.960So that's where I would sort of kick off with.
00:16:40.940But yeah, that's a thing that really grabbed me in the book is that he really talks about the need to the maintenance of these systems,
00:16:51.280not just the machines themselves, though that is of course a big part of it, but the social abstractions,
00:16:57.060how each one of these things that was supposed to better our existence and reduce our labor and otherwise kind of remove us from the human condition
00:17:07.780actually demands increasingly more and more of our time until we warp our society and our existence and kind of our understanding of what was the metaphysical
00:17:17.620around the maintenance of these completely artificial and separate things that no longer really tie us to humanity,
00:17:24.780the land, kind of a natural existence that we otherwise would value.
00:17:28.940Yes, and this, this, so this is the technic, this is, so the, the, the, the man, the man of, of technics,
00:17:37.560this is to him in the same way that the lion adopts the nature and it gets worse.
00:17:45.380I mean, just on a, just on a, yeah, like this is, everybody knows that Spengler, like reading Spengler is not a happy time,
00:17:54.520but he, one of the things that this leads to, I'm jumping ahead a little bit,
00:17:59.300but one of the problems with the, the kind of the utilitarian frame,
00:18:03.300which he emphasizes again and again and again in man and technics,
00:18:07.640which is because you can see that that's where it's just efficiency and you end up with a situation where we begin to think like machines,
00:18:16.820we begin to behave like machines and the great arc here is, is that in, in, in, you,
00:18:24.660we've become enslaved to the machine in more ways than, well, I need the microwave to cook my tea or I need the car to take me there.
00:18:36.040It's actually deeper than that because we think like machines.
00:18:38.880We think in just in terms of raw efficiency, which is why he says here, um, of the soul,
00:18:45.800not one word was discussed, meaning to get back to the, the, the difference between the man of vision,
00:18:51.680the man of the eye and the man of the, the hand, the man of the, the spiritual man is now gone from the equation here.
00:18:59.760So you've, you're just left with, with the techniques.
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00:19:32.380Well, you, you were also relaying to me one of your, cause I've seen this video,