Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 97ytkljgg789 (talk | contribs) at 14:52, 1 September 2013. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Oswald Spengler's civilization model appears as three tables on a three-page-long folded sheet, placed after the Introduction to his Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit. The English translation, published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1926 as The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, carries these tables at the end of the volume. For their meaning and significance, see the main article.

Prolegomenon

Spengler's tables reflect the inevitable transition from low-synergy spring (infancy, femininity) to high-synergy winter (old age, masculinity):

"The difference between children and adults is profound," Fair says. "In a graph depicting the strength of connections between the brain regions we studied, children's minds have just a few connections between some regions, while the adult brains have a web-like mesh of many different interconnecting links involving all the regions."

—Brain Network Linked to Contemplation in Adults is Less Complex in Children ScienceDaily, 11 March 2008

Women have a higher proportion of gray matter to cranial volume than men. Conversely, men have higher proportions of white matter and cerebrospinal fluid to cranial volume than women. Gray matter refers to the neuronal cell bodies and their dendrites, the short protrusions that communicate with immediately neighboring neurons in the brain. White matter refers to the longer axons, sheathed in a white fat called myelin, that reach out from neurons to more distant regions of the brain. Cerebrospinal fluid is the liquid in which the brain floats inside the head. Gray matter is where computation takes place, while white matter is responsible for communication between groups of cells in different areas of the brain.

—Sex Differences Found in Proportions of Gray and White Matter in the Brain: Links to Differences in Cognitive Performance Seen ScienceDaily, 18 May 1999

The redshiftedness of the Mongoloids and the blueshiftedness of the Jews imply that they are the broad Epimethean and narrow Promethean parts of the same funnel-shaped gravity well:

Photons climbing out of a gravitating object become less energetic. This loss of energy is known as a "redshifting", as photons in the visible spectrum would appear more red. Similarly, photons falling into a gravitational field become more energetic and exhibit a blueshifting. ... Note that the magnitude of the redshifting (blueshifting) effect is not a function of the emitted angle or the received angle of the photon—it depends only on how far radially the photon had to climb out of (fall into) the potential well.

—Nemiroff, R. J. ♦ Gravitational principles and mathematics American Journal of Physics, 61, 619 (1993)

Imagine you have two synchronized clocks (two angels) and drop one of the clocks into a gravity well, leaving its twin at the gravity well's rim. The frequencies of the matter waves, of which the falling clock consists, will begin to increase, so that the falling clock (the falling angel) will run ever faster and will travel ever further into the future from its nonfalling twin. Thus, falling into the universe's gravitational potential is equivalent to travelling into the future, or, simply, to motion in time, which means that the universe's gravitational potential is eternity:

We are being sucked into the body of eternity.

—McKenna, Terence

Being such blueshifted fallen angels, men are Promethean (future-minded, goal-oriented) mentally and Mephistophelean (spaghettified, serpentine, penile) corporeally. Humanity's descent into the gravity well of history emancipates (masculinizes) women, making them more spaghettified, ectomorph.

An organism, too, has a gradient of matter waves' constructive interference analogous to a gravity well, where the role of blueshifted fallen angels is played by neurons, whose spaghettification is manifested in their axons (neurons are the "wise serpents" among cells). The human brain can be simplistically regarded as a single neuron, whose axon is the spinal cord.

Matter waves' mutual constructive interference is their informed state, which is at a negative energy level and exerts suction, so that due to the siphon principle, energy surges in the present in order to overcome all barriers and tunnel to a future lower level. The siphon principle is the mechanism by which the more-informed future loans energy to the less-informed present. The universe begins in a state of zero energy, then borrows some energy from the future and begins an exponentially accelerating cascade of transitions to ever lower energy states, each time radiating the borrowed energy into the past and borrowing a bigger amount of energy from the future. Therefore, from the physical point of view, the universe is a pyramid scheme.

A financial debt is essentially a potential difference (a voltage) in a dielectric medium between the status quo and a more informed future state—the only way by which an indebted system can repay the original amount of a debt plus the interest is by becoming more informed, more synergetic. That is why the beginning of the overtly exponential period of debt accrual roughly coincides with 14 February 1946—the day of the unveiling of the first electronic general-purpose computer (ENIAC), regarded as the birth of the Information Age. In November 1990, the debt voltage reached a critically high level, which initiated the final stage of the dielectric medium's pre-breakdown electrical treeing—the emergence of the World Wide Web. The progress of the electrical treeing is indicated by the concomitant release of positive energy (synergy, binding energy, heat of crystallization), measured as the growth in the nominal GDP per dollar of new debt. In the end of 2014 AD, the synergy of new debt will decrease to zero, at which moment the world will undergo an electrical breakdown—an instantaneous tunnelling to a more negative energy state, to a qualitatively deeper level of informedness and synergy compared with the status quo.

Eventually, the material world will be ephemeralized (spaghettified) into eternity, which is a potential flow of free (holistic, aesthetic) information:

Bound information is always connected with a definite material structure, free information is abstract/symbolic. Free information is to a high degree independent from the carrier. <...>
Free information is connected with meaning and with goals (Zweck). <...>
In course of evolution several phase transitions from bound to free information are observed.

—Ebeling, Werner ♦ Entropy, Information and Predictability of Evolutionary Systems in Hofkirchner, Wolfgang (ed.) ♦ The Quest for a Unified Theory of Information ♦ Gordon and Breach, 1999, p. 262

Being analogue, free information can only be conveyed by analogies, which Oswald Spengler appears to have succeeded in doing.

Spiritual epochs

Corrections

Artistic epochs

Corrections

Political epochs

Corrections

References

1. Sheldon, William H. ♦ The Varieties of Temperament Harper & Brothers, 1942, p. 47 ♦ "V-20. Orientation toward Infancy, and toward Family Relationships. There is deep love of the period of infancy and of the idea of being a child."
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica University of Chicago, 1951, p. 900 ♦ "Among the Mongoloid majority, obesity is relatively rare, but the bone-fat index (proportion of osseous to adipose tissues) is high"
3. Sheldon, William H. ♦ The Varieties of Temperament Harper & Brothers, 1942, pp. 255, 256 ♦ "As another alternative, it is possible to rationalize a general orientational schema for life on essentially viscerotonic grounds. Buddhism has done so, and Buddha is rarely pictured as less than 5 in the first component, both morphologically and motivationally. In Buddhist doctrines we find a fairly consistent exposition of viscerotonia. We find relaxation, deliberateness, love of comfort, pleasure in digestion, ceremoniousness, tolerance, complacency, love of sleep, orientation toward family, in short, viscerotonia. And for an honest rationalization of viscerotonia, read Lin Yutang's book, The Importance of Living."
4. Sheldon, William H. ♦ The Varieties of Temperament Harper & Brothers, 1942, p. 67 ♦ "C-20. Orientation toward the Later Periods of Life. There is a primary longing for a later period of life, and a persistent conviction that greater happiness lies in the later decades, when the individual will be (he believes) relatively free from the inhibitory tenseness and emotional insecurity which seem so fearfully to thwart him in youth. Also, among academic or intellectually ambitious cerebrotonics there is a strong feeling that the best fulfillments of life lie in the intellectual maturation, and in the richer understanding and insight of later years."
5. Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick ♦ The Dublin Review Burns and Oates, 1879, p. 194
6. Sheldon, William H. ♦ The Varieties of Temperament Harper & Brothers, 1942, p. 36
7. Pasternak, Boris ♦ Doctor Zhivago 1957
8. Sheldon, William H. ♦ The Varieties of Temperament Harper & Brothers, 1942, p. 43
9. Carlson, Karen K. ♦ Advanced Critical Care Nursing Saunders/Elsevier, 2009, p. 530
10. Voracek, Martin; Fisher, Maryanne L. ♦ Shapely centrefolds? Temporal change in body measures: trend analysis British Medical Journal, 21 December 2002
11. MCAT Physics 2009–2010 Kaplan Publishing, 2009, p. 271 ♦ "... bound state energy levels are negative ..."
12. ENIAC: The Birth of the Information Age Popular Science, March 1996
13. The ENIAC Effect: Dawn of the Information Age ENIAC Museum
14. Battersby, Stephen ♦ Big Bang glow hints at funnel-shaped Universe New Scientist, 15 April 2004
15. Driesen, Cynthia vanden ♦ Patrick White and the "Unprocessed Factor": The Challenge Before the Contemporary Religious Novelist ♦ in R. Shepherd and K. Singh (eds.) ♦ Patrick White: A Critical Symposium ♦ Adelaide Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1978 ♦ "Transcendental truths can only be conveyed by analogies from the sensory world."
16. Spengler, Oswald ♦ The Decline of the West v. 1, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, p. 123
17. The American Magazine v. 86, 1918, p. 132 ♦ "Worry is almost always associated with emotion of some sort. Emotion is potential energy. It is steam which must find an outlet."
18. Sheldon, William H. ♦ The Varieties of Temperament Harper & Brothers, 1942, p. 82 ♦ "Yet it should be remembered that the C-12 trait does not indicate lack of emotion. Cerebrotonic people are often highly emotional. The phenomenon of emotionality as such seems to be a variable nearly independent of what we have called the primary components of temperament. Differences lie in the manner of expressing emotion, and perhaps also in the kind or quality of emotion. Since this last variable refers really to a quality of consciousness itself, we have no way of comparing it in different individuals, except by inference drawn from outward behavior. Cerebrotonic people seem to feel emotion more intensely, or more acutely, than do either viscerotonic or somatotonic people. Their sensory responses in general seem to be sharper and more discriminative. If this is actually the case, then in one sense they have more emotion, or are more emotional."
19. Sheldon, William H. ♦ The Varieties of Temperament Harper & Brothers, 1942, p. 82

External links

The following links to print versions of the tables are provided for verification purposes.
In German:

• "Gleichzeitiger" Geistesepochen
• "Gleichzeitiger" Kunstepochen
• "Gleichzeitiger" politischer Epochen

In English:

• Spengler, Oswald ♦ The Decline of the West v. 1 (©1926) and v. 2 (©1928), Alfred A. Knopf

• Theories of history