The Warrior, the Priest and the Merchant

Oswald Spengler offers an interesting insight that helps us understand our time and the challenge we face. We are a merchant people. But living cultures are, at their heart, warrior societies.

32. The Warrior, the Priest and the Merchant

Oswald Spengler is always an interesting and enlightening read. I am currently working through the second volume of his The Decline of the West and came across an interesting portion in his chapter on “Peoples, Races and Tongues” that may help enlighten our current political situation and the problems we face. As most know, Spengler’s writing deals with his theory of the birth, life cycle, and death of the great cultures. Loosely, a great culture is a thing born out of the soil, among a people bonded together spiritually into a unified whole. Within this unified, rooted group, towns begin to form and over time the towns become cities and the living culture transitions to something which is freed from its attachment to the soil, is abstracted and becomes a thing of the cities and eventually the megalopolis. The cities then bleed the cultural energy of the soil attached culture until it is empty, there is nothing left, and it becomes a dead thing, sometimes to continue on zombie like in…