>I’ve started to read Oswald Spengler again, one of the most interesting minds I’ve ever encountered, and right now I’m working on an article about Man and Technics (1931). In the meantime I’ll publish some quotes from the abridged edition of The Decline of The West (1918/1923).

For a better understanding of these quotes (that is if you’re not familiar with Spengler, his definitions of Culture and Civilization, the Faustian soul and so forth) I recommend you read the previous posts first:
Oswald Spengler – The Decline of Cultures
Här finns inget varaktigt och allmängiltigt (Swedish)
Is world peace possible?

The Decline of The West, Chapter IX
Soul-Image and Life-Feeling: Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism

Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say ”thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders are unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. […] You ”shall”, the State ”shall”, society ”shall” – this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.
What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittlingly or no, Socialists. […]
It is quite wrong to associate Christianity with the morale imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity – and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The ”it” became the ”I”, the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted – nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. […]
There are as many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. Just as every painter and every musician has something in him which, by force of inward necessity, never emerges into consciousness but dominates a priori the form-language of his work and differentiates that work from the work of every other Culture, so every conception of Life held by a Culture-man possesses a priori (in the very strictest Kantian sense of the phrase) a constitution that is deeper than all momentary judgements and strivings and impresses the style of these with the hallmark of the particular Culture. […]
Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no general morale of humanity. A morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum, fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity.

…to be continued.