Jacques

“A people who choose spectacle over skill will dance to the rhythm of their own extinction.”
― PIERRE LAGRENAT

“Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase “art for art’s sake”) to be played before a highly intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone masses and taking harmonic fences, or in some tour de force of coloring. Then a new fact-philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical speculation, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials. Neither Alexandrine poetry nor plein-air painting is anything to the "people".”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“Bannon’s vision is shared by Russian far-right ideologue Alexander Dugin, who is popular in both Trump’s and Putin’s circles.3 “It is generally important,” Dugin wrote in his 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics, “to introduce geopolitical chaos within the American daily experience by encouraging all manner of separatism, ethnic diversity, social and racial conflict, actively supporting every extremist dissident movement, racist sectarian groups, and destabilizing the political processes within America.”4”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Added to all this is the universal dread of reality. We "pale-faces" have it, all of
us, although we are seldom, and most of us never, conscious of it. It is the
spiritual weakness of the "Late" man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his
cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural
experiencing of destiny, time, and death. He has become too wide awake, too
accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear
that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless
chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the
individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed
place. That is what he longs to forget, refute, or contest. He takes flight from
history into solitude, into imaginary far-away systems, into some faith or another,
or into suicide. Like a grotesque ostrich he buries his head in hopes, ideals, and
cowardly optimism: it is so, but it ought not to be, therefore it is otherwise. We
sing in the woods at night because we are afraid.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution