Tsar Nicholas II and his advisers. In 1914 the mere though that Russia might become a German colony was horrible for ethnic Russians. But after 1917 the Kaiser’s Germany seemed in Russia to have been an idyllic, humane, civilized country. Nicholas II should have made any concessions to the Kaiser rather than plunge into the war which undercut the European civilization perhaps forever and ushered in something no European could even imagine in his most fanciful diatribes against the existing regimes before 1917.
As I’ve said before, if only the Good Emperors of the Central powers had achieved victory… The world would have been spared Hitler and Stalin. The collective institutional wisdom of tradition would have been depleted more slowly, probably giving us higher standards of living and faster technological progress. Not only that the end of colonialism would have been postponed, which would likely translate into millions more lives saved, perhaps even an Africa that could handle its independence as well as India did.
And what might we have enjoyed if the French, the American or Glorious Revolution was crushed by those tasked with preserving civilization and order! Such waste. But this is daydreaming, as beautiful as visions Western civilizations continued rise through the universe is I now notice they taste of ash.
Gentlemen we have been robbed of tradition, it is time to be much less conservative and more willing to adopt new radical courses, even those based on long chains of fragile reasoning. To use a metaphor, the background radiation level has reached the point where the organism of our value system must be much simplified it it is to carry forward any of its DNA at all. Taking this line of thinking seriously I now think some parts of our cultural tradition will have to be euthanasied. James_G and Nick Land as much as I have tried to deny it have discovered the first steps on a golden path of greater good or maybe I should say lesser evil. My heart sinks thinking what may have to be done to our humanity yet the most likely alternative will do far worse to it.
Quoted in the post A word of warning from Lev Navrozov:
As I’ve said before, if only the Good Emperors of the Central powers had achieved victory… The world would have been spared Hitler and Stalin. The collective institutional wisdom of tradition would have been depleted more slowly, probably giving us higher standards of living and faster technological progress. Not only that the end of colonialism would have been postponed, which would likely translate into millions more lives saved, perhaps even an Africa that could handle its independence as well as India did.
And what might we have enjoyed if the French, the American or Glorious Revolution was crushed by those tasked with preserving civilization and order! Such waste. But this is daydreaming, as beautiful as visions Western civilizations continued rise through the universe is I now notice they taste of ash.
Gentlemen we have been robbed of tradition, it is time to be much less conservative and more willing to adopt new radical courses, even those based on long chains of fragile reasoning. To use a metaphor, the background radiation level has reached the point where the organism of our value system must be much simplified it it is to carry forward any of its DNA at all. Taking this line of thinking seriously I now think some parts of our cultural tradition will have to be euthanasied. James_G and Nick Land as much as I have tried to deny it have discovered the first steps on a golden path of greater good or maybe I should say lesser evil. My heart sinks thinking what may have to be done to our humanity yet the most likely alternative will do far worse to it.