According to the theory, the Western world is actually ending and we are witnessing the last season — "winter time" — of the Faustian civilization. In Spengler's depiction, Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.
Winter: Coming fissure in the world-urban civilization. Exhaustion of mental organization strength. Irreligiousness rises.
• Religion: Materialism, cults of science, utility, and luck.
• Ethical-social ideals: Philosophy without mathematics, skepticism. The last mathematical thinkers. Decline of abstract thinkers, and the rise of specialized academic philosophy. Spread of the last ideas.
• Art: End of symbolic art. All art becomes meaningless subjects of fashion.
• Politics: Democracy, rule of the rich, followed by Caesarism and bureaucracy.
Decline is also evidenced by a formlessness of political institutions within a state. As the "proper" form dissolves, increasingly authoritarian leaders arise, signaling decline. The first step toward formlessness Spengler designates Napoleonism. A new leader assumes powers and creates a new state-structure without reference to "self-evident" bases for governance. The new régime is thus accidental rather than traditional and experienced, and relies not on a trained minority but on the chance of an adequate successor.
Spengler predicts that permanent mass-conscription armies will be replaced by smaller professional volunteer armies. Army sizes will drop from millions to hundreds of thousands. However, the professional armies will not be for deterrence, but for waging war. Spengler states that they will precipitate wars upon which whole continents—India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam—will be staked. The great powers will dispose of smaller states, which will come to be viewed merely as means to an end. This period in Civilizational decline he labels the period of Contending States.
Caesarism is essentially the death of the spirit that originally animated a nation and its institutions. It is marked by a government which is formless irrespective of its de jure constitutional structure. The antique forms are dead, despite the careful maintenance of the institutions; those institutions now have no meaning or weight. The only aspect of governance is the personal power exercised by the Caesar. This marks the beginning of the Imperial Age.
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Despite having fought wars for democracy and rights during the period of Contending States, the populace can no longer be moved to use those rights. People cease to take part in elections, and the most-qualified people remove themselves from the political process. This marks the end of great politics. Only private history, private politics, and private ambitions rule at this point. The wars are private wars, "more fearful than any State wars because they are formless". The imperial peace involves private renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but conversely requires submission to that minority which has not renounced war. The world peace that began in a wish for universal reconciliation ends in passivity in the face of misfortune, as long as it only affects one's neighbor. In personal politics the struggle becomes not for principles but for executive power. Even popular revolutions are no exception: the methods of governing are not significantly altered, the position of the governed remains the same, and the strong few determined to rule remain atop the rest of humanity.
Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system.
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Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument. The "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective. The principles of equality, natural rights, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war (the bourgeois against the aristocracy). Freedom, to Spengler, is a negative concept, simply entailing the repudiation of any tradition. In reality, freedom of the press requires money, and entails ownership, thus serving money at the end. Suffrage involves electioneering, in which the donations rule the day. The ideologies espoused by candidates, whether Socialism or Liberalism, are set in motion by, and ultimately serve, only money. "Free" press does not spread free opinion—it generates opinion, Spengler maintains.
On the subject of the press, Spengler is equally as contemptuous. Instead of conversations between men, the press and the "electrical news-service keep the waking-consciousness of whole people and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year." Through the media, money is turned into force—the more spent, the more intense its influence.
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For the press to function, universal education is necessary. Along with schooling comes a demand for the shepherding of the masses, as an object of party politics. Those that originally believed education to be solely for the enlightenment of each individual prepared the way for the power of the press, and eventually for the rise of the Caesar.