The Book that Kissinger gave Nixon

“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support.” —Otto Neurath, Anti-Spengler (1921)

When I found the quote above, and decided to use it for my post, I had a completely different idea in mind. I thought that I was going to write about Trump and USAID, and how the Democrats are reacting. I wanted to use an old lecture called The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by C.P. Snow, to try and bridge the communication gap between the two parties. But I saw the word “Anti” in Neurath’s Anti-Spengler and couldn’t help myself from digging deeper. I never found his book, but I found the reason why he wrote it.

Once upon a time, a hundred years ago, there was an influential group of people with various different academic backgrounds who met frequently in Vienna. They were known as The Vienna Circle. Led by philosopher, physicist, and professor Moritz Schlick, this group was interested in fostering guidelines pertaining scientific research and philosophy. After much deliberation, they developed “the scientific world-conception” or SWC, and published a manifesto that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, that a theory or theoretical statement should be based on only empirical evidence and logic reason, and that metaphysical theories and statements violated their guidelines.

While members of the Circle had mixed political views, Otto Neurath and several others were left wing. For every force, there is a counterforce, and Otto Neurath’s counterforce was a successful man by the name of Oswald Spengler, author of a controversial book called The Decline of the West. Neurath and several other Circle members saw this book as a metaphysical philosophy of history, and considered Spengler to be a “dangerous antagonist” to what they saw as universal moral code of the West. This is why Neurath wrote AntiSpengler (1921), to support his view that Spengler was anti-scientific and ideologically dangerous. In other words, to keep people away from him and his ideas.

Oswald Spengler was a German nationalist and a prominent member of the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution. Today, a person like Spengler would be called a right-wing conspiracy theorist and shunned by the left. He was not mainstream, but was highly respected and revered by many followers. It amazes me how much “deep thinking” happened just a hundred years ago, and how dumbed-down society has become today. I started reading his book, and he clearly has an incredible command of history and cultures. Not surprisingly, Secretary Kissinger gave a copy to President Nixon to read, six decades later. But why? asked a reporter. I was curious too.

The Circle saw the world as a ship in perpetual ad astra and reconstruction, so to speak, while Spengler saw high cultures (each with a period of youth, growth, maturity, decay), sandwiched between pre-cultural peasantry and post-cultural civilization. He foresaw the cyclical demise of the West by looking through the lens of history rather than the lens of nature. Spengler presents two world views: (1) the world as history, the West, and (2) the world as nature, Classical. The first world view is the one he asks his readers to see and try to understand. Here’s a comparison, borrowed from a review on The Decline of the West.

It is the lens of history that allows us to trace the rise and fall of major cultures, particularly the West, which has peaked and is now in decline. Spengler predicted that two factors will play a major role in the decline of democracy: (1) mainstream media and (2) money in politics. It’s only been a few weeks and Trump’s administration has already uncovered one of the biggest money laundering schemes in history. We know the mainstream media is a big part of that, as well as money in politics, but the Democrats remain blind, or just apathetic to the corruption therein. Anti-Spengler is somewhat similar to the story of Anti-Trump. Destruction of anything, good or bad, riles up a lot of people.

What’s fascinating me about history right now is that it appears to be circling back to the decade I was born into (the 1970s). I didn’t know about Oswald Spengler’s work, and I didn’t know that Kissinger gave it to Nixon to read. After all, I was only about a month old. Kissinger (the same guy who was wowed by Spengler) was the dollar’s savior after Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971. It was Kissinger who set up an agreement with the Saudis, creating the petrodollar in 1973. And it was this petrodollar that held the dollar up as the world’s reserve currency. Now, the petrodollar is going extinct, and a shortage of gold is driving systemic crisis. I’m still trying to predict what’s next.

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