Yeah, right. The qualitative difference between the three "…

Yeah, right. The qualitative difference between the three "great" philosophies of history couldn't be greater. Fukuyama's prediction is complete trash, Huntington is somewhere in the middle and then there's Spengler who more than Orwell deserves to be the face of the "did I call it or what?" Meme. It's a great lesson about how we subscribe to false things we like and ignore true things we don't like. The dismissal of Spenglers thesis, following the initial sensation his book caused, seems to be largely caused by a mixture of psychological reasons (the denial of cycles too big to be under our control) and a misunderstanding of his predictions. According to Spengler Western civilization could keep going another two hundred years just to fulfill the average time-line. And then there's what Spengler called byzantinism, which is essentially a zombie state of an already dead civilization that just keeps going. If I'm not mistaken the eastern Roman empire kept going for another thousand years after the soul of their civilization had already died. I think people tend to mistake Spenglers model of cycles as a prediction of impending doom. In reality it's worse: a prediction of a long, slow death, absent some kind of event that ends the suffering.