The Viking Spirit vs The Order Spirit in Oswald Spengler’s Prussianism and Socialism

Oswald Spengler is both a treat and a pain to read. The way he puts words and ideas together is excellence on a level above almost all others. He’s some divine categorizer of peoples and cultures. You can imagine him like a Darwin who — like a scientist — is putting together the pieces for how the world the works. But on the other hand, he attacks and he attacks in a way that you cannot easily disprove so you’re forced to consider the unsettling reality that he’s right. And why is Spengler unsettling? Much of it comes from my own position, having descended from what he calls the English Viking Spirit, which he’s able to both praise as a culture of high order and attack at the same time.

Many on our side immediately shun people and thinkers who go against them. It’s inconceivable that someone might think differently from them. I’ve always seen this reaction as childish and as long as the thinker, for the most part, is more on my side than my enemies, I’ll consider what they have to say. Maybe I’m too tolerant, I’m sorry I’m a liberal(lol can’t even type this with a straight face). This idea that you cast out heretics however, is very much an English life feeling, according to Spengler. It’s very PURITAN in origin.

I’m going to talk now about Spengler’s essay entitled “Prussianism and Socialism.” It’s not long by any means and could be read in a day. So if you’ve been intimidated of reading Spengler due to the lengths of say his magnum opus, The Decline of the West, this is a much easier task. I won’t be going over the entire essay, rather I want to focus on his idea of the current world order being the conflict between the English Viking Spirit vs the Order Spirit of the Teutonic Knights. He very much sees the world order of his time as a collision between the English and Prussian worldviews. Reading this as an American is a tough task as our blood is a mixture of the European races, but it is very much dominated by the Viking Spirit. However, the Saxons are GERMANIC, so when Spengler speaks on what’s missing from the English worldview and how it’s found in the Prussian, you can understand what he’s talking about.

It would be best to start with how Spengler classifies the Viking Spirit vs the Order Spirit. The Viking Spirit is something  we Americans understand in the blood. The Viking is straightforward enough, a man hopping on a ship to explore unknown lands for booty and glory. He has a strong sense of individualism, a strong sense for freedom and yearning for the frontier. Most reading this will be thinking, “YES. That’s RIGHT.” But it’s not all glory and fortune, the Viking after he meets with success becomes something else that we also know in the blood.

For the Order Spirit, Spengler goes back to the Order of the Teutonic Knights as the Prussian origin point. If the Viking Spirit is about being free, the Order Spirit is about being of service. It’s about community, all for all. Where the Englishman cares about exploring and getting rich, the German cares about inward freedom, about piety, and working for the good of the whole tribe. They’re foundation builders. You must make strong the community. Both Viking and Knight descend from the same people however, and so, we can find both mentalities within us. Especially, if you’re American.

The images of the Viking and the Knight are very inspiring and heroic, but they become something else in the modern day.

How has the Viking Spirit influenced the descendants of the Vikings and the Order Spirit those of the Germans? You can get a glimpse in how they both view democracy. Democracy for the English is having the equal opportunity to get rich while for the German it’s the equal opportunity to obtain rank. The Viking became the English merchant or the American trust. The Knight, the administrative official. Frederick the Great identified himself as the first servant of the German people. If you’ve paid attention to the power structures of the modern world, you realize it’s the Viking Spirit of the billionaire that’s won out.

The American Empire runs the world. Almost all of Western Europe has become vassal states to the US. You can mark the Second World War as the end of that debate which Spengler said would be fought to the last, but what did he see happening to those with the Viking Spirit? English and German both descend from the same tribes. What became the Viking Spirit came from the nobility of that primordial tribe as they explored the frontier for adventure and booty. But that blood can only go so far without the foundation that bore it. Spengler believed the Viking Spirit on its own had no future because it had no foundation, no background to root itself to.

What happened with the Teutonic Order Spirit? It was rooted, perhaps stronger than any other people, but it was so rooted it became a giant target for their enemies. The entire world came at Germany from all sides. How much of the Order Spirit still exists today? It’s hard to tell, but I tell you now that you need both. The Viking Spirit has carried the English and then, the Americans, far in this world, but without the foundation you have what we’re dealing with today: a people completely separated from their heritage and made to hate their own race, to act in the interest of their enemies. The Germans didn’t allow that, National Socialism rose because of the attempt.

Both the Viking and the Order Spirit experienced REVOLUTIONS in their development. The Viking revolution was a religious revolution beginning with the likes of Cromwell and the Puritans. What’s interesting about the Order revolution was that it produced Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto. It’s hard to follow Spengler when he talks about Marxism as he sees it as the Order’s revolution, but Marx himself was of the English mind. That it was the English way of thinking that made the beast we’re dealing with today. And many of his attacks against the English and the Viking Spirit hit the mark, but I admit, I don’t know enough about Marx to make judgment on this.

You can try to play the blame game. Ernst Nolte is correct in calling the two World Wars one big European Civil War. Spengler himself says in comparison to the Russian, the English and German are more alike than different. The modern American may be mostly English by nature, but he got some German mixed in and the result was men of power. You have to understand that it’s not one or the other, we need both. I propose new eugenics program to mate the Germans into the Americans and English. We need both the will for foundation building and the will to unleash hell on our enemies. Never again can we allow the Order Spirit to splinter from the Viking Spirit.