The Prophets of Doom Quotes

“The heroic is a genuinely terrifying idea to the liberal mind which must seek to make everything petty and small.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The Spark, the animating spirit of the early warrior caste, is distinct from the religion that comes to predominate and maintain the later multiethnic empire, which I will call The Imperial Altar. Civilisational successes—such as conquest, wealth, and education—generate their own loss conditions. The Barbarism of Reflection destroys the foundations of the Imperial Altar and successfully kills any last remnants of The Spark. The castes of the lion archetype (warriors and peasants) have mutual antagonisms with the castes of the fox archetype (priests or intellectuals and merchants). Where the lion archetype predominates either as monarchism (warriors) or as Caesarism (peasants) ‘civilisational successes’ can be held in check for a period. They tend to create strong regimes through ruthlessness but such strength, ironically, leads to the managerial need for administration generated by growth and complexity, which in turn leads to the rise of elites of the fox archetype taking over. When the fox archetype predominates, either as theocracy (priests/intellectuals) or plutarchy (merchants), ‘civilisational success’ may accelerate but, in the process, the very foundations that facilitated such success in the first place (i.e. the strong regime maintained by the lion’s ruthlessness) are eroded, eventually leading to collapse. Quantity has a quality all of its own, which manifests as all that is ‘mass’: democracy, utilitarianism, standardisation, and the destruction of quality and distinction. This is a feature of the late, pre-collapse cycle. Individuals of one civilisational season cannot embody the spirit of another: the Children of Winter, for example, cannot embody the Spring. Civilisation is incommunicable. The ‘world-feeling’ of a people as Spengler says is ‘not transferable’. ‘What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring feeling—is a name, dress, and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other.’[1] Ethnicity is a constant reality which promotes ingroup solidarity in the early cycle and becomes a problem for the ruling class to manage in the late cycle.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever. The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“A simpler way of putting it might be to say that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’ across both time and space, historically and, in the present, geographically. ‘No value can survive beyond the civilisation that produced it. Values are perishable, there are no absolute truths; every truth is relative to the context of the civilisation that posits it, and when the latter is exhausted, the concept of truth also crumbles, shatters.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“We tend to think of any decline as catastrophic, but ‘collapse’ never means ‘the end’. A people who starts to understand itself in civilisational terms, rather than in terms of graphs and spreadsheets, may be better built to endure. The alternative to what I have outlined in this book, which is the belief that things as we have known them since 1945 will continue indefinitely into the future, for 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, as GDP goes ‘up and up’ and Progress marches on, should be recognised by all but the most hopelessly utopian reader as being at best wishful thinking, and at worst stupidity.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“However, it is worth stressing that our study has shown that empire is a completely inescapable reality of human life. The independent nation-state is an anomaly, little more than a political fiction. This is relevant because much political chatter since 2016 has cast ‘globalists’ versus ‘nationalists’, but it strikes me that ‘nationalism’ is only ever a short-run phenomenon which takes place in specific circumstances such as during Toynbee’s ‘withdrawal’.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Western leaders simply ignore the grim on-the-ground realities of multiculturalism: whether it is mass-grooming gangs in the UK, fire in the streets of Paris, or out-of-control crime in American cities, the political class still bury their ostrich-heads in the sand and pretend that there is no qualitative difference between peoples. Won’t someone think of the curry houses.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Civilisation begins with a set of particularisms (such as ethnicity, a local god, local customs and rituals) and only later does the complexity of society enable and call for universalism and the ‘Big Gods’ follow; they do not create complex societies.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“In other words, universal moralising religions, what Toynbee called ‘universal churches’—which recall, for him, was a late-civilisation development—are a product of more complex societies. This is contrary to what has been claimed by many scholars, which is that universalising social technologies are the engines driving civilisations.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The second variable is population density in relation to the carrying capacity. Density pushing at the subsistence limits promotes intragroup competition, and causes asabiya to decline. Low population density implies low intragroup competition, and conditions favoring the increase of asabiya.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The first variable is the degree to which the environment of a group is pacified. Because the primary source of intergroup variation is conflict between groups, location in a stateless environment should promote asabiya increase, while location near the center of a large polity (far from boundaries where warfare mainly occurs) should promote asabiya decrease.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“In Pareto’s terms, warriors and peasants are both lion types while priests and merchants are both fox types. Note that in practice, as pointed out as far back as Polybius’s Anacyclosis, the peasants can never rule themselves and elect instead a Caesar.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“For Turchin, the crucial factor that precipitates this will is group unity among the elites, or asabiya.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Second, the key factor which differentiates a successful ruling class from an unsuccessful one is their will to hold onto power as against the will of counter-elites to take power from them.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“in most times and places, the bulk of the population simply do not matter in the determination of history, which is to say that—whether broadly contented or discontented—they represent the ruled and not the rulers. This runs directly counter to democratic or populist or even Marxist notions of history, which are, to put it bluntly, merely wrong.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“It is a profound and repeated finding that the mere facts of poverty and inequality or even increases in these conditions, do not lead to political or ethnic violence. In order for popular discontent or distress to create large-scale conflicts, there must be some elite leadership to mobilize popular groups and to create linkages between them. There must also be some vulnerability of the state in the form of internal divisions and economic or political reverses. Otherwise, popular discontent is unvoiced, and popular opposition is simply suppressed.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Tainter essentially denies concepts such as the metaphysical, human spirit, social zeitgeists, governing philosophies, attitudes about the relationship between humans and their environment, ideologies, because they cannot be measured by the tools of science.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“A new energy subsidy is necessary if a declining standard of living and a future global collapse are to be averted.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“In Tainter’s view, a similar situation is faced by the rulers of complex societies beyond a certain point of complexity—we might say they become supra-marginal societies. Here such a society reaches a point where ‘at increased cost it is able to do little more than maintain the status quo.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Increased investment in legitimizing activities brings little or no increased compliance, and the marginal return on investment in legitimization correspondingly declines. The appeasement of urban mobs presents the classic illustration of this principle. Any level of activities undertaken to appease such populations—the bread and circuses syndrome—eventually becomes the expected minimum. An increase in the cost of bread and circuses, which seems to have been required in Imperial Rome to legitimize such things as the accession of a new ruler or his continued reign, may bring no increased return beyond a state of non-revolt.[17]”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Consider the situation of a hierarchy that must invest in legitimizing activities among a politically potent but minimally compliant segment of the population. Once this population segment has become accustomed to any pattern of increasing investment in legitimization, continuance of this trajectory is necessary to maintain the compliance status quo.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“For example, consider a coffee shop which has three workers who can serve 18 coffees an hour; the average unit product, which is the total output (coffees) divided by the number of input units (workers), is 6 customers per worker. Let us say adding a fourth worker takes coffee output up to 30, a fifth increases output to 40, a sixth to 45, and a seventh to 49. We can see that the average unit product with 4 workers is 7.5, with 5 workers is 8, with 6 workers is 7.5, and with 7 workers is 7.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve … After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“In Britain and in America today, and in most of Europe, any such ability for self-defence seems a rapidly fading memory. Furthermore, any response to the ever-accelerating demographic transformation of our major cities that does not loudly celebrate this fact is increasingly treated as a ‘hate crime’ —such is the Age of Decadence.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“The Age of Decadence marks the near total loss of the sense of duty that had marked the empire in its period of growth, as expansion turns to defensiveness and a holding onto what one already possesses. Optimism turns to pessimism. This coincides with an ‘intensification of internal political hatreds’—of which no one who lived through the Brexit and Trump eras needs to be reminded. Interestingly, Glubb argues this intensification of hatred is exacerbated by a two-party parliamentary democracy.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Age of Affluence silences the voice of duty. The object of the young and ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash. … No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to service their country. Parents and students alike seek educational qualifications which will command the highest salaries.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Spengler’s notion of pseudomorphosis finds its parallel when he says, ‘Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but … they will often be less willing to sacrifice their lives and their property than will be the original descendants of the founder race.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Glubb nonetheless in the final analysis agrees with the Gobineau-Spengler thesis that ‘civilisation is incommunicable’.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“During the pre-eminence of each culture, its distinctive characteristics are carried by it far and wide across the world.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom

“Here ‘democracy and communism proceeded from widespread contempt for the past and a corresponding faith in progress; where politics focused on economics, where the global population was darkening due to northward migration from the global south, and where feminism and secularism forged a culture that celebrates sexual hedonism and chaotic disregard for boundaries of all kinds.”
― Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom