The Spengler Complex

story: Thijs Van Nimwegen

Art: Tomas Kucerovsky

sometimes, on gray, rainy days, i take a walk in the suburbs.

I prefer the ones that are somewhat slummy, that have a feel of poverty and social disarray.

And then I start to imagine.

I imagine this is not a slum, I imagine the whole world is like this.

A world after the apocalypse, be it nuclear, social or economic - it doesn’t matter. The world as a scrap yard, with the few people left barely surviving.

I think this fantasy has something to do with being European.

When you look at the science fiction literature and movies of the 19th and 20th century, there’s a clear division between European and non-European works.

Stories from the USA, Australia and other postcolonial societies mostly depict an optimistic, explorational future, where humans have beaten nature and their own inadequacies, happily conquering the universe.

If they show us a post-apocalyptical world, it’s one where the protagonist is a rebuilder: the first new airplane, restoring the postal service, rediscovering old knowledge.

While in European literature and film, sci-fi stories tend to look back at what once was.

They show us the final throes of civilization; the destruction of the last library, people failing to grow crops, a man standing on the edge of the continent, overlooking an empty sea, as everyone else has died of an unnamed plague.

It’s Huxley versus Orwell, Roddenberry versus Shelley. Oswald Spengler may have summed up this European fixation on death instead of rebirth the best.

I will leave the explanation of this Spengler-complex to the mass psychologists.

As for me, I definitely get a masochistic thrill out of this little fantasy.

A lonely world.

An empty world.

The end.