The West is Faustian, not Neoliberal, neoliberalism is just some shitty political fad, you don't need to be white or be born in Western Europe to be faustian, a brown, blackie or yellow who tries to improve his village through some makeshift electric generator is infinitely more faustian than the whitest european attempting to kill its country industry even if he is a minority among his race.
>>18406018Read the book nigga.
>>18406018His take on the Aztecs is a blatant example of his romanticism failing his "scientific" approach to historiography. He claims they were on the cusp of some cultural renaissance or civilizational peak before getting stomped out by Spain. Now I personally think mesoamerica is cool, but the Mexica in particular we're a bunch of savages who showed up and started We Wuzzing as the inheritors of a much older and more refined civilization.
>>18406255He never claims anything of the sort, though. He says that they were going to launch a new round of imperial expansion to replicate something like the peak of the Roman Principate (The five good emperors specifically) which isn't the same thing but could be mistaken as it.And he wasn't necessarily wrong about that, the Aztecs were launching wars of conquest on the years directly before contact.
>>18406271But he doesn't define a civilization's peak as a period of imperial expansion either. Endless expansion for the mere sake of it was a sign of internal pressures causing them to crack and desperately reach out for whatever land or resources would prolong their strength. It meant that they had grown complacent with their understanding of their world and began to neglectfully decline artistically, technologically, culturally, etc..
>>18406289Yeah, he doesn't. >Endless expansion for the mere sake of it was a sign of internal pressures causing them to crack and desperately reach out for whatever land or resources would prolong their strength. Well it wasn't to prolong their strength, it was to manifest outwardly what no longer could be done so inwardly. It's simply the last stage of decomposition into a petrified state. That just so happens to bring about it with it superficially impressive achievements. They are a direct analogue of the Romans.>It meant that they had grown complacent with their understanding of their world and began to neglectfully decline artistically, technologically, culturally, etc..Yeah, that's what he says and that is what happens when a Culture, now Civilization, is close to the end of its development. Ok not technologically, but that's because the Meso-americans, like the greeks, cared very little for technics.
>>18406018You watched some meme youtube video or otherwise incorrect summary. Literally every idea the West produces is Faustian including Neoliberalism and transgender ideology or whatever other political thing you dislike. Read the book.
>>18406255Picking the Aztecs as the best pre-Columbian civ, when you had civilizations like the Inca (who were anti-cannibalism and had a much larger empire), is very weak indeed.
