How man is trapped by his own creation

Introduction. In the popular mind, progress is largely considered good, and hierarchies are largely considered bad. In Man and Technics, Oswald Spengler turns the conventional wisdom on its head and shows that progress leads to questionable places, and hierarchies are inevitable.

Two types of work: directing vs executing. Every form of human endeavor, including "hunting big game or building temples, an enterprise of war or of rural development" - needs an "inventive head to conceive the idea," and obedient hands to execute it.

For Spengler, there are people "whose nature is to command," and others "whose nature is to obey." The mentality and skills needed to invent and command are very different than the mentality and skills needed to execute. This duality will exist as long as life exists.

Heavy lies the crown. Leadership is no walk in the park: "Governing, deciding, guiding, commanding is an art, a difficult technique...Only children imagine that a king goes to bed with his crown, and only Marxists and literary people imagine the same thing about business kings."

Genius is fickle. Those who envy men of genius are blind to its unreliability - genius tends to "mysteriously and suddenly" come and go. Meanwhile, the executors who sustain the products of genius find support in "tradition, teaching, training." The genius gets no such comforts.

As civilization gets more complex, the leader and the led become less free. Everyone, from the king to the soldier, is now a cog committed to the "enterprise, whatever it may be." Everyone must stay "in form" - you stay tensed, a prisoner of the role, unable to assume a new form.

This enterprise signifies a move "from organic to organized existence." Everything natural becomes artificial. Our organic rhythms and innate nature are traded away for a rigid role in the organizations. But organizations survive and spread because they make progress possible.

Political organizations (nation states), commercial organizations (companies) and progress (technological advancement) do have utility as they satisfy human needs. But, Spengler writes: "Every fulfilled wish awakens a thousand more."

The irony of man's creativity. Through hierarchical organizations, man creates a new world. But in the process he loses his old freedoms. His creations take him captive - culture becomes a "close-barred cage." This is nature's "quiet and deep revenge" upon man.

Bottom line. The best never achieve "quiet, happiness, or enjoyment." They're too full of creative energies, yearnings for new struggles against the frontier. Such a creative life is a curse, but there's a "grandeur inherent" in it too.