For Lego’s mechanical action figures, Hero Factory represents what Spengler would call the Winter of Civilisation. Robot warriors are no longer sent down from the heaves like angels riding on chariots—they are built in a factory, at the heart of a sterile World-City engaged in continuous production to fuel mere expansion and hollow vastness. They no longer fight for Mata Nui—the patriarchal monotheist Godhead— against the Satanic Makuta: they answer to a police station and respond to its call-centre, to enforce mechanistic rules and regulations, to apprehend criminals and deliver them to a judicial system. The organic forms—which represent a spiritual, living force—paradoxically found in such machine-toys are vitrified into dead forms: more refined, easier to assemble, perhaps more pleasing to the eye, but as sterile and cold as a late-Roman statue.
