In my opinion, so much of the current flowing through popular American culture is distinctly Nietzschean in origin.
Fred Nietzsche, another example of someone from a wealthy family who never had a job in the private sector, would have fit in perfectly in Haight-Ashbury in the late 60’s. If he had a motto, it would have been “Let it all hang out” because that is exactly what he believed (paraphrasing from a lecture I heard a few years ago):
As a thinker, Nietzsche attacked the conventional opinions of his day because he felt these opinions served as so many barriers to a fuller and richer human experience. He had no faith in social reform, he hated parliamentary government and universal suffrage. He hated liberals, conservatives, communists, and socialists – basically he hated everybody, most likely including himself.
He loathed the vision of progress so characteristic of the western intellectual tradition for the past two hundred years. He condemned Christian morality. He mocked the liberal notion that man was inherently good.
Nietzsche proposed that mankind must understand that life is not governed by rational principles, and it is full of cruelty, injustice, uncertainty, and absurdity. There are no absolute standards of good and evil which can be demonstrated by human reason. There is only naked man living alone in a godless and absurd world.
Excessive rationality, an over-reliance on Human Reason, does little more than smother the spontaneity necessary for creativity. For man to realize his potential, he must sever his dependence on reason and the intellect and instead, develop his instincts, drive and will. Christianity, with all its restrictions and demands to conform, crushes the human impulse to life. Christian morality must be obliterated because it is fit only for the weak and the slave.
Modern industrial, bourgeois society, according to Nietzsche, made man decadent and feeble because it made man a victim of the excessive development of the rational faculties at the expense of human will and instinct. Against the tendencies of bourgeois society, Nietzsche stressed that man ought to recognize the dark and mysterious world of instinct — the true life force. “Du sollst werden, der du bist,” Nietzsche wrote. “You must become who you are.”
And because he objected to the rules of polite society that prevented him from walking down the street with his penis in his hand and a chicken on his head, he decided to kill God.
Nietzsche glorified the irrational as only a poet could.
So where does that leave us? Nietzsche thought that the creation of the “Übermensch,” the Superman, was the coolest thing since sliced bread or electric milkers.
With the PARABLE OF THE MADMAN, Nietzsche established that Christian morality is dead and we ourselves are responsible. There are no higher worlds, no morality derived from God or Nature because “God is dead.” There are no natural rights and the idea of progress is a sham. All the old values and truths have lost their vitality and validity. That is what we call nihilism today. Nietzche argued that one could then rise above and go beyond nihilism by creating new values: man could then become his own master and be true to himself rather than to another. Man can overcome uniformity and mediocrity, he can overcome socialism, democracy, trade unionism, progress, enlightenment and all the other ills so consistent with western civilization.
According to Nietzsche, man could be saved by becoming a new type of man, the “Übermensch,” the Superman. These are the men who will not be held back by the fiction of modern-mediocre-industrial-scientific-bourgeois-Christian civilization. The “superman” creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. He affirms his existence not by saying, with the Christian, “thou shalt not.” No. Against the Mosaic law, the new man shouts, “I will.” The new man dares to be himself and as himself, traditional, Christian ideals of good and evil have no meaning and he recognizes them as such.
His “will to power” means, for Nietzsche, that he has gone “beyond good and evil.” The enhancement of the will to power brings supreme enjoyment. The Superman casts off all established values and because he is now free of all restraints, rules and codes of behavior imposed by civilization, he creates his own values. He lives his own life as one who takes, wants, strives, creates, struggles, seeks and dominates. He knows life as it is given to him is without meaning — but he lives it laughingly, instinctively, fully, dangerously.
Enter the idea of postmodernism.
Nietzsche’s ideas were distinctly postmodernist.
For the postmodernist, there is no unifying reality. Reality was personal, it was individual and therefore necessarily subjective. Where the middle-class industrial society of the nineteenth century valued reason, industry, thrift, organization, faith, norms and values, the precursor to the postmodernists of today, the 19th century “modernists”, were fascinated by the bizarre, the mysterious, the surreal, the primitive and the formless.
As a rule, this “modernism” was less concerned with reality than with how man could “transform” reality, making it his own. Interestingly enough, this idea of an individual reality has transformed into the idea that others must be forced to adopt the “reality” of another person, making the reality no longer individual, but collective.
Ahh, yet another contradiction.
Any wonder why we can’t talk to people on the left?
Were Adam and Eve happier in the garden before taking the fruit from the Nietzschean tree? Yes, Adam and Eve transcended themselves - but were they better for it?
Thought provoking Michael.
For certain a trait I find with many, if not most, of the folks who espouse the current 'woke' fantasy is hatred and loathing (including self) of all around them. Another trait is a relatively narrow education about the achievements of human kind and how the concept of liberty became foundational in the US Constitution.
My college years were in a Jesuit institution. In the same year I read Nietzsche and Eliade. The first I came to understand as a nihilist, and with Eliade an understanding of humankind's overarching search for meaning and goodness, creating spiritual higher beings and rituals to make the connection.
It is hard to reason or have a conversation with anyone who has closed their mind to the inherent disposition for humans to overcome evil and create goodness.