Civil Commotion

History moves fast. It’s hard to believe that gay Americans achieved full constitutional personhood just five years after corporations did.

Stephen Colbert

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal

§345   The tendency of moral evolution. Every one’s desire is that there should be no other teaching and valuation of things than those by means of which he himself succeeds. Thus the fundamental tendency of the weak and mediocre of all times, has been to enfeeble the strong and to reduce them to the level of the weak; their chief weapon in this process was moral judgement. The attitude of the strong towards the weak is branded as evil; the highest states of the strong acquire an evil name.

The struggle of the many against the strong, of the ordinary against the extraordinary, of the weak against the strong — one of the finest interruptions in this struggle occurs when the rare, the refined, the more exacting, present themselves as the weak and repudiate the coarser weapons of power —

I can’t think of anyplace in the Nietzsche oeuvre where the first paragraph appears in a completed work, but that in a nutshell is the whole of his anthropology of Christianity — the claim that the Jesus movement was an organization of the underclass to exact vengeance against their betters. Certainly, the movement inverted its material and character failures — poverty, obsequiousness — into virtues. And, of course, the incoherent hysteria that has consumed the loonies since the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision is consistent with the drive to compel everyone else to be just like themselves.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal

§344   To avoid knowing himself is the prudence of the idealist. The idealist: a creature who has reasons for remaining in the dark concerning himself and who is also clever enough to remain in the dark concerning these reasons also.

Take that, Pat Robertson.

And the American ideal of natural rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness rolls on. Yay!