Nietzsche as Spiritual Warrior — The Antichrist (Part 1 of 4)
Everyone familiar with the world of ideas has heard the term “Nietzschean” invoked as an allusion to the purported beliefs of the great German philosopher, but what does this term really mean and why does it matter? In this series we will examine excerpts from Nietzsche’s Antichrist, a profound and devastating critique of the Judaeo-Christian slave morality which the post-modern West has internalized in the form of Jewish liberalism to the detriment of its own survival. Our struggle today is as much about liberating Aryan Man from the hegemony of this Jewish value system as it is about seizing the reins of power. — Dissident Millennial
by Friedrich Nietzsche
WHAT IS GOOD? — Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil? — Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases — that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice? — Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak — Christianity…
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (— man is an end— ): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;— and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man — the Christian…
Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This “progress” is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts — the strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!—
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used — and I wish to emphasize the fact again — without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward “virtue” and “godliness.” As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”— and it is possible that I’ll have to write it— would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will — that the values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.
Christianity is called the religion of pity. — Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy — a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (— the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (— in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness— ); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues— but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial — pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence — pity persuades to extinction…. Of course, one doesn’t say “extinction”: one says “the other world,” or “God,” or “the true life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness…. This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue…. Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer’s case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary decadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged… Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here — all this is our business, all this is our sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!—
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Source: H.L. Mencken Translation
Mercy towards an enemy is cruel treason towards your brother.
Nietzsche was, according to Wagner, a terrific masturbator, and needed professional help.
This is the action of a weak man.
I would pay more attention to Nietzsche if he had lived what he preached. He was a pathetic figure.
Perfect remarks on pity, which isn’t just woven into our culture through religion. For most of my life, I’ve gotten exasperated while watching movies when the time comes (and this happens in almost every film) for the hero to vanquish the villain–the gun is locked and loaded or the knife is at the throat…and he doesn’t. The bad guy is either hauled away to jail or the hero makes some idiotic remark to the villain such as, “You’re not worth it”. Rarely, if ever, do we see heroes in films give the human villain (not an alien or monster) exactly what he has coming to him. If the villain dies at all, it usually happens as the result of an accident in his struggle with the hero, rather than from… Read more »
I don’t know if you will see my reply to your comment, written 6 years ago, but if you do, I am saying that you have hit the nail on its head. Like you, I have experienced many times the same feeling of frustration and annoyance with the pathetic “mercy” shown by the hero towards the obnoxious villain who, of course, is unworthy of it. In a British mini-series about the famous Zulu king known as Shaka, he said to one of his followers: “Never leave an enemy alive behind you because he will get up and go for your throat!” That is an eternal truth that was also known by our Aryan ancestors before they were corrupted by Christianity and its concepts of “mercy” and “compassion”. The only compassion… Read more »