Nietzschean Aphorisms

Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was for slaves—love god as I love him, as his son! What concern is morality to the sons of god!”

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink—but he didn’t die from that. He degenerated into a vice.

In praise there is more pushiness than in blame.

You utilitarians, you also love everything useful only as a cart to carry your inclinations—and you too find the noise of its wheels really unbearable?

Ultimately one loves one’s desires and not the objects one desires

.The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.

There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in something.

It is inhuman to bless where a man is cursed.

“Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you has shaken me.”There are no moral phenomenon at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. . .

Anyone who feels himself predestined to observe and not to believe finds all those who believe too noisy and pushy: he keeps them at a distance.

Where the game has neither love nor hate, woman plays indifferently….. (Ouch! thats not fair)

The great epochs of our lives occur when we acquire the courage to rename our evil quality our best quality.

There is an innocence in admiration: such innocence belongs to the man who does not yet have any idea that he, too, could at some point be admired.

Sensuality often makes the growth of love too fast, so that the root remains weak and easy to rip out.

What someone is begins to show itself when his talent subsides, when he stops showing what he can do. Talent is also finery, and finery is also a hiding place.

All credibility, all good conscience, all appearance of the truth come only from the senses.

We act while awake as we do in a dream: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate—and then we immediately forget the fact.

What we do best our vanity values as the thing which is most difficult for us. The origin of many a moral.

What is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.

With individuals madness is something rare—but with groups, parties, peoples, and ages it’s the rule.

The thought of suicide is a strong consolation: with it people get through many an evil night.

Not only our reason but also our conscience submits to our strongest drive, the tyrant in us.

Love of one man is a barbarity: for it is practised at the expense of all the rest. Also the love for God...:

It’s not the strength but the duration of the lofty sensation that makes lofty people.

Some peacocks hide their peacock’s tails from all eyes—and call that their pride.Anyone who despises himself nonetheless still respects himself as the one doing the despising.

Woman learns to hate to the extent that she unlearns how to enchant.

Dreadful experiences lead one to wonder whether the person who undergoes them is not something dreadful.

For the sake of his good reputation who has not once sacrificed himself?

The disappointed man speaks: “I listened for the echo, and I heard only praise.”

We all present ourselves to ourselves as more simple than we are: in this way we give ourselves a rest from our fellow human beings.

The danger in happiness—”Now everything is turning out the best for me; now I love every destiny. Who feels like being my destiny?”

It is not their love of humanity but the impotence of their love of humanity that prevents today’s Christians from burning us.

Neocons and Islam

American Republicans and Muslim Extremists

How ironic that official enemies such as the Republicans and Muslim extremists should have such a similar ideologies. Both groups see liberalism as root of evil; a pathway to hedonism and nihilism (in their view; Nietzsche would call it reality, the will to truth) that poses the ultimate threat to fundamental religion. Thus neo-conservative Republicans under the influence of Leo Strauss see it imperative that big lies should be told to the public to guide them away from the dangerous thinking first understood by Nietzsche; neccessary illusions. We are all familiar with these illusions, they are the illusion of fear, designed by the neoconservatives to “restore the moral order” and give purpose to Americans. The first neccessary illusions emerged after the failed liberal movements of the 60’s with the “cold war”. I put the inverted commas around cold war because it wasn’t really a war; a war is when two sides fight, not just one flexing its military muscle as is the case of the United States, the same can be applied to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq among others. It should be noted that whilst Leo Strauss condoned the use of lies to restore moral order, he never suggested it as a use for imperialism.
Muslim Extremists too, as above, see liberalism as causing self interest, or egocentrism in people. Their vision is a population working selflessly under their god, a restoration of moral order and a shift away from western lifestyle. So in effect we have both the neo-conservative Republicans and the Muslim Extremists declaring a Holy war on each other.

Labor and education

Rudd on Education

If we really are concerned about our current prevailing social problems in Australia we ought to have a listen to Kevin Rudd on education. We all seem to love the band-aid approach to politics: lets throw all the members of the youth gangs terrorizing the northern suburbs in jail, perhaps kill them?;  lets put the price of beer up to counter teenage binge drinking; increase the school leaving age. Are we really worried about economic development of those in the lower socioeconomic strata? If you’re a liberal, the answer is clearly no and here’s why:

1. Increases in uni fees – education is a vital factor in creating upward mobility, by decreasing its availability we serve to repress those who do not have the money.

2. Decrease funding to public schools – yet another attack on the lower wage earners. By doing this we create a system that more and more resembles that of the dark times when only those who could pay would get an education thereby securing their own position based on ascription rather than achievement.

3. Industrial Relations laws – they say theyre great for the economy, thats  exactly right because it they decrease the bargaining ability of unskilled worker so the cost of labor is pushed further and further down.

In our capitalist society it is important that we do not employ a system that by nature represses the poor. Social security, which includes free high quality education, not only provides a safety net for the disadvantaged and increases their ability to bargain with employers (that is, they will not be so poor that they are forced to provide cheap labour) but the education is one of the only realistic sources for potential upward mobility based on achievement. Consider removing this safety net. In a free market economy all people will be forced to work. In this atmosphere it is most advatageous for high income employers to push the wages down thereby creating greater profit; all employers must follow suit to avoid being swallowed by companies propering from cheap labour. Consider education. The poorest families cannot afford schooling for their children without government subsidising public education. The child of a poor family is condemned to a life of job insecurity since his replaceability, as measured by his academic and learning abilities, is driven higher and higher…forever existing as a cheap source of labour.

Apathy in the Suburbs

Here’s a blog i started some time ago and haven’t since bothered to finish.

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This is inspired by an article written by Connor O’Brien, a youth writer in the Sunday Mail (7/1/06, p.45). The article describes the architecture of suburbia and how it manages to atomise the population creating isolation and therefore apathy to important communal issues. Also, it describes how far removed people feel from the political process. This result is rather disturbing when you consider that in a democracy, under the conventional meaning of democracy, it is we the people that should be saying what happens in our country and that should be educated and informed appropriately. There is another conception of democracy however, one “that is widely held and deeply rooted in our own civilisation” as Noam Chomsky put it. Contrary to the above definition, this conception holds that democracy is “a game for elites; not for the ignorant masses who have to be marginalised, diverted and controlled for their own good”. This latter definition has proven in recent times to be the prevailing belief among elites. All we have to do is take a look at recent changes in industrial relations laws, the GST and the war in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />
Iraq to discover that this holds true because none of these were undertaken with the support of the majority of the Australian population. At the heart of this form of democracy is use of the media to create “necessary illusions” about public affairs and perhaps more importantly, to divert the “stupid majority” into watching “big brother”, “The O.C.” and such – just get them away from anything that’s important. In achieving this goal, the elites may go about their business, setting policy often in their own interests.

 

The justifications behind this prevailing form of democracy go along the lines of “the common interests of all people elude the public opinion as they are unable to reach beyond their own self-centred beliefs…therefore it is up to a specialized class to shape policy” (Walter Lippmann, 1921). Reinhold Niebuhr put it another way: “Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason but faith and this naïve faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the [popular press/media] to keep the ordinary person on course”. In effect this indoctrination system is the essence of the prevailing form of democracy.

Taming Capitalism and the state; perhaps just human nature

Just as Michael Foucault proposed the panopticon as an appropriate model to describe the way in which the medical establishment and the justice system put people under surveillance to promote conformity shouldnt the public be forever scrutinizing and surveying the institutions that exercise power in our society? The state is meant to be by the people and for the people, thus it follows that this institution should be completely “visible” to the public. If it is easy to see the flux of money and power in our institutions then the contigency for deviance in the form of exercising power in self interest will be greatly reduced.

The main obstacles lie in public interest and the dissemination of information. Will the state (let alone a private institution) ever make itself more accountable thereby willingly decrease its ability to maintain power? of course not, these are tasks to be organised and carried out by a social movement. We are only moral creatures insofar as we are social creatures.

Refining Anomie

Im not so sure if media and education play the role in anomie that I proposed earlier. Much more significant is the social basis for anomie; isolation. It is clear that isolation leads to anomie and a greater risk of deviance but predicting which conditions will cause isolation is difficult. Durkheim postulated that rapidly urbanizing cities are apt to create anomie; an increasingly impersonal, insensitive environment with huge population turnover in which relations will be increasingly governed by self interest rather than any sort of communal loyalties. Such is the description of capitalism by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. With respect to urbanization however it is apparent that many people even in the largest cities maintain close family attachments. Furthermore, in areas of low economic development we find that the high rates of mental illness, alcoholism and other such pathological conditions are the result of people drifting into these areas rather than the other way around. Certainly, these conditions do not help one break out of these situation, but it is just as much an effect as it is a cause. So is there any definite set of circumstances that will cause isolation thus deviance and anomie?

confessions of sex

Im fascinated by the way we have this desire; a need to confess. Myspace taps this need quite well, and our confessions lie in many areas of our life. However, it is in the area of sex that these confessions arouse us most. In the majority of “survey” bulletins I have read there is a trend to confess our sexual experiences, partners and fantasies. References to sex and provactive pictures fill many profiles. Sex is a normal and integral part of life, something not to be overlooked or considered taboo; however, to me it seems that sex is not only the height of some people’s existance, but something that they donate most of their cognitive resources to.
One of my “friends” on here is obviously interested in photography…well, of herself anyway, and it was funny to watch as she frequently took pictures that she wore less and less clothing….i suggested she just take a nude and be done with it…but the point is she took it to the ultimate destination, by taking a nude only just accaptable on myspace. I suppose im just trying to make a case in point that we are obsessed by it; thinking about it; talking about it; seeing it; everything to do with sex. Again, whilst its not a bad thing, it’s something many people can’t see beyond; beyond hedonism, beyond satisfying our basic carnal drives.
Caveat: This is just an observation, i am not suggesting what is “right” and “wrong”.

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