I See Nietzsche Fall Like Lightning

On the dissident right.

I'm going to take an ill-advised stab at assessing the world's most pretended-to-be-understood philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

To me, Nietzsche was a brilliant writer, a lucid critic of some of the more anemic versions of Christianity, but also clearly wrong.

Still, there's a whole group of people online – as far-flung as they come – who aspire to the mad philosopher's ideals.

They want a return to some kind of Greek or Roman "aesthetic vitalism." You can get the vibe from their profile photos of ancient Greek "chads" or the images of high art. They want to help you become the Übermensch.

In our WALL-E world of docile phone addicts, you can at least understand what they're yearning for. But, somebody asked a question about this that struck me as pretty funny: "What does a day in the life of a vitalist even look like?"

I think we can answer that technically.

If you really want to adopt Nietzsche's values, first consider: the entirety of human history before Christianity. "Vital" paganism is covert stories of endless human sacrifice, or "scapegoating."

Modern people don't really have a good understanding of why human sacrifice happened. A little background (I’ve been reading Girard):

Chaos arises: bad politics, disharmony, or even a literal infectious disease. A marginal person is deemed a scapegoat. The victim is murdered and then, miraculously, revealed to be the very demon causing the problem. Myths would be written post-hoc about Zeus slaying Hades – or whatever. After that great catharsis, the problem would abate… for a time. Until, chaos creeps back in, as it always does. Forever the cycle of violence would go on like that.

It's Nietzsche's "time is a flat circle," eternal recurrence idea.

Ever wondered why all the gods of the old myths are characterized by incest, murder, and betrayal? It's because at some point or another in their mythological past, these gods were set up as scapegoats. They were embodied by some hapless victim. The victim was accused of all the most disgusting crimes you can think of, so as to be justly slew by a hero. The reputation of the misbehavior clung to the god in question.

I think it's easy to read about the savagery of our past and think, "Well, that has nothing to do with me." But, it is you. Those processes have just been sublimated into the collective unconscious. They still emerge in the form of addictions, distractions, and other self-destructive (or other-destructive) behavior. "Mental illness" is their name now. You will always find some kind of scapegoat, even if you don't know it. You can still see the pattern play out on the societal level, too: someone shot Trump in the ear recently.

Scapegoats create in-group harmony. There is not a human or society that is an exception to this.

What Christianity offers is the Son of God as the ultimate scapegoat. This not only does away with the need for further scapegoating, but it also reveals the eternal pattern, which, we can suddenly see, works through us to murder a victim and create temporary peace. Christ, the ultimate innocent scapegoat (the lamb), upends the eternal cycle. By simply revealing this tendency to our conscious mind, we're already a good way toward overcoming it.

Scapegoat patterns can still be enacted, and people certainly still do. But they are no longer a big mystery. Before, there was no way to see the pattern from a third-person perspective. The "mimesis" of the tribe totally grips you — the "madness of crowds."

This madness is such a powerful force that Jesus predicted that even his closest followers would fall prey to the rabid, scapegoating mimesis and betray him. And of course, that's what happened. He was redeemed and he redeemed all of us – even those who personally sold him out.

This story is so deep in our bones, it's hard to imagine what it was like before we knew it. Nearly every story we love is at least a partial retelling.

As far as I know, Nietzsche is one of the first philosophers to explicitly (not just symbolically) point out this pattern. That's enough alone to call him a genius. But, Nietzsche does not then go on to condemn pagan scapegoating.

Instead, he wanted a return to what we would now call "vitalism," away from what he called the "slave morality" of Christianity, or victim morality. Christ was the ultimate victim, and Nietzsche thought this made us too focused on weakness. That's what people on the right are railing against now – victimology, as reigned in by unconsciously Christian post-moderns.

So, we're back to our original question. What does it look like to be a true Nietzschean vitalist in the midst of all this?

Easy. Tossing lepers into volcanoes.

I'm joking... kinda. Seriously, Nietzsche actually thought we should return to human sacrifice. If you want to defend Nietzsche, you gotta take his ideas seriously. He did. And specifically, he wanted to sacrifice lesser people so we could build a race of Übermenschen.

He didn't want that because he was crazy. He wanted that because, unlike most vitalists online, Nietzsche actually understood how Christianity worked. He knew what removing it would cause, and he still didn't care. The death of God is nothing to celebrate because "what water is there to clean ourselves?"

People defend Nietzsche, saying that the Nazis misunderstood or co-opted him. True, Nietzsche was a lot more nuanced, subtle, and complex than the Nazis, who were more strictly political and overtly murderous. But you really don't have to "misunderstand" Nietzsche very much for a Nazi to find his philosophy quite handy. A return to human sacrifice, the death of God, and becoming our own gods? That all jives with gas chambers, no?

All of this talk of Nietzsche being "misunderstood" or his sister misinterpreting his work or whatever – that's just the desire to keep his brilliant writing – which, you have to hand it to Nietzsche – he had a hammer.

But, maybe you're not convinced that Nietzsche unleashed an ancient Nordic berserker rage with panzer tanks. OK, let's look at Nietzsche's personal life. What did this return to paganism do for him?

A sickly, broken incel. Rejected by the love of his life, and doomed to insanity. We should at least entertain the possibility that those things aren't completely unrelated to his philosophy, eh? I do believe that we outwardly manifest our philosophies, to the extent to which we take them seriously.

Nietzsche, possibly more than anybody else ever could, took his own philosophy seriously. It's evidenced by his staggering ability to communicate it. As he himself said, he had the ability to write more in a sentence than most philosophers could write in a book. That kind of boasting, rarely deserved, in this case, was. And it drove him mad before killing him.

Nietzsche had to find a scapegoat. He could not find one in the external world, politically powerless as he was, so he unconsciously deemed himself the victim, and ritualistically descended into madness and finally death.

OK, so maybe Nietzsche couldn't become the Übermensch. He was born sickly. Unlucky, perhaps. Maybe someone else could?

His followers don't fare much better. There has not been a great historical Übermensch to speak of. None we would be proud to display, anyway.

You may take, for example, somebody "great" like Hitler. He was quite proud of his ability to stand perfectly still for eight hours – his iron force of will. He used everything at his disposal to make himself into the Übermensch, even taking massive doses of amphetamines to fortify his will to power. Ultimately, of course, he did a big genocide and then killed himself. Nice legacy.

There was a woman who (I don't remember her name), before World War II, said that there was a great barbarian spirit – a vitalist spirit – in the German people that was held at bay by the image of the cross. If that cross were to ever fall, she predicted, that savage barbarian would come to the fore again and spill more blood than you could imagine.

Hm. Well, that's vitalism for you – come flooding back into the modern world at least once, just last century.

Maybe they'll say, "But real vitalism has never been tried!" Where have I heard that?

Truth is, vitalism doesn't work. It was the default before the advent of Christianity. It caused endless cycles of violence. And as soon as Christianity touched the ears of our world, it spread like wildfire, (mostly) stabilized societies, and allowed us to have peace. If we could remember what it was like to live as an actual pagan – to kill and be killed, endlessly, with only the cold mud to comfort you – we would understand why Christianity was such a welcome relief.

It was so effective, modern people think that ideas like inherent human worth are "self-evident" without realizing they are Christian ideas. I'm not asking you to believe anything, by the way. Those are just the historical facts.

There have also been many great Christians who achieved many great things. We still admire thousands of Christian saints, writers, statesmen, and poets today. There are few, if any, vitalists of the same ilk. So, where are the Übermenschen?

They don't exist. It just doesn't make sense as a way of life – not if you know anything about history or anthropology. So, why does the "dissident right" feel so drawn to it all of a sudden?

C.S. Lewis said that a return to paganism would be better than the dead materialism that we're stuck with today. At least the world would be enchanted again. So, I can understand yearning for beauty, conquest, and glory.

But the story gets even stranger, still. Because of our supposed "dead materialism," we've actually returned to a very primordial religion – a worship of the devouring mother myths that were ever-prevalent before the more heroic vitalist myths emerged.

Since we are fundamentally religious creatures, when we try to destroy our religious structures, we just unconsciously revert back to more basic religious instincts. Before vitalism, we sacrificed the primordial male ego to the great mother (the great goddess, mother nature).

The next step after that is, historically, the epoch of heroes. The Homeric epics, or Beowulf before it was rewritten by the Christians. The vital desire to "not go gentle into that good night." To fight against the forces of mother nature – chaos — even though the heroes know they will ultimately lose at Ragnarök.

But, even though this is an improvement, vitalism still requires endless human sacrifice.

The final Word that allows peace to overcome this conflict is the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Christ and, in fact, his entire embodied participation. His own sacrifice.

In Luke, when he's dying on the cross, he says, "I see Satan fall like lightning." Satan's kingdom is all of these pagan empires built on murder for however many thousands of years. What Christ did was reveal the tricks of Satan that say, "one more murder will bring final peace." Once his game was revealed, the jig was up, the lie was made true, and he fell like lightning.

When Christ asks us to pick up our cross and follow him, he's asking us to, instead of externalizing a scapegoat, find ourselves to be the proper sacrifice. To realize that, really, our desire to scapegoat our neighbor and our brother is really a desire to sacrifice what is wrong with us, most deeply. Sacrifice our own lives and then to live again through him. As it happens, that works.

Practically, this allows us to live in our world of relative peace. Not that anybody adheres to it perfectly, but the very few members of our society who act it out with any degree of fidelity are what keep us from descending into chaos and human sacrifice.

So, Nietzsche got it wrong. And I see him fall like lightning.

Still, there's very much I don't know, and what I've sketched here is very full of holes and ignorance. I simply want to point out what we've figured out 2,000 years ago: vitalism doesn't work.

I mean, what are you going to do? Pick up the glorious sword of your fathers to battle Joe Biden?

I'm glad vitalists want to re-enchant the world. As much as they're going to hate this, here's how to do it: go to church, make friends, be of service to the community, and turn the other cheek. These are not clichés or slave morality. They work. Millions of examples show it.

The meek, in fact, do inherit the earth.