Nietzsche in 900 Words -- If You Can Take It

There I was at the gym, reading my Nietzsche on a cardio machine that made it difficult to read because I couldn't use my regular cardio machine because I cannot stand listening to nearby women talking loudly to each other on the cardio machines.

And all of a sudden, Fritzi explained the whole procedure, in a couple of pages in The Will to Power. Of course, The Will to Power was not published in Nietzsche's lifetime; it is a collection of notes in his usual aphoristic style, so who knows what he really meant. But still. He explained his pitch:  on morality, decadence, nihilism, Eternal Recurrence, and Will to Power just like that. Slam, bam, thank you ma'am. It is all presented at the end of Book One: European Nihilism starting at Section 40.

For instance, I had not really got the point of his Eternal Recurrence thingy until now.

Let's start with Morality (Section 55):

It was morality that protected life against the despair and the leap into nothing, among men and classes who were violated and oppressed by men; for it is the experience of being powerless against men, not against nature, that generates the most desperate embitterment against existence.

But what happens when people start to lose their faith in morality?

Decadence (Section 40):

The concept of decadence.-- Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned; they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is necessary as any increase and advance of life; one is in no position to abolish it.

In other words, when the old order -- particularly the old morality -- is collapsing, maybe because God is Dead, we get a period of decadence. Nothing to be ashamed of: Just life.

Which brings us to nihilism. Nietzsche does not champion nihilism. He just regards it as natural and physical when some religious belief or morality has collapsed. (Section 55)

Nihilism is a symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be destroyed; that without morality they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves"[.]

And so we get to the Eternal Recurrence. In the collapse of morality into decadence and nihilism it seems

as if everything were in vain... [So] "Are not all 'values' lures that draw out the comedy without bringing it closer to a solution? 

Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: "the eternal recurrence."

In other words, it is the nihilist, demoralized by the collapse of morality and the increase of decadence and decay, who collapses into nihilism and a philosophy of eternal despair.

Thus to the Will to Power (Section 55):

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not demand extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes -- human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.

How would such a human being even think of the eternal recurrence? 

Easy for you to say, Fritzi. Be not afraid of misfortunes.

The Will to Power is obviously a difficult concept for us post-Nazi humans. Because we think of the Will to Power as the Nuremberg rallies and SS stormtroopers and concentration camps. Of course, the worstest Will to Power of all was Lenin and Stalin and Mao who created societies of what the Jewish intellectual Georg Lukács approvingly called "totality." Yep, societies which were defined solely by political and military and ideological power. And which were, dialectically, incredibly weak.

Well, the truth is that Nietzsche's Übermensch is indeed a disturbing and unsafe chappie, for he is not afraid to burst all bounds. Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert is all about that. And one of Pervert's ideas is that the real man is a pirate, unafraid to sail around the world in tiny wooden sailing ships looking for trouble.

Crusaders like Cortes and Pizzarro, Fernando de Soto, Drake and Raleigh, Magellan and Balboa equal in daring, intelligence, magnitude of spirit, resourcefulness and achievement any of the great men of the Greeks and the Romans.

As the hero says in Pirates of Penzance:

It is a glorious thing
To be a pirate king.

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I say that the modern thing is to be a creative person, one of the People of the Creative Self. But, as Pervert says, "I don't promote for you the life of the scientist, or artist, or writer, because in our age these degenerate into hobbies and ways to pass the time, and there's no value in this." The true creative life is indeed the work of God, to create the world anew. But that means that the creative life is the life of a man, to be a creator, fighter, destroyer, a life indeed with no happy ending, as is required in all religions up to and including socialism.

I think that the quintessential Bronze Age man, or Übermensch, is Elon Musk: crazy, fearless, piratical, willing to take the government's money to make stupid electric cars on the one hand, and make rockets to go to Mars on the other.