If Nietzsche ended his life by going mad, maybe he made a mistake in the development of his Übermensch philosophy. Maybe his mistake was to imagine that his revaluation of values for “we free spirits” could just vault nonchalantly over all the suffering and misery of the world. For, as Mircea Eliade records in The Myth of the Eternal Return, humans are eternally obsessed with the suffering of life, and that there must be a reason for all the misery.
The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]
There has to be a fault. And it has to be avenged.
Primitive man, according to Eliade, solves the problem of existence and its suffering by denying history, and lives life as an annual repeating cycle, with each New Year representing a new Creation following a brief descent into Chaos. Only with the Axial Age religions does mankind dare to enter history, with the priests and prophets promising an end to suffering at the End of Time. Nietzsche sneers at “the priests,” that they teach us to hate ourselves. But perhaps the opposite is true, that the priests have cunningly taught us to hope that the natural self-hate that issues from our universal suffering will be dissolved in the moment of Redemption.
And, of course, the Left’s secular religion learned from Marx is just another priestly attempt to resolve human suffering with the hope of Redemption. The Left offers the balm of social justice once the arc of history has been heroically bent by progressive political activists towards justice. Or is the left a lurch back to the primitive, insisting that all suffering arises from a social or economic fault or a “hater” and there has to be a fault? And boy, are we activists going to teach you haters a lesson!
So what do we do about it? After the Death of God how do we acknowledge the problem of suffering and yet invent a meaning to our lives that can give us the hope we yearn for? Humans did it in primitive times, and then later with the God of the Axial Age. We tried socialism, but a scientific experiment conducted in the 20th century by eminent social scientists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao proved that socialism created more suffering than it redeemed.
Can we invent a meaning for those for whom God is Dead but who hesitate to blame kulaks or billionaires or even white supremacists for human suffering? And if we succeed, we lordly thinkers, perhaps we can then take a step further -- and I warn you this is really radical. Suppose our lordly philosophy creates not just a narrative for us lordly ones, but actually thinks just a little about the rest of the world, and concedes to lesser breeds without the law their right to a meaning that makes sense for them: for primitives, yea, for ordinary deplorables -- foul racist-sexist-homophobes though we be -- and even for the “free spirit” bad boys, the Übermenschen of Nietzsche’s fevered dreams?
And, as a bonus, wouldn’t it be fun if we could conjure up a vision of the good life “more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers” that would appeal even to lefties? It would be nice for our fellow humans, considering how often that lefty dreams have ended in the abattoir.
Three Kinds of People
Nothing could be simpler. But first we have to take a leap of faith. There is always a leap of faith.
Let us suppose there are three kinds of people in the world. First, there are the primitives, that live in an eternal present, buffeted around by angry neighbors and wrathful gods. Second, there are the responsibles, living in history and seeking the dignity that attaches to people taking responsibility for their own suffering in the hope of eventual redemption. Third, there are Nietzsche types, that imagine themselves the creators of their own lives: Übermenschen, a cut above the rest.
Is this too simple? Yes of course it is: the world is infinitely complex and all our knowledge but a crude effort to keep dodging disaster. But it is still pretty sophisticated, for most people cannot understand anything except their own perspective: solipsism. Even so, many of us have managed climb out of solipsism to construct a two-kinds-of-people world of semi-solipsism: Us and Them: the good people and the evil people, where the evil people are barely human and are to blame for all our suffering.
Still, a lot of people have gone the extra mile beyond the binary of Us and Them. The Vikings had their earls, peasants, and “thralls” or slaves. Romans? Patricians, Plebeians, and Slaves. Why the number three? Because with anything more complicated you will lose your audience. I discuss this further here.
And then there is Curtis Yarvin, who proposes in his “Clear Pill” that modern society comes in three layers: Gentry, Commoners, and Clients -- after George Orwell’s Inner Party, Outer Party, and Plebs -- where
The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.
I have my own three-layer theory that I call my reductive Three Peoples theory. I introduced it here. It is pretty close to Yarvin’s theory. I have: the People of the Subordinate Self, that “attach themselves to a powerful patron in return for scraps from the lordly table;” the People of the Responsible Self that “must individually shoulder the responsibility of finding their place in the city scramble and holding onto it.” And then there are the People of the Creative Self, the special people:
Our modern son of the middle class wants to live a creative life, as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. His sister wants to work in global health for a non-profit.
Yes, we creative people really are insufferable. Yarvin agrees; he describes his Gentry, as not so much creative as creatures of the ruling class, animated by “ambition, honor, and vanity.” I would say that most people that think of themselves as creative are fake-creatives. Really they are just intelligent ticket-punchers with an inflated idea of themselves: experts, scientists, and policy analysts. But they are Somebodies!
Here is a curious difference between Yarvin’s three-layer theory and my Three Peoples theory. It occurred to me, as most things do, in the middle of the night. Yarvin’s theory is an external theory, the description of actors on a stage: playing their roles as Gentry, Commoners, or Clients. My Three Peoples theory is an inner theory, about how people experience the world. Do you feel Subordinate, Responsible, or Creative today?
But what does it all mean? I will tell you.
The center of gravity of the modern world is the Responsible, the Commoner, the Anybody. These are people that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules. They have surrendered to the will of the market -- some people call this modern slavery -- which is to say that they live more or less willingly in the social cooperative system of the market where you work to produce, not for yourself, as a peasant farmer might, but for others in exchange for money. Responsibles learn to trust people that demonstrate trustworthiness, and a reputation for trustworthiness is the beginning of dignity.
If you are a Subordinate or Client, a Nobody, you have not yet learned how to wive and thrive in the modern world. You live in a tribe, or an ethnic enclave in a city, and trust only other tribe members. You “got your rights” and you expect someone else to tell you what to do and you imagine yourself as their loyal and beloved retainer. But in fact you are the Little Darling of your lord and his power project, and the day will come when he will no longer need you. Hello, white working class.
If you are a Creative or Gentry you are a problem, because even though you are Somebody chances are that you are neither very creative or very gentlemanly. The real creatives, the people that have transformed our modern world, have usually started out as Commoner Anybodies: Rockefeller the store clerk; Carnegie the telegraph messenger; Einstein the patent clerk; Jobs the castoff of educated parents raised by a coastguard mechanic. Good breeding and selective colleges don’t change the world.
But, obviously, these three kinds of people will experience suffering in different ways, and will need a different understanding of the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" in order to understand their suffering and hope for a better life, despite the sorrows of the world: in other words, each of the three kinds of people needs a different religion.
Next: Three Religions for Three Peoples
Your religion depends on your understanding of suffering
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