Geoffrey P. Hunt – Are you awash with anxiety, and horrified that decency, truth, hope, faith, and probity are being firebombed by the leftist anarchists intent upon upending all civilized norms, and wonder how it came to be?
The transgender movement and all extant scourges on humanity — sexual mutilation of children, denial of human biology, mainstreaming mental illness, de-criminalizing violence, mayhem and murder, celebrity of killing babies in the womb with impunity, emptying the prisons, depopulating the earth, and dozens more social perversions now commonplace — can be traced to a single source.
We are witness to the academic legacy of Friedrich’s prescient foreboding of nihilism since his madman declared in The Gay Science that “God Is Dead, God Remains Dead, And We Have Killed Him….”
As Nietzsche foresaw and could not escape, the death of God and moral philosophy deconstructed any notions of truth vs vacant suppositions, beauty vs ugliness, good vs evil.
Nietzsche asserted that upon the age of Charles Darwin, God and Christianity (and the metaphysics that depended upon God for notions of truth) were deemed irrelevant, an impediment to heroism, deserving to be erased.
Human beings were no longer majestic individual designs from our Creator, just a more complicated higher order genus amidst the chaos of nature. The philosophical structuralisms from the time of Plato through the Christian era to the Enlightenment to the rise and supremacy of the natural sciences created arbitrary social constructs that needed to be abandoned.
According to Nietzsche, since the face of God was a fiction, teleology and the progressive dialectic of history were nonsense, history didn’t matter, truth and meaning were simply subjective and fleeting.
Thus, every person’s imagined or constructed self-identity and notion of good or evil was as valid as any other.
Without God, humans no longer had any legitimate moral claim over any other organism, nor upon each other.
Nietzsche brutally and unassailably swept to the curb Christianity and its unique claims to the transcendent reverence for each individual life. He also believed his analysis was catastrophic for civilization.
His solution, of course, was the ubermensch in his Thus Spake Zarathustra. More on that later.
Now, Nietzsche is not just some historical curio in the annals of philosophy, language, psychology, and sociology. Follow Freud from Nitzsche, then to Jung, Erickson, Fromm, Adler, Foucault. Follow the French anti-foundationalists from Nietzsche to Camus, to Foucault. Where there is Nietzsche there is Gramsci. Where there is Cloward and Piven there is Nietzsche. Scratch Saul Alinsky and you’ll find Nietzsche. Then comes Karl Popper, and …George Soros. Don’t leave out Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum.
The transgender movement is part of the larger trans-humanism wave that denies objective truth. It admits no moral authority. It replaces God’s image with a random result of biodiversity, making each of us just another amoeba to be manipulated.
Retired Great Books professor Michael Sugrue in his series of lectures on the “Intellectual Tradition of Western Civilization” offers a succinct, accessible, and stunning summary of Nietzschean analytics about the necessary degradations of culture and how it came about. Sugrue’s lectures are all on YouTube, mostly recorded in the mid to late 1990s.
This is how Prof Sugrue frames it… from his lecture “Nietzsche and the Death of God” explaining the Exceptional Man immune from morality :
“Remember Nietzsche is a prose poet, an artist, not a logician. In abolishing morality and destroying ethics he is staking a position much like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s” Crime and Punishment” who commits murder because he has the theory of the Exceptional Man—that is, the usual norms of right and wrong which we expect to be universal, can be ignored by certain superior individuals.
“The superior men are the great artists, creative in language, politics, or science—those who are breaking the boundaries inherited from centuries of error. That creative ability is more important than any moral judgment we might make of such a superior man.”
Although Nietzsche had only scorn for the proletariat and hated socialism because it would dilute and suppress the superior man, we cannot dismiss Karl Marx in exploring today’s incarnation of Nietzsche’s superior man, his ubermensch.
Marx of course introduced dialectic economic materialism, leading to the identification of the momentous clash between the proletariat working class and the propertied dominion. Marx’s struggle actually wasn’t between the propertied class and the proletariat according to sociologist the late Alvin Gouldner in his work—“The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.”
The proletariat were mere pawns in the real war for power between the property-owning class and the upcoming rival—the mercenary technocrat and intellectual class, as Prof Darren Stallof, colleague of Michael Sugrue, whose lectures are also on Youtube, remarks in his reading of Gouldner’s argument.
Further, this intellectual class over the past fifty years has gradually elbowed its way to power in enlarging, controlling and manipulating the Administrative State, according to UNLV sociologist Prof John Marini in two podcasts with Steven Hayward at Powerline. Prof Marini says this intellectual class now is able to dictate rules and norms to the propertied class and nearly everyone else; an incremental subtle coup in the takeover of private property and the means of production while dismantling the US Constitution by obviating the separation of powers.
Nietzsche’s superior man in the flesh, here and now, in our face, neither conjecture nor conspiracy, is this intellectual class, Prof Marini’s Administrative State. And this technical intelligentsia is not populated by Christianity’s faithful warrior/evangelists.
These new overlords are emboldened by Nietzsche’s imprimatur to carpet-bomb moral guardrails and structuralism, and purpose for life, in order to impose their own secular eschatology whereby the remains of the civilized world would be theirs to inherit — and resuscitate — for their sole glory.
Karl Marx can only watch and weep. His clash of the titans never benefitted the working class — only enabled the intellectual elitists, the cultural bourgeoisie, the revolutionary technocrats in exploiting the working class to seize state and economic power, ostensibly temporarily, to facilitate the redistribution of wealth and power to the common man.
Marx expected the proletariat takeover would lead to the evaporation of the temporary central state. Except, in the real world, following Nietzsche’s Will to Power, once acquiring central state power, the intellectual class will never relinquish it.
Who shall dismantle the Administrative State, destroying Nietzsche’s ubermensch and the forces of evil surrounding us?
In the meantime, Dostoyevsky’s Exceptional Man, Raskolnikov, in the end finds solace, salvation and redemption by reconverting to his Christian root, seeking God’s mercy, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
SF Source American Thinker May 2023