The Drowning of our Race.Posted by simon on February 18th, 2008
Nietzsche poses and interesting philosophy with his presentation of the “overman”. A human that has evolved to the point where “pity, suffering, tolerance of the weak, the power of the soul over the body, the belief in an afterlife, the corruption of modern values” are all conquered. The “overman” is capable of forging his own destiny as he is no longer bound by the bindings of society, right/wrong or religion. The “overman” continually changes with the world he/she lives in.
The reason I bring up Nietzsche’s concept of the “overman” is this, Our world is one where people always want to get the upper hand on another person. It’s human nature. When you meet a person who is smarter, prettier, richer or whatever, you are attracted to them. Not only are you attracted to them but you envy and hate them a little because you want what they have. You are a greedy bastard, admit it. Everyone wants fiscal freedom, lots of sex with beautiful people and enough intelligence to overcome any obstacle that may be put in your way. So what does society try to do to all these people who we perceive as a threat because they have things we want. They try to level the playing field. They tax the rich more, they make beauty something that is only for supermodels and make intelligence a faux pas by isolating them and making the intelligent feel out of place. Now mind you these are the extremes but they are common themes present in today’s society. All you need to do is watch a few weeks of TV and you will see each of these cases more then emphasized, you will see them as a common way of life.
The real question is why does society want to level the playing field so much? Because of Fear. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before but society is completely driven by fear. The reason we evolved laws and government is simply because of fear out of what someone else would do to us. The Stock Market will shed hundreds of points in a day on the fear of a recession. People are scared to lose what they have or don’t have. They fear those who have more power then them and that is okay. It’s instinct, though we don’t have that fear for survival anymore. We have a fear of being socially ostracized, a fear of losing those few investment dollars we managed to scrape together and a fear of just plain being taken advantage of. You can look at almost any part of our ancient world, modern world even predict in our future existence that fear will dominate our society. The hope is somewhere in the future we will overcome fear.
This brings us back to the “overman”. The Overman frees himself of all of these fears and all of these hang-ups ( good vs evil, pity, religion, etc) by just living a life that is full and meaningful. If every person were to evolve to this plane of thinking and living one would have an understanding of life that would allow our species to continue to evolve further. Nietzsche’s Overman is just a stepping stone on the path to our species evolution. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want a bunch of uncaring pricks running around doing whatever makes them feel good. Nietzsche’s philosophies are thought provoking but they don’t exactly paint the picture of the world I want to live in. I think they do give us an idea for how our race needs to begin perceiving the world around them and dealing with the problems created in that world.
If I had to describe my perfect world, it would involve a populace that doesn’t fear what may or may not happen but deals with that is happening and tries it’s best to avoid anything negative from happening again, while at the same time knowing and accepting that it will happen again. It is not based on moral absolutes but an understanding of what it is to be imperfect and how to best deal with the imperfections that each individual has. Life is ever changing and so must the tenants we live our lives by. I believe the saying is “Idle hands are the tools of the Devil”, well I believe “Idle minds are Tools”.
And with that I leave you