Letters by a modern St. Ferdinand III about cults

Just read some Nietzsche. His works are complicated and largely fatuous in many ways. The 'superman' theory is almost an Ayn Randian fantasy play – a new 'race' of will-to-power hominids will and must replace the current set of easy-living bourgeois who make life so dull and unexciting. This is one core element of Nietzsche's philosophy. One can make the argument, though it is incorrect I believe, that such ideals will lead to a dictatorship, or the imposition of state power and stronger will through cult rule. It does not necessarily have to. Nietzsche never supported socialism, or virulent nationalism. Witness his comment on China, appropriate 129 years later [he wrote it in 1882 in the Gay Science, a title which would be a 'hate' crime today....];

“China . . . is a country in which large-scale dissatisfaction and the capacity for change have become extinct centuries ago; and the socialists and state idolaters of Europe with their measures for making life better and safer might easily establish in Europe, too, Chinese conditions and a Chinese "happiness."

China's 'capitalism', like its inevitable takeover of the world's IPE is largely a myth. Apparently Japan was supposed to rule the world back in the paleolithic era of the 1980s. China's 'reign' will end the same way, either through a depression or more likely civil discord.

The second aspect of Nietzsche is his view of morality and culture. He was not a Christian, though ironically born to a clergyman. His new 'Gods' or supermen are the replacement for Christianity. He knew that once you killed God than something would have to replace it. In 'Thus spoke Zarathustra', the new Godhead demands that the human race 'face up to its destiny', by becoming more rational, more perfect, more physical, more alive, and more human. This is of course philosophical bunk and Nietzsche, like Nostradamus is a fakir, a sooth-sayer who says nothing that is either real or comprehensible. His works are dense, hard to understand and torturous in their illogic.

Nietzsche and all les Philosophes including those Randian Libertarians, make their points through the extremity of their arguments. I doubt that many women are as capable in business, intelligence or in sexual lusts as Daphne Taggart [who is Ayn Rand's alter-ego]. Likewise we can be skeptical that Zarathustra could ever exist except in the vivid imagination of a lonely German man living in Italy.

This is the key to Nietzsche. He was an isolated, distempered, unsexed and friendless man. Contemporary accounts portray him as an ascetic – nary a glass of wine, a sugar loaf, nor a gleaming leg of mutton would grace his life. He led a simple almost impoverished existence, surrounded by broken furniture, too many books, and musty clothes. He reminds me of a literary St. Francis. He never married. He did not spend any time with the fairer [or more devious] sex. He had no friends. Nietzsche is the apogee of philosophical reflections and ultimately irrelevancy precisely because he is a hermit. He mimics the academic, ivory tower world, where active minds conjure up fantastical theories, and invent wonderful characters and themes, but none of these intellectual forays are joined to reality, the true nature of being a human, or to the real joys and sorrows of a real existence. Nietzsche's ideas are simply expressions of a very lonely man, who wore out his mind and his body trying to make himself and his theories appear to be important and full of meaning.

On a cultural level his declaration that Christianity was dead, did percolate throughout the Continent in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It was a decidedly negative influence. Perhaps his 'supermen' would be able to resist the vagaries of the mind which would come to afflict Europe as Christianity withered and the all-powerful state came into being. National Socialism and Communism were of course the same twin bastards which sprang out of Marxism and Darwinian social theory, married with the power of the nation state. They replaced the successful culture of Christian Europe with their own versions of 'will to power'. Cultural Marxism is finishing off what they began. Europe never recovered from the destruction of its Romano-Christian heritage. Nietzsche of course hated Christian Europe. He was an early cultural Marxist, a man who knew little about Islam, European history, the medieval period and nothing about the Crusades. Only such an ignoramus could write this about Islam:

"Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (--I do not say by what sort of feet--) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin--because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! . .

Nietzsche is thus part of the problem. Destroy your own civilisation. Extol the Oriental. Create supermen [Obama?] to lead you to the better and greater world of action and heroic quality. No wonder the Nazi cult venerated this lonely, misguided and uneducated man. No wonder his works are largely petrified gibberish.