Thus Spoke Zarathustra

youtube.com/watch?v=Sn7QvnhJgeA

he is the left half of lit personified though

...

Are we just fleshy blips in some meaningless stew of cosmic oblivion? Or is it vice-reversa?

Nietzsche never gets the credit he deserves. The curse of intelligence, it is said, is to be misunderstood. Of all the existential philosophers I've read none have managed to throw off the shackles of nihilism with such force and fury as Nietzsche. To tackle the herd mentality of the opiated masses must take unimaginable courage. But is it not necessary? To leave our future in the hands of "Christians and other nihilists" would be spiritual suicide. Such beliefs are the seed of what Nietzsche termed "slave morality". By ignoring this world's problems in favor of otherworldy concerns, so-called "Christians" reduce the value of life itself to nihil. Modern day Christianity abstracts the divine spark of life, the so-called "will to power", and turns it into something illusory and shameful. In doing so, Christianity subverts the traditional virtues of courage, nobility, honesty, and chivalry. Such naivete is not simply foolish, it is dangerous. In our modern times, slave morality can also be seen as the seed of communism, political-correctness and other "feel good" evils. Any involuntary attempt to make all men equal only serves to emasculate the strong and drag everyone into weakness.

This understanding of what nihilism means is essential in understanding what Nietzsche meant when he wrote that; "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." Quite literally, God has been murdered by his own followers. Christianity and slave morality were the death knell for the elites of society, as they were condemned for their strength. The more powerful you were, the more evil you seemed by the Christian criteria. Carried to their logical conclusion, Christian values are harshest on the most powerful being of all, which, in the Christian cosmology, is, of course, God Himself. What Nietzsche was saying, essentially, was that the Christian God could not have survived the hollowing out of the human spirit perpetrated by Western Christendom. The most powerful spirit of all would be the first to go. With this quotation, it seems to me that Nietzsche actually had a grasp of the infinite that far exceeds most people today. This paradox is particularly clear in his admiration for mystic figures such as Socrates and Zarathustra.

Nietzsche's concept of the will to power is often portrayed as a selfish and Machiavellian view of the world. Ironically, however, one of the most salient features of the will-to-power as a concept is its capacity for unconditional self sacrifice. The association of "power" with egotistical domination of the will falsely presupposes that power is itself preceded by an ego-substance. The way the concept is articulated by Nietzsche, however, is that the will-to-power exists at the base of everything, and is, in fact, proposed as an alternative to "grammatical" theories of metaphysics which incorrectly put the language of "I" before the raw becoming of the world.

Unfortunately, no language has an easy way of expressing things in terms of process, the best we get are people like Heraclitus or Lao Tzu, both of whom try to point to the world as "fluid" or "conflict" but cannot force us to stop thinking about these utterances in terms of things flowing or striving. No language has begun to be adequate for this until 20th century physics, with the relativistic focus on "events" rather than "bodies" and developments in quantum theory that showed the notion of simple location, i.e. an absolute difference between a particle and the space surrounding it, or the particle's "being a thing", to be an approximation, since there is a nonzero probability that any given particle could be in a range of positions in space-time (and ultimately anywhere at all).

According to Nietzsche, the inherent problem with the Christian notion of selflessness or agape is that such notions act against the ego and are not truly indifferent to it. The result is a morality which is, to Nietzsche, reactionary and hypocritical, because it nevertheless fortifies the ego-substance in acting against it. He doesn't therefore condemn self-sacrifice, however, since that would obviously be just another example of the tyranny of the ego -- exactly what the Christian doctrines are reacting to in the first place! He is cleverer than that. Sacrifice remains an integral element of the will-to-power, because it really does produce strength and power -- not for some delusion of ego, but for becoming. Sacrifice occurs when there is an ingression of novelty, complexity, beauty.

Although the call to move beyond human concepts of good and evil may seem threatening to some, it can also be seen as the highest form of faith. Rather than subordinating the will to the ego for either selfish or selfless reasons, one subordinates their ego to the will recognizing the former to be merely illusory. Thus the call beyond good and evil is not a call to immorality but a summons to a truer form of morality. Once one no longer defines good and evil in relation to the ego, one can find true morality within the recognition of a force greater than one's self. This of course has a parallel in the Chinese concept of the Dao or even the Christian notion of "let not my will but thine be done." Despite Nietzsche's demonization it would appear that his anti-Christian agenda was not a call to destroy the faith but to refine its essence and focus back to where it was meant to belong.

Powers are for the weak. I have no powers. I mean, unless you count the power to blow minds with my weapons-grade philosophical insights.

"Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had power."
- Part II, Chapter 29, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

(((LYFE)))

no. he is the snarky, self-involved millennial shit-head personified. the people who can't watch rick and morty because they want people to think they aren't exactly who they are.

the ones who snicker each time they hear a catchphrase, even though they don't know why.

> "MORE COAL!"
> - spike milligan

>Do you believe in God?
>Yes.
>*Head explodes freeing tiny sheep

what did they mean by this