These thoughts have taken me longer than usual to formulate, to write. The second movement of Nietzsche’s vision-story of a camel that changes into a lion is well worth reading/absorbing as one would taste an exquisitely prepared appetizer. Why should one desire, or better, – need to become a lion?

I cannot get out of my head the image transmitted in the press yesterday of the first cabinet meeting of the Trump administration. To my sense of things the scene was a variation of a largish pool of stagnant water, ringed by toads of various sizes and types, on edge to join in chorus with the largest toad present. But wait, it is worth pointing out the frog taking second most time to croak, also had no official position, no standing at all to be present at the crowded table. According to the New York Times, Musk, who is not part of the cabinet, attended the meeting and spoke more than anyone except Trump.

Insight, recognition dawns given our social and political reality, – why it is necessary to become the lion!

But in the loneliest wilderness
the second metamorphosis happens:

here the spirit becomes a lion;
it will seize freedom,
and become master in its own wilderness.

Here it seeks its last master:
it will fight him, and its last God;
for victory it will struggle with the great dragon.

What is the great dragon
which the spirit is no longer inclined to call
Lord and God?

“You shall,” is what great dragon is called.
But the spirit
of the lion says,
“I will.”

“You shall,”
lies in its path,
sparkling with gold – a beast
covered with scales;
and on every scale glitters a golden,
“You shall!”

The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales,
and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons:
“All the values of all things – glitter on me.
All values have already been created,
and all created values — do I represent.

Truly, there shall be no ‘I will’ any more.
Thus speaks the dragon.

My brothers, why is there need of the lion in the spirit?
Why is it not enough the beast of burden,
which renounces and is reverent?

To create new values
– that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish:
but to create itself freedom for new creating
– that can the might of the lion do.

To create itself freedom,
and give a holy No even to duty:
for that, my brothers, there is need of the lion.

To assume the right to new values
– that is the most formidable assumption
for a weight-bearing and reverent spirit.
Truly, to such a spirit it is a theft,
and the work of a beast of prey.

It once loved “You Shall” as its most sacred:
now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness
even in the holiest things,
that it may capture freedom from its love:
the lion is needed for this capture.

But tell me, my brothers, what the child can do,
which even the lion could not do?

Why must the predatory lion still become a child?
Innocence is the child, and forgetting,
a new beginning, a game, a self-propelling wheel,
a first movement,
a sacred Yes.

For the game of creating, my brothers,
a sacred “yes” to life is needed:
the spirit now wills its own will;
the one who had lost the world
now attains its own world.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I told you:
how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion,
and the lion at last a child. –Thus spoke Zarathustra.

And at that time he staying in the town
which is called The Motley Cow.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, page 25