Once decay has reached its climax along with the infighting of
all sorts of tyrants, the Caesar always appears, the final tyrant
who puts an end to the weary struggle for sole rule-by putting
weariness to work for himself…

In these ages bribery and treason reach their peak, for the
love of the newly discovered ego is much more powerful now …

There is hardly any secure future left; one lives for today,
and this state of the soul makes the game easy for seducers,
for one allows oneself to be seduced and bribed only ‘for today’
while reserving the future and one’s virtue.

Individuals–being truly in-and-for-themselves – care, as
is well known, more for the moment than do their opposites,
the herd men, for they consider themselves no less incalculable
than the future. They also like to attach themselves to violent
men because they credit themselves with the capacity for actions
and for information that the mass of men would neither under-
stand nor forgive.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 1, Section 23 by Friedrich Nietzsche

The New York Times reports this morning:

• The F.B.I. arrested a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman at his mother’s home in the leak of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents.
• The suspect, Jack Teixeira, was the administrator of a chat group called Thug Shaker Central, where the classified materials surfaced.
• How could Teixeira have obtained these documents anyway? The leak has started a conversation about security clearances in the government.

Certainly I was not the only one, dumbfounded that recently composed documents detailing the material support, and battle plans for Ukraine’s spring offensive were published on the internet.  How could such information consequent to life and death of many – be accessible, and leaked, and published?  What of the mindset of the one who released this information?

Nietzsche describes a ethos of accelerating disintegration of social cohesion, ascendancy of the narcissistic individual, who becomes easy prey for conspiracy theorists advocating violence.  Lonely, isolated individuals attaching themselves to violent individuals, each a Caesar-mini-me.