Once again I visited the old Joliet penitentiary.  The abandoned, decrepit site draws me.  I wanted to have another opportunity to feel the place, a scarce relic of the past.  The prison was constructed in 1860 out of limestone, built by convicts brought from the prison at Alton.  Alton was shuttered in part due to horrendous conditions of existence for the incarcerated there.

A prison is a self contained subculture, a way of life encompassing those placed there by society, and those who are employed there, the warden, the guards…  The prison at Joliet was built just before the outbreak of the Civil War.  Certainly it was a raw time, especially if your family resided in the South, or participated in the frontier.  Chicago was considered a frontier town.

By contrast our time, the early 21st century is a more corrupt time, a time of superstition.  I have in mind the evangelical communities with their Jesus fetishism, as well as the AR-15 fetishists.  Superstition is a involuntary eruption of un-reason, an expression of a hard-edged individualism.  Our time is one of refined taste, even in the habits of cruelty, the inhumanity which is potential in each of us.

By returning to the old prison ruins, I wanted to get the feel of a time when the axis of our common life was less refined, a time that concealment, and misdirection had not yet infiltrated, would metastasize in my time …

This is what Nietzsche wrote in comparison between a time before, and a more refined, “sophisticated” time:

Third, it is usually said,…
that such times of corruption
are gentler and that cruelty declines drastica11y,
compared with the older, stronger age that was more given to faith.

But this praise I cannot accept …
All I concede is that crue1ty now becomes more refined
and that its older forms henceforth offend the new taste;
but the art of wounding and torturing others
with words and looks reaches its supreme development
in times of corruption:

it is only now that malice and the delight in malice are born.
The men of corruption are witty and slanderous;
they know of types of murder that require neither daggers nor assault;
they also know that

whatever is said well is believed.

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

Did Nietzsche intuit the advent of Fox News, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook, or RT news…