Plague Journal, Already A Shrapnel Casualty
54
One should not let oneself be misled:
great intellects are skeptics…..
The vigor of mind,
its freedom through strength
and superior strength, is proved by skepticism.
Men of conviction simply do not come into consideration
where the fundamentals of value and dis-value
are concerned.
Convictions are prisons.
They do not see far enough,
they do not see things beneath them:
but to be permitted to speak about value and dis-value
one must see five hundred convictions beneath one – behind one…
A spirit which wants to do great things,
which also wills the means for it,
is necessarily a skeptic….
Grand passion,
the ground and force of his being,
even more enlightened,
more despotic than he himself is,
takes his whole intellect into his service,
it makes him intrepid;
it even gives him courage for unholy means..
…Grand passion uses and uses up convictions,
it does not submit to them –
it knows itself sovereign. –
Conversely; the need for belief,
for the unconditional Yes and No,
is a requirement of weakness.
The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort
is necessarily a dependent man –
such as out of himself cannot posit ends at all.
The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself,
he can only be a means,
he has to be used,
he needs someone to use him.
… The believer is not free
to have a conscience at all over the question ‘true’ and ‘false.’
To be honest on this point would mean his immediate destruction.
The pathological conditionality of his perspective
makes of the convinced man
a fanatic.
The larger than life attitudes
of these sick spirits, these conceptual epileptics,
impresses the great masses — fanatics are picturesque,
mankind would rather see gestures
than listen to reasons…
Excerpt, The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 185
I have not watched any of the Republican nominating convention. I was asked by a friend this week if I had watched any of the speeches, and if I planned to watch. I answered, “No I had not watched, and I did not plan to watch any of it.” To my curiosity about her interest, she replied that she planned to watch in order to make up her own mind about the respective candidates. I offered that we hear directly from the President daily on Twitter. The News often features his surrogates speaking on his behalf. I had heard quite enough to make up my mind about him. Could anyone possibly say what has not been said already too many times over? Have we not suffered damage already from the President’s prevarication?
To ask if I plan to give attention to Republican convention speeches is analogous to asking if I plan to attend a Klan rally. What is the upside of exposing oneself to unfiltered racism, lying with malice aforethought, and fanaticism?
Life is short, too short to endure gratuitous damage to ones soul, the damage that true believers inevitably inflict.
2 thoughts on “Plague Journal, Already A Shrapnel Casualty”
An old adage is, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” In that regard, I understand we are inundated with the verbiage of pro-Trump rhetoric on a daily (if not hourly) basis, but even though I too cannot stomach the stench of the current administration’s constant lying, I also feel it necessary to stay abreast of the machinations of Trumpists. We need to know what they are up to in order to be able to rid ourselves of this existential scourge. So as distasteful as it is, I will digest bits and pieces of the fear-mongering spewed by the Trump family and their surrogates.
As noted in the excerpt from Nietzsche, the weak among us are sucked into the vortex of Trump’s web of lies because they desperately want to believe and therefore will set aside their birthright of using a brain for analysis of fact or clarity of vision. They immerse themselves in the cesspool of a chest-thumping nightmare and then refer to it as divine providence, not even remotely realizing they are flushing themselves and the rest of us down the toilet.
I cannot help but fear we are indeed doomed. That the overt hatred espoused by these relics of a humanity I had hoped we had moved beyond, will once again find a way to usurp our democracy and retain power. I will do everything I can to fight this cancer, but it may be too late. Time will tell. 67 days to be precise.
67 days! Now I’ll start counting.
As a society, we are effectively silo’d apart from one another, into socio-economic enclaves….. In retrospect we can see this this may be a prelude to disaster. As social beings we need to intentionally support sharing of diverse cultural backgrounds, tastes, etc. or be subject to demagogues, from McCarthy to Trump. Once a construct of reality is solidly formed, only a cataclysmic event can provoke doubt, an openness to alternatives. Clearly society cannot withstand a cancer of a tyrant in the White House for four more years, nor can we go back to business-as-usual with influence and fortune continuing to be vacuumed up by the already uber-wealthy.