Dark Nietzschean Thoughts

The serious thinker is self-critical: his examination of life, without which his life is not worth living, is a self-examination, even unto a painful thinking against himself. He has the courage to entertain, which is not to say endorse, dark thoughts. He is not an apologist for a ready-made worldview. He toes no party line. His watchword is ‘inquiry,’ not ‘worldview.’ He would have a worldview if he could, but he must inquire to find one.

Here is a dark thought, one I do not endorse, but entertain, though not with much hospitality.

The world is just power and brutality at bottom. The healthy human animal, sensing this in his guts, exercises his power for his own pleasure and to his own advantage without moral scruples. The sick human animal moralizes and reflects and hesitates, having hobbled himself with moral codes and an excess of thinking. The sick human animal’s reasoning and spirituality, quest for Transcendence, pursuit of the Good, thirsting after justice and righteousness, and so on are nothing more than expressions and legitimations of his weakness. And part of his sickness are these very reflections on whether he is a sick animal unfit for life in the only world there is, and whether morality is buncombe.

Though it smacks of paradox, the healthy human animal does not entertain dark Nietzschean thoughts. He does not think; he lives, innocently, like a beast. He does not torment himself with thoughts about moving beyond good and evil. He lives — beneath good and evil.

Christianity has civilized us but also weakened us. No longer is our penology unspeakably brutal like that of the ancient Romans or the present-day Iranians. We in the West have gone to the other extreme: we oppose capital punishment for even the worst miscreants and absurdly debate whether death by lethal injection is “cruel and unusual punishment” and thus unconstitutional.

So much for the dark thoughts, which I do not endorse. Now a question which I do endorse as a question: To what extent, if any, has Christianity contributed to the suicide of the West? Our suicidal empathy is well-documented by Gad Saad in his eponymous book. And no doubt you caught my allusion to James Burnham.