Friedrich Nietzsche was wrong. Or at least, his philosophy contained a rather vast contradiction. His spin on what he called Eternal Recurrence, an idea which actually predates him by centuries, was that all of energy and existence has been recurring and shall continue to recur from infinity to infinity. Yet Nietzsche had this other notion of what he called The Last Man, which will be the antithesis to his more popular ubermensch ideal. A society culminating with a breed of loser who loses so much he has nothing left to lose, and thus nothing left with which to barter his way back up from off his knees and onto his feet to fight anew.
The problem I see is that while his Eternal Recurrence concerns how life has always been repetitive and shall always be repetitive, the turns of society leading up to his Last Man form a distinctly downward spiral, with said Last Man essentially being so pussy-whipped that he no longer even dreams. The Eternal Recurrence may not mean that fate is entirely preordained, but it does mean that the objective bits of all that we might ever know are cyclical. But the Last Man on the other hand, is a one-way streak straight down the pisser. These ideas cannot compliment one another. One is without end; the other is lower than low to the inevitable and rather final marriage of both a whimper and a bang.
What’s more, it is my belief that the world around us today reflects this exact contradiction.
The Hermetic lunacy of “as above, so below” is cancelled out by the disgusting meme expressing how endless streams of bad things happening to good people balances good things endlessly happening to bad people. We cannot be drained of our last dying breath again and again ad infinitum though. Even if that is what the perpetual Pawnbrokers That Be seem to eternally want. Eventually there will be nothing left to colonize, no virgins left to scream, and no more dreams left to dream beyond the never-ending quiet night which graciously waits for us all regardless of credit score or Facebook likes.
I wrote ago about the tiny class of self-styled ubermensch wielding the controls full throttle over whatever Eternal Recurrence for the cultivation of a Last Man sort. And of how, for lack of actual heroes in our society to hero-worship, such personalities are erroneously given the keys to the car, on a silver platter. Rewarded for destroying the world and all who dwell in it.
Expanding on its insanely lucrative working relationship, Amazon Web Services recently announced a special secret region of its cloud exclusively for the CIA. And simultaneous to this is the Trump administration’s plan to even further privatize intelligence, to literally award the keys to the entire kingdom to officials who are not only unelected, but who are purposed fundamentally with for-profit endeavors. Immediately prior to these two news stories, was an occurrence where Amazon Web Services incidentally proved itself inconsiderate enough for extra safeguards on matters as paltry as national security, to allow dozens of terabytes of data from the US military to end up unencrypted on the web. At no point in the coverage of this event was Amazon even remotely blamed, a point which prompted me to jest in private correspondence that the ordeal was ultimately a matter of Amazon showing the Federal government precisely who wears the pants in this relationship. The promptness of the announcements regarding the secret cloud and Trump’s business deals with movers and shakers of the intelligence community would seem to validate my charge. Extravagantly so.
And in spite of its own services leaving dozens of terabytes of data from the US military open to anyone on the planet with a WiFi connection, governors and mayors around the states are bending over backwards to woo Amazon into relocating its new HQ to their regions, with outright bribes of further tax breaks, corporate subsidies, and gaping city councilmen assholes aplenty.
The divide in logic is so vast, that mainstream news-persons such as CNBC’s “personal finance reporter” Jessica Dickler seem as oblivious to the notion of rewarding pillagers being wrong and criminal as she is by the idea that most citizens tax-paying or not cannot and will not ever be able to afford a one-million dollar retirement fund for themselves. Much less anything more. Because finances never trickle down, not even the taxes given to multinational corporations for outsourcing jobs while residents starve and economics strangle families left and right. Improving the grip the slave-master wields over his chains does not by any definition improve the livelihoods of the slaves, yet that is the feeble-minded culture of the USA. It’s idolizing the persons whose existence depends entirely on handouts and free rides at the expense of everybody else.
And while the ideal of “hero” has been misappropriated to mean the exact opposite of what it should, so too has the target of scorn over handouts and free rides. For example, observe this Malibu church pressured to end meals for the homeless because it lures the needy. One would think that a privatized problem-solving initiative finding a way to feed people for free would be considered supremely enterprising, yet instead of garnering a status as entrepreneurs its organizers have been shut down by their local government. Because the treasured label of entrepreneurship truthfully only applies to con-men bleeding the bulk of society.
Those who actually do lean the least on society, those persons living underground away from the means or interest in televisions that record them or census dicks counting heads or taxes paid to already-wealthy entrepreneurs in exchange for devouring the petty cash of governmental offices, those persons are vilified the most. Instead of enabling or placating such an inherently flawed system of controls, they are finding ways to legitimately survive, and they are gathering in number with each new mass layoff and they are not working to save up for the new iPhone or whatever gizmo and they are not wasting time strengthening Twitter algorithms by their very participation. They don’t care about sweeps week or Black Friday or celebrities dry-humping one another while climbing over each other to the perceived top. Not everyone can be so easily distracted, or bought off.
Unlike the uniforms, these folks have something worth defending, worth fighting for and worth living for and worth dying for. And there is nothing the celebrated cult leaders can do to stop them.