by R.J. Jacob
Friedrich Nietzsche described the “free spirit” as one who takes his acquired positions, his instincts, his experiences, and holds them as foreground—stressing them, straining them, and discovering what they are made of. The free spirit requires a discipline of not “staking his heart” on ideas and concepts, for ideas and concepts merely assist us as “hostels for a night, which a wanderer needs and accepts,” and though one may be tempted to move into the most comfortable hostel, one must be wary of settling down.1
Nietzsche sought to see western man move away from the passive recede of concepts to become active in the creation of new concepts. This rejection of purifying and polishing concepts was not a call to ignore the western cannon, but a desire to see the individual cast off his snake skins, at which point, the individual creates new work without irony or moral condemnation—“the work of the pure free willed spirit.”2
In the late 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche spotted in Richard Wagner a hindrance in the upward development of the German spirit. For years, connected closely by shared desires and appreciations, Nietzsche considered Wagner as the consummate proto-Master, until the disappointing year of 1876, when all that Nietzsche had admired in Wagner had spoiled before his eyes.
Nietzsche believed that Wagner had transformed the spontaneity of music-creation into a studious duty of designing compositions to arouse, enrage, and teach Germans how to attain virtue. Adding to this, Nietzsche despised Wagner’s obsessive anti-Semitism, writing in his essay “Nietzsche contra Wagner,” “[Wagner] had condescended step by step to everything that I despise—even to anti-Semitism.”3 Nietzsche saw anti-Semitism as a weakness in man, a problem of honor and discipline in character. In terms of principle, the anti-Semites lacked cleanliness as a consequence of their excessive oppositions, which hampered the spiritual development toward a wonderfully artistic fight through modernity. Those who would fall short of relinquishing excessive oppositions and all its indignation—who would allow the dirt to gather on their brow—for Nietzsche, were unworthy of power and benevolence.
Certainly, hate and wrath are natural elements of man—and must not be denied. However, Nietzsche came to see the anti-Semites as the “latest speculators in idealism,” whose hatred had formed in connection to a highest moral imperative, which, as Nietzsche stressed, functioned as a Trojan Horse for herd values manifesting in a type of “Christian-Aryan-bourgeois manner.”4 Although Nietzsche believed the Germans were somewhat strong, he observed that they were narrowly fixated on duty rather than instinct. Nietzsche believed the anti-Semites would self-contaminate with a certain self-confidence in the “right road,” eventually and unknowingly acclimatizing men into even “narrower values.”5 When it becomes about duty, the individual devotes his entire existence to a “highest good” (the “truth” and welfare of the “Aryan race”) and becomes more objective, more referential, more dogmatic, and thus retires from the pursuit of knowledge.
For Nietzsche, nothing could be worse, for this, is a betrayal of the discipline.
Unlike the Romans, the New Right attempts to create virtue out of their own oppressed condition. In the case of German Nationalism, which overlapped considerately with Christianity (as does the New Right), the powerlessness of the Germans grew into herd hatred—similar to the slave hatred of the Jews under the Romans. Likewise, the New Right has developed itself in opposition to “international Jewry” to the highest degree, showing pity to all whites and naming “the Jew” as the primary cause for the decline of the white race. As a result, the New Right has absorbed into its ideology an obsessive anti-Semitism which functions in contradiction with its own aristocratic goals.
Nietzsche in all his work warned of theorems and ideals that speak of duty to justify the “highest feelings,” as an attempt to escape nihilism through the highest ideal, producing the opposite, and making the problem more problematic.6 Nietzsche regarded the anti-Semites as “the foremost moral bigmouth today,” a product of an “attitudinized morality,” which should not be confused with aristocratic virtue.7 For Nietzsche, this attitudinized morality is one that makes “weakness” appear as strength, dressing morality as duty, or as my comrade MRDA describes it, “hiding behind the apron strings of morality.” Such duty is fixed with an inability to forgo one’s own assumptions, whereby instinct and spontaneity is falsified—and newer, future movements still appear strong under false names and valuations.8 Nietzsche argued that this morality was deeply rooted in a psychological conviction of faith, that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies,” and “an ‘anti-Semite’ surely does not become more respectable because he lies on principle . . . conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle because it serves a purpose, have borrowed from the Jews.”9
Instinctive individuals do not make appeals to grand systems in order to logically deduce what is thought by “White Nationalism” of what the individual ought to do. The strong, act out of instinct, not, out of duty. This duty-based discourse is a barefaced break from the aristocratic spirit in which groups of individuals progress through herdification rather than hierarchicalization. People of the New Right, for instance, come together through powerlessness and herd-instinct, united in social solidarity, thereby positing a whimsical whitopia for an entire race—in addition to a few worthy points of honor. For Nietzsche, this is the meal of a flock, preparing to lose its teeth, as there are too many sheep who would lose their joy if such a “duty” were taken from them.10
Nietzsche noted that what distinguished himself “above” the men of fatherlands was his strict possession of disciplina voluntatis: the ability to train one’s self. More, Nietzsche believed that a deep love for an entire nation (or race, or the world) is a “love falsified as surrender (and altruism), while only the most complete persons can love,” whereas mediocre minds (a following, group, nation, or movement) who take their morality too seriously always become the “worst lovers.” This applies not only to love of God, but as Nietzsche stated explicitly, “also to love of ‘fatherland.'”11
It is important to understand that Nietzsche rejected the glorification of a “nation as a whole,” as a “lie,” and an illusion.12 Nietzsche believed that the unique strength of man is only that of a few. More importantly, Nietzsche argued that strict attachments to the so called nation prevent the individual from being firmly rooted in the ego—eradicating the advancement of the nation’s strongest individuals (egoism as egomorphism, altruism as alter-ation).13 Nietzsche wrote:
I am interested only in the relations of a people to the rearing of the individual man, and among the Greeks the conditions were unusually favourable for the development of the individual; not by any means owing to the goodness of the people, but because of the struggles of their evil instincts.14
For this and other reasons, individuals with the potential for greatness must guard from the collective intoxication, for which disregarding is to deny the will to power and to degenerate into herdification. Also, and essentially, the individual must recognize social solidarity as the strongest herd virtue. Nietzsche actually developed his concept of the Übermensch following his assessment of modern European Nationalism and the ways in which the nation suppressed the potential of the individual to fully develop under a cultural mandate to conform.
Instead of learning to rear the individual, the White Nationalists have inherited all the trappings of previous variations of European Nationalism, and if anything, more closely resemble the Phariseeism of those who best pose as “noble indignation.”15 Pretexts for revenge in men of extreme resentment who attempt to teach truths to a people, in time, eliminate the charm of rareness, originality, specialness and unaverageness from its virtue—“removing its individualistic and aristocratic magic.”16 As Nietzsche best put it, “it’s as if they assume values were inherent in things and all one had to do was grasp them!”17
Already we find that no skeptic, no critic, and no free spirit are permitted to speak without conforming to the sacred duty. In the past, I’ve criticized the noise, labels, tactics, strategies, analytical approach, and ends of the White Nationalists, and in doing so, have been called “ignorant,” “idiot,” “stupid,” “jocksniffer,” “probably a Jew,” and much else. Nietzsche regarded the skeptic as “respectable but rare,” possessing the ability to challenge all inherited concepts whereas groups with the highest feelings merely balk, bark, or bully the exception.18 Nietzsche asked himself, “is it likely that a tool is able to criticize its own fitness?”19
Nietzsche was a man who battled the Jews at the highest level of war, yet he was a man of the highest war-like spirit. Nietzsche was no fan of the Jews but greatly admired their energy, “higher intelligence,” capital, and silence which, according to Nietzsche, was “accumulated from generation to generation in the long school of their suffering.”20 Of course Nietzsche considered the ways in which the Jews had attained power to be the most preposterous, insidious, cowardly, and anti-biological achievement in recorded history (Christianity, liberalism, socialism, etc.) Nonetheless, Nietzsche recognized that the Jews had awakened the “envy and hatred” of inferior and powerless men, placing the blood lust of the herd on the backs of all Jews as scapegoats for every conceivable public and private misfortune.21
Interestingly, Nietzsche contemplated the thought of whether the Jews “wanted” to exercise power, and noted that “if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want—could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe.”22 Now, more than one hundred years later, Nietzsche’s prediction of the Jews as a distinct race capable of taking over Europe in response to the hostility of the anti-Semites has been borne out quite well.
While Nietzsche made numerous attempts to reveal the boyish buffoonery of anti-Semitism to his fellow Europeans, he ultimately failed, describing his writings as “completely buried and unexhumeable in this anti-Semitic dump.”23 Nietzsche even cut ties with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner to fund and release “Beyond Good and Evil” out of his own pockets, and later moved to issue second editions of his earlier works as an attempt to exonerate his legacy by distancing himself from the anti-Semites. By doing so, Nietzsche hoped that a worthy readership would one day emerge.
At times, I tend to return to Nietzsche’s personal letters—particularly those written during his later years, when he was lonely, short on money, and wounded in friendships. He found himself battling a mountain of melancholy upon discovering that his sister had degenerated into anti-Semitism and broke from his discipline. Nietzsche was surrounded by the Nationalist current, at which point, had become “three-quarters rotten” in his eyes, while the German women—including his sister—had lost their youth and beauty to excessive oppositions.24 In the same vein, I too find myself surrounded by a collection of scapegoat factories run by dandies and little bitches who specialize in supplanting white failure. And though I’ve held my temper to remain in amity and have unleashed the least of my wrath in this essay, it stands to reason that the anti-Semites will resent these observations and brush me out for penning this piece—a testament to their slaphappy behavior.
It must be acknowledged that the longing for self-mastery over one’s instincts and passions can not be achieved through the anti-Semitic picture. Although some individuals of the New Right are decent, the general weight of the movement belongs to the infinite regress backward. As I see it, White Nationalism is a strange occurrence in which the conditions of powerlessness and meaningless dupe its thinkers into assuming that nothing can be more important than race and virtue.
I predict that any original, fresh and dynamic ideas surrounding White Nationalism will originate in the minds of loosely associated thinkers who are not terribly fixated on race, duty and oppositions. The rest will serve as bus boys and bonafide morons of duty-based discourse. There is the possibility that a heretical sect of the alternative right emerges, but as of now, the New Right remains a giant question mark.
These criticisms of White Nationalism and the New Right may be difficult to see at the moment, but can be expected to become more apparent as its irreverent approach becomes more visible and more evident in time. We, freer spirits, must recognize that the creative element of the free spirit to recreate the re-conceptualized thinker is a consequence of the ability to shed one’s inherited ideas. Ultimately, the new thinker must be a destroyer, not a refiner.
We find ourselves at a moment in history when the ability to create new systems of thought has nearly become extinct. Nietzsche’s assessment in everything he has ever written was an attempt to make way for an oppositional force in defense of instinct and Hellenic thought, and more specifically, against all systems of moral valuation and moral judgement. If Nietzsche’s acquisition for power is correct—instinct will triumph. The question arises: what might such an oppositional force look like? Men of instinct, who can see what follows from a distance—what might those individuals look like?
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Notes:
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by R.J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann [y4 iVew edition], Random House, 1967, [132 (1885)]
2. Will to Power, 80: 132 (1885)
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, How I Got Rid Of Wagner, translated by Thomas Common and Walter Kaufmann, 1895, pg. 74
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1989, pg. 158
5. Will to Power, 113: (1883-1888) 70
6. Will to Power, 28 {Spring-Fall 1887)
7. Genealogy and Ecce, pg. 124
8. Will to Power, 1007 {Spring-Fall 1887)
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, translated by H. L. Mencken, the Vail-Ballou Press, 1923, pg. 157
10. Will to Power, 1009 (Spring-Fall 1887)
11. The Will to Power, Book Two, 167
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, The Pennsylvania State University, 1999, page 7
13. Will to Power, book two, 5., 167
14. Zarathustra, pg. 7
15. Genealogy and Ecce pg. 123
16. Will to Power, 317 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev, Spring-Fall 1888).
17. Will to power: 422 (1885)
18. Will to Power, book two: 223 – 414 (Jan.-Fall 1888) 121
19. Will to Power, 410 (1885-1886) For the Preface 120
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, translated by Helen Zimmern, 1909, pg. 475
21. Human, pg. 475
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, Random House Digital, Inc, 2000, pg. 378
23. The Nietzsche Channel, Correspondents
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, Translated by Anthony Mario Ludovici, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921, pg. 180