The only two other persons I have told about this are my Delaware cousins, and I immediately said after “It feels so pretentious!” I am reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and mostly because I don’t have anything else at hand (except Plato’s Republic, and which, like BG&E, is tedious). Nietzsche wrote in a different time, and of course, I only have benefit of him via a translator, as he wrote in German. He often writes in long paragraphs, and uses semicolons too often for my taste – how about shorter sentences? He makes points I (most) often don’t get, or even think a little too subtle for anyone’s taste, even mine.
I was raised in a Catholic family, both Mom and Dad deeply religious, which brought them through his younger years of angry drinking. He settled down and became a good person. Had she any good sense, she would have left him in the 1960s, but her religious faith would not allow it, and anyway, where to go? She was a smart woman, but only educated through high school. She could only have moved in with her mother and two unmarried sisters in Milwaukee. She could have been a waitress! She stuck it out.
The second of her four boys (I was the baby) was smart beyond smart, and at the end of high school announced that he was entering the seminary to become a priest. He became a god of sorts, and made it through, taking his ordination in 1969. He was a good man and wise counselor until his death in 2011. I idolized him, but for myself, came to resent that the Catholic faith demanded so much of my Sundays. In 1988, at age 38, I quit the Church, and advised each of my children that they were on their own, to do as they wished. They all followed in my footsteps. My extended family was aghast, and the only support I received as I moved forward was from my older brother, the priest.
I was resentful of the Catholic faith for some years after that, the indoctrination and rituals. In fact, I felt this disdain for all religions. At some point I read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and took it to heart. Religious people were neither pretentious nor stupid. They merely responded to spiritual matters in a manner different than me, some (not all) not necessarily believing all of the tenets of faith, but feeling a warmth and regarding that feeling as real, along with a God with whom they felt a comfortable harmony.
That would never work for me, but I came to respect it. To this day, decades later, I regard religious faith as an instrument to help people be happy. I respect it and them, and bear them no ill will.
All that aside, last evening I came upon the following (long) passage from Nietzsche which I am reprinting here knowing full well it may not resonate with most readers. It is paragraph 58 of Beyond Good and Evil, and as I struggled through it I realized “This is me!” I am not stupid, and at the same time am tolerant. I’ll go through the rituals, not believing any of them to be meaningful. They matter to others, many of whom, like me, merely go along, not just to get along, but to be mindful of others and their sincere beliefs.
I read where Nietzsche, like Ayn Rand, is someone whom young people come across and adopt, failing to grow out of him/her. I still have no patience for Randians, but think Nietzsche might have more depth and staying power. You are free to disagree. Here is what I read that (finally ) reached me last evening. It is a very long paragraph with a shortage of periods. That’s how he wrote. Enjoy. Or not. God bless you all, and to those of you who have read Nietzsche, elucidate away, as I am all ears.
I feel freethinkers of diversified species and origin, but above all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to generation has dissolved the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose religions served, and only note their existence in the world with the kind of dull astonishment. They feel themselves, these good people, be it by their business or by their pleasures, not to mention the ‘Fatherland’, and the newspapers, and their ‘family duties;’ it seems that they have no time whatever left for religion; and above all, it is not obvious to them whether it is a question of a new business or a new pleasure – for it is impossible, they say to themselves, that people should go to church merely to spoil their tempers. They are by no means enemies of religious customs; should certain circumstances, State affairs perhaps, require their participation in such customs, they do what is required, as so many things are done – with a patient and unassuming seriousness, and without much curiosity or discomfort; – they live too much apart and outside to even feel the necessity for a for or against such matters. Among those in different persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority of German Protestants of the middle classes, especially in the great laborious centers of trade and commerce; also the majority of laborious scholars, and the entire University personnel (with the exception of theologians, whose existence and possibility there always gives psychologist new and more subtle puzzles to solve). On the part of pious, or merely church-going people, there is seldom any idea of how much good will, one might say arbitrary will, is now necessary for a German scholar to take the problem of religion seriously; his whole profession (and as I have said, his whole workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled by his modern conscience) inclines them to a lofty and almost charitable serenity as regards religion, with which is occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the ‘uncleanliness’ of spirit in which he takes for granted whatever everyone still professes to belong to the Church. It is only with the help of history (not through his own personal experiences, therefore) that the scholar succeeds in bringing himself to a respectable seriousness, and to a certain timid difference in presence of religions; but even when his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards them, is not personally advanced one step nearer to that which still maintains itself as Church or as piety; perhaps the contrary. The practical indifference to religious matters in the midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually sublimates itself in his case into circumstances and things; and it may be just the depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings with it. – Every age has its own divine type of naïveté, for the discovery of which other ages may envy it: and how much naïveté – adorable, childlike and boundless through foolish naïveté is involved in this belief of the scholar in his superiority, and the good conscience of his tolerance, and the unsuspecting, simple certainty of which his instincts treat the religious man as the lower and less valuable type, beyond, before end above which he himself has developed – he, the little arrogant dwarf and mob-man, the city sedulously alert, hand-and-hand dredge of ‘ideas‘, of modern ideas‘!
Piece of Mindful 
Mark, good choice of topics. I very much prefer philosophy and history topics vs current news.
Of all the classic philosophers, Nietzche was the only one who made any sense to me. He had a sense of humor and disdain for the common “intellectual” class of university scholars, who today are the worst of the worst, freeloading grifters nearly to a man (and woman).
The one issue I had with reading him when I picked up his complete works to read a few months ago was his attitude towards women. He has the most outrageous negative attitudes towards women, to the point where he sounds like a complete idiot or charmless individual who only talked to two women in his life.
Now for my question for the group: was his death a psyop? I don’t believe Miles touched on this at all in his recent paper, going to his formulaic they are all gay disinformation. So the legend is he had sex (once!) in his life with a prostitute, and died of syphilis, first losing his mind, and then being a vegetable for years, taken care of by his sister. Am I the first one to call BS on this? And I am still looking for these legendary sexual transmitted diseases, they seem to mostly occur on drug addicts, amyl nitrate users, prostitutes who never wash their genitals, people who go to doctors and get tested for STDs, and controlled opposition types like Charlie Sheen.
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You are not the first to call bs.
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I am only slightly aware of him and unaware of his attitude towards women or suspicious death. I purchased the complete works around the same time as you, I think. My most prominent memory is a Time Magazine cover in the 1960s saying God is Dead, shocking. He was featured. My mother used to listen to a Saturday radio program by Dr. Stuart McBirney (sp) where he demonized Nietzsche (pronouncing his name neet chy-EV) as some sort of monster.
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There’s a young guy sitting in a trailer in the Mojave Desert, giving lectures about this philosophy to his YouTube audience. The channel name is NON-CONFORMIST-RADIO 2
A short listen should get anyone quick to the mindset, to what the psy op is about. The journey starts from there, after swallowing the black pill. Most people refuse to take the black pill in the first place, and many get stuck afterwards. It’s a maze. Dick’s simulation theory. Exiting the matrix. Or is the answer to be found somewhere else?
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Can you give a little more of a hint of what this Mojave YouTubers take is? I’d follow a link to a text piece, but I’m not a big YouTube watcher and hesitate to wade into those sands.. lest it be quicksand, or a sarlap pit..
Side note – one of my pet peeves about YouTube is, it won’t let you just turn off the video and listen to audio, on a phone.. I much prefer podcasts. Hate that so many people are just on YouTube. And the ads, of course, and automatically starting the next video, and so on. Unfathomable that it’s so popular.
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Mark, a suggestion:
Pick up the Modern Library translation of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”. You are into good stuff. Cheers, Stewart
PS/ Just a guy trying to straighten out the life insurance industry again.
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It sits on my bookshelf, unread (by me). I appreciate the encouragement and will get to it.
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I’ve dabbled in reading Nietzsche occasionally, with somewhat similar results – much of it can seem tedious or useless, then you get into sections that do seem profound or spot on, or you start to think maybe his boasts about being this super subtle breakthrough thinker could be true, and if you can hack your way through the jungle of his fine distinctions and reversals and inversions, maybe you’ll emerge in a clearing on some higher plane of understanding.. or something.
His main American promoter, translator and commentator in the mid 20th century, Walter Kaufman, IIRC emphasized that due to the maze of his thought, and the way he developed his ideas through the whole body of work, it’s not possible to read one little bit, or perhaps even one book, and get a clear idea of his views overall. Nietzsche himself, again IIRC, repeatedly says how he isn’t writing for surface level readers, and that he can easily be misread and distorted, that few will understand him, etc. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt as to all that, or reserving judgment a bit, I sort of look at reading him as a long term project, that I may or may not manage. Probably something that would take monastic dedication, full time, to really grasp his full body of thought.. and determine if there’s any there there, or not so much.
I have a book, unread by me, called something like American Nietzsche. Every chapter is about a different “Nietzsche,” ie how he’s been viewed and projected to the public or to various subcultures in the US, over the decades. Many wildly different of course, demonized or lionized, he’s been a popular totem of love or hate, by far more than have actually read him. And a punchline for jokes in sitcoms and movies.. whenever you want to make a character seem pompous or pretentious. So now everyone is slightly embarrassed to read him.
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Your first paragraph there, not to diminish the others, is gold.
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My only exposure to him growing up was Dr.Stuart McBirnie and the Voice of Americanism, who demonized him. My mom had a curious mind, and introduced us to things like that and Bill Buckley’s Firing Line.
This reminds me … my older two brother were pre-war and long gone from the household, but my brother Joe and me and our Dad were vegging watching a TV show about the Revolutionary War, and they had General Washington in his tent hosting a young black man, and Washington was saying things like “Be patient, son, [not “boy”] things will get better for you but it will be gradual.” Mom stepped between the TV screen and us and said “They are reading lines written today and making it sound like that’s how people talked then.” Something like that.
She had occasIonal insights that make for good memories.
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Thanks Mark.. I guess I’m a bit OCD, I edit and revise as I write, sometimes it pays off and you get a nice turn of phrase or manage to get close to what you’re trying to say.
Off topic, I found this interesting –
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06/musk-and-tesla-compensation-or-control.html
The authors’ focus is about how the media missed the point of musk’s alleged giant stock option package – it’s really about defending his control of Tesla from corporate raiders, they say.
But much more interesting to me is the overall background they give on “shareholder capitalism” and “predatory value extraction” as a result of regulatory changes beginning in the Eighties.
It appears to me to be an intentional hollowing out of US corporate and industrial capacity, reinvestment, development and innovation, long term profitability, etc. Not surprising perhaps, but interesting to see this level of granular detail on how it was and is being achieved – not by any fiat demands to puppet execs, but by laying the groundwork of rules and incentives, such that corporate boards have virtually no choice in the matter. They have to “go with the flow” or get crushed like bugs.
Very long-winded writers, but highly readable and clear for anyone with the patience to go through it all.
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