Trying to Understand Our Age

in terms of nietzsche

While everyone is fixated on whether President Trump is getting bogged down in Iran, or the dupe of the Israelis, I have been ruminating about the future and whether it will be defined by the tech lords like Marc Andreessen.

I have been very partial to Nietzsche, ever since I saw lefty Helen Lewis refer to Nietzsche as “the Nazis favorite intellectual.” There is a tendency in lefty land, don’t you know, to believe that Nietzsche leads directly to Literally Hitler, do not pass go.

There is a tendency in people like me to believe the opposite of whatever is currently fashionable in lefty land.

Reading a very detailed book about Nietzsche titled The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 by Steven E. Aschheim, I can understand why lefties believe that Nietzsche is Literally Hitler. But the book makes clear that just about every second-rate thinker in Germany that you have never heard of was using Nietzsche to push their agenda — left right and in between.

You might just as well say that Marx was the Commies’ favorite intellectual. But somehow it doesn’t have quite the bite as saying that Nietzsche created Hitler. I wonder why.

I think the radical thing about Nietzsche is that he argued that the future — the meaning of life, the universe, everything — was open. It was up to the Übermensch to create it. Typically, almost all religions and ideologies argue for a closed system, as in “we” know the meaning of life, the universe, everything, and all you have to do is get with the program, whether it’s Greek philosophy, Christianity, or the various flavors of modern leftism.

That’s what I’m getting from Jerry Z. Muller’s Mind and the Market. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas both have a program to show us what to do. And almost all philosophers and theologians practice this rigid system: get with the program — my program — and all will be well. And almost all philosophical and religious tracts are very rigid, arguing from logic and reason.

But Nietezsche is different. He doesn’t use too much logic and reason. He likes nothing more than a nicely turned phrase in a maxim or an aphorism. That’s what his famous quote is all about, retailed by Google Search:

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (from The Gay Science, 1882), warns that the Enlightenment and rising secularism rendered the Christian God unbelievable as a foundation for morality, threatening to plunge humanity into nihilism.

He presents Also Sprach Zarathustra as the musings of a prophet. I interpret that to mean that the logic and reason of the Enlightenment and the various secular ideologies aren’t going to bring Heaven on Earth. Only, of course, most prophets tend to be selling their followers on the One True Path.

Nietzsche tells us that the future ain’t gonna be easy. After nihilism comes the eternal return of Groundhog Day stumbling around in the dark. Maybe, but only maybe, you and I will figure it all out and wake up one morning with Andie MacDowell in bed with us. More likely is the notion of the venture capital industry, that the world is full of entrepreneurs with good ideas. The problem is to find the good idea that works.

In a rigid society, defined and controlled by philosophers and theologians, the only way to live is according to the One True Way. If the One True Way leads to famine and disaster, that’s too bad. But the world of the market is a selection process, where everyone is pushing their idea and their invention. The guy that comes up with a new idea that works gets to make a fortune.

And by the way, he does not “accumulate” his fortune. Instead his billions are the present value of his invention or his company to the rest of society.

Of course, it could be that the great idea that works will lead eventually to disaster. That is the narrative of the left at least since Marx. Marx said that capitalism would lead to the “immiseration” of the workers. The Progressives said that monopolists like Rockefeller were cornering the market in oil. The New Deal Brain Trusters believed that the Great Depression was the fault of economic royalists. Now we have the climate change movement that believes that fossil fuels will mean the end of life as we know it.

It’s true. Ice ages come and go. Species flourish and then die out. Asteroids collide with the Earth and cause mass extinctions. Modern humans will one day be sidelined, just like Neanderthals back in the day.

Meanwhile, the tech lords showed up in battalion strength at Trump’s inauguration. MBS had Elon Musk in the frame with him when listening to a speech by President Trump on his 2025 visit to the Middle East. And all across Europe the old guard is desperately trying to keep the populist nationalists out of power.

All is proceeding as Nietzsche prophesied.