Nietzsche: Ode to a liberal Icon

Liberal Culture

The Nietzschean Concept That Explains Today’s PC Culture There once was a fellow named Nietzsche Who was generaly quite filled with der shitsy  But he was also a Packer  And as middle line baker  He was one real son-of-a-bitchky ‘God,” Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared, “is dead.” God, it has been noted, made a similar yet more lasting pronouncement about Nietzsche. - Jonah Goldberg But before the German philosopher departed this mortal coil, he had some interesting things to say. Nietzsche argued that one of the most powerful forces in society was “ressentiment.” Similar to the everyday word “resentment,” ressentiment lay at the heart of new kinds of morality. In ancient times, nobility was associated with power. The downtrodden, the poor, the weak, the enslaved were ignoble. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the ‘privileged’ feel uncomfortable. The masses of have-nots, to use a more modern language, resented their plight for understandable reasons. But they were too weak to launch a real, armed revolution. Instead, the powerless resorted to a moral revolution, assaulting the concepts of nobility, goodness, and morality and rendering them evil in the popular imagination. [...] In 2015, our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts. The University of California recently issued a set of guidelines about the terrible danger of “microaggressions” — small, usually unintended slights that allegedly hurt the feelings of the newly anointed classes of victims. One must no longer say that America is a “melting pot,” for to do so is to suggest that minorities should “assimilate to the dominant culture,” according to the new moralists at the University of California. And one mustn’t say anything that advances “the Myth of Meritocracy.” Saying “America is the land of opportunity” or “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” is now a form of bigotry. Of course, the surest way to guarantee that America is not a meritocracy is to teach young people not only that it isn’t one, but that it’s evil to say it is, or should be, one. Read on ... Post script:  In 1889, at age 44, Nietzsche suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. The breakdown was later ascribed to atypical general paresis due to tertiary syphilis ... Ahem