Enjoying the view from Limbo
As Nietzsche has become far and away the most dominant thinker of the age, his most savage and radical ideas have (as he himself may have foreseen) become trivialized and democratized — a pair of adjectives Nietzsche would have regarded as a redundancy. In other words, what is dominant today is not so much Nietzsche’s own ideas, but his words shrunken in the...
Hatred of “elitism,” with its inherent suspicion of anything that seems to imply a standard of human superiority, follows inevitably from long immersion in political and moral egalitarianism. Democracy, the political product of the principle of equality run amok, is the fertile soil of egalitarianism’s most spiritually invasive weeds, gradually fostering a general, almost instinctive anti-elitism. In practice, this anti-elitism constitutes a most...
In this egalitarian age, the concept of the hero seems as superfluous and out of touch as the pomp and circumstance of the British royal family. Paradoxically, our fetish for equality has combined with our impious self-absorption to turn us into idolaters, rather than hero-worshippers. We have infantile personality cults where in the past mature men admired genuine greatness as a guide for...
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