“Brian K. I’ll assume you are talking about Nietzsche in terms of “slave mentality”. If so I think that it is left to some interpretation. I do not read Nietzsche in the literal sense of slave but one who is incapable of giving (not just physically, but empathetically) has a slave mentality. To me it is clear that George W. Bush had a slave mentality, at least, what we saw of him and his actions.”

Nietzsche talked about slave mentality in terms of “herd mentality”, in contrast with the “rugged individual”, which he considered himself to be. Rugged individuals are the antidote to the herd mentality in the short term, and a return to a Greco-Roman culture of nobility is the long term antidote, according to how I read Nietzsche.

“You can be the President or a lowly peasant have power or be powerless (slave).”

That’s naive. A lowly peasant has to spend most of his life just keeping himself alive – that’s the way slavery works – to *prevent* slaves from morality, which is why slaves value morality so highly. Not because they *are* moral but because they have so little opportunity to express it.

Bear in mind that “poor Americans” are not slaves – poor Americans are the equivalent of the servants of lords, who get perks for their proximity to power. Most of the rest of the world are the true slaves.

Peasants are the “herd” and the elite are the “rugged individuals”.

“The beauty of putting this in Nietzcheian terms is that it takes us out of the realm of ideology. There has been controversy about Nazis using Nietzche to provide crediance to the “super race”, but Nietzche was far too subtle and would never think of Germans (of all people according to Nietzche) as a “super race”.”

He thought someone was. He spent a lot of time and emotional energy talking about his own ancestry, and claiming that “above all I am not a German”. Nietzsche would say that he was talking about *culture* (which he explicitly stated could be superior or inferior) but given the limited amount of physical movement across genetically-linked individuals in the past there is quite a connection between race and culture (not so much anymore in the modern homogenized world).

If certain cultures are superior to others, having more “giving” according to your analysis of Nietzsche, and these cultures are closely linked to race, then some races are more “giving” than others.

And certain cultural traits (such as imperialism) are connected to racial ones (such as white supremacy).

“Nietzche made one thing emphatically clear – as I recall from one of his aphorisms – “don’t follow me”. He had neither a school of thought nor a system of thought. I think would abhor Marx and Adam Smith.”

Nietzsche also believed that “anything goes” in the quest for power, so the humility of “don’t follow me” or his “concern” that he would be made holy after his death can be read as a kind of calculation. Nietzsche likened himself to Jesus Christ and likened Christ’s charisma to an expression of Christ’s desire to be followed. So Nietzsche pretended to have anti-charisma, going so far as to cultivate a distasteful and ascetic personality, just so that anyone who disagreed with him could be disregarded as irrational. Even today, the most common response to someone who criticizes Nietzsche is “you just don’t get Nietzsche”. What other philosopher has a built-in “can’t be criticized” filter within his own philosophy?

Nietzsche, much like Obama or Keanu Reeves (pardon the comparisons), is a blank slate upon which anything can be written. So Nazis and everyone else can find in Nietzsche whatever they’d like. It’s irresponsible for a philosopher to be a blank slate. The 20th century in part is a result of that irresponsibility, that immaturity, and that naivety that is the legacy of Nietzsche.

Here’s a distinction between Marx and Nietzche:
“Note that Nietzsche and Marx/Engels use the concept of “dominance” differently. For Marx and Engels, the dominant group is the one we ordinarily understand as dominant, i.e., the group that controls wealth and power. Thus for Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie is currently dominant, and the workers are destined to become dominant. For Nietzsche, however, the “naturally” dominant “masters” are not socially or economically dominant; in fact, they are enslaved in modern times by the more numerous “slaves,” who wield power by their sheer numbers.”

I believe that at least on some days of the week Nietzsche fantasized about an end to power relations, and I agree that Marx and Engels wanted the rulership of the proletariat. On other days of the week Nietzsche believed that the rulership of the many (the herd) by the few (the powerful) was the rightful way of things, with his support of “great men” and support of Greco-Roman culture merely two illustrations.

So shall we talk about the Nietzsche of Sunday, or the Nietzsche of Monday? The Nietzsche after he woke up in the clear bright morning, or the Nietzsche after a painful reminder of his invalidity? The Nietzsche who resented his mother, or the Nietzsche who loved her?

Nietzsche is irrational.

http://www.amazon.com/Trap-Selling-Afloat-Winner-Take-All-America/dp/0805080651/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

The Trap is not about the selfish rants of idealistic recent college grads seeking a life of starving activism. It is about a pervasive crisis facing America, where it is becoming ever harder to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and pursue a meaningful career, even after graduating from a top-class college and holding a steady professional job.

The book begins discussing a national PR director who took a job she doesn’t enjoy in order to make enough money just to raise a family, “feel comfortable and have a sense of security.” Chapter one profiles a computer programmer with a six-figure income who qualified for affordable housing in the town where he works. We also meet a teacher who, like many, can no longer afford to live in his own school district.

Chapter two features a “master’s degree-toting professional married to a Harvard-educated lawyer” in Washington D.C. who is worried about how she will afford to have a house and raise a family in the nation’s hyper-gentrified capital. Born in Denmark she “grew up thinking that part of social justice is you can…afford some pretty basic things like decent schooling.”

In Chapter five we meet an aspiring tech industry entrepreneur in California, a government-hands-off libertarian, who is finding the path of starting his own business (the bread an butter of a free-market economy) almost impossible because of the high costs of entry including prohibitively expensive health insurance.

The Trap also discusses lawyers and investment bankers, many of whom hoped to do more productive things with their lives, finding no other way to raise a family and pay off their colossal college loans than to join a corporate firm. There they work as essentially glorified secretaries doing menial tasks, working every waking hour in a job they hate, unable to enjoy their lives.

The Trap explains, with substantive data, that today’s struggles of all but the wealthy is a pervasive problem. Today’s America makes entrepreneurship ever more difficult, and forces the nation’s best and brightest into a select few professions where their skills, intellect and creativity are barely put to use.

But it was not always this way, The Trap explains. Our current crisis is the result of generations of new tax policy, reducing the burden of the wealthy, and putting greater and greater burden upon the middle class. College tuition, healthcare, home prices and other basic expenses have risen exponentially, while middle-class incomes have been simultaneously falling.

The Trap also discusses how this crisis does not just affect the middle class. Understanding the nature of the crisis raises critical concerns about how we can even begin to think that America can provide opportunity for those born into poverty if those privileged enough to attain a good education and professional career have trouble making ends meet. After reading The Trap, it becomes clear that the solutions of reversing the failed tax policies of recent generations will be necessary to bring the American dream back within reach of all hard-working Americans.

This book struck a strong chord for me personally. I have plenty of friends in this position, trapped in the “golden handcuffs.” I also find myself in “the trap,” having graduated from a US News and World Report top-ten college, holding a professional job with a decent salary and benefits, and yet living in an efficiency apartment, finding it difficult just to pay my bills each month, including exorbitant college loans. I come from a middle-class family, I do not have a trust fund, and in my mid-twenties I see no economic feasibility in the near future of buying a house or raising a family.

The Trap is for all the members of my generation who cannot figure out why the American dream is eluding us. It is also for the boomer generation, like my friends’ parents, who cannot figure out why their children are making decent incomes and cannot afford a home–why it is so much harder today than it was for them.

The Trap is surely one of the most important pieces of social criticism to be written in the past decade. I hope it is only the beginning of a true discussion about the crisis imposed on America by now several generations of failed social and economic policies. I also hope it starts us on the road to rethinking those policies and ushering in a new and more hopeful era.

This book is a great counter-intuitive look at how growing income disparity in the United States is hurting all of us, not just those trying to make ends meet with minimum wage. And it’s not just 20-something independent filmmakers who are now struggling to pay the rent (although Brook does profile plenty of them) it’s the district attorney who stops putting criminals behind bars to work in a corporate law firm to make ends meet. Teachers who can’t even afford to buy a home in the city they teach in. Investment bankers, corporate attorneys and software engineers are all vital to the economy, but that doesn’t mean they should be the only people who can afford to pay off their college loans, buy a house and (gasp!) maybe let one of the parents stay home and raise the kids.

With the world we live in today, I for one want the people who commit their lives to community service or who work for the government–analyzing terrorist threats, tracking down tax cheats and making sure the medicine and food (and toothpaste) we consume aren’t tainted–are the best qualified, best educated people available, not just those born rich or altruistic enough to take a cut in pay for work they think is important. With a mix of economics, sociology and anecdotal reporting, Brook does a great job showing how the skyrocketing costs of health care, education and housing, combined with (and caused by) the shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle-class, is hurting us all.

President Bush says that community service should replace big government intervention; that’s fine, but as Brook shows, America’s economy is making it increasingy hard for people to even do that.

prezs as a rule know very little; they are pols; their field of knowledge is narow; concetrating on how to get elected and have no time left to obtain a broad and enlightening education.

nixon’s and carter’s fates show us that. [un]spoken rule is, Don’t cross uncle sam! nixon did that and had been deposed; altho for trivial reasons when it is juxtaposed with vietnam, hiroshima, iraq, palestina, etc.

carter is being slurred for merely telling the truth that differed from uncle’s. the ruling class, which is fiercely interdependent, will not allow an independent view.
one must remain interdependent no matter what. if one is not a member of the gang or mafia, one can be independent; the more the better; devisiveness being the goal.
cosa nostra have seen this centuries ago. thnx

“So Western slaves watch TV, while retaining an ascetic distance toward TV. These slaves play video games, while retaining an ascetic distance. These slaves never enjoy the world as crafted by master, not because they ARE slaves but because this lack of enjoyment maintains an emotional distance from the master’s tools, does not lure him into the master’s tools, and maintains his revolutionary processes. The normal Western slave, according to modern slave morality, is to pretend to be a happy slave while acting toward revolution.”

Yeah and what you said is true, i mean if you think about it, there is a great big line between the physical appearance, monetary status and well-being of the Hollywood stars, celebrities and Gods of the US masses, and the masses themselves who lead desperate lives which lead to sickness, ugliness, biological physical deformations and depression.

So you are right, the US capitalist simulacra system offers you: a great body, luxury houses, nice cars, sex and enjoyment but you will never get to enjoy it. It’s like if you are hungry and starving and your master shows you a pizza, but you won’t be able to get a slice of it.

It is fair to state that only about 20% to 30% in America can enjoy all the things shown in movies, while the remaining 70% are alienated and separated it from those pleasures, like great body, sex etc.

Thanx for pointing that out, i think about it all the time !!

So, the solution is to socialize pleasures and every thing for everybody

.

That’s why that US constitutions and system needs to be reformed into socialist-consitution and system, in order to stop US fascism, US wars and crazyness !!

In fact, you will never see Obama wearing a red shirt like Chavez, he always has to dress ‘morally and politically correct, with suits and ties’ like the average American Capitalist Psychos.

For example a man who masturbates in a plane like Elvis Crespo (The merengue music singer, might be stronger than a moral “educated” man. defying laws, codes, breaking the laws is more revolutionary and a trait of supermen than being legalist and moralist.

.

(hahaha, he said i work for CIA and FBI haha)

BILL JOHNSON: I WISH I COULD WORK FOR FBI AND CIA, THEY GET REAL BIG PAY CHECKS !!

BY THE WAY YOUR UTOPIAN WORLD VIEW WON’T WORK!!

YOU WANT TO CHANGE US CAPITALIST SYSTEM TOWARD A UTOPIAN ANARCHO-SOCIALISM WITHOUT WAGES AND WITHOUT LAWS !!

ARE YOU CRAZY OR SOMETHING?

READ ABOUT THE VENEZUELAN PROCESS !!

A REAL SOCIALISM THAT I BELIEVE IN, AND NOT YOUR UTOPIAN- WAGE-LESS, MONEY-LESS SOCIALISM !!

READ ABOUT WHATS HAPPENING IN LATIN AMERICA, SPECIALLY IN VENEZUELA, ECUADOR AND BOLIVIA!!! WHERE PEOPLE ARE BEING ARCHITECTS OF THEIR OWN DESTINY, INSTEAD OF READING AND LISTENING TO CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND B.S LIKE YOU BELIEVE IN LIKE MONEY-LESS SOCIETY !!

WAKE UP FROM YOUR SLUMBER, AND LAND ON EARTH !!

..

of course, not all facts need to be collated; just the salient ones. and facts can be evaluated as true or false; an ism cannot be thus evaluated.
or one cld conclude that when people talk about an ism, all are right by their own definitions.
the word “IS” forces us to define an issue using “IS” on and on; thus people may keep talking about it forever.
tnx

Witnesses told of their health problems and others told of the effects on the birds and mammals by the million and especially upon the otters and the whales, and the fisheries. Even the life cycle of the molluscs has been damaged and oil can still be collected on the shores on the many islands in the sound. The employees of the company seemed not to show any guilt for the catastrophe to this day nor for the very slow and inadequate response to the massive spill that occurred but could best be described as blustering.

A beautiful part of our planet was spoiled and ruined.

Oil Spill – The Exxon Valdez Disaster is available on this link for the next seven days.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jhgjw

You can be the President or a lowly peasant have power or be powerless (slave).

The beauty of putting this in Nietzcheian terms is that it takes us out of the realm of ideology. There has been controversy about Nazis using Nietzche to provide crediance to the “super race”, but Nietzche was far too subtle and would never think of Germans (of all people according to Nietzche) as a “super race”.

Nietzche made one thing emphatically clear – as I recall from one of his aphorisms – “don’t follow me”. He had neither a school of thought nor a system of thought. I think would abhor Marx and Adam Smith.

Here’s a distinction between Marx and Nietzche:
“Note that Nietzsche and Marx/Engels use the concept of “dominance” differently. For Marx and Engels, the dominant group is the one we ordinarily understand as dominant, i.e., the group that controls wealth and power. Thus for Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie is currently dominant, and the workers are destined to become dominant. For Nietzsche, however, the “naturally” dominant “masters” are not socially or economically dominant; in fact, they are enslaved in modern times by the more numerous “slaves,” who wield power by their sheer numbers.”

a loner has much less power, etc. [or selfpower, whatever that may mean?] than a gregarious individual surounded with people who think much like the sociable person.
in short, interdependence strenghtens and encourages interdependent people.
independent people discourage belittle other independent people.
this leads to the fact that most ruthless, possibly the stupidest, people take control over us, who think of selves as near-total dependency or independency.

paradox appears to be, that rulers selves are strongly interdependent; thus supporting one another even in obvious crimes that their members perp.

bailout for robbers shows that the ruling class covers for them. obviously, for robbers to have been able to rob so much, specific conditions wld have to have existed.
and manufactured by the pardoners!
unfortunately, our much enlarged genetic pool, is producing not just lotsof more geniuses than ever but also crooks.
but, alack, geniuses don’t rule; crooks do. tnx

If someone holds a gun to one’s head one acts as a slave toward that person, that’s a form of wisdom. Notice that the phrase “give me liberty or give me death” has the outcome of death whenever liberty is not achieved. Death is the *antithesis* of slave values, thus death is the greatest threat to make against a slave, which masters well understand. Corporeal bravery, a devaluation of death, is largely held by masters not as a mark of their superiority over slaves (as they and their lackeys have long pretended), but as one of inferiority.

Every revolution has three possible outcomes – death (for the revolter), freedom (for the revolter), or a return to slavery (for the revolter). I’ve never seen any reason to believe that slaves are against *wise* revolution – the disagreement among slaves is about *how* and *when* to revolt, not whether to revolt.

One of Nietzsche’s tragic outcomes is the false assertion that humanity is cowed slaves. It’s not surprising that the 20th century featured so much fascism – Nietzsche was not an antidote to fascism but a *cause* of it.

Nietzsche said that humanity needed saving and he would provide the philosophy of salvation. But if humanity in fact does NOT need saving then his assertion degrades humanity. Nietzsche made humanity *into* pathetic slaves rather than recognized it.

A slave by necessity is deceitful. Master is always watching so the slave can never give away his revolutionary movement and intent, or he will be punished, perhaps even killed, and there goes the revolution.

So Western slaves watch TV, while retaining an ascetic distance toward TV. These slaves play video games, while retaining an ascetic distance. These slaves never enjoy the world as crafted by master, not because they ARE slaves but because this lack of enjoyment maintains an emotional distance from the master’s tools, does not lure him into the master’s tools, and maintains his revolutionary processes.

The normal Western slave, according to modern slave morality, is to pretend to be a happy slave while acting toward revolution.

Masters can speak openly with each other, deceiving each other only with respect to competition for profit and control. For slaves deceit is far deeper and more meaningful – slaves must always keep their true power a secret, from master. Slaves have hidden secret languages among themselves – a slave’s glance is nothing like the look of a master. For a master, truth is what is spoken. For a slave, truth is always what is not spoken.

The role of Nietzsche is not to save slaves, but to seduce them. To mock their weakness, to cause them to lose their composure, to make them insecure, to cause them to rage out and lose the fight for their freedom.

Slaves do not form freedom organizations or freedom structures until they openly revolt. Slave culture is completely amorphous and mostly involves interactions between individuals – family and friends. It’s primary language is comprised of empathy and emotion.

One way to exterminate slave culture is to kill these interactions. The final extermination of slaves will be by science – for science (and thus the elite) to gain control of human reproduction and take that control away from slaves.

Nietzsche ignored the identity of slaves, slave culture (for which Christianity is largely a front), and slave desires, so he could degrade humanity and offer his “redemption” for it.

Nietzsche wanted slaves to *express* power, to threaten the elite, and then for the elite to predictably respond. Nietzsche is harmful at worst and a fool at best.

Love is the greatest slave interaction and forms the core of slave culture.

The religion of slaves is not Christianity – it’s fellowship, friendship, love, and life.

According to Nietzsche, his task is to liberate individuals from that slavery mentality that people have, like a sort of fear. most individuals are not aware of their domination power, are not conscious of their own self-power

So *awareness of individual’s self power* is the real answer and key to break out of the vicious trap of fear, insecurity and weakness against the totalitarian hegemony of the Democrats and Republican Corporate Parties

does any of us fear an ape? no, i’ve never heard of such a case.
but priests, pols, and dogs have very strong vocal chords that i don’t wish on anyone.

there is no question that people fear disapproval of other people. question is, how to teach people not to fear other peoples’ wrong and right thoughts.

it can be seen that no amount of talking wld help any person to overcome own feelings of inferiority.
thus, i am not a bit impressed what nitzche has to say. and it seems to me that, what he learned, had been learned by countless individuals from almost all folks.

to bolster my conclusion, i offer jesus and his supposed teachings as an example of using zillions of words and not advance a cm.

but a smile of a stranger or non-stranger is of value than anything jesus may have said. jesus, as a savior, had merely enabled the priests to spread hatred and intolerance.

as a wise person said, To know how to criticise is good, but to create is better! tnx

While I think Nietzche is a great thinker (perhaps one of the most fecund of the 20th Century) and his works do provide clarity, beyond “good and evil” and thus ideology, he was the complete opposite of an ideologue.

Still, I do think that injecting Zarathustra amd Nietzche into this “dialog” is very useful.