Zarathustra Speaks

The role of Zoroaster is to speak forthrightly, candidly, without cant, and—perhaps most conspicuously—without that false respect for puerile views that would lend undeserved respect to them. Fair play, yes! But the assumptions that there is parity between opposite opinions and that the truth always lies between extremes? These cowardly, “safe” assumptions Zarathustra can only excoriate and contemn. I have for some years assumed the mantle of Zarathustra in a monthly column. As of now I am expanding the column to a full-fledged blog, encouraging readers to deposit opinions, catalogue reactions, debate among themselves, and to contribute to the blog with essays of their own. You will be reading authors besides me, but emerging from the same general perspective. It is a voice not heard often enough, a perspective of openness to any truth, convenient or inconvenient, a severe skepticism whether any particular candidate for the title “Truth” deserves that laurel wreath. Such skepticism is not jaded but passionate with love for the truth. It will brook no less.

In our day public discourse has become a starving and abused hostage of the slave-ideology called “Political Correctness.” The only absolute is “Thou shalt not tread upon the toes of the whiners.” But there is so much unremitting whining going on, even before one ventures an initial step, that one might as well obey Luther’s dictum and “sin boldly.” You have heard it said there is a difference between “offense taken” and “offense given,” but since everything one may say will, like an organist’s foot, depress the pedal of the whining pipes, one might as well rejoice to play one’s preferred music with gusto! Drown out the whiners. They are only whining so that they may not hear the hard and discordant truth. Even if the truth is perfect and pure and harmonious, it must clash against the ear drums of the cowards, the sniveling mob who relishes nothing but their whining chorus. By such one cannot hope not to be misunderstood, so why worry? But there are, by contrast, those, albeit a little flock, who long to hear some forthright trumpet blast, even if it implicates them and their assumptions. They are striving to hear some discordant, beautiful note beyond the waterfall of whining, and Zarathustra speaks to them, to you.

The reader will notice quickly that Zarathustra parrots no party line. Zarathustra chafes at the near-universal assumption among the intellectuals that the same enlightened mind that sees through the empty threats and promises of religion will remain a blithe believer in the uncritical optimism of political liberalism. When these antithetical tendencies are combined, the horses fight one another inside the harness, and one gets nowhere.  Likewise, Zarathustra welcomes atheists, though his own gospel is not that there is no God but that God is dead. Zarathustra esteems science above most else, but he does not join those whom Lovecraft dubbed the “self-blinded earth-gazers,” who, for fear of superstition, hate myth and forfeit its mighty power.

Zarathustra proclaims the ever-impending birth of the Superman, who rests now in the nurturing womb of the imagination, as we all do until we detect that the birth-moment has come, the hour to strike out and to shake off lassitude, and to make the difference one can make. The Superman may be measured against the hobgoblin consistency (as Channing called it) of little minds. He seeks to grow to be a Gulliver among Lilliputians, though in the end he hopes to make Gullivers of them all, even while they plot to whittle him down to size. But the Superman will soar in whichever direction his curiosity desires, first in this direction, then in that one. A mortal, he cannot comprehend all things in a single glance, but, as a god, he can transcend parochialism (which the slave mob cherishes) and enter into as many different perspectives as possible. And so it is that here you will read many, perhaps random-seeming but wide-ranging, experiments in thought. You need not accept any or all of them. But perhaps they will add to your deposit of knowledge and illumine a few more steps on our shared journey, our pilgrimage into that dark night with no North Star to guide.

So says Zarathustra.