{"id":25904,"date":"2014-08-07T08:27:16","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T12:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=25904"},"modified":"2014-08-17T01:41:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-17T05:41:29","slug":"nietzsche-versus-the-nanny-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/nietzsche-versus-the-nanny-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Nietzsche versus the Nanny State"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"neitzsche<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently my wife Carol appeared on the radio program Equal Time for Freethought<\/em>. The topic was the Supreme Court decision on Hobby Lobby, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153closely held\u00e2\u20ac\u009d corporation (i.e., owned and run by a single family). The court agreed that the fundamentalist Green family did not have to violate their conscience by having to provide employees abortafacient methods of birth control (while happily providing 16 other methods that prevent conception rather than nipping it in the bud). I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to get into that issue here, though I agree with the Court\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ruling. Instead, I want to focus on the reaction the other panelist had when Carol dared venture the opinion that advocates of the Nanny State are catering to a lack of moral fibre on the part of those dependant on it and thus reinforcing<\/em> it. Instead, people ought to be taught to think critically, Carol said, to make good life decisions, and to learn self-reliance rather than being addicts co-dependant on a government only too happy to reattach them to the umbilical cord\u00e2\u20ac\u201drather like the human batteries in The Matrix<\/em>, exploited by the Machines which keep them in a blissful coma.<\/p>\n

Carol had uttered unspeakable blasphemy in the ears of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Liberals. It is impermissible to suggest that anyone is to blame for their disadvantages. Such a stance is understandable. Liberals rightly loathe the practice of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153blaming the victim,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d damning the poor for their poverty, as if they were simply lazy when in fact they are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lost and afraid in a world they never made.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d An excellent dismantling of such cruel prejudice is available in the still-enlightening book Black Power<\/em> by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. For fear of allowing this aspersion ever to be cast again, Liberals jeer at any suggestion that the victim has ever<\/em> brought it on himself. And I think their alternative is insidious. Carol was right.<\/p>\n

I believe the Liberal approach closely reflects that of Twelve Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. This therapeutic ideology requires those who seek help to start by admitting their utter helplessness, their absolute powerlessness. Anything short of that would hold out false hope to the addict. One thus evades responsibility and the resultant guilt. Every Twelve Stepper takes refuge amid a plausibility structure of the like-minded. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t blame me for my failings, I won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t blame you for yours. Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that great?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It would be dangerous for such a person and such a group to recognize any case of a person who simply (though not easily) broke with his addictions by sheer force of will. Such a case of moral heroism would tend to debunk their crucial tenet: an addict is helpless outside the womb of the group, and without dependence upon a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Higher Power,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which, a la Durkheim, is a mystification of the group. Its tangible avatar is your \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sponsor.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In the case of the Nanny State, the Higher Power is of course the government itself, even the current President. But the government actually plays the role of the addicts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 enabler.<\/p>\n

I cannot help seeing the whole business as a perfect manifestation of what Nietzsche called the Slave Morality. One seeks to escape responsibility by fleeing into the open arms of others who are happy to embrace an identity of mediocrity, victimhood, and mutual low expectation. Again, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hold me accountable, I won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hold you accountable.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u0153good\u00e2\u20ac\u009d because no<\/em> one <\/em>is, or can be, good. And no one better expose the scheme! If anyone should recognize his own potential, presupposed in and presupposing his responsibility and guilt (Kant: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI ought\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 implies I can.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), and strike out on his own, recognizing himself<\/em> as his Higher Power, the self-satisfied dwellers in the Platonic cavern will try to take him down, to persuade him that he is arrogant and that he is a doomed Icarus, sure to crash. Better to remain safe within the anthill of the happily mediocre. Nietzsche\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Zarathustra exhorted such potential Supermen not to suffer themselves to be stung to death by a cloud of biting gnats. Shoo them away and excel!<\/p>\n

Nietzsche\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153transvaluation of values\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was nothing sinister but only recognized the need for the Superman (why not you?) to cease acquiescing in the values of John Q. Public (what Heidegger called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153das Mann\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) and decide for himself. This marks a transition many people never make: the breaking with conventional moralism and the preachments of authority figures, the assuming of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own moral autonomy and responsibility.<\/p>\n

To bring this back to the race issue, can there be a better example of the Slave Morality than the tendency of African-Americans to ostracize their members who manage to excel and to succeed in the larger society? Condoleezza Rice is an example, Colin Powell is another. Black school children are persuaded to think that to succeed represents a selling out to an oppressive White culture, and that anyone who does that is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153acting White.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Race-baiters like Al Sharpton encourage such belief, implying that black failure is a badge of fidelity and authenticity. But it is instead the sickening spectacle of blacks internalizing the worst propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Blacks must fail; just watch them fail. See?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But this is the Slave Morality, the huddling together of a frightened crowd under the umbrella of a creed of self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell me I can succeed, because then I will have to feel guilty if I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t try.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

African-Americans of this pathetic persuasion like to condemn successful black individuals as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Uncle Toms\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153house niggers.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But this is to transvalue values in the wrong direction, calling success failure so that if an African American acquiesces in failure and poverty he has \u00e2\u20ac\u0153succeeded\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and can praise himself to the strains of Gangsta Rap (though those rappers seem to have succeeded in Whitey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world pretty well). If someone breaks out of this socio-mental ghetto and makes some money, he has failed! That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just where the KKK wants them! I view someone like TV business guru Charles Payne as one who flew over the cuckoo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nest. Payne was harassed and rebuked by neighborhood children for trying to do well in school. But he pressed on and succeeded. He is the Superman who shooed away the stinging gnats.<\/p>\n

But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just the KKK who wants American blacks to fester in defeat and failure. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the government, too. Obviously. They pretend to meet the needs of the helpless while enabling their dependence and, in classic Twelve-Step fashion, assuring their target group (ideally, everyone) that they are all helpless. It is like Bonhoeffer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s scathing remark that Christian evangelists in a post-religious age must circle like vultures, seizing on the feeble\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand trying to convince everyone else that they, too, are feeble. Such Christians are like the peddlers of a medicine show elixir, trying to sell the audience the notion that they are sick with an ailment only their elixir can cure. And so is the government, as they actively seek to recruit more and more to the welfare rolls and to flood the country with the wretched of Central America. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re your friends<\/em>! And you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to vote like your friends <\/em>vote!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Why kill the governmental goose that lays the golden egg?<\/p>\n

Who is<\/em> the Superman? Are there only a few exceptional individuals? If they can be so characterized, then people like Charles Payne become exceptions that prove the rule. But that was the opposite of Nietzsche\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s point. The Superman is anyone who resolves no longer to dwell among the indistinguishable, passive, unmotivated, and self-despising mass. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get me wrong: certainly there are genuine cases, loads of them, of inescapable oppression and insurmountable odds. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d prefer to make that conclusion after<\/em> I try to transcend my limitations, not before<\/em>. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when I take Camus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Sisyphus as my model.<\/p>\n

So says Zarathustra.<\/p>\n


\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently my wife Carol appeared on the radio program Equal Time for Freethought. The topic was the Supreme Court decision on Hobby Lobby, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153closely held\u00e2\u20ac\u009d corporation (i.e., owned and run by a single family). The court agreed that the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}