I really do not see much evidence of fascism in Nietzsche. Perhaps there is some authoritarianism in Beyond Good and Evil, especially with regard to gender roles, but Nietzsche was opposed to brute force, whereas fascism is nothing but brute force. It's the reason why Nietzsche saw value in the Catholic church as a system of SPIRITUAL organisation, which he compared favorably to the state, the latter being a system of force. In all Nietzsche was looking to reinstate a spiritual hierarchy that would be based on his principles of psychology, which he was discovering. Fascism is anti-psychological to the core, and down on the intellect. Fascism is emotion. But fascism also kills the emotions, through its exertion of extreme force. Those who embrace fascism end up dead inside and long to die to seal the internal fact with external evidence. Nietzsche struggled to stay alive.
Thursday 29 September 2016
Tragedy or chaff?
It is very difficult to see tragedy if you have the moralistic idea that anything bad that happens to a group of people is because they "had it coming". These are two opposing world views. I tend to write in a tragic vein, because I think that if anyone is deserving of annihilation, and even seeking it, it is the current crop of narcissists, who have become like chaff, without a core, and which the winds need to blow away. They condemned me and my people and my origins in a very pompous manner, but one can surely not replace a real seed, even if it is a bad seed, producing wildness and overgrowths, with a harvest of chaff. I just deny that this is permissible or that it makes any sense.
Yes, I read Alice Miller ages ago, and you summarize her views well.
As for the issue of Christianity, yes, I was brought up with strict Christian discipline, sometimes arbitrarily getting the hell beaten out of me, quite literally -- getting a real thumping from my father.
There is also some nobility (also in the Nietzschean sense) in the kind of Christianity I was brought up with, which was paternalistic in a good way, not just violent in a bad way. Taking the responsibility to oversee nature, and to become caretakers of it was part of my upbringing. Wild and tame nature was our preserve; it was what we had to occupy ourselves with.
The very difficult side of the Christianity I was brought up with was that it was also warlike and militarized (also quite literally). The government of the day had declared war against all other values, though its choice of words in the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (1965), which spoke of having struck a blow on behalf of Christianity and Western civilization. The point was to dig in one's heels against the global changes leading to modernity, globalism and liberalism. Once Rhodesia had made its proclamation, I guess war was inevitable, so a civil war that had been starting to take off and became increasingly intensified, with the communist countries of China and Russia funding and training the guerrilla fighters. This was tragic. My father lost a brother to that war, who had barely entered adulthood.
Anyway, if was probably for reasons of the intensity of the emotions that the war had stirred up that my parents refused to allow me to leave Christianity. They really wanted to beat it back into me, after I renounced it, as their whole lives would have been in vain if the Christianity they had fought and sacrificed for was not true.
As you now might be able to imagine, this put me in an extremely painful position indeed, because I was made to feel that I was killing myself and my parents by not complying with the Christian belief system. At least, I think, and I feel that I was killing a lot of emotional lifeforms that were begging me not to do that.
That was my background so far as Christianity goes.
Wednesday 28 September 2016
Tuesday 27 September 2016
Monday 26 September 2016
Sunday 25 September 2016
Saturday 24 September 2016
Thursday 22 September 2016
Wednesday 21 September 2016
Tuesday 20 September 2016
Sunday 18 September 2016
Saturday 17 September 2016
Friday 16 September 2016
Wednesday 14 September 2016
Tuesday 13 September 2016
Monday 12 September 2016
Surviving the war
It's a long story, but thank you for the
question. A bit of background first: I grew up in Rhodesia during a time of
war. My father fought in the army for the ideals of white, Christian
civilization -- a very masculine ideal. When the war was lost, he began bashing
me, taking out his rage and disappointment about how things had turned out on
me. He also swore to bring me up in the Rhodesian way, with really a military
standard of discipline, no mistakes allowed. He expressed his hatred of women
and emotion, and took revenge against the new world values by sticking to the
old ways in relation to me. That is how I became emotionally repressed in the
first place. I had no idea how much rage I had against my father, as well as
with how I had been treated as a newcomer to a new culture. I had not been
permitted to express emotion growing up (the change of regime in Rhodesia
happened when I was about 12), with the consequent upping the ante of rage
attacks from my father). Whilst I remained in Africa, I was still more or less
adapted to that situation, though, as it was not common for anybody to express
strong emotion or to act in their individual self-interest. That is the
background. When I came to Australia, aged 15, I found that people here already
had predetermined ideas about me. I was very shy, but they thought I was
arrogant. I had no idea how to conduct myself in modernity, and asked
questions, but people presumed that I was seeking attention in an unwarranted
way. Also they had been told that I was racist and egoistic and superior, none
of which I was aware of being, as these attributes did not belong to me, or to
the culture I had been brought up in, which was a Rhodesian, feminine culture
(think of the women as lieutenants in a civil system, operating the structures
of civil life in war time. ) Anyway, I really didn't fit in and had no way of
relating to anything about me. That was when the stress of not being able to
adapt, or to understand the new situation I was in took its toll. My father
felt I had let him down, and began bashing me, trying to install Christian
values into me at this point and thereafter. Every time somebody was angry at
me, for reasons I could not fathom, he began bashing me. I struggled a great
deal with an increasingly weaker constitution, basically because I needed a
great deal of assistance, but when I tried to ask for it, I only got
reprimanded. During this time I developed a lot of rage, but because I was
unused to expressing emotion, and found it distasteful in the extreme, as well
as dangerous if I felt a negative emotion against my father welling up, I did
not understand that this internalized rage was creating an auto-immune
disorder. Every time I got angry, I got sick. I could not allow myself to get
upset in any way, as I would immediately come down with a virus. I only started
to turn the situation around after I hit rock bottom. That was a deeply
shameful place to be. i was the victim of a dysfunctional workplace and was the
scapegoat. I had been trying to prove that I could survive Western culture, by
building my energy and my knowledge, but all my efforts had fallen into a heap.
My health disintegrated significantly with this crisis of workplace bullying.
My digestive system broke down and I could hardly eat solid food after that
(indeed for quite a few years). I had to build myself up again. Part of how I
learned to see my own anger was when I felt that I had lost everything ain
terms of any social standing or belief system I could salvage. When I realized
suddenly that I had lost everything, I began to sense my own rage, as though I
had moved into the eye of the storm where everything was peaceful. Everything
around me slowed down and I could feel my rage for the very first time. This
gave me the inner strength to start looking for a new perspective, which I
found in Nietzsche. Since I had to start again from scratch, I had bought some
books by Nietzsche and tried to use them to understand psychology. I had to
return to live at home whilst my health recovered, and during this time I kept
getting bashed by my father, but it seemed to matter less than before, since I
now had a goal and an agenda for my recovery. I still didn't understand about
psychology or about the new world I was in, but I was learning about emotion
from Nietzsche, and I was finding a basis to reorient myself. My goal more
recently has been to reintegrate my emotions into my general state of being, so
that I make myself as whole as possible.
Sunday 11 September 2016
Saturday 10 September 2016
Friday 9 September 2016
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Later, I encountered groups of people who must have been some of the foundational people in what is now called the "alt right" in the US. They all read books by Julius Evola, Fracis Parker Yockey, Jack London, Ezra Pound,
and so on. They of course, also quoted and read Nietzsche constantly, and
wore his name like a badge of membership in their group.
I've always thought it odd how my own experience of Nietzshe's writings
was so "off", from what I was being told he "really meant" and what he
"really believed". And so, it is quite interesting for me, to hear you using his work as you navigate your own personal thoughts and experiences. It makes me think that I would like to begin re-reading him again, with an
eye toward my original experience of his writings.