By Emily - College 2003

There is a man who I work with that everyone thinks is crazy. He said to me, “You know, it’s like you are on another level of existence. You need to just go to a mountain somewhere and think.” I laughed and I laughed because just when I thought no one understood me, the crazy guy does.

When I sat down to write this paper on Nietzsche in The Fountainhead, I realized that I do not want to write about that. Howard Roark is the overman. Anyone could write that paper. So if I did, would I have learned anything from Nietzsche at all?

When I was a senior in high school I started to see. I began to see the world for what it was. I really don’t know how it happened but my eyes opened. I think it happens to everyone but some people can’t handle it. Truly seeing is not easy; “the service of the truth is the hardest service” (Nietzsche, The Antichrist, p 633). The reason that so many kids party is that their eyes have just opened, so they are new and clear. The truth is just too intense for most youths so they drink to cloud their vision, or they have sex to cloud their minds. Truth gets easier to ignore with practice. Eventually people just turn it off and become the ones that don’t care, or they turn away and become the ones that create their own reality, or they turn it upside down and become the ones that find God.

What a state that leaves us in.

They turn it off, the apathetic public, suburbia for suburbia’s sake, a picket fence so blindingly white that they don’t have to look through the slats. These are the “flies of the market place”; this is “the rabble” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p 163, p 208). The information revolution of the last hundred years has turned the rabble into art, into ideal, into the media. The media is the truest democracy because it lives and dies by the masses, by ratings. The rabble hate their own mediocrity. This is why they watch Jerry Springer and The Bachelor. Dysfunction makes their utterly drab lives seem so much better. “Their bloodless souls crave blood” so they love scandal and tragedy (Zarathustra, 165). Thus with glee they watch OJ Simpson, Tonya Harding, Michael Jackson, and American Idols fall. The rabble are pitiful, full of pity that is, which really means guilt. They send money to Save the Children, they walk dogs at the animal shelter, they recycle their newspapers when they are finished reading the sports page. It makes them feel better because they are insecure in their comfort. They make themselves less comfortable in order to feel righteous, to defeat guilt. This is suburbia, the American family. Vaguely religious – there is a nativity scene on the mantel at Christmas, vaguely political - they vote absentee on party lines, vaguely cultured – they can hum Beethoven’s Fifth. Vague. Yes, the rabble, still with a “thirst for the unclean” but now with a glowing box to readily provide it twenty-four hours a day.

The rabble float along in haze, eyes unfocused so they cannot see, but others choose to look, though with tunnel vision. This is counter-culture, sub-culture, underground, the goth, the hippie, the hobbyist, the materialist, the rocker, the rapper, the Disneyana collector, the Raider fan, the Civil War buff, the Trekkie, the stereotypical anything. Oh my, they are focused. They are focused because they can’t handle the truth. They despise the rabble, like ladies on Rodeo Drive or coffee shop intellectuals do. They love one thing intensely and build a world around it, be it gothic gloom, love not war, or Kobe Bryant’s jump shot. They are scholars in their fields. They “gape at thoughts that others have thought”, deeds others have done, because they themselves are empty (Zarathustra, p 237). They are afraid of the world, of the truth and so create a false world. They learned that “to esteem is to create” so these scholars esteemed and esteemed something until its value surpassed all others, creating a new center of their universe (Zarathustra, p 171). Like life or death they cling to that thing they have created because it is the only sense they can make of the world. That is a frightening existence. That is a fanatic.

Luckily the fanatic often chooses rather harmless areas of focus, like professional wrestling. Unfortunately the most dangerous fanatic is also the most common: the religious fanatic. “When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the ‘beyond’ – in nothingness – one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether” (Antichrist, p 618). That is the danger. All value is a product of estimation so life becomes empty because to the religious fanatic that estimation must come from God. Man is powerless. Only God can tell him what is right and true. If only God were more articulate. They tell us that the danger is in good being twisted into bad. It is all in the interpretation, they tell us. Is it? Maybe the problem is not what God is saying but that we are straining to hear so hard that we have forgotten life. Suddenly thought is not necessary. There is no reason to ask why because the answer is always the same: this I know, for the Bible tells me so. “Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies.” (Antichrist, p 632)

My goodness, when we look at our world like Nietzsche might, it certainly seems grim. It has changed though because now we know. We know everything today, or at least we can find out. The touch of a button and the wisdom of the ages pops up on our screen. That is the difference. People know now. They know that there are infinite ways to live their lives. That is the biggest difference. That is why the secular fanatic has become so common. The more the rabble sees the more they have to invent reasons not to. The difference between people today and people a hundred years ago is that today we choose not to see. It is not an act of ignorance. It is a choice. The fanatic is evidence that people are choosing to fabricate worlds out of mere fluff rather than live in reality.

Certainly secular fanatics are not the only problem. A recent resurgence of religious fanaticism has us scared out of our wits, and rightly so. That day could have been the hammer to knock us into reality. It wasn’t. We didn’t want to see. So we became fanatics ourselves. Perhaps the second most dangerous kind: the patriot.

That leaves us here, fighting an enigma on unknown fronts, the hawks, the doves, the indifferent, but all of us patriots. Nietzsche liked war, but would he consider this a worthy opponent? We are the world’s last superpower. There is only one enemy that can equal us, one enemy worthy of combat: ourselves. If only we would knock down the blinders and blow out the haze we could see. War against the only thing that holds us back from greatness: our own shallow perceptions. From the battlefields and out of the smoke of that war maybe an overman could emerge, a nation of overmen. Will that day ever come?