The most natural disposition of a free person is the laid off attitude of live and let live. It is hard to imagine a free person meddling in other people’s affairs. In fact, for better or for worse, a preoccupation with others forfeits one’s freedom. A person in love is chained by Cupid to the object of his affection, which is perhaps the best form of slavery when the love is returned but hardly the worst if it is not. The worst kind of slavery is an obsessive attachment without the redeeming grace of love.
All such preoccupations in vain persons are somehow related to their feeling of personal importance vis-à-vis the rest of humanity. The immediate downside here is that the corollary of a superiority complex is an acute inferiority complex, a need for an authority, and a compulsion to obey it. Such an authority does not have to be the President of my country, especially when he belongs to another political party. My supreme authority can be my doctor, or the principal of my children’s school, or my favorite news network, and my favorite television personality. What they say is the law which I am always eager to obey either consciously or unconsciously… Needless to say, I can think of myself as the freest of the free, but there is no freedom here…
On the scale of nations, none of the great nations are free, as they tend to measure their national excellence by the criteria of the outside world: their sense of national greatness boils down to other nations’ inferiority. Hence, it becomes their global mission to prove to all others their national superiority, which can’t be done of course without imposing on them. In the end they become hopelessly dependent on them, and even start rationalizing their own national interest exclusively through their prism.
National superiority, that is, superpower authority, does not come free of charge to the superpower citizens. Obedience, like charity, begins at home. How can the world obey our superpower if her own citizens don’t? The implications are clear: protest over the little things, but obey over the bigger things. Those who choose to protest over the latter anyway, are trivialized, and very few seem to mind…
I hope that the reader understands that I am talking in generalities. To make this point clear, let us remove ourselves from the current time frame into, say, the second half of the 19th century, and pick Nietzsche’s Germany as a more specific subject of this conversation.
The following is a brilliant summary of the effect of Hegel’s philosophy on German society, which can of course be legitimately generalized by applying Hegel’s concept of the “world-process” to any nation at any time, as long as that nation possesses, at that particular time, a self-awareness as a happening nation, to use the new-age jargon as by far the most appropriate and explicit, a virtually perfect word for self-awareness. The author of this brilliant summary is obviously Nietzsche.
“Were we to think of antiquarian late arrivals as suddenly exchanging that modesty for shamelessness; let us think of them as with shrill voices they proclaim: the race is at its height, for only now does it know itself and has become revealed to itself---we would then discover the significance of a certain famous philosophy for German education. I believe that there has been no dangerous change or turn in the German education of this century which has not become more dangerous through the enormous influence of Hegel. The belief that one is a late arrival of the ages is paralyzing and upsetting; terrible and destructive it must seem if one day such a belief, by bold inversion, deifies this late arrival as the true meaning and purpose of all that has happened earlier, if his knowing misery is equated with the consummation of world history. Such a way of looking at things has accustomed the Germans to talk of the world-process, and to justify their own time as the necessary result of this world-process; such a way of looking at things has established history in place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as solely sovereign, insofar as it is the self-realizing concept, insofar as it is the dialectic of the spirit of people and the Last Judgment.
This history, understood in a Hegelian way, has contemptuously been called the sojourn of God on earth, which God, however, is himself first produced by history. But this God became intelligible to himself inside the Hegelian craniums, and has already ascended all dialectical steps of his becoming up to self-revelation so that for Hegel the apex and terminus of world history was his own Berlin existence. He should have said that all things after him are to be only a musical coda of the world-historical rondo. He didn’t say that and so he implanted in the generation leavened by him that admiration for the power of history which turns into naked admiration for success and leads to the idolatry of the factual. But who once has learned to bow his head before the “power of history” finally nods his “yes” to every power, be this a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority. If every success contains within itself a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or of the idea, then down on your knees, and up and down on every rung of the step ladder of success. And what a school of decorum it is to contemplate history in this way!” (Unzeitgemäßen, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Section 8.)
The totalitarian ideal, which I have been writing expansively about, characterizes the new self-awareness of a nation coming into her own. One cannot possibly describe either Germany or Italy of Nietzsche’s time as new nations, on the formal grounds that their new status of statehood had just been achieved. But there can be no doubt that the rebirth of the national spirit associated with this new status, the Einig, Einig, Einig! cry of a “race at its height” qualifies them as “new,” and justifies their unbounded “shamelessness.” The same goes, of course, for the phenomenon of Soviet Russia, an old nation that had just plunged itself into the fire, imagining herself a phoenix and exhilarated by the excruciating pain, which it then interprets as the pangs of rebirth.
A nation bowing its head to the power of history is indeed a sadomasochistic ruffian, ready to teach them a lesson, yet yearning to be disciplined by the strong hand of a sadistic ruler. Here is the actual paradox of the totalitarian reality: the progress of a genius revolutionary-pervert, happily trading his newly gained liberty for voluntary bondage.
…National superiority… two world wars, both lost. The good news is that it takes more than two lost world wars to put down a strong nation. The bad news is that World War III of today is none of the above…
It must be clear from my last paragraph that I am prepared to leave this discussion well before it imposes its eerily suggestive similarities on our present time. Before we tackle our present, we must properly digest our past. In this sense, this entry’s mission is now accomplished.
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