DOG EAT SELF

First, a general philosophical riddle, courtesy of Nietzsche’s Jenseits (76):

“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” Nietzsche’s aphorism exposes his generally negative attitude toward the Ascetic Ideal, with its self-torture: the zealot-saint killing his Dionysian self. It follows easily that self-abuse is a form of war whenever ‘normal’ war is for any reason beyond the abuser’s reach. Does it mean that the will for [aggressive!] war is a form of religious zeal? To those who will dispute such a suggestion, we might elucidate that any zeal is a form of religion, not a particular religion, mind you, but proselytizing religion as such.

Freedom to kill, characteristic of war, is a very revealing sort of freedom. It goes hand in hand with the two remarkable Hobbesian ideas: of war being the natural state of man, and of liberty as freedom from restraint. Thus, war is the ultimate expression of freedom in the Hobbesian man. Which is why men ought to be organized in commonwealths, according to Hobbes, to put their freedoms in restraints.

The shocking conclusion from this is that the idea of freedom itself may need to be put under restraint. The notion that “I am free” is a very dangerous notion when promoted with unrestrained abandon. “I am free” is translated in Dostoyevsky as “Everything is allowed,” hence we have Raskolnikov on the smaller scale, and the Demons, on a somewhat larger scale. The celebrated Russian nihilists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, were men and women who cried “Freedom! Freedom!” Stalin put severe restraints on Russia’s revolutionary freedom in order to save the freedom-intoxicated Russians from themselves, channeling their bellicosity instead into a defensive zeal in preparation for the great war with Nazi Germany.

...Now returning to the Nietzsche passage above, let us consider this. Granted that the blond barbarian beast is a warlike creature, under what circumstances does he happen to set upon himself? Would not this become an immediate contradiction? Such self-destruction of the healthiest type of man… to add insult to injury, of the fictional man, who has every right to be perfect!... But, perhaps, the forces of nature, such as the warring urge, are much stronger than any ideal, and have been destined to overpower man’s desire for peace?

How do all these things stand together in the American context?

I am sure that if we put the recurrently exhibited American bellicosity under the lens of this argument, we may see things which we have not seen before, and get enlightened with many new insights. So here finally comes the big reason why I am putting this entry in the Twilight section. Here is our neat riddle for the New American Century:

Granted that, even if we like to grumble about the evils of today, as opposed to the good old yesterday, this world of ours has always been a dog eat dog place. Assuming, only hypothetically, of course, that, after all dogs but one have been eaten, a one-dog world emerges,--- does it mean then that the new order of the day is Dog Eat… Self?

This is what can actually happen to a superpower that has lost her noble enemy, and has declared herself the one and only remaining superpower in the modern world. Georgi Arbatov was absolutely right: Russia may have indeed defeated the United States in the apotheosis of the Cold War, by… depriving her of her enemy. (Need I add: her Nietzschean noble enemy?!)

That is why in the absence of such an enemy, America willed to revert to a search for another Vietnam, but this time without even a quasi-legitimate cause, and most definitely an enemy far inferior to either Vietnam or previously North Korea. Iraq in particular, and Afghanistan later on after the al Qaeda rationale had worn off, have represented wars for war sake, to satisfy the excessively cultivated national Crusader zeal of “I am free, he must be subdued,” paraphrasing Nietzsche in Jenseits 19.

But could the new freedom-loving American zealot be satisfied with questionable wars with little enemies? A bigger enemy had to rise or had to be erected in the vacuum created by the collapse of the USSR. Islam? A quick-acting narcotic injection, perhaps, but certainly unrealistic and outright devastating as a long-term solution. That is why our freedom-loving zealot is increasingly seeking gratification on the domestic scene. A frightening form of autocannibalism!… The worst part of it is that we are not dealing with some isolated freaks of nature, who regularly run amok in every society, but with a persistent effort to breed their psychological type by America’s new social engineers…