exams over... no more learning until march 1st. Watch my brain further turn to mush, doesn't really have a purpose anyway... so bring on the brain cell destruction
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"Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders, and also taking into consideration that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You should do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt."
This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands shouts in people's ears-parents, teachers, laws, class bias, public opinion. The curiously limited intelligence of human development, the hesitation, length of time, often regressive and turning around on itself, is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding.
If we imagine this instinct for once striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow maxims of the herd and from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good."
On the other hand, the herd man in Europe makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd as the really human virtues, as well as public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and compassion. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin.
But for all that, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:-the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments."
part 199 of beyond good and evil by friedrich nietzsche, written in 1886.
This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands shouts in people's ears-parents, teachers, laws, class bias, public opinion. The curiously limited intelligence of human development, the hesitation, length of time, often regressive and turning around on itself, is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding.
If we imagine this instinct for once striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow maxims of the herd and from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good."
On the other hand, the herd man in Europe makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd as the really human virtues, as well as public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and compassion. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin.
But for all that, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:-the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments."
part 199 of beyond good and evil by friedrich nietzsche, written in 1886.
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