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"A Squeal Of Weakness"
23 Oct 2007 08:48 am
A reader writes:
Your video featuring the boss who smashes a computer because of the reference to porn recalled to mind a passage from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols (the essay entitled "Morality as Anti-Nature"), that I think you'll find worth reading and reflecting upon. The essay is worth reading in whole, but here's a part of it:
The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?" It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of
Nietzsche sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.
The same means in the fight against a craving--castration, extirpation--is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves; by those who are so constituted that they require La Trappe, to use a figure of speech, or (without any figure of speech) some kind of definitive declaration of hostility, a cleft between themselves and the passion. Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will--or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus--is itself merely another form of degeneration. The radical hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state of one who is excessive in this manner.
Viewed through this lens, the entire current era of American cultural politics -- the Christianist era -- could be seen and understood as a squeal of weakness: weakness reflected in the overwhelming urge to deprive others of choices and options, the weakness reflected in political bullying and in the impulse to create an all-powerful executive, the weakness reflected in the recourse to torture, the weakness reflected in refusal to engage in the unglamorous arm-twisting of diplomacy.
It's all very sad, but America right now seems like nothing so much as a very insecure adolescent.
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