To
pick up where I
left off in the
last Nietzsche node:
Man is something that is to be surpassed.
In spite of
rampant goofiness when it comes to scholars
interpreting Nietzsche, he's pretty obvious about what he means most of the time. The
above statement refers to what is probably Nietzsche's
favorite idea: That of the SUPERMAN.
That's right, a
crazy philosopher is responsible for at least
inventing the identity for the
Man of Steel. But it really wasn't anybody anything like
Christopher Reed at all that he was talking about.
No, Nietzsche was talking about
The X-Men; in fact, the new X-Men
movie is probably one of the better
possible modern
interpretations of what Nietzsche saw as
necessarily our
future. He didn't claim to know what the
SuperMan could do, or how the
change would come about; he only
steadfastly insisted that
Mankind has got to evolve; there's no
choice; there's no
static spot on the Great Wheel where you can just
rest on your laurels and stop
growing up. His
lambasting of the
State and various
restrictive or
unnatural institutions stems from his
belief that people like that,
fatcats in priest's robes or
CEO's in marketing meetings, will be the ones to
oppose the
changes that will bring about the Superman--the next
evolutionary step up the
human ladder.
I'm sure some
people were pretty pissed when we
stopped being monkeys, too. Hell, for one thing, monkeys can get as much
nookie as they can handle without a
moral majority stuffed up their asses. But I
digress.
What side would
you be on if your children--or
mine--suddenly
develop telepathy? Or learn to
fly? Will you let them be
crushed by the current
power-structure? Or will you do what you can to
pave the way for Nietzsche's X-Men?