Can I Get a RaMen- Part Two

Vol. 1 Issue 30

I’ve been reading a lot of Nietzsche (1844–1900) lately. A LOT. The things about his writing that seem to be sticking with me the most are his condemnations, which means pretty much everything, since all seems to do is condemn stuff. His condemnations match up pretty consistently with everything that I myself dislike i.e. sentimentalism, facileness, falsity, thus my own beliefs are fortified and I am made to feel better. Is this a good thing? Yes, I guess, but most of his views are hardly the kind of views that should ever make any body feel better.

It’s true that he could help one think of things in new ways, or question things that one may have otherwise just accepted without having ever thought otherwise, such as morality or religion, but it’s one of those scenarios where the bad makes me feel good, and then makes me feel bad again out of realization. He does seem to offer at least a glimmer of a chance for change and improvement. His writings might be negative, but I don’t think they’re hopeless; however I am reading them translation, so maybe truly they are…

Unfortunately it seems the people that really should read Nietzsche, like the extremely religious, the overly vengeful and aggressive, or the just plain over-zealous, do not. Or maybe they do, and they just don’t agree, which is fine, but I have a feeling that those Jehovah’s Witnesses who spent hours handing out The Watchtower and condemning everyone else who is not a Jehovah’s Witness to hell, albeit they are usually at least doing their condemning with a smile on their face, never bothered to read Nietzsche’s ideas about the soul, that it’s an invention of ancient creditors to collect debts from the indebted, even in the afterlife (Genealogy 64 Vintage).

I’m also assuming they also didn’t read their Joseph Campbell or else they’d know that what they are preaching is more or less exactly the same thing humans have been preaching since they began effectively expressing themselves with the dawn of consciousness: deity worship. Why for some reason every two thousand or so years a new wave just so happens to come along, and that this new wave just so happens to be the true one, invalidating all past religions which would have done the same thing to their predecessors, and their predecessors to their predecessors, etc, etc, I do not know. If I knew the answer we would have a religion that worshipped Chris instead of Jesus, and for simplicity’s sake, we'd even be able to keep the same name: Christianity.  

Instead, I worship His Noodliness, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Can I get a RaMen?

Anyway, Nietzsche’s reality is only bad in comparison to our reality. The bad is realizing how much better things could be in a perfect Nietzschian world. I’m no Nietzsche scholar, and probably misunderstand much of his stuff, but I do wonder what the world would be like if instead of worshipping the Bible and Jesus, people starting worshipping Zarathustra, the character from Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Oh yeah, also Nietzsche and I have the same birth date, only 137 years apart.

So anyone who is anyone knows that I am very interested in subjects such as sucking at things, being unpopular, failing at stuff, and so on, so it’s probably no surprise that when it comes to love and relationships, where all three of the previous adjectives could be accurately applied to my reality, I have found in Nietzsche the justification of my horrendicity. But that will have to wait until next week.