We live in the age of the
Last Men. God died long ago; we murdered him, and in our collective torment we rid ourselves of the crime by amputating the means by which we committed it. We surrendered our freedom for security. Our ancestors entered into a Faustian bargain called Morality. Mans actions were no longer valued in and off themselves; they were valued by the sentiment behind them. The “good” men were no longer the strong, the ambitious or the passionate. They became the meek and the obedient, or else the metaphysicians who cloistered themselves in stone buildings in an attempt to totally amputate every facet of nature in a deluded effort to apprehend the pure abstract realm of thought and logic.
Despite this reversal in values, nature still could still exert it’s presence through mans lack of technological sophistication. So long as the sentiment remained behind the veil of the sacred, Man could continue doing what he always did. Little did he know that he had introduced a virulent strain to his nature; a parasite that feeds off his hypocrisy and threatens to rot his most ephemeral of drives. Something so fragile. The arrogance to build a dwelling in the face of primal chaos.
The narcissism to name the sensory haze of reality and transform it into language. The selfishness to build a monument out of stone that will outlast the civilization that erected it. The products of Mans efforts are also the means by which he transcends his own nature, yet it is only possible when fueled by the savage
baseness of his animal drives. With the advent of slave morality as a dominant value system, this drive was infected. Despite this it remained in incubation. And along came science.
Before the advent of what we know as modern science, the measurement and evaluation of the universe was a supplementary concern to the arbitrary goals of humanity itself. The Pyramids demanded an increase of mathematical sophistication, yet an increase of mathematical sophistication doesn’t demand the Pyramids. The ends were justified and prioritized over the means; and science is in every respect an active means of measurement rather than a definitive result of it. Before I continue it is important to highlight the distinction between Slave and Master morality.
This topic has already produced an obnoxious amount of intellectualizing, so I will keep it brief. A Master is his own highest authority, whilst a Slave is an instrument of someone else’s authority. A Master has to face the unknown alone and exposed; he has no authority to delegate the responsibility of life towards and his own success or failure is in his hands. A Slave is ignorant of the raw pulse of life. He has no will of his own and his value is measured by how effective he is as a tool. His only freedom is in some mindless bestial throb that is the heritage of his animal origin, and his only pleasure is surrender.
While this dynamic has always existed, it wasn’t until the creation of a singular moral god that the values of a slave became written into culture. With the exponential prominence of science as the means for valuing the world, this mistake was soon replaced with something far more horrific.
For all its pitfalls, Christianity had one redeeming factor. Whilst all humans were worms writhing in excrement under the benevolent gaze of God, some humans were afforded divine grace and allowed to cultivate the natural drives with impunity. The kings, the artist, the nobles, the soldiers and the madmen were afforded the freedom necessary to stave off the degeneration of slave morality. They were afforded passions, and they were celebrated for the results of their ambition.
But in the eyes of science, all men are measured.
It is important to note that science as we know it is entirely a result of slave morality. It is also its murderer. The veil between god and man was shattered by measurement, and the morality necessary for slaves was laid bare for what it is; a means by which a human being can be turned into cattle. The values of the slaves turned in on itself as science started measuring Man directly. What if found out is that we are made of the same base matter as the animals we hold in contempt. We found out that all of us are decaying compositions of flesh and blood and bone and shit.
We found this out from the perspective of a species robbed of its will and its passion. The result is Nihilism.
Nihilism is the single most destructive force in the world. Even slave morality pales in comparison to the nightmare of true Nihilism, and no one can escape it. There is no avenue of retreat possible, and to ignore it is to be broken by it. Nihilism pervades the very air we breathe, and every aspect of the environment bleeds it with a gasping sigh. There is nowhere to go to transcend it; the vacuum and infinity of space is the void from which it springs and will incubate no sanctuary. The only question is the response to it. We are left with the Last Man and the free spirit.
Those who belong to the latter category don’t need any more useless analysis. They are self selected and are only definable by what they are not, since what they are is not something that can be communicated. They are not crushed by Nihilism; they revel in it. They thrive in the freedom of the void;
they actively work to propagate it. The strong and the free seek to overcome; and Nihilism is the ultimate battlefield for overcoming.
As for the rest of you...
You join the ranks of the Last Men. You have no passion, you have no will, you have no god and you have no history. You don’t know nature, you don’t know joy, you don’t know suffering and you don’t know ambition. You are an expression of decadence in its most degraded form; you have fallen below the realm of the animal into that of the insect. You have some reactive fear of the savage howling of the barbarians on the street, and you have some dumb awe for the few human beings who seem to have transcended your pathetic existence. You work only towards security. You claim to live for pleasure, but will never pursue this goal to its full extent. You claim to live for loyalty, but you require an appropriate pay check for your efforts. You claim to live for family, yet will plunder their graves on the moment of their death. You claim to live for power, yet only if you are given permission. You claim to live for society, yet at every step you will lower it as far as possible towards the cesspit you inhabit simply for ease of access. You claim you live for freedom, but you don’t even know the meaning of the word. You are incapable of pain since you have never known pleasure, and you are incapable of pleasure since you have never suffered any deprivation.
You are the Last men, and it is to late to even utilize you as tools. The end comes not with a bang but with a whimper they say, but you can't mourn the loss of something you have never known.
PS: I am not anti science for the record. I am talking in moral and value terms rather than application, and I am talking in generalizations rather than specifics. It would be nice if people refrain from getting their panties in a knot over semantics, but I don't really expect nor care if people get the point or not.
The Last Man
