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p230
The problem with the view of the social conservative is that it assumes a man’s duty to his wife and children is more natural, and therefore more easily enforced, than it actually is. They often do not see the immense work that had to go into making men good husbands or fathers, nor the great privileges through which men had to be enticed to accept these duties; still less do they see or dare to mention the great work—some would say oppression—that had to be exerted to make women faithful wives and mothers.
Modern societies are faced with men who either reap the fruits of sexual liberation through easy copulation, or men who for any number of reasons won’t or can’t put up with the stress of this chase and instead become apathetic, at least so far as women are concerned. The problem, as social liberals and feminists are finding out, isn’t that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children, but that men simply don’t care.
Men seek status above all because it is attractive to women and results in intercourse or breeding—in fact, in social animals, where status and hierarchy clearly exists, status serves precisely this purpose. Only males of high status breed.
breeding practices and human inequality are connected at the root.
Behind the Greek obsession with citizen quality, with excellence, with personal and generational biological improvement, lies the converse, a depreciation of the life of the slave, or, more generally, of the type of man who lives only to live, who is willing to survive at any cost, or who is willing to accept subservience to avoid death. To speak of superior and inferior ways of life is necessarily to deny that every form of life has dignity or meaning. But, in particular, the net effect is to deny that mere life has any worth.
If one can speak of one type of life being superior and another being inferior, it’s only a few steps to this conclusion. For this reason Nietzsche begins his early essay on the Greek state by pointing out that the Greeks would have rejected as vile lies and cant our modern ideas of the dignity of human life and the dignity of labor. Labor, as the mere maintenance or preservation of mere life, has no value in and of itself, because mere life has no value. The fundamental Greek insight is the “nihilistic” insight of Silenus: “Better never to have been born, and if born, to die as soon as possible. Mere life, a drudgery and bleak terror, is not worth the trouble.
The connection between philosophy and tyranny at bottom has to do with the necessities of educating the first philosophers. Such an education, in an era in which philosophy does not exist established as a tradition, that is, when philosophy is in its beginnings, necessarily risks the production instead of a tyrant—it depends on encouraging a political orientation that is tyrannical from the point of view of the polis; and it trains certain skills and abilities that are “tyrannical.”
The development of such a class of functionaries [magicians] is of great importance for the political as well as the religious evolution of society. For when the welfare of the tribe is supposed to depend on the performance of these magical rites, the magician rises into a position of much influence and repute, and may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king. The profession accordingly draws into its ranks some of the ablest and most ambitious men of the tribe, because it holds out to them a prospect of honour, wealth, and power such as hardly any other career could offer. The acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to play on his superstition for their own advantage.
The pitfalls which beset the path of the professional sorcerer are many, and as a rule only the man of coolest head and sharpest wit will be able to steer his way through them safely. For it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious. Accordingly the sorcerer who sincerely believes in his own extravagant pretensions is in far greater peril and is much more likely to be cut short in his career than the deliberate impostor.
The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect…Even the whims and caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe ceases to be swayed by the timid and divided counsels of the elders, and yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress.
or extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.
The opponent of intelligence is the rule of the elders, the institution through which the rule of custom, the rule of the ancestral, is made concrete.
By contrast, in other parts of the world magicians and medicine men manage to make a relatively complete break with the rule of elders and the totality of custom…In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings…
nomos: ancestral law, custom, convention
phusis: nature, blood, body, (inheritance)
Nature of man only manifests itself in great deeds and in victory in contests… nature and heredity may lie fallow for a generation or two, but if they exist, they only manifest and prove themselves in great deeds that overwhelm the perceptive observer as an outward visible sign. Aside from this there is only convention, “tradition,” empty speech, chatter.
When nomos or convention outsteps this or pretends to, when it is forgotten that “he who wins rich renown in the games or in war” belongs to a different reality and owes his origins to a different principle, then nomos becomes something else, it becomes a systematic and perverse covering-up of nature, party to the forgetfulness of nature and the hierarchy between man and man that exists in nature. The highest type of man is the product of a breeding program, and not of an educational program of nomos.
Men pursuing high achievement should strive according to nature [marnasthai phuai] and not be misled or “educated” by convention or teaching. The “standard” high achievement for a man is to possess areta—and let us remember that “virtue” here refers ultimately to the ability to be a good leader in war, namely to possess andreia and phronesis, battle prowess and ability to give good war counsel
The primary function of nomos is “social control,” homogenization, taming, tribal survival, the continuation and preservation of mere life—through a regime of commands, speech and teaching that covers up and suppresses nature. Excellence, virtue, on the other hand, is a matter of nature, of blood, and it cannot be taught. [ccv] Maybe the climax of Pindar’s thoughts on nature are revealed in this explicitly negative attitude to teaching, the taught, what we might call the “try-hards”…
Machiavelli: You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.
One of most absurd mystical religious beliefs is in equality of humans would you agree? Another is the belief in rights. Still another is the belief in the dignity of life or of labor. Another is belief in Creation out of nothing.