Nietzsche’s Amor Fati Is An Ancient Disaster, Denying Progress and Evolution

Abstract: Nietzsche based his philosophy on a number of axioms, including “Amor Fati” and “Will to Power”. Both are found in animals… but on different occasions: death for the former, life for the latter. The two notions, embracing one’s fate and imposing one’s will, contradict each other in a philosophical system. This riddle is explained when one realizes that Nietzsche was so shattered by the death of god (Nietzsche’s father was a professional godist [0]), he was so inconsolable, that he ended up confusing pure rationality with “Amor Fati”. Pure rationality appeared to Nietzsche like a terrible fate one had to love.  OK, pretty silly. So why to condescend to write this essay? Well, it was a discovery process… And “Amor Fati” dominates as a philosophical system all too much in places where I grew up, and used to be the bane of the Middle Ages… with deplorable results…

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“Amor fati”, love of fate, is just convenient metaphysics for beasts full of endorphins, devoured by dogs. Or for populations submitted to greedy tyrants. Stoicism is amor fati writ large. 

Nietzsche was great in many ways, but also incredibly naïve, stupid and obsolete in others. Nietzsche’s recipe for greatness is “amor fati”? Inconceivably stupid: the recipe for humanity is “plus ultra”, “plus oultre” (Charles Quint!!!) Always was… Going “Meta” in other words, to speak Greek instead of French or Latin… And the importance of the meta concept is why Facebook stole the concept.

Nietzsche, apparently ignorant of North Africa and the Middle East, didn’t know the famous Arabic saying: In sha’Allah (/ɪnˈʃælə/; Arabic: إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ‎, ʾin šāʾa -llāh… If god wants it), embracing fate, is a very old slogan and attitude, and not just Muslim. Worse: “Si Dieu le veut!”, its French version, was the slogan and attitude of all too much of the European Middle Ages…

In recent centuries, the Middle East has been dying from In sha’Allah. In sha’Allah is as old as the Hydraulic Dictatorships of the desiccated Middle East…

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Amor Fati is a philosophy central to the Greco-Roman Stoics (among the ancestors of both Christianism and Islamism). Stoicism is the philosophy of the wise bearing the civilization-terminating dictatorships of the Hellenistic States and ravenous plutocratic and imperial Rome. Epictetus was a philosopher initially in Nero’s closest power circle (as was Seneca, another prominent Stoic, who ruled Rome for 5 years, in the name of his pupil Nero who was still too young to be interested by power… Epictetus was slave to Nero’s secretary, surviving the suicided Seneca…). Here is Epictetus:

“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”

In other words, say you messed up: just pretend that’s what you wanted to achieve all along. Say you are addicted to some substance: wish that happens some more, you always wanted this.  

In a return to the gutter, Nietzsche made love of fate central to his philosophy. In “Why I Am So Clever” Ecce Homo, section 10, he writes:

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”

The concept is used elsewhere in Nietzsche’s writings. For example in section 276 of The Gay Science:

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

Nietzsche refers to the “Yes-sayer” as a person who is capable of uncompromising acceptance of reality per se… In other words, Nietzsche wants to embrace a proto-rational, rational, science oriented attitude. But he goes metaphysical in too restricted a way, getting stupid by claiming we should love whatever happens. (In another even more stupid version, Amor Fati is described as “whatever happens, happens”… as if we had a choice in the matter…) 

Indeed, why did prehistoric men do science? Why did prehistoric men try to find out what raw reality was? Because their lives depended upon it! It was not that their lives in academia depended upon it, but their real lives…

Prehistoric men tried to determine what reality was, not to please superiors, and get a bigger house, but for day to day existence, dominating the subjects they needed to dominate for survival. For example the local saber tooth lions’ pride. Nothing promotes rationality better than the will to not become dinner.

In other words, the science oriented mind, embracing reality, evolved and was selected, precisely because looking at things as they are, as much as possible, provides us with power… The ultimate power, survival. Nietzsche did not understand that, and denied evolution: he hated Darwin, and probably in no small measure because evolution denies “eternal recurrence”… the ultimate parody of “Amor Fati”…

Nietzsche was great, highly likeable, his work on Dionysus and Apollo stand… although not as original as those who know only Nietzsche may think… After all, these are Greek inventions… And Jacob Burckhardt pointed out that Renaissance Italy viewed the State as an art form, born of gore and madness, keys to the sublime… And Nietzsche admired Burckhardt… but Nietzsche’s Amor Fati contradicts Renaissance Italy. Amor Fati was useful to Nietzsche, as he was ravaged by disease… But it is mostly useless, even to him, and not original. Curiously, “Amor Fati” contradicted, to some extent, another core of Nietzsche’s work, the “Will to Power”. Now, it is true that, to fully express one’s “Will to Power” one may have to embrace it as fate: the knight in shining armor needs amor fati, not just armor fati…

In his last moments of sanity, Nietzsche embraced a horse who had been flogged by his owner for resisting progress. Nietzsche then cried, and talked to the exhausted animal. Compassion. No Amor Fati there…

Amor Fati evolved as a trait meta-useful to entire ecological systems. Animals have to be devoured so that other animals, generally superior, can, in turn, exist… And they have to let themselves be devoured, to prevent chaotic ecological systems [1]. Amor Fati is a sort of evolution created built-in euthanasia… And this is precisely the law of the jungle humanity evolved to break. 

Patrice Ayme  

 

http://www.shardcore.org/shardpress2019/2011/07/20/nietzsche-and-the-horse-2011/ I love therefore I am…

[0] Racists worry about race, godists worry about god, a dog in the sky…

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[1] The math of this exists, I developed them… The basic idea is that predators are beneficial to prey species (for example by preventing pandemics). So prey species have interest that they would be preyed upon. But that can only work if the prey in its death throes doesn’t insist to kill the predator. Thus the prey, once condemned, is flooded with endorphins, and stop struggling…

German Fascist Racist Herd Stupidity Excoriated By Nietzsche

German racist fascism of the invasive type, in one concept, Nazism, is the most serious warning of the last few millennia: a most sophisticated people became murderously insane to the point of self-mutilation, torture and assassination on a scale never seen before… All in the name of civilization.

In 1900, the Germans were the most literate population in the world. However, as Nietzsche had pointed out stridently earlier, what they read was the problem. It was a grotesque, unreal mix of racism, superiority complex, militarism, respect for authority, and mental fascism… in an “empire” (“Zweite Reich”) which was growing very fast demographically, industrially, technologically and scientifically (the analogy with Xi’s China is not perfect, as the later is not officially racist, nor growing demographically).

Nietzsche is a much deeper and subtler thinker than, say, Kant. Nietzsche believed that Kant helped boost the nation-state and its would-be universal values, thus ushering enormous conflicts. Attempting to reconcile individual and collective autonomy can only lead to the latter absorbing the former. Nietzsche, if nothing else, was ardently anti-totalitarian.

That Nietzsche in any sense approved of what became two generations later Nazism is an enduring lie and disinformation… Which, interestingly, the crafty racist fascist militaristic German oligarchs were the first to launch: copies of Nietzsche’s book Also Sprach Zarathustra were given to German troops in WW1. 

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WHAT THE GERMANS LACK FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1888) 

1. Among Germans today it is not enough to have spirit: one must arrogate it, one must have the arrogance to have spirit. Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths. The new Germany represents a large quantum of fitness, both inherited and acquired by training, so that for a time it may expend its accumulated store of strength, even squander it. It is not a high culture that has thus become the master, and even less a delicate taste, a noble “beauty” of the instincts; but more virile virtues than any other country in Europe can show. 

Much cheerfulness and self-respect, much assurance in social relations and in the reciprocity of duties, much industriousness, much perseverance–and an inherited moderation which needs the spur rather than the brake. I add that here one still obeys without feeling that obedience humiliates. And nobody despises his opponent. One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. 

One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid. The Germans–once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters. DEUTSCHLAND, DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES–I fear that was the end of German philosophy. 

“Are there any German philosophers? Are there German poets? Are there good German books?” they ask me abroad. I blush; but with the courage which I maintain even in desperate situations I reply: “Well, Bismarck.” Would it be permissible for me to confess what books are read today? Accursed instinct of mediocrity! 

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2. What the German spirit might be–who has not had his melancholy ideas about that! But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.

WHAT THE GERMANS LACK FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1888)

Recently even a third has been added–one that alone would be sufficient to dispatch all fine and bold flexibility of the spirit–music, our constipated, constipating German music. How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown–how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation–and drink beer? The alcoholism of young scholars is perhaps no question mark concerning their scholarliness–without spirit one can still be a great scholar— but in every other respect it remains a problem. Where would one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit? Once, in a case that has almost become famous, I put my finger on such a degeneration–the degeneration of our number-one German free spirit, the clever David Strauss, into the author of a beer-bench gospel and “new faith.” It was not for nothing that he had made his vow to the “fair brunette” [dark beer] in verse–loyalty unto death. 

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3. I was speaking of the German spirit: it is becoming cruder, it is becoming shallower. Is that enough? At bottom, it is something quite different that alarms me: how German seriousness, German depth, German passion in spiritual matters are declining more and more. The verve has changed, not just the intellectuality. Here and there I come into contact with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among their scholars, what desolate spirituality– and how contented and lukewarm it has become! It would be a profound misunderstanding if one wanted to adduce German science against me-it would also be proof that one has not read a word I have written. For seventeen years I have never tired of calling attention to the despiritualizing influence of our current science-industry. The hard helotism to which the tremendous range of the sciences condemns every scholar today is a main reason why those with a fuller, richer, profounder disposition no longer find a congenial education and congenial educators. There is nothing of which our culture suffers more than of the superabundance of pretentious jobbers and fragments of humanity; our universities are, against their will, the real hothouses for this kind of withering of the instincts of the spirit. And the whole of Europe already has some idea of this–power politics deceives nobody. Germany is considered more and more as Europe’s flatland. I am still looking for a German with whom I might be able to be serious in my own way–and how much more for one with whom I might be cheerful! Twilight of the Idols: who today would comprehend from what seriousness a philosopher seeks recreation here? Our cheerfulness is what is most incomprehensible about us. 

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4. Even a rapid estimate shows that it is not only obvious that German culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. In the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true of an individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interests–if one spends in the direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self- overcoming which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction. Culture and the state–one should not deceive one-self about this–are antagonists: “Kultur-Staat” is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Goethe’s heart opened at the phenomenon of Napoleon–it closed at the “Wars of Liberation.” At the same moment when Germany comes up as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power. Even today much new seriousness, much new passion of the spirit, have migrated to Paris; the question of pessimism, for example, the question of Wagner, and almost all psychological and artistic questions are there weighed incomparably more delicately and thoroughly than in Germany–the Germans are altogether incapable of this kind of seriousness. In the history of European culture the rise of the “Reich” means one thing above all: a displacement of the center of gravity. It is already known everywhere: in what matters most–and that always remains –culture–the Germans are no longer worthy of consideration. One asks: Can you point to even a single spirit who counts from a European point of view, as your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer counted? That there is no longer a single German philosopher–about that there is no end of astonishment. 

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5. The entire system of higher education in Germany has lost what matters most: the end as well as the means to the end. That education, that Bildung, is itself an end–and not “the Reich”–and that educators are needed to that end, and not secondary-school teachers and university scholars–that has been forgotten. Educators are needed who have themselves been educated, superior, noble spirits, proved at every moment, proved by words and silence, representing culture which has grown ripe and sweet–not the learned louts whom secondary schools and universities today offer our youth as “higher wet nurses.” Educators are lacking, not counting the most exceptional of exceptions, the very first condition of education: hence the decline of German culture. One of this rarest of exceptions is my venerable friend, Jacob Burckhardt in Basel: it is primarily to him that Basel owes its pre-eminence in humaneness. What the “higher schools” in Germany really achieve is a brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service. “Higher education” and huge numbers–that is a contradiction to start with. All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What contributes to the decline of German culture? That “higher education” is no longer a privilege–the democratism of Bildung, which has become “common”–too common. Let it not be forgotten that military privileges really compel an all-too-great attendance in the higher schools, and thus their downfall. In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet “finished,” or if he did not yet know the answer to the “main question”: which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like “callings,” precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of “finishing”: at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child. Our overcrowded secondary schools, our overworked, stupefied secondary-school teachers, are a scandal: for one to defend such conditions, as the professors at Heidelberg did recently, there may perhaps be causes–reasons there are none. 

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6. I put forward at once–lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily–the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see–accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to “will”–to be able to suspend decision.

All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion–almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability not to react.

A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things–in short, the famous modern “objectivity”–is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. 

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7. Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out. One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery–that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing. Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle? The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping–that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such.

The German has no fingers for nuances. That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace. For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education–to be able to dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to dance with the pen too–that one must learn to write? But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers. 

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Denying the intellectual and mental fascism which led to Nazism from a collective madness is indispensable to those who claim no such a thing is possible, so that they can best enjoy it again (and we see plutocrats, claiming to be “philanthropists”, many not even residing in the state, ever, spending enormous amounts of money so that their corrupt creature can stay governor of California). This is particularly acute with the rise of coders, the persons presently programing our existence. An example is: Godwin’s Law: Code For Holocaust Denial…. programmers love it: it fosters contempt for inquiring in what exactly happened to Germany which led to the Holocaust. More on this later…

Patrice Ayme

All is opinion. Redeeming Truth… And “Democratic” Plutocrats

All is opinion. Learn.

Facts are opinions which are fully justified.

And all too often opinions rest on facts which are not fully justified.

Nietzsche argued that truth is impossible—there can only be perspective and interpretation, driven by a person’s interests or ‘will to power’. Against [empiricism], which halts at [observable] phenomena— “No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations” (Will to Power § 481). The doctrine that there are no facts, only interpretations, Nietzsche sometimes calls ‘perspectivism‘. 

Picture is of Yosemite Valley, looking towards Half Dome (not visible from mist). “Three Brothers” formation front and left, “Sentinel” back right, Yosemite Falls Buttress to the left background, and Washington Column can be guessed behind it. I climbed on Three Brothers many times. Two parts where I used to climb spectacularly collapsed. Over my climbing career, no less than five (5) places where I climbed collapsed, including the place where I did a spectacular first ascent, fast and free after nearly getting killed in an avalanche. 2,500 feet of buttress gone, causing a Richter III earthquake…

I go further than Nietzsche. Economy of Thought (ET), not just Will to Power (WP) is a major driver of human behavior. In a sense ET is the opposite of WP. WP asks for energy, ET reduces the demand for energy. One expands and attacks, the other shrinks and conserve (energy).

Hopefully Biden (and Pelosi) have enough self-knowledge, and general knowledge to realize that, in light of history, they are war criminals and criminals against humanity… A deeper truth will, hopefully, be preferred by the perpetrators to the asinine chorus of the sycophants…

Hopefully, then, they will try to redeem themselves, and will try to enact policies that make them look better in the fullness of time. A fundamental drive of “Populism” is to unleash the animal instincts of the general population (not just those of the oligarchs). This empowerment of all now means .more direct democracy, more debate, and unleashing mental creativity. That will require to rollback the destruction of the Patent System which favored well-financed monopolies. 

Nominating Yellen Secretary of the Treasury is a step in the right direction (Trump had her, and came to regret her, after he didn’t renew her). Excluding the career Neocon, dictators promoting, war fostering, hereditary plutocrat Susan Rice, was another step in the right direction. There were more discrete steps, also in the positive direction, as when Biden (I saw it live) said rejoining the Paris Climate Accord would be “subject to negotiations”… As are “many other things”. 

Indeed. The climate Paris accord was a terrible thing for those ecologically minded: it was a blank check for the most major polluters to keep on polluting… While getting a rent from the most advanced nations, which as usual, get accused of… being most advanced and too democratic?

The WHO was another disaster. Faced with a pandemic, it refused to launch an inquiry on what Taiwan knew. Taiwan took measures against COVID 19… in 2019! COVID 19, Taiwan 19. The WHO then insisted that a ban on international travel was uncalled for… While China had already blocked, weeks earlier, all internal travel, and especially inside the city of Wuhan (total lock down), or within Hubei province. The US paid to the WHO something like ten times what China paid. Still China made the rules… and the virus!

How do I know Biden and Pelosi may want to redeem themselves? Well, Biden said so about the Crime Bill of 1994, the “New Jim Crow”… the author of which he was. he confessed, in one of the two debates, that it was an error (which the entire Senate committed he insisted… Actually 97 Senators, not 100… And the fact remains that he wrote it, all by himself!)

It’s a hop and a skip away from admitting the same about foreign policy, and Iraq in particular (he and his Foreign Sec has confessed only to bad “execution” so far).

Pelosi’s unhinged anti-Trumpism was not just from her being a member of the political plutocratic class: she used any single occasion to proclaim herself a good person and even a good Catholic. She is not the thief she looks like, making a fortune from politics, and the accomplice of Bush in the matter of Iraq (which she compounded by refusing to impeach Bush on Iraq in 2006, when she headed the US Congress!)

We will see where Biden goes. But other things have surfaced, monsters from the past, more blatantly monstrous than ever, pursuing their descent into the abyss, namely President Barack Obama coming out with striking pronouncements about how “we will have to work” with the Big Tech monopolies he himself created… to find out what truth is. Ignorant greedsters of the world unite and impose their truth on all!

Verily, the only thing these monopolistic people and their servants, who became so wealthy in a few years, by stealing minds, are qualified to find is greed, ever more of it, and outrage, ever more of it. 

Patrice Ayme   

What Use Philosophy?

Only Philosophy will teach the children well:

STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), or STEAM (adding “Arts” to the preceding) are the latest (well justified) fashion in teaching children in the USA (inspired by China and Singapore). The method is spreading (and I contributed to push it). However, a subject has been forgotten, the most important: philosophy (and, in particular, the history upon which it rests!)

Like science, philosophy is a sum over histories. But it isn’t just that. Like science, philosophy is a method. Like science, the engine of philosophy is unbiased common sense. Yet, a more general method. Like science, philosophy uses facts, and is itself, among other things, a set of facts (not forgetting that ideas and emotions are, themselves, facts). Yet, philosophy doesn’t just use scientific facts (that is, facts beyond any suspicion). Like science, philosophy is a method of enquiry to guess further facts. Like science, philosophy establishes systems of thought. Like science, philosophy can use a single fact to put in doubt a system of thought, and build another. Unlike science though, philosophy can guess facts, and propose (or even establish) systems of thought on those guesses.

Hence philosophy, the philosophical method, common sense applied to whatever, is the key to major advances in science. Major advances in science call upon, and necessitate, guessing the imaginable. They call upon the philosophical method. No philosophical method, no major advances in science possible. Indeed, any major advance in science is built on new facts, and to go fetch those new facts require desire, hope, imagination, systems of potentialities, fancy financing on fumes, curiosity about what could be, etc.

Our bodies love to dance, in part because we love music, part of our dialogue with the universe. Learning to learn, or just to tolerate others’ music is not just pleasant, it’s enriching, a form of wealth which honors the spirit, source of all and any goodness, besides being our very essence!

Buridan’s momentum, force, inertia, relativity of motion and heliocentrism in the Fourteenth Century provide a  nice example of philosophy & science entangled:

Indeed Buridan (circa 1340 CE) guessed that Aristotle’s false physics depended upon neglecting air resistance and friction in general. Absent those errors, what was left was the theory of inertia, a particular case of impetus theory. Buridan noted that we can only ever observe relative motions. We cannot really know absolute motions. So if, for example, we happened to be in a boat going along a coastline, we really don’t know whether the boat we are in is moving or if the coastline is moving alongside us. Nicole Oresme pushed further the physics unmoved on a movable ship argument (replicated by Galileo 250 years later).

A consequence was that a heliocentric system, with planets orbiting the sun indefinitely (and the Earth rotating on itself) was a possibility. Buridan then slyly said that such a system couldn’t be distinguished experimentally from the one in “Scripture”, so we may as well believe the latter. It was an invitation to develop other observations.

Amazingly, both (rector) Buridan and (elected bishop in 1377 CE!) Oresme, having removed all reasons against heliocentrism, and having argued that it was more economical a system of thought, then said it couldn’t be decided, pointed out that this failure showed the limits of reason, and thus that reason couldn’t be used against (their) faith: “What I have said here, by way of diversion of intellectual exercise can in this manner serve as a valuable means of refuting and checking those who would like to impugn our faith by argument.”

“Argument” (reason) is a very powerful, says Oresme, but not powerful enough to determine whether the Earth moves or not. Similarly, if “argument” cannot answer a physical question about the world, we have to be very careful about arguing about faith. Oresme has therefore used rational arguments about physics, involving relativity of motion, to show rational argument can come short, in physics, and thus metaphysics (“faith”).

This is a magnificent example of how entangled science, philosophy and… faith, are.

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Trying to teach science alone is trying to teach the chicken, how it moves, without its head (philosophy):

Philosophy goes much further than science and its scientific method, as the philosophical method, which uses whatever, enables to establish systems of thought using whatever, including emotions, songs and poetry (the great Twelfth Century philosopher was relatively as famous as the Beatles for his songwriting; even more than Buridan and Oresme, Abelard was in total war with the Catholic Church, namely Saint Bernard; he got emasculated and excommunicated for it…) In particular, philosophy establishes wisdoms of life: why and how to live. Can’t live without it. It may as well be taught, lest all young end up as Jihadists, snowflakes, or culture deprived nerds.

Here is a bit of the love of more advanced wisdom. More advanced philosophy enables to listen to music others, less mentally advanced types, can’t hear. Therein a happiness others are deprived from. However, establishing new thinking inside one’s brain is expensive, not just expansive, and involves suffering. Thus, some whine, Nietzsche prefered suffering to happiness. (Not really true: Nietzsche observed that lions are happy, and  imagined them happy not to be mice… Bertrand Russell, like all good hypocrites, practicing the opposite of what they preach, disingenuously called Nietzsche not compassionate… While siding with the despicable Kaiser in World War One… while Nietzsche correctly vomited the preceding Kaiser already)

Here is a relevant philosophical perspective Buddha himself blithely ignored: IF ONE PREFERS SUFFERING TO HAPPINESS, HOW CAN THINGS GET WORSE? Verily, suffering and happiness are entangled: happiness is best experienced, like the best tsunami, with the contrasting experience, of a lowering of expectations…

Philosophy at its best. Science can’t do that.  

Science can study suffering, science can’t say why one should study suffering, and what to do with it. Only philosophy can do that, thus only philosophy can order science to get going.

We, humans, have been scientists, for millions of years, but so are we, because we love to be wise. That’s how we are. Neglecting the love of wisdom is neglecting us. It is easy to see how greedy potentates will want to neglect us. Let them not have it. In ancient Rome, philosophy failed first, followed by the failure of democracy, then intelligence. Teach philosophy to children, and, if you don’t, ultimately science and technology themselves will falter, as they did in Rome, barbarity will win, as civilization won’t be sustainable anymore. 

To finish how we started here, the most important subject to teach, with heart and mind, is the most encompassing philosophical attitude. How to do this with children? By teaching them the history of civilizations (notice the plural). Killing two birds with one stone. The rise of violent Muslim Fundamentalism in Europe, in particular France, is directly attributable to an astounding lack of knowledge of history among not just the young, but also self-described “intellectuals” (multiple shootings and wounded in France again today, March 23, 2918, in attacks claimed by Daesch, the so-called Islamist State… no problem we shall just live in a state of siege, adorned by shootings in the streets, schools, supermarkets…)

Generally when taught, in only in one hour, the rough circumstances of Muhammad’s ascent to the position of Mecca’s dictator, a discernible mental shift among young Muslims is discernible. It’s just astounding that this telling part of history is not taught anywhere in French schools (all the more as France is a direct political, cultural and legal descendant of the Roman State, half of which got violently invaded, and ruined… by the immediate successors (“Caliphs“) of Muhammad…

China, Europe, India, are the major scientific, and technological powers of civilization. It is no coincidence that they are also the philosophical superpowers.

Human is the philosophical animal. And science, facts known for sure, a consequence. Art also: try to make symbols that will last 50,000 years… without any science.

You want life and the pursuit of happiness? Let society pursue philosophy first!

Patrice Aymé

 

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TRANSCENDENCE Is The NATURE Of HOMO

I preach and teach you transhumanism. Not just because that’s what we wish for, but because that’s what we are. Man, the genus Homo, is something which, not only  shall be overcome, but whose very nature is to be continuously overcome, to be continuously transcended. We call that evolution, and that very smart force is strongest with us. (Says Quantum Physics, no less!)

What have our leaders done to overcome Homo? Nothing new. Instead they cling to the past, because that’s where the money is. And that’s the only thing they understand. Elected “representatives” forced on us the return of ever more grotesque plutocracy, now made global, an attempt to reduce us to a huge, worldwide chimpanzee society, with alpha males doing whatever they want, even murder, while brandishing nukes to impress us. As the ever more acidic sea rises, cannibals brandish nukes, overcoming man has turned from choice, to necessity. (Yes, that’s also an allusion to sustained violence against females, something weakening considerably our species’ mental capability, our core.)

Living beings on Earth have created something beyond what they themselves evolved into. This is what life has done for billions of years, even changing the atmosphere of the planet from methane to its antagonist, oxygen.

And do you want to be the chrysalis left by this great metamorphosis, going back to the beasts, as Nazis, Khmer Rouges, Jihadists, and worst of all, global plutocrats tried, and persist… Rather than to be human in full, and overcome man?

What is ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. A reminder of what we truly are. And yesterday’s humanism shall only be that, a painful embarrassment, to the sort of transhumanism we need. Ape should be a lesson of what to avoid, in more ways than one. Despising yesterday’s humanism long has been the way to further humanism. Despising yesterday’s ways has long been the essence of sustainable civilization. Watch the Romans heap contempt on Celtic and Punic civilizations, for practicing human sacrifices (of prisoners for the former, their own children for the latter). That’s how wars are won, and empires built.

A laughingstock or painful embarrassment, this is what representative democracy, truly a reprehensible oligarchy of the lowest passions, has become. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Thus you aspire to be led by worms obsessed by “power”. And, even more embarrassingly, you deny it.

Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape… Only in man, the old-fashioned way, is violence against one’s own species, the fundamental religion. Even chimpanzees don’t go that far. Yet, only then, by massacring each other, could Homo evolve into us. Transcending our species could only be achieved in the bloodiest way.

The transcendence of blossoming intelligence is the meaning of the Earth. Let your will say: the transcendence of intelligence shall be the meaning of the Earth… Man is a rope, tied between beast and spiritual transcendence —a rope over an abyss … what is the greatest in Homo is being a bridge to somewhere hoped for, and not an end to the mud we come from.

The means can’t justify the ends. But better ends have always justified stronger means.

Only by overcoming us, are we ourselves.

***

Aristotle scoffed that we needed slaves, because we didn’t have machines. Thus Aristotle tied technology to ethics. The myth Athenian philosophers, in the greatest Greek age, imposed, all too brutally, was the “Open Society”, and total democracy. Western Europe has been more subtle, and much more rich in myths. The fundamental myth of the west is not Christianism, as Nietzsche himself pointed out. Nor is it just the “blonde beast”, the no-holds-barred aristocracy, as Nietzsche claimed. No, the fundamental myth of the West is the secular, Republican law, up to 25 centuries old. But this is exactly what global plutocracy presently violates (complete with its Jihadist attack dogs).

***

Notes on the preceding: “Transhumanism” is fashionable in the Silicon Valley. The preceding gives it some scientifico-poetic metaphysical backup.

The first loud transhumanist was Nietzsche, something rather ironical. My own contribution above is a modification of one of Nietzsche’s most famous passages. Below is Nietzsche’s original from Also Spracht Zarathustra. There are significant differences between my version and Nietzsche’s. First the notion of Superman of Nietzsche (Ubermensch) is vague. It seems to be mostly a wished-for change of mentality, in Nietzsche’s parlance, sometimes, although at other times, he refers explicitly to biological evolution (worm, ape, etc.)

I refer explicitly to evolution. We have become masters of evolution, ever since we evolved goats, and saw the devil in them. Nietzsche professed to detest Darwin, as he did most “Englishmen”, for their lack of humor, a dearth of laughter, among other things, he said. In truth, strict Darwinism, the selection of the fittest, established by rolling the dice, robbed the universe of meaning. (And makes little scientific sense, when one looks at numbers with an open mind!)

Nietzsche could be very Lamarckian: “Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species.” [Gay Science, Origins of Knowledge, # 110.]

I am more Nietzschean than Nietzsche, as I believe that what works is true. Truth does not need to be corrected, I embrace it, be it only to smother it to death. If a species is tried and true about some ways, how could it be in error?

More generally, Nietzsche’s metaphysics was borderline self-contradictory (Nietzsche’s “superman” in the end, is supposed to use his super mental powers to embraces “amor fati”, the love of one’s fate, something a mussel already does to perfection! Why is the superman indispensable to achieve the status of walrus’ food?)

My metaphysics is simpler: I believe understanding should be privileged, and that means love of, and for, those who generate and embrace it.

From my point of view, Homo evolved a succession of biological supermen (with the possible degeneracy from Homo Neanderthalis to a significantly inferior Homo Sapiens hybridized a bit with Neanderthal: Neanderthal genes were probably overcrowded and displaced for purely mathematical reasons, as I discovered, and some academic scientists recently confirmed by running computer models demonstrating my acumen without acknowledging it, as those in the rat race are wont to do).

Technology, which hindered our recent biological evolution, can now accelerate it enormously (thanks to gene editing, and various implementable devices).

So we can deliberately evolve really super supermen, guided by our super ethics and super smarts.

But there is even more tantalizing: Quantum Computing will bring, I boldly prophesize, Quantum Consciousness, Quantum Sentiensizing (Self Conscious Quantum Computing). Creating Artificial Consciousness, thanks to our mastery of Quantum Physics, will erase the frontier between man and machine.

Transcending the human species will then leave even supermen behind…

***

Before exposing Nietzsche’s famous discourse on the overman/superman, let me insist that Nietzsche’s superman has nothing to do with the Nazi supermen, quite the opposite. Indeed, Nietzsche hated the Prussianized Germany he saw created under his aghast eyes. Throughout his works, Nietzsche made a formidable campaign against Germany, the German state unified under Prussian hegemony at Versailles (France!) in 1871, complete with a thought system dominated by military superiority and racism (verily, trojan Horses for plutocracy). Prussia constitutionally hated, exploited and discriminated against Poles and Jews, whom Nietzsche made a show to judge to be vastly superior to Germans.  The thinker whom they claimed, inspired their ideas, actually explicitly hated most of what the Nazis stood for! One can’t be more misinterpreted than being taken as an icon by a system of thought when one thoroughly contradicted it.

***

Nietzsche’s overcoming in his own words:

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape… The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth… Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

As we tinker with the entire biosphere, this has all become very practical…

Don’t underestimate poetical metaphysics: had the Germans read and understood Nietzsche, there would not have been the savage Prussian inspired racist, fascist and demented assaults German plutocracy unleashed in 1914 and 1939 (yes, I know, Great Britain financed Prussian racism and furious militarism as early as 1757).

Nietzsche was certain that the Germans would cause massive wars in the Twentieth Century, he wrote this explicitly, and he was, unfortunately 100% right (thus showing that the German catastrophe was predictable, thus avoidable; Nietzsche’s critique was similar to Einstein’s). History would have been different, if Germans had condescended to understand in 1912 what their descendants understand now. And even then, what they understand now is not history in full, which is even more dreadful and humiliating (in particular the stealthy, but decisive, role of US plutocracy, scrupulously ignored by the powers that be, as they were put in place by that very process they condemn with the tips of their forked tongues!)

Patrice Ayme’

Bowie Knife Gut Naivety

So David Bowie is dead from cancer in 18 months. Sad. His latest album was highly original, as usual. What I view as Bowie’s best piece of music, “Heroes” (with Brian Eno) was recorded in Berlin, where Bowie lived before of the fall of the Wall. The State of Germany noticed:

Patrice Ayme Retweeted from:

Germany Officially Thankful To David Bowie. Rock Rocked The Wall

GermanForeignOffice ‏@GermanyDiplo : Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall. https://youtu.be/YYjBQKIOb-w  #RIPDavidBowie

Bowie had rigged speakers during concerts in Berlin, so that they directed music over the Wall. But the connections with Germany are deeper than that: Friedrich Nietzsche inspired Bowie:

Nietzsche Said He “Made Philosophy With A hammer”. Bowie Also Cut Through The Crap

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” (Friedrich Nietzsche.)

Rock rocked the Wall, because it changed the mood. It changed the mood by breaking down a lot of conventions in the West. So rock installed a rocky mood: if convictions could be brought down that easily there, why not here?

The first rock artists to have played on the other side of the Iron Curtain where the Rolling Stones, in Poland, 1967 (just before Bowie started his career). Tickets to the concerts were given out by the Communist Party, much to the bands’ dismay. An unamused Keith Richard complained about it during a concert. Visiting Soviet officials were not pleased. “They thought the show was so awful, so decadent, that they said this would never happen in Moscow,”— Mick Jagger.

Bowie, an English native, was also a formal Canton de Vaud resident, for more than 5 years, and married (Somali top model Iman) in Switzerland in 1992 (they have a daughter, and Iman became foster mother to Bowie’s son from his previous marriage).

Asked why he kept on innovating, David Bowie said:”Elitism”.

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

I felt very puny as a human. I thought,

“Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman.”

-David Bowie

Nietzsche had written this earlier, and Bowie had read him. But, of course, this is the metaprinicple of humanity. Humanity would never have evolved, if our (pre) human ancestors had not said: Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman.

Some say the generations have to flow, because youth and creativity will replace the old gizzards. But David Bowie said he stayed stuck at the age of twenty, and, one day, was told he was in his fifties. Relative to the flow of centuries, a human life, whether destroyed after four years, or eight decades, is just a flick of time.

A 15-year-old refugee just attacked a Jewish professor in France: youth does not have necessarily more brains than the elders. The son of Turkish refugees of Kurdish origin, the adolescent youth was a good student in high school. He attacked the teacher in the street in Marseilles, with a 50 centimeter hatchet.

The victim protected himself with the Torah, which got cut up badly. Witnesses intervened and a biker pursued the attacker until a police patrol could nab him. He was found with still another lethal knife hidden on him (something unlawful in France). The crazily vicious youth declared to the police that the knife was to kill police officers. He also declared he self-radicalized on the Internet, by reading about the Islamist State, and he engaged in all these murderous rampage for Allah (as if Allah, should He exist, needed help from demoniac morons!)

This is one more potentially lethal attack by Muslim refugee rendered insane by the Qur’an. The preceding one was on David Bowie’s birthday, last Friday, an assault against police. French detectives found a German chip in the phone of the assaillant, and the (now safely dead) “refugee” was tracked down to Germany, where he had taken refuge, indeed.

Our ancestors were humans. It did not matter if their wisdom was only human: what could they do that would go really wrong? Eat each others? Well, the cooks would survive, and they did. It was the eternal return of the same old evolution. But now evolution has been all too successful: it has evolved god.

No, not the one in the Bible and Qur’an. Not just a figment of the imaginations of some primitives, 3,000 years ago. No, real gods, this time, and they are not kidding. Some are even insane, dedicated to the Cult of Death.

We, now, are not simple cannibals. We can cause a lot of damage. We are gods: we propose and dispose upon the greatest gift in the Universe: life on Earth.

Indeed, the greatest gift: I argued that not only Earth is in the habitable, water rich zone, it’s also equipped with a powerful radioactive core, which enables very long-term life evolution, hence the rise of sentience.

Earlier philosophers, starting with G. Bruno, following Buridan, argued conscious life was all around the cosmos; nowadays, forsaken physicists argue universes full of conscious life are all over; I disagree. Although habitable planets are obviously in the hundreds of billions, in this galaxy alone, sentience may well be on this planet alone.

Now we have the powers of the gods. We can use it to construct and improve, ad vitam eternam, again and again. We can also use it for utter destruction. Just once.

And there would be no tomorrow. We thus need huge intelligence to move forward and progress, the intelligence of the gods, just as we have the power of the gods.

Intelligence, creative intelligence is rare. Not as rare as live on Earth, of course, but still, it cannot be replaced by the hordes and the herds. Replacing David Bowie will be difficult, for civilization itself, and one more reason to push for life extension.

To extend intelligence, we need to extend life, it’s a simple as that. Just contemplate the lives of cephalopods: they are very clever, but cannot establish a culture: they live too short for that. Do we live long enough to establish a sustainable culture?

The jury is out, and it does not look good.

As we mourn David Bowie, we have to remember that intelligence is not just about being kind. Intelligence is also about cutting through naivety, not to say the crap. Following his elders the Who, Stones, Beatles, Bowie pushed a bit further to stab the beast. Yet the beast, and the mark of the beast, are more vigorous than ever. Don’t ask who brandishes the knife, ask why it is brandished. This is as far as pacifism can realistically go.

Patrice Ayme’

 

What Are Germans So Angry About?

… THAT GERMANY IS NOT THE HEGEMON.

The terrible war between Sparta and Athens which destroyed Greece, started because Sparta wanted to be seen as the hegemon of Greece. Whereas, truly, all indicators were that Athens was the rising hegemon.

And the reasons for this were deep: the racist, fascist exploitative model of Sparta, far from being a leader, was going down, whereas Athens, whom Pericles described as an “Open Society“, was going up. Athens is the leader (hegemon) that we are following today.

Smart people learn from history, and France, in particular, has long pondered Athens’ fate.

Balancing a budget is worthy, as long as there are not excellent reasons to make it unbalanced.

A military situation is an excellent reason for unbalancing the budget of a state. The USA generated a massive deficit in World War Two. So did Britain, or France.

Hegemon Celebrates In Style Victory Over Germany In The Case Of Greece, July 14, 2015

The USA deficit was from credit extended by the USA, to the USA. In other words it was convertible into a tax. The debt could be extinguished by taxation. And that is exactly what FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower did (tax rates were hiked up as high as 93% under Ike).

The British or French debts were credited by the USA, and that meant a sort of slavery, looking forward, as happened. France has seriously recovered. In August 1914, 38 million Frenchmen were invaded by 122 million German speakers. Now there are significantly more young Frenchmen, than young Germans.

Right now, the French Republic’s army is making war, or containing organized outlaws on several continents (South America, Africa, and Eurasia) and many countries. The French government does not have the money to do so. Thus the French government ought to keep its budget unbalanced. The French imbalance is targetted at 4.5% of GDP (in violation of Euro regulations by 50%).

British budgetary imbalance is only at 3.7%. The price Britain pays for this better budgetary balance, is to play now only a puny military role… relative to France. France does not like that, her only serious ally being now, once again, the USA. Same old same old, just as in the 1780s…

Germany has a primary budget imbalance of zero percent. Which may look balanced, but is not, because it’s mentally imbalanced to count cents, while Europe burns.

A republic which does not defend its values is not a Republic.

Balancing a budget can kill an economy: the Greek GDP is somewhat down 30% from its peak. However Greece has a primary budget excedent: that means that the Greek government spends less than it receives in taxes, fees, etc. The reason for the Greek overall current account deficit is payment of interest to (world government’s) institutions such as the ECB, the ironically denominated European Stability Fund, the IMF, etc.

The French government knows all of this, and is, truly, the real hegemon of Europe. So when the French president drew the line, Germans, most of them against keeping Greece is the Eurozone, according to polls, had to capitulate.

Another 85 billion Euros is going Greece’s way. Dr. Merkel, in the end did the reasonable thing, what the French government told her to do (and she overruled her hawkish, asnd somewhat deranged finance minister).

However, the Germans are angry. Very angry. The New York Times ponder “Germany’s Destructive Anger“.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/opinion/germanys-destructive-anger.html

The author, Jacob Soll, an American, played a role in Greek debt drama (rumors are that the debt may have been overestimated). Says he: “German anger, and we know they are angry. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble was reported to have started yelling during Saturday night’s negotiations. France and Italy have both made huge loans to Greece, but neither country has expressed hostility to Greece. Why is Germany so angry?

As an economic historian, I got a taste of this resentment…”

Indeed why are the Germans so angry? Because they are resentful. About what? Nietzsche was so intrigued by German Resentment, that some view him, first, as the philosopher of resentment.

How did Germans got so crazy, once again?

Mr. Soll, a professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California, is the author of “The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations.” He concludes: “German attendees circled me to explain how the Greeks were robbing the Germans. They did not want to be victims anymore. While I certainly accepted their economic points and, indeed, the point that European Union member countries owe Germany so much money that more defaults could sink Germany, it was hard, in Munich at least, to see the Germans as true victims.

Here lies a major cultural disconnect, and also a risk for the Germans. For it seems that their sense of victimization has made them lose their cool, both in negotiations and in their economic assessments. If the Germans are going to lead Europe, they can’t do it as victims.”

Krugman makes similar observations in “Angry Germans“.

Says Paul: “Germany’s sense of victimization does seem real, and is a big problem for its neighbors.”

Germany’s sense of victimization is how it got to hate the French, the Slavs, and the Jews. Just read Hitler’s Mein Kampf: it starts with Germany victimized by the French, then smoothly transit to it being victimized by the Jews…

Why so angry?

Because the truth is out: Germany is not the hegemon of Europe. It tried, once again, and completely failed. Once again. The French Republic stood in the way, gathered around her a more powerful coalition than Germany, in the Eurozone itself, and then added the IMF.

The IMF made first a 180 degree turn: it has concluded that the Greek debt, as it is, is completely unsustainable, and should be cut drastically (Tsipras proposed 30%, I propose 50%). All serious students of debt agree. And Germany used that trick several times in the last 150 years.

Meanwhile, the USA had rallied the French position. The USA has created for its economy 13 times more money than the Eurozone.

France won. France won even Merkel.

France is the hegemon of Europe, Germany the moribund. Because, assuredly, only the mentally moribund would strike such a stupid position about Greece with so much obstinacy, absent any capacity for reason and introspection.

Patrice Ayme’

Piketty Pickets Titanic Teutonic Ignorance

Watching the entire German political establishment (so-called “Socialists” from the SPD Schultz, Gabriel, etc…) threaten Greece with punishments not in their powers to inflict… One is reminded that some countries have a habit of lying (this is, basically, what Nietzsche already accused Germany of doing… 130 years ago).

I said the entire German establishment… But for, paradoxically, Angela Merkel. Instead she, correctly, went to take her orders in Paris (a good instinct). After his victory the Greek Premier called Hollande first… And Hollande told him that Greek finance Minister Varoufakis had to go. Varoufakis had gone a truth too far, namely that plutocrats and their agents are terrorists.

You Two Better Solve This By Cutting Greek Debt 30%, Or History Will Punish You

In August 1914, the German Socialist Party, the SPD, supported the wild attack of Prussian and filthy rich plutocrats against the rest of the world, and in particular, the French Republic. A month later, the entire German army got nearly annihilated east of Paris (the First Battle of the Marne).

Why is it that the SPD cannot learn? (Germany is governed by a SPD-CDU coalition headed by CDU’s Merkel; Merkel, just like Hitler, needs the approval of her Parliament. Differently from Hitler, she can’t just send the SS to help approval.)

Countries are not just affected by their own cultures, ideologies, systems of thought. They are also influenced by something more pernicious, systems of mood. The mood that welcomed Auschwitz and another 5,000 extermination camps in Nazi Germany, was not made by Hitler, contrarily to despicable legend. Hitler just accompanied the exterminationist mood. That, in turn, was implied by a great admiration for Luther, one of the worst men. Ever.

Martin Luther was one of the great thought criminal, ever, because of his vicious anti-Judaism (many others, more courageous than Luther had criticized Catholicism before, without hating the Jews).

This is a serious PHILOSOPHICAL problem. Friedrich Nietzsche (who had fought against France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, before realizing his mistake), wrote hundreds of pages on the madness of the German herd, and its strident anti-Judaism.

Somehow the Nazis turned around Nietzsche’s philosophy against himself.

I thank John Rogers, a commenter on this site to attract my attention to (French) economist Thomas Piketty’s interview below.

Piketty wrote “Capital in the XXI Century”, a book where he presents (part of the) problems in economy and finance long exposed on this site (and its ancestor), and a few of the solutions (although I go much further, as I consider the public-private fractional reserve system a fundamentally fascist system, which has, ideally, to be outlaed in the long run)

This interview with Thomas Piketty puts it all in perspective:

DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?

Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.

ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.

Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.

“Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.”
ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

ZEIT: Are you trying to depict states that don’t pay back their debts as winners?

Piketty: Germany is just such a state. But wait: history shows us two ways for an indebted state to leave delinquency. One was demonstrated by the British Empire in the 19th century after its expensive wars with Napoleon. It is the slow method that is now being recommended to Greece. The Empire repaid its debts through strict budgetary discipline. This worked, but it took an extremely long time. For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education. That didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t happen today. The second method is much faster. Germany proved it in the 20th century. Essentially, it consists of three components: inflation, a special tax on private wealth, and debt relief.

ZEIT: So you’re telling us that the German Wirtschaftswunder [“economic miracle”] was based on the same kind of debt relief that we deny Greece today?

Piketty: Exactly. After the war ended in 1945, Germany’s debt amounted to over 200% of its GDP. Ten years later, little of that remained: public debt was less than 20% of GDP. Around the same time, France managed a similarly artful turnaround. We never would have managed this unbelievably fast reduction in debt through the fiscal discipline that we today recommend to Greece. Instead, both of our states employed the second method with the three components that I mentioned, including debt relief. Think about the London Debt Agreement of 1953, where 60% of German foreign debt was cancelled and its internal debts were restructured.

“We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable.”
ZEIT: That happened because people recognized that the high reparations demanded of Germany after World War I were one of the causes of the Second World War. People wanted to forgive Germany’s sins this time!

Piketty: Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a

rational political and economic decision. They correctly recognized that, after large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.

ZEIT: The end of the Second World War was a breakdown of civilization. Europe was a killing field. Today is different.

Piketty: To deny the historical parallels to the postwar period would be wrong. Let’s think about the financial crisis of 2008/2009. This wasn’t just any crisis. It was the biggest financial crisis since 1929. So the comparison is quite valid. This is equally true for the Greek economy: between 2009 and 2015, its GDP has fallen by 25%. This is comparable to the recessions in Germany and France between 1929 and 1935.

ZEIT: Many Germans believe that the Greeks still have not recognized their mistakes and want to continue their free-spending ways.

Piketty: If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.

ZEIT: The German Minister of Finance, on the other hand, seems to believe that a Greek exit from the Eurozone could foster greater unity within Europe.

Piketty: If we start kicking states out, then the crisis of confidence in which the Eurozone finds itself today will only worsen. Financial markets will immediately turn on the next country. This would be the beginning of a long, drawn-out period of agony, in whose grasp we risk sacrificing Europe’s social model, its democracy, indeed its civilization on the altar of a conservative, irrational austerity policy.

ZEIT: Do you believe that we Germans aren’t generous enough?

Piketty: What are you talking about? Generous? Currently, Germany is profiting from Greece as it extends loans at comparatively high interest rates.

ZEIT: What solution would you suggest for this crisis?

Piketty: We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable. Just now, we’ve lost six months in the completely intransparent negotiations with Athens. The Eurogroup’s notion that Greece will reach a budgetary surplus of 4% of GDP and will pay back its debts within 30 to 40 years is still on the table. Allegedly, they will reach one percent surplus in 2015, then two percent in 2016, and three and a half percent in 2017. Completely ridiculous! This will never happen. Yet we keep postponing the necessary debate until the cows come home.

ZEIT: And what would happen after the major debt cuts?

Piketty: A new European institution would be required to determine the maximum allowable budget deficit in order to prevent the regrowth of debt. For example, this could be a commmittee in the European Parliament consisting of legislators from national parliaments. Budgetary decisions should not be off-limits to legislatures. To undermine European democracy, which is what Germany is doing today by insisting that states remain in penury under mechanisms that Berlin itself is muscling through, is a grievous mistake.

“If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.”
ZEIT: Your president, François Hollande, recently failed to criticize the fiscal pact.

Piketty: This does not improve anything. If, in past years, decisions in Europe had been reached in more democratic ways, the current austerity policy in Europe would be less strict.

ZEIT: But no political party in France is participating. National sovereignty is considered holy.

Piketty: Indeed, in Germany many more people are entertaining thoughts of reestablishing European democracy, in contrast to France with its countless believers in sovereignty. What’s more, our president still portrays himself as a prisoner of the failed 2005 referendum on a European Constitution, which failed in France. François Hollande does not understand that a lot has changed because of the financial crisis. We have to overcome our own national egoism.

ZEIT: What sort of national egoism do you see in Germany?

Piketty: I think that Germany was greatly shaped by its reunification. It was long feared that it would lead to economic stagnation. But then reunification turned out to be a great success thanks to a functioning social safety net and an intact industrial sector. Meanwhile, Germany has become so proud of its success that it dispenses lectures to all other countries. This is a little infantile. Of course, I understand how important the successful reunification was to the personal history of Chancellor Angela Merkel. But now Germany has to rethink things. Otherwise, its position on the debt crisis will be a grave danger to Europe.

ZEIT: What advice do you have for the Chancellor?

Piketty: Those who want to chase Greece out of the Eurozone today will end up on the trash heap of history. If the Chancellor wants to secure her place in the history books, just like [Helmut] Kohl did during reunification, then she must forge a solution to the Greek question, including a debt conference where we can start with a clean slate. But with renewed, much stronger fiscal discipline.

***

I read, and approved what Piketty said. I would add this: only two countries, Denmark and deluded Britain, have an opt-out of the Euro currency. All other European countries are supposed to adopt the Euro (and Denmark is already pegged to the Euro… As the Swiss Frank basically is… by spurts). Thus, to kick Greece out of the Eurozone is a bit like wanting to kick it out of the Union. Interestingly, too, Greece has not breached some democratic aspects that other countries (namely Austria and Hungary nearly did, exposing themselves to sanctions… The Austrian case was resolved, Hungary is still under close watch).

Thus Greece really is making plutocrats and their obsequious servants furious. Some think the banks of the USA got 13 trillion dollars of money from the government (namely, the Fed). Europe’s ECB gave only one trillion Euros. It’s high time to write some huge checks to relaunch the European economy. In the case of Greece we are talking about making a 100 billion gift. Scaled to the entire European economy, that is ONLY five trillion Euros. Notice it’s smaller than the case in the USA.

Last, but not least: California, with many times the economy of Greece, got broke a few years back. It paid employees with IOUs (I Owe You). Now California has fully recovered, thanks, in great part, to its knowledge economy. So, no panic. Just keep money flowing to Greece’s necessary functions, such as science and education…

Patrice Ayme’

NEUROGENESIS: WISDOM; Memories: Resentment

The old thinking about the brain was that neurons were given at birth, and then progressively died. A researcher named Altman found otherwise in 1962: he showed that adult human brains created new neurons. Few believed him, even fewer found that interesting. However, by 1995, incontrovertible evidence of new neurons was found in at least two regions of the brain.

And if one blocked neurogenesis, one blocked learning.

The first memory organ of taxicab drivers learning a lot of streets, the hippocampus, got visibly enlarged.

A rat hippocampus creates at least 10,000 new neurons a day. Yes, a vulgar rat.

New Neurons In White: Forge, Forget, Forgive

Yet, the mind is not just about adding neurons. For those keen to remember their past, fresh neurons are the worst things. Newly formed neurons in the hippocampus — an area of the brain involved in switching from short term memory to the longer sort — dislodge previously learned data, a May 2014 Science article shows.

That’s counter-intuitive at first. Naively, one would expect new neurons to mean a better brain, thus better memory. On second examination, though, if neurons are the brains, new neurons mean new brain, not the old brain, with its old memories.

Many studies have shown that boosting neural proliferation before learning enhances memory in mice.

More neurons increase the capacity to learn new memories. However, memory is based on circuits, synapses, and maybe pre-existing “grandmother neurons” (whatever that exactly means: it could be a tight group of cells). If one adds new elements, it makes sense that they have nothing to do with pre-existing neuronal geometries.

Quite the opposite: creating new neurons could clear old memories… Therapeutically.

In the 2014, Science study, newborn and adult mice were trained to fear an environment that brought electric shocks. The mice learned the task quickly. Infant mice remembered the horror for only one day, adult mice retained the fear for weeks.

This difference correlates with neurogenesis. Memory persistence in newborn mice was enhanced genetically and by chemically suppressing neurogenesis after learning. In adult mice, four to six weeks of regular exercise — an activity known to promote neurogenesis — reduced the previous fear.

Massive neurogenesis in young animals explains why youngsters do not remember their early life. And, as luck has it, an animal model exists.

Guinea pigs and Chilean rodents called Degus have longer gestation periods than mice, and thus reduced brain growth after birth. Baby Degus and guinea pigs do not have infantile amnesia. Yet, heavy exercise and drugs promoting neurogenesis brings it on.

Just as neurogenesis tends to deny the past, it denies visiting again the feelings one had then. That’s resentment. French for feeling again: re-sentiment (with a second “s” added to make a snake sound).

Nietzsche used the word “ressentiment”, because German has not word for “resentment”.

That semantic gap is, per se, reason enough to suspect that Germans walloped in it: if one avoids a notion like the plague, it is an indication that one indulges in it. Luther is full of resentment against the Jews, and Hitler against the French, and then, the Jews.

For the philosopher Kierkegaard, ressentiment occurs in a “reflective, passionless age“, stifling creativity and passion in passionate individuals. Individuals who do not conform to the masses are made into scapegoats and objects of spite by the masses, to maintain the status quo ante and to imbue the masses with their sense of superiority.

According to Nietzsche, the more a person is strong-willed, and dynamic, the less place and time they have for contemplating what’s done to them. The reaction of a strong-willed person (a “wild beast“), when it happens, is short: it is not a prolonged filling, and take-over of their entire intellect by an obsession.

It’s impressive to realize how the most recent neurological findings (above) relate to those philosophers’ insights.

The super intelligent person is always in full neurogenesis, in her haste to model the world with more faithfulness. That makes her unable to hold a grudge: she has better thing to think about.

This opens a new way out of the eternal wheel of conflict, and various vicious circles: react as wild beast to attack, but then smother what led to it under the new mindset of neurogenesis.

Instead of rejecting the world as painful, and hoping for a better one as Christians, Muslims and Buddhists do, think the world again, and the old problematic will fade away.

The same may apply to entire societies, nations, or religions, or civilization. If any of these favor ressentiment, it will have to spurn neurogenesis, or its societal equivalent. Just as individuals will.

Hence a vicious circle: the more resentment, the less imagination, and intelligence, and thus the more madness in crowds as in individuals.

Let’s notice, moreover, that denial and bad faith (a la Sartre, De Beauvoir) are very close to resentment.

So what would the moral conclusion of the preceding be? Generating new ideas, just as generating new neurons, is how to break out from the past’s vicious circles. Higher intelligence is also a better morality.

Patrice Ayme’

Calmly Thinking Up A Storm

Buddhists, Muslims and other Christians, often make the argument that human society is a terrible place, a false world, that it has to be fled at any cost.

Saint Augustine famously recommended to leave that “City of Man” (Rome), and join instead the “City of God”.

Soon all Romans joined the City of God, which happened to also be that of the Plutocrats. There was no more money for real things, like the military. By 400 CE, the Franks were put in charge of defending the North West of the empire. In 406 CE, the Rhine froze, and several German nations broke through, surprising the Franks. There were no hinterlands military reserves.

The Vandals, one of these nations, charged across Gallia, Hispania, and landed across, in Africa.

Soon the Vandals were below the walls of Saint Augustine city of Hippo (of which he was bishop). Hippo fell, a case of divine justice, no doubt. Augustine died. The Vandal occupation, overall, lasted a century, before a puny, but successful Roman counter-attack.

Within three centuries, North Africa, the world’s most Christianized place, would fall to the invading Arabs. And it fell the hard way: after a war that lasted many years, the cities were annihilated.

A characteristic of Roman North Africa is that the presence of Roman soldiery was very light. Eight centuries of peace were enjoyed, aside from episodic violence during Vandal rule. Now contemplate this:

Here is Alex Jones, a successful blogger, in “Finding calm in the storm“: “Human society encourages you to become anxious, always in a state of panic. The adrenaline constantly runs like an angry river… The news is always ugly, full of fear and worry. Human society is a constant raging hurricane of angry fear.” He then recommends to pet a cat: ”You are calm, the cat enjoys your company. The cat has pulled you out of the storm into a calm centre.”

I am myself a great apostle of Nature, and the realism it fosters. Using a human body, and a human mind, the way they were evolved to be, in nature, allows us to enjoy what we are meant to be. That’s why I hike, run, dive, climb, and work on my garden.

Yet, a purring cat, per se, comes rather short, as a full expression of nature. And why are some people so disturbed by… nothing?

The argument can be made, and ought to be made, that, in this raging storm, being calm should be the least of our worries. There is all too much calm about big things, and too much tempests in tea pots.

Alex Jones kindly replied this to me: “A calm mind is a wise mind.”

There we have the naked truth: a blatant identification between calm, and wisdom. They are related, but far from identical. It’s true that a wise mind will often be calm, when others are not. That’s because the wise has anticipated the situation, and those who are less wise, when confronted to reality, get all excited while they are trying to adapt to it. They have no choice.

Conversely, those who were never excited never learned anything.

If one believes that “a calm mind is a wise mind”, the Americans were sure wise to keep calmly supporting Hitler in 1939. The Japanese were sure wise to calmly support emperor Hiro Hito, from 1937 (Nanking) to Pearl Harbor (1941), and beyond.

And those who do not give a hoot about whether humanity is poisoning the biosphere, are certainly remarkably calm, thus very wise. Meanwhile, Nile crocodiles, who barely move for months in winter, deep in the watery depths, have got to be the wisest.

Believing that calm is wise, renders the calm acceptance in the UK and the USA of Bush’s attack on Iraq in 2003, really wise.

In truth, unveiling truth often demands not just excitation, but outright violence. Even if that’s just the violence of changing one’s own mind. Nietzsche pointed out, courageously, that he made “philosophy with a hammer“.

Conventional wisdom is always calm, because it is so sure of itself. Calm also are the deepest errors, those harder to expugnate. It’s easier to keep one’s mind at ease, and regurgitate the past, as one learned it at the age of four.

To identify wisdom with calm is, thus, a fundamental error.

Building the correct ideas and moods requires work, thus energy, thus, one could say, violence. A child has to accept a lot of force to be perpetrated on her mind to fabricate all that knowledge and wisdom, which shows up in immensely subtle neuro-geometry.

When one looks in the small, at the Quantum scale, one discovers extreme agitation. And the smaller one looks, the greater the agitation. Most of the mass of a proton is created by the kinetic energy of the quarks zooming around inside, thanks to E = mcc. (E, the kinetic energy of quarks, creates m, the mass of the proton.) Agitation itself creates mass.

Last night, I watched a tremendous thunderstorm. Nature herself is violent. Truth itself is what’s left of the imagination, once all trials and errors one could think of have been made.

Truth is not calm, nor is it arrived at calmly. Believing otherwise was all the excuse authorities often had to send many a thinker to death.

Patrice Ayme’