There is a hidden path for you also that remains…behind the marketplace, it begins in the thickets of small woods….it winds up many steep paths toward the high mountain air, to life in the ascent, uncorrupted by the miasma of the yeast man and the toilets in the river valleys….the life on Jason’s Argo can be reclaimed…and by some few in the modern world, it has been….
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Greek Friendship—You think maybe I promote the ruthlessness of a machine politician with tuna-stained brown sportcoat, or a petty office intriguer, or catty interior designer with upward lilting voice who backstabs his colleagues to get contract. Fools, you think I’m here to promote a “way of life” or morality! No principles or ideas are of any use today, all will be retooled and taken over by people like these. Self-help is completely useless, and not what this book is about: rather, I would like most to go toward self-destruction and to be rid of them. I only care about very few who, being constrained in their predatory nature by this open-air zoo, must look to the past to understand what is possible. I want to give encouragement to some who are a certain way, in their blood, and to encourage them to become the purifying hand of nature. Among your instincts you will find the longing for strong friendships, that the modern evil tries to snuff out. And they have good reason to try this, because every great thing in the past was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power. The modern zoo wants you instead to be a weak and isolated “individual.” In most Greek cities there were the aristocratic clubs or fraternities, which were always places of great plans, great ideas and spiritual ferment. Here were made great political plans, plans of colonization and exploration of new lands and new cities, plans of conquest, actions against the designs of tyrants and plebs. Where is your bulwark today against Babylon, when all this has been made illegal for you? In life of Cellini you see how different is a real free man: when insulted, or when one of his friends or family is hurt, he gathers fifty bravos for a raid on the enemy, something impossible in our states today, not only because of the immense power of the evil that suffocates, but also because you have no such friends who could or would help you. A brotherhood of men in this form is the foundation of all higher life in general: there is a certain madness, an enthusiasm that exists also in a community of true scientists or artists, that follows this same pattern. It is totally forbidden in our time: it’s totally absent in universities, which is where science has been sequestered. But what fate can science have here? Everything in corporate labs, in universities, as in government labs, and at the military and intelligence facilities that still carry out some scientific tasks…everything militates to crush the spirit of science. The dedication, severity, focus and enthusiasm necessary to sustain true scientific enterprise are forbidden because they make women and weaklings uncomfortable: the presence of “lactation rooms,” and an environment where such rooms could even be built…the suppression of vigorous debate, the promotion of an “unhostile environment” of petty chitchat and chumminess, the subjection of scientists to administrators, human resources cunts with fibromyalgia, to the crushing banality of everydayness, all of this reduces the young scientist to domestic muck again and destroys his aspirations and will. The assault is very heavy in Silicon Valley and other holdouts of research as well where, however, there wasn’t any serious innovation being done in the first place: already technology had been reduced to the development of dick pic apps for adolescents. Science has long ago ceased and been castrated… Will it be born again? The cleansing barbarism that I talk about here must first sweep the world: no science is possible any longer, nor anything else, in a place where all spheres of life have been submerged into the great mother of the Yeast. But this isn’t really about science or art, I say again, you’re very far from understanding what those are even supposed to do in the first place. Do you know how for Greek all higher aspirations went into strong friendship between two men who together dedicated themselves to a higher task? In Thebes, Epaminondas and Pelopidas reformed the state, and established a democracy based on the Pythagorean sect—that last part not important. They believed in some peculiar things, like reincarnation, the veneration of the “left side” and also of beans and other legumes, which I don’t understand so well. But it was they who established the famous “Sacred Band,” the elite military unit that broke the power of Sparta. This group was formed of close friends, and you will always have too much love and compassion for a real friend to waiver in courage in front of him—but I doubt you understand what such friendship means or that you ever had such friend! In Athens the two friends Harmodius and Aristogeiton put down the tyranny through their schemes and their bravery: this is, you know, why all tyrants and totalitarians are suspicious of strong friendships between men. Most of all this is feared by the middle-aged lesbos and defectives that are used as guards by our prison-states. And yes, I know the rumors that these friendships were sexual, but I believe this is misunderstanding and exaggeration promoted by the homonerds of our time, for reasons I will explain later. The model for all such friendships was that between Achilles and Patroclus: Homer never hints such friendship was sexual. It is only out of the poverty of our imagination that we think it was, because we can’t conceive of such intense love between friends without some carnal or material benefit in play. It was out of his friendship for Patroclus that Achilles embarked on his great rampage: it was for the sake of his friend that he would not tolerate living a long and inglorious life at home…he chose instead a short and glorious one, and a violent death full of promise and beauty. Friends can spur you to this! How shameful to drag out life like a dog and die overseen by strangers in a hospital, who hate you, rather than to die in the prime of your youth, for the sake of your friend, and to leave behind a beautiful corpse! The original form for all this was the divine pair of charioteers: Castor and Pollux, or for the Aryans it was the Ashvin twins, and for the Saxons it was Horst and Hengist, the pair of the chariot driver and the archer—do you understand this is the real root of all the higher aspirations of Europe? The charioteers who took over Europe around 1500 BC depended on this close bond between two men for its military organization; and probably this people itself had its ultimate origins in friendships of this kind. The Spartan state, in any case, entirely depended in its education of youth on this pairing of two friends, as knight and squire. It was this conquering aristocracy that really made Europe stand out from the morass that the rest of the world has always been stuck in… And for the Greeks, and all great men of the Bronze Age and not just the Greeks, friendship wasn’t just a way to “temper” the lust for power and adventure that some of you will surely embrace, but an absolute prerequisite for it. It is most of all not a duty. Friendship is a social relation of a kind that is beyond all “ethics,” you see, and if you ever think of it in terms of ethics you misunderstand it. It is a great pleasure between two, very different from sexual pleasure between man and woman, but of the same species, in that it is pleasant, and never feels like “ethics,” which is for cows. There have been a few attempts in our age to replenish this form of friendship, for example Montaigne’s famous essay. There have been other attempts as well, you find some nice words on friendship in Nietzsche in Zarathustra, and then most of all there are the modern scouting movements, that come from Germany and from this same spirit. The first movement like this was called the Wandervogel, but there were various others, all based on the experience of nature, the promotion of camaraderie and of nationalism. This included the Jewish youth guard movements that became Zionists, the Boy Scouts and others in America of course. Among the Jews, the promotion of this kind of camaraderie and friendship was a great miracle in the early 20th Century, because it so much went against their culture of the cramped shtetl, of nerds dominated by women and old people and by fear. It was a great act of self-overcoming for them, and many are right that in some sense the creation of Israel is the most “anti-Semitic
” act ever conceived. It is, in any case, a great model for others to show that reestablishment of antiquity is fully possible, although there is no real reason why Americans or Europeans should have any regard for the welfare of this country. In their case too, however, by our time that spirit of piracy is long gone, and they’ve gone so soft that on the streets of Tel Aviv you have Yemeni “Jewish” bluegums with Rasta style feeling up Ashkenazi girls, and in general a feeling of torpor. The condition of other modern nations is worse. In our time friendship is made illegal between boys in school, real fraternities are for all purposes banned, and the scouting movements are forced to accept women—and women are destructive entirely of any great friendship. In private life, friendship among isolated and defeated modern males is unheard of. Men are deluded into thinking their wife can also be their best friend (and this, of course, also makes their wives lose respect for them). Then also so many are rightly afraid of the way such relations have been sexualized between men and are never sure if a prospective friend has sexual intentions…at the same time as all this goes on, gays act out a domesticized and castrated parody of friendship. Where to recover true friendship then? In this case though, more than in others, how could they stop you, if you only learned to listen to instinct and follow the pleasure of desires? There’s nothing in principle that the state can do to stop you, if you should give yourself over to real friendship. All of the things I’ve said are a kind of conditioning, a very strong conditioning, but it’s all a form of psychological control that should in principle be easy to break. All you need to do is give in to desire for great things. The true foundation of the Bronze Age, of the age of great adventures…such a thing is a matter of the blood and spirit and for those few among you who are suited to it, it should be as easy to recover as the carelessness that comes from filling yourself with the fire of the life-force. You must only embrace your own instincts with abandon and understand that in common dedication to a higher cause, a great friend is invaluable because you spur each other on and keep guard on each other in the mission.
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Superman mindset—inside every noble Greek was an unquenchable lust for power, and this means power to become lord over life and death in your state. It’s hard to understand what this means from looking around today, because there’s nothing like it from the big examples you might have heard. Many of you might think of dictators in North Korea or some public lavatory of the world, or of the great total states of the last century, but you’d be wrong. These men weren’t really free or powerful, in many ways they were hostage to their own security services. Someone like Stalin was trapped in a stream of events where his freedom to operate existed only in the realm of murder, and murder alone, and any small step outside of this would mean his doom. Ideology is so tiresome! These are “systems” of control that call on the mobilization of the entire society; and the demands of this control far outweigh the capabilities of a single man. In a monarchy he could delegate these tasks to ministers and concern himself with other projects, but someone like Stalin or Mao can’t really do that. You must understand that all true greatness is parasitic on matter, for example the brain and nervous system are parasitic on the body: for anything good to happen the capacity of the hegemon must exceed the demands made on it for attention, management and control. The analogy here would be a body with the lower organs so large and powerful, their demands for control so overwhelming, that the brain would be barely equal to the task and would remain entirely in their service, although ruling or tyrannizing over them. That is the kind of “modern dictator” you know about. And the types of men that are drawn into this today are also quite different, they are the kind of ideological martinet you meet every day among those who are “public spirited” and into “public service.” It’s a kind of very aggressive schoolmarm type. This is a lower kind of creature. What I’m talking about is entirely different from public service, but seeks to live like a parasite on the state and on the substance of its various factions, to pursue quite different interests and desires. They have interests alien to yours. In the modern world this condition isn’t approached by dictators of totalitarian states, but certain others I will describe soon. In fact the great totalitarian states you know about weren’t that different from our own, or the “liberal democracies”: we live in the same kind of state, only that it is more prosperous and the viciousness of the power is indirect and hidden. But it is no less monstrous. If anyone is free, it certainly isn’t anyone you see or know about. No Greek that I talk about, in any case, would have enjoyed being the gofer of the national security and industrial state and its thousands of demands. Such men saw the prize of sovereignty as a means…a perch from where they could remain watchful over the state and of territory far outside it, and swoop down like eagle for the prize; in one swoop the king of birds catches its bloody prey in fast talons. They were true artistes: take, for example, Periander of Corinth. This man’s name means literally “superman.” At no point in his life as king of Corinth did he restrain his lust for the darkest paths: it is said he copulated with his mother, that he violated his wife’s corpse, and much worse. He had all the boys on the island Corcyra castrated. And, having done all this, he was memorialized as one of the Sages, or Geniuses of the ancient world. A philosopher and a poet, he wrote an epic on the mysteries of nature… that showed themselves to him alone on afternoons when the long shadows make the blue-green shores of those seas whisper to ears ready to hear. He supported also the art and philosophy of others in the state, but only out of a careless generosity: I was there at his court, I played the harp and he once threw a well-used courtesan in my lap with a gesture of disdain. It is true that he established his city as a great trading outpost, bringing great wealth. He also built the first railroad in history—a kind of way to transport goods across the isthmus of Corinth; at the time a great innovation. He did many other such things…he established colonies abroad, he built temples, he chastised the nobles and raised up the middle classes, but you must forgive these acts, or rather, not misunderstand them. He never did any of this “for the good,” out of duty or necessity, but rather these actions flowed from those we consider vices, as a kind of excess. Everything came from his instincts to conquer and expand the domain of his action. Born to power in his state, he could have chosen a middle course. If he had excessively enjoyed honors…or prestige…or security. These were his to have, and easily. The great danger for a house passes once the son is able to succeed the father in seat of king. But he gave all this up, for really no reason. He chose a path of adventure, but …he chose even a path of sorrow. In all he did, there was a kind of artistic sorrow and grotesque misfortune, that he seemed to want to bring on himself…to make life interesting, or so he could overcome even this latest outrage. He killed his own wife, and I know why. She was pregnant, and though he had copulated with her, in a dream he received word that during the act a small snake had become attached to his member. And that a monster would be born. Then it’s said that his son was murdered by those same people from Corcyra that Periander had made the subjects of his weird experiments, but that they did so because they loved the youth. But this is absurd. The real reason was that he was trying to impregnate all the women on the island. So Periander dreamt he would become progenitor of a “brood of snakes.” He only ever saw political office as a means to self-overcoming and self-perfection, as a way to turn himself into a living work of art. From this came for the citizens much good and also much bad. It has to be expected that such men will appear as monsters to others. In any case, the things he did were hardly the worst. One other man I can think of, a tyrant or a king, have it what you will, he married off the women of his state to slaves: through this overturning of values, that he learned from Plato, he secured his infamy and power. Do you understand what Plato’s Republic means? It is a formula for such men to unleash their complete madness on the world. It teaches them certain tricks to expand the domain of their struggle for self-perfection into every area of socia
l life. Plato himself says that the secret desire of every Greek was to become a tyrant, and Nietzsche understands all the greatness of that people, their exploration of the seas and limits of the world, their foundation of the arts and sciences…all of this as just an extension of this secret desire in the heart of every noble Greek. It was the secret desire also in the heart of the great French artists, and it is simply put, the unlearnable desire behind all great things. If you have it you must by no means restrain it. This is because human nature is feeble and easily led astray, and only when driven by this kind of monstrous and single-minded obsession for the heights of power can it find the motivation to overcome the lying, dirty ape in us. A certain distance too from oneself is necessary. A “clinical” eye in regards to oneself, one’s faults, is required for this mindset. In our time this can be achieved in part by embracing spirit of true science, whereas for man of Bronze Age it was easy to embrace because he saw things that happened to him, including the great motions of the spirit, the feelings that troubled him, as instantiations of various gods, for which he was not responsible, and which he could therefore judge and evaluate externally. His view was, however, correct. For this reason when you see men like Periander you have to understand their special quest wasn’t one where they try to accomplish “the public good,” nor was it some worthless desire to dominate others or exert will for petty satisfaction: they see others instead as tools or objects on a mission of self-overcoming. He was trying to turn himself into a work of art, his life into a replay of the great motions of the stars, or the secret passion plays of the gods. In the same way that the Greek state in general was conceived as a work of art by the citizens. Periander understood his position as king then as just another means: here science, here art could be free from all limits and could rule unhindered and embark on great experiments. And yet from all this you see something very strange…The secret desire of every Greek…the Bronze Age mindset….was to be worshiped as a god! This is the secret target to which that boundless lust for power aims! There are many other examples. Among the Spartans you find the great general Lysander. He turned the Spartans from a land power into a great navy, defeated the Athenians and ended the Peloponnesian War: then he went from city to city as a liberator, on a great tour of self-glorification. He was the first to be worshiped as a god at altars. He had searched for this his entire life, and it was the prize of his victories. There was another such unlikely man, Brasidas, a Spartan general of a generation before Lysander, of very unusual character. He liberated many cities by his force of personality and the magical charisma that emanated from his body. A Spartan and man of battle and the science of war, he nevertheless managed to win by persuasion and speech: only such man, with disdain for words, can really understand what speech is really for. He was type of man who, when his back is against the wall, the strong spirit in him rallies like wild boar who rages in his thick chest when he is cornered by hunters, and charges for the kill. In same way Brasidas performed best when he relieved many cities of siege. He died the most glorious death, in the middle of victorious battle, when he rushed into the thick of the enemy with his elite guard. He was worshiped as a god thereafter in the city of Amphipolis. It’s not a surprise that you see men of this type of man come out of Sparta: the place that made the sternest demands on itself produced also the most brilliant men. They went rogue and easily imposed the intensity of their magic charisma on foreigners. True power needs no effort: it draws all around it like a force-field. Power of character and body attracts others in orbit as if by magic.
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