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Philosophy Series: Nietzsche and the Death of God

🕑 Added 2025-01-16 23:31:07 +0000 UTC

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Derek

Hey Breht, just listening to your episode on Neitzsche, and I was so moved by your long digression on mystical unity/ego collapse vs the "egocentrism at the core of our civilizational problem." I'm sure you get 100 pitches for episode ideas for every 1 you can do, but I wonder if you would see any value for your listeners in a conversation about the philosophical paradox or contradiction (at least, from my perspective) at the heart of ML thought. In this same moment in the podcast, you laid out the contrast between a "dominion over" mentality versus a "harmony with" approach, and characterized it as humanity needing to movng from an adolescent phase to an adult phase. And I loved how you put it: "We cannot take the same mentality... that got us here... and create a happy, sustainable world for everybody." But isn't the very idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat in its essence a "dominion over" approach, one that is obsessed with seizing state power? And then once you have it, maintaining it at all odds against class enemies? I know this is thought of in progressive terms, because you empower the vast majority at the expense of the tiny minority, but to me the philosophical beating heart beneath it is an assertion that we can, indeed, build the better, sane world on a foundation of subjugation. Even if it's a much "better, more just" subjugation for the masses, doesn't it feed a will to power as well? And once fed and sustained in creating and maintaining the forces of the state, how on earth will that will be dismantled? I don't feel that actually existing socialism has been able to answer this essential question. If Marxist theorists have attempted to, I'd love to read their take. Marx himself was at his most idealist when dismissing this contradiction as the eventual withering away of the state and achievement of a fully equal communism. (I get why at that historical moment, the focus was on seizure of power and not much beyond.) But as we know, the state as an institution then has its own drive of survival that as a machinery is much bigger than the human cogs that make it up. It's very similar to how once you have a capitalist machine, everyone within it becomes enslaved to forces much bigger than themselves, including the capitalists. I find this paradox interesting and more than a little necessary to grapple with seriously, and have often wondered how you reconcile it, as I've listened for years to RevLeft and your other work, and I hear in you an earnest mystical appreciation and love for all humanity, the dignity of all, mixed with (at times) a bit of a vengeful "I can't wait to put the boot on your neck, motherfuckers, when it's our turn" framing that seems so contradictory, though I totally fucking get it on a visceral level. But again, the question is, can one of these diametrically opposed, though natural, human impulses truly be used to accomplish the other, or is that wishful thinking? Seems to me that since there will always be hostile forces somewhere (internal, external), socialism will never be able to yield state power and the repression it entails. A world without contradictions has never existed, and in my view never will. We are all a bundle of forces, drives, and values, some of them inevitably contradictory.