| This is from Friedrich Nietzsche
|
| You know, of course you probably know that he was the philosopher who announced
|
| the death of God
|
| What he meant by that was that the fundamental metaphysics that underly Western
|
| culture had lost their foundation
|
| And that the consequence of that would be the disintegration of the idea of
|
| value itself, especially of value hierarchies
|
| He thought of the inevitable consequence of that
|
| Or one of the consequences of that
|
| A dramatic move towards a doctrine of radical equality
|
| See because if value itself is destroyed
|
| The value distinction between things so that one thing is not any better than
|
| another
|
| Then there’s no reason for hierarchies of virtue or of value
|
| And so the equality doctrine is a logical, is a logical outcome
|
| So here’s what he wrote about that:
|
| Behold; |
| this is the hole of the tarantula
|
| Do you want to see the tarantula itself? |
| Here hangs its web; |
| touch it so that
|
| it trembles. |
| There it comes willingly. |
| Welcome, tarantula! |
| Your triangle and
|
| symbol sits black on your back, and I also know what sits in your soul:
|
| revenge sits in your soul. |
| Wherever you bite, black scabs grow.
|
| Your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge
|
| Thus I speak to you in a parable — you who make souls whirl, you preachers of
|
| equality. |
| To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. |
| But I shall bring
|
| your secrets to light; |
| therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the
|
| heights. |
| Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your
|
| lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word: justice.
|
| For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the
|
| highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms
|
| The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. |
| «What justice means to us
|
| is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge»
|
| — thus they speak to each other. |
| «We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all
|
| whose equals we are not» — thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. |
| «And 'will to
|
| equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; |
| and against all that has
|
| power we want to raise our clamour!»
|
| You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamours thus out of
|
| you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud
|
| themselves in words of virtue! |
| Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy — perhaps the
|
| conceit and envy of your fathers — erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy
|
| of revenge
|
| What was silent in the Father speaks in the Son, and I often found the Son the
|
| unveiled secret of the Father
|
| They’re like enthusiasts, but it is not the heart that fires them, but revenge.
|
| And when they become elegant and cold it is not the spirit, but envy,
|
| that makes them elegant and cold. |
| Their jealousy leads them even on the paths
|
| of thinkers. |
| And this is the sign of their jealousy: they always go too far,
|
| till their weariness must in the end lie down to sleep in the snow
|
| Tarantulas
|
| Tarantulas
|
| Tarantulas
|
| Tarantulas
|
| Out of every one of their complaints sounds revenge; |
| in their praise there is
|
| always a sting, and to be a judge seems bliss to them. |
| But thus I counsel you
|
| my friends: mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
|
| They are people of a low sort and stock;
|
| The hangman and the bloodhound (x4) look out of their faces. |
| Mistrust all who
|
| talk much of their justice! |
| Verily, their souls lack more than honey.
|
| And when they call themselves «the good and the just», do not forget that they
|
| would be pharisees, if only they had power. |
| My friends, I do not want to be
|
| mixed up and confused with others. |
| Some preach my doctrine of life,
|
| and are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas.
|
| Although they are sitting in their holes, these poisonous spiders,
|
| with their backs turned on life, they speak in favour of life, but only
|
| because they wish to hurt. |
| They wish to hurt those who now have power,
|
| for among those the preaching of death is still most at home. |
| If it were
|
| otherwise, the tarantulas would teach otherwise; |
| they themselves were once the
|
| foremost slanderers of the world and burners of heretics
|
| I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality |