His point, and the thrust of the essay, is that we human beings, especially people like John Boehner, really don't know squat. We think we do, but most of what we deal with in our lives, to borrow the term made popular by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, is "bullshit." [5]
Here's Nietzsche again:
"The intellect, as a means of preserving the individual, develops its principal strengths in dissimulation, for this is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, it being denied to them to wage the battle of existence with the horns or sharp fangs of a beast of prey." The notion of "the meek shall inherit the Earth" is another version of the same observation.
Because of this state of affairs, Nietzsche says, "man needs a peace treaty," an understanding of things to get beyond Thomas Hobbes' [6] world of "war of all against all." What we call truths, Nietzsche says, "are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions."
This perfectly explains the outrageous "bullshit" that people like John Boehner and his ilk amazingly get away with in the current and on-going struggle for power in post-9/11, post-debt-bubble America. The Will To Power, of course, became the mature Nietzsche's major focus. Power and the future are what's at stake in the current struggle. Who has power and who will wield it in the years to come? Who has the legacy of wealth and power to make the rules as to who will prevail in the future?
The struggle has nothing to with justice and questions of who deserves what and who has what to lose and who caused the economic disaster in the first place. The young Nietzsche says "truth" is "the obligation to use the customary metaphors" and "the obligation to lie in accordance with a fixed custom." In other words, truth is the story a people agree to go with and to stick with. Truth can be the consensus of a lynch mob.
In America, this means reaching way, way back in history to the days of exploration and "discovery," to the conquest of peoples and societies, and once those peoples were subdued and pacified, the development of the conquered lands and the introduction of new technologies like the railroads and -- fast forward -- computers and the internet. Capitalism and profit-making have become an instrumental part of this mythic story, which is told with great righteousness, received with great enthusiasm and manifested in action with great energy and momentum. And when there is a setback -- like the current, on-going economic depression -- the lies and delusions that make up the story become the empowering fuel to get beyond the setback.
The fact that, in this case and others, the process of recovery circumvents actually addressing the problem and, instead, means normalizing and reinvigorating the same dysfunctional circumstances that caused the problem in the first place only makes Nietzsche's view of truth seem quite contemporary. He really understood slippery, power-hungry men like John Boehner and Joe Biden, to name two of the most sleazy now negotiating a dismal future for a society of TV-addled human beings, a "deal" that will be delivered just under the Tuesday wire. The cynicism would not shock Friedrich Nietzsche.
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