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Reading Nietzsche in Starbucks

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"[O]nly to a limited extent does man want truth," Nietzsche writes. "He desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; to pure knowledge without consequences he is indifferent, to potentially harmful and destructive truths he is even hostile. ...Only through forgetfulness can man ever come to imagine that he possesses truth."

 

As I loudly slurped the dregs of my Starbucks iced coffee, it dawned on me none of this really mattered, since like everyone else I would too soon be food for the worms. I didn't know the "truth" any more than anybody else. All I knew was that I and all my allies who believe in, and advocate for, the bottom-up empowerment of ordinary Americans as a means of saving this nation from further disaster -- and, yes, at the expense of the rich -- all I knew was that we were really screwed and the deck was being re-stacked.

 

To fall back on sixties' terms, the fat-cats and the war-mongers are winning. They are marshalling the power that reaches deep into American history to design a future that will increasingly screw those at the bottom of the heap -- all in the name of protecting their investments and reinforcing their security in their gated communities. American capitalism, with all its deceptions and excesses, is only temporarily on the ropes. Recent history has made it tragically clear in the halls of government there is more concern about the security and comfort of those at the top than there is for those at the bottom.

 

The Slovenian Marxist writer Slavoj Zizek [7] addresses the pitfalls of current American capitalism with a scalpel and humor in his book First as Tragedy, Then As Farce. In his mind, the famous Marx quote about history repeating itself applies to our times: 9/11 was the "tragedy" and the debt bubble crash of 2008 and the bailout was "farce." He writes of a growing culture of people whose ambition is to live above the troublesome chaos of life lived by ordinary humanity:

 

"[O]ne feature basic to the attitude of these gated superrich is fear; fear of external social life itself. The highest priorities of the 'ultrahigh-net worth individuals' are thus how to minimize security risks -- diseases, exposure to threats of violent crime, and so forth."

 

Zizek sees this phenomenon growing and manifested in a nightmare vision of the future he has in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a Third World culture fast becoming a major First World economy -- as we in the United States go through a reverse process of Third Worldization. "To insulate themselves from the dangers of mingling with ordinary people, the rich of Sao Paulo prefer to use helicopters," he writes, "with ordinary people swarming through the dangerous streets down below." It reminds him of the cold-blooded dystopia in the movie Blade Runner.

 

I tossed my empty iced coffee cup into the trash and headed for the grocery store, for those vital supplies to sustain life. As I walked from Starbucks to the Giant food store, a fancy new police cruiser slid by me. It was the kind with several laptop computers on racks all aimed at the person in the driver's seat. A young neighborhood cop I know told me his SUV cruiser even had thermal sensing equipment; he was so new on the force he didn't know what it was for.

 

I imagined the well-armed officer in the cruiser passing me as the bedrock, socially-designated arbiter of the vast socially-constructed, bullshit-driven system that I more and more felt myself incarcerated in. It was a world at the end of the evolutionary arc that had begun with that society of animals in Nietzsche's parable that had in "the most arrogant, most mendacious minute in "world history,' " invented knowledge and, then, had been destroyed for it.

 

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I'm a 72-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a naive 19-year-old. From that moment on, I've been studying and re-thinking what US counter-insurgency war means. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I'm a writer, photographer and political (more...)
 

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