Power

Imagine you are the most important human being alive. Let's say you're the Wittgenstein of your time. Everyone palpably knows your name will go down in history, that you have contributed heavily to whatever field you specialize in, that you have a ridiculously broad knowledge (the "last remaining Renaissance man") in all areas of life; you can assimilate everything into unity; you are the solution for the question of where mankind should be going. Added to this, you know how to silence your enemies; your intelligence is incomparable. Your name paints the cover-pages of the most auspicious magazines of this generation; Time has held your portrait more than once. Your friends almost fall prostrate before you with their admonitions; more: you are quite the character to be around. Women adore you. In short, you are history, and you, in your youth, in ascertaining this fact, extract all the euphoria involved with such a discovery: most geniuses throughout history never know their own place until -- they are dead.

Then something fantastic happens. The aliens finally land, and Sagan leaps from his grave. They land, and, moreover, bring a master-race of human beings with them. They have learned the tricks of God, you could say, and have discovered how to work the genetics of human evolution. They have quite literally grown a master race, fashioned after their super-intelligence, their ten-thousand year advance in technology, the natural sciences, and other disciplines. The world, following the leads of the governments of America and England, enthusiastically accepts the integration of these individuals into society: they will, after all, solve our mathematical, theological, scientific, pharmacological, medical, philosophical, and political problems. Diseases will be reduced to history. This race is a genius: a preternatural gift from a preternatural discovery: the aliens, after all, are nice. Every problem humanity has encountered has been solved. Things are well for everyone.

But not for you. You come to realize that this race, oh history incarnated, surpasses your genius at every single infinitesimal angle. There isn't a single member of these super-humans that this is remotely approximate to you in intelligence. In firebranded despair, you search every angle of this race for a single exception; but there is none. You have suddenly become one-millionth place. You are no longer exceptional. You are clumped with the rest of humanity, significantly no different than the lowest mind, given the ridiculous leap these super-geniuses have over the human race (statistics has no mercy). You are no longer spoken of behind closed doors; the magazines dedicate their time to the far more conspicuous advances of the just-landed super-race. Your friends still look on you with positivity, but there is a strange reflective pause in their eyes. They admired you because you were the best; but now you're no-one. A negligible grain of flesh. Power, you come to find, is the greatest metaphysical bastard to ever live.

Yes, I must say that if your emphasis is on power, I can only call you stupid. Why waste your time? Your life is relativity, devoid of anything absolute, anything immutable. What is the absolute for a human being? His meaning. Meaning is relative to the individual, yes, but absolute in relation to this individual. Power is both relative to the individual and to his relation to other men. For this reason, I cannot trust you, Nietzsche; I cannot trust the ideal man, the Ubermench, as a man of power, who lives in the hope of an unending struggle for superiority, no matter how expedient this drive is in answering an objectively meaningless universe for the human beings thrown into it. I can't, in part because I find a correlation between people who seek power and assholedness. Yes, and it may very well be that invisible sting that evokes the assholedness of those who seek to overcome the world. The world is a much better place without assholes; therefore, whatever means to reducing this is a preferable aim. Even if this involves resigning one's "selfishness". Perhaps in that last glimmer of sanity you grasped this, as you flocked towards that abused horse in Turin, contradicting your anti-pity philosophy through a substitution with your own hidden sparkling humanity, embracing that abused animal with a breaking mind. You were too grand a human being to limit yourself to pettiness, and it is the greatest tragedy that imbeciles far outweigh the noble souls in relation to those who claim to follow you.

Power, that is, an intoxicating feeling analogous to religious experience -- a secular substitute for religious euphoria, but based, alas, in unstable ground. No shock that paranoid schizophrenics are characterized by delusions of grandeur in addition to hallucinations. Could one make the amateur case that the one causes other rather than limiting one's explanation to purely boring biological grounds? Not likely, but perhaps; there are many culprits in causality, for causality is synthetic, not singular.

You live for power you say, you poor bastard. You have instrumentalized the entire world, dehumanized the saints and ghosts we call human beings that hide inside, dissipated beauty (what greater absurdity to think that Napoleon knew beauty!). Is there anything intrinsic? Anything you perceive for its own sake? Ah, I see your repsonse: that even if through consciousness one thinks one has a moment of exhileration or exuberance, you would say we must look deeper to a biological basis, an unconscious, Id-saturated groping for overcoming -- that, you say, is a response to any intrinsic experience; all is instrumental except the telos of power by virtue of a necessary biological drive. So much the worse for you.

So much the worse for you.