Back to the Future with Justin Raimondo

Back to the Future
The economy crashes, war looms, a savior appears – haven't we been here before?

by Justin Raimondo

"The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche eventually went mad, some say due to the effects of syphilis, others blame the implications of his complex and darkly ironic philosophy of life, which included, as its central precept, the doctrine of eternal recurrence. The concept makes its most dramatic appearance in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Nietzsche, speaking through Zarathustra, is arguing with a grey dwarf who represents human limitations:

"‘Behold this moment!' I went on. ‘From this gateway Moment a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us.'

‘Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past?'

‘And if all things have been here before: what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been here – before?'

‘And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that this moment draws after it all future things? Therefore – draws itself too?'

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane.'

‘And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must we not all have been here before?

‘ – and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane – must we not return eternally?'"

This concept, it has to be admitted, is subject to various interpretations: since Nietzsche wrote in parables and aphorisms, his text rich with metaphor, it's hard to say whether he was speaking about the willingness to relive one's life, exactly as it was lived, over and over again, as a sign of life affirmation and psychological health, or if he meant it in the temporal sense, as a cosmological theory. Time, according to this variant of Nietzschean thought, doesn't progress in a straight line, but loops back on itself: we are doomed to go through the same cycles, again and again, and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it.

In any case, it's this latter interpretation that fascinates me, these days, because we seem to be reliving the first days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and war drums are heard in the distance. As the stock market takes another dizzying dive, and the ghosts of FDR, Hoover [.pdf], and – yes – Hitler return to haunt us, reproach us, taunt us, the madness that overtook Nietzsche isn't hard to understand. To continually make the same mistakes, to stumble over the same ruts in the road, to repeat mindlessly and without the least bit of irony or self-mockery the dusted-off slogans of yesteryear, all to the same tragic and bloody effect – what kind of a nightmare universe are we living in?

Once again, the delicate structure of human economy shudders, and falls, as the death of a system that has made us the wealthiest nation on earth is loudly proclaimed. Capitalism is dead – long live … what?

[...]

Digg here: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Back_to_the_Future_24