Nietzsche might have been the first self-proclaimed nihilist, but what he realized was always already true, as in it applied like a natural law does. Sartre, for one among many, seems to have misunderstood a key part of this nihilistic realization. In Repulsion the narrating character looks at a tree and shakes his head at the thought that will to power would be the driving motivation of things. No, it isn’t. This realization is nihilistic (or existentialist, if you will), not will to power. Nor is the Hegelian dynamic of master and slave the only dynamic out there. Power is a narrative. It is a mode of organisation, and as such, authoritative and hierarchical.
It centers around the meaning giving dictator, that acts with impunity and is beyond all criticism, like God whose existence surrounds all being with its absolute meaning giving context and whose representative the divine ruler is. Of course, plainly, this means that reality must be according to the divine will. But to bend everyone and everything under your will is an impossible task. Such power doesn’t exist, although it is presumed with the omnipotent divine author of things by the grace of whom the ruler rules. Power is a myth, a narrative.
This is why the prevailing narrative must support the institutions of power. Real functioning democracy would be antithetic to this kind of power in stead of being the excuse those in power use. And here is the problem. It doesn’t matter that power is a myth, and as such by far not the only truth, what matters is that people respect those who assume it. And it is logical to respect those who assume power, not because their myth is real, but because those that assume such myths are dangerous psycopaths and ruthless megalomaniacs. You kinda want to keep a distance even if you were a nihilist, because sanity might be relative, but violence is violence.
To worship those who assume power is an act of submission, which, in the world of many animals, is key to survival since there is no divine interventions to keep the physically powerful adults at check: the young and defenseless must learn to submit. The original balance of horror did exist, the natural landscape of fear, and still does. Hegel was at awe when standing next to power. Diogenes the dog told Alexander the great to move away as the emperor was blocking the sun. Alexander was checked, like the rich man who suddenly feels poor when confronted with someone who wants nothing from him and doesn’t value what he values. The indolence of such heresy: who dares not to believe in money?
You can vote, you can express your values, but the money can buy armies of lobbyists and built institutional fortifications that enforce the laws that consolidate money and abstract ownership. Money overrides the qualitative human values with quantitative figures as if numbers, like words, weren’t also abstract symbols. Their origin is in the cave paintings our ancestors made. We can’t know what meaning was given to them. Any meaning we assign to them is ours. What is the value of a human life? If you were given a billion would you shoot this person with a bag around his/her head?
What if the next day the markets crashed and the billion could only afford you a loaf of bread? Such extreme devaluation is known to history. When faith is lost, power vanishes. Nikolai the Czar knew this, as did the last king of France. Power is a gamble. The mighty also sometimes lose faith. Wolves sometimes cannibalize overly agressive and dominant alphas. Homo homini lupu est. When you actively manipulate the masses or the market, you carry the responsibility even if your ownership to the stocks that you profiteer through made you invisible like the hand that was supposed to guide the markets for greater good.
When the markets crash on the last frenzied gamble and the angered and displaced masses tear the whole circus down there is real power in real numbers: a body equals a body, dead and alive. The counter revolution of those who wish to restore their wealth and power will have to be aimed at eliminating the radicalized however numerous. Cold numbers, cold logic. Will to make power real. But that is also why class war is real. And it is not those who refuse to be oppressed and eliminated that are responsible for the conflict. It is a necessity to them. Those who assume power assume the inequality that creates the dynamic of rebellion.
Those who assume power wage class war, not the oppressed when they are pressed to resist. The powerful are the pessimists that assume the worst from people. Sometimes people are lead like lambs to the slaughter and they willingly go hoping for mercy. The very same thing the macchiavellian psychopaths consider a weakness. But that is because they assumed also the double or nothing bet, the sadistic dynamic, the law of the jungle and acted on it. They might have assumed right, that there will be no divine intervention to stop them, but that doesn’t mean that the displaced masses all go quietly into the brutal night in the shadow of the tyrant however virtuous and noble submission is framed as.
The right side of history is the side that assumes equality, not the side that assumes power, even if it is two monsters we are talking about. Mutual respect is a necessity between the really tough who understand to fear each other. Sociopaths risk everything without a blink. Desperate sociopaths clinging to their imaginary power while clutching the controls of weapons of mass destruction are an existential threat to all of humanity, thus we really should be more ferocious when we demand the kind of equality that is antithetic to arbitrary power. They are the sick ones made paranoid by their faith in their own greatness. Not us that demand justice.
Rebellion is justified when it demands justice and equality. It is self emancipation through mutual agreement to end oppression. Imperialism, the logic of domination, is the opposite of this. And the catch 22 is that will to power does not emancipate you, it enslaves you. You are not free from domination when you dominate. You dominate out of fear of domination. And when you assume power, you assume responsibility, even if the forces you control allowed you to act with impunity. True freedom is not freedoom from responsibility, it is absolute responsibility.
You can decide for yourself which is more noble, if something truly is noble, the tyrant free to pass arbitrary judgement hiding behind the institutions of power, or the rebel, who assumes responsibility of life and death to resists violent oppression, who resists to survive together with the ragged masses however desperate. Sartre may have misunderstood Nietzsche, but he understood this dynamic: the displaced and brutalized become radical and will come to tear down the gilded palaces built out of their exploitation. The following excerpt is from his foreword to Franz Fanon’s The Wrecthed of the Earth:
”Thus the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you will have to fight, or rot in concentration camps. This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters; never fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge. Then, perhaps, when your back is to the wall, you will let loose at last that new violence which is raised up in you by old, oft-repeated crimes.”
In 1961 the battle was in Algeria, now it is in Palestine, it is in Kobane, Rojava, but mostly it is the poor who die in rich man’s wars, like Sartre wrote. Confused people volunteer to fight imperialist wars because they have been offered no other narrative than that old Fatherland and faith. The nation as a myth became a thing when God and King lost their power in the bourgeoise revolutions. It is a subject group narrative, a story that the imperialists use to separate peoples of the earth and make them fight in their armies.
Don’t be confused, war for profit is still war for power, even if international capital is arming both sides of the conflict. They need the wars to keep the racket running, that is, draining tax money from nation states to fund their industries. Otherwise the pyramid scheme would collapse and the record stock market highs would be revealed as the hot air they always were. Peace is in the interests of the overwhelming majority who are rapidly losing faith in the excuses the parasitic and the pompous have misused to the point of nonsense.
The hypocrisy is
blatant as the capitalist value system stands naked: all that matters is
that people don’t lose their faith in money and find each other in
stead. Autonomous collaboration of workers internationally would make
the capitalist class obsolete overnight as the additional value the
capitalists extract from all production was never exactly real. It went
like this, the early emperors minted coins to pay for their armies, and
the people needed the coins to pay taxes, thus everyone was enlisted in
supplying the military. The bourgeoise learned to use the money thus
invented to circumvent old power hierarchies: the origin of power
shifted from God to money, from the King to the capitalists.
Now
we have more abstract derivative wealth/debt than there is money in
circulation, fortunes bigger than ever in history and money created out
of thin air. Well, the emperor’s coins were only valuable because of
FIAT, the arbitray degree of the emperor: thus I have spoken, thus shall
it be. As a nihilist I take such degrees with more than just a pinch of
salt, I take it with the pint of black bile I have to reswallow every
time I am submitted to the propaganda the powerful use their money on to
maintain the status quo. Torch carries of old Rome, my ass, I say, burn
their palaces, and win back your integrity.
