Our narrow minds make us believe that we live in strange days. And we are, but not particularly stranger than ever before. With every step we take, we forget the third or praise the ground it had just stepped on. Our world might be destroyed by climate change or nuclear war, but people have lived for thousands of years in worlds no larger than the six houses around them or the small city they inhabited in fear of instant destruction. The theatre we live in now might be as large as the whole world and the angst real, but don’t pretend it’s new.

I don’t have many good reasons for my aversion to this kind of doom-and-gloom. We will always live among nay-sayers and deniers, and the idea of progress is a challenge for many, but don’t forget that these people are also happy to have clean water to drink and to visit a dentist when they have a toothache. Progress does not care what we think; it will move forward, and no one is innocent in this game of who is to blame.

Don’t forget that behind all the nonsense we believe in and are willing to die for are people who bleed when they get cut, mourn their loved ones, and even fall in love for the first time, just like we do, even when these feelings are hidden behind shame and fear. You know for yourself what is hidden inside, we are all afraid to look in the mirror, to look deep in the reflections of our own eyes.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Also Sprach Zarathustra

Of the Thousand and One Goals

Zarathustra has seen many lands and many peoples: thus he has discovered the good and evil of many peoples. Zarathustra has found no greater power on earth than good and evil.
No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates.
Much that seemed good to one people seemed shame and disgrace to another: thus I found. I found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honours.
One neighbour never understood another: his soul was always amazed at his neighbour’s madness and wickedness.
A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power.
What it accounts hard it calls praiseworthy; what it accounts indispensable and hard it calls good; and that which relieves the greatest need, the rare, the hardest of all – it glorifies as holy.
Whatever causes it to rule and conquer and glitter, to the dread and envy of its neighbour, that it accounts the sublimest, the paramount, the evaluation and the meaning of all things.
Truly, my brother, if you only knew a people’s need and land and sky and neighbour, you could surely divine the law of its overcomings, and why it is upon this ladder that it mounts towards its hope.
‘You should always be the first and outrival all others: your jealous soul should love no one, except your friend’ – this precept made the soul of a Greek tremble: in following it he followed his path to greatness.
‘To speak the truth and to know well how to handle bow and arrow’ – this seemed both estimable and hard to that people from whom! got my name – a name which is both estimable and hard to me. 10
‘To honour father and mother and to do their will even from the roots of the soul’: another people hung this table of overcoming over itself and became mighty and eternal with it.
‘To practise loyalty and for the sake of loyalty to risk honour and blood even in evil and dangerous causes’: another people mastered itself with such teaching, and thus mastering itself it became pregnant and heavy with great hopes.
Truly, men have given themselves all their good and evil. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven.
Man first implanted values into things to maintain himself – he created the meaning of things, a human meaning! Therefore he calls himself: ‘Man’, that is: the evaluator.
Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creative men! Valuating is itself the value and jewel of all valued things.
Only through evaluation is there value: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creative men!
A change in values – that means a change in the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.
Peoples were the creators at first; only later were individuals creators. Indeed, the individual himself is still the latest creation.
Once the peoples hung a table of values over themselves. The love that wants to rule and the love that wants to obey created together such tables as these.
Joy in the herd is older than joy in the Ego: and as long as the good conscience is called herd, only the bad conscience says: I.
Truly, the cunning, loveless Ego, that seeks its advantage in the advantage of many – that is not the origin of the herd, but the herd’s destruction.
It has always been creators and loving men who created good and evil. Fire of love and fire of anger glow in the names of all virtues.
Zarathustra has seen many lands and many peoples: Zarathustra has found no greater power on earth than the works of these loving men: these works are named ‘good’ and’ evil’.
Truly, the power of this praising and blaming is a monster. Tell me, who will subdue it for me, brothers? Tell me, who will fasten fetters upon the thousand necks of this beast?
Hitherto there have been a thousand goals, for there have been a thousand peoples. Only fetters are still lacking for these thousand necks, the one goal is still lacking.
Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking – humanity itself?