Feelin a Little Fred

Fall must be on the way because I'm starting to dig into existentialism again. It gets as regular as the leaves turning with me. The pause that finally comes with the break in the weather allows a pullback and some meta inspection. The only possible explanation for digging into Nietzsche in early September is that I'm trying to will a change in the weather.

Anymore I'm finding a bit of fascination with the concept of the Ubermensch. The whole idea got hijacked by Adolf and twisted around by a bazillion amateur thinkers thereafter. Fred wanted humanity to redefine itself upward outside the constricts of the church and without resorting to nihilism. The industrial revolution, and the resulting shrinking of the world that occurred with the telegraph/telephone and steam engine, drove a lot of people out of eons of spiritual comfort zones and into a low grade mania. Fred saw where this was heading, nihilism and war, and tried to call a flag on the play. He called the first 50 years of Europe's 20^th century from the cheap seats. But he was just a philosopher, and a dense one at that. They paid as much attention to philosophers then as they do now.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Not sure, but I think all of this is my own personal flight from idiocy. A little too much time among my fellow man, and a viewing or two of Idiocracy, and I start digging into the deep thinkers so I can tell myself I'm not like “them”. Athena and I have a rhetorical question we've been asking each other for years: What's the prize for being smart? Okay, maybe her and I aren't that smart, but there's some blatant self-awareness at work. What's the reward? Anymore I see some virtue in being a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. The further you seem to get from vice, habit, routine, and entertainment the more intractably complex things appear. Fred could have used a beer and some Cartoon Network. Might not have thunk himself to death. (Or visited the hooker that gave him the clap that eventually killed him. In the context of that I always thought it would have been deliciously ironic to put All to Human on his gravestone.) Taking a bit of my own advice I think I'll crack a Sam & see if Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is on.

Ares