Rick Roderick on Nietzsche and the Will to Power [full length]

I'd like to wrap up my remarks about self creation self invention and the challenge of the eternal recurrence by saying that that we need to remember that this has to do that this has to do with what I mentioned later in the lecture the love of fight loving the place you found yourself in history and sometimes that's a difficult thing to do and for me that's a quite personal remark that has to do with my own self invention is to try to love the place I've found myself in history like me other people now is I thought I found that difficult Nietzsche on the other hand thought it might be difficult but it was a challenge that we should attempt to meet in this next set of remarks I'd like to address the will to power and of course that gives me a chance to address something that I probably should have talked about in the opening lecture because in a set of lectures on Nietzsche that in which we want to reach an audience a very wide audience we need to dispel some of the myths about Nietzsche's text and concerning Nietzsche and one of the most prevalent and certainly it's a widespread myth you can you can find it in many places is the myth of the connected leg I want to first say for myth and then I want to argue that the danger and risk in Nietzsche's text it because I use myth in a strong sense that allows it to be possible I want to discuss for just a moment the relation of Nietzsche's work to fascism and the reason I want to do that is because the first sort of American knives reception of Nietzsche involved the use of Nietzsche's text for propaganda purposes by various National Socialist Party hacks unfortunately it belongs to the nature of propaganda even by the good guys who do counter propaganda as if we knew who good guys or after all the events that occur this isn't this isn't going to turn out to be a you know a defense of the fascists or anything it's not it I hope it doesn't have to be a defense of any parties I wish them all equal up in the words of Nietzsche whatever is shaky should be pushed over something is shaky on the shaky foundation his advice is to push it over it's not on a shaky foundation then when you push it'll stay there to be okay but on a shaky foundation push it over in any case the counter-propaganda are also involved Nietzsche and the British in their efforts to combat Nazi propaganda also participated in just like the Nazis were valorizing certain remarks of Nietzsche's then the British were at the same time demonizing those remarks and that couldn't help but affect the reception of his work in England and since in the United States is I may have already remarked we're so in love with British intellectuals we know they couldn't be wrong about anything just because of their damn accent you use that accent and American academics begin to swoon you know they go into into you know almost orgasmic reactions to what's being said we knew that this British reception of Meacham must mean that that he's you know like the philosopher of fascism well there are there are elements in Nietzsche's texts that open up on to the risk of a hideous new project in which against a technological world weary and try to reinvigorate it through blood steel and a new human being the famous over man which I will discuss when I discuss the text of Zarathustra that such a sort of clever interpretation could then be used for propaganda purposes is clear it was clearly it could be used that way I don't think to be fair to the text of nature that this use is one that can in any sense be authorized under older fairer standards of interpretation however I should say that those are the very standards Nietzsche himself attacked older fare standards interpretation but by those hermeneutic standards interpretation the older fairer ones it would be fair to point out that Nietzsche always viewed himself is a good European rather than a good German he skied he just skipped he just blade turns upon tons of abuse upon those narrow nationalists who were good Germans and always talked about the Teutonic forests once Nietzsche said well back to the forest with them then yes and they're just boring the hell out of me I hope they go live in the forest they're that sort of the way I feel about a lot of the rhetoric in the United States on the right today is oh it's so good we'll just go live in the big go from coast to coast and banger to shining Maine or whatever the hell you want to do but I don't need just scorned this this German nationalism it's hard to imagine that someone so sensitive that the event that finally as it were tripped Nietzsche off into madness another topic that we'll talk about in the lectures that remind the event that finally tripped him into madness was someone beating a horse with a whip someone that sensitive was that sensitive a nature in a certain way it's hard to imagine would have done well had he lived long enough as a great propagandist for that gang of petty bushwa thugs that took over Germany and became the Nazi Party so I think that that was a dangerous misunderstanding of the text of Nietzsche however and this is the admission that I think is necessary to show the risk of the text however once you've introduced processes of radical self creation and redirection left them wide open and then argued for the strongest possible misinterpretations you know the ones that are the most creative interesting and new clearly you've opened yourself up to the possibilities of violence death madness and many other things as well well that's the admission on the one hand not that it needs to be admitted I mean we live in the 20th century one of the most barbaric perhaps the most barbaric century in the history of the world I mean if there was a central fact to our century it would be murder killing of people by their people so to take before the bar this one rather literate cosmopolitan quiet little man who wrote these rather exciting texts as some causative factor in that much larger process I think is is overkill of a very high order in any case his text does open on to the danger of fascism but as I said that for me is not an objection because dangerous and insane risks are taken in his text in other directions as well and that many texts have risks many interesting texts many interesting bodies of work have risks and many uses the the standard though Americanized pop line that Nietzsche was for the German Superman in blond beast is just simple-minded and so that's not a criticism is just that doesn't mean it's dark lines and his work that are like that but it's simple-minded you and that should be enough to move slightly past that it's a simple-minded way to look at nature far too simple-minded and I and that's not as I say to get out of the the trap that Nietzsche's text is full of risk however an odd thing has happened in the return of Nietzsche in our own time is that while at one time he was that used for ideological purposes in the National Socialists in the movement of fascism according to bloom and other paleo conservatives of the current period the return of Nietzsche in the 60s and then what I might call his we return in the 80s and 90s has been scandalously and artistic left-wing Nietzsche so obviously this is a text that can produce many differential political effects because the nietzsche denounced by Blum is the person who argues for strong multiple interpretations for recreating you know cannons and destroying older canons of knowledge the Nietzsche's that said that if things are shaky pushed them over that Nietzsche so you know it's hard it's hard if one wants to play simple moral blame upon a body of text to go well Nietzsche was responsible for fascism and damn it now he's responsible for its opposite number anarchism why wasn't he just a damn good liberal like judge Stuart Mill well he thought mill was a blockhead you know I mean why wasn't he just a middle-of-the-road ER I mean you know that's politics that seems to dominate the current period of middle-of-the-road or mainstream well to quote my friend Hightower from Texas there's nothing in the middle of the road where I come from except yellow lines and squashed armadillos and so I'm glad that Nietzsche's text isn't in the middle of the road and it does allow for multiple political uses and some of those I want to talk about now in terms of the will to power and I'm going to have to return to in order to do that to my discussions of genealogies before I do I want to leave one more note on Jesse Jackson in the lecture I'm not his campaign manager it's just an interesting example but uh I have been asked you know well if he has you know this real courage of self creation why doesn't he like run for a real job like mayor that would show real courage well my view of that and then I don't know if it was me choose and I don't care my view of that is it doesn't take real courage to be a mayor a governor or senator a president real courage to be the head of a bureaucracy real courage to be the president of IBM but it does take real courage as you know if you live in the Washington DC area to sleep under the bridges at night takes a lot more courage so I'm not sure that running for mayor something that we should particularly valorize as an act of courage I mean in a certain way it takes far more courage to be a pimp than a politician even though in many other respects the jobs are similar and now enough of that for now we'll return to that layer the will to power well first let me say that the will to power is the name of a text by uh Nietzsche's I shouldn't say by Nietzsche because the will to power was pieced together in a way that makes us suspect the text itself by his sister and I've already you know denounced his sister somewhat for dressing him up for marrying one of these good Germans and for the uses she made of her brothers persona after he lost his mind well she was one of the editors that helped compile these fragments the will to power since then however Kaufman and others have worked upon this compilation but by now it's almost useless to go back and pretend there's no such text because as in the case of a much shorter text namely the fragment I discussed which was I have forgotten my umbrella which has now become a text of Nietzsche's by through this radical process of interpretation so now to is the will to power a much larger more complex text become a text of each's even though he never compiled it in that way or put it together in that way the will to power is a in fact I'm not sorry that it did because the will to power contains a a host of suggestive fascinating and interesting views among which is Nietzsche's famous view of power that I will be discussing it's impossible to discuss it however without connecting it in some way to the genealogy that the process of genealogy that we discussed when we talked the genealogy of morals because one of the things that genealogy was supposed to do is to show us that as it were what shapes discursive practices and actual human practices are certain relations of power which create the conditions for the possibility of certain sentences being written and certain practices being carried out then calls for an account of what those relations of power are like and in the will to power Nietzsche gives us an account of force as it were our power that is very interesting for Nietzsche power won't be the simple power of domination of one self over another and the reason it can't be that linear self over another self kind of power is because as you may have guessed already for Nietzsche as for Hume in a certain way there is no essential self there are only as it were a kind of multitude of personas that when a life as well live will have the coherence of a character in fact there's not what we say about someone we know whose rather advanced in years and we want to valorize them we say God Oh Bob Aunt Sue was really a character when you say that you've said something Nietzschean about them they've put together those various cells in a way that makes them really a character and that's not a bad thing to say really the reason that these that for niche a power can't be simply the power of one person over another can't be that simple is because selves aren't that simple and also because power is not just as it were horizontally applied in models that we might think of like the Marxist theory of exploitation or other theories of power high power is it just applied as it were across the horizon of the social body by that I mean but that rather wild phrase I mean it's not as though power is applied merely to the external manifestations that break the rule of the current existing order power is also applied that were vertically across the intensity and in within the subjectivity z' of people one way of putting this is that in some sense we internalize relations of power within ourselves that allow many of the external relations to function now to give a West Texas example of that is that each one of us has to have a little cop inside us little tiny policeman inside that keeps us from stealing because there aren't enough cops on the outside to keep us from doing it and yet there are many things we want that we don't have the money for and under conditions where we carry out our will and vital valorize ourselves we might otherwise take them I am given the rate at which people who steal things are caught which means much less frequently then you'll be caught it weren't trying to take a long break kind of makes it rational to want to steal certain things easier to do then get by with than getting by with laying off work for a while under those conditions it becomes clear that power also is in a sense an intensity within something that you bring against yourself and a might against your own self project in a way that's been characterized by certain French theorists as micro logical power or sets and effects of power rather than macro logical power so if I talk to you about the police or the state or the even in Marxist sense of the power of the marketplace these are macro logical views of power and Nietzsche provides us with a micro logical view and and that micro logical view has to do with tiny inter seas of overlapping effects very difficult to characterize very subtle effects of power almost unnoticeable in fact they sometimes pass not for power at all this is what a genealogical analysis is supposed to show sometimes they don't pass for relations of power at all but rather for things like a good conscience clear mind or fair rule or even fairness itself those discourses as self-evident as they may seem to us today are also structured by power and I think that to make Nietzsche's analysis of power come alive for us now rather than a sort of long account of it I'll give a little bit more of the sort of theoretical complexity of it then I'll give a real example to give it real bite okay so let me give a little more of the theoretical version of it for Nietzsche power is not is always in some sense relational it's not as no power is a thing that we can find in the world but it is always a complex relational set of intervening and interacting effects it's not always the best question to ask what are the causes in some cases it might even be although it sounds oxymoronic it might be best to say quasi metaphorically or maybe metaphorically that that power sometimes gives off effects where we have in what is amounts to an absent cause those what the analysis really should look at are the effects and Brackett out what might what might otherwise in a normal analysis be called da cause instead these multiple effects these relational effects and to use some more terminology which isn't French it's modern American lit crit terminology these overlapping economies of power of influence of persuasion of control these micro logical ones are not subject to as I say two simple linear analysis in any one of the various modes that we might be used to it analyses of us in particular ordinary analyses of political power these can I let me see if I can cash this in with what I think is a very interesting example and at least I hope it's a example and it should lead to the next thing I want to discuss which is Nietzsche's view of history I'm going now to refer to Mikkel fuko's brilliant work discipline and punish and if you haven't read it please read it because it is a strange artifact and it would not be possible without the influence of Nietzsche and to discuss fuko's discipline and punish will have us enter the terrain of the politics of reading Nietzsche which I want to get onto now which is I said might be a banal topic but it's one I enjoy so what the hell I'm going to talk about itself but Mikkel Foucault is a someone who's made great and systematic use of parts of Nietzsche the genealogical method and Nietzsche's sensitivity to these mycological relations of power now for me the best work by Foucault as I said is discipline and punish and in that book what Foucault is interested in is to do a genealogy of the forms of punishment and how they changed if they did change and in what ways they changed between this period I have characterized as futile to this period that I have characterized as modern so Foucault starts this book with older forms of discipline and punishment in fact the first section is on the spectacle of the scaffold and it begins with as Gloria description as one could wish of an execution in France huge audience bring out this guy I'm just going to gloss it don't read all that stuff you turn this damn thing into a horror movie anyway you have this huge audience for this execution you bring out the guy he's drawn quartered molten lad poured into here horses pull on him the cry out is in an uproar scream and it's tortured by a pull pull pull finally they dragged him up and a prelate of the church comes up the man still can speak and he confesses that stun wrong and courageously states that now he's paying his price his honor to God and then they burn him you know after using sulfur and so on well you read this section in Foucault and you work oil in horror from those old feudal relations and how barbaric they were and Foucault does his best to make it come alive for you the conditions of possibility for those practices the arbitrary rule of kings you know the necessity to give the crowded spectacles its festivals of atonement it's important that the criminal they are you know atone in a rather spectacular public way for his crime well toward the end of this long and rather barbaric chapter and feudalism which of our own this sort of feudal setting Foucault begins to mention how the spectacle of the scaffold begins to die away under a rather strange condition of reversal I hope this it will make Nietzsche's genealogical idea clearer too if I use the Foucault example the spectacle of the scaffold begins to die away and one of the reasons that Foucault suggests for this is that who turns out to be the hero of the spectacle the legislator or Prince who condemned the man the prelate who forgave him or the suffering wounded courageous body of the victim imagine the crowds you know who they will eventually begin to pull for as it were well the insinuation by Foucault is this form of exercising power across the social body begins to undermine itself through a strange reversal for the victim being slaughtered becomes as it were the center the imparted focal point of the ceremony and begins to win the sympathy of the crowd and of course that's not the idea of discipline and punishing in that period or in this one hardly the idea right for the punished party to be the star of the show now you may say well we've gone back to that in a way because we do all there's one sure way to get a mini-series and that's to be a serial killer that's true under conditions that I will describe before the end of this lecture as postmodern but right now we're going from feudal to modern under postmodern condition things have grown so bizarre that I'm not sure how am i I will use Nietzsche to help analyze them but in any case now I want to go from this futile spectacle of the scaffold to moderate to the modern methods of discipline and punish the heart of evoked in us by what Foucault does there is the horror simply at a past form of life in the way they punish people now of course what happens after that are there these great prison reforms in the 18th and 19th century utilitarians for example like Bentham were very involved in prison reform and in ending this scaffold business in these public spectacles no they wanted clean I mean they had programs like bushes clean new prisons that were sort of humane but enough of them so Bentham and in Foucault makes brilliant use of this Bentham the great utilitarian interestingly enough also came up with a great architectural design called the panopticon and it was a building where from the sort of top of the building I wish I had a drawing of it here for you but from the top of the building you can kind of see everything that goes on down through it and each one of the cells facing in on them where the prisoners are have the peculiar characteristic that you're isolated so that you can see the other people but as the guards walk through in surveillance they can see you quite easily and this was very important for the device itself this is the surveillance aspect of modern power and this is quite micro logical to give you an ordinary example of how modern power works in that way you may be a perfectly honest citizen a straightforward person but when you walk into a department store frequently you're being filmed and watched and it's the ordinary so micro logical so beneath the surface of your consciousness and everyday effects that you don't think about it but you're being filmed and watched and surveilled as you walk through the mall as you walk through a department store or as you drive through the city these sort of omnipresent helicopter it is not a paranoid delusion you see them all the time it's just that you forget because of their ubiquity the powers like anything ubiquitously running here and there it becomes easy to forget what structures our own power becomes easy to remember about the past how barbaric it was it sort of distance ourselves from it well anyway Bentham's panopticon was as Foucault argues a principle and not merely a building the general principle of surveillance and it's been crucially important for the shift to new forms of discipline and new forms of punishment Bentham brilliantly shows that it's no mere building by arguing oh by the way this same design for this panopticon building would be absolutely appropriate for schools work houses and many other socially utilizable socially utilitarian benefit I mean schools could be built this way right so that all the students are working and you can see them and they can't see you easily and until the principle can be at the top and looking down upon the thing and Bentham's thought what a wonderful device this panopticon is sort of one way visual presentation of all the surveilled people again to return to my example you never get to see the face do you of the person behind the one-way glass in Macy's he's doing the filming of you as you walk up and down the aisle I don't even notice this anymore right you even know this is how it shouldn't be outrageous you know to sort this earlier generation of Americans what the hell are you doing filming me I don't steal I'm honest you know god-fearing taxpaying American I don't want to be on your damn film surveilled watch filed numbered I don't want that but the ubiquity of this kind of surveillance is just obvious also you know in what we've now found out that the telephone is quite a strange instrument to pick up since god knows who's listening and recording what you're saying and now the possibility for multiple interpretations reinstitute sit self at a much higher level because you may in fact say on the phone I have forgotten my umbrella it might click off some strange computer by some strange government agency saying ah this person is one of those weird interpreters of nature and you may only be telling your Aunt Susan that you forgot your umbrella and that you're already been a huge Bank of information pre interpreted in some basement in the city where they are going over it providing analyses companies and agencies provide the analyses power mycological like this very well maybe beneath the level of everyday life by that I mean in everyday life we may just walk past it I mean I know I know I do for sure the department store I don't well sometimes I stop and wave at the little guy and sometimes when I hear a click on the phone I stop and go oh I'm sorry you have this job of listening to all these boring you have ever commiserated with a surveyor it's going to I'm so sorry you don't have anything to do but listening open my mail and listen to all phone calls if you ever get lonely please call them let's talk this is a nice strategy to adopt but here the power of fuko's argument is supposed to be to show that what has happened is not that we've gone from one thing that appears to us to our sensitive liberal utilitarian instincts as barbaric to something less barbaric but to a new mode of discipline and punishment and surveillance which is itself an incredible effect of the expansion of power not of its contraction across many areas of life across many areas of life the spent of the sort of spectacle of the scaffold is over but we still execute people we just do it behind wall after wall of secrecy wall after wall of secrecy they're still executed but it happens in a space where we in principle can't look now I know that people have run for they the governor of Texas and argued that we should put these things on TV you know hell if we're going to execute them show it on TV and you know it didn't work out as an idea and he lost the election I think if he had sold it to the network's first and then tried it is a political idea he would have had something but he didn't try that well the serious point being made by Foucault is not that that old barbaric power of the past has been broken and liberal democracy is one everywhere no it's that power has shifted there is expanded in its intensity and precisely by becoming even more hidden mycological every day in a certain way sort of seeping in every day it has become as it were even more sort of totalizing territorial izing if you like more and more of our lives in subtle but profound ways so I guess that I wanted to use that example in particular because now we begin to wonder about even fuko's analysis if it isn't a bit old-fashioned and we're not in yet another space because Foucault is still to my mind at least somewhere on the borderline between a modern account of power and one that I would characterize as postmodern or after the modern and it's going to be difficult for me to characterize that in spite of the title of these lectures which is Nietzsche in the postmodern condition because no one yet knows what the postmodern condition is because it is not a condition we're in yet it is a trajectory as Nietzsche said of the death of God it is perhaps an event on its way I wanted to use Foucault eggs are the example Foucault however to try to show you what genealogy is do how they reverse our perception so in the case of the feudal period they show us through a versal that occurs on the scaffold when all of a sudden the person you're tearing apart becomes the hero and if that's not surprising through you know when you see through their courage and stamina they become the hero of that spectacle the spectacle begins to disappear we don't make I can't be the hero well similarly the stories we tell ourselves about our institutions are sort of a noun our institutions under a sort of modern liberal democratic societies democratic society the stories we tell ourselves is that they are based on legitimacy consensus and so on and fuko's book warns us that that may be the discourse within which we discuss them but what makes that discourse possible are the micro logical powers of discipline punishment and surveillance that undergird that liberal discourse and again like as in the case where Nietzsche quotes st. Thomas one could hardly quote a better source than Bentham who was a social engineer or a farmer in the tradition of you know many others we've encountered since and this panopticon device to show that a reversed look at this discourse of democracy and so on shows that beneath it are these micro logical effects of power and I would like to say about them that they are differential and highly complex the and I don't know if the Foucault example is enough one might have to do more still to make this come alive let me see if I can try another way to do this well let's take for example a situation where it seems as though the only force that's being recognized is the force of the better argument namely a university setting that's what I'm familiar with so we'll I'll take that as an example argument within that setting seems to proceed free of power knowledge seems to be produced in a way that is interest free that's the ideal of research in a way interest free knowledge knowledge free of the effects of power if Nietzsche is right about power wherever there is knowledge it will be an effective power that will not mean it's not knowledge folks in other words well understanding that knowledge is an effect of certain power won't mean that it isn't what is really knowledge yes it will be but it will be to see as it were the other side will be a reversal it will be to see that that knowledge effect is itself an effect of certain relations of power down the case of the university the institutional powers are quite subtle in other words it's very rare that especially a university and this is more common in high school where you can simply take on release students and throw them out into the street the University you don't get that opportunity quite so often that thrilling opportunity to just take the student you don't like they get the hell out of here don't come but there are other ways and then they seem childish but sometimes power is childish another ways to discipline one of my favorites is grading and it starts very early in our lives our first system is highly complex and struck if you want an account of structuralism this is an interesting one in kindergarten the way we sort of discipline our kids they do that they do their rows and it's really read and they stay in the lines they get a happy face if he gets a little out of the lines they just give us sort of straight face they really just draw all over the thing and chaotic Nietzschean wildness they get a sad face you know and they don't turn in the work at all they don't get a face no face and I noticed that as you go out there throughout school that this same topography of of discipline continues in elite universities we still go I and the fact that we've substituted a letter for that happy face doesn't mean the message is different in others they've been socio those socialization power is already instructed in that that is a happy face and you get an eye and you see a happy baby and guess what you get see and if you forgot --sykes in an elite University if you flunked somebody you won't see their face you may get a letter from their attorney but you won't see their face my point here is that the structural disciplinary way that that's done believe me if you're grading in the humanities the difference between a brilliant paper on Plato and one that's completely insane is not an easy distinction if you think it is you just you don't teach that I mean I missed it in math courses you know there we can let a sort of traditional view hold sway for a moment but when you're writing a paper on Plato for godsakes or Shakespeare or Proust it's hard to know the difference between a brilliant insight and a piece of garbled lunacy and this is exactly to return to my political moment this is exactly the problem we have when we listen to many of our current official leaders speaks so we don't know whether this is really a piece of powerful political rhetoric or a garbled line from a David Lynch film you know sometimes I expect to see one of the currently elected high executive officials just walk around going in the land I come from the Virgin CPD's own stuff like that weird David Lynch dialogue we don't know you know might even be an act of political genius for at least one person I have in mind here to do something like that free him of his image where they were in any case what I'm after here is a typography a very subtle power because it looks as though my power to give that grade is my power but what happens if I decide I'm not going to play that game anymore and I'm going to just give all my students eyes that complete the work and otherwise else I'm not going to do this gradation this typography anymore I can't I've tested that one empirically they want to be good no you have to have a spread now here's the interesting about power today they don't tell you what the spread is exactly because micro logically they're disappointed that you haven't been as it were already conditioned to know that so they're sort of disappointed in you that you didn't realize all along that you needed that spread just like if you open the Macy's that you happen to be the manager of it didn't get that camera installed your supervisors would go well I thought you knew we always use cameras you know you are a pretty nice fella but we always use them we don't want to interfere with our customers know but we always use these cameras it's for the good of the rest of the customers because if there's a lot of shoplifting the prices will go up of course that'll be an act of God no human will actually rise that's economics no humans do it axial because they're the only things left it probably are acts of a dying gods economic acts but anyway these forms of powers that nietzsche sets our sights on in the book the will to power shows shows power in quite a different light than normal political theory because these these are situations within which power and knowledge and principle are intermingled for example when I earlier said there was you know paradoxically and each argues is an Amaro origin to morality paradoxically there is a rational knowledge itself as its origins in relations of power which themselves in my view cannot be rationally defended that that is their origin does not mean that what they produce again to make this point again so you don't take a simple-minded mistake out of here that doesn't mean it isn't real knowledge the universities and and many other things research institutes at all produce real knowledge what we today call knowledge anyway I call it information I'll return to that later I don't want to call it knowledge Oracle information but the conditions under they would produce it are these subtle conditions of power grading is one example grading is just one example it's one of my favorites though because it's one of the times in life when you see what an incredible effect you can have by making a happy face you can make someone happy by just now someone's bound to say well of course you do because those grades depend upon what they do later in life and their jobs well that just feeds back into my earlier argument of course because the rest of your whole stinking life you're going to be looking from a happy face from someone you know eight years in the law firm and you're looking at all the old lawyers that forgot all the law they ever need 20 years ago and you're waiting for one of those s o WS or whatever to give you another happy well the challenge of Nietzsche is a sort of left Nietzsche that I want to evoke is to at least be aware of these intercedes of power at least be aware of them and to be willing to challenge their boundaries because it is not a pretty life to always be in search of a happy face and it is not for your own good for God's sakes remember when your father my father used to spank me and the first thing he would tell me is the same thing they tell me at school I'm going to do this for your own good and I always wanted to say well damn it why don't you spank yourself then because you could spare me the favor if it's for good do it to you I love you dad and if it's for good do it to yourself because we want you to have the good don't do it for my own good don't do me any favors here oh we don't think you'll work out with our firm it's for your own good oh thanks anyway but I'll sacrifice for you you know modern power presents itself as what I would like to call and I and I mean this especially where it's least obvious we know what modern power has looked like in the East Bloc and in the Soviet Union and it was no surprise to anyone they were totalitarian but I would like for us to recognize is that we are totalitarians as well the harbor but till we see it we won't have a chance to be really radically democratic ever I mean I mean it okay a little biblical scholarship here easy to find the moat your brothers are difficult to see the one in your own very difficult so this account of power reminds us that the totalitarian is not the other sometimes we meet the enemy and it's us

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 69,219

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Keywords: Friedrich Nietzsche, Full, Rick, Roderick, philosopher, philosophy, postmodern, condition

Id: ZI9asjQnTIM

Length: 46min 13sec (2773 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2012