Konchog1 wrote:Perhaps some illuminating quotations:
“Anything which is a living and not a dying body will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is the will to power. 'Exploitation' belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, s.259
“To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be 'unjust,' since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character. One must indeed grant something even more unpalatable: that, from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general meaning that every will must consider every other will its equal—would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 2:11
"I don't like the current world order. Therefore, the current world order is evil." What is this if not selfish?
4ur Nietzsche quotes
I get the point you're trying to make - it irritates me that Buddhism in the west seems to attract leftwing extremism.
Nietzsche was
also pointing out that much of what is normally thought of as evil is actually beneficial -in the medium term- to its individual agents, much as it may harm others. Since Uncle Fred's day, civilisation as a means of organising human creativity has often appeared to make such 'necessary evils' unnecessary, but with the decline of the USSR (despite its own
unnecessary evil) came the decline of the idea of the 'mixed economy' in the west, leading (particularly via the resulting de-regulation of financial markets) to the mess we're now in. Meanwhile, the rise of 'sweatshop Asia' (since China's rulers successfully decided to replicate the west's Industrial Revolution with the aid of ready-made foreign buyers) triggered the return of the 'slave labour' conditions that western societies had long since put behind them. I don't even mean to sound 'centre-left' here, as the conditions that prevailed in the west between the collapse of the Third Reich and the collapse of the Soviet empire -e.g. jobs in all conceivable fields that barely even selected applicants- were surely fit only for children rather than adults. {It was also only a matter of time before having a 'safety net'
for able-bodied adults of working age turned in many cases -such as in the UK's 'Chav culture'- into having a 'comfort blanket' or even a 'steady basic income', via its corrosive effects on values like self-reliance.} So, with the world and humans as they are, relative happiness is built on the use of some people by other people, and even when civilisation rises above this to a more-level 'playing field', its roots lie either in a murkier past or in a murkier present elsewhere (and that's before anyone starts on meat
).
Nonetheless, your quotes sit uneasily with Buddhism -albeit not (I'm sure) with actual enlightenment- as they support a view that actions which affect others negatively -not actions that affect them positively- bring 'positive' results for an individual's life, and -more to the point- as they're actually informed by some limited understanding of Buddhism. Nietzsche became aware of Buddhism via Schopenhauer, who had popularised a concept of it in terms that directly led Nietzsche to see it (ultimately) as just another 'secret path to nothingness'. Being the consummate intellectual/artist/teenager that he clearly was, Nietzsche seems to have aimed to prove his forebears -particularly Schopenhauer- misguided despite lacking the nous to look beyond the paradigms they'd operated within. It would be more interesting, then, to discuss how a "Schopenhauerian" understanding of Buddhism (which one might call "leftwing extremist meets reality") is faulty, or maybe whether it can only be applied to the first two noble truths rather than all of the teachings.
If what we'd be best off 'saved' or 'liberated' from is the idea of self, what does that leave? It's hard to be consoled with the idea that all the best that anyone can get from samsara has already been experienced in past lives - especially when there's no memories. Maybe that's why it's advised (I can't remember where) to approach the dharma after first having experienced all possible peaks of fulfilment in
this life and then seen its
dukkha nature - like the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes or (better) the Buddha himself. I don't believe it's
all just 'useless samsara', and although I'm guessing the dividing line becomes clearer with realisation, there seem to be a lot of elements underpinning our broader western understanding of human life -e.g. vigour, focus, or intuitive understanding- that are not only self-evidently positive in themselves but which are also encouraged in the Buddhist teachings. On the other hand, if every conceivable aspect of 'life itself' is inevitably nothing but suffering and/or its own destruction (except for the fittest of the fit - who themselves inevitably become 'unfit' in old age and death) then there's no conceivable path to follow.