Nietzsche71

I'm not your average opponent.

I don't like playing at any price. When I lead 4 or 5 points for me the game is over. Beauty will save the world, not speed.

Funny how people think about wooden pieces more than about their own lives.

Nietzsche, Friedrich:

1. Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of departure: it is an error to consider "social distress" or "physiological degeneration" or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most decent and compassionate age. Distress, whether of the soul, body, or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e., the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted.

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Nevertheless, in many places in Europe they may yet bring off occasional coups and attacks: there will be deep "rumblings" in the stomach of the next century, and the Paris commune, which has its apologists and advocates in Germany, too, was perhaps no more than a minor indigestion compared to what is coming. But there will always be too many who have possessions for socialism to signify more than an attack of sickness--and those who have possessions are of one mind on one article of faith: "one must possess something in order to be something." But this is the oldest and healthiest of all instincts: I should add, "one must want to have more than one has in order to become more." 

292.
Victory of democracy.— All political powers nowadays try to exploit the fear of socialism in order to strengthen themselves. But in the long run it is democracy alone that derives the advantage: for all parties are nowadays obliged to flatter the "people" and to bestow on it alleviations and liberties of every kind through which it will in the end become omnipotent. As socialism is a doctrine that the acquisition of property ought to be abolished, the people are as alienated from it as they could be: and once they have got the power of taxation into their hands through their great parliamentary majorities they will assail the capitalists, the merchants and the princes of the stock exchange ["occupy"] with a progressive tax and slowly create in fact a middle class which will be in a position to forget socialism like an illness it has recovered from. [Direct democracy is planned for the 21st century, one calculation says 1776+250=2026 (Harry Dent), yellow wests are requiring it, but nihilism will continue, since democracy is just a prolonged hand of Christianity. At the end of this century democracy dies and an decadent empire rises for the next 4 centuries. First in the USA. ]
The practical outcome of this spreading democratization will first of all be a European league of nations within which each individual nation, delimited according to geographical fitness, will possess the status and rights of a canton: in this process the historical recollections of the former nations will be of little account, since the sense of reverence for such things will gradually be totally uprooted by the domination of the democratic principle, which thirsts for innovations and is greedy for experiments. The corrections of frontiers which prove necessary will be so executed as to serve the interests of the large cantons and at the same time those of the whole union, but not to honour the memory of some grizzled past. The task of discovering the principles upon which these frontier corrections should be made will devolve upon future diplomats, who will have to be at once cultural scholars, agriculturalists and communications experts, and who will have behind them, not armies, but arguments and questions of utility. Only then will foreign policy be inseparably tied to domestic policy: whereas now the latter still has to run after its proud master and gather up in a pitiful little basket the stubble left behind after the former has reaped its harvest.
293.
End and means of democracy.— Democracy wants to create and guarantee as much independence as possible[in fact alienation]: independence of opinion, of mode of life and of employment. To that end it needs to deprive of the right to vote both those who possess no property and the genuinely rich: for these are the two impermissible classes of men at whose abolition it must work continually, since they continually call its task into question. It must likewise prevent everything that seems to have for its objective the organization of parties. For the three great enemies of independence in the above-named threefold sense are the indigent, the rich and the parties.
I am speaking of democracy as of something yet to come. That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.—Have things really got less perilous because the wellbeing of the nations now rides in this vehicle?