“Not every love story is written the same way. I don’t need a happy ending. I need our ending. The one that might be messy and imperfect, but exclusively ours.”

human nature

“You're not alone. We are accomplices. If you're a witch, then I'll be your warlock.”

The guy on the left is that philosopher of cringe — Thomas Hobbes

On the right: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Herbert Marcuse, Peter Kropotkin

“Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke- and pseudo-philosophy. Many states have been founded since the world began; that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth? ...

Here, however, we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity. It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this — and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroys stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too. That is why I am concerned with a species of man whose teleology extends somewhat beyond the welfare of a state, with philosophers, and with these only in relation to a world which is again fairly independent of the welfare of a state, that of culture.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §4)

“When [the philosopher] thinks of the haste and hurry now universal, of the increasing velocity of life, of the cessation of all contemplativeness and simplicity, he almost thinks that what he is seeing are the symptoms of a total extermination and uprooting of culture. The waters of religion are ebbing away and leaving behind swamps or stagnant pools; the nations are again drawing away from one another in the most hostile fashion and long to tear one another to pieces. The sciences, pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire, are shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief; the educated classes and states are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy. The world has never been more worldly, never poorer in love and goodness. The educated classes are no longer lighthouses or refuges in the midst of this turmoil of secularization; they themselves grow daily more restless, thoughtless and loveless. Everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming barbarism. The cultured man has degenerated to the greatest enemy of culture, for he wants lyingly to deny the existence of the universal sickness and thus obstructs the physicians. They become incensed, these poor wretches, whenever one speaks of their weakness and resists their pernicious lying spirit. They would dearly like to make us believe that of all the centuries theirs has borne the prize away, and they shake with artificial merriment. Their way of hypocritically simulating happiness sometimes has something touching about it, because their happiness is something so completely incomprehensible.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §4)

radically changing our way of living

So am I, Süße...

Shall we – shall we merge and shake up the spacetime?

After all, our gravity is irresistible 👉🏼👈🏼

“If it may be one-sided to emphasize only the weakness of the outlines and the dullness of the colours in the picture of modern life, the other side of the picture is in no way more gratifying but only more disturbing. There are certainly forces there, tremendous forces, but savage, primal and wholly merciless. One gazes upon them with a fearful expectation, as though gazing into the cauldron of a witch's kitchen: at any moment sparks and flashes may herald dreadful apparitions. For a century we have been preparing for absolutely fundamental convulsions; and if there have recently been attempts to oppose this deepest of modern inclinations, to collapse or to explode, with the constitutive power of the so-called nation state, the latter too will for a long time serve only to augment the universal insecurity and atmosphere of menace. That individuals behave as though they knew nothing of all these anxieties does not mislead us: their restlessness reveals how well they know of them; they think with a precipitancy and with an exclusive preoccupation with themselves never before encountered in man, they build and plant for their own day alone...”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §4)

the original (and ongoing) colonialism of the Indian subcontinent

Morality

🫶🏼 🫶🏼

I'm so overflowing with life that should I have to choose between ending my life once and for all, and having to live this same life — exactly the same way — again and again, for all eternity... I'd choose the latter without hesitation

The eternal recurrence of life ❤️

relationships under capitalism

“Nowadays the crudest and most evil forces, the egoism of the money-makers and the military despots, hold sway over almost everything on earth. In the hands of these despots and money-makers, the state certainly makes an attempt to organize everything anew out of itself and to bind and constrain all those mutually hostile forces: that is to say, it wants men to render it the same idolatry they formerly rendered the church. With what success? We have still to learn; we are, in any case, even now still in the ice-filled stream of the Middle Ages; it has thawed and is rushing on with devastating power. Ice-floe piles on ice-floe, all the banks have been inundated and are in danger of collapse. The revolution is absolutely unavoidable, and it will be the atomistic revolution: but what are the smallest indivisible basic constituents of human society?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §4)

Re-living the entire life — even again and again — is worth it for a single great, beautiful moment

Ressentiment, the death drive, guilt etc — characterizing weakness of will — typically lead to ascetic renunciation and passive nihilism, to inaction in a sense... and that's deplorable enough...

But when they do lead to action — when they become "creative", when they become the driving factors behind movements etc — that is when the slave morality triumphs... and it's all the worse!

They cannot lead to liberation or creation, but only to destruction of everything, to destruction of life, to death and only death... not destruction for the sake of creation, as in active nihilism, but destruction for the sake of destruction...

Fascism is the clearest example of this.
But it's not only explicitly reactionary movements that exemplify this...

Every "liberation" movement which doesn't oppose the State — the greatest death machine — and worse, aims to take control of it and make it "omnipotent"; and, in general, which doesn't aim for and work for effecting the transvaluation of all values... every such movement is also an instance of the foregoing death cults.

Capital, the abstract parasite and vampire
(Mark Fisher quote)

“[H]e who really is convinced that the goal of culture is to promote the production of true human beings and nothing else, and then sees how even now, with all our expenditure and pomp of culture, the production of such human beings is hardly to be distinguished from cruelty to animals protracted into the human world, will think it very necessary finally to replace that ‘obscure impulse’ with a conscious willing. And he will think so especially for a second reason: that it shall cease to be possible for that drive which does not know its goal, that celebrated obscure impulse, to be employed for quite different objectives and directed on to paths which can never lead to the supreme goal, the production of the genius. For there exists a species of misemployed and appropriated culture — you have only to look around you! And precisely those forces at present most actively engaged in promoting culture do so for reasons they reserve to themselves and not out of pure disinterestedness.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §6)

“Among these forces is, first of all, the greed of the money-makers, which requires the assistance of culture and by way of thanks assists culture in return, but at the same time, of course, would like to dictate its standards and objectives. It is from this quarter that there comes that favorite proposition and chain of conclusions which goes something like this: as much knowledge and education as possible, therefore as much demand as possible, therefore as much production as possible, therefore as much happiness and profit as possible — that is the seductive formula. Education would be defined by its adherents as the insight by means of which, through demand and its satisfaction, one becomes time-bound through and through but at the same time best acquires all the ways and means of making money as easily as possible. The goal would then be to create as many current human beings as possible, in the sense in which one speaks of a coin as being current; and, according to this conception, the more of these current human beings it possesses the happier a nation will be. Thus the sole intention behind our modern educational institutions should be to assist everyone to become current to the extent that lies in his nature, to educate everyone in such a way that they can employ the degree of knowledge and learning of which they are capable for the accumulation of the greatest possible amount of happiness and profit. What is demanded here is that the individual must be able, with the aid of this general education, exactly to assess himself with regard to what he has a right to demand of life; and it is asserted, finally, that there exists a natural and necessary connection between ‘intelligence and property’, between ‘wealth and culture’, more, that this connection is a moral necessity. Here there is a hatred of any kind of education that makes one a solitary, that proposes goals that transcend money and money-making, that takes a long time; such more serious forms of education are usually disparaged as ‘refined egoism’ and as ‘immoral cultural Epicureanism’. Precisely the opposite of this is, of course, held in esteem by the morality that here counts as valid: namely, a speedy education so that one may quickly become a money-earning being, yet at the same time an education sufficiently thorough to enable one to earn a very great deal of money. A man is allowed only as much culture as it is in the interest of general money-making and world commerce he should possess, but this amount is likewise demanded of him. In short: ‘Man has a claim to earthly happiness and for that reason he needs education, but only for that reason!’”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §6)

institutional violence vs revolutionary violence