Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

114 Jürgen G. Backhausmasters and no servants” has no allure for us. We simply donot consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concordshould be established on earth (because it would certainly bethe lighted with all who love), as we do, danger, war, andadventures, who refuse to compromise, to be captured,reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors;we think about the necessity for new orders, also fora new slavery – for every strengthening and enhancement ofthe human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.Is it not clear that with all this we are bound to feel ill at easein an age that likes to claim the distinction of being the mosthumane, the mildest, and the most righteous age that thesun has ever seen? It is bad enough that precisely when wehear these beautiful words we have the ugliest suspicions.What we find in them is merely an expression – and a masquerade– of a profound weakening, of weariness, of old age,of declining energies. What can it matter to us whattinsel the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let themparade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weaknessmakes one mild, oh so mild, so righteous, so inoffensive,so “humane!”The “religion of pity” to which one would like to convertus – oh, we know the hysterical little male and females wellenough who today need precisely this religion as a veil andmake-up. We are no humani tarians; we should never dareto permit ourselves to speak of our “love of humanity”; ourkind is not actor enough for that. Or not Saint-Simonistenough, not French enough. One really has to be afflictedwith a Gallic excess of erotic irritability and enamoredimpatience to approach in all honesty the whole of humanitywith one’s lust!Humanity! Has there ever been a more hideous oldwoman among all old women – (unless it were “truth”: aquestion for philosophers)? No, we do not love humanity;but on the other hand we are not nearly “German” enough,in the sense in which the word “German” is constantlybeing used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and racehatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabiesof the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nationsof Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against eachother as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are tooopen-minded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too wellinformed, too “traveled”: we far prefer to live on mountains,apart, “untimely,” in past or future centuries, merely inorder to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage toHere, Nietzschetakes up centralaspects of freemarketeconomics, stillin a criticalposture,however.When hetalks about“enslavement”,he is at whatnow we callconsumerism.(It is telling thatVance Packard,who promotedthese ideas,never mentionedNietzsche in hisdiatribes.)