GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF FASCISM 63!
ness are virtues appropriate to slaves; pity is the offspring
of cowardice, for "the greatest of almsgi vers is cowardice.
All those who are not sufficiently masters of themselves and
do not regard morality as a self-control and self-conquest
continuously exercised in things great and small, uncons-
ciously come to glorify the good, compassionate, benevolent
impulses of that instinctive morality which has no head,
but seems merely to consist of a heart and helpful hands".
Kindness, helpfulness and benevolence are, in other
words, signs of weakness. Christianity, in fact, is little
more than an organized conspiracy to put a premium
of the inefficient
upon weakness. Christianity is the religion
and the cowardly; it assures the failures of this life that
they will succeed in the next; the miserable, that they
will be happy; the lonely, comforted, and the poor, wealthy
with a wealth more valuable than earthly riches. At the
and self- .
manly virtues of independence, boldness, pride
assertion it calls "sour grapes", assuring the herd who
lack them that their possessor is displeasing to God. Finally,
it offers the bribe of eternal life to comfort the many for
their inferiority, assuring them that in virtue of their
possession of immortal souls they are "ends in them-
selves", and that as "ends" they are the equals in the eyes
of God of the mighty, the proud and the powerful. "That
everybody as an 'immortal soul'," Nietzsche writes,
"should have equal rank, that in the totality of beings
the 'salvation 9
of each individual may lay claim to eternal
importance, that insignificant bigots and three-quarterlunatics
may have the right to suppose that the laws of
nature may be persistently broken on their account
any such magnification of every kind of selfishness to
infinity, to insolence, cannot be branded with sufficient
contempt, And yet it is to this miserable flattery of personal
vanity that Christianity owes its triumph; by this means
it lured all the bungled and the botched, all revolting and
revolted people, all abortions, the whole of the refuse
and offal of humanity, over to its side. The 'salvation of
in plain English, the world revolves around me."
the soul 1