Page 98 [98]
OCR
solipsist attack the philosopher, or they attack each other first. If one becomes anthropophobic upon learning this, we can almost understand why. The person of the crowd then calls the rat race world a civilization and despises those who do not want to “be civilized.” And this civilization, which is in fact nothing more than collapse into a foolish, unimaginative, and indifferent boredom, is set on a pedestal as civic virtue. The person of the crowd insists that this is the only realistic alternative, and people go to the corral proudly and voluntarily to become proud, baaing members of the uniform flock. Life thus becomes more and more prosaic. The human world becomes atomized. It narrows in space and time. As Nietzsche writes, it “shrinks,” and there “jumps up and down on it the last man” (der letzte Mensch), who dwarfs everything and who is happy in the knowledge that “the earth has then become small, and on it there hops the last man who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.” (KSA IV. p. 20. TSZ p. 17.). So writes Nietzsche, as though he were describing what happened to him. At this moment, the other, the alien, appears, since they are not part of the flock. That is enough also for them to be the enemy. In this way every thinking person becomes an alien to fools. And since there are more of the latter, the outcome of any conflict between them cannot be in doubt. In this respect, not only thinking but also art lose their value. Neo-nomads only have a use for useful things. What is useless does not interest them. Spengler again: Rousseau and Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappear ance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds - all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence - anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite ” inevitable. ” (Spengler1927. p. 34.)
