The Nazism of the weak

de Ştefan Bolea
translation from Romanian by Alina-Olimpia Miron
 
click aici pentru versiunea română
 
The strong must be protected from the weak.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Just like the Nazis were trying to create super-humans, thus marginalizing the weak, now we’re witnessing the reverse: the creation of sub-humans and the assassination of the strong. The sub-human or the new man (the terms are equal) is ignorant, illiterate, uneducated, but shrewd, sly, self-sufficient and unaware (his sub-life does not exist in the realm of self-consciousness), generally happy he / she is so small and that his / her nothingness is protected by international laws. An imbecile sneer takes shape when he smells that his pettiness is the project of the new world order. It is for him that the TV and commercials have been invented, it is for his living-room that a new booking case which can fit only a plasma TV and three crystal bowls is being designed. The sub-human does not read, because nowadays one can get educated via the TV screen and Google: one need not read in order to be successful in this life. The sub-human is mentally illiterate, in the sense that he cannot use his brain to make logical operations, he has no taste for the abstract and he yawns whenever he hears an idea. The difference between him and a monkey? The monkey is cute and, besides, at lunch time it could beat the heck out of Van Damme, Seagal and Jet Li together.
 

Intelligent people, on the other hand, are doomed to extinction. They have become contingent. It’s better to train a slave – a smart move, because, at the same time, one gets rid of potential masters. It is obvious humankind is suffering from the death instinct which lies at the root of our culture. The end of Melancholia is the perfect example of our age-old desire for extinction, of our ambition as dying men, as Cioran would say. If psychologically and biologically we’re getting ready for the Big Sleep, drooling over thanatos, victims of a morbid enthusiasm (perhaps we should say endemoniasm, because we’ve long stopped being possessed by the god, the Anti-creator is riding us), we can anticipate that in a few centuries, perhaps even decades, reality will imitate art and just like World Trade Center (2001) copied the end of Fight Club (1999), the total catastrophe will be in tune with the end of Melancholia and the famous Pan will pipe Tristan and Isolde over the “devastated landscapes” in the honour of a primate species which has self-destructed. As I was saying, if psychologically and biologically we’re a dying breed, culturally speaking the same phenomenon has been set to occur since the reign of the sub-human. People who enter an art gallery and buy a painting, people who can make the difference between Brahms and Schubert, people who have an extensive vocabulary and, thus, perceive certain nuances and subtleties are very few. Many a time I see myself forced to translate my own words in order to be understood, because if I were to speak as I do in my mind, the conversation would swiftly come to an end. If one is genuine and all the others are lunatics, in the end only you will be the lunatic. Orwell spoke of a minority of one; capitalism is about to produce this totalitarian desideratum.
 

In his Journal, Noica says that, in the future, people will be so intelligent that the achievements of our culture will seem minor, petty. The same idea is present in the movie Youth Without Youth: after an atomic winter, a new species will thrive over the ruins. I believe people have become so stupid that they will give up the achievements of “our” culture out of envy and an inferiority complex. We no longer have to burn books because they end up in the garbage anyway. Owners of TVs are outnumbering owners of books.
 

If I am right, I realize there’s nothing I can do against this process of artificial selection, against this eugenic project which saves useless people precisely because of their squalor and paucity. Perhaps the habitat of exception is the zoo, while the lesser man will remain consigned to the sofa until the end of time.