Thank you! This does look like it could provide a much needed perspective to some Nietzsche-adjacent issues (relating to his own “cosmodicy”) that I have been wrestling with others about.. especially as I recently, off-handedly, in anger, in grandiosity even, accused somebodies of being well-intentioned bullies.. Also relevant to organizational/selves herding, of course ;)
EDIT: if i may, your review makes me imagine that one socially virtuous mantra (or vitious countermand?) to meditate upon in mitigation of narcissism could be “loyalty to the Other”
Tangential EDIT: it could also be worth meditating on the wide spread opinions that Ayn Rand (mentioned above) and Nietzsche are both young people’s (mostly young men’s) writers
In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more... the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).
To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger... in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical...
"The I That Is God" as translated in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (1984) edited by Ken Wilber
Most felicitous, for tomorrow he could be sure of being free from meeting with people (for surely if there were such a century later, they'd already been there in Vespasian's time) who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsocial.
I hope this isnt directed at me but i was glad to see some HN comments getting unflagged yesterday. Cant expect curmudgeons to become real estate salesmen* overnight..
Not directed at you; it was recalling how MAA noted that the reward for being at the very top of a hierarchy is getting to spend your waking hours in the company of the sorts of people who get near the top of hierarchies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930334
