Over the ages, over the course of history, over the course
of life on this planet, there has been only one constant. War. It began at the
minutest level, on a cellular level. The first single celled organism, finding
nothing else to wage war against, turned upon itself and tore itself into two.
Today, we call it reproduction. It was merely, in fact, the cell obeying the
eternal law. If you live, you war.
As life evolved, so did the forms of war. Life came into contact with life. Both
were subject to the same laws, both must war. And so it was inevitable, in
fact, it is surprising that it took as long as it did, for life to begin its
war against its counterparts. There developed a different kind of organism. One
that needed another’s life to be sacrificed in order to keep on living. This
branching off had seismic repercussions. We may trace our Warring instincts’
lineage directly through the ravages of time all the way to this crucial point.
From this organism developed the herbivore, then the carnivore, and at last, the
all-consuming omnivore. Everything that lived was eventually locked into an
eternal chain of predator-prey, predator-prey. This dynamic shaped not only the
direction of the organism’s evolution, but along with it shaped the very
landscape of this planet. The world as we know it would not exist if this unquenchable
drive for war was not omnipresent in all of existence.
But here, Life pulled out a wonderful weapon. It turned this very instinct to
its advantage. It had bided its time, waiting for exactly the right moment to
stage its ambush, and when the moment arrived, what a marvel it was to behold!
A coup that Napoleon or Hannibal or even Genghis Khan would have been proud to
claim as his own. Life used War for progress. It turned the instinct for war
into a disinfectant. It used War to weed out the weak, to cleanse the species
of its freaks. It had discovered “natural selection.” Where War strove for
destruction, it found it was only strengthening Life. The strong, now freed
from the burden of the weak, bounded ever faster and higher, dodging death
nimble footed wherever they went. The species accelerated their evolution, and
Life flourished. A masterstroke executed to perfection.
The Warring instinct found itself at war. It had met a worthy foe at last. It
was at war with Life. A war that, as yet, shows neither indication nor
inclination of ending. Aeternum Bellum.
Up until now, the whole of war was based upon two base instincts, sustenance
and reproduction. Even up until man was yet a caveman, in the Palaeolithic era,
it was still these same two drives that did the donkey work for the Warring
instinct. But here, a novelty made its appearance. Life sensed its own position
of dominance and sought to finish off the Warring instinct. And thus, Life
produced Reason.
At its inception, it still served merely as a tool to ease the acquisition of
sustenance and to achieve reproduction. It was not an open threat to the
warring instinct. Life observed gleefully as Reason slowly but surely worked
its magic over our species. We began using tools, building shelters, forming
clans, developing social systems, languages, identities. We started transcending
bestial behavior. Within no time at all, or so it seemed, we had risen so far
above the rest of evolution that we had managed to banish the insecurity that was
the root cause and loyal agent of both manifestations of the Warring instinct.
Man had almost completely removed the risk involved in his obtaining food. He
had escaped the fatal dual dynamic of predator-prey. And man had also developed
his social system to a point where a feud over a female did not always result
in a physical confrontation. Indeed all forms of physical confrontations came
to be branded as evil. And War being the most sublime forms of confrontations,
it was by default viewed as the most sublime form of evil. Life had thus dealt
a double blow. It had kicked War while it was down, and dealt it what some may call
overkill.
One may at this point be wondering just why War sat quietly gazing on while
Life leaped from strength to strength, developing and perfecting its techniques
over millions of years. One may even assume that Life had broken the Warring spirit.
Life had triumphed after all. If you thought that, you certainly were not
alone. Life itself shared your view, and flourished and multiplied with all the
pomp of a new King spraying the contents of his treasury to his peasants.
Nay, you do dishonor to the immortality(and also, immorality) of War if you so
blindly narrow its scope. War was not dead. War cannot be, as long as Life
exists.
What Life had in exuberance and gusto, it lacked in experience. What Life
failed to realize is it was at war with War. It was playing at a game that it
was not suited for. It may have won some battles and put up a respectable show,
but it was up against a veteran, an expert. One whose entire existence centered
around this interplay of predator and prey.
War managed to execute an inversion of such exactitude that the phenomena would
pretty much define the concept of poetic justice for the rest of eternity.
It watched, reservedly, as Reason blunted its two most potent weapons, hunger
and lust. It suffered the ignominy of being branded as impotent by Life, and it
still held its silence. If Life had not by now been bloated with arrogance, it
would have found the silence of its opponent disconcerting. What weapon did War
possess that allowed it to stand almost nonchalant in the face of Life’s
burgeoning display?
It had foresight.
Mankind, spurred on by the ideal of Life and Reason, forgot one key fact. War
was a big reason it had reached this point in the first place. Life itself
could not flourish without War. When Reason elevated itself to the point where
it exiled War from its domain, it unwittingly removed its antibody. Life had
lost its disinfectant.
At first, Life exploded with all the jubilance of an animal freed from a cage.
Everywhere, progress, no longer hampered by destruction, accelerated to an
almost almighty pace. Technology overtook everything and transported man into a
world which he himself could not have imagined a mere century ago. New
cultures, new ideologies, new beliefs, new philosophies sprang up all over the
place. Mankind had conquered the Earth.
But Man was not ready for these heights. He was an untimely occupant of the
throne and his stomach was not strong enough. When Man was under the influence
of the Warring instinct, he was by necessity hardened, strong, weather beaten,
almost invincible. Since the banishment or, to use a religious term, the exodus
of the Warring instinct, Man had lost his skill for self preservation. He had
gone soft. The body, rid of its antibodies, was now vulnerable to any form of
disease.
Disease and stagnation indeed struck Man, and with an almighty blow at that.
The origin of Reason was at core a reaction against the Warring instinct. As
such, its essence consisted of an ideology that was antithetical to War. The
only philosophy that could possibly emanate from that core was the
idea of everybody having a “right to life”.
This, then was the masterful inversion that War pulled off. Life had used the
Warring instinct to make War work to Life’s benefit, using it to clean away the
weak or the flawed while Life itself went from strength to strength. Now War,
by removing itself completely, and indeed encouraging Life on its path, set in
motion a sequence of events that we are still living out now.
What War foresaw was this:
Life, even at its best, produces a mass of herd consciences, or undermen, and only
a smattering of leaders, or Overmen. By preventing War from culling the worst
of the undermen, indeed, by preserving
and enhancing the breed of the
undermen under the guise of charity, Life had tipped the scale completely over
to the undermen’s side. They now ran free, larger in number and louder in voice
than all of the Overmen. Formerly, it
was the Overmen, guided by the light of Reason, who had successfully kept War
at bay. The intricate balance that exists between freedom and prudence was maintained
with much difficulty and force of will. However, with the onslaught of undermen
in ever rising tides, the Overmen had eventually to give way. This epoch was
called Democracy.
How War cackled in glee when he heard this term!
Democracy was the victory of decay, of diminishment, of the process of becoming
mediocre and of the loss of values. And it was celebrated as the pinnacle of
civilization! Ah, the irony!
Before long the suicidal path that Life had set itself on, hand in hand with
Reason, began to show its true colors. The undermen claimed equality with the Overmen.
And since the undermen were greater in number, this essentially put the Overmen
out of commission in every Democracy.
The herd.
One does not give them the name lightly. Their behavior indeed indicated a
form of atavism. The herd mentality aped the bestial behavior that Reason had
labored so long to transcend. They had reverted to type. They had become
animals again.
This, War foresaw, and this was what it was waiting for. When all of mankind
was degenerate enough, when the morality and ideology of mankind had become so
disease ridden that it could no longer muster up a spirited resistance, War
revealed itself in a new avatar, and stepped back into the arena.
Hunger and lust had failed War. It now took up new minions. Where its
predecessors had succeeded due to the element of necessity (both food and
reproduction are essential pillars of existence), the new minions of War achieved
unprecedented amounts of success with possibly the simplest method of all:
Overwhelming the opposition with numbers.
War, the wily General, identified the Overmen as the greatest threat to its
cause, and directed the will of the undermen to oppose them. Wherever, on
Earth, an Overman arose, he was countered by multitudes, literally droves of
undermen bent on nothing else but to quell his glory. Overmen were being singled
out and destroyed, picked apart by the ruthless, thoughtless mob. Life teetered
on the brink of the abyss. War watched on impassively, the hint of a smirk on
its face.
But then one of those queer incidents took place that, though insignificant in
themselves, and by no means unique, end up influencing the entire course of
history.
In a country where the herd instinct had found its true home, the whole
populace of which identified themselves with the “virtues” of discipline and
obedience, there existed an Overman. In physique and in health, he was far from
superior; however his intellect towered not only above the herd, but even the other
Overmen, whether in history or posterity. This Overman, grimacing in disgust at
being forced to witness the degeneration of mankind from a civilized species,
back into an anarchic beast, encountered a force that had remained hidden from
the battlefield of War and Life. The force had only been discovered at all because of the invention of Reason. A force that neither War nor Life had reckoned with, and
consequently, neither knew the potential of. The Overman met Idea.
Influenced, almost compelled by this new force, the Overman gave shape to the
idea. The Idea that was invisible to all but him till now, was suddenly
accessible to the whole world.
The profundity, the elevated nature, and sheer brilliance of the Idea shook War
out of its stupor. Dismayed at the force of will of this new opponent, it bent
all its energies into destroying the source. It turned upon that greatest of
Overmen. The herds gnashed their teeth and stamped their hooves and champed at
the bit. They railed and protested and picketed and rioted. They ostracized,
stigmatized, terrorized, falsified, calumnized. Not even the Overman could
withstand such a relentless torrent. His intellect, stubborn in the face of this
unstoppable force, finally broke, and the Overman spent his last years in an
asylum. Nietzsche had been overcome.
But what’s this? The Idea still remains? The mob, spurred on by the accumulated
confidence of their successes, unites as one to wipe Idea off the face of the Earth,
but try as they might, they cannot lay a hand on it. They have nothing to swing
their swords at, nothing to set their torches to. Nothing tangible. The Idea
was a concept in the mental sphere. The herd by definition had no inclination towards mental exercises. It was a foreign and
inaccessible land, and they stood there, helpless.
War bellowed with rage, it turned man upon man, herd upon herd, culture upon culture,
community upon community. Everywhere mankind turned, he was engaged in a battle
of some form. Destruction and chaos reigns. Out of the blue, Nature, the spectator aeternum, finally weighed in.
With one fell swoop, all of Creation was brought down to its knees. The Earth, tilted on its axis, almost as a head bowed in reverent shame. A lesson learnt.
Life slunk away back to the depths of the oceans and the recluse of hidden
caves. War stood supreme, serene, surveying the landscape, or what was left of
it.
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Amongst the rubble, a single boy stirred. He gazed, dumbfounded, at the
spectacle he beheld. His whole world, the only world he knew of, had ceased to
exist. All that remained were haunting remnants and morbid memories. Weeping
with grief, he scoured the landscape that spelled only oblivion.
Why had he survived? What was his purpose? Was there even any such thing as
purpose? Was not everything that mankind had ever worked for taken away by
their own stupidity? Was mankind’s biggest mistake the fact that they assumed
life had a meaning?
He collapsed onto the dusty marble floor, the remnant of some grandiose
structure no doubt. Leaning his back against a crumbling wall, he quaked in fear and
remorse. Fear of losing his sense of existence and identity, and remorse for
the lunacy of his species. Of such vastness was the emotion he felt.
And there, right before him, it lay. Covered in soot, hardly recognizable and
obscured even further by his streaming tears, lay the book. Slowly, almost
mechanically, he picked it up and swept the dust off its cover.
The title read, "Freidrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil"
He opened the book and began to read. And thus in the boy of fifteen, the Idea was brought
alive again.
