Month: July 2025

In seemingly every Western nation at the moment, the number one question to be asked about the governing class of society is, Are they stupid or are they corrupt? The corruption option is always the easiest to invoke because political decisions almost always benefit some group or other. To explain any policy, you just find the group who benefits and say that they bought off the politicians.

Every now and again, however, an issue comes along where seemingly nobody wins and this means that the corruption explanation doesn’t work. Nominally, this should leave us saying that the government is stupid. But we can be more specific than that because what is really going on is ideological wowserism, which, I suppose, could be thought of as a sub-category of stupidity.

(Note: “wowser” is an Australian word for sanctimonious hypocrites whose main purpose in life is to stop anybody else from having fun. Basically, modern day secular Puritans).

We have a uniquely clear-cut example of ideological wowserism going on here in Australia right now and it shouldn’t surprise us in the slightest to find that it’s been implemented by the same morons that ran the Covid debacle, i.e., public health technocrats. On the advice of said public health morons, the Australian government has been significantly increasing the tax on tobacco beginning with a 25% hike back in 2010 and then going up by 12.5% every year. The compounding effect means that the excise more than tripled over this period which has resulted in a massive spike in the retail price of a pack of cigarettes. It took a while, but eventually the price got so high that smokers began looking for alternative options and a black market for tobacco began to appear, which grew and grew in proportion as the excise on retail cigarettes went up year on year.

There are countless news stories of drive-by shootings and other assassinations. More importantly, a lot of these stories now involve innocent members of the public. A couple of months ago in my area, some strays bullets from a failed drive-by shooting came within inches of killing a young boy who was sitting in the family car in a suburban driveway. The collateral damage includes stores that have been mistakenly firebombed or got burned down because they were next to a tobacco store. To make matters worse, even though the percentage excise has more than tripled, the gross revenue to the federal government has fallen because so many people are simply no longer buying tobacco legally.

It’s hard to think of a more comprehensive policy failure. Just off the top of my head, here’s a list of the losers:-

• Federal government has lost billions in revenue, not exactly a good thing given how much debt it has on the books. Incidentally, one of the promises of the imbeciles who came up with this policy was that it would raise money. Whoops.
• Citizens around the country are now getting caught in the crossfire of gang wars
• Small business owners are having to deal with damage to their property and presumably higher insurance premiums as a result of all the fire bombings
• State police forces, which are already significantly understaffed, have had to devote major resources to responding to all the crimes and also to trying to break up the criminal gangs
• Smokers have had to choose between paying outrageous retail prices or turning to the black market

That’s an impressive set of losers. But the key point is that the only people who are winning from all this are the criminal syndicates. Thus, unless you want to make the argument that the politicians are in the pocket of Big (Illegal) Tobacco, it is not possible to explain any of this by the usual corruption excuse.

The only other excuse would seem to be that our elected officials are complete morons. But, more specifically, what is going on is a moral crusade against cigarette smoking. A few months ago, the premier of New South Wales explicitly called on the treasurer to cut the excise. The premier has a vested interest in the matter because it is his state that has to pay for the police resources required to tackle the problem created by the federal government’s decision to increase the tax.

Since all of these negative outcomes were obviously and clearly caused by the policy decision in the first place, the solution is dead easy. All you have to do is reverse the policy. That would lead to billions of dollars in revenue flowing back to the federal government and away from criminal syndicates, something you would think the treasurer of the country would want to happen. What was the treasurer’s response? He said there would be no change in the policy because apparently the goal here is to get rid of smoking.

Now, you might ask the question, if the goal is to get rid of smoking, why doesn’t the government just make it illegal? The obvious answer to that is that about 10% of the adult Australian population smokes, and they are going to be mightily pissed off with whichever party pushed to ban tobacco. 10% of the voting public is more than enough to swing an election. What’s more, a policy of making tobacco illegal would be rather strange at a time when we’ve all but decriminalised marijuana and even harder drugs are now being considered for the same treatment. How is the government going to explain why tobacco must be illegal but not other drugs? Thus, what the government can’t do for political reasons, it is doing through taxation instead.

Now, if you think about it for a minute, that’s a big problem. The whole point of democracy is that we should be able to vote on these kinds of issues and debate about the pros and cons first. Here is a government pursuing a policy agenda where the costs clearly outweigh the benefits, and it is doing so entirely on ideological grounds. It is clear that this course of action is not in the national interest, and yet when the obvious problems are presented back to the government, it refuses to back down. Thus, the government of Australia is currently waging an ideological war against a section of its own citizenry and forcing the rest of the public to be collateral damage.

Now, if we assume for a second that the elected politicians are not complete morons (a tenuous assumption, I know), then the only other way to explain this is that the politicians have more to fear from the public service than they do from the public. That seems to me to be true. The true source of political power now lies not with elected officials but unelected bureaucrats. There are a number of other examples from Australian politics that lead to that conclusion. We don’t have a democracy anymore, we have a wowserocracy: government by bureaucrat.

And so, if we come back to our initial choice between corruption and stupidity, we now have a third option, which is ideological zealotry. Our government appears to be full of zealots who utilise the reins of power to pursue an ideological agenda that is never actually presented to the public honestly and which the public has to pay for both directly and indirectly.

The tobacco issue provides an unusually clear example of that dynamic. But we can ask the question to what extent this same dynamic is the driving force behind other questions of public policy. When you start to think about it in this way, it seems that the majority of issues in modern politics can be primarily explained by the Wowserocracy: Covid (especially the forced vaccines), renewable energy, the trans issue, immigration and housing (including illegal immigration), offshoring of jobs, ostracising smokers, etc.

It is no coincidence that every one of these issues seems to be affecting all Western nations at the same time. It turns out that the issue of tobacco is a lot more relevant to all this than would appear at first glance because when did the war on tobacco start? Almost the exact same time that the neoliberal agenda was implemented. What a coincidence.

What a coincidence also that it was at exactly this time that Western culture in general began to suck. Correlation is not causality, but pretty much everything was better when everybody smoked. At the very least, Western culture was much cooler back then.

I had intended to continue releasing excerpts from my upcoming book for the next few weeks, but this idea has been derailed since I’ve had to do a fairly significant re-write of the opening chapters on account of the fact that the book refused to end in the manner which I expected. Given this will be my ninth innings, I really should know by now that a book is not over until the fat lady sings, and she has a habit of belting out a different tune to the one in my head. In any case, this is a very good problem to have since even I wasn’t aware how deep the rabbit hole went in the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner. It’s one hell of a story.

I’ve always loved studying the 19th century because so much of the modern world was created at that time, and yet so many of the issues that have now been decided were still up for grabs back then. As research for the book, I’ve had to go back and revisit a number of Wagner’s operas, and that made me realise something about the Covid debacle that I hadn’t fully appreciated.

By coincidence, it is almost exactly five years since I wrote my very first Coronapocalypse post. That series of posts would give rise to my two books on the subject, The Plague Story and The Devouring Mother. The combination of those two ideas has spearheaded all my thinking over the five-year period since then and has led directly to the book on Nietzsche and Wagner, which is all about the power of stories and archetypes. So, I guess I was predisposed to see connections between two seemingly unrelated topics.

What on earth can a Wagner opera tell us about the Covid debacle? Well, let’s talk about the Ring Cycle. Wagner wrote the libretto for the whole series of operas in 1851-52 (there are four operas in total). This was in the immediate aftermath of his expulsion from Germany after the failed Dresden uprising. Even though the Ring is couched in mythical and archetypal terms, it has a fairly obvious political theme that relates to what was going on in continental Europe at that time.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleon had blown away the Potemkin façade of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a structure that had been in place for the best part of one thousand years and which unified the lands of central Europe. In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, both Prussia and Austria set about a long period of harsh repression to ensure that any revolutionary spark still remaining among the general public would not again light into a revolutionary conflagration. It was the Prussians who put down the Dresden uprising.

After his exile, Wagner gave up any active involvement in politics and channelled his revolutionary spirit into his art. The Ring Cycle was the first thing he wrote.

The figure of Wotan is fairly obviously a symbol of the kings of Europe since Europe had followed the divine right of kings for about a thousand years, and the collocation of king and god was implied for most of that time. Therefore, among other things, Wagner was making a statement about the powerlessness of kings in the 19th century.

Hitler was an unemployed, homeless man who spent years living in poverty before rising to power out of nowhere. Stalin was born into similar poverty. Mao was a peasant whose father disowned him because he refused an arranged marriage in order to run off to university. The story of Pol Pot is almost identical. The worst butchers of the 20th century were all power-mad in exactly the way that Wagner characterises the Nibelungen in the Ring Cycle, and they all deposed kings in order to take power. The only exception is Hitler, who didn’t need to get rid of a king since Wilhelm II had abdicated 15 years beforehand.

Nowadays, we live in a post-king world, and it’s tempting to think that the message of Wagner’s opera is no longer relevant. But, actually, the exact opposite is the case. Why had Wotan become weak and powerless? It was not because of any infirmity in himself. It was because he had bound himself by agreements and treaties that removed his freedom of action. That’s why he can’t stop the bad guys.

It’s not a coincidence that Wagner would portray a king in this role because that’s the way many people thought about it in the 19th century. They saw not just the kings but the entire aristocracy as being weak and ineffectual.

The trouble for Wagner’s story was that he had set up a dichotomy between Siegfried and the Nibelungen. Unlike Frodo Baggins, Siegfried knows how to wield power, as seen by his use of violence in the story. Therefore, any would-be dictator was always going to associate himself with Siegfried rather than the pathetic, miserable Nibelungen. In fact, a would-be dictator could easily accuse his enemies of being pathetic, miserable Nibelungen and use that as an excuse to kill them, all the while thinking of himself as Siegfried.

(Wagner could argue that his story had nothing to do with politics and was really about love and freedom. That might be true but, when it came down to it, he did little to dissociate himself from politics. This was the main source of the falling out between him and Nietzsche).

In theory, we have now gotten rid of not just kings but also dictators, and so everything should be rosy, right? Well, not if we understand that the cause of Wotan’s problems was all those rules and treaties. If that is the source of weakness, then we are now in far worse shape than the 19th century ever was. Just like Wotan, we are bound by rules, treaties, and agreements, and it is increasingly these that are the source of all of our problems.

Why can’t Australia solve our absurd housing problem? Because we signed up to the neoliberal economic and financial treaties that allow free movement of people and capital, and we have to allow foreign money to buy our assets so that we can get cheap consumer goods in exchange. Why can’t Europe solve its people-smuggling problem? Because it’s bound by the rules that were set up after WW2 to prevent the effects of statelessness on large populations. Why can’t the US solve its debt problem? Because it runs the global reserve currency, and it’s the backstop that keeps the whole system up and running.

World War 1 was started not because of kings but because a web of treaties meant that when one country declared war on another, others would come to its aid. The whole point of those treaties was to avoid war, and yet all they did was lead to a massive global conflict. The exact same thing happened with Covid. Every country was a signatory to the WHO for the purposes of avoiding a pandemic. When the threat of a pandemic appeared, the treaties kicked into action to give us lockdowns, masks, forced vaccines and all the rest of it. It was all executed through the vast bureaucratic machine that runs on rules, agreements, and treaties.

Wagner implied that if we could just get rid of kings, then we would have freedom. What he never saw coming was the rise of the technocrat and that technocrats love rules more than any monarch ever did. No surprise, then, that five years after the covid debacle began, the technocrats have decided that we need even more rules. Of the 11 countries that abstained from the new pandemic agreement, Russia and the US are the two most notable. Apparently, everybody else is happy to sign away even more freedom.

What would Wotan say?

This is the fourth excerpt from my upcoming book titled The Initiation of Nietzsche: Wagner’s Disciple. Anybody stumbling upon this without having read the first three should consider reading those first, since the argument made here builds upon the earlier posts. With that said, here is the excerpt.

***

The normal state of affairs in any culture is that there is a well-defined and understood tradition in place and an equally well-defined set of Elders whose job is to safeguard it and propagate it to the next generation. History shows, however, that there are times of upheaval when a paradigm shift is taking place in a culture, usually due to some combination of external pressure and internal fissures. 19th-century Europe was an example of this latter type, and Germany was at the centre of the difficulties. A number of different schisms had opened up. There was the Catholic-Protestant division, with the latter splitting up into hundreds, if not thousands, of alternative interpretations of the faith. Then there were the secular approaches to the same set of stories taken by thinkers such as Feuerbach, Strauss, and Renan. Shakespeare enjoyed a massive spike in popularity, as did the medieval myths which were being rediscovered. As if that wasn’t enough, breakthroughs in archaeology and historical research more broadly led to renewed interest in the ancient world. The Orphans of the 19th century were offered all of these varying traditions as a kind of smorgasbord from which to choose their identity. The result was an identity crisis felt at both the collective and individual levels. 

What this meant for Nietzsche and other members of the upcoming generation was that there were a number of options available and, by cross-cultural and historical standards, a perhaps unprecedented freedom of choice about which one to choose. We have seen that Nietzsche exercised his freedom of choice to decide in favour of the new secular wave of thinking. More specifically, however, our picture of Nietzsche during the Orphan phase of his life has so far been one of a successful initiation into that thinking. The separation from his family life offered by the Schulpforta scholarship was no doubt very important in establishing his independent frame of mind. He thrived in the military-like conditions of the school, and his subsequent university enrolment placed him under the tutelage of one of the best philologists of his time, Ritschl. Nietzsche was initiated during this time by a strong set of Elders culminating in his relationship with Ritschl, who ensured his ascent through the ranks of academic philology.

The story we have told about Nietzsche’s early life is a coherent and convincing one, and yet it points to an obvious problem. We have said that the Orphan-Elder relationship is about initiation in the institutions of society and the culture more broadly. Nietzsche had a first-class initiation in which he excelled. He gone from strength to strength and seemed set for a long and prosperous career as a scholar. Yet, the archetype that Nietzsche is known for in Western history is as a philosopher-hermit eventually leading to him earning a role that was very popular in the 19^th-century: the mad genius. The question then arises, how did Nietzsche go from being one of the most promising philologists of his era to becoming a philosopher-hermit?

The key to understanding this is to recall the point we have just made, namely, that the 19^th-century was a time of cultural upheaval where a large number of potential life paths had opened up, at least for the educated and upper classes of society (things were very different for the working poor). Although Nietzsche had ended up on the pathway of the scholar, this was by no means the only area that was of interest to him. In fact, his original enrolment at the University of Bonn was in a dual degree studying theology and philology. Since the theology part of the degree was intended to lead to a career as a pastor in the Lutheran church, and since that was the life path that would have seen Nietzsche in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather, it was surely no easy decision when he chose to drop that part of the degree only months after starting his university studies. On the surface of it, this seems only to have strengthened Nietzsche’s pursuit of the philological pathway. However, it was no longer afterwards that a seemingly random encounter in a bookshop would give the first hint of Nietzsche’s fate.

Nietzsche followed Ritschl to the University of Leipzig in 1865 following the dispute with Jahn in Bonn. Shortly after arriving in Leipzig, that he stumbled across the work of the man who was to become a kind of spiritual Elder that would guide Nietzsche towards philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. At just the moment in his life when Nietzsche had exercised his will, perhaps for the first time on a truly life-altering decision, he stumbled upon a philosopher who had made the subject of the will central to his work. Due to the intensely personal nature of his writing, we are fortunate to have Nietzsche’s reflections on what the work of Schopenhauer meant to him courtesy of an essay he would write almost ten years later in 1874. It was one of his Untimely Meditations called Schopenhauer as Educator. What is especially interesting from our point of view is that, even though Nietzsche did not think about it in our terms, the essay is really about the Orphan-Elder relationship. In fact, we could very well translate the title to Schopenhauer as Elder. Our preceding discussion has hopefully made clear why this is valid. Schopenhauer would become a culture hero to the young Nietzsche, a man worthy of imitation. But, more than that, Nietzsche’s essay is really about the personal aspects of the Orphan initiation and why the Elder role is necessary. He begins the essay by reflecting on the idea that our task in life is to become independent by the discovery of our selves:-

“We have to answer for our existence to ourselves; and will therefore be our own true pilots, and not admit that our being resembles a blind fortuity.”

In terms of our archetypal framework, this independence, self-assurance, and self-guidance is a quality not primarily associated with the Orphan phase of life, which is a period of training and education, but with the Adult archetype. However, it is very fitting that Nietzsche would have turned to such concerns during the last part of the Orphan phase of his own life since that is the time when adulthood is knocking on the door. But he notes that there are significant dangers from this transition, and he anticipates the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung by noting that the dangers are mostly psychological in nature. In order to mitigate those dangers, Nietzsche proposes the need for “educators”

“There are other means of ‘finding ourselves’, of coming to ourselves out of the confusion wherein we all wander as in a dreary cloud; but I know none better than to think on our educators.”

In order to understand what Nietzsche meant by the phrase “educator”, we need to correct a modern bias that has become especially acute in the post-war years. Our concept of education has now been taken over by the technocratic philosophy that has come to dominate society more broadly. According to this philosophy, a teacher is a kind of professional service provider to a student rather than a role model or mentor. This was not the case in Nietzsche’s time, especially for students such as him who earned attendance at elite schools and universities. For Nietzsche, the relationship between students and teachers was certainly based in obedience and authority, but it was also far more personal than what has become the norm in our time. That is why Nietzsche was prepared to move cities to continue to study under Ritschl and also why he had a personal relationship with Ritschl’s wife, with whom he swapped numerous letters. When Nietzsche uses the word educator, he means it in the broader and older meaning of that term which is almost identical to what we have called the Elder archetype. That is why we are justified in claiming that Nietzsche was really talking about Elders.

But it turns out that the Elder that Nietzsche sought was a specific kind:-

“I wandered then as I pleased in a world of wishes and thought that destiny would relieve me of the dreadful and wearisome duty of educating myself: some philosopher would come at the right moment to do it for me,—some true philosopher, who could be obeyed without further question, as he would be trusted more than one’s self.”

Before continuing, let’s reiterate the points made earlier about the Orphan-Elder relationship as an induction into an institution of society. That institution can be highly formal, as in the case of a modern army, or informal, as in the case of a voluntary association or society. The Elder is both the individual who has the authority to initiate the Orphan and the one who is responsible for their training and education in whatever domain the institution operates. Nietzsche’s reflections in his essay on Schopenhauer show that he had formed an imaginative vision of this archetype when he was a teenager. His philosopher-educator (our Elder) is somebody to be “obeyed without further question”. But that is exactly the kind of authority which the Elder has wielded over the Orphan for most cultures throughout history. Whether the Orphan is being initiated as a warrior, a religious anchorite, a scholar, a philosopher, a medicine man, or a priest, every society has its elite forms of initiation where strict discipline is enforced with the goal of raising the initiate to the highest level of performance. Nietzsche was not just dreaming of any old initiation; he was dreaming of an elite kind of initiation in the realm of philosophy.

But here we must also reiterate our earlier point that the philosopher archetype is an Elder tied to a specific cultural tradition that the West inherited from ancient Greece. More broadly, the philosopher is a manifestation of the Sage archetype. The modern West also has the concept of a different kind of Sage which comes via the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Prophet. Looked at in this way, we would also say that the priests, bishops, and popes of the Catholic Church are Sage archetypes. Meanwhile, by Nietzsche’s time, there was a new recognisable manifestation of the Sage which we now call the Scientist. Finally, there was also the relatively new concept of the heroic Artist, which we can also posit as a Sage archetype. When we view it this way, we can see that, throughout his formative years, Nietzsche had flirted with each of these different variations of the Sage archetype. We know he had considered becoming a priest and even went to Bonn University with that goal in mind. We know he was an enthusiastic and talented musician as well as a writer of poetry, placing him in the Artist category. We also know that he seriously considered a move into the hard sciences after completing his studies in philology and was therefore considering a life as a Scientist.

For these reasons, we have to be careful about taking Nietzsche’s claims in Schopenhauer as Educator at face value. He wrote the essay in 1874. The work not only provides the background to why Nietzsche was attracted to the work of Schopenhauer, it also laments the current state of philosophy in Germany and attempts to sketch out a remedy to that situation. A shallow reading may lead us to believe that the discovery of Schopenhauer in 1865 had changed Nietzsche’s life and placed him on a new pathway. If so, that would give us the answer to the question we asked earlier about how Nietzsche came to be a philosopher. The answer would be simple: Nietzsche read Schopenhauer; the rest is history. We have to be very cautious in drawing that conclusion, however, because it commits the same error we identified at the start of the book i.e., it judges former events by later ones. It also judges Nietzsche’s earlier attitudes and decisions based on ones he wrote after the fact. Nietzsche had not just warned about this error; he had demonstrated it in his writing. His mature philosophy is filled with little deceptions, ambiguities, and clues. He leads the reader astray and subtly invites them to find their way back. He was the philosopher who said everything is interpretation, and he structured his work as a kind of interpretive puzzle. These puzzles are meant as a kind of training exercise in the art of interpretation.

In this case, Nietzsche is leading us into the kind of error that occurs because there is a romantic notion in our culture that people are somehow destined to become what they actually do become. This is especially true for the great figures in any field of endeavour. We like to believe that they are all savants who were born to become great. Since Nietzsche became a great philosopher, we are predisposed to think that he must have been born that way. In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche tells us the kind of story we like to hear i.e., that becoming a great philosopher was his destiny. But this is exactly the kind of trick that Nietzsche would often play in his writings, and he himself would have urged interpretive caution in this respect. As we will do repeatedly throughout this book, the best way to begin is to compare his story against the facts.

In 1858, Nietzsche began his studies at Schulpforta. His schooling focused heavily on languages and philology and contained an emphasis on the twin traditions of western culture, Christianity and ancient Greece and Rome. We know Nietzsche had a strong interest in music and art, as evidenced by the Germania club which he and his friends created and through which he was introduced to the work of Wagner. At this time, Nietzsche had not yet discovered Schopenhauer but was reading contemporary philosophers such as Feuerbach and David Strauss. It should be clear that Nietzsche was dabbling in all of the above-mentioned sub-archetypes of the Sage: the Philosopher, the Priest, the Artist, and the Scholar-Scientist.

At the end of high school, Nietzsche appears to have decided to become a priest, as evidenced by his decision to study theology at the University of Bonn. After a few months, he quit and wrote to his sister explaining that he had renounced what he called “peace of soul and pleasure” to become a “devotee of truth”. We have every reason to believe that Nietzsche was genuine in his sentiment here. We also have every reason to believe that this was a major turning point in Nietzsche’s life. It was a break with his devout mother and sister and, even more importantly, with his dead father. We have to remember that Nietzsche himself had been so devout as a child that his classmates referred to him as the “little pastor”. By giving up any hope of becoming a priest, Nietzsche was renouncing the life path that had been laid out for him as a child. In doing so, he was asserting his independence. Another way to think about it is that Nietzsche was crossing off one of the possibilities on his list of potential futures. The Priest was gone, but that still left the options of Philosopher, Artist, Scholar-Scientist.

Nietzsche was already on the pathway of the Scholar-Scientist under the tutelage of Ritschl, who was one of the foremost philologists of his day. This relationship began at the University of Bonn, but Ritschl would soon have a major falling out with another pre-eminent philology scholar, Otto Jahn. These days we think of scholarly disagreements as being relatively tame affairs involving politely worded criticisms in journals or newspapers. The Ritschl-Jahn dispute was far more intense. There were physical altercations on campus between supporters of the two men, and even the Prussian government got involved. Again, this shows us that 19th-century academia was a very different beast from the post-war one we are all used to. In any case, Ritschl was forced out of Bonn University only to be immediately scooped up by the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche and a number of other loyal students moved there to continue to study under him.

To say it again, this is not the kind of behaviour that we would expect from students in our time, and it once again points to the far more personal nature of scholarship in 19th-century Germany. Since we know that Nietzsche would become close to both Ritschl and his wife, it is clear that their relationship was more than the cool professionalism we would consider normal between a student and professor. In fact, we can go one step further and say that Ritschl had become Nietzsche’s Elder not just in the academic sense but in a broader, more personal manner. This Orphan-Elder bond was clearly a very close one, as is evidenced by the fact that Ritschl later went out of his way to find Nietzsche a position as a philology professor in Basel.

The reason why this is important is that it gives us a strong reason to doubt what Nietzsche would later imply in the Schopenhauer essay, namely, that he had had no inspiration from his educators prior to discovering Schopenhauer. Clearly, Ritschl had been his educator (Elder). What’s more, we can see that Nietzsche’s discovery of Schopenhauer did not trigger the kind of dramatic change that he had been prepared to make by quitting theology and moving from Bonn to Leipzig. The Orphan-Elder relationship with Ritschl began in 1864, one year before Nietzsche would first discover Schopenhauer. Nietzsche had already shown a willingness to make life-altering decisions. If, as he would later have us believe, Schopenhauer’s example had proven so decisive and revelatory, if Nietzsche suddenly felt the uncontrollable urge to become a philosopher, why did he not give up his philology studies and swap to the philosophy department at the university? Why did he not throw off the constriction of academia altogether and become a self-directed philosopher following the example of Schopenhauer? At least at this time in his life, Nietzsche chose to remain a disciple of Ritschl rather than follow the life path of Schopenhauer. In the years ahead, he would continue to excel in his field, even having a number of scholarly papers published in philology journals, a very unusual achievement for a student who did not yet have his degree. In short, he had consciously chosen the Scholar-Scientist option and was succeeding in that role.

None of this is a problem or even a criticism of the young man. It just means that Nietzsche was not yet prepared or willing to take the step of becoming a philosopher. He had simply not yet decided what he wanted to do in life. This makes sense; Nietzsche was just starting his university studies. He had found himself under the tutelage of a renowned philologist and would go on to become perhaps Ritschl’s best student. He would later do some time in the army, as required by Prussian law. We know that, when he was coming to the end of his university degree in 1868, he and some friends considered living in Paris for a while. Nietzsche had even written in his letters and notebooks about perhaps starting up some kind of artistic or intellectual commune. In short, Nietzsche was still experimenting. He had ruled out the Priest archetype as a life path, but he still entertained hopes and dreams for the other options, including the Philosopher, the Scholar-Scientist, and even the Artist. We take this kind of thing for granted nowadays. Nobody expects a first-year university student to have their life planned out. But in the 19th century, it was the prerogative only of the educated class, of which Nietzsche had become a member.

We must remember that Nietzsche was twenty-one years old when he first read Schopenhauer. His eventual life path as a philosopher-hermit was not even on the radar at this time. He was a young man who had friends and was active in the institutions of which he was a member. Meanwhile, Schopenhauer was dead, and while he was able to provide an abstract example that Nietzsche could engage with in his imagination, he was not able to provide a direct Orphan-Elder relationship. Schopenhauer had had no disciples and created no institutions. In fact, he had explicitly removed himself from the universities after unsuccessful attempts at promoting his philosophy in Berlin. He was an outcast and a loner. As fate would have it, Nietzsche would eventually follow him down the lonely path as a disciple of truth, but to say that Schopenhauer was the direct cause of Nietzsche’s eventual life journey is not correct. It would be more correct to say that Schopenhauer provided him with an archetype: a possibility in his imagination.

Thus, we still don’t have a definitive answer to the question of how Nietzsche became a philosopher. Schopenhauer had perhaps planted a seed, but it had shown no signs of germinating. As a twenty-one-year-old, Nietzsche was still in the Orphan phase of life. He had a real, flesh-and-blood Elder in Ritschl, somebody that he could interact with and learn from. He had been initiated into a community of fellow students who had already rallied around their academic leader and followed him to Leipzig. He was winning renown in the institution of academia more generally. This was the everyday reality in which Nietzsche lived at that time. Schopenhauer existed in a different reality, an esoteric or spiritualised one. He existed as an archetype in Nietzsche’s mind and also in the collective mind of Western culture. Schopenhauer was one of a number of such archetypes that existed in this spiritualised form. Nietzsche himself would later join the ranks of the spiritualised philosophers. As he himself famously predicted, his (spiritual) birth would come posthumously. But as a young man in his early twenties, there was no indication that Nietzsche would become a philosopher at all, let alone a great one. Rather, his most likely life path was still that of the scholar.

It would require a different kind of flesh-and-blood Elder to eventually lead Nietzsche to the pathway of the philosopher. The fact that the man for the job was a famous and notorious composer of operas doesn’t make a whole lot of logical sense, and this is one of the reasons why commentators have avoided tackling the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship in its early manifestation. Of course, Wagner himself insisted that he was not merely a composer of operas. He had always demanded more of his art. As a result, he became one of the most influential storytellers of his era. He did so in a culture which believed that art would fill the void left by religion. The heroic Artist would take over the roles of priest, bishop, and pope as the custodian of the deeper truths that governed human affairs. Wagner had inadvertently become the prophet, and Nietzsche was about to become his foremost disciple. The young philology student, who had renounced Christianity just a few years earlier, was about to receive a personal and direct religious initiation.

This is the third excerpt from my upcoming book titled The Initiation of Nietzsche. Anybody stumbling upon this without having read the first two should consider reading those first, since the argument made here builds upon the earlier posts. Still, this post should make some sense as a standalone topic looking at the issue of how cultures propagate themselves and change over time, with specific reference to 19th century Western society. With that said, here is the excerpt.

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To the list of difficulties in understanding the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship that we have already mentioned, there is one more to add, and this is the fact that the image that has been handed down by history is of both men as supreme individuals. This is certainly warranted in the case of Nietzsche, who became a philosopher-hermit whose writings are radically subjective in nature, a feature that he did not shy away from but rather placed at the centre of his thought. But Nietzsche had held this position ever since he was a young man. He was the supreme believer in genius and claimed that the purpose of society should be to facilitate the development of great individuals. Wagner was exactly the kind of individual man of greatness that Nietzsche was talking about. Wagner’s individualism comes from the bombastic nature of his personality, his writings, and his operas. He was not in the slightest bit shy of criticising those he perceived as his enemies, and he did so without providing any argumentation, logic, or empirical evidence for his claims but simply by asserting them through the force of his own character.

The individualistic tenor of Nietzsche’s life led one of his main commentators, Stefan Zweig, to proclaim in the opening line of his book on the philosopher, “The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche is a monodrama: no other figure is present on the brief-lived stage of his experience”. The theme of our book already implies a refutation of this claim since we are arguing that there was at least one other main figure who shared the stage with Nietzsche, namely, Wagner. But, more generally, this idea of a monodrama is highly problematic. It is worth quoting the extended text of John Donne’s famous sermon in response:-

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

For all Nietzsche’s individualism, questions of culture and especially German culture were always one of the main themes of his philosophy. Even Zarathustra must come down from the mountain top to share his wisdom with the common folk. Nietzsche always retained a small readership throughout his quasi-exile in the mountains, and he always hoped that more people would read him, eventually extending that hope to the time after his death (some are born posthumously). Zweig’s error is the one we have already noted: he began at the end. Nietzsche became an island unto himself, and we could very well say that this was his tragedy since it drove him mad. But it was not always so, and one of the goals of this book is to show how and to what degree Wagner changed Nietzsche’s life so that we no longer view his story as a monodrama. More broadly, however, another advantage of the archetypal approach we are using in this book is that it abstracts away from the individuality of these two supreme individualists and provides a more general perspective on them. One of the ways we will do that is by placing them in the cultural milieu of their era. Although both men were innovators, their ideas did not come out of nowhere. Like all of us, they were very much influenced by the society in which they were born. By understanding the wider cultural zeitgeist, we not only understand how it influenced the two men, but we also better grasp what were the truly new ideas that Wagner and Nietzsche introduced.

In terms of the archetypes, it is the Orphan-Elder relationship which is primarily responsible for the propagation of a culture. When we speak of a culture as a whole, we are almost always referring to a set of fundamental ideas that form the core worldview that gives the culture its unique properties. In the broadest meaning of the word, it is the religious institutions of society which carry these fundamental meanings. In the modern West, our understanding of this is clouded by the fact that we have inherited at least two very different traditions. On the one hand, there is the “philosophical” tradition from ancient Greece, and on the other hand, there is the “religious” tradition handed down through Christianity. By thinking of these as distinct histories, we lose sight of the incredible commonalities between them. Socrates was put to death largely because he was seen as a threat to the established worldview of his society. But so was Jesus. Both men were considered too radical by their own societies, who felt the new ideas as existential challenge and reacted accordingly. The “victory” of the new worldview of these radical Elders came later (some really are born posthumously).

Socrates and Jesus were Elders who were initiating their own set of Orphans into a worldview that their own societies deemed incompatible with the status quo. However, the methods of initiation into a worldview appear to be the same whether they are carried out by radicals or in the normal propagation of a culture. By understanding those methods, we deepen and broaden our understanding of the relationship between Elders and Orphans.

From an anthropological point of view, there are two primary mechanisms of initiation into a worldview. There are the rites of passage, and there are stories, myths, and legends. In most cases, the rites and stories are closely correlated, if not used simultaneously. The 4th-century scholar Sallustius referred to stories used in rites of passage as mixed myth. We have a prime example of this in the extensive rites of the Catholic Church. A Catholic mass consists of the Liturgy of the Word (stories) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (rite of passage). Both of these practices are tightly coupled since they revolve around the story of Jesus. Therefore, the stories and the rites reinforce each other. To take one other example from a completely unrelated culture, in Australian Aboriginal society, the young man (archetypal Orphan) receiving initiation from the Elders of the tribe is put through a complex array of rites. At the same time, he is told the stories of the culture heroes of his tribe. Those stories relate directly to the rites the young man is going through.

The use of story and myth alongside ritual has the purpose of contextualising the practices that the initiate is going through by showing how the culture hero portrayed in the story went through the same experience at an earlier time. The initiate is not just becoming a member of the institutions of society in their own time; those institutions are themselves derived from the authority of the founders of the culture, thereby creating a chain that links the generations. Of course, most cultures throughout history have not had such a sophisticated historical consciousness as the modern West, and so the mythological is almost always seen as being timeless or infinite in nature rather than historical. This is why the core stories and myths of any culture need to be understood religiously.

Thus, for any given culture, to understand how initiation works, we need to look for the institutions that manage the core rites of passage and stories of that culture. It should not surprise us to find that 19th-century Germany, and the West more broadly, was a time of major upheaval in this respect. Christianity had been the core religion and therefore the core initiatory system in northern Europe for the best part of a millennium. By the 19th century, however, the influence of Christianity had very much begun to wane, especially among the educated elites of European society. This loss of faith was directly related to the rise of historical consciousness that occurred at around the same time, not to mention the fact that the global nature of European civilisation had allowed a deeper appreciation of non-Christian cultures such as Japan, China, and India. Alongside the increasing dominance of scientific materialism, the mythological ground on which Christianity had stood was slowly giving way.

In addition, there was another set of problems that had been opened up by the Reformation. One of the ways to understand those problems is in the appearance of a debate over the difference between being a “Christian” and being a “disciple of Jesus”. This issue ties back to our earlier question of how initiation into a culture works. Ritual and myth are about the imitation of the heroes of the past. Imitation and mimicry are usually very literal in nature. It is clear from the gospel story that Jesus expected his disciples to emulate him directly. He wasn’t just teaching them in an academic or abstract fashion; he was having them walk the same path that he did, and he expected them to follow his example after his death. It is for this reason that the word disciple means something more than student. A student learns a theory or an abstract principle. A disciple commits to a lifestyle based on imitation of the master.

Because of the increasingly abstract nature of modern education, we don’t automatically associate the process of learning with imitation and mimicry, yet these are still widely practised. Plumbers, carpenters, and other trades learn their craft through imitation during their apprenticeship. The same is true of musicians and other artists. Our modern focus on the written word as a pedagogical device is a practice which was born out of the scholarly tradition of university education in the Middle Ages. While it made sense for scholars, for whom the written word was their speciality, it made far less sense for other domains of life. A prime example of this difference can be found in the early life of Wagner, who received a theoretical musical education as a young man but who eschewed that in favour of learning and transcribing works by ear, including and especially those of Beethoven. By playing along to Beethoven on the piano, Wagner was directly imitating one of his culture heroes. That is how he learned his craft.

Coming back to Jesus and his disciples, it is clear that the education Jesus was giving was not just about understanding his teachings in a theoretical or intellectual sense; it was a complete change of life for those who were willing to join him. The disciples were expected to leave their jobs and even, in some cases, their families. Such sacrifices are a core component of initiation, especially in the religious sphere. We saw earlier that Nietzsche had needed to make a similar, although less dramatic, sacrifice in order to attend Schulpforta. That is why we can say that Nietzsche’s scholarship there was a proper initiation since it was very much a lifestyle change, one that the young teenager took quite a long time to adjust to.

But there is an important difference between the initiation offered by Jesus and the one Nietzsche received. Schulpforta was a distinguished school which was recognised and celebrated by the wider society of Nietzsche’s time. By contrast, the initiation that Jesus offered his disciples placed them in direct opposition to the Jewish religious authorities and then later the Roman imperial state. Jesus required his disciples to follow his example of challenging these authorities even though it put their lives on the line, just as he put his own life on the line. After the death of Jesus, the disciples faithfully carried out the task and, especially in the case of Peter and Paul, met the same fate as their master before them. The difference here is between initiation into a recognised and accepted institution of society versus initiation into an institution that is in opposition to powerful segments of society.

In the case of Jesus, rebellion against the institutions of society was part of the initiation he was offering. This rebellious attitude continued on for centuries after the death of the prophet. The Roman state set out to persecute the Christians on a number of occasions, thereby affording those who wanted to imitate the master the opportunity to die for the cause. The Romans had no compunction about killing both external and internal enemies as a method of pursuing the goals of the state, and this worked to crush opposition in most cases. But the example of Jesus had the highly unusual effect of creating a group who not only did not fear death but exalted it as a way to imitate the prophet. Thus, it was in the 2nd century AD that the concept of the Christian martyr was generalised as a response to Roman persecution and became part of the tradition.

What happened next is something that has perplexed thinkers down through the ages and which set up the paradox that would later lead to the issue of what was the difference between a “Christian” and a “disciple”. During the latter phase of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion was incorporated into the Roman state. That institutional structure subsequently gave rise to the Catholic Church, which survived the Dark Ages and went on to unify Europe into what was essentially a Christian caliphate around 1000 AD. Whatever else can be said about that, it rendered the original concept of being a disciple problematic at best. Jesus had expected his disciples to follow his example and live as he did. That entailed rebelling against the corrupt authorities of his time. But what could it mean for a medieval peasant of Europe to imitate Jesus in this respect? At the very least, the part of the imitation involving a rebellion against the authorities had to be airbrushed out of the story since it was those exact authorities i.e. the Catholic Church, which were promulgating the religion in the first place. Ironically, in the meantime, the Church had reverted to the old Roman tradition of putting to death anybody who threatened their authority, as can be seen from the numerous killings of heretics and the Inquisition.

This strange state of affairs continued on for about five hundred years until a rebellious (there’s that word again) group of scholar-monks began to realise that there was a problem. It is no coincidence that these scholars had direct access to the original Greek texts of the Bible and therefore to the foundational myth of the religion. They were able to see which parts of the story had been airbrushed out by the Catholic Church. More generally, the Protestants correctly saw that the rites that had been built up by the Catholic Church were problematic, especially given that the gospel story makes clear that Jesus considered the rituals of his time to be outdated, if not entirely corrupt. That message could only have resonated strongly among those who watched the increasing decadence of the Catholic. Thus, the corruption of the Catholic Church placed it in an identical position to the religious authorities in Jesus’ time, and what could be more fitting than to emulate the master in rebelling against it? In this way, we can very much say that the Reformation was based on imitation.

The reason to go into some detail about this history is because these developments form the context not just to Nietzsche’s own life but to the broader cultural trends of his age. Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran pastor, and Luther was still viewed as a heroic figure in 19th-century Germany. In Luther, we have the strange combination of a specifically German culture hero who was advocating on behalf of the ultimate culture hero that had been the foundation of modern Western civilisation, Jesus. Of course, the story of Luther is very similar to that of Jesus. Like Jesus, Luther held the strong conviction that the religious authorities of his time were corrupt. Also like Jesus, he had the ability to communicate his position with clarity and with passion, winning him a great deal of support among his contemporaries. That support made him a danger to the authorities and he required great courage to stand up to them. All of this places Luther very much in the context of a disciple imitating the master’s example as mediated through a myth that had been handed down over millennia. That is the incredible power of stories as initiatory devices.

But there are a number of important differences between Luther and Jesus. Just like the other Protestants, Luther was a university man. The Reformation was driven by men whose rejection of the Catholic Church was justified by the fact that they believed they had access to the direct source of truth in the Bible. There is a subtle irony here in that the Catholic Church had founded the universities and educated the very scholars who would later turn against it. The Protestant reformers had come to see that the official translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, was riddled with errors. Moreover, those scholars also accused the church of misleading the congregation by omitting large sections of the Bible. All of this is relevant to the young Nietzsche since his high school and university education placed him on the same track as scholarly heroes like Luther, for whom the question of the truth of the interpretation of texts was quite literally a matter of life and death. There really was a heroism tied to the archetype of the scholar in this cultural milieu, and Nietzsche was being inducted into that mythology.

With the Reformation, the Catholic Church lost control of both primary methods of initiation mentioned earlier: rites and stories. It’s no coincidence that a big part of the fight that had been going on for centuries was to ensure that both the Bible and the rites of the church were not translated into vernacular languages. All this changed with the victory of the Protestants. One of Luther’s greatest achievements was his translation of the Bible into German. Nietzsche was born into a culture that arose out of these developments. We can now see why that culture had, from the very first, been preoccupied, even obsessed, with the written word. The reason why literacy rates in Protestant communities rose sharply in the aftermath of the Reformation was because being able to read the Bible for yourself became an article of faith. It was the heroic scholar, Luther, who had ushered in this change.

All of this was true for the general culture that the Reformation brought into being, but we can’t fail to see that it was even more true of Nietzsche as an individual. Not only was he the son of a Lutheran pastor and a devout mother, but he was also sent to a school whose military-style discipline was dedicated to exactly the kind of scholarship that Luther and the other Protestants were masters of. The interpretation and translation of the holy books was the life’s work of such men, and Nietzsche was receiving a first-class education in the same methods. But, alongside the Christian tradition, there was the other tradition that had heavily informed European culture: the Greeks and Romans. The Renaissance had most conspicuously revived interest in this kind of classical scholarship, and it had also seen a surge of interest in the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, Nietzsche’s original enrolment at the University of Bonn saw him studying both theology and classical philology, essentially the two foremost influences on modern Western culture.

In short, Nietzsche received a first-class initiation into the kind of scholarly life that had existed in Europe since medieval times. The university was a genuinely new kind of institution that medieval Europe created for itself through the influence of the Catholic Church. As a result, university scholars were always Christians, often devoutly so. But there are two things about this tradition that are highly unusual when viewed from a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective. The first was the diverse array of culture heroes and stories that had been handed down from antiquity. Through the Christian tradition, there was the figure of Jesus as well as all the other major figures of the Bible. Then there were the Roman and Greek traditions with culture heroes such as Socrates, Plato, Alexander and so on. This meant that modern Western culture from medieval times onwards had at least two different sets of culture heroes to draw on in addition to the indigenous mythology of the various regions of Europe.

The second thing that is highly unusual about this is the abstractness of it all, and this brings us back to the issue of imitation. The stories of Jesus or Socrates took place in societies which no longer existed. If initiation is supposed to entail imitation, how could one imitate a man like Socrates if one didn’t live in a Greek city-state? And how could one imitate Jesus in rebelling against the religious authorities when it was those religious authorities who claimed to speak on behalf of Jesus? The way to resolve this was to take a more abstract approach to the lessons handed down from antiquity, but that de-emphasised imitation in favour of abstraction. That is why the issue of the difference between a “Christian” and a “disciple” arose. The Christian knows the doctrines of the faith but does not necessarily practice what he preaches. Without the requirement for imitation, Christianity eventually devolved into hypocrisy. This was especially problematic among the Protestants since it was Protestantism that reinvigorated the idea that imitation was required of the faithful, and yet how could one translate the example of Jesus into the modern world? The growing problem of hypocrisy meant that the abstractions of the faith had become even more stretched and hollowed out by the 19th century. This was a big part of the reason why Christianity lost relevance among the educated classes. In many respects, Nietzsche represented a paradigm example of a member of that class since he renounced his belief in Christianity at exactly the time he began his university studies.

At the same time as this loss of faith in Christianity was happening, scholars had begun to approach the religion from a secular point of view. In the years before his renunciation, Nietzsche had been reading Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Ernest Renan, and others who interpreted the Bible not as the sacred word of God or as holy revelation but as the projection of human psychology. Jesus was no longer the son of God but just a man who thought he was the son of God. The miracles he performed were no longer real but either figments of imagination or standard literary tropes that had been inserted into the story. Whether we agree or disagree with any of that, the point is that these new interpretations also functioned as initiatory devices. When we say that Nietzsche “read them”, it’s clear that he did more than that. He believed them, and he believed in the broader movement of which they were a part. Nietzsche’s renunciation of faith was not just nihilistic rebellion for its own sake; it was a decision to renounce theology in favour of a different way of life, philology. It was a decision to follow a different group of Elders (Feuerbach, Strauss, Renan) on a different initiatory pathway.

Thus, the Orphan phase of Nietzsche’s life does not show us an individual only but a young man following in the footsteps of the heroes of his culture. His enrolment at Schulpforta and his subsequent university studies place him in the category of the scholar-monk that had been a staple archetype in Europe since medieval times. The scholar-monks had inherited a synthesised tradition with heroic figures such as Luther and Calvin concerned with the Christian lineage, while other great scholars such as Montaigne or Goethe drew inspiration more from Greece and Rome. One way to view Western history since medieval times was as a back-and-forth battle between these two traditions, the Renaissance tilting the balance in favour of Athens and the Reformation in favour of Jerusalem. If that’s true, then the 19th century saw the waning of Jerusalem and the return of Athens. Nietzsche made the choice to become part of that movement. In a letter to his sister, he put it this way, “Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire…” The young scholar was choosing what he saw to be the more exciting path forward for his life.