What is ‘wrong’? The Strong can do as they please.
Who are the ‘Strong’?
They who conquer. They who take the spoil and camp on the battlefield. All life is a battlefield.
How did subjectiveness originate?
The first slave was a defeated fighter, afterwards tamed by hunger and blows. His descendants being born and trained to submissiveness are more tractable. All the Servile Classes are posterity of beaten battlers.
Then vassalage still flourishes as of yore?
Certainly. In the pitiless strife for existence, all weaklings and feeble-minded persons are justly subordinated.
But we are taught ‘all men are created equal’?
You are taught many a diplomatic Lie.
How can a slave recover his liberty?
By re-conquering his conqueror. If he feels that he not man enough then he must submit, cut his own throat, or die fighting unsubdued.
But freedom may be granted to him?
‘Freedom cannot be granted, it must be taken’.
Then Strife is perpetual, inevitable, nay, glorious?
Yes! It is intended as an ordeal, a trial by combat. It unmistakably divides the guilty from the non-guilty.
But that is a harsh philosophy?
Nature is harsh, cruel, merciless to all unlovely things. Her smile is only for the Courageous, the Strong, the Beautiful and the All-Daring.
You have no comfort for the ‘poor and lowly’, the ‘innocent ones’, the ‘downtrodden’?
The poor and lowly are a creeping pestilence — there are no innocent ones, and the downtrodden are the justly damned — sinners in a hell they’ve made.
You praise the Strong, you glorify the Mighty ones?
I do. They are Natures noblemen. In them she delights: the All-Vanquishers! the Dauntless Ones!
CHAPTER IV: MAN — THE CARNIVORE!
It has taken countless evolutionary epochs to make man what he is, the most ferocious hirsute beast of prey that inhabits the caverns and jungles of earth.
Can his osseous mechanism and pathological instincts be summarily extinguished or reversed, merely by connecting him, per an electric wire, laid through the sewers of Rome, to the feeble dynamos of Bethlehem, and Tarsus? Can his structural anatomy, intended for conflict and slaughter, be transformed in a day, a year, or even in “a million, million of suns?”
To overmaster and devour his neighbor, in the reasoned effort to obtain food and booty, land, love, renown and gold is bred into the very marrow of his bones. Therefore all efforts made by Reformers and Messiahs, to transfigure him into a “lamb” are fore-ordained to fathomless failure. Indeed it would be much more reasonable of them, to attempt the transfiguration of a grizzly bear into a parlor poodle or propose the transformation of a bald-headed eagle into a gently cooing turtle-dove.
Nearly all the prophetic demi-gods of Democracy from Paul and Isaiah to Carlyle and Ruskin, have ever been madly screeching by the roadside, vainly endeavoring to stay the march! march! march! of a world of bannered armies; striding grimly, sternly by. What are these howling prophets of Evil but dogs eloquently baying at the moon? “Right wheel there! Right wheel! Turn back! Turn back! You are going to the devil!” is there resounding ear-splitting chorus. But the human flood sweeps on silently, scornfully, confident, inspired as it were by some over-mastering instinct. “We may be going to the devil,” is the unspoken retort of these thundering legionaries — these Nations “but even so! is not the Devil honest — the Destroyer of Deception! — the Disobedient One?”
Can you lasso the stars with a green-hide lariat? Can you block the march of Might with magnificent howls of declamatory despair? No! No! Skyward or hellward, man moves on and on and on. If there are barricades in his way, he must surmount them or blast them aside. If there are Wild Beasts ready to spring upon him, he must destroy them or they will destroy him. If the highroad leads though hells, then those infernos must be besieged, assailed and taken possession of — aye, even if their present monarchs have to be rooted-out with weapons as demoniac and deadly as their own.
This world is too peaceful, too acquiescent, too tame. It is a circumcised world. Nay! — a castrated world! It must be made fiercer, before it can become grander and better and — more natural.
Fools indeed are they who would arrest the unfolding process with “humanitarian” Cagliostroism, and “rescue the perishing” mummery. Maniacs are they who would ward off the suns blazing rays from withering souls or the blighting frosts of winter from hearts that are already broken. For, I doubt not, through the ages, one tremendous purpose runs; and maturing crops are ripened with the process of the suns — to be sickled down, threshed and rolled away.
Undoubtedly the Black Magic of the Christ Myth, combined with the subterranean sorcery of medieval sacredotalism has partially succeeded, not only in sapping individual initiative, but also in suppressing in our Race many of its ancestral leonine traits and superb Barbarian Virtues. But as yet, it has not wholly triumphed in its emasculating necromancy. No! it has not transfigured us all into teams of contented oxen and bunches of earmarked sheep, although that is its final hope. There are some of the grand old stock, left alive. Few indeed are they amidst a world of slaves and swine.
The lion is still the lion, although his teeth have been most foully filed down by abominable moral codes; his skin made scrofulous with the mange and leprosy of caged peacefulness — his paws fettered by links of slave-voted statutes and an iron collar of State Officialism wound around his regal neck.
Someday, sometime, he is destines to break through the vile bonds that have been cunningly laid on him, escape from the wasting decline that originates from unnatural confinement and regain once more his primitive freedom of Action. The treacherous legislators and illustrious statesmen, who are now so eager to teach him the method of growing wool like sheep and how to fit his battle-scarred shoulders to a horse collar, may then be sorry and sad (if they have time) — for he will probably chew them up.
Great and powerful governments, Commanding Peace, come into existence only in ages of decadence; when nations are on the downward grade. If the human animal lives a natural, cleanly life, out on the plains and forests, away, where oceans rollers crash along the shore, or on the banks of the pouring rivers he requires no police-force to “protect” him — no usurious Jew to rob him of his harvests — no tax-gathering legislators to vote away his property, and no ‘priests of the Idol’ to “save” his soul.
It is false standards of morality that debase and enfeeble individuals, tribes and nations. First, in obedience to some sovereign code, they lose their hardihood and increase their numbers. Then that all may live, they become laborious, submissive to Regulations; and finally — with Death held up by priestcraft as a fearsome Terror, all personal valor fades away. Thus nations of spaniels are manufactured.
The normal man is the man that loves and feasts and fights and hunts, the predatory man. The abnormal man is he that toils for a master, half-starves, and “thinks” — the Christly dog. The first is a perfect animal; the second, a perfect — monster.
Every belief that makes a duty of humility — that inspires a people with “moral” courage only, enervates their fiber, corrupts their spirit, and prepares them first for thralldom and then for — throttling.
It is not possible to conceive of Grand Life without incessant rivalry, perpetual warfare and the implacable hunting of man by man.