Zip file of the entire book (365MB)

Nietzsche advocates social change in order for humankind to rise above its present deplorable condition. He says that God is dead and is no longer a model for moral leadership. He counsels us that redirecting our focus from the unknowable to the knowable will guide us towards the journey to humankind’s next incarnation – the Superman. In order to begin this evolutionary journey we will first have to experience a great revulsion at the current human condition. In this “hour of great contempt” we will deny all of our previous, favorable conceptions concerning happiness, reason, virtue, justice, sympathy, and sin. Instead, we will embrace over-going, down-going, despisers, earth-worshipers, seekers of practical knowledge, workers, inventors, true virtue, altruists, achievers, and free spirits.

Nietzsche believes that all of the present, negative social trends will culminate in the most contemptible of all beings – the last man – who is no longer capable of despising himself. This last man will live in a condition which he has helped create of fear, false happiness, pleasure-seeking, working as a pastime, over-concern for the feelings of others, egalitarianism, and cleverness without wisdom. Further, once the last man evolves, the social environment that has created him (and he has also, reflexively, created this environment) will be somewhat permanent because it will tend to absorb all differences of opinion, merge them into a consensus, and reflect them back into society through an opinion-shaping filter of egalitarianism voiced in politically correct terms. In a moment of irony, the crowd called-out to the sage, Zarathustra, to “make us into these last men.”

It is arguable that the last man is alive and well in contemporary society, and that the intellectual, social, and regional diversities which once generated the rich and vibrant hues of the American canvas are being replaced with a drab, homogeniety of sterile sameness. Nietzsche feels that the ultimate, inevitable revulsion against and overthrow of the kingdom of the last man will give rise to its polar opposite – the spiritually elevating, authentic world of the Superman.

The author has an almost compelling thesis, however, his bipolar construct ranging from the last man to the Superman seems to minimize the fact that objective reality represents only a small group of choices from an infinite pool of alternatives. The world will not long march to the tune of a single drummer, be he the last man or Superman, because of how unchanging human nature is constituted. A first constant of human nature seems to be that we are well aware of our own situation, but only remotely aware of others’ concerns. A second constant seems to be that we will, on the average, tend to maximize our chances for immediate personal benefit over chances for potentially greater long-term gain. Therefore, we will, on balance, tend to act in ways which maximize our own short-term self-interest. We probably always have and likely always will. If history is any guide to the future, attempts to reshape the world modelled after the vision of a Superman (or even the last man) will be morphed to unrecognizable dimensions by the unfolding, collective self-interest of individuals in the day-to-day process of following their own, personal stars.

Although I feel that Nietzsche’s prescribed alternatives are distortions of reality through oversimplification, misdirection, and projection to a whole from a subset, his work is a highly-influential, excellent read.