Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

On the craft of morality

Each one of us has a set of beliefs and there are many aspects of these beliefs that quite often go unchallenged, unquestioned. For example, most of us, if not all, see kindness and sympathy as a virtue. Most of us think that freedom is better than slavery, or equality is better than inequality. These are the beliefs which we never question, challenge or ponder over. The line of thinking that involuntarily comes to mind is that how could inequality be better than equality. Such line of thinking, to our psyche, persistently appears so obvious, rational and therefore, unshakable. 

But nothing could be farther from truth. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that all moralities are designed and they serve the purpose of those who created that morality. There are fundamentally two types of people who create moral values: masters and slaves. According to Nietzsche, in ancient Greek and Roman societies, the predominant morality was that created by the masters. In those societies, the elites or aristocrats, in accordance with their practical circumstances, valued “nobility, strength and power” over “weakness, cowardice and timidity”. They considered it a good thing to perform their duties to their equals only. They found it derogatory to help those who were weak, inferior and oppressed. Instead, they inspired fear and inferiority in them to gain power over them. In time, the superior persons in the society shaped a moral code that made strength a good thing and weakness a bad thing. And this entire conferring of honor on things was based on a simple sentiment: what is good to me is good in itself and what is bad to me is bad in itself. If you lived in such society, you would probably have believed slavery to be a natural order or equality to be "a collective degradation of men".

When the masters created their own morality, the slaves retaliated by what Nietzsche called slave morality. It was a reaction to the master’s oppression. It villainized the oppressors and gave birth to the concept of evil. It intended to make the master feel guilty about himself because he oppressed the weak, the needy and the unemancipated. It brought warm heart, obliging hand, humility, charity and pity to honor. It valued those qualities which highlighted the plight of the sufferers. In other words, the slaves chose humility and sympathy to be moral virtues because this suited their own position and because it demonized the masters whom they hated. The moral values were made moral in an attempt to conceal the creator’s selfishness.

According to Nietzsche, in the struggle to power, the slave morality triumphed the master morality. This was because the powerful were few in number compared to the masses of the weak. The weak corrupted the strong into believing that “good” means “tending to ease suffering” and “evil” means “tending to inspire fear”. This was the most intelligent revenge designed by the weak. Nietzsche considered the biblical principle of turning the other cheek and kindness towards fellow humans as the manifestation of same slave morality. Religion was, to him, just a tool of the dominant class to indoctrinate the society in such a way to best serve their own interests.

In the same way, he considered the rise of democracy as a part of the same emasculating ideology. Democracy seeks to offer everyone freedom and equal representation which is exactly what the weak wanted. The predominant belief in our society that democracy is better than dictatorship is a testimony to the victory of the slaves over the masters. This old invention of the weak has permeated into every part of our socio-economic lives. We can't help but see the ideas like utilitarianism, liberalism, and communism in the same light. Their "priestly vindictiveness" has conquered the psyche of a modern man.

So, what we consider as a moral is not actually moral in literal sense. These morals are good not because of their inherent goodness, but because of their usefulness to those who believe and act according to them. It is equally good or equally wrong to help others. Find who you are because depending on your position, your weapon of morality should change. If you are the one in need of help, your morals should be pity, kindness, friendship etc. If you are the one who has a command over the one who needs help, your morals could be power, strength and even cruelty.

P.S. I have skipped the part where Nietzsche argues in favor of master morality on very rational grounds. Personally, I still don't endorse the concept of "the higher path" for higher individuals at the cost of lower individuals, but it makes me reflect upon my own morality and its true identity. While it does not change the basic tenets of my moral thinking, it sure provides a new perspective, a new way of looking at it.

The Alchemy of the Reality and the Self

For a major portion of my life, I have found the world a regular and sensible place. This state of mind has, since childhood, provided a sense of meaning to my own existence and a sense of identity to everything around me. I have, inadvertently and involuntarily, felt ‘accustomed’ to the status quo. Everything I have experienced, thought, and done has added up to an eloquently usual picture. And since there was no aberration or bizarreness, such a picture of the world has always appeared to me so elegant, so beautiful and so majestic.

But in the last few years, the world has started to look an unusual place to me. In a state of confusion and bewilderment, I have made a naïve attempt to dissect things into more fundamental level just as a kid makes an attempt to dismantle a toy he is puzzled by. I thought that I could make sense of the toy by understanding its constituents, its inner parts. But ironical as it may seem, things turned out exactly the opposite. Before I could have realized, I had ventured into a brave new world where most of the things were, at best, absurd and, at worst, meaningless. As I painfully figured out to my surprise and shock, my own endeavors had shaken the very foundations of my world. I realized that all my life was a lie and even my thoughts had betrayed me so far. What was earlier an axiomatic truth, a usual course of event, and an absolute order- was now something else entirely. I realized that I was just a pawn in the bigger scheme. I found my conclusions wrong not because I concluded wrongly but because the assumptions behind those conclusions were, in the first place, fallacious. The deep-seated beliefs, the long-held observations, the indoctrinated thoughts had left my side when I needed them most to put sense to my world. Like a lone wanderer gets lost in an unknown desert, I had gotten lost in the desert of what we fondly call reality. Or probably, I was just coming to senses that I was lost.

In these dark times I saw my theories change, ideologies mutate, and view-points modify. The thoughts of the old times … well …became thoughts of the old times. The ‘person’ in me changed forever. And climactically, this metamorphosis was not such a pleasant experience as I thought it would be. The normal world was beautiful while the new unusual world had no concept like beauty. The old values were full of charm, optimism and hope; the new values were devoid of any such thing. The old perspective had the bliss of ignorance, it had ways to deal with the fundamental questions; the new perspective had the curse of wisdom which was all too murky inside its boundary and which simply denied any explanation to the deeper questions with sheer nonchalance. The old life was an exciting, enthusiastic existence; the new one a mere mindless, relentless game. But for me, the greatness of the old had given way to the mundaneness of the new. In a short span of time, I had taken an irreversible, and detrimental, leap of shift from elegance to inelegance, grandness to ordinariness, and excitement to boredom. And there was no coming back to the old world because although it was persistently beautiful, it was still an illusion, a hypnosis.

And it is perhaps the value of ‘truth’ which singlehandedly outclasses the virtues of the old world. The pain of being wiser is not as hurtful as the pain of being under deception of the greater scheme. Even though I have not lived long, I seem to have seen enough of the commonsense feelings and the mainstream reality. Grown weary of this "fake sense of the sensible", I place the highest value on truth and, truth alone. This blog is simply a testimony to this feeling and this feeling is solely mine. And at no cost should such feelings be forgotten or lost because if they are lost, so would I be.

Therefore, I write this blog to remind me in future that when I finish off my duel with evolution, when I meet life beyond the borders of right or wrong, when I chase away the darkness of a subjective, ego-centric human life and when I have nothing to care about in this whole world except the profoundest reason and abyssal mystery, I, my true self, would have to set out on a journey which is so ironical in nature that it may lead me nowhere or perhaps everywhere, that it may be utterly meaningless or perhaps full of meaning or, that it may be  very important or perhaps very futile. Last it may for a fleeting second, such a journey, such an experience of the unattainable, such a moment of true romance would be more fulfilling than a lifetime spent in the awe of the old world and in the glitter of an illusive existence.