Stats for nerds
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2020–2024years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- if you want to understand what's going on zoom out and look at the last 200 years of civilization and society. Nietzsche is probably the best resource who predicted this. You can read "Ecco Homo" or "Thus spoke Zarathistra" and see the parallels in our modern life. He predicted the herd mentality which we've created. We despise and fear mental pain which is required for growing and most of us rather Netflix'n'Chill than read a book. Parents who put their kids on Ritalin or give them a tablet to be quiet.
Then as part of the herd-mentality we have the social-justice-warriors and activists and the cancel-culture preachers who try to fill this void with their own faulty logic (as a way to cope with their own pain - knowing something terrible is happening but drawing dangerous and false conclusions they are nothing but fools).
Today we have also the PsychologyIndustrialComplex which is filled with people who have no idea what they're talking about. It's no surprise that the product of all this is collective depression, rising nihilism and anti-natalism, and hate. Technology's (and Science and Academia in general) role in this is to produce ways of "making things easier" (coping mechanisms) but no longer to produce greatness. So science and knowledge as taught today is not the way out but part of the cause.
Here are a few videos, though you should probably read the books if you can:
1) Nietzsche and Psychology: How To Become Who You Are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfyCzLbcAvk
2) Nietzsche and Morality: The Higher Man and The Herd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE67Ye91Ii0
3) Nietzsche and Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Last Man and The Superman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnhMJl11JUo
4) Nietzsche and Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Becoming Gods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XrVnjpVdWE
there is also "The conspiracy against the human race" by Thomas Ligotti (which was stolen by the producers of "True Detectives" for a monologue without giving credits). https://archive.org/details/TheConspiracyAgainstTheHumanRace
- Nihilism has nothing to do with either world war. You’re likely trying to blame Nietzsche, who was the polar opposite of a nihilist, for German nationalism. The radical optimist Nietzsche, in his old age while writing Ecco homo, disavowed his German heritage and spoke about how awesome Poland and his polish identity were.
Nihilism is only just now having an impact in the academy as it is the intellectual foundation of post modernist and critical theory.
- Yet again, recommending abstruse works. Being and Time is absurdly difficult for even Philosophy Ph.Ds to parse. Worse yet, Phenomenology is kinda like metaphysics in that many people in the field don't believe that it's even truly legitimate. Heidegger had to go and claim that his biggest fans (Sartre) actually compleatly misunderstood him entirely. If Sartre can't get it right, can a random newcomer understand it the way Heidegger intended?
As far as Nietzsche goes - by his own words (he is very clear about this in one of his books - I think it was ecco homo) - you're supposed to have read ALL of the works of Kant and then Schopenhauer before you can even understand Nietzsche. Not that many people agree with him about that, but it did color my perception of him (and the study of the two that he asks the readers to look into does a massive amount to explain why Nietzsche sounds like such an edgelord)...
