FeralJesus.com - Feral Resistance to Government, Religion and Toil

Unless a dog is domesticated

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Feral Jesus

Crumbs fall to the marble floor where the dog lays waiting, licking her wounds

Wary, slinking, she sometimes shows her teeth out of fear

of the too-familiar strangers garbed in business suits, deputized with badges, or adorned with medals of honor.

The cute puppy perks her ears and tilts her head hoping a stranger will toss her a scrap.

She gets a pat on her head and a Medicaid card until she is of age.

Now grown, the desperate dog rolls around on her back with the suits and warriors for a few crumbs.

Sometimes the angry, hungry bitch snarls and pulls the feast from the rich man’s table.

The strangers then lock her up or put her to sleep.

Unless a dog is domesticated, she is not worth the trouble.

Binding the Strong Man

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Feral Jesus

“In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house.” ~ Jesus of Nazareth (Mark 3:27)

If you don’t think that government is at its core a coercive, violent organization, take a look at the Cyprus government’s plan to loot the savings of private investors in recent days. Cypriots are feeling the searing flames of government theft as the Cyprus government just announced it will confiscate billions of dollars from Cypriots and foreign nationals from banks to help secure a bailout of its financial structure from the EU. Put another way, the State is taking property from the people to secure the fortunes of the elitist of the elite.

Expect more of this activity by the State as governments become desperate to protect the interests of the elite bankers and the wealthiest of investors and corporations. In the U.S., the wealthy class has been more furtive in their looting efforts. Instead of outright confiscation of funds from banks, they have stolen people’s savings by keeping interest rates artificially low and by borrowing trillions of dollars in money that does not exist from future people who do not yet exist.

Civilizations are unsustainable by nature. Civilizations extract from external sources in order to meet the needs of the people within a civilization. Historically, the elites within a civilization are master extractors. They use the moral force of government and religion to justify their actions.

The work of Feral Jesus and his followers is to discredit the legitimacy of civilization and to debunk the moral authority of the State, of all tools of civilization. This work is accomplished by demonstrating the immorality, the deceit and the horrific violence of civilization’s tools – the State, religion, corporations, and mass media, to name a few, and by living an alternative way of life outside of civilization’s structure.

Jesus called for a binding of the strong man. Some will choose violent protests and guerilla actions to bind the strong man. Of course, such violent reactions are usually unsuccessful and when they are successful produce only a temporary freedom from oppressors before another oppressor fills the void.

Feral Jesus sought to bind the strong man through a series of creative and amusing activities. He engaged in the paradoxically playful activity of publicly, smarmily ignoring the State and religious authorities (If there is one thing the sociopaths of the State and religion hate, it is to be ignored. Don’t believe me? Don’t pay your taxes or tithe and see who gets offended). Feral Jesus also created temporary “economies” outside the authorized structure (e.g., gleaning and fishing). He publicly demonstrated the fraud that is the State and religion and wealth-building by contrasting their avarice and greed with the purity of the poor. On one occasion he engaged in property destruction, disrupting a part of the financial machine (e.g., driving out the money-changers).

What creative and amusing activities to live faithfully the way of Feral Jesus can you imagine and practice?

Finding “Living Water” in an age of water scarcity

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Feral Jesus

Water is naturally abundant. It wells up from deep, vast, life-giving springs. For millions of years, men and women around the globe had unqualified access to free, clean water. A little over ten thousand years ago with the rise of civilizations, as wandering peoples began to settle and populate the earth in large numbers, water, once thought as an everlasting source, became a commodity, an exploitable resource. Ever since, neighborhood feuds and regional wars have been fought over access to water. The situation is worsening and becoming an acute problem in the early twenty-first century. In the Middle East and the Asian and African continents, water access is becoming a huge national security issue and public health issue. By 2040, observers predict that water shortages around the globe will lead to ever-increasing regional conflicts between people groups and nations.

In recent decades, nations whose populations have outpaced their water supplies have tried various makeshift strategies to provide water to their people. They have tried everything from importing water via complex delivery systems to reverse osmosis desalination plants, both of which are logistically and economically unsustainable as water resources dwindle. Water systems are increasingly polluted by industrial and agricultural run-off. They are also at risk of being polluted with lethal contaminants by neighboring enemies. Furthermore, climate change is drying up water stores in regions faster than any technological fix can restore it. Desalination, often mentioned as a hopeful answer to regional water scarcity, is a costly process that yields little water in return for the exorbitant costs.

Newer attempts at desalination do not promise immediate relief to the growing global water shortage. Weapons-maker Lockheed Martin recently announced it is developing a new desalination filter known as perforene that could be 100 times more efficient than current expensive filtering processes. Its production is still a long way off.

The water shortage problem is a civilization problem. The historical advance of civilization, that sweeping, destructive change away from the traditional hunter-gather way of life to an agricultural and urban existence, is a project defined by unsustainability, extraction, division and violence. The earliest agricultural and urban enterprises stretching from Egypt to Babylon quickly demonstrated the unsustainability of large-scale farming as soils rapidly depleted, famines regularly occurred and water supplies were overused. Urban centers, which developed around agricultural economies, increasingly depleted available resources, requiring that city-states go outside of their boundaries to acquire resources to provide food, water and other resources to their peoples and economies. Violent wars to obtain access to land, water and slave labor initiated endless suffering and destruction among civilized peoples. Furthermore, those primitive nomadic groups who chose to remain outside the civilization project were driven out of their hunting and gathering grounds by more militarily and technologically “advanced” urban peoples. The annihilation of indigenous peoples around the globe by the civilization project is nearly complete today.

We are a people now totally dependent on municipal water supplies for access to water. Water is a commodity. A commodity in a scarcity environment become expensive. We will see the cost for access to water increase in the decades to come, meaning the wealthy will have access to clean water while the poor will make do with contaminated water or die from the lack thereof. This scenario is already playing out in impoverished, water-scarce pockets of the world. As the aquifers and lakes dry up on the North American continent, industrial and agricultural pollutants in our water supply continue to increase, and as wealthy landowners and corporations begin to seize water supplies around the continent, we, too, will begin to see wars for water.

Jesus of Nazareth called for an exodus from the civilized life that dried up both our natural resources and our souls. He called followers to seek a simple life, reject the suicidal quest for material gain that leads to destructive acquisition and extraction of resources and to instead pursue living water. There was a hope among the early Christians that by following Jesus out of civilization’s destructive grip they would find a primal land, one reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, in which they would no longer have to worry about the scarcity of food, water and famine brought on by civilization’s destructive governments, armies and ecological destroyers. In one vision, a follower of Jesus’ way, who had been exiled to an island because of his criticism of the powers that be, wrote:

‘Never again will they hunger;

never again will they thirst.

The sun will not beat down on them,’

nor any scorching heat.

For the Lamb at the center of the throne

will be their shepherd;

‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’

‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes (Revelation 7:16-17)

Janus Christians and “The War Prayer”

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Feral Jesus

“Everything in the Bible is written for us, but not to us.” ~ Laurence M. Vance, “Janus Christians”

“Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.” ~ Mark Twain, “The War Prayer”

Historian Laurence M. Vance writes that the average evangelical Christian is largely to blame for the horrific American military empire that encircles the globe spreading torture, death, destruction and fear wherever it goes, which is just about everywhere these days. Without the political support of evangelicals, the American military death machine with its “empire of troops and bases that encircles the globe, large defense budgets, overseas military interventions, the perpetual war on terror, and now torture” would dry on the vine, and we would be free from its evils, or at least see its destruction diminished.

Here is a link to Vance’s article, called “Janus Christians.”

While you’re at it, take a look at “The War Prayer,” by Mark Twain, which satirizes the war-mongering Christians’ support of war and militarism. This “prayer” was published posthumously in 1916 as the nation’s leaders prepared for another one of America’s fine imperialistic interventions, World War I. Twain did not publish “The War Prayer” while alive for fear of the backlash he would receive from Janus Christians.

The State and the Church crucified Jesus

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Feral Jesus

“There does not exist on this earth today an institution that is more distinctly or persistently hostile to all that Jesus stood for, or that is more radically opposed to all his teaching, or that has a greater contempt for that Nazarene, than this church which pretends to worship him as a God. The church did not even adopt the name of Jesus. It was under the name of Jesus that the pillars of church and state crucified him. They did not crucify a Christ. Not at all. They put to death Jesus of Nazareth, the man whose ideas and ideals were hostile to all they were cherishing. That was the man the pietists and rulers of that first century were after.”

~ William Thurston Brown, “The Axe at the Root“

Two Views of Cynicism: Bertrand Russell and Diogenes of Sinope

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Feral Jesus

Bertrand Russell in his 1930 essay, “On Youthful Cynicism,” decried the cynicism of young adults in the western world, posited why for the first time in

Bertrand Russell

the West youth were not optimistic but rather cynical about the future, and suggested, in good liberal fashion, that education was the answer to modern youthful cynicism. Modern youth, said Russell, are “unable to believe what they are told, but they seem also unable to believe anything else.” He contrasted this distrust with the idealism of the East in Russia, China, India and Japan were young people still held to a political ideology. In the East, young people were not cynical because they were either still animated by the dreaminess of political ideology or filled with hatred for those who did not subscribe to their religion. Young modern intellectuals in the West had outgrown such patriotism, “the chief curse of our age,” and other-worldly faith with its “oppressive ethic.” Western youth also no longer trusted in the promise of progress, having lost enthusiasm for economic and technological growth, realizing that each new invention, such as “the radio, the talkies, and poison gas,” only “make people silly.” Russell lamented that beauty no longer inspired modern youth. With the earth no longer at the center of the universe, as was not the case with the philosophies of past generations, modern youth could no longer take their art seriously, and so were filled with a cynical “rage against the world.” Finally, modern youth no longer held truth as “absolute, eternal and superhuman.” No one was motivated by pure truth but rather by Marxian economic or Freudian sexual motives.

As is often the case with the insight of liberal observers, Russell’s critique is helpful but the solution is daintily weak and naively malicious. Ultimately, for Russell, it was neither the lack of love for country or God, nor a rejection of progress, beauty or absolute truth that were the cause for modern cynicism in the West. Leaving behind the “rusty armor of outworn superstitions” seemed a natural progression for the intellectual West. Why then were young Westerners so cynical? The lack of a classical education among the economic and political elite of the West was to blame. Russell maintained that If only the filthy rich and the corrupt politicians could be educated in ancient philosophy and “real cultural values,” then the West would come alive again. “How pleasant a world would be,” he wrote, “in which no man was allowed to operate on the Stock Exchange unless he could pass an examination in economics and Greek poetry, and in which politicians were obliged to have a competent knowledge of history and modern novels!” In other words, education is the remedy for the scourge of modern cynicism.

What Russell failed to see, as do most liberal and conservative social commentators, is that cynicism is not a sickness but a cure. The sickness is hierarchy, domestication, mass culture, alienation and the violence of civilization as a whole. (See John Zerzan’s essay, “No Way Out?”). Patriotism and religious faith are idealistic masks to veil the true horror and pain of mass society, which the powerful use to maintain their authority. The classic cynics understood this and called into question the entire civilization project. For example, Diogenes of Sinope, the early Greek cynic in Athens, saw the civilized world as nothing more than an artificial apparatus and domestication as nothing more than enslavement. Authentic cynicism in any age shares Diogenes’ critique and rejects the silly idea that a power elite educated in the classics would more benevolently rule over the punch-drunk masses. A sociopath who can read Homer and Shakespeare is no less torturous and murderous of the masses he rules. Your pain will not be measurably reduced by hearing Mozart’s Concerto in D Minor hummed by the State guard ripping off your fingernails or the financier foreclosing on your home. Education does not make a sociopath more honest. Thus, Diogenes wandered about in broad daylight with a lit lantern looking for an honest man that he knew he would never find in civilized society.

Diogenes of Sinope looking for an honest man

What cure does cynicism offer for civilization? Early cynics like Antisthenes and Diogenes of Sinope, as well as other cynical figures throughout history, have offered similar ways to escape the oppression of civilized society. Diogenes of Sinope’s very public living out of cynicism is particularly helpful. First, the authentic cynic trusts in the ability of natural reason to guide one away from the control of social and political indoctrination. This was not the abstract reason of Platonic forms or the instrumental reason of the modern era (see Theodor Adorno) but one grounded in observing the way of nature and following nature’s patterns. Diogenes of Sinope recommended learning from the mouse as a means of adapting to life outside of domestication. Dogs, too, were good masters from whom to learn as they seemed happy, alive to the moment, and free of the anxieties of civilized life. Second, a cynic does not swear allegiance to any particular political, religious or geographic entity. Diogenes claimed to be a resident of the world, the first cosmopolitan. Third, a cynic is not encumbered by material possessions. Diogenes of Sinope lived in a wash basin and ate what he could find in nature or from the scraps of civilized people. Fourth, a cynic is hopeful, not full of rage. The cynic does not hate civilized people. Rather, the cynic sees men and women stuck in the rat race as pitiful creatures who have not yet awakened to the freedom and joy that is theirs if they would only reject the grip that social conventions have on their lives. Diogenes of Sinope thought a man was only free if he could defecate in public without embarrassment. The cynic enjoys helping lift the veil of ignorance from the faces of people whom she encounters. Whether by reasoned argument, wild acts of anti-social behavior, creative street theater or other innovative means, a cynic lives for the prospect of freeing one more person from the death grip of civilization.

Russell seemed nervous that the patriotic fervor and religious zeal of the Communist, Hindu and Islamic cultures of the East would combine to pose a threat to a Western world comprised of apathetic, uninspired cynics. But the authentic cynic is hopeful that the idealism (and accompanying fundamentalism) phase of the East will pass, as it is passing in the West. What will evolve throughout the cosmos – East and West – will be a world of people living free of hierarchy, oppressive domestication, militarism and the coercive State. The cynic’s solution for the good life is anarchy.

The gang known as The State

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Feral Jesus

Does wearing a T-shirt with the word “Marines” with a picture of two rifles underneath the word promote violence? An eighth-grade teacher at Genoa-Kingston Middle School in Illinois thinks so, but Karen Deverell soon learned that school administrators believe violence perpetrated by the State is an acceptable, even laudable, form of violence and the duty of all loyal patriots to celebrate.

According to Fox News, on February 26, Ms. Deverell instructed 14-year-old Michael McIntyre to turn his shirt bearing the word “Marines” and the picture of two rifles inside out or risk being suspended. She naturally assumed the shirt violated the district’s dress code that prohibits such references to violence. The boy’s father protested to Fox News, which investigated the incident.

The boy’s father, Daniel McIntyre, said, “It’s more about the Marines instead of the rifles.” Is it? What is a Marine without his rifle? He is no more than a man (or woman) in a camouflage uniform with a bad haircut. Marines are given rifles for a reason. That reason is to kill.

The Genoa-Kingston school district threw Deverell under the bus, bowing to a dull-witted public that worships the military and the State. Superintendent Joe Burgess pleaded ignorance of Ms. Deverell’s actions and said that the McIntyre’s shirt is not in violation of the district’s dress policy. But what does the policy state?

The Fox News report says that the policy reads: Student dress (including accessories) may not advertise, promote, or picture alcoholic beverages, illegal drugs, drug paraphernalia, violent behavior, or other inappropriate images…Student dress (including accessories) may not display lewd, vulgar or obscene or offensive language or symbols, including gang symbols.

The rifle and Marine shirt seems to violate the dress code on two counts. First, McIntyre’s shirt violates the prohibition of shirts with pictures promoting “violent behavior.” If a shirt with crossed rifles underneath the word Marines does not promote violence, then nothing does. It is not a shocking statement to say that the U.S. Marines are a violent group. Their purpose is to force the will of the U.S. government on anyone the government deems necessary by means of military violence. The fundamental mission of the US Marines is not Toys for Tots. Their fundamental mission is to kill in order to protect the State from enemies, foreign and domestic.

Second, the T-shirt violates the district’s dress code because it displays a gang symbol. A gang is an organized group of criminals. Criminals are persons who commit crimes. Crimes, to use Lysander Spooner’s famous definition, are “those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another” (“Vices are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty” 1875). Thus, we can say that a gang is an organized group of persons who commit acts of harm to the person or property of another. This defines the State. The State causes harm by forcibly appropriating the labor and property of the people within the landmass that it controls and uses these for its own purposes, most often against the will of those whose labor and property are being appropriated. The Marine Corps, and the other branches of the military, have the express purpose of protecting this gang-related behavior of the State. To wear a shirt with the word “Marines,” with or without accompanying rifles, is unmistakably a gang symbol.

Superintendent Burgess understands and supports the violent nature of the State and the public education’s role in maintaining the State’s dominance. “Our middles school,” he said, “is well-known for its support of the armed forces.” The students are “dutiful patriots who support U.S. troops as much as they can.” Translation: We support the State’s seizing of individual’s labor and property, the military’s mission to protect this gang-like activity and the school system’s role in ensuring that each new crop of citizens never questions this activity.

Karen Deverell failed to see that her school and the Marines are both tools of the violent gang known as the State. Like the school’s dress code, the State’s dress code requires that all good citizens live in a “neat, clean, well-fitting manner.” To question the legitimacy of the Marines is “lewd behavior.” To question the State is “vulgar and obscene.” Ms. Deverell’s school, like all public schools, is in the business of ensuring that citizens never think otherwise. Ms. Deverell showed signs of thinking otherwise and was quickly silenced.

Oh Well, Orwell, I Guess You Were Right

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Feral Jesus

There’s drones in the sky

Cameras on the wall

The Ministry of Truth

Just paid us a call

Someone’s been listening in

Oh well, Orwell, I guess you were right.

There’s guards on the wall

To keep people out

But haven’t you noticed?

They’ve done an about face

Staring down the barrel of a gun

Oh well, Orwell, I guess you were right.

Hey, sleepy girl, where have you been?

Don’t you know they’re listening in

To this song

Patriotric parades

Once brought me to tears

Now they create in me

A cadence of fear

Jackboots pounding on the pavement

Oh well, Orwell, I guess you were right

That screen in the corner

That you’re staring at

It’s staring back

Into your soul

Are you fulfilling your role?

Oh well, Orwell, I guess you were right

Hey, sleepy girl, where have you been?

Don’t you know they’re listening in

To this song?

They’ve taken our child

Put them in schools

They’ll learn to salute

Follow the rules

One more child for the war

Oh well, Orwell, I guess you were right.

Hey, sleepy girl, where have you been?

Don’t you know they’re listening in

To this song?

They’re always listening in to your song.

The Authentic Cynic

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Feral Jesus

Thesis

Authentic cynicism is optimism. This is not Orwellian Newspeak. Understand the veracity and depth of this statement and you will find joy. The biting dogs are the happy ones.

Modernism

Modernism is cold, rational thought,

denuded forests,

an endless procession of power-line poles

white-dashed interstate highways leading nowhere.

Crumbling pavement blanketing the soil, suffocating earthworms.

Believing the same technology that begat the atomic bomb and the earth mover has the capacity to create for us a safe, settled life.

The cold, vicious State

inducing tears and lumps in the throats of its dulled victims

the flag waving at sporting events. Fighter jet flybys.

A spotted, sagging soldier, 101^st Airborne cap, a dementia stare, facing a wall,

rocking to and fro in the nursing home

Fat, uniformed attendants step around him, sipping on Pepsi.

Modernism is a smirking god in the sky, supernatural or ideological,

Astounded after thousands of years that we still believe his shit.

Cynicism glares at modernism and bites.

Postmodernism

Cynicism glances at post-modernism and laughs uproariously,

embarrassed for but amused by its effeminate philosophers.

Black-framed glasses, hair gel, oxfords, blue jeans and sandals,

sipping cappuccino.

Unskilled laborers on laptops,

lying on tweed sofas, lying to themselves in the cloud.

Teachers of a shameful, weak digression.

They cannot reach the transcendent,

so they cling to fatherly fragments of transcendence in the ideological sky,

a paternal presence that abandoned them when they were in diapers.

A broken world they traverse and a miscellaneous sky they wing.

The postmodernist found no unity so embraced a misty mosaic,

the god of Moses for the god of montage.

Both gods reside in the dreamy sky of ideas.

Ideas in the sky destroy life on earth.

The cynic remains faithful to the earth.

Authentic cynicism defined

Authentic cynicism is really not a reaction or response but a life-affirming Awakening made lucent by the nihilism of modernism, the emptiness of post-modernism, the artifice of civilization.

Awakening from a Dream

Authentic cynicism growls at the hypocrisy and decadence of social customs, the State, religion, toil and all other elements of the civilization project. The old ideas and institutions that for millennia sustained civilization’s lie are revealed to the cynic as ever-tightening shackles. Cynics have awakened from the dream of civilization to see that it was indeed a juvenile fantasy contrived by indolent sociopaths and maintained by well-paid warriors, bureaucrats, priests and kings who have overseen the enslavement of humans and suicidal extraction from the earth, all of them inspired by an infantile fascination with technology as an answer to the human condition.

Religion

Institutional religion has crumbled under the weight of its own arrogance, self-aggrandizement and irrelevancy. Unemployed priests and preachers are flocking to bureaucratic positions in the State where they can control people from the lofty heights of government power. Perhaps not as lofty as heaven, but they will find higher salaries with benefits. A temporary gig until the State, too, collapses of its own avarice and greed. Then the only remaining kingdom will be the family where the former hireling priests will rule with an iron fist. The head of household is the last great hold out for sociopaths.

The State

Government offers sanction and inspiration

for those who hunger for flesh and thirst for blood

In Pilate’s washed hands the body is broken and the cup is poured

Perpetual, imperialistic wars

Debasement and reliance

Unbridled corruption

Monopoly money to further fund the farce.

At his hands, civilization was forced on the free,

the wandering free, rolling barrels

Authentic cynics resist its allure,

its clean, marble veneer, which veils its violence

Family

The family is no longer a natural association of free individuals practicing mutuality. The family is an indoctrination tool into the civilization project that teaches obedience, punctuality, orderliness, god worship, consumerism, domesticity. Subsumed and co-opted by civilization, the family, like the earth, has been ripped apart by violence, divorce and addiction.

Nature

Finally, nature itself is dying.

Food is tainted.

Air is poisoned.

Landscapes are denuded and leveled,

paved over with concrete interstates and

big box stores that offer consumer fixes to a dream

shattered in humpty-dumpty fashion.

Cynics get an unsettling feeling in their stomachs

when they see the kings’ horses rushing to save the planet with state programs,

popular pogroms funded by Pharma and Agri, quaintly marketed at county fairs

Popular Cynicism

Popular cynicism is owned by mass marketers.

In mass unreality, it is cool to be cynical.

Marketers co-opt natural cynicism and package it as lame popular cynicism. “Do not trust anyone over 30.”

The popular cynic buys a $30 T-shirt that reads, “WHATEVER.”

Whatever.

The popular cynics owned by the grim, mass marketers are dark,

Lifeless prophets of doom, garbed in gothic gloom.

They stare at screens, gamers, blinds pulled down, annihilating avatars

By hiding, they cower before authority,

killing children in the classroom

Cowards!

Authentic cynics awaken to mass culture’s dullness,

strip off their clothes and walk barefoot in the mud,

shouting with joy,

flipping off the judge.

Diogenes, the true cynic, lies in a barrel, rolling to fresh autonomous zones when

he tires of one place.

When the emperor imposes this imposing presence on Diogenes, the cynic says, “Get the hell out of my way! You’re blocking my sunlight!”

The young cynics owned by the mass marketers are naïve,

Pollyannaish cowards.

Their bohemian dress is a costly substitute (in more ways than one) for

Diogenes’ rolling barrel.

Emerson’s Oversoul and Nietzsche’s Overman

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Feral Jesus

“The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eternal optimism, expressed in such essays as “Self-Reliance”, “Compensation”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, and, to some extent, even “Fate”, grew out of his rejection of a transcendent sky god and his perception of an Oversoul. Emerson, once an orthodox Unitarian, abandoned Christian doctrine, and entertained God as the universal mind that is at once panentheistically transcendent and imminent. God is neither static Being nor a personal God of judgment and vengence. Instead, Emerson characterized God as a stream which flowed into Nature. Nature, fed by the Oversouls’s stream, is constanly stirred and growing, like rippled circles expanding in the water.

The perpetual influx of the Oversoul kept Emerson hopeful and optimistic about life and the future. If Nature is characterized by the eternal influx of the Oversoul, then the old notions of right and wrong are obsolete. Morality becomes a matter of listening to one’s own nature and pursuing that which will expand the rippled circle of one’s own life. But how does one know if an intimation or nudging is of the Oversoul or, instead, some corrupt notion pressed upon us by the clanging voices of civilization, greed, avarice and fear?

In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson responds to this concern:

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.

Frederick Nietzsche, who commented favorably on Emerson, also came to understand that traditional notions of good and bad were an error. He elaborates on this error in such works as ”Beyond Good and Evil, “The Geneaology of Morals,” and “Twilight of the Idols,” among others. In “Twilight of the Idols,” for example, he rejects any claim to unity, identity, permanence, substance or cause in the universe. Instead, he says that Nature is characterzied by “alteration, mutation and becoming,” All is becoming. Yet, Nietzsche, who was no nihilist, did not lament the passing of static Being. He saw the passing of god, Socratic reason and its insidious improvement morality as a hopeful development for man. Man was now unleashed to pursue power, art, growth, overcoming, to be no longer the tired, defeated, base “last man,” but the ever-expanding ”Overman.”

Continual growth and overcoming were central to both Emerson and Nietzsche. For Emerson, the measure of one’s openness to the Oversoul’s influx was marked by one’s intellectual and soul growth. Nietzsche’s Overman – always evolving and surpassing by following instinct and rejecting Christian nihilism and decadence – resembles this Emersonian improvement.

Where Nietzsche and Emerson part is on Being. The transcendentalist Emerson maintained that a Unity underlie all existence. One could discover and appropriate the power inherent in this Unity through self-reliance. Nietzsche maintained there was not Being beneath, only becoming since the beginning. Nietzsche, who pronounced that God is dead, also declared the Emersonian idea of an Oversoul as illusory error. Here lies the fundamental difference between Emerson and Nietzsche. Both rejected Christian morality and traditional notions of good and evil. However, Emerson believed that one could trust the universe because it was fed by the Oversoul. Nietzsche, on the other hand, insisted that one could only trust one’s instinct and pursue one’s will to power. Any other approach to life was in error.