“The last man (German: der letzte Mensch) is a term used by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  The last men are tired of life, take no risks, and seek only comfort and security.” His “last man” thus was a prototype for the attitudes of millions now living in Western civilization and the United States. This writer notes that this increasingly present, even dominant, mindset rejects meaning, truth, rationality, and God as living and necessary realities to be grasped. The idea of membership and participation as part of an honored nation-state and as part of Western civilization is diluted or altogether rejected. This rejecting mindset is nihilistic and left wing. It can be characterized as anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-the pursuit of happiness. It can be characterized as anti-American. It can be characterized as anti-faith and anti-family.

The nihilistic/leftist climate is characterized by many behaviors, ideologies, attitudes, and lifestyles. Owing to space constraints, only three of these anti-culture mindsets will be depicted.

1. Lives are to be pacifistic and comfortable. Not only “just wars” are ruled out, but all wars. Wars of self-defense required by patriotic identity means you are a tool of cultural and political imperialists. The military is a matter of last resort, and will be composed of the members of an underclass upon whom contempt rather than honor is heaped. Peace is not a reprieve from the horror of war, but a longed-for euphoria to be bought at any price.

Geopolitical peace and peace of mind are blurred in a kind of pseudo-unity which pretends to be the meaning of “love your neighbor as yourself.” This important Biblical command declines into a fuzzy, neo-Beatles sense of life, an unspoken mantra that afflicts the non-thinking masses, especially so those on the left. Rodney King’s 1992 response to the Watts riots in Los Angeles made him the prophet of the new, vacuous understanding of “love your neighbor” when he said “why can’t we all just get along.” A new version of “love” was suddenly manifested in this sophomoric one-liner. You see, when Christ tells us to love our enemies, he did not anticipate that in our brave new world there would be no enemies, no divisions between the true and the false in values or belief. When Christ said the truth will set you free, to the modern atheistic mentality, the mentality that dominates in the Democrat Party, truth is not needed to set us free because what is true for you is not necessarily true for me.

The comforts of society have become paramount, including gourmet food, video games, intense involvement with social media, merriment based on drinking, drugs, and sex, and sports frenzies. TV shows and magazines flooding supermarkets and pharmacies divert us with endless gossip about celebrities whom the masses can identify with in their endless affairs, squabbles, break-ups, addictions, and self-indulgence. “Reality TV” takes us into an ocean of unreality as we enter into virtual realities where life is simulated, not lived. Consider the perennial favorites, “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette.” Who would really want to bring one of those shallow, handsome boy-toys home to mom and dad? Additionally, mass gatherings at EDM, rock, and hip-hop “concerts” (concerts without concertos) are of utmost importance in helping distract society from self, sin, and sorrow.

2. The distinction between ruler and ruled becomes attenuated. Thus, tried and true systems of governance in our republic come under attack by simple-minded commentators, like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who smugly asserts that no other country in the world would allow the person coming in second based on votes cast (Trump) to win the Presidency. Mr. O’Donnell stupidly fails to appreciate the rigorous and historically informed frame of reference of our Founders. They instituted checks and balances -- including the Electoral College -- expressly to protect us from the tyranny of the majority. On the one hand, there was the tyranny of the king, but on the other hand, grasping a reality expressed long ago by Aristotle in his Politics, they understood there was also a danger arising from a tyranny of the majority, and took steps to protect our republic from that danger.

Instead, O’Donnell and the left turn against the informed dialogue and conclusions of our Founding Fathers. The left reverts to the political ideas and ideals of the French Revolution. These ideas and ideals are governed by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau whereby political power does not center in the states or with individuals enjoying natural rights, as in the U.S., but rather political “freedom” is governed by a mystical collectivity called the General Will. There is a paradigm shift and the French Revolution with its bloody tyrannies of the majority, anti-clericalism, and penchant for war becomes the paradigm replacing the peaceable kingdom of the U.S. (Strangely, the left wing likes to portray the U.S. as imperialistic and colonialist abroad, arriving at this conclusion not from the facts, but from the Marxist model that insists that all of capitalism depends on imperialism for its growth. If the facts, as in the case of the USA, do not fit, assert the Marxist dogma anyway.)

3.  Alienation, anxiety, and anger increasingly dominate the psyches of the population. Alienation implies separation and fragmentation: men from women, humans from nature, citizens from country, and civilization (in favor of global or even intergalactic identification), creatures from their Creator, and, intra-psychically, self from itself. These alienations, in a vicious circle, give rise to and in turn are intensified by anxiety and anger. Worry and fear arise because of these schisms. The unity of life is broken, mangled in each of the above-mentioned divisions. Intense loneliness besets increasing numbers of people. What Freudians call separation anxiety does not, however, arise mainly from the trauma of birth, but from vast cultural, philosophical, and spiritual disconnects.  

Vast manipulations by people in power, irresponsible choices, Luciferian interventions, and fallen spirituality have led us too far down the path where meaning is lost. Vast numbers of people believe that meaning and truth should be replaced with deconstructionist relativism, anarchy, and meaninglessness. Reasoning and understanding are devalued, quaint relics of the past. This writer’s students in philosophy repeatedly insist that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, and that no statement of belief or value is or can be better than any other.

Look at the passionate contempt with which President Donald Trump was greeted when he stated that we are withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord in order to “reassert American sovereignty.” The globalist governance people, speaking in the name of climate control, could hardly control themselves. To them, love of country is merely a disguise for aspirations of imperialistic conquest and dominance. Sovereignty is a concept that should disappear sooner rather than later. Instead of preserving sovereignty, the nations of the world should be preserving ice caps. Also, look at the offense he gave to so many of his Democrat opponents when, in Poland, he affirmed his desire to defend Western civilization. For them, there is nothing to defend. They are already alienated from our country and our civilization. The mere mention of these terms in a positive way causes spasms of anxiety and intense anger -- anger already fomenting within -- to erupt.

The intra-psychic alienation and cultural disintegration continues. Faith in God, love of country, upholding of family values are disparaged on a scale that could not have been imagined a generation ago. Unless these are restored as top priorities, we shall witness our culture sinking into a tragic oblivion.