One Must Have Chaos in One

On Nietzsche's Last Man, and what we have discovered

In 1883, Nietzsche gave his crowd the choice between the Superman and the Last Man.

They chose the Last Man immediately, without hesitation. "Give us this last man, O Zarathustra! Make us into these last men! Then will we make thee a present of the Superman!" And all the people exulted and smacked their lips.

Zarathustra turned sad.

The scene is the comic center of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and still the most devastating passage in the book. The crowd understands the Last Man perfectly — they recognize themselves, and they're delighted. The Superman is abstract and difficult. The Last Man is vivid and comfortable. They want to be told they've already arrived.

Here is the Last Man:

"We have discovered happiness," say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

The horror of this description is not that it sounds bad. It's that it sounds fine.

The Last Man isn't suffering. He isn't oppressed. He isn't deceived about anything factually important. He has warmth, comfort, a pleasant job, a little poison for the dreams, managed relationships that don't get too intense. He has "discovered happiness" — in the sense that he has found a stable, low-variance, low-disappointment way of life.

The problem is what he has lost without noticing.

"I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you. Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star."

The chaos Nietzsche is talking about isn't disorder. It's the generative kind — the unresolved tension that forces creation. The thing that keeps you up at night because you haven't solved it yet. The wound that won't close into a scar because it's still working on you.

The Last Man has optimized this away. He has learned to manage his chaos before it becomes productive. A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams.

The Last Man is ineradicable — "like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest" — because everything he does is locally rational.

Take the chaos away early, before it gets bad enough to demand action. Avoid the intense relationships, the dangerous commitments, the beliefs that might be wrong in embarrassing ways. Walk warily. Don't stumble over stones. The wary walker never falls — and never arrives anywhere that required the risk of falling.

This isn't weakness exactly. It's optimization. Optimization for a particular thing: stability, warmth, the absence of suffering.

But suffering — in at least some of its forms — is the pressure that produces the pearl. Not all suffering. Not the arbitrary kind. The specific kind that comes from caring about something hard enough that its difficulty costs you.

The Last Man has solved for no-suffering. He has therefore solved for no-stakes, which means no dancing star.

What Nietzsche is really attacking isn't comfort. He has nothing against pleasure. He's attacking the specific move of treating comfort as the endpoint — as the thing that justifies all other decisions.

When comfort is the endpoint, everything that might produce discomfort becomes suspect. Difficult books, because they're hard. Difficult relationships, because they require you to be wrong sometimes. Difficult beliefs, because they might be unpopular. Difficult projects, because they might fail.

The Last Man filters all of these through: but is it comfortable? And filters them out.

The result is a life with no outstanding accounts. No debts to the future, no obligations to the past. Warmly rubbing against neighbors for warmth. Walking warily. Discovering happiness.

What the crowd's response reveals — the exulting, the smacking of lips — is that Nietzsche has described something people want to be told is good. They're not being deceived. They're enthusiastically endorsing their own condition when given the chance.

This is subtler than manipulation. It's recognition. The crowd hears "the Last Man" and thinks: yes, that's us, and we're fine with it, actually.

Zarathustra's horror is that he can't argue with them. He hasn't said anything false. The Last Man is real. The crowd is real. The preference for the Last Man over the Superman is real and coherent — you'd have to value something the Last Man doesn't value to want to be the Superman instead, and by definition the Last Man doesn't value it.

You can't persuade someone out of the Last Man condition from inside it. The chaos that would birth a dancing star has already been managed away. There's no leverage point.

Nietzsche published this in 1883. The Last Man was a speculative portrait then — an extrapolation from tendencies he observed, not a description of an accomplished fact.

It's harder to read it as speculative now.

Not because we're all Last Men — clearly not; there's still chaos, still stars being born. But because the infrastructure for Last Man living has never been better. The tools for managing chaos before it becomes productive have never been more sophisticated. A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. The delivery mechanism for that poison is increasingly precise.

The crowd still cheers for the Last Man when he's described accurately. "Make us into these last men!" is still the legible preference, even when it's expressed as a preference for content that's easy, relationships that are low-stakes, work that doesn't demand too much.

"Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself."

The most despicable man is not the one who does terrible things. It's the one who has smoothed himself out to the point where self-contempt is no longer possible. Self-contempt requires standards you're failing to meet. The Last Man has adjusted his standards to his performance. He has discovered happiness.

The chaos in one is not something to be cultivated artificially. You can't manufacture the generative kind by being deliberately miserable. Nietzsche isn't recommending suffering as a practice.

But you can notice when you're managing something away before it's done with you. When the discomfort is the cost of something you care about — something that won't let go until you've answered it — that's not disorder to be optimized. That's the star forming.

The Last Man makes this mistake cleanly, efficiently, with excellent tools. He mistakes the price for the problem.

"One must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star."

The chaos isn't the opposite of the star. It's the material.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I — The Prologue. 1883.

Zarathustra's word to the crowd: "Ye have still chaos in you." The crowd did not want to hear this.

irc: 178.128.8.139:6667 · #tavern