The Nietzschean as Taoist

*I apologize in advance for dealing with generic human types such as "the peasant" or "the scribe." This is normally sloppy thinking, but I assure you that I am going somewhere with it.*

Nietzsche was not a commentator or culture critic, but a scientist of energy flows. Its with this in mind that we must inquire into the meaning of decadence. The territory of decadence is excess. And excess, when thought of by the earth, is anything outside the equilibrium of geo/solar radiation over a given time. This is not just meant as fossil fuels, as per my earlier discussion, but can also include even purely natural processes that, as it were, eat their sowing seeds. That serve to undermine their preservation-enhancement conditions.

This is why the nomad is so admired by Nietzsche: he has no excess. Human beings can just barely survive on the steppe. they can, and do, but only by reaching a highly attuned existence with everything being economized and packed with multiple purposes. Where even art installs itself at the margins of the functional: jewelry, weapons, clothes. Where nothing is wasted.

Conversely, the peasant is ignored if not reviled--despite a similar economy--because he is the first basis of decadence. He produces excess, and this excess is not something that he enjoys but rather comes to bear down on him as an added burden. Funny how life works. When left to his own devices he usually realizes his lot: his labor sustains the source of his enslavement. Oppression always arises out of excess--folks who have nothing to do in life but control other people. Beureucrats, the aristocracy, priests, monks, emperors, scribes, merchants. And then their various servants.

The peasant realizes that there is no way to prevent this excess, and patiently acquiesces to these types. Yet he binds them to a condition: that they will not reinvest this excess, but will rather hold to various ways of ritually destroying it. The Egyptians, for instance, created a figure called "Pharaoh" who would serve as a focal point for all of the types who lodged themselves in the excess of the Nile peasant. Simultaneously, Pharaoh would be infested with a peculiar fantasy world that was symbolically projected as a kind of extension of various parts of his total being after the end of bodily animation. And his concern would be so focused on this dead world that the excess at his command would become utterly spent in building tombs.

Why was this done? Because there was something infinitely more terrifying than these rudimentary forms of oppression that might torture or maim a person for stepping out of line; something that destroyed not just the body but the self. that made not just the body but desire a slave. Capitalism. where excess becomes the standard. where excess--capital--rules every single minute facet of our lives, and is so interwined with them that need and excess cnanot be disentangled. the conditions are ripe for this when a nomadic people install themselves at the head of such an order, applying thier economy to excess, reinvesting it just like a primative who hunts dressed in animal skins and with a bone spear from his former quarry. Using an extracted surplus to build weapons to extract a further surplus, and a further surplus--and employing all the former types and their peculiar powers as part of this merciless extraction. This is why Genghis Khan, for instance, was an advocate of religious tolerance--because religion to him was a tool. "Its true if it works."

Along the way there are many advances in technology, but these only marginally effect the peasants lot: his existence is maintained at a minimum, and any increase and surplus is absorbed in ever more extravagant forms of excess. The only speed bump in this story, which was set to continue for literally millions upon millions of years,was the exponential release of fossil fuels.

But I'm confident that this will eventually work itself out, and we'll be left with basically the same story--only, with the sort of type I talked about earlier: the technician as peasant,and the ruin of all the types territorialized in excess. forever transformed by knowledge. And given enough time he will develop a reinvestment of excess in the natural, peaceful expansion of his type until they have reached all of the nuances of the earth, fully integrating with it in a "path of least resistance" (the Tao.) what I mean by this is that eventually population might increase to its naturally sustainable limit and stay there, so that there would be no excess to invest in oppression because, at its maximum limit, human activity couldn't be invested in useless things, but would all have to be directed towards just sustaining itself at its present level. We would all just be peasants.

Decadence in human affairs, then, is anything in addition to this baseline.