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Today we’re going to be talking about Nietzsche’s view of beauty, high art, and ugliness and the ramifications that it holds for us who either want to live a better life by pursuing philosophy or are using philosophy to understand, critique and undermine the people who would want to rule us, to atomise us, to make us eat the bugs and live in the pod. Personally, for me at least, it started out as the former and became the latter. I can’t stand by whilst everything that I know and love is being dismantled around me, without my consent or even my opinion.
So, on the subject of beauty, Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols:
“Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man — and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct…”
The surprising conclusion drawn from Twilight of the Idols, is that ugliness makes you weak, it saps the spirit of man and contributes to his degeneration, so let us not be reduced by the psychotic elites, these people who do not know the joy of high art, fine music, good food and even better company. Those who would demolish a listed building because they’d rather have a car park in its place. If they understood the uplifting effects of beauty on all of mankind, this type of crime would be unthinkable, but they care not for beauty, they care not for heritage, indeed it’s fair to say that they’d rather that we didn’t have a history or heritage at all. Such is the destitute nature of the global man, the ‘global homo,’ the atomised man, the rootless cosmopolitan who doesn’t know nor understand what it is to have a romantic attachment to the land of his birth or even his childhood surroundings, usually as a result of having been moved from place to place, and school to school by parents who always put their careers first, those that were always willing to up sticks for the sake of work. If it’s not that, then it’s usually as a result of being sent to boarding school or sometimes both, but either way they have no passion for the environs of their childhood, and this is not natural. I would even go so far as to say that it’s a kind of ‘disability,’ because it prevents their proper functioning in society. These are the globalists of which we speak, those roving internationalist types that want us all to live in high tech cyberpunk cities, easy to control, kept in pens like farm animals, and as such, easy to milk, and equally easy to cull. In order to fight this, it’s essential that we have a working understanding of Aesthetics, the branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste.
At present, the hyper capitalist society that we live in doesn’t really leave much room for beauty, everything must be efficient, min maxed for optimum profitability and not splendour. It’s almost unheard of today for instance that new buildings are made with Corinthian pillars, or more correctly the type of stoa, commonly seen in the Hellenistic world, from which the Stoic philosophers get their name. There’s no room for ornamentation, there’s no room for beauty when something cheap and functional will do just as well. The only times that our cultural and political elites get excited about anything that is genuinely beautiful, whether it’s a painting, sculpture or even a nice-looking construction is when it goes under the hammer at auction. When it fetches a large amount of money then it’s celebrated, but not before. It’s not the item that they find to be beautiful, but its price!
So, what we can learn from this, is that our surroundings do matter, should a housing developer want to build some wretched little box houses in our neighbourhood, the type of homes that have little to no garden, small rooms, plasterboard walls and timber frames surrounded by a thin veneer of cheap, little bricks, then we must be the first to complain, ‘make them beautiful, and we’ll all agree with them, but make them ugly and we’ll oppose you every step of the way, by doing so we add costs to the system, robbing them of the one thing that they truly care about and that is the maximum profit, thus we corrupt the globalists.
“…The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of “ugly.” Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the colour, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, “ugly.” A hatred is aroused — but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness — it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
We must make the case, as does Nietzsche that the effects of ugliness extend beyond the physical realm and have psychological implications. Like Nietzsche we must suggest that when we feel depressed or down, it’s because we can sense the proximity of something ugly. This implies that the presence of ugliness exacerbates negative emotions and contributes to a decrease in personal strength and motivation, thus it has a detrimental effect on our well-being, productivity and as such GDP. We have to argue in a language that these mental invalids can understand and that is the language of money and profit, or the lack of it, the liability for which rests with them.
The effects of ugliness have been well known and equally well documented for at least a hundred years, when we perceive something as ugly, it evokes negative emotions and associations such as decay, danger, and impotence, hence the brutalist architecture of the former Soviet Union in which government buildings were deliberately made to look imposing. Eastern block party HQ’s were square, concrete and steel buildings that projected the power of the state onto the populace near them, they were imposing, clean and dwarfed the more traditionalist architecture of the ‘before times,’ giving the impression that the state was indomitable, forever, joyless and unforgiving.
So, we can begin the great work of rolling back the globalist empire by demanding that our buildings be beautiful, and that art be meaningful, that the cultural output of the globalists filled with political messaging have a market value of zero by our refusal to consume, condone or celebrate their sad, dismal offerings that do nothing to uplift the human spirit. Where we see ugliness in all of its forms, in art, music or culture we must not partake, but only condemn, because then it will stop being produced. Beauty, we understand, enhances our well-being, and strengthens us. It inspires positive emotions and associations such as power, courage, and pride. The experience of beauty, according to Nietzsche, leads to an increase in our overall energy, will to power, and self-confidence.
We can’t rely on our would be masters to recognise beauty because they can only recognise ‘price,’ so we must create our own art and be ever vigilant for the corruption of the globalists who will seek to capitalise and commodify our songs, our paintings, sculptures, our plays and performances, our buildings and in the end, the entirety of our civilisation because we’ve made beautiful things, gifting them with value beyond the physical, value that they then feel entitled to put a price on so that it can go under the hammer.
I totally commend the efforts of Oliver Anthony who sung about ‘rich men north of Richmond,’ with his refusal to sign a record contract for 8 million dollars after being propelled to fame on social media; he instead sings in local bars and small venues to the people he understands, the people he knows, the people, who when it’s all said and done are just like him. He even cancels his appearances if he feels that the ticket prices are too high. This man is a hero and I commend the judicious use of his Will to Power.
Ugliness might weaken and decay us but an encounter with beauty has the opposite effect, increasing our energy, will to power, and overall well-being. So, the obvious thing to be done is to surround ourselves with beauty wherever we can find it. We must consciously select for the things that we find to be beautiful in media, art, entertainment, culture, history and so on, by pursuing beauty and continuously creating it we keep our civilisation young, vibrant, and resplendent with the thoughts of its people. The globalists don’t understand beauty, they only know price and because of this they will never be a part of our world and our civilisation, they have no place among us, they ride upon our backs like fleas on a dog. We the people, produce culture, they simply exploit it for personal or political gain. They are the ‘Last Man,’ as described by Nietzsche in ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra,’ living for short term comfort and gain because they lack the noble spirit so richly described by Nietzsche throughout his work.
