Against Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug

 

Nietzsche writes:

A great man — a man whom nature has constructed and in- 
vented in the grand style — what is he? 

First: there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey 
because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the 
ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to 
despise and reject everything petty about him, including even 
the fairest, “divinest” things in the world. 

Secondly: he is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without 
fear of “opinion”; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect 
and “respectability,” and altogether everything that is part of the 
“virtue of the herd.” If he cannot lead, he goes alone; then it 
can happen that he may snarl at some things he meets on his way. 

Third: he wants no “sympathetic” heart, but servants, tools; 
in his intercourse with men he is always intent on making some- 
thing out of them. He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it 
tasteless to be familiar; and when one thinks he is, he usually is 
not. When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. He rather 
lies than tells the truth: it requires more spirit and will. There is 
a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame, his 
own justice that is beyond appeal. 

Of course Nietzsche is romanticizing here.  (This fantasy was a little doodle he wrote in an unpublished note, later edited into "The Will to Power" by his infamous Nazi-sympathizing sister.)  This "great man" he speaks of has never existed, and probably never will.   It's a nice counterbalance to the ideals of altruists like Levinas, etc., but it is just as ideal as their fond imaginations.  Reality is more complex and interesting than these stereotypical dreams.  Here in reality, human being is more interdependent than this fantastical "great man" is willing to acknowledge.