Image by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty).
In the Twilight of the Idols, in one of his more peckish, dyspeptic moments, Nietzsche opined about freedom in terms that bear a striking resemblance to the deranged fever dreams of the modern American authoritarian Right. He declared:
“The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it -- what it costs us...Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic -- every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.”
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Remer.