I was prompted to read this by the claim that it was the first fictional work to inspire suicides. In other words, it’s the kind of book I hope to write. This quick read hearkens back to a day when people were melancholy, despairing, crestfallen — when clinical depression had some class. The characters have personal servants, so it also happens to be a time when mental illness was a gentleman’s sport; a hobby for the idle rich (or upper middle class). It’s like that Wes Anderson movie. What was it called? Oh yeah: every single movie he’s ever made. Alas, the poor were too busy fetching their masters’ tea and battling the runs to articulate their despair. Nowadays, we can pop a couple Zoloft and watch “Ellen.”

Werther is a sensitive guy (self-absorbed prick) capable of talking at great length about gardening (pussy). Then he meets Charlotte, who cock-teases him for most of the book. Meanwhile, he gripes via letters to his friend, Wolfgang, about his terminal blue balls. Unfortunately for Werther, the girl really likes some other dude, and she encourages Werther to bark up some other tree. Contrarily, however, Charlotte seems to love the attention. Even after she marries this guy, Albert, she strings Werther along, corralling him into the friend zone as an adoring confidant (doormat).

Unable to get mad at the infuriatingly amiable Albert, the two become awkward friends. In one conversation, Werther pounds home some sweet foreshadowing, vigorously defending the nobility of suicide (emo). Later, Werther finally recognizes his resentment of both Albert and Charlotte, and so he descends into a protracted bout of self-pity. He can only satisfy his passive-aggressive rage by constantly guilt-tripping Charlotte. Albert knows better than to get involved in all this bullshit, and runs “business errands” or hangs out in another room (scotchy scotch scotch) when Werther visits. Charlotte tells Werther to piss off until after Christmas. Werther again burdens Wolfgang with how lost he is without seeing his one true love (stalker), and Charlotte realizes how much she misses the attention (cock-tease) since her husband is getting tired of her needy crap and isn’t as lovey-dovey anymore (won’t go down south).

Werther shows up unexpectedly (stalker), and Charlotte tosses the poor, dumb bastard a bone (buying time while dialing 911), by asking him to recite this inhumanly tedious poem he’d translated sometime before (nerd).

Since Werther can’t have the girl, he must content himself with dropping a lifelong guilt trip at her doorstep and creeping her out. In a monotonous suicide note, he emphasizes how he’s savored kissing his portrait of her, and a pink hair ribbon he’d pocketed (panty thief). With a romantic air of menace, he promises they’ll be together in the afterlife. Always a crowd pleaser.

Finally, after licking all the salt off the gun Charlotte had touched at some point, Werther somehow shoots himself in the forehead — a feat I can’t even conceptualize not ending in a broken wrist. He died as he lived: awkwardly.

There is one part of the book that made the whole thing worth reading for me. During his usual lolling about, our protagonist meets a wandering schizo, and he tells him:

“I envy the delusion to which you are a victim. You go forth with joy to gather flowers for your princess — in winter — and grieve when you can find none, and cannot understand why they do not grow. But I wander forth without joy, without hope, without design; and I return as I came. [...:] Happy mortal, who can ascribe your wretchedness to an earthly cause! You do not know, you do not feel, that in your own distracted heart and disordered brain dwells the source of that unhappiness [...:]“

This passage strikes me as one of the most insightful (depressing) things I’ve read in a while. It summarizes the outlook I’ve developed (resigned myself to) since informally starting to study philosophy, and that I’ve gathered from both fiction and nonfiction. In my view, a perceptive person’s only reward is recognizing the abyss. We’re servants of genes, our little gods too stupid and gauche to be aware of anything, let alone us. If you buy causal determinism, as I do (unfortunately), we’re not even servants with the purpose of propagating those genes (which is already a grim prospect). The word “purpose” doesn’t mean anything in a determined world. The whole affair, soup to nuts, is a predetermined collision of particles, a big Rube Goldberg invention, and we’re incidental puppets to the process, with no free will at all. To discern a sense of purpose in any of this, I suspect a person must first be totally insane, because there’s no rational reason to give a shit.

I’ve never liked self-help books. So many of them peddle a naive optimism that asks one to pull happiness out of thin air. You could call it crypto-Christianity as seen via Nietzsche’s rendering of Judeo-Christian philosophies in “Beyond Good and Evil.” He called the principle the inversion of values,  which he said made the religion anti-life. This point is illustrated effectively in the promise of an afterlife. To get a reward one first has to die. The enjoyment of life is irrelevant, if not a hindrance to this promised eternity. But the philosopher did effectively put misery on a pedestal himself, though for reasons concurrent with life. He wished nothing but strife on those he loved. It makes them stronger, he contended.

But, much as the Judeo-Christian view defers the benefits of one’s suffering to a hereafter, Nietzsche makes the assumption that strength of character is inherently valuable. He emphasizes misery as an investment in one’s will, but the unspoken sacrifice is happiness and joy. Which is to say the point of life is to become desensitized, to brace for the eventual storm. If one can ask what the value of pain and sacrifice is if there is indeed nothing waiting beyond death, one can ask the same question regarding the turmoil of life itself if one’s focus narrows the coming horror. In either case, one has willingly sacrificed their enjoyment of life for an expectation (one probable but depressing, and one encouraging but undemonstrated).

In practice, Christians rarely self-flagellate anymore, literally or figuratively, for the benefits promised beyond death. They do embrace happiness, sitting within the wide margins of scriptural interpretation. Likewise, Nietzsche advocated the celebration of life itself. He favored philosophies and religions that affirmed life rather than denigrating it.

Nietzsche’s description of views that celebrated poverty and misery over success and pleasure, or concepts that attempted to null the contrast between beneficial and harmful circumstances (e.g. nirvana), placed them under the banner of nihilism. Contrary to the clichéd misinterpretation that’s hounded Nietzsche in popular culture, he didn’t advocate nihilism. In his story of the madman, from which the famous paraphrase about God being dead originated, he observes a modern scientific world in which cause and effect are clearly seen. Without the necessity of superstition, supernatural ideas would become less relevant, relegated to vague symbolism; not the immediate practical functions they’d once served. People will irrigate their plots, not burn a lamb for spiritual favor.

In that world, where metaphysical ideas give way to physical ones, the afterlife comes into question, and with that, meaning itself. Whether there is a meaning to life, a point, a purpose. Is there some deliberate force behind the existence of a living planet, or is it simply an indifferent fluke? That’s the position one is faced with when one lets go of rewards and meaning in an ultimate sense. One is left to question the very value of life to a self-aware animal with apparent choices. Then one must look at things subjectively and try to determine what it is that drives them forward in a much more immediate sense. And one is alone with this decision.

Both concepts of nihilism intersect at the death of meaning. The religious view makes the qualitative differences between events and circumstances null as a deliberate discipline, and the other is an incidental consequence of following a thread of monist logic to its bitter end. In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Nietzsche attempts to reconcile humanity with a rational sense of meaning by deliberately choosing to live, and to overcome one’s inherent weaknesses: things he characterized as useless and detrimental. Emotions like pity, which depress the person, while not fixing anything in itself. Taken as a literal whole, there are callous elements to his ideas, though the man himself, if it makes any difference, was not prone to cruelty. Before his health and mind mysteriously disintegrated, a famous story involved him intervening on behalf of a horse being beaten. Perhaps he was already unhinged by that point, so take it as you will.

Coming back to my original point, optimism and positive thinking share their underpinnings with the nihilistic tendencies described above. It, like the inversion of values, and the death of meaning, is a distortion of the natural impact of circumstances on the psyche. With the view that no event can be qualitatively bad, but instead offers some kind of lesson, or has happened for a reason, the distinction between good and bad events becomes unclear.

With real success, gain, and achievement, a sense of joy is — under most circumstances — completely inevitable. A smile crosses one’s face that couldn’t be straightened out if one wanted to! There’s no need to rationalize this kind of elation. There is no mindfuck at work here. Something qualitatively beneficial has happened, and every nerve and instinct rises to meet it. Certainly, one can become complacent, and the excitement of a victory, even if the spoils are kept, will wear off. Nicholas Taleb, in “Fooled By Randomness,” cited a study that had shown the psychological impact of even a minute beneficial change was greater than the maintenance of a more quantitatively substantial baseline. Seeing one’s bank account grow by a hundred bucks is delightful, even if one has maintained a healthy balance that happened to stagnate for some months.

There are events and circumstances that are simply bad, harmful, injurious. To tell oneself to feel good about them is to suppress a natural reaction. The instinct is there for a reason, so that an animal can survive by knowing what is beneficial and what is not. Just as an animal will ideally disregard its own shit in favor of a fresh, nutritious chunk of wildebeest. If an animal can convince itself everything smells appetizing, I don’t see how it really benefits the animal in the long run. To celebrate horror is to cheapen joy, as any philosophy that equates them through rationalizations will force them to meet in the middle.

The tentative conclusion I can draw from this exercise is that pain needn’t be sought, but is unavoidable and should be felt when appropriate. To acknowledge terrible things for what they are is honest and natural. The only real joy is the inevitable one that follows a qualitative gain.

“No crime if there ain’t no law.”
— The Damned, “Neat Neat Neat”

The liberal instinct urges me to say that I disagree with it, but this book and its implications are bigger than me. I almost have to laugh at myself for leveling judgement on it, as if it mattered — me: already living in the world of the leviathan. In the bigger sense, I don’t disagree with it, anyway — perhaps in the normative sense, but as an observer of society I see he seems to have his shit together. With my judgement out of the way, it’s obvious that Hobbes didn’t invent authority — he’s just a messenger after all, so no use blaming him for it. He illustrates and details the structure of power, the rationale behind why he would prefer a monarchy to a democracy.

Book one is where it’s at. In a few lines, centuries ago, Hobbes dispenses with the main premises of childish political conceits — the politics of the healthy and unburdened — that still stink up the fringes of the political landscape: anarchism and libertarianism. As the title suggests, without some ultimate bully to enforce contracts between one party and another, there really are no contracts at all. Libertarian theorists invariably find themselves either defending an apocalyptic scenario where contracts are upheld between equal parties by personal or hired force (e.g. having lotsa guns), or they resuscitate the government they tried to bury under some pseudonym like “the courts.” Never mind the fact that still other parties can’t be expected to stagnate on the arms issue, or maintain a fair policy with regard to their neighbors. They will not have started equal, and they won’t remain equal if they can help it. There will always either be governments or warlords.

Hobbes is a pious man, and so prone to getting caught in the tide pool of infinite regresses. What justifies one part of his argument itself needs justification, but none is to be found. Such is the case with the power of his beloved monarchy. Subjects get their rights from the king, the king gets his rights from god, and god, is, well, god (himself justifiable by the Socratic piss-take, the Cosmological Argument). Which is to say the authority of the king can’t be justified at all. In a similar abuse of logic, geography, demographics, and chronology, Hobbes contorts himself to find the consent of the people for the king to do unto them what he argues is their own will. The king, he says, serves the will of the subjects, so whatever he does is, in a Nixonian kind of reasoning, not illegal or against their will. That, by his being king, well, his subjects have obviously agreed that it be so. Except that the majority of his contemporaries weren’t consulted before his coronation; not to mention the generations to follow which didn’t even exist. What he didn’t know was that it doesn’t need to be justified. The subjects don’t merely give up their rights grudgingly cowed into submission by some undeniable justification of divine right; they relinquish their rights and responsibilities deliberately, urgently, because that’s what people do.

One point which surprised me was that Hobbes said the king’s responsibility is to protect his subjects, and where he falters, so should the subjects’ loyalty. This bleeding heart wouldn’t have lasted under eight years of Reagan or Bush.