Dari: I agree 'that the prime motive in man and the universe is a drive for power'.
M: I don't. I stated that as what I took to be N's position from the WIKI stuff. I gather he was challenging, who, Schopenhauer's idea that the motive is to live, a notion, I further gather, that N's associated with being weak, or insufficiently active as a basis for morality.
D : But don't you find it ironic that this deduction led him to believe that instinct was stronger than reason?
M: I lack sufficient knowledge to say if that was his position. I certainly think, myself, that the unconscious motives that drive people are stronger than reason. My definition of rationalization is reason in the pursuit of justification for unconscious desires and attitudes, bigotry explaining whey it is justified, etc.
D :Also, isn't it ironic that Hitler became a dictator using the tools of democracy in the most educated nation in the world at the time? It may seem like a wholesale regression but there seem to be (at the time, perhaps all time?) a desire for pure, unadulterated power.
M: I do not find it ironic. I think Nazi Germany is right under the surface of American life all the time in wait of a moment in which to raise it's ugly head. It is not, in my opinion, however, anything to do with a will to power. It is a will to control life so that it causes no negative feelings to arise.
D : In essence, reason was just a conduit to explain something that we've known all along; something that, even with all our modernity, we can never escape.
M: We will never escape if we remain unconscious of what we feel. It is possible to become conscious of what we feel, but it is profoundly difficult.
D : This is that nothing is a substitute for strength. Is the pen really mightier than the sword? Only when everyone plays by the rules. But what if I just gorge the person that's holding the pen? What then? Well, I become the new leader. Simple as that.
M: I think, if it were that simple, the next guy down from the benevolent leader of whatever his horse shit name is in North Korea, would have been gorged long ago. Just my opinion.