The good hunter shall have a good hunt

October of Zarathustra

One time, a million years ago, I was at the podiatrist and he was doing surgery on my big toe and he said something I never forgot. He said, "It's obviously true that the best form of government is benevolent monarchy, the trouble is guaranteeing the benevolent part."

It stuck with me. My mind keeps turning back to it. Which doesn't mean I'm a monarchist! But it does mean that I am the sort of person who likes to look at the other side of things. I think about trade-offs.

This does not make me popular at parties. I never get invited to parties, actually, now that I think about it!

Today brings me to the end of the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, so I went back through my post so far on this part and re-read them. I noticed a theme that seems to be confirmed by a line in the last chapter: Command.

In the last chapter of part 2, "The Stillest Hour," a voice is speaking to him without a voice. He says:

So the first part of the book is Zarathustra drawing followers because of his message of vitality, of living this life now and cultivating a world that is ready for greatness.

That sells. Zarathustra gets a following. In fact, they are waiting for him while he's in isolation between part 1 and part 2. But then part 2 raises the question: What do you do with a following?

I don't think it's any accident that this is something that Nietzsche was meditating on. He looked back to the Greeks. He revered the old values. I don't 100% know this, and I'm not going to fact check it right now because this is just a blog, but I don't think Nietzsche loved democracy.

Even if, on balance, democracy is better than other forms of government, there are always trade-offs.

This is one of those verboten things to say because we've all agreed that republics/democracies are the best way we know of to run a nation. You can't question that in polite society. And I do think it's right, but we are so deeply into the democracy arc of history that it might be okay to just start talking about some of the trade-offs now, to give us a sense of what we might need to compensate for.

That's not really what these chapters are about though. These chapters, I'm intuiting, reflect Nietzsche's growing uneasiness with a world lurching deeper and deeper into democratic order. Nietzsche wanted to see more people following leaders with real qualities, with real leadership in their bones.

And I suspect this reflects why Nietzsche endures. I suspect humanity is, in general, uneasy about democracy. Everywhere I look I see signs that people want rulers, they want someone to follow. History has pulled off this amazing trick getting so much of the globe to coordinate around democracy, even though it's not what humans really want.

And that could be what this whole idea of the Ubermensch is about. That someday someone will come that is so elevated, of such inestimable quality, that mankind will once again let an individual steer history because it will be incontestable that he's the right one.

I could be really reaching here, but what does Nietzsche expect? He's not the most legible guy.

The prior chapter is "The Precipice," which of course is the place just before the peak; Zarathustra is at his most uneasy when he's almost reached his goals. He knows he's been prudent, like a human, staying among humans. He knows that's out of fear. It is very scary to be close to getting what you want.

Can you live up to it? Can you hold onto it? Will someone try to take it from you? Do you even deserve it?

And I suspect that Nietzsche is reluctant to depict Zarathustra in triumph because I suspect Nietzsche doesn't know what triumph looks like.

I don't know if that podiatrist had a point, but I'll tell you what: He fixed my toe. My big toes were a mess, man.

One line

"I dwell at the foot of my height: how high my summits are no one has yet told me. But I know my valleys well." —Zarathustra

—Brady Dale
October 14, 2026

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