Nietzsche the Visionary

A Reflection on the Nature of a Civilization Guided by Nietzschean Values

Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in the nineteenth century that the crisis of Western civilization generated by modernity’s overthrow of the traditional European order and the loss of faith resulting from the torpedoing of traditional theology by advancements in human knowledge would have repercussions that would endure for two centuries. As the twenty-first century now enters its second decade, the confrontation with that crisis becomes ever more imminent.¹ At present, Western civilization continues to exhibit symptoms of advanced decay and the five hundred year position of Western Europe and its colonial offspring as the dominant centers of power on the earthly stage is steadily being eclipsed by the rise of new great powers represented by such nations as Russia, China, India, and Brazil. Likewise, mass immigration from the Third World into the West threatens to erode the demographic majority of indigenous European peoples in their traditional homelands by the middle to latter part of the century. The egalitarian ethos that provides the foundation of the self-legitimating ideology of the Western ruling classes becomes ever more absurd in its pronouncements and oppressive in its practices with each passing decade.