Credo: A Nietzschean Testament by Jonathan Bowden

I think ideas are inborn, and you’re attracted, if you have any, toward certain systems of thinking and sensibility and response. From a very young age, I was always fascinated about meaning and purpose and philosophy and those elements of religion which impinge on real matters.And very early in life I was attracted to vitalist, authoritarian, and individualist ideas. And in my late teens I came across Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings in the 28-volume, Karl Schlecta edition. Now those ideas predate my interest in them, because I was drawn towards them in a particular way.As we look around us in this society now, our people have an absence of belief. They’re very technically sophisticated. We still as a civilization bestride much of the rest of the world, like a sort of empty technological colossus. But if you peer inside, as to what we are supposed to believe, and account for, and what we think our destiny is individually and as a group, there’s a zero; there’s a nothingness; there’s a blank space for many people.A hundred years ago, Christianity was an overarching system in our society, for those who went along with it socially, for those who believed in it in a deep core way. It’s now virtually — apart from small minorities — invisible. It’s extraordinary how a faith system that can shape a civilization in part for a millennium-and-a-half to two millennia, can disappear. Those who say that certain ideas and ideals are impossible should look at what’s happened to many of our belief systems.A hundred years ago we had an elite. We actually had a government. We really haven’t had a government in this country, pretty much, for about 100 years. Not an elite that knows what it wants and understands its mission in life, and that will hand on to people after it, and that comes out groups that exist before it. We’re ruled by essentially a commercial elite, not an intellectual elite or a military elite or even a political one, but a commercial, profit-and-loss one.