Discovering the world, youth discovers evil, and is horrified to learn the nature of his species. The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong. Youth, shocked, rebels, and calls upon the world to make itself a family, and give to youth the welcome and protection and comradeship of the home: the age of socialism comes. And then slowly youth is drawn into the gamble of this individualistic life; the zest of the game creeps into the blood; acquisitiveness is aroused and stretches out both hands for gold and power. The rebellion ends; the game goes on.
Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organism forever. Here is history, a futile circle of infinite repetition: these youths with eager eyes will make the same errors as we, they will be misled by the same dreams; they will suffer, and wonder, and surrender, and grow old.
And yet what if it is for life’s sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled and youth would find no room on the earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous.
Nature (i.e., here, the evolutionary process) is mad about reproduction, and makes the individual a tool and moment in the continuance of the species. She cares little about anything but eating and begetting; all our literature, art, and music mean nothing to her except as stimulation or ornament to sex and continuity. In this perspective even eating is subordinate, however primary; it comes first, and without it life could not be; but it, too, is servant to sex; the unconscious purpose of our eating is to preserve and develop us for biological maturity — i.e., the ability to reproduce. When we have fulfilled that function we eat in order to survive as caretakers for our progeny. When we have completed both of these functions nature has no further use or regard for us; normally we would soon thereafter die; if we go on living it is as dispensable bystanders in the procession of life.
Each of the rival systems has drawbacks that their rivalry has helped to reduce. Capitalism still suffers from a periodic imbalance between production and consumption; from dishonesty in advertising, labeling, and trade; from the efforts of large corporations to crush competition; from involuntary unemployment due to the replacement of labor — even of skilled labor — by machinery; and from abnormally swollen fortunes generating resentment in the enclaves of poverty. Communism suffers from the difficulty of substituting governmental prevision of what the consuming public will need or demand for the capitalist way of letting public demand determine what shall be produced and supplied; it suffers from restraints on competition, from inadequate incentives to invention, and from reluctance to appeal to the profit motive in individuals and companies.
Everything natural is forgivable.
The source of variety is human creativity (whatever that is) and the selection mechanism can be whatever the market will reward, or whatever governments and foundations will fund, or whatever meets human needs.
Human history is a fragment of biology. Man is one of countless millions of species and, like all the rest, is subject to the struggle for existence and the completion of the fittest to survive. All psychology, philosophy, statesmanship, and utopias must make their peace with these biological laws. Man can be traced to about a million years before Christ. Agriculture can be traced no farther back than to 25,000BC. Man has lived forty times longer as a hunter than as a tiller of the soil in a settled life. In those 975,000 years his basic nature was formed and remains to challenge civilization every day.
SV’s testosterone and stock option-fueled competition often felt less like the sterile economics described in textbook and more like a Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest. Many firms failed, fortunes were lost, and tens of thousands of employees were laid off. The companies like Intel and Micro that survived did so less thanks to their engineering skills — though these were important — than their ability to capitalize on technical aptitude to make money in a hyper-competitive, unforgiving industry.
However, the rest of nature doesn’t work like that. A bluefin tuna can release as many as 10M fertilized eggs in a spawning season. Perhaps 10 will make it to adulthood. A million die for every one that survives.
Nature wastes life in search of better life. It mutates DNA, creating failure after failure, in the hopes that every now and then a new sequence will outcompete those that came before, and the species will evolve. Nature tests its creations by killing most of them quickly, the battle “red in tooth and claw” that determines reproductive advantage.
The reason nature is so wasteful is that scattershot strategies are the best way to do what mathematicians call “fully exploring the potential space.” The way to get from a “local maxima” to the “global maxima” is to explore a lot of fruitless “minima” along the way. It’s wasteful, but it can pay off in the end.
But it is almost impossible to stop. Economics has little place for morality for the same reason that evolution is unsentimental about extinction — it describes what happens, not what should happen.
But Darwin, without attacking any creed, described what he had seen. Suddenly the world turned red, and nature, which had been so fair in the autumn’s colors under the setting sun, seemed to be only a scene of slaughter and strife, in which birth was an accident, and only death a certainty. “Nature” became “natural selection,” that is, a struggle for existence; and not for existence merely, but for mates and power, a ruthless elimination of the “unfit” of the tendered flowers, the gentler animals, and the kindlier men. The surface of the earth seethed with warring species and competing individuals, every organism was the prey of some larger beast; every life was lived at the expense of some other life; great “natural” catastrophes came, ice ages, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, pestilences, famines, wars; millions and millions of living things were “weeded out,” were quickly or slowly killed. Some species and some individuals survived for a little while — this was evolution. This was nature, this was reality.
Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe. Man was no longer the son of God; he was the son of strife, and his wars made the fiercest brutes ashamed of his amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer the favored creation of a benevolent deity; it was a species of ape, which the fortunes of variation and selection had raised to a precarious dignity, and which in its turn was destined to be surpassed and to disappear. Man was not immortal; he was condemned to death from the hour of his birth.
It asserts that a society’s view of right and wrong is determined by those in power, with a meaning similar to “History is written by the victors.” That is, although all people have their personal ideas of the good, only those strong enough to overcome obstacles and enemies can put their ideas into effect, and spread their own standards to society at large.
According to Nietzsche, masters create morality; slaves respond to master morality with their slave morality. Unlike the master morality, which is sentiment, slave mentality is based on resentment — devaluing what the master values and what the slave does not have. Slave morality is the inverse of master morality. As such, it is characterized by pessimism and cynicism.
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.
Natural selection is often described as “survival of the fittest,” but fittest does not necessarily mean biggest, fastest, or strongest. Fitness refers to whatever traits make an organism more likely to survive and reproduce in a given environment.