On Nietzsche

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As usual, the latest issue of Playboy has an article that quotes Nietzsche. I’ve given up trying to decide what to do about this. I’ve complained, but the Playboy editors don’t care. Apparently, Nietzsche is terribly sexy for them (See image). And so we have this situation. Therefore, it is up to The Fred Effect to offer supplemental materials that help people to understand Nietzsche in a fun, if not entirely sexy, way.

If you haven’t read Nietzsche, don’t worry. Everybody quotes him so much that you’ve already gotten the idea, pretty much. And it doesn’t matter if you pronounce his name “NEET-shee” or “NEET-shuh.” It really doesn’t.

He was an existentialist. That means he wrote books. Big books. Lots of words, paper, and everything. He could say in a hundred pages what most people say in five or ten. Words. That’s how prodigious he was. And by prodigious, I mean boring.

Briefly, existentialism means that people exist. Really. Even if they don’t want to. They really do. I mean really, really. Especially the prodigious ones. Now those guys REALLY exist. You might think your goldfish exists, but that ain’t diddly compared to a prodigious existential guy.

You can’t discuss existentialism without bringing up the existence of God. Or the potential existence of God. Or the non-existence of God. Or the potential consequences of the existence or non-existence of God. Or the potential simultaneous existence and non-existence of God.

At this point, it becomes necessary to apply The Fred Effect to the question of God’s existence. As we all know, it depends. Some days He does. Some days He doesn’t. Unless you sell Amway, in which case, He damn well DOES exists and anybody who says otherwise is looking for a fight.

The greatest contribution of existentialism to humankind is the creation of the personal crisis. Prior to Nietzsche, the personal crisis was little more than a small, zit-like pustule that one popped in the mirror and then washed with tap water and baking soda. Thanks to upgrades written by Nietzsche and his pal Kierkegaard, exciting new features were added such as stress, neatly divided into external and internal causes, and the absolute requirement that you worry about it. An example of stress goes something like this Holy Shit! What if God exists?  Unless you sell Amway, in which case, stress goes like, Holy Shit! What if God doesn’t exist?

I’m getting the signal from The Fred Effect editors that it’s time to wrap this up to stay somewhere near the 500-word limit. Besides, this is really all the material you need to get a good grip on Nietzsche. Frankly, I never read anything in Nietzsche that hadn’t already occurred to me by the age of 17. But the writers and editors at Playboy find him sexy or something. We at The Fred Effect just find him hard to draw.