Hopelessness, Despair, and The Last Man

Did a German philosopher predict our decline in the 19th century? How you can overcome and become a Superman like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Does it seem like everyone has stopped caring?

You walk into a store or a restaurant, there’s almost no one working, and the few still there are clueless, surly, or both. You get in your car, and there are visibly drunk drivers on major roads in broad daylight. Many of us see stuff like this all the time now.

I talk to other preppers who tell me they have friends who admit how bad things seem to be, but have no interest in doing anything to prepare. Or they get mad at you for prepping. I hear about this a lot in marriages: one partner wants to prep and the other tries to stand in the way. They seem to want nothing else than to watch TV, turn off their brains, bundle under a comfy blanket, and sleep.

We all see it, and there are endless theories as to why it’s happening: post-pandemic stress, being spoiled by COVID stimulus checks, income inequality, poor working conditions, long COVID, a lack of spirituality, intestinal parasites, 5G towers…

But while COVID made things worse, the crisis of despair began even before the pandemic. American life expectancy began falling in 2014, largely due to drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, obesity, and suicide. The opioid epidemic was well underway before 2020, and youth suicide shot up 56 percent between 2007 and 2017.

Many theories, no clear answers. Some point to KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West in 1970 and proceeded to warn Americans of a Soviet plot to demoralize the American people.

But the demoralization may have been set in stone long before the Soviet Union even existed. In the 1880s, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned of encroaching nihilism and described a vision of the ultimate culmination of Western culture: The Last Man, a person who has no interest in thinking or taking risks but simply seeks comfort.