Why do people who give credence to some master race or outstanding breed so often seem to be seriously damaged if not deranged?
I do not imagine that Haltom's 13th Law is original, but I have never heard anyone come out and state what almost all think: talk of supermen belongs in comic books.
In some classic treatments of characters who think themselves transcendent, the deluded seem taken with themselves for no reason apparent to the mass of men. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is said by many around him to be a genius, but Dostoevsky hides Raskolnikov's superiority well. In Hitchcock's "Rope" and Fleischer's "Compulsion," cinematic Leopolds and Loebs are as callow and feckless as Raskolnikov albeit less depressive. A far more impressive product of eugenics in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- as I shift to cultural creations that cost me less time and brought me more pleasure than those mentioned already -- seems outstanding for a while but is bested by Captain James T. Kirk. On the television "Star Trek," Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban) lost a previous bout to Lieutenant Marla McGivers (the late Madlyn Rhue), who was far from a formidable opponent.
Perhaps such cultural commentaries are not to be trusted. Their audiences are people of middling abilities or less. Perhaps authors were merely soothing too-human humans so that they would not fear the super-human reapers who operate beyond good and evil. Maybe the authors saw in themselves too little superiority and so lampooned their masters like so many valets and maids on holiday. It could be that Western culture is addicted to Manichean portraits about struggles between good and evil about which I believe Zoroaster had views, too.
Nonetheless, the few persons I have known who took master races, higher breeds, or transvaluing over-men seriously and recognized themselves as such Übermenschen were, as the Brits like to say, not prepossessing. I do not propose here a genealogy of morons. A quick example may suffice.
A friend from my teens in Ballard tended to admire the Nazis and joined the American Nazi Party. If this was merely a phase, it was an ominous one. This Irish lad was given to shooting at hobos on passing railroad flatcars with his .22 rifle. He was a good but not great chess player, which is to say that I won perhaps one game in ten from him. Other than that, however, I cannot remember a solitary virtue in the lad. This superman lived in the perpetual twilight of the idle that was adolescence in Ballard in the 1960s. He did escape Ballard by joining the Navy. Now that was super!
To be polite about it, my experiences in academe have not improved my assessments of those who propound some next big human thing. I profited from reading Nietzsche far more than from slogging Dostoevsky. Cliff's Notes improved on the latter far more than on the former, to be sure. I have also known graduate students and professors who could derive insights of value from Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, although I never knew one who actually got beyond gay science to testable propositions. Still, their political patter had a distinguished lineage. Like the futurist who purports to understand it all courtesy of Yeats' gyres or the Straussian who decodes classic texts to discover truths, the intellectual who sees supermen and hears dead people writes fabulous articles for the New York Review of Books without advancing understanding much that those of us with too little will to power can appreciate.
In sum, those who sip the Nietzschean Flavor Aid have deftly hidden their genius from me. They partake of the public timidity and circumspection of Clark Kent more than the pluck and persistence of Lois Lane. They exude the competence and capacity of Lex Luthor's henchmen. Jerry Lewis might mistake them for Professor Moriarty, I suppose.
If these are the Übermenschen, we all owe pessimists a big apology.
Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.
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