`NDT 2

Weber HT
 1AC
My advocacy is to kill god.
 Happy Easter 1AC
God: NO! Please don’t kill me! I am God! I give the people meaning! I teach people
how to live happily! Without me, what does life mean? Without me, the world is
nihilism.
We don’t need your meaning. I can be happy without you. My meaning is not yours,
not anyone’s really, just mine. I create it myself. Your death is a rupture, a recognition
of instability, a willful affirmation of chaos within myself. I become what I am in the
face of your death.
Hirst, 13
(Aggie Hirst, Department of International Politics, City University London. “Violence, Self-authorship and
the ‘Death of God’: The ‘Traps’ of the Messianic and the Tragic”
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/42/1/135.abstract) Henge *we don’t endorse gendered language
The ‘Death of God’, the Suicide of ‘Man’ and the Be(com)ing of the Subject In the geo-cultural contexts within which the ‘Death of God’ has been declared, a
severing of the connections between the earthly realm of the human and the divine world of God is suggested. As Armando Salvatore notes, ‘[m]odern

global society is heir to a fundamental rupture in human history, through which the human grasp of
symbols of godly majesty and divine intervention on both nature and human society is replaced by a
reflexive rationalization of their meaning.’ For some, he continues, this has been welcomed as ‘a swift transition from mythos to logos,’
while by others it has been ‘decried as the progressive liquidation of human community and its incorporation into the iron cage of the power-saturated, anonymous
relations of global modernity.’9 For better or worse, what these ongoing ruptures suggest is that the subject can no longer
rely upon divine points of reference as a means by which to ascertain meaning, value or direction; with the
‘Death of God’, ‘[w]hat has died is the “reality” of an order of existence that is “other” than self-
perception and subjective appropriation.’10 As Heidegger similarly frames it, if ‘God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is
dead, if the supresensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above all its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing remains

to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.’11 The ‘Death of God’ would seem, then, to
amount to the breaking of the links between the subject and divinely sanctioned modes of thought
and being. Nietzsche’s engagement with this rupture combines tones of awe and affirmation. He celebrates it at least in part because in his view the assumed
connection between man and the divine was never in reality possible. He suggests that far from enjoying such a transcendental relation, ‘Man’ rather

mistook his ‘inner world’, predicated on his ego, for Being. This error led him to believe in a reality
‘outside’ himself that corresponded to his ego. For Nietzsche, what the ‘Death of God’ ultimately
demonstrates is not a fundamentally new condition in which the connection to the divine has been lost, but rather that what the subject
had previously taken to be an independently existing reality ‘outside’ was only ever a projection of
itself: Man projected his three ‘inner facts of conscience’, the will, the spirit, and the ego, in which he
believed most firmly, outside. He first deduced the concept of Being out of the concept of Ego, he supposed ‘things’ to exist as he did himself,
according to his notion of the ego as cause … The thing itself, I repeat, the concept ‘thing’ was merely a reflex of the belief in the ego as cause … [This] error

of spirit [was] regarded as a cause, [and] confounded with reality! And made the measure of reality!
And called God! 12 Thus, for Nietzsche, far from enjoying a connection with the divine, the subject had succeeded only in
projecting its own ego outward and had mistakenly construed this for a reality independent of itself;
the subject deduced grand ideas about Being by inflating itself to resemble something greater, so
great, in fact, that it gave it the name ‘God’. The death of this God renders this process of projection
apparent, according to Nietzsche. The result of this is that the subject loses its (illusory) connection to the divine: ‘man
has become incapable of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself and of having a
relation with it.’13 As such, the ‘Death of God’ exposes only what was already the case: the subject must generate meaning
without recourse to standards sanctioned by divine licence. Importantly, what this also means is that, as well as undermining
the supposed connections between the human and the divine, the ‘Death of God’ simultaneously alienates the subject from
the communal, earthly realm ‘outside’ of itself. As originator of the shared values which had underpinned society hitherto, God
had previously made possible a meaningful connection between the individual and the community.
With the death of this origin and sustaining force, these collective bonds are severed, and the subject
loses recourse to shared mores outside itself. The subject is then left to its own devices to make sense
of existence; Jacob Taubes notes Hegel’s claim that such phenomena as philosophy emerge ‘when a gulf has arisen between inward strivings and external
reality, and the old forms of religion etc. are no longer satisfying.’14 The measure of value and meaning must, henceforth, be found

not through commonly shared understandings of the sacred or the divine, but rather through the
subject’s own faculties, through reason and conscience. Such conscience is ‘inward, but exists in
constant tension with the world, forcing us to bridge the gap between it and the realm of the world.’ 15
These ruptures with the divine and the earthly communal occur not simply as a consequence of God’s
death but rather of His murder . Nietzsche is explicit that the ‘Death of God’ is an act of deicide: ‘We have killed
him – you and I! We are his murderers.’16 Such deicide is, for Nietzsche, an unparalleled moment in
history: ‘ There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all
history up to now!’17 Nothing less than the world is saved, Nietzsche claims, by this ‘greatest recent event … that the belief in the Christian God has become
unbelievable.’18 This great act of deicide occurs, Heidegger shows, because ‘Man enters into insurrection.’19 Through this insurrection, the
subject’s
status shifts from one of ‘being-written’ by standards and norms the value of which were inherited
rather than chosen, to one of ‘self-authorship’, in which, by virtue of its choosing of them, the subject
bestows meaning on such principles. As such, ‘[t]he earth, as the abode of man, is unchained from the
sun. The realm that constitutes the supresensory, which as such, is in itself[,] no longer stands over man as the
authoritative light … That which is, as the objective, is swallowed up into the immanence of subjectivity. The horizon no longer emits light of itself.’20
Consequently, while the vastness of this act is clear, it is also devastating. As Heidegger explains, thinking in terms of values is radical killing. It not only strikes down
that which is as such, in its being-in-itself, but it does away utterly with Being … Thevalue-thinking of the metaphysics of the will to
power is murderous in a most extreme sense, because it absolutely does not let Being itself take rise ,
i.e. come into the vitality of its essence. Thinking in terms of values precludes in advance that Being
itself will attain to a coming to presence in its truth.21 Thus, along with God, Being is also murdered . With no
possibility of redemption or repentance, because God remains dead, is not resurrected, the ongoing murder of God is thus, in an

important sense, ‘Man’s’ suicide. By ‘Man’, I intend to suggest the human (within the geo-cultural contexts in question)
understood as something in particular, a mode or form of being which inherits and is constructed via
divine and communal inheritances which provide external justifications for the subject. In Heidegger’s [t]hat
which formerly conditioned and determined the essence of man in the manner of purpose and norm has lost its
unconditional and immediate, above all its ubiquitously and infallibly operative power of effective action. That suprasensory world of

purposes and norms no longer quickens and supports life … That is the metaphysical meaning of the word ‘God is
dead,’ thought metaphysically.22 Thus, in murdering God, ‘Man’s’ claim to Being is also killed. ‘Man’ thereby
commits suicide. In Foucault’s words, ‘Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one
another, at which the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the first … It is no
longer possible to think in our day other than the void left by man’s disappearance.’23 What remains is an underdetermined subject-

to-be(come) which has precluded from itself points of reference from which its meaning and selfhood
may be inferred. In other words, ‘in this event man also becomes different. He becomes the one who does away with that which is, in the sense of that
which is in itself. The uprising of man into subjectivity transforms that which is into object .’24 In Taubes’ terms, man
moves from ‘nature’ to ‘history’ through an exercise of this terrible freedom: ‘Only mankind’s answer [Antwort] to the word of God, which is essentially a negative
one [ein Nein], is evidence of human freedom. Therefore, the freedom of negation is the foundation of history.’25 In this reading, the
‘Death of God’
thus simultaneously provokes and compromises the subject’s self-authored be(com)ing. On the one hand, it makes
possible a willed and agential production of subjectivity: it comprises a call to ‘become who we are –
human beings who are unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.’26 As
such self-creating agents, subjects attain a new and, according to Heidegger, superior form of existence : ‘humanity which

wills its own being human … is determined by a form of man’s essence that goes beyond and
surpasses man hitherto.’27 On the other hand, however, ‘Man’s’ act of deicide is also an act of suicide: as a
consequence of the undermining of enduring points of reference from which the subject might take its
bearings, it is forced to serve as the only available standard by which to judge. ‘Man’, understood as something in
particular, is thereby undermined . Instead, the underdetermined subject must affirm selfhood, values,

meanings, without access to stable principles, guides or inheritances. This ruptured subject and this
paradoxical and vertiginous process pose a crucial question regarding the ethico-political implications of self-authorship
under conditions of foundationlessness brought about by the ‘Death of God’: where might the subject seek out the
terms and values via which it may self-create? As noted previously, Nietzsche identified two possibilities, a
‘reaching outward’ towards shared norms , even after such mores have been shown to be indefensible, and a ‘turning
inwards’ towards the ‘inner conscience’. In order to explore this question, the political implications of Derrida’s messianic thought, in which
the former is in evidence, and Dillon and Nietzsche’s respective engagements with the tragic, wherein the latter can be perceived, may be fruitfully explored.

God: I give people agency! Free will! Ethical character! I give an objective measure for
right and wrong!
Agency? What agency? Will isn’t free. We didn’t will the will into willing. It’s either
strong or weak. How resentful to believe that we have subjective control over our
surroundings. I’m not a single human subject. I’m a shameless mixture of forces, all
flowing through me, expressing outward in various expressions of power.
Brace, 15
(Laura Brace, Director of Research and PhD Studies, Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics and
International Relations at University of Leicester. “Slave Morality” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought.
3465–3470) Henge

On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche’s starting point for On the Genealogy of Morals was that historians of
morality all stand under the command of a particular morality that they assert must be both universal
and unconditionally binding. At the core of Nietzsche’s project is the idea that meaning is “radically historical” (Ansell Pearson 1994 : 124), so that
“every concept, every sentiment and every passion has a history” (1994: 126). This means that we cannot expect morality as a concept to

have a single, universal validity that could last us for all time. Nietzsche set out to challenge the
hegemony of “the herd-animal morality which refuses to acknowledge that it is only one particular,
partial perspective on the world” (1994: 126). He examined the underlying value of morality, and asked us to be ready to experiment
and overturn the accepted norms and meanings that we give to fundamental terms such as good and

evil, and to recognize that we may need a whole new kind of knowledge to re-evaluate our values. The
first essay of the Genealogy of Morals focuses on the slave revolt in morality, and in particular the identification of the good with a lack of egotism. It explores the
feeling of powerlessness that characterized the slaves, and what it meant for them to be subject to the arbitrary will of another. Nobles, Nietzsche argued,

experienced themselves as agents who commanded those of the lower ranks. The nobles identified as
intrinsically valuable those traits that expressed their agency , and gave them spiritual superiority. Their political
agency gave them ethical character, and their morality was based on action: “how one acts is what
one is” (Owen 2007 : 78). This was a positive account of agency, where the agent’s intentions cannot be
separated out from what he does because the deed is everything. The noble could spontaneously
affirm himself as good, and then declare that those at a distance were lowly and inferior, and
therefore bad. Every noble morality began “from a triumphant affirmation of itself ” (Nietzsche 1887 : I, §10).
The slave revolt in morality was a countermovement, a re-evaluation of dominant noble values. Questions arise
over whether the slave revolt was calculated to harm the powerful, to subvert their power and to institute new values as an act of spiritual revenge. Against this
“strategic” reading, some argue that the slave revolt was a psychological process, an expression of the slaves’ emotional orientation toward the powerful, rooted in
“intense and focused malice” that led them to develop and internalize a new evaluative framework (Wallace 2007 ). The
nobles, the powerful,
“esteem life in terms of a feeling of overflowing power” (Ansell Pearson 1994 : 129). Their values were rooted in
a powerful physicality, war, adventure, hunting, and dancing, “vigorous, free, joyful activity” (Nietzsche
1887 : I, §7). The noble was self-directed, self-affirming, virile, and independent of the other. He gained a

sensation of satisfaction from being able to vent his power on the powerless, able to despise and ill-treat a

fellow creature. There was, Nietzsche argued, a joy in sheer violence and cruelty in ancient man ( 1887 : I, §10). The
nobles experienced a sweetness in mastery, a “lightening of the soul” at having their sense of honor personified in another person whose
resistance had been overcome (Patterson 1982 : 78). The capacities and dispositions of the slaves were given only an instrumental and not an intrinsic value, and
the slaves experienced themselves as objects of disdain (Owen 2007 : 78). Slave Morality The slave type of morality, the morality of the weak and

oppressed, the powerless, on the other hand, could

only define itself as good by first negating others as evil. Nietzsche
suggested that the
slaves experienced their powerlessness, their dishonor, and their position as objects of
disdain as intolerable. Their experience of slavery generated feelings of ressentiment that could not
be given outward expression, and so turned inward and became creative . The nobles’ contempt for
the powerless meant that the slaves had no choice but to contest the terms of moral recognition, and
to try to forge their own morality. From the outset, slave morality says “No” to what is outside, other,
not itself (Nietzsche 1887 : I, §10). This “No” is its creative deed. It is embittered by the world, and by its own
frustrations. In order to exist, slave morality needs a hostile external world, an opposing world. Its
action is fundamentally reaction . It is “parasitic on what it must negate” (Ansell Pearson 1994 : 130). The
creativity of slave morality lies in inventing the idea of a human subject who is free to act (Nietzsche 1887 : I,
§13). This allows the slaves to attribute blame to the nobles for being strong and powerful, and hold

them responsible for their actions. In turn, the slaves glorify their own weakness and construe their own
inability to act as a free choice (Ansell Pearson 1994 : 130). This picture allows the powerless slaves to experience themselves as agents, and to
evaluate the nobles as evil and themselves as good (Owen 2007 : 79). They construct slave traits, such as humility and

obedience, as virtues, and noble traits, like boldness and the joy of command, as vices. Nietzsche was not
arguing that there was something naturally slavish about the “slaves of history”; they just “happen to have been
on the wrong end of the violent constitution of the state” (Owen 2007 : 79). Their position compels them to
revalue good and evil, to engage in revenge, and to try to make sense of themselves as “agents whose
agency is intrinsically valuable” (2007: 79). Nietzsche assigned the initial emergence of the slave revolt in morality to the Jewish people, and its
development to Christianity. His psychological focus, as David Owen argues, was on how the slave revolt “transmutes a feeling of

powerlessness into a feeling of power” (Owen 2007 : 84). The slave revolt in morality was conducted by the
priest, the nihilist, and the philosopher, all figures who were disappointed with the world and yearned
for something else. The attack on noble values was a form of spiritual revenge in the hearts of the
slaves and the minds of the priests, “forcing one to turn inside instead of outside for retribution” (Linstedt 1997 : 84). The priest was
pushing his misery into the consciousness of the happy, so that they came to be ashamed of their
happiness . The priest understood the sufferers, and acquired the trust and awe of the weak. He taught the slaves to reinterpret their suffering as a sign of
their goodness, and so their weakness as a sign of freedom. The ascetic priest “brings with him, doubtless, salve and balsam;

but before he can play the physician he must first wound; so while he soothes the pain which the
wound makes, he at the same time poisons the wound ” (Nietzsche 1887 : III, §15). In the presence of this “strange shepherd,”
everything healthy becomes sick, and everything sick becomes tame. According to Nietzsche, the ascetic priest
was the person who altered the direction of the slave revolt in morality. Every suffering person
searches for a cause of his suffering, a responsible doer, somebody to blame. The priest taught them to blame
themselves . He offered the sick an anesthetic, and in the process the development of conscience was transformed into bad conscience, “which is unable
ever to relieve itself of its feeling of guilt” (Ansell Pearson 1994 : 134). Suffering became entwined with guilt, and concepts of

suffering, indebtedness, and bad conscience were moralized, “caught up and understood primarily in
terms of the values of slave morality” (Lindstedt 1997 : 99). Slave morality, under the direction of the priest, the nihilist, and the
philosopher, presented itself as an impartial view of value, but Nietzsche argued that it actually expressed the

desire for vengeance, for power over the nobles. He emphasized the mendacity of slave morality, but also recognized that it introduced
intelligence to the powerless (1887: I, §7), which they brought to bear in coping with the intolerable position that they occupied (Owen 2007 : 87)

God: If you let me live, I can reward you. Think of all the things you’ve ever wanted in
life.
What? All I want is what I have. I say yes to suffering. What else can we do? I’m not
afraid of pain, not afraid of life. Misery will not set the terms of my reality. What a
sad, wretched existence you offer.
Roney, 13
(Patrick Roney, Aesthetics and 19th/20th Century Continental Philosophy at Koc University.
“Transcendence and Life: Nietzsche on the “Death of God””
http://kaygi.home.uludag.edu.tr/issues/2013/2013-20-7.pdf) Henge

The Joy of Suffering The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same presents an interpretation of the
world as a whole which denies the existence of anything outside of life that can justify it. This not only places
Nietzsche’s doctrine in direct opposition to the Christian promise of redemption in the afterlife, it also puts into question the interpretation

of suffering that goes with it. Christianity lives and breathes on the idea that suffering is punishment for
one’s sins, and since we are all guilty of original sin, we are all doomed to suffer. For Christianity, the
fact of suffering means that life is not just. Suffering therefore is experienced as something negative ; it
is the means by which we accuse life and find it guilty. We are called upon to accept our suffering as penance and punishment for the very fact of living. Worse than
that, aspunishment suffering is extended beyond mortal death into the realm of eternal damnation. The
famous passage from Romans 6:23 proclaims just that. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The

death that is spoken of here is a second death, an eternal death that is opposed to the eternal life that
awaits the faithful after mortal death. Eternal recurrence changes this completely. If we accept and
affirm that we shall repeat over and over again the events of our lives, then we must also necessarily
affirm the sufferings that we undergo. In a sense, transcendence is linked to the desire to live a different
life and to escape from suffering. Christianity has idealized this into the notion of the “new life,”
which can only be obtained through an acceptance of Jesus Christ as the savior who alone can wash away our sins. But
what if the “new life” is never new but is always repeated? What if one eternally returns to the
moment of re-willing oneself through the creation of new values? Then one cannot separate the good
parts of life from the bad and seek to retain only the former, which means that one must say ‘Yes’ to
suffering even though it cannot end in redemption as per Christian teaching. There is no reason why we suffer,
no reward that we will receive at the end. Our suffering appears to be quite meaningless, so how could
Nietzsche turn this into an affirmation? Nietzsche’s reinterpretation of suffering seems strange. Shouldn’t we try to eliminate suffering from our lives? Not
necessarily. Once
suffering is understood as a negative and harmful thing, then our aim to try and avoid or
eliminate it. This is what the Last Man tries to do. In doing so however, we allow suffering to set the terms and
conditions for our lives . The avoidance of suffering then rules our destiny, and we in turn become slaves
to it. Philip Kain makes the following very insightful comment about this issue: “Embracing eternal recurrence means imposing
suffering on oneself, meaningless suffering, suffering that just happens, suffering for no reason at all.
But at the very same time, this creates the innocence of existence. The meaninglessness of suffering means the

innocence of suffering.” (Kain, “Nietzsche, the Eternal Return and the Horror of Existence,” 59) There is much to recommend this reading. What would
we be without our sufferings after all? Do they not make us who we are as much as our happiness, perhaps even more so? We are not shaped

simply by the act of enduring our sufferings patiently and working to overcome them, but by
affirming them, and those who do are freed from the weight of judging, blaming and devaluing life . We
can summarize Nietzsche’s point by saying that the affirmation of life without goal or aim requires the affirmation of

suffering; only then can we be freed from the spirit of revenge; only then can we be freed from the
Nay-saying of Christian morality. There is yet one further aspect of the affirmation of suffering that must be noted. The common idea
of the course of human life is one that proceeds irreversibly in one direction from birth to death. Our
personal identity is intimately bound to this interpretation of time—it is assumed to remain the same throughout our lives
because this “I” that I am is co-present at every moment through which I pass and throughout the entire succession of nows that will make up my life. This is merely
an assumption however. If time is not constituted as a series of nows but as the eternal recurrence of the same,
then the self to which “I” return may be the same but is never identical. Nietzsche’s idea that I re-live my life
innumerable times suggests that what I actually pass through are multiple selves, and that my life consists of a

plurality of selves in which I am constantly returning to a self which is certainly mine, but which is also
different from the self that I was. My identity does not remain the same through the changes. I do not live
according to a history that develops along a single, successive line of moments and hours and days,
but as a repetition of myself that is lived through a series of different individualities . This does not mean that
there is no “I,” but that the “I” constantly returns to itself only by becoming other. Remarkably enough, the eternal

recurrence of the same not only makes it possible for us to experience the innocence of life, but it also makes it possible for us to finally
break with a certain notion of the self. Christian morality is inseparable from the idea of the self as a
person with a conscience who is capable of feeling guilty. This interiorization of the self is necessary
for us to think and act as morally responsible agents. As free-willed beings we enjoy a certain independence from the temptations
and injustices of the world, which solidifies into the notion of a person who is in possession of an identity that remains essentially the same. The eternal

recurrence of the same releases us from this idea of the self and the corresponding accusation of
existence. “There are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from a superabundance of life –
they want a Dionysian art as well as a tragic outlook and insight into life – then, those who suffer from
an impoverishment of life. . .” (NW, p. 271) “Dionysian” suffering is not penance and it does not make one
passive. It is life as the will to power expending itself in a new release of energy that does away with
the stability of existing forces. The joy of suffering arises from the feeling of discordance that results
when the overabundance of the will to power encounters the feeling of security of an existing life,
and surmounts it. To affirm the return of is this joy-insuffering represents an unrestrained affirmation
of eternally returning life, which serves no other end except for itself.13
God: But what of the afterlife? Heaven? A perfect world must surely entice you to
spare me.
What afterlife? I don’t need an afterlife. This life should be meaningful, not some
abstract, otherworldly paradise. This world is so much better than heaven. I have no
need for asceticism, I prefer Dionysian will to life.
Turanli in 2003 (Aydan, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty of Letters and Sciences
Istanbul Technical University, “Nietzsche and the Later Wittgenstein: An Offense to the Quest for
Another World”, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 26 (2003), 55-63)
The craving for absolutely general specifications results in doing metaphysics. Unlike Wittgenstein, Nietzsche provides an account of how this
craving arises. The
creation of the two worlds such as apparent and real world, conditioned and
unconditioned world, being and becoming is the creation of the ressentiment of metaphysicians.
Nietzsche says, "to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world that
makes one suffer: the ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative " (WP III 579).
Escaping from this world because there is grief in it results in asceticism. [End Page 61] Paying respect to
the ascetic ideal is longing for the world that is pure and denaturalized. Craving for frictionless
surfaces, for a transcendental, pure, true, ideal, perfect world, is the result of the ressentiment of
metaphysicans who suffer in this world. Metaphysicians do not affirm this world as it is, and this paves the
way for many explanatory theories in philosophy. In criticizing a philosopher who pays homage to the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche says, "he wants to
escape from torture" (GM III 6). The traditional philosopher or the ascetic priest continues to repeat, "'My kingdom is not of this world'" (GM III
10). This is a longing for another world in which one does not suffer. It is to escape from this world; to create another
illusory, fictitious, false world. This longing for "the truth" of a world in which one does not suffer is the desire for a world of
constancy. It is supposed that contradiction, change, and deception are the causes of suffering; in other
words, the senses deceive; it is from the senses that all misfortunes come; reason corrects the errors;
therefore reason is the road to the constant. In sum, this world is an error; the world as it ought to be exists. This will to
truth, this quest for another world, this desire for the world as it ought to be, is the result of
unproductive thinking. It is unproductive because it is the result of avoiding the creation of the world as it ought to be. According to
Nietzsche, the will to truth is "the impotence of the will to create" (WP III 585). Metaphysicians end up with the creation
of the "true" world in contrast to the actual, changeable, deceptive, self-contradictory world. They try to discover the true, transcendental
world that is already there rather than creating a world for themselves. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the
transcendental world
is the "denaturalized world" (WP III 586). The way out of the circle created by the ressentiment of
metaphysicians is the will to life rather than the will to truth. The will to truth can be overcome only
through a Dionysian relationship to existence . This is the way to a new philosophy, which in Wittgenstein's terms aims "to
show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle" (PI §309).

God: I provide order! The world is rational, it makes sense, I make everything sensible!
The world isn’t rational! Socrates failed, life is only fun if it’s disordered. Stability is
impossible, and I have no need for a rational existence. Ascetic search for perfection is
weak compared to my willful affirmation of chaos.
Saurette ‘96 [Paul, 1996 “I mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid Them: Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis
of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory.” Millenium Journal of International Studies. Vol.
25, number 1. pp. 3-6]
The Philosophical Foundation of the Will to Truth/Order: ‘I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. A will to a system is a lack of integrity.’
According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give meaning to
the phenomenon of human existence within a given cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to
Power, this will to meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a particular
community. Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of the most basic philosophical
foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the origins of values which we take to be intrinsic and
natural. Nietzsche suggests, therefore, that to understand the development of our modern conception of society
and politics, we must reconsider the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of Socratic thought.
Nietzsche claims that pre-Socratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life on heroic myths which
honoured tragedy and competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the joyful and ordered
(Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian) aspects of life were accepted and affirmed as inescapable
aspects of human existence. However, this incarnation of the will to power as tragedy weakened, and became unable to sustain
meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the self-respect and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order.
‘Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were but five steps from excess: the monstruin in animo was a universal danger’.
No longer willing to accept the tragic hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic myth, Greek thought yielded to decadence, a search for a new
social foundation which would soften the tragedy of life, while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates’ thought became
paramount. In the words of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the
idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself the old Athens was
coming to an end. And Socrates understood that the world had need of him —his expedient, his cure and his
personal art of self-preservation. Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual
standard paralleled the widespread yearning for assurance and stability within society. His expedient,
his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that promised mastery and control,
not through acceptance of the tragic life, but through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent,
and the problematic. In response to the failing power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to renounce the very
experience that had given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the Apollonian world promised
by Socratic reason. In Nietzsche’s words, ‘[r]ationality was divined as a saviour... it was their last expedient.
The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of
emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational...’ Thus,
Socrates codified the wider fear of instability into an intellectual framework. The Socratic Will to Truth
is characterised by the attempt to understand and order life rationally by renouncing the Dionysian
elements of existence and privileging an idealised Apollonian order. As life is inescapably comprised
of both order and disorder, however, the promise of control through Socratic reason is only possible
by creating a ‘Real World’ of eternal and meaningful forms, in opposition to an ‘Apparent World’ of
transitory physical existence. Suffering and contingency is contained within the Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and
ignored in relation to the ideal order of the Real World. Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the
fundamental contradiction between the experience of Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and
the idealised order of the Real World. According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the
emergence of a uniquely ‘modern” understanding of life which could only view suffering as the result
of the imperfection of the Apparent World, This outlook created a modem notion of responsibility in
which the Dionysian elements of life could be understood only as a phenomenon for which someone,
or something, is to blame. Nietzsche terms this philosophically-induced condition ressentiment, and argues that it signaled
a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by exposing the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution.
This contradiction, however, was resolved historically through the aggressive universalisation of the Socratic
ideal by Christianity. According to Nietzsche, ascetic Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the Apparent
World as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life could be turned. Blame for suffering fell on individuals within the
Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the Real World. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘I suffer: someone must be
to blame for it’ thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: ‘Quite so my sheep someone must be to blame for it: but
you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,—you alone are to blame for yourself—This is brazen and false enough: but
one thing is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered.’Faced with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the prospect of
meaninglessness, once again, ‘one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational....” The genius of the ascetic
ideal was that it preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by extrapolating ad absurdium the Socratic division
through the redirection of ressentiment against the Apparent World! Through this redirection, the Real World was transformed from a
transcendental world of philosophical escape into a model towards which the Apparent World actively aspired, always blaming its contradictory
experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action. This subtle transformation of the relationship between the
dichotomised worlds creates the Will to Order as the defining characteristic of the modern Will to
Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the Apparent World, the ascetic
ressentiment desperately searches for ‘the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose of deepest
sleep, in short absence of suffering’.’3 According to the ascetic model, however, this escape is possible only when the Apparent
World perfectly duplicates the Real World, The Will to Order, then, is the aggressive need increasingly to order the
Apparent World in line with the precepts of the moral Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment, of the Will to
Order, therefore, generates two interrelated reactions. First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the
Apparent World in accordance with the dictates of the ideal, Apollonian Real World. In order to
achieve this, however, the ascetic ideal also asserts that a ‘truer’, more complete knowledge of the
Real World must be established, creating an ever-increasing Will to Truth. This self- perpetuating
movement creates an interpretative structure within which everything must be understood and
ordered in relation to the ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche suggests, “[t]he ascetic ideal has a
goal—this goal is so universal that all other interests of human existence seem, when compared with
it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it
permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and sanctions solely from the
point of view of its interpretation.’

God: Well then, you choose hell. Eternal damnation is your tragic fate.
There’s no divine status to that resentful hatred. Hell is a construct, resulting from an
internalized fear of difference and power. I do not fear my power, nor blame myself
for the misfortunes of the world. I refuse to resent myself for my strength.
Solomon, 3
(Robert C. Solomon was a professor of Continental philosophy at the University of Texas. “Living with
Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us” pg. 89-93) Henge

Among those passions Nietzsche recognizes as “life-stultifying,” the one which he by far spends most
of his energy attacking is the singularly malevolent emotion of resentment, which he calls
ressentiment. Slave morality, he tells us, is a defensive reaction against the values of the more powerful, a
reaction that is born of resentment. I want to talk about the nature, uses, and vicissitudes of resentment and locate resentment and the other
“reactive” emotions within the scheme of Nietzsche’s general conception of the passions. Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson has recently created quite a stir in the
analytic debates over the “free will problem” with his essay “Freedom and Resentment,” in which he outlines the significance of the “reactive emotions” in our
conception of ourselves and others in what I have called “the blaming perspective.” One could, I think, pursue a similar argument with reference to Nietzsche, that
our sense of responsibility (especially the ascription of responsibility to others) is part and parcel of that perspective
which employs resentment as its driving motive. Nietzsche, of course, is critical of this perspective, but I think the philosophical insight
is the same. Resentment and responsibility are part of the same conceptual brew, and though one can ascribe

responsibility without resentment (for example, in praise and admiration), one cannot easily imagine resentment without the

ascription of responsibility. There are other reactive emotions, that is, emotions whose nature is essentially a reaction to (or
against) other people. That unpleasant but close-knit family includes envy, spite, pique, and of course that peculiar emotion, Schadenfreude

(delight in other people’s misfortunes). Other emotions are somewhat kin, such as jealousy and indignation, but the differences are
informative. Jealousy requires an involvement and a sense of right that are absent from envy, and indignation includes a sense of moral right that is notably absent
from many reactive emotions. In this chapter, I want to explore some of these similarities and differences in detail, but for now, it is enough to note that all of
these emotions are to be distinguished by the fact that they require another person, a person who is
in one way or another blamed or held liable, as their object . The obvious contrast would be an emotion such as pride, which is
(at least arguably) both self-directed and wholly laudatory. But love and pity, which would seem to be dramatic contrasts to

the reactive emotions, are more akin to resentment, according to Nietzsche. Love seems to be an emotion
directed at another in a wholly laudatory way, but Nietzsche argues (among other charges) that it is ultimately the
most selfish and possessive of emotions. So, too, pity would seem to be all caring and concern for
other people and waive any claim that they are responsible for their plight. But in some cases, at least, such
claims turn out to be false and hypocritical, based instead on resentment and an invidious concern for
one’s own superiority . Resentment is the emotion that Nietzsche focuses on, and for good reason. Resentment is most obviously directed against
others (as opposed to love and pity, for instance), but unlike hatred and contempt, for instance, it does so from a marked perspective of inferiority. Rather

than taking responsibility for one’s own inferior position, resentment always projects the
responsibility onto other people (or groups or institutions). Simply stated, resentment is a vitriolic emotion that is always aimed
outward and whose presupposition is one’s own sense of oppression or inferiority. Nietzsche’s most profound philosophical ad hominem argument is that
people who defend Morality are in fact expressing their resentment, and the “moral” values that they
present as ideal and objective are in fact nothing but the expressions of bitter resentment and should
be understood as such. They may be understandable reactions to what oppresses and threatens, but
they do not have any Moral much less absolute or divine status. As a master if perhaps overly imaginative philologist,
Nietzsche traces the language of noble and slave morality back to the nobles and slaves of ancient times. He suggests that our most cherished values

originated not among those who were the best and brightest of their times, but among those who
were the most oppressed and impoverished. The dominant emotion in the evolution of Morality, in other
words, came to be not pride in oneself or one’s people but a defensive prejudice against all of those who succeeded and

achieved the happiness that one could not oneself achieve. The ancient Hebrews and then the early
Christians, Nietzsche argues, simmered with resentment against their ancient masters and concocted a
fabulous philosophical strategy. Instead of seeing themselves as failures in the competition for wealth
and power, they turned the tables (“revalued”) their values and turned their resentment into self-
righteousness. Morality is the product of this self-righteous resentment, which is not nearly so concerned with living the
good life as it is with chastizing those who do live it. In its extreme form—asceticism—it is the aggressive denial of the good life, even insofar as one is able to
achieve it. Morality
is neither justified nor refuted by its historical or psychological origins. The nature of
the motive that drives one’s action need not necessarily undermine the action’s value (or, for that matter,
guarantee it). But it is not only Nietzsche who insists that the rightness (or wrongness) of an action has much to do with its motives and intentions. It is very much in
agreement with Kant, for example, that Nietzsche asks, Is acting “in conformity with” the moral rules sufficient to be moral (or Moral)? And the answer, for both of
them, is clearly “no.” One has to be properly motivated as well; one has to have the right intentions. As Kant puts it, one has to act for the sake of duty and duty
alone, motivated by reason and not by our inclinations. But even Kant freely admits that the actual motives of our behavior
may be unknown to us. Among those inclinations may well be such self-absorbed and bitter emotions as resentment and “ulterior motives” that have
nothing to do with duty at all. Thus Nietzsche’s ad hominem argument emerges within the Kantian scheme: insofar as “moral behavior” is

motivated by resentment, it is thereby despicable. Kant’s (complementary) argument is that insofar as our action is motivated by
duty, it has “moral worth.” The difference between Nietzsche and Kant lies in the difficult question, What is to count as an “inclination”? Why are respect for the
moral law and the urge to do one’s duty not, for Kant, inclinations? How do some inclinations undermine the claim of an act to moral goodness while others do not
(if even compassion has no moral worth)? Nietzsche, who would reject the very distinction between reason and the inclinations, would argue that the
motive
of resentment may be just as relevant to the evaluation of morality as the intention to do one’s duty. It
is unclear for Kant whether resentment would undermine or simply be irrelevant to moral worth, assuming (as both Kant and Nietzsche do) that motivation is
complex and both respect for one’s duty and resentment of others are possible motives. Nietzsche would deny that there is any such motive as a sense of duty for
its own sake, but he would clearly insist that if there were any such motive it would not eclipse but should rather be explained in terms of the resentment that
accompanies it. What Is Wrong with Resentment? What
is wrong with resentment? Why does pointing out that someone is acting (or
theorizing) out of resentment undermine their moral authority? Resentment
cannot be despicable just because it is an
inclination or a feeling, for all acts, according to Nietzsche, are motivated by the inclinations— our desires, passions, and
emotions. Indeed, it is action supposedly motivated solely by reason that he finds most suspiciou s (and he therefore
suspects that resentment may be the actual motive). The problem with resentment cannot be its lack of “objectivity”
either, since Nietzsche denies that any moral authority is objective in the required Kantian sense. Neither is the problem the
apparent egoism of resentment, for Nietzsche often argues that all acts are essentially egoistic: the question is rather, “whose ego?” One might well

object to the hypocrisy of claiming to be selfless while defending rules that are clearly to one’s
advantage, but it is not even as if deceit as such is a vice. Indeed, Nietzsche (like Machiavelli) sometimes seems to quite admire it and he practices it in his
work with some regularity. Nor can the problem be that resentment (like vengeance, to which it is closely related) is notoriously self-absorbed and obsessive. All
passions and virtues are in some sense self-absorbed and obsessive, according to Nietzsche, and that (as opposed to the “disinterestedness” of reason) is one of
their virtues. Resentment
undermines claims to authority, according to Nietzsche, because it is essentially pathetic. It is an
expression of weakness and impotence. Nietzsche is against resentment because it is an emotion of the weak that the
strong and powerful do not and cannot feel. What is not clear is whether resentment is an emotion
expressive of weakness or rather an emotion that produces weakness by enervating or “draining” the
person who has it. (Spinoza, sometimes Nietzsche’s model here, would stress the latter but would also endorse the codependence of resentment and
weakness.) Strong personalities who are politically or economically oppressed for a short time may also

experience the most powerful feelings of resentment, but in them that emotion may well turn out to
be a virtue. The difference, Nietzsche says, is that they act on it. They do not let it simmer and stew and
“poison” the personality. There is also petty resentment, and sometimes Nietzsche makes the case against resentment in these terms.
Resentment is an emotion that does not promote personal excellence but rather dwells on competitive strategy and
thwarting others. It does not do what a virtue or a proper motive ought to do—for Nietzsche as for Aristotle—and that is to inspire excellence and self-
confidence in both oneself and others. A simple but useful example of this particularly vicious and unvirtuous aspect of resentment is a simple footrace. There are
two ways of winning such a race. One is to run faster than everyone else and in doing so inspire those you beat to greater effort and faster speeds too. (It is not
unusual, when a runner breaks a world record, for those behind her to clock their best times ever too, and sometimes to even break the old world record
themselves.) The other way to win is to trip your opponents, greasing the track, perhaps, or through some deceptive strategy to degrade the race, demean the skill,
and trade the virtue of “good sportsmanship” for a cheap victory. It is clear what Nietzsche would object to here. If the moralist replies that the rules of Morality are
formulated precisely to prevent such a strategy, the Nietzschean response is that the universal rules of Morality are themselves just
such a strategy, a strategy for inhibiting the best. Nietzsche’s protracted ad hominem argument, his “genealogy” of morals, is not a
simple undermining of Morality, and though his language shows this only grudgingly, he clearly admires the genius of the slave’s

“revaluation of values” as much as he condemns that strategy as the desperation of the weak. True,
there are “life-denying” aspects of slave morality. The universalization of Morality ignores if it does
not inhibit the exercise of the virtues. But it is just too simple to say, as is often said, that Nietzsche wants to get rid of Morality or that he
wants to get rid of slave morality and replace it with a new, improved, updated version of noble morality. What Nietzsche wants to do is to get rid of the Kantian
analysis of Morality and those features of Morality that depend upon universalizability and our undifferentiated equality as moral agents. He wants to replace these
with an ethics of the virtues not unlike Aristotle’s, a compromise between the spirituality we have developed over two thousand years of Christianity and the rather
barbarian morality of the masters of Homeric Greece. The
role of ad hominem arguments—and genealogy in general as an ad hominem argument writ
large—is
to demonstrate the viciousness as well as the inferiority of the minimalist character of the
“moral point of view.” This may not “refute” either Morality or ressentiment but it does expose one
pretentious form of resentment whose primary purpose is to deny or inhibit the virtues and enjoy a
judgmental self-righteousness at the expense of excellent action and enthusiasm.

God: Who are you to decide my fate? Why do you get to assist in my death?
I’m a cultural physician, questioning the nihilism of the Christian world around me. I
bring the destruction of religious dogmatism. Your decadence will not prevent my
powerful generation of values. Out of your death springs my creativity.
Scott and Franklin in 2006 (Jacqueline, assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola University of
Chicago, and A. Todd, associate professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, “Introduction: The Art of
the Cultural Physician”, http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/61326.pdf, rcheek)

In general, much
of Nietzsche’s philosophy connotes an attempt to assume the role of the cultural
physician. Troubled by what he consi- ders the conspicuous decay and decline of modern culture,
Nietzsche turns to the ancient Greeks for insights concerning ways to effectively promote and preserve the future health of
Europe. Focusing more speci- fically on the pernicious potential of fixed cultural ideals, he concludes that
at their height the Greeks skillfully availed themselves of philo- sophy as a powerful liberating and
regulating tool of culture. Moreover, he surmises that for the Greeks, the ultimate significance of philosophy
was predicated on the way it embodied a “skeptical impulse” that would strengthen “the sense of
truth over [and] against free fiction,” and in doing so bring about the destruction of all “barbarizing,
immoral, and stultifying” forms of “rigid dogmatism.”1 Thus viewed, Nietzsche considered the Greeks an
early example of a people who deftly utilized philosophy as a means of curbing and controlling our
very powerful and potentially dangerous “mythical impulse.” Burdened with a consciousness that
beckons us to question the meaning of our own existence, Nietzsche finds that our mythical impulse,
that is, our impulse to create our own narratives of meaning, saves us from falling prey to a life-
threatening sense of nihilism (GM III, 28) Unfortunately, however, grandiose efforts to avoid the Scylla of
nihilism eventually plunged the Western descendants of the Greeks into the downward spiraling
Charybdis of otherworldly idealizations of identity and value. Leery of the way modern Westerners
dogmati- cally cling to such metaphysical contrivances, Nietzsche challenges all conscientious seekers
of knowledge to take seriously the possibility that such sacred pillars of culture may actually connote
“a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic,” through which human beings in the present are
wantonly living at the expense of the vigor and health of human beings in the future (GM P, 6). Convinced
that this is indeed the case, Nietzsche chastises the purveyors and proponents of dogmatic ideals and values
for arresting humanity’s development. Moreover, inspired by the Greek ideal of the cultural physician,
Nietzsche strives to counteract the root causes of Europe’s insidious decadence by cultivating a
powerful new generation of philosophers that embodies a revitalized skeptical impulse. Dedicat- ing
themselves to what Nietzsche foreordains as a new “aristocratic” vision of cultural health, these new philosophers
initially focus on unmasking and undermining all of the ideologies and ideals that impede this vision
from becoming a reality.2
2AC
 2AC---FW
Their FW causes ressentiment
Antonio, 95
(Professor Antonio (PhD Notre Dame) specializes in social theory, macroscopic sociology, and economy
and society. His writings have focused on Marx, the Frankfurt School, Weber, Dewey, Habermas, and
others in the classical and continental tradition. “Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the
End of History” http://www.jstor.org/stable/2782505?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents) modified for
ableist language

The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered
"roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification
with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a matrix of
autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify
with their positions and engage in gross fabrications to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion
of others, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective

role players that they have trouble being anything but actors-" The role has actually become the
character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity . The powerful
authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integrity, decisiveness,
spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and
consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or
do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks"
reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra . One adopts "many roles,"
playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you
genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an
imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine
article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259;
1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to
others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring networks of
interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice"
(Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One
thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one
always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely astring to throttle all culture. . . . Living in
a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and
anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an
oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or
ethnicity). The most mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche
respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect
ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions .
Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors amplify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are
"violent, envious, exploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to circumstances. "
Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to
command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severelya god, prince, class,
physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming and
overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant (Nietzsche 1986, pp.
137, 168; 1974, pp. 117-18, 213, 288-89, 303-4).

Agonism DA---FW is the annihilative desire to eliminate challenging forces---this

breeds antagonism, ruining productive competition---reducing the aff to the demands
of the community is purely the impulse of their weakness
Acampora, 13
(Christa Davis Acampora, editor of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, associate professor of philosophy at
Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “Contesting Nietzsche” ISBN
978-0-226-92391-8) Henge

1 . 3 w h a t i s a n a g o n ? a t y p o l o g y o f n i e t z s c h e ’ s c o n t e s t s Nietz sche articulates several features of productive

contest, although he never off ers a full exposition of what makes some contests better than others. In the following chapters, I show how he persistently
develops and repeatedly utilizes these features to analyze forms of contest he fi nds in most spheres of human existence. What we can gather from “Homer’s
Wettkampf ” and some other early writings as they relate to identifi cation of types of competition are the following: 1. There
are at least two diff
erent ways of competing: one aims to win by destroying what opposes (i.e., it engages the activity of
forcing back [herabdrücken] what poses a challenge); the other aims to win by excelling what opposes (i.e., it
engages the activity of elevating above [erheben] opposition). 2. Forcing back is an expression of an annihilative desire

(Vernichtungslust), and excelling is the expression of a competitive, agonistic drive reminiscent of Nietz sche’s

view of early Greek modes of contest (Wettkämpfe). 3. The agonistic mode of competing can be embraced as
good, not only for the competitor, but also for its promotion of the general welfare because
competition of that sort potentially advances human possibilities generally; that is, it can—provided a relevant goal is
sought—promote meaningful excellence. In order to fully appreciate how Nietz sche makes use of these critical distinctions, in order to link agon with superior
accomplishment and recognize institutionalized agon as culturally productive, we
need to specify what constitutes agonistic
interaction and distinguish it from other potentially nondestructive contests. Contests of chance, games of mimicry, and self-
induced vertigo are modes of playful activity that do not typically involve competition in which opponents face
off and try to beat each other.13 For example, a lottery contestant engages in play and might reap great rewards, but success in the lottery indicates little about the
character or value of the person who, by chance, happens to win. A lottery winner might be wealthier, but there is little reason
to believe that that kind of success makes the person better; at least, there is not any obvious intrinsic connection between
winning the lottery and being a productive contributor to the cultural development of a society. Furthermore, it is not clear that there is any

way in which playing the lottery makes one a better person or contributes to the development of productive
skills. Finally, while the winner of a lottery might think her new wealth makes life worth living, such a
disposition would seem to be signifi cantly diff erent from the positive valuation of life Nietz sche
identifi es with the ancient Greeks. Thus, there is some work to do in identifying precisely what constitutes an agon and how one engages it.
Agonistic engagement is organized around the test of specifi c qualities competitors possess. When
two runners compete, the quality tested is typically speed or endurance; when artists compete, it
might be creativity or mastery of a particular style; craftsmen test their skills; etc. The contest has a specifi c set of rules and
criteria for determining (i.e., measuring) which person has excelled above the others in the relevant way. This is not to say that the criteria
could not be a source of disagreement among competitors, judges, or spectators (if there are any). The point is that it is essential to there being
a competition that success criteria exist so that their satisfaction or excellence can be ascertained, so that a decision can be reached. This would
be true even in cases in which the criteria are vague or poorly defi ned. What is tested is a quality the competitive parties (either individually or as a team)
themselves express; external assistance is not permitted. Ideally, agonistic
endeavors draw from competitors their best
performances, their greatest capabilities. Although agonistic competition could occur in the form of a
zero-sum game in which the winner takes all, Nietz sche, at least in his early and most concentrated study, focuses on
how it occurs that all who participate are enhanced by competition .14 Winning must be a signifi cant goal of participation
in agonistic contests, but it would seem that winning might be only one, and not necessarily or always the most important one, among many reasons to participate
in such competitions—one can play for the sake of play- ng, one can play to win, and one can desire to play well. In his later writings, Nietz sche is
particularly interested in thinking about how the structures of contests or struggles can facilitate diff
erent possibilities for competing well within them. In other words, he considers whether the structure of the
game might both limit and motivate the way in which one is able to compete. As we shall see in discussion of the
agonies of Christianity and Nietz sche’s contest with Paul, Nietz sche’s study of slavish morality illuminates especially well the

dynamic relation between forms of contest and kinds of actions they make possible and cultivate. Those
who look to “Homer’s Wettkampf ” for guidance about how Nietzsche thinks about power also sometimes refer to what he says there about ostracism. What he
cites as the original meaning of ostracism is supposed to be evidence of the fact that the Greeks were conscious, at least to some extent, of the importance of their
new discovery in their invention of the second Eris. While he grants that ostracism later became a way for tyrants to minimize their opposition, he follows
Heraclitus’s account of its origin. Diogenes Laertius reports that Heraclitus complained that his friend Hermadorus was forced into exile by his native Ephesians
when his accomplishments became so great that no one could even hope to better him.15 Allegedly, the Ephesians did this because they were concerned about
cultivating the pursuit of excellence on a broad scale, not because they despised greatness itself. The value and merits of others in the community were to be aff
ected by ever extending the prospect of being able to earn a title to greatness, not through reduction to the lowest common denominator. In making such a
prospect real—that is, making it suffi ciently motivating—it had to be reasonably possible for at least some people to consider themselves prospective victors. And,

to be so accommodating, there must necessarily be a certain amount of fl exibility or fl uidity in that standard
of excellence. This notion of how the best is determined further extends prospective participation in
creating the standard for what would count as best. Moreover, such standards themselves can be
renegotiated in the course of rendering decisions because every decisive agonistic exchange summons
the judgment of the community that sanctions and legitimizes the contest. Nietz sche cites the most
exemplary contestants as those who both off ered exceptional performances in the contest and set
new standards by which others were later judged. His admiration of these features of contest makes it clear that he is not simply
nostalgic for a heroic ethic of nobility lost and not just pining for a return to the good old days of Homer (even though he might harbor such views). He

relishes the agon because of its potential for what he later describes as the “revaluation of values.” This
key feature of “Homer’s Wettkampf,” which the ostracism example illustrates, is crucial for understanding Nietz sche’s development and appreciating what he
conceives as the prospects for revaluation, as we shall see in each of his engagements with his own agonists. Thus, Nietz sche considers ostracism to be a social
mechanism for regulating political power and contentious relations more generally; the
origin of the practice was allegedly designed
to protect the dynamism of the contest itself even if its later use was clearly to avoid serious
competition, precisely the opposite of what he seems to admire. In the event that anyone became so dominant that he could not
be seriously challenged, he had to be excluded from the community of prospective contestants —exiled. The sanction
functioned foremost as protection for the institution that allowed striving contestants their exercise, not to secure the position or authority of any particular one of
its participants. Nietz sche infers that the creation of the institution of ostracism is an expression of the recognition of the essential role contest played in the health
and vitality of Greek cultural life. Agonistic contest, Nietz sche speculates, is a productive force that regulates without subjugating the
interests of individuals, coordinating them without reducing them to the interests of the community,
and providing radical openness for the circulation of power that avoids ossifi cation into tyranny. It also provides a
means for producing individuals by allowing participants to distinguish themselves through their pursuits within competitive interactions. In this way, agonistic

relations create a context in which distinctive performances emerge; understood in this light, they quite literally
activate the process of individualization, the basis of distinguishing one from another . Moreover, the agon
also produces communities insofar as it generates social signifi cance through relations between
individuals and the community of judges who bear witness to and sanction the action produced in agonistic
exchange. Nietz sche envisions the best possible situation as one in which these interests are
reciprocal and in tension: the community desires the production of greatness cast in terms it
establishes; the most potent competitors achieve the affi rmation of the community that provides the conditions for the possibility of their victories, but they
also aspire to become standard bearers and thereby bring about a reformation of judgment generally. Although its advantages are great, Nietzsche thinks, agonism
is an extremely fragile condition to maintain. The
agon’s sustenance requires, fi rst, preservation of the viability of challenge
and, second, fl exibility suffi cient to generate decisions about excellence that are both relative to past
performances and in accordance with new standards that are derived through subjecting the
prevailing standards of measure to contest. While this second feature of the agon is especially attractive to contemporary theorists
looking to Nietz sche for instruction about the role of dissent and progressive contention in a democracy, I am ambivalent about this particular application of
insights drawn from his work. On the one hand, I am wary of the use of Nietz sche or “Nietz scheanism” for projects that strive to articulate democratic practices
because he is quite clearly and relentlessly a critic of democracy,16 although I appreciate the compatibility of democracy with a number of Nietz sche’s other claims
about freedom. On the other hand, I think the very articulations of radical democratic political theory that look to the agon specifi cally as Nietz sche discussed it or
at least in that same spirit are, ironically, not Nietz schean enough and, if they had some interest in being true to the ultimate possibilities they fi nd in radical
contestability, they would do well to follow Nietz sche all the way down to the heart of the matter. In other words, despite protests otherwise, democratic

political theorists who view the agon as a means of legitimizing contingent values seem unwilling to
admit as contestable the larger democratic values of freedom and equality. If agonism is a means of
legitimizing, promulgating, and sharing values and one turns to it as the alternative to a foundational
scheme or specifi c procedure, then no value can be sacrosanct, no value spared from possible
agonistic contention . This is not to say that such theorists could not argue for yet another basis for founding democracy’s core values (for agon need
not be the only way in which one comes to hold or share a value) or that the values supporting the institution of an agonistic framework are not enduring. Indeed,
such values must have longevity; otherwise, there would be no reason to prefer the agon (or anything for that
matter) to its alternatives. But, if the values in question emerge, are created, and acquire their legitimacy

through contestation, then they all must potentially be subject to it at some point.17 Nevertheless, prior to
mounting such arguments, one must be clear about precisely what Nietz sche thinks an agon is, how it potentially organizes human life, what it contributes to
culture, how it is deployed in morality, and wherein lies its interpretive power, which are precisely the aims of this book. Fortifi
ed by an
appreciation of the breadth, depth, and expanse of Nietz sche’s agonistic meditations, we might be
better prepared to grasp new insights in fi elds in which Nietz sche’s work has long been fashionable,
such as political theory and moral psychology, and at the same time fi nd some ways to put his work in dialogue with a less familiar scope of concerns.

Their FW args ask us to be the herd instead of free spirits

Young, 14
(Julian Young, W. R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest. “Nietzsche: The Long View” in
Individual and Community in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/history-philosophy/individual-and-
community-nietzsches-philosophy) Henge
Free Spirits and Philosophers of the Future Returning now to Nietzsche, I have been arguing – to repeat the words of Human, All Too Human – that, according to
him, “most people” flourish best when, “as a consequence of their shared faith, they have a living sense of community”. But, someone
who reads
Nietzsche in Bertrand Russell’s manner may object, Nietzsche does not in fact care about “most
people”. He cares only about the exceptional individual. It is true he seems to talk a fair bit about community, faith, and festival
(more, perhaps, than one had noticed), but these are important only as opiates for keeping the masses in a quiescent state so that the exceptional types can get on
with doing their exceptional things – art and philosophy – undisturbed. This is the view expressed in one of the very first reviews of Beyond Good and Evil. Writing in
the Berlin Nationalzeitung for December 4, 1886, a P. Michaelis reports Nietzsche’s new book as holding that “religion is an anachronism, a superseded standpoint,
but a useful device for controlling the herd”, adding that, for the author, “morality is only for the rabble” (KGW III 7/3, 2, appendix 6). One
question this
‘only the superman counts’ reading faces
is why Nietzsche should hold such a view. Why should he care only for
great artists, philosophers, and maybe generals? Since it would be ludicrous to think of him as claiming to intuit the Platonic form of, as
Russell calls it, “the good per se”,14 the answer, it would seem, could lie only in a particular aesthetic taste. That, however, invites the response: Why should we, as
philosophers, be any more interested in Herr Nietzsche’s aesthetic taste than we are in his health – something he instructs us to forget about (GS, preface 1)? The
fact that the Russellian reading trivializes Nietzsche suggests that we need to take a closer look at just why he values the
exceptional individual – actually not “the superman”, who is, Nietzsche writes in the notebooks, not a person but a
“metaphor” (KSA 12 10 [17]), a metaphor for, at least sometimes, an ideal community: “in the superman”, he writes,
“individuals have become one” (KSA 10 4 [188]). Nietzsche’s central word for the exceptional individual is “free spirit”.

Free spirits are the no-longer-“fettered” spirits. Within the class of free spirits, however, The Gay Science tells us, there are two types, those of

first and “second” rank. Those of the second rank reject the “previously common faith”, preferring
some kind of private “superstition” (GS 23) – vegetarianism, nudism, dance, or Eastern mysticism, perhaps.
Second-rank free spirits belong to the pathology of modernity – their prevalence is what constitutes its “motley” character –
and are of no further interest to Nietzsche. Free spirits of the first rank, on the other hand, while similarly unfettered from
communal ethos in its current form, are the “seed-bearers of the future”, the creators of “new life-possibilities to

weigh against the old ones” (KSA 8 17 [44]), so that, with luck, a few will become the “spiritual colonisers of new states and communities” (GS 23).
A central requirement of any healthy community is that the vast majority of its members be “herd
types”, the “unwavering beat-keepers”, the “virtuously stupid” adherents to the “universally binding faith”. Yet if it is a healthy community
there must also be a small minority of first-rank (that is, creative) free spirits (GS 76) (from now on I shall use ‘free spirit’ to
refer exclusively to these). The reason it is essential there be this creatively dissenting minority is that without it the community cannot

evolve to meet the challenges of an ever-changing human and natural environment. The reason China was so
powerless in Nietzsche’s day, a victim of European exploitation, is that significant “discontent became extinct
centuries ago”. ‘Asian values’, Nietzsche is suggesting, led to social ossification and consequent loss of power. Europe’s “celebrated
capacity for [self-]transformation”, on the other hand, is due to its “discontent”, to its free spirits (GS 24;
cf. HH I 224).15 Here, then, we have a sensible answer to the question of the value of the exceptional individual: free spirits are valuable because

they are the agents of change that allow a community to adapt to an everchanging environment. The free
spirit is valuable because he enables the community to survive and thrive. He is valuable, that is, because he preserves the conditions in which most people are able
to find meaningful, happy lives. It is not the case that the community derives its value from being a support system for the exceptional individual.16 Rather, the
exceptional individual derives his value from his contribution to the preservation of the community. One might be inclined to compare the Nietzschean free spirit to
the Darwinian “random mutation” (Young, Religion 49, 62, 70, 97). What this obscures, however, is that the free
spirits are not just accidentally
“seed-bearers of the future” but are consciously, deliberately, and essentially so. Like Nietzsche himself (whose
description of the free spirit is, of course, intensely self-referential), free spirits are in constant dialogue – or at least attempted dialogue –

with their community. This becomes clearer in Beyond Good and Evil, in which The Gay Science’s free-spirited “seed-bearer of the future” morphs into
the “philosopher of the future” (BGE 44).17 This is someone “with the most comprehensive responsibility, whose conscience bears the weight of the overall
development of humanity” (BGE 61). This responsibility is what generates his dialogical relation to his community: the genuine “philosopher” is someone who says
to his community, “[W]e need to go out there where you [Nietzsche here uses the intimate, communal plural] feel least at home today” (BGE 211). This mission is

what gives meaning to the life of the free spirit and thus constitutes his “formula for happiness”. Sensitive to the ‘paradox
of happiness’, Zarathustra lies in a “sky-blue lake of happiness” not because he has been “looking out” for

happiness but because he has his “work” of communal regeneration (Z IV 1; cf. Z IV 20). And so the free spirit, too,
derives his meaning and happiness from the community, although not in the same way that “most
people” do. Whereas the majority find meaning and happiness in fulfilling the function assigned to them
by communal ethos – by , as it were, the community’s ‘game plan’, the “voice of its will to power” (Z I 15) –
the philosopher of the future finds his meaning in, as it were, monitoring the game plan, the assignment of functions to
individuals, and in determining whether it is appropriate to the needs of the present and future world or whether it needs to evolve.
 2AC---Talisse
Talisse procedurally votes aff---limiting discussion kills deliberation, and substantive
policymaking isn’t vital
Talisse, 5
(Robert Talisse, American philosopher and political theorist. “Deliberativist responses to activist
challenges” https://www.academia.edu/654370/Deliberativist_responses_to_activist_challenges)
Henge

As I have indicated, this picture of deliberative democracy is not shared by all deliberativists . Although I cannot
present a full argument in defense of this version on the deliberativist position here, it is worth noting that certain other conceptions of
deliberative democracy will have a hard time responding to activist challenges. Rawlsian ‘publicreason’ proposals seem
especially vulnerable. As they begin from a set of ‘conversational restraints’ (Ackerman, 1989: 16) placed upon the kind of reasons that
are admissible in public debate and furthermore place constraints upon the issues that may be the subject of such discussion,25 public reason
proposals ‘remove from the political agenda’ (Rawls, 1996: 157) those issues that are deemed too contentious.26 Rawlsian
deliberativists thus ‘restrict the agenda’ (Benhabib, 2002: 109) of political discussion within a narrow range,
thereby rendering certain voices and concerns out of bounds .27 The activist’s objections to this
tendency among deliberative democrats seem to me entirely appropriate. Other deliberativist
proposals may be open to similar objections.28 It is a mark in favor of a version of deliberativism that it can respond to the
activist challenges Young has posed. Although Young’s activist has not challenged deliberativism in all its forms, the dialectic has exposed what
may be serious problems with certain theories of deliberative democracy. Exponents of those versions of deliberative democracy would do well
to attend to the activist challenges posed by Young. Yet even among those theorists whose deliberativism is not particularly threatened by the
proposed activist challenges, Young’s essay occasions vital questions. Particularly, deliberative
democrats must engage the
issue of whether and under what conditions they would endorse the kind of disruptive action
advocated by the activist. I of course cannot take this up fully in the present article. My suspicion is that a deliberativist
approach to activism must stipulate that proper activism is aimed at restoring, cultivating, fortifying,
and enriching the deliberative process itself rather than at instituting substantive policies . That is, a
deliberativist can endorse an activist mode of political engagement as a means to establishing a properly deliberative system; however, once
such a system is in place, substantive questions of justice must be decided by democratic deliberation rather than by activist methods. This
response ofcourse raises questions of what a ‘properly deliberative system’ is, and whether there is any
principled way to sustain the distinction between proper deliberative processes and substantive
issues of justice. To be sure, these are difficult questions, but I believe satisfactory deliberativist answers can be developed.
 2AC---Goodin
Concludes aff---no one scheme works and no UQ for deliberation DA
Goodin and Niemeyer, 3
(Robert Goodin, Social & Political Theory and Philosophy Programs, Research School of Social Sciences,
Australian National University. Simon Niemeyer, Social & Political Theory Program, Research School of
Social Sciences, Australian National University. “When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection
versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0032-
3217.2003.00450.x/abstract) Henge

Our larger aim, here, is not to particularly champion any one of those visionary schemes. Instead, it is
simply to point out the virtues – and centrality – of the sort of deliberation that goes on inside
people’s heads privately, and among citizens informally, well before formal public deliberations ever get underway. People
engage in those sorts of private and informal deliberations all the time . That they do is crucial to the
functioning of politics, writ large or small. Empathy requires no harangues. It may not even be compatible with
them. One of the most important things of which the Far North Queensland Citizens’ Jury has reminded us is the possibility of internal
empathetic reflections shaping citizens’ attitudes even toward the politically mute, such as a World Heritage rainforest. In that spirit, let us
leave the last word to one of our jurors, Matilda, who, when asked ‘what changed your mind?’, replied simply, ‘Being in the rainforest itself,
especially when the driver turned off the engine’.
 2AC---Capitalism Top Shelf
Perm solves
Escobar, 98
(Elizam Escobar, Puerto Rican art theorist, poet, visual artist and writer. “Marx/Nietzsche: Nihilism,
Revolution and the Eternal Returning” http://www.leftcurve.org/lc22webpages/nihilism.html) Henge
6. The Unexpected (...) at the start, it is characteristic of reactive forces to deny the difference that originally constitutes them, to reverse the
differential element from which they are derived, and to give it a deformed image. (...) an active force becomes reactive when reactive forces
separate it from what it can do. (...) in each case this separation rests on a fiction, a mystification, or a falsification. (...) Nietzsche calls that force
active which goes right to the end of its consequences. - Deleuze, Active and Reactive It
could be adduced that Marx's and
Nietzsche's philosophies are irreconcilable because while Marx positions himself against class
exploitation and oppression, and works/lives for a theory of the proletariat as revolutionary subject, as that
social class which has the potential to transform itself and simultaneously transform class-based society into an equalitarian, communist
society, etc., Nietzsche lives at "6,000 meters high" from the class struggle, "supra-historically" piercing
through class views and choosing "physiological" types, an aristocracy of the spirit and a superior new man who should
"tragically" accept/overcome the world's incessant and infinite becoming, as well as the finitude of all particular life. However,
Nietzsche's and Marx's thought complement each other in various epistemological, historical and cultural
aspects, in spite of their diverse/ divergent ways of valuing: their admiration for classic antiquity; their critique of
metaphysics/idealism, platonic as well as German; the relations of power/truth, praxis/ knowledge; the materialist
approach to history; the artistic base of their models for a new or superior human being in its integral and full
development; their polemic, "arrogant," sarcastic sytles: if an ironic Marx expressed that he was not a "marxist," a sarcastic Nietzsche
preferred to be taken as a "buffoon" rather than to be "sanctified." In the same way, both were well ahead of their historical
epoch and they leave us a crushing, demolishing critique and valorative analysis of history and ideologies. Also
their visions of the future have many times been unilaterally developed as prophecies characterized by literariness or reduced to literal
interpretations. For example, the enthusiastic marxist optimism that annunciated (we annunciated), at the international level, the end of
capitalism and socialism's definitive triumph in this XX century. And in Nietzsche's case, on the one hand, the nazi distortion and appropriation
of him as their philosopher of aryan supremacy (even when Nietzsche was in reality one of the severest critics of Germany, German statism and
the feverish anti-semitism of the period before Hitler); on the other hand, his philosophy arriving at a pessimist/apocalyptic vision of existence;
and in a third case, as a springboard to a kind of irrationalist post-modernism that, in the most paradoxical and sophist manner, returns to a
nihilist metaphysics. Yet, an intergral reading, beyond sanctification or demonization, would show us that both
of them announce,
explicitly or implicitly, a
global system necessary for the ulterior creation of the "non-system," "non-state"
realm of freedom/power and an overcome human being.

Socialism is slave morality but capitalism is nihilistic hedonism

Kilivris, 11
(Michael Kilivris, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College. Certified red chili pepper hotness rating on
RateMyProfessor. “Beyond Goods and Services: Toward a Nietzschean Critique of Capitalism”
http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/kilivris_december2011.pdf) Henge

From Below: Nietzsche’s Critique of Socialism Nietzsche

appears to have two closely related problems with socialism.
The first has to do with the view of exploitation as unjust and historical. For Nietzsche, such a position depends
on a conventionally moral perspective, which he also considers nihilistic, in the sense of being life-denying or “anti-
nature.” The second problem deals with the populist dimension of socialism. In Nietzsche’s view, not only does

this make socialism a movement of the “herd”; it also explains its moral standpoint which, as in the case of
Christian morality, he considers a kind of “slave morality” arising from ressentiment. In this section, I will briefly discuss these
problems that socialism presents for Nietzsche, the main implication being that unlike Nietzsche’s own criticisms of capitalism, the socialist, and by extension the
Marxist, critique of capitalism is one originating from below. 3 The socialist critique of capitalism centers on class exploitation,
which Marx, for example, explains as the extraction of “surplus value” from the laboring class by the
owning class.4 The socialist not only views exploitation in moral terms as unjust, alienating, etc., but also as a
historical phenomenon that can and will one day vanish. For instance, Marx and Engels espouse this position in the Communist
Manifesto when they refer to the proletarian revolution as “inevitable.”5 For Nietzsche, both of these perspectives on

exploitation – the moral and the historical – depend on conventional presuppositions that he
considers within good and evil, rather than “beyond” good and evil. In the case of the moral critique of
exploitation, Nietzsche argues that it assumes a normative sense of “right” and “wrong,” which is then projected onto a

phenomenon that in itself is amoral. As he writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, “ To talk of right and wrong as such is senseless; in

themselves, injury, violation, exploitation, destruction can of course be nothing ‘wrong,’ in so far as life operates essentially—that is, in terms of its

basic functions—through injury, violation, exploitation, and destruction, and cannot be conceived in any other way.”6 As for the

socialist view of exploitation as historical, Nietzsche contends that it rests on a similarly traditional notion of moral

perfectibility, even as it claims to be “scientific”: … everywhere people are now raving, even under scientific
disguises, about coming conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect” will be removed—which sounds to me

as if they promised to invent a way of life that would dispense with all organic functions. “ Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or

imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of

the will to power, which is after all the will of life.7 That socialism’s moral and historical critique of exploitation ignores the
“essence” of life – the will to power – renders it nihilistic as well, according to Nietzsche. An equivocal term in Nietzsche’s thought, nihilism here
means life-denying, world-slandering, or anti-nature more so than the sense of meaninglessness following the death of God. Hence Nietzsche can find Platonism
and Christianity nihilistic, since both negate life or nature qua will to power, affirming its antithesis in the ideas of Being and God, respectively. Nietzsche sees a
secular version of this tendency in socialism, insofar as it likewise refuses life or nature qua will to power by morally denouncing exploitation, and imagining that it
can and will be overcome at the “end of socialism, from The Will to Power, he characterizes socialists as “the envious,” with “poisonous and desperate faces,”
recalling his reference to the Christian’s “poisonous eye of ressentiment” in On the Genealogy of Morality. Additionally, Nietzsche asserts that socialism as a whole
is a “hopeless and sour affair… an attack of sickness,” much like the “slave revolt in morality” he attributes to the first Christians. For Nietzsche, then, socialism

is marred by a perspective through which capitalism and capitalists can only be seen as above. As such,
socialism lacks the pathos of distance from which there is never a “higher,” only a “below.” In the following
section, I will show how Nietzsche’s own criticisms of capitalism are characterized by just this pathos of distance, thus making his perspective, in contrast to the
socialist’s, aristocratic rather than moral, nihilist, and populist. From Above: Nietzsche’s Aristocratic Critique of Capitalism Nietzsche’s
critique of
socialism is sometimes interpreted ipso facto as an affirmation of capitalism. Hence thinkers such as Rand and Fukuyama
have looked to Nietzsche for support of their pro-capitalist positions. However, while Nietzsche undeniably endorsed a class system or division of labor, he

was highly critical of the remaining aspects of capitalist society, many of which are foundational. In this section, I reveal this dimension of
Nietzsche’s thought by piecing together a number of his comments on money-making, money itself, work, workers, pleasure, and the marketplace. In the aggregate,
these claims prove, contra Rand and Fukuyama, that Nietzsche was just as critical of capitalism as he was of socialism. Yet, unlike socialism’s critique from below,
Nietzsche criticizes capitalism from an aristocratic perspective or pathos of distance. Thus I also demonstrate how Nietzsche
sees himself and other
free spirits as above such things as money-making, work, and the marketplace. In the case of one of the most
fundamental feature of capitalism, money-making, Nietzsche was hostile from his earliest to his last writings . In

Untimely Meditations, his second major publication, he writes, “Nowadays the crudest and most evil forces, the egoism of the

money-makers and the military despots, hold sway over almost everything on earth.”11 Elsewhere he talks of the
“hugely contemptible money economy” as well as the “harmful” effects of the “economic principle of
laissez faire.” These comments come from the third meditation, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in which Nietzsche posits the goal of
society to be not the creation of wealth, but the “production of individual great men” in the specific
realm of Bildung or culture (i.e., philosophers, artists, and saints). Since “that and nothing else” is humanity’s task,
Nietzsche regards money-making as a force or obstacle to be overcome. Discussing the stranglehold of money-making on the
pursuit of culture in his own time, Nietzsche writes the following, sounding more timely than untimely: Here there is a hatred of any kind of education that makes
one solitary, that proposes goals that transcend money and money-making… Precisely the opposite of this is, of course, held in esteem by the morality that here
counts as valid: namely, a speedy education so that one may quickly become a money-earning being, yet at the same time an education sufficiently thorough to
enable one to earn a very great deal of money. A man is allowed only as much culture as it is in the interest of general money-making and world commerce he
should possess…12 If this seems like a young, naïve Nietzsche, the later Nietzsche of Ecce Homo, his penultimate work, expresses a similar view. In reflecting therein
on his Untimely Mediations, Nietzsche asserts that they “prove that [he] was no Jack the Dreamer.” The third and fourth essays (the latter is on Wagner), he claims,
exalt the “hardest self-love, self-discipline” as the pathway to “a higher concept of culture,” and are thus “full of sovereign contempt” for the idols of the day such
as financial “success.” Nietzsche then suggests that in describing Schopenhauer and Wagner, he was really expressing himself.13 Indeed, earlier in Ecce Homo
Nietzsche writes of his own self-love and self-discipline, which was likewise remote from money-
making: “But that is how I always lived. I had no wishes. A man over forty-two who can say that he
never strove for honors, for women, for money!”14 To the extent that he strove for anything – in this same passage, Nietzsche shares
that he “became what he was” without “struggle,” “striving,” or “willing” – it was the greatness of his heroes, most of whom were cultural figures (Montaigne,
Spinoza, Goethe), and none of whom were money-makers. Nietzsche rejects money-making not just because it stands in the
way of achievement in the realm of culture, but also because he sees money itself as yet another way
humans attempt (vainly) to establish security . Today, those who value money see themselves, and are seen by many, as “realists.” The cliché
“money talks” illustrates this view, suggesting that everything besides ensuring economic survival is just airy-fairy idealism. However, for Nietzsche,

money is no less an object of idealism than the idea of God, which he sees as offering the ultimate comfort of “metaphysical
solace.” Like the idea of God, money is believed to promise psychological comfort , albeit through material or economic security.

Money thus becomes a kind of fortress thought to keep at bay need, want, pain, and unhappiness . Yet for
Nietzsche such a fortress is undesirable, not to mention unattainable, since he sees life as “becoming,”

which “does not aim at a final state.”15 Hence, free spirits are “full of malice against the lures of dependence that lie hidden in honors, or
money, or offices, or enthusiasms of the senses.”16 Preferring to “live dangerously,” free spirits live with becoming rather than

(nihilistically) against it. In chasing the illusion of security, most money-makers must spend the vast
majority of their lives working. “[A] society in which the members continually work hard,” Nietzsche writes, “will have more security: and security
is now adored as the supreme goddess.”17 To many, especially in the United States where the Protestant work ethic still reigns supreme (even as it

increasingly intermingles with hedonism), work itself has become a goddess. It is considered an expression of strength

and will-power. Moreover, it is associated with individualist notions such as self-development. According to
Nietzsche, however, work has more in common with ascetic self-denial . In On the Genealogy of Morals, he puts work on par with
herd organization when it comes to providing relief from self-loathing. Hence the blessing in the “blessing of work,” Nietzsche argues, is that “the interest of the
suffering man is completely distracted from his suffering—that nothing enters his consciousness but activity, continual and repeated activity, and thus leaves little
room for suffering.”18 He goes on to call this a “forgetting of self” and “incuria sui” (self-neglect). In The Dawn, he goes further by arguing that work “obstructs”
self-development: Behind the glorification of “work” and the tireless talk of the “blessings of work” I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal
activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work—and what is invariably meant is relentless
industry from early till late—that such work is the best policy, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of
covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love,
and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one’s eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions.19 Nietzsche’s disdain for work even led him to offer a solution
to the problem facing “workers in factory slavery.” This comes as a surprise, since Nietzsche seems to have generally held that such workers are necessary for the
sake of (high) culture. In the early essay “The Greek State,” he argues that “In order to have a broad, deep and fertile soil for artistic development, the
overwhelming majority must be slavishly subjected to the necessities of life in order to serve a minority beyond the measure of its individual needs.”20 However, in
a passage from The Dawn called “The impossible class,” Nietzsche presents an alternative to the “indecent serfdom” of capitalism as well as socialism. As a third
way – to “protest against the machine, against capital” and the “socialistic pied pipers” – Nietzsche recommends an “era of a vast swarming out from the European
beehive” in declaration that “as a class,” workers are a “human impossibility.”21 In “savage fresh regions,” they could cease caring about “the rapid rise and fall of
power, money, and opinions,” and begin to focus on “inner worth,” “mastery of myself,” “beautiful naturalness,” and “heroism.”22 Here, Nietzsche posits an idea of
liberation completely beyond the paradigm of labor, in which he sees socialism as still caught up. Thus, in addition to fleeing capitalist exploitation, workers would
also escape the socialist belief that reforming the system, even revolution, would fundamentally change their servitude: Phew! to believe that higher pay could
abolish the essence of their misery—I mean their impersonal serfdom! Phew! to be talked into thinking that an increase in this impersonality, within the
machinelike workings of a new society, could transform the shame of slavery into a virtue! Phew! to have a price for which one remains a person no longer but
becomes a gear!23 Nietzsche discourages work because for him play is the more valuable activity. Counter to the
self-denial of work, play allows for self-cultivation outside the confines of utility and productivity.24 Thus, play

for Nietzsche is associated with Dionysian creativity rather than hedonism---.25 Yet, despite this as well as his many
denunciations of Epicureanism, Nietzsche continues to be misinterpreted as an advocate for hedonism, even the kind prevalent in capitalist societies today, where
pleasure is tightly entangled with conspicuous consumption. Ishay Landa reflects and challenges this view when discussing how, in the context of popular culture,
James Bond can be seen as a Nietzschean hero due in part to his “refined hedonism,” for example his preference for (shaken) martinis.26 While Landa makes a case
for this interpretation, he rightly points out that Bond’s hedonism is “thoroughly disciplined” and “with a purpose,” as opposed to the “aimless, un-heroic, cowardly
hedonism of the rich who are characterized precisely by shunning anything resembling ‘dangerous work’.”27 However, in both theory and practice Nietzsche

takes a harder line against hedonism, and by extension consumerism , than Landa admits. Theoretically, Nietzsche
considers hedonism a close relative of Christianity, insofar as both seek to minimize pain and suffering. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks of a “tranquillizing
(for example, Epicurean or Christian) medicine… the happiness of resting, of not being disturbed, of satiety, of finally attained unity, of a ‘sabbath of sabbaths’.”28
As such, hedonism violates Nietzsche’s “formula for greatness,” amor fati, which demands the affirmation of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering. Practically, while
Nietzsche paid close attention to his gustatory habits, he did so in the name of strength, not pleasure. Hence, his guiding concern was, “how do you, among all
people, have to eat to attain your maximum of strength, of virtu in the Renaissance style, of moralinefree virtue.”29 We also learn in this discussion that Nietzsche
“abstained” from alcohol: “Alcohol is bad for me: a single glass of wine or beer in one day is quite sufficient to turn my life into a vale of misery… [I] cannot advise all
more spiritual natures earnestly enough to abstain entirely from alcohol: Water is sufficient.”30 There is perhaps no better proof than this that Nietzsche did not
conceive of the Dionysian in hedonistic terms.31 Neither
Nietzsche’s thought nor his life can be used to justify hedonism
or consumerism because they altogether transcend the realm of goods and services, that is, the
marketplace. Contra Fukuyama and (especially) Rand, who see “big” entrepreneurs as realizations of
Nietzsche’s free spirits and even Übermenschen, Nietzsche in fact looked down upon such people. In a section of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra called “Of the Flies of the Market-place,” Nietzsche describes them as “small men,” “actors,” “buffoons,” and “heroes of the hour,” who receive glory
only because “The people have little idea of greatness.”32 By contrast, the
true “great men,” though they rule “imperceptibly,” are the real
centers around which the world revolves, not because they excel at inventing things, but because they
are inventors of new values . Of course, as opposed to Rand’s claim that the “businessman’s tool is values,” for Nietzsche the creation of
new values takes place beyond the marketplace.33 Hence he asserts, “All great things occur away from glory
and the marketplace: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the
marketplace.”34 The foregoing paragraphs reveal that Nietzsche dismisses much that is essential to capitalism. Thus it cannot be maintained, as Rand and
Fukuyama hold, that Nietzsche embraced capitalism and/or regarded capitalists as realizations of his Übermensch. For it has also been shown that Nietzsche

saw himself and other free spirits as above such things as money-making, work, and the marketplace.
Thus I call Nietzsche’s perspective vis-à-vis capitalism aristocratic . By this I mean the pathos of distance

that he possesses in relation to the most important of capitalism’s defining features. In On the Genealogy of
Morals, Nietzsche defines the pathos of distance as “the enduring, dominating, and fundamental overall

feeling of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to a ‘below’.”35 It is this “feeling of a higher kind,” moreover, that
distinguishes Nietzsche’s critique from that of socialists. As discussed above, the latter oppose capitalism on primarily moral and populist grounds. By contrast,
Nietzsche criticizes various aspects of capitalism for being beneath him and other free spirits. To put it another way, whereas socialists take issue with capitalism’s
immorality, Nietzsche condemns its tendency to foster mediocrity. In the following section, I will further address the latter claim, as well as discuss its implications
for our own time.

History disproves materialism and the alt is impossible

Domhoff, 5
(William Domhoff, Professor in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. “A Critique of Marxism”
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/theory/marxism.html) Henge

Historical Materialism From a Four Networks point of view, Marxism'semphasis on historical materialism is too narrow a
base for understanding the complexity and variety of power structures across time and places. The idea that all
power is rooted ultimately in the ownership and control of the means of production, with the ensuing class
struggle providing the motor of history, does not fit the origins of civilization in the years from 3000 to 2300 B.C.E.,
when most property was held by the state and there was no class conflict; nor the 2500 years of
empires of domination, when military networks were in the ascendancy; nor the 900 years after the
fall of the Roman Empire, when the ideology network called "Christendom" combined with the
independent armies of the nobility to create the framework within which a class-ridden capitalism
and a closely intertwined system of nation-states began to rise to the fore. In short, there have been great
stretches of history when economic forces, no matter how broadly conceived to accommodate the Marxian claim about the primacy of the
"mode of production," were not primary in either the first or last instance. Moreover, there were other epochs where the

activities of the ruling class were far more important in understanding new developments than any "class struggle"
with direct producers, who were far too localized and lacking in organizational infrastructure to challenge the
dominant class, let alone to be considered a class themselves. The Origin and Function of the State For Marxists, the
state is a structure of domination that protects private property, even though they argue among themselves about the way in
which this state domination takes place. Marx's general view of the state followed logically from the fact of human productivity. As already stated, the surplus
created by this productivity led to inevitable conflict between the forces and relations of production, an increasing division of labor, inevitable class conflict, and
then the creation of the political state as the defender of property. There
are several problems with this theory of the state. First,
archaeological and historical evidence do not support the claim that the state has its origins in class struggle and the
rise of private property. Early
states were a mix of religious and political institutions that had functions for
small societies as a whole in terms of the need for a common way to store grain and other foodstuffs. These states
also had other regulatory functions as city life became more crowded and complicated compared to what faced small groups of hunters and gatherers. Second,
changes in the nature of the state are not usually a product of changes in society due to conflict
between social classes. One of the biggest impacts on the nature of the state was the need for a
common defense against nomadic groups, and later, rival states. Third, even in later times states are not always
involved in subjugating the producing classes. Sometimes dominant classes do the subjugating
directly, as during the Middle Ages (Mann, 1986, pp. 391-392, 411). Fourth, by conceiving of the state so narrowly, and not seeing its political and religious
dimensions, Marxists minimize the potential for patriotic and religious feelings in shaping how groups and

classes act. They therefore underestimate the strong possibility that common social bonds also can
exist between the social classes in a country. Fifth, the Marxist analysis of the state, with its emphasis on its alleged original
role in protecting private property, led to a false homology between the state and the economic system that

creates a tendency to downplay the importance of representative democracy. Not all Marxists accept the argument
that follows, but many do. For this large subset, representative democracy is an illusion that grows out of the same type of mystification that is created by the
marketplace. Just as the capitalists appropriate surplus value "behind the backs" of the workers through the seemingly fair mechanism of the market, when the real
story is in ownership and control of the forces of production, so too does representative democracy appropriate the political power of the workers through the
seemingly fair mechanism of elections, when the major action is over in a state bureaucracy that responds to the interests of the owners of private property. This
view is best summarized in Stanley Moore's A Critique of Capitalist Democracy (1957), a book based on an extremely close reading and synthesis of everything that
Marx, Engels, and Lenin wrote on the subject of the state. It is so crucial to understanding how some Marxists view representative democracy, and thus to
understanding the politics of those Marxists, that it needs to be quoted at length: These distinctive features of the bourgeois democratic state correspond to
distinctive features of the capitalist economy. The
capitalist economy appears to be controlled through a series of
competitive exchanges, in which all members of the society participate voluntarily under conditions of universal freedom and equality. Similarly,
the bourgeois democratic state appears to be controlled through a series of competitive elections, in
which all members of the society participate voluntarily under conditions of universal freedom and
equality. But beneath the formal freedom and equality of capitalist exchange lie the material bondage and

exploitation of capitalist production, resulting from the monopoly over the means of production exercised by members of the capitalist class.
And beneath the formal freedom and equality of bourgeois democratic elections lie the material bondage and oppression of bureaucratic administration, resulting from the monopoly over the means of coercion exercised by
agents of the capitalist class. The democratic republic is the optimum political shell for capitalism because the relation between bureaucratic administration and universal suffrage is the optimum political counterpart for the
relation between capitalist exploitation and commodity exchange. (Moore, 1957:87-88.) The ongoing importance of this analysis can be seen in the work of the Marxist economist James O'Connor, who had a major impact on the
thinking of the generation of Marxists who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. He is still carefully read by radical environmentalists and many members of the global justice movement. O'Connor had the following to say about
these matters in Accumulation Crisis (1984): In Marxist theory, the "liberal democratic state" is still another capitalist weapon in the class struggle. This is so because the democratic form of the state conceals undemocratic
contents. Democracy in the parliamentary shell hides its absence in the state bureaucratic kernel; parliamentary freedom is regarded as the political counterpart of the freedom in the marketplace, and the hierarchical bureaucracy
as the counterpart of the capitalist division of labor in the factory. (O'Connor, 1984, p. 188.) There are some Marxists who would say that this is really the Marxist-Leninist view of representative democracy, not of Marxists in
general. Be that as it may, the point for now is that this analysis is often accepted as "the" Marxist view by new Marxists, and is identified as such by O'Connor in the passage quoted above. I think it is a crucial point to consider
because the idea that liberal freedoms are really a thin veil for the repression of the working class, when combined with the idea that the market is inherently exploitative, generates a contempt for liberal values and democracy
that leads to crucial misunderstandings of the United States. It says that representative democracy is all a sham. I think this may be one of the root problems of Marxist politics in the United States, a problem that makes it difficult
for Marxists to join into coalitions with liberals. For those Marxists who see representative democracy as a sham, the solution is "direct democracy," meaning small face-to-face groups in which the people themselves, not elected
representatives, make decisions. This is in fact the meaning of the term "soviet." But historical experience shows that such groups came to be controlled by the members of the Communist Party within them. Problems also
developed within direct democracy groups, often called "participatory democracy groups," in the New Left and women's movements in the 1960s. Although they tried to foster open participation among equals, they developed
informal power structures led by charismatic or unbending members. There came to be a "tyranny of structurelessness" that shaped the group's decisions, often to the growing frustration of the more powerless members (Ellis,
1998, Chapter 6; Freeman, 1972). Based on this experience, it seems that selection of leaders through elections is necessary to avoid worse problems. Rather than downplaying the elected legislature, as some Marxists do, the Four
Networks theory suggests that the creation of legislatures was a key factor in breaking down the unity of the monarchical state and thereby limiting its potential autonomy. Put another way, representative democracy and
legislatures are one of the few counterpoints to the great potential power of an autocratic state. They should not be dismissed as inevitable mystifications of class rule, even if empirical investigations show that legislatures in
capitalist societies are often dominated by capitalists, as is generally the case in the United States. The idea that Marxists and liberals should agree on is to extend the openness of legislatures in ways discussed in the Social Change

section of this Web site. The Problems of Socialism The

planned economy envisioned by classical Marxists has not proved to
be workable either in terms of productivity or democratic responsiveness. There are several reasons for these failures. The productivity
problem is rooted in the fact that the range and depth of information needed to run a complex
consumer economy is too great for any planning bureaucracy. Moreover, no planning agency currently has
the capability to analyze the information that does exist in a timely enough fashion to deal with sudden shifts in
the availability of raw materials or changes in consumer preferences. The result is an unproductive economy. As the planners and plant managers come under
criticism, they start to cut corners and cheat in ways that can allow them to meet their quotas. The result is hoarding of raw materials that other plants need, and
shoddy goods. In other words, all
the potential problems with large-scale bureaucracies come into play. Power
accrues at the top. Then corruption ensues, such as placing friends and relatives of questionable competence in positions of responsibility,
withholding important information from rival agencies, and skimming off resources for the personal benefit of the top officials. All this adds to the morale problems
generated by the failures of the economy and multiplies the large economic inefficiencies. The disappointing conclusion that emerges from the social sciences and
history is that non-market planning cannot work, even in democratic societies. Thus, progressives and other egalitarians have
to develop methods of planning through the market in order to realize their egalitarian goals. For all its potential weaknesses, a planned market system within the
context of a representative democracy can be both productive and more equal than present-day societies because it relies on many different people with small
pieces of information to make small and limited decisions. Many contemporary Marxists are rethinking these issues as well. There are interesting arguments about
"market socialism" (Elson, 1998; Ollman, 1998).
 2AC---Cap Root Cause
History proves Christianity led to capitalism---chaos destroys capital
Novak, 00
(Michael Novak, philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat. “How Christianity Created Capitalism”
http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-10-number-3/how-christianity-created-capitalism)
Henge

Capitalism, it is usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment–the eighteenth century–and,
like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the

main locus for the first flowerings of capitalism . Max Weber located the origin of capitalism in modern Protestant cities, but
today’s historians find capitalism much earlier than that in rural areas, where monasteries, especially those of the
Cistercians, began to rationalize economic life . It was the church more than any other agency, writes historian
Randall Collins, that put in place what Weber called the preconditions of capitalism: the rule of law and a
bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional
permanence that allows for transgenerational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with
the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation, and new undertakings. The Protestant
Ethic without Protestantism The people of the high Middle Ages (1100—1300) were agog with wonder at great mechanical clocks, new forms of
gears for windmills and water mills, improvements in wagons and carts, shoulder harnesses for beasts of burden, the ocean-going ship rudder,
eyeglasses and magnifying glasses, iron smelting and ironwork, stone cutting, and new architectural principles. So many new types of machines
were invented and put to use by 1300 that historian Jean Gimpel wrote a book in 1976 called The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages.
Without the growth of capitalism, however, such technological discoveries would have been idle novelties. They would seldom have been put
in the hands of ordinary human beings through swift and easy exchange. They would not have been studied and rapidly copied and improved
by eager competitors. All this was made possible by freedom for enterprise, markets, and competition–and that, in turn, was provided by the
Catholic Church. The
church owned nearly a third of all the land of Europe. To administer those vast
holdings, it established a continent-wide system of canon law that tied together multiple jurisdictions
of empire, nation, barony, bishopric, religious order, chartered city, guild, confraternity, merchants,
entrepreneurs, traders, et cetera. It also provided local and regional administrative bureaucracies of
arbitrators, jurists, negotiators, and judges, along with an international language, “canon law Latin.”
Even the new emphasis on clerical celibacy played an important capitalist role. Its clean separation
between office and person in the church broke the traditional tie between family and property that
had been fostered by feudalism and its carefully plotted marriages. It also provided Europe with an
extraordinarily highly motivated, literate, specialized, and mobile labor force. The Cistercians, who eschewed the aristocratic and
sedentary ways of the Benedictines and, consequently, broke farther away from feudalism, became famous as entrepreneurs. They mastered
rational cost accounting, plowed all profits back into new ventures, and moved capital around from one venue to another, cutting losses where
necessary, and pursuing new opportunities when feasible. They dominated iron production in central France and wool production (for export)
in England. They were cheerful and energetic. “They had,” Collins writes, “the Protestant ethic without Protestantism.” Being few in number,
the Cistercians needed labor-saving devices. They were a great spur to technological development.
Their monasteries “were the most economically effective units that had ever existed in Europe, and
perhaps in the world, before that time,” Gimpel writes. Thus, the high medieval church provided the
conditions for F. A. Hayek’s famous “spontaneous order” of the market to emerge. This cannot happen
in lawless and chaotic times; in order to function, capitalism requires rules that allow for predictable
economic activity . Under such rules, if France needs wool, prosperity can accrue to the English sheepherder who first increases his flock,
systematizes his fleecers and combers, and improves the efficiency of his shipments.
History’s on our side
Grimes in 2005 (William, “Capitalism, Brought to You by Religion”, The New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/30/books/30book.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, rcheek)
Rodney Stark comes out swinging right from the bell in "The Victory of Reason," his fiercely polemical account of the rise of capitalism. Mr.
Stark, the author of "The Rise of Christianity" and "One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism," is sick and tired of reading that
religion impeded scientific progress and stunted human freedom. To those who say that capitalism and democracy
developed only after secular-minded thinkers turned the light of reason on the obscurantism of the
Dark Ages, he has a one-word answer: nonsense. "The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested
entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians," he
argues in this provocative, exasperating and occasionally baffling exercise in revisionism. Capitalism, and the scientific
revolution that powered it, did not emerge in spite of religion but because of it. If this sounds paradoxical, it
shouldn't, Mr. Stark argues. Despite the prejudiced arguments of anticlerical Enlightenment thinkers, free inquiry and faith in
human reason were intrinsic to Christian thought. Christianity, alone among the world's religions,
conceived of God as a supremely rational being who created a coherent world whose inner workings
could be discovered through the application of reason and logic. Consequently, it was only in the West, rather than in
Asia or the Middle East, that alchemy evolved into chemistry, astrology into astronomy. Mr. Stark gets down to cases quickly. He rapidly
administers a few bracing slaps to Max Weber's theory that the Protestant ethic of self-denial and
reinvestment propelled capitalism, pointing out that capitalism was in full flower in Italy centuries
before the Reformation. As Mr. Stark himself concedes, historians have long since dismantled Weber's elegant and highly influential
thesis, but he beats this dead horse one more time.
1AR
 AT---SSD
No link and can’t overcome UQ---instability of the rez allows SSD/their edu and
perspectives inev
Young, 11
(Kelly Young, Wayne State University. “IMPOSSIBLE CONVICTIONS: CONVICTIONS AND INTENTIONALITY
IN PERFORMANCE AND SWITCH-SIDE DEBATE”
http://www.cedadebate.org/CAD/index.php/CAD/article/view/279) Henge

We should not define switch-side debate in reaction to fears about the conservative (e.g., “acting in support of
communist China makes one a communist”) or liberal (e.g., “roleplaying as the state is imperialist”) ideological indoctrination of
students and the ethics of those pedagogical choices. These concerns misunderstand the inherent and ontological instability
or play or polysemy contained in all communication and its effects (Pada, 2009). Rather than viewing the resolution
as defining and stabilizing the inherent meaning of a resolution and clearly demarcating each side of
that statement, we should view the resolution as an artifact that has unstable and contestable
meaning . The instability of the resolution as an artifact is inevitable as different teams, judges,
tournaments, and documents deploy the resolution in different contexts in many different ways. Even
when exact meaning is policed through topicality, no single topicality debate ever plays out the same way,
thus ensuring variation and difference through citation. In this perspective, SSD does not have to be at odds with
performative speech acts. Instead, SSD should be defined as switching sides on an orientation or perspective

towards a set of words that operate as an unfixed resolutional text . These orientations would exist on
a continuum with many ways to approach the resolution. One of those orientations could be to read for the presence of
framers’ intention located in the syntax and arrangement of the resolution’s terms as a “partial, if not, a total glimpse of the author’s
intentions” (Pada, 2009, p. 87). This perspective would likely best serve traditional federal government-centered policy debate as it provides a
source of predictability found in an unstable resolution. On the other end of the continuum, affirmatives might approach the resolution as a
debate about identities and experiences that are both included and excluded by the text. These debates
should not be
determined on a strict ethical system defined by the authenticity or sincerity of beliefs or performances, but instead on the
perlocutionary effects that the speech acts have. This would best preserve a space for performance style debate while allowing for negative
arguments like counterplans and disadvantages. Maintaining that the resolution is an unstable artifact does not
default us into a nihilistic situation without stable communication or debate (Pada, 2009). According to Derrida
(1988), the ontological possibility of play and instability does not mean that communication and a semi
stable resolution is impossible. As Pada (2009) explains, play always “implies a possibility and not an absolute
condition of mis-communication….Différance does not mark the end of communication, rather, for Derrida, it opens new
possibilities that are latent behind the text” (pp. 82-83). Thus, debate can begin with grammar and other cues for intent
and meaning of the resolution, but there must always be room for a critique of that reading’s exclusions and
consequences. This redefinition of switchside debate allows a great deal of space for both traditional
policy and conviction and performance-style debaters to operate. Additionally, it acknowledges the ontological
instability of speech acts and their illocutionary effects, which opens up a number of possibilities for both policy
and performance-styles of debate.