The True Revolutionary

What is the hallmark of a true revolutionary?

The brainless masses, as well as that great herd of pseudo-intellectuals, conceive of a revolutionary as someone who causes a great amount of death and destruction in bringing about political change. And they would be wrong. No, a man can be responsible for the deaths of millions of people and violently disrupt dozens of societies — as did Genghis Khan — without being revolutionary at all.

True revolutionary change occurs only when preceded or accompanied by a change in spiritual values. The creator of new values is thus the truest revolutionary.

Or, as Nietzsche commented: “The world does not revolve around the inventors of a new noise, but around the inventors of new values.”

A subsequent political revolution might require physical warfare and physical destruction in order to clear the way for a new existence and a new order of things. But if any real change is to be effected, the successful physical revolution must follow the successful spiritual revolution.

Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo:

"Fundamentally, I intended something quite different with those books than pursuing psychology: an unequalled problem in education, a new concept of self-discipline, self defense to the utmost hardness, a path to greatness and to world-historical tasks sought to express itself for the first time."

"O my brothers, I direct and consecrate you to a new nobility: ye shall become begetters and cultivators and sowers of the future.

"Not from whence ye come shall henceforth be your honor, but whither ye go! Your will and your foot, that want to pass to something beyond yourselves — that will be your new honor!

"Verily, not that ye have served a prince — what do princes matter any more! — or have become a bulwark to that which standeth so that it may stand more firmly!

"Not that your kin have grown courtly at courts and ye have learned to stand for long hours in shallow pools, like unto the flamingo, brightly appareled.

"And not that a ghost, called holy, led your forefathers into lands of promise that I do not praise: for there, where the worst of all trees — the Cross — grew, in that land there is nothing to praise!

"And verily, wherever the Holy Ghost hath led its knights, goats and geese and Cross-eyed and wrong-headed creatures always ran at the head of the procession!

"O my brothers, not backwards shalt your nobility look, but forwards! You shall be fugitives from all fatherlands and forefatherlands!

"Ye shall love your children’s land: be this love your new nobility, the undiscovered land beyond the farthest sea! I bid your sails to seek it again and again!

"Ye shall make amends unto your children for being the children of your fathers: thus shall ye redeem all that has gone before! This new tablet of law do I set over you!"

The strong individuals are those who oppose and resist society’s general trends and rules, the rules of the majority, and successfully struggle against them. Out of those individuals, the new aristocracy will be moulded — but many will perish in the process. For this process will not be easy and comfortable.

A true revolutionary understands that ours is a war of ideas - a war between contending ideas! 

True revolutionary change occurs only when preceded or accompanied by a change in spiritual values. The creator of new values is thus the truest revolutionary....