Oh, you sentimental hypocrites, you lustful men! You lack innocence in desire: and therefore you now slander desiring! - Nietzsche
After re-reading Nietzsche’s “Of immaculate perception”, I started seeing some of the subjects of resentment more clearly. It is all too common to reject our own nature, and resent our love and desire in this world for we lack a certain innocence in this desiring. We can be a jealous bunch, afraid of our own desires. It is like a child throwing a tantrum, saying that if they can’t have it, nobody can. Instead of little fists, we wave around morals and values.
It is this humane lusting from which a need for religion and social boundaries arise. For example, Roman catholic Christianity talks about the seven deadly sins. Why warn of specifically these sins? Because in our darkest times, we desire to indulge in them. The need for Christianity and denouncement of sins is a sign of rejection of our lust. But it is precisely this stuffing of lust that makes it grow resentful all the more. This church teaches us to reject desire and live diligently, but should we not learn instead to embrace this desire and to desire with innocence? Do we not, by distancing ourselves from our own desires, distance ourselves from ourselves? Let us not speak of rejecting worldly desires then, but of learning to desire properly!
Take the incel as a case study, a person in involuntary celibacy. Often, these types of people can start to denounce love and sex and femininity. But is this resentment not spawned from a jealousy in their desire for these things. Do they not ache for their lack, and wish this ache onto others? It seems they want to rid themselves from a desire they cannot satiate, and that their only way of doing so is in reshaping their values and beliefs to fit this narrative. Yes, they fill their mouths with noble words of which they do not know the true meaning, and make of themselves habitual liars and hypocrites. How can these people speak of the death of romance when they themselves have killed it in themselves?
Yes, it seems to be something humanity is prone to; we kill our own desires (and with it parts of ourselves) out of fear of a lack of innocence in these desires. Let us not become our desires, and let us instead act them in innocence. And if such desire cannot be satiated, let ourselves be at peace with that as well. We should aim to be master of our desires, not rejectors. Once we start to recognise which of our world-views are spawned from a rejection of our own desires, we can start to shape them not out of rejection of the self but out of love of the self.
Ask yourself the following: how am I making myself more miserable by rejecting my desires? Am I rejecting romance because of a bad breakup? Do I loathe the acquisition of wealth because of my lack of it? Do I loathe socialising because of my lack of popularity? Do I reject society because I don’t fit in? Often, you will find that it is an unfulfilled desire that fuels other negative parts of your life. Instead of rejecting the self, we should aim to create over and beyond ourselves, and to create our values by what we desire our world to be! Are we not the universe? Let this over-going be our down-going! (laat deze overgang onze ondergang zijn!)