While we democrats fight over which kind of all-encompassing herd to belong to, Nietzsche raises the awkward possibility that any kind of all-encompassing herd is “an attempt to assassinate the future of man” — that nihilism awaits at the end of any egalitarian humanism. This is a really European position to take. In America, we've developed in a way so different from the Old World that we can almost literally play with fire without getting burned. In Europe, Heidegger is fuel for an unprecedented cataclysm of human destruction. In America, he is but one of many ingredients in the broth of semi-spiritual life pragmatism.

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