Reading the great books in one’s late teens is intoxicating. The critical faculties are half-formed at that age, liable to be overwhelmed by the literary master or virtuoso philosopher. The teenager reads each classic work thinking, “This book is so right!” and “Isn’t it just so!”—without pausing to note the differences among the various authors, let alone his own doubts and objections. It was in this spirit of rash enthusiasm that I approached the existentialists, starting with Nietzsche.
To say that I “read” Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra would be an understatement. I took the book home from the store, lay belly down on my bed, and finished it over three or four days, barely stepping out to eat and wash. I consumed Zarathustra, and it consumed me, in turn. Today I consider most of Nietzsche’s ideas to be not merely wrong but positively sinister. His aphoristic style, which so wowed me at age sixteen, now strikes me as pretentious and overwrought. And yet he gave me the zest for philosophy and abstract ideas that has remained with me to this day.
Hitherto, I had only lashed out, crudely and feebly, at religion and authority. Reading Nietzsche lent me a conceptual framework for criticism and awakened me to the big questions: What is man? Where does he come from, and what is his destiny? What makes some men good and others bad? Is modern science capable of answering these questions? Or do we still need philosophy and ultimate truths to order and explain what our senses and instruments tell us?
He offered terrible answers. Following his Zarathustra led me, first, to some of the most lethal ideologies of the modern era and, later, to philosophies that denied the possibility of truth. Like some besotted intellectual groupie, I trailed Nietzsche and his Continental progeny wherever they led me. And like any fashion maven, I tried on every modish theory that I came upon along the way. None left me wiser than I was before.
* * * * *
“When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home.”
So began Nietzsche’s madcap account of the life of his Zarathustra, a prophet come to herald a new epoch in human history and a new kind of man. When I first read it, I didn’t even catch this opening allusion to the life of Jesus—the first of many throughout the book—for I hadn’t yet read a single word of the Bible. Still, it didn’t take a theologian to figure out that Zarathustra was on a warpath against God generally, and the God of the Bible especially.
Instead of commencing his public ministry at age thirty, as Christ did, Zarathustra goes “into the mountains” and spends ten years conversing with the sun and the moon, the trees and the birds. Then he descends into a nearby town, bringing news that God is dead.
That infamous proclamation sent a frisson of transgression down my spine. I reread the words several times: “God is dead.” “God is dead.” “God is dead!” Did that mean that God had been alive at some point? When had God died? Who had killed God? Or had God died of natural causes? It took some knowledge of the Western tradition—reaching back to Athens and Jerusalem and forward to the European Enlightenment—to truly appreciate Zarathustra’s meaning. This was knowledge that I sorely lacked. Even on Nietzsche’s own, militantly antitheistic terms, I was unprepared for the death of God.
In his first sermon, Zarathustra teaches that the great spirit who brings new values must first submit to the old. He must kneel “like a camel wanting to be well loaded”. Only after becoming a beast of burden can this great spirit morph into the lion, which tears down every old value and every “thou shalt”. Put another way: Only he who knows tradition through and through can destroy it. Afterward, the great spirit undergoes yet a third transformation: The ferocious lion must become a child, the bearer of the new.
I was not yet even the camel. But I pressed onward, drawn by the deceptively simple allegories and Zarathustra’s roaring pronouncements, which, I thought, echoed the highest yearnings of my soul. What Zarathustra mainly spoke to was my loneliness. As Nietzsche’s English translator and great booster, Walter Kaufmann, has noted, Zarathustra was the product of a supremely lonely mind, which is why the book has appealed to generations of alienated adolescents.
The Nietzschean prophet rages against the “believers of all faiths”. Peeking behind their veil of piety and chastity, he discovers only hypocrisy, ressentiment, and the will to power. For Nietzsche, it is the will to power that animates all men and that is the wellspring of all morality. Different nations and character types through the ages have valued things differently, his Zarathustra says, according to their will to power and need for self-preservation. These valuations the various peoples have etched into tablets of moral law, hallowing their own invention as holy writ.
“Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil,” Zarathustra says. “Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed a value in things to preserve himself.” Biblical morality reflects the will to power of slavelike men. Invented for and by people who envied the strong and the virile, it proscribes strength and virility. Invented for and by people who didn’t appreciate earthly pleasures, it conditions men to fix their gaze on transcendent horizons.
“Isn’t it just so!” I thought. Of course, a voice from heaven hadn’t burst through the clouds to tell us, “Do this but not that.” And hadn’t Nietzsche described perfectly the conceit of the Mormon bishop and the gaudy televangelist, not to mention the Shiite ayatollah, who claimed to echo that voice from heaven? And wasn’t I precisely the creative, virile type? Yes, and I had a right to seek my own way and my own values. But how was I supposed to do that? Here, Nietzsche’s book took a mystical, and mystifying, turn.
Zarathustra prophesies the “overman”. A series of revolutions in science and general knowledge—spurred, ironically, by Judeo-Christianity’s exhortation to seek truth—has made God impossible. But men can’t let go of him, or of parts of him; they still feel the tug of God’s dead hand. Therefore, it is the all-too-human that must be overcome after God. Man must overcome himself, to give way to the overman. “Man is a rope,” Zarathustra says, “tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss.”
What an image! Was the overman, then, the end point of biological evolution? Was Nietzsche setting out a eugenic agenda? Not exactly, though assorted racists have long sought to claim him as their own. Nietzsche’s thought was far too mad and anarchic to lend itself to such causes. He had no truck with the cult of Teutonic supremacy that was gathering strength in his lifetime and would go on to wreak global havoc a few decades after his death in 1900. And yet, there was no denying the elitism of his overman concept.
What distinguishes the overman from the all-too-human is the former’s rejection of the good-and-evil mentality. This doesn’t mean that there is no code or hierarchy of values: Zarathustra at various points sings hymns to self-mastery, true friendship, radical creativity. But for the overman, there are no preexisting moral absolutes that bind all. An action isn’t inherently good or evil. Rather, what matters is who takes that action. The higher character type, the elevated soul, gives value to actions by virtue of the fact that he is higher.
The conclusion, which I drew but couldn’t yet fully articulate, was that values were relative. What was wrong for the many was, perhaps, right for the few.
* * * * *
I drank Thus Spoke Zarathustra in my little room in our little trailer, and it proved a potent elixir. It healed some of the wounds of adolescent solitude even as it magnified my already-swollen sense of self-importance. Which clever and resentful teenager doesn’t like to think of himself as ahead of the “superfluous many”, as tending toward the overman while the rest are stuck in the all-too-human? I don’t need pep rallies and Christmastime food drives! I get to designate value, not the herd!
Nietzsche corroborated all my prejudices against religion and traditional morality. The German philosopher wasn’t the first to claim that all faith is but a fanciful tale that helps weak minds cope with the mystery of existence, or that organized religion is a con played by the hustling cleric on his gullible flock. But his genealogy of Judeo-Christianity—that is, that it originates from a slavelike people’s will to power—was unmatched for originality and polemical firepower. It struck me as perfectly cogent at the time.
With Nietzsche, I could be virulently misanthropic while claiming to stand for a deeper humanism than the religious believer could appreciate. The Nietzschean spirit locked his gaze on the horizon of the here and now—on what he could achieve within the bounds of his own reason, creativity, love, and will to power. Wasn’t that a more humane, more heroic spirituality than one that sought after an invisible, all-seeing, all-judging deity in the sky?
Then, too, Nietzsche pinpointed exactly what it was that I had found so dissatisfying about America. Although he reserved most of his bile for religion, he was also a vicious critic of egalitarian liberalism. When I lived in a society animated by romantic politics and Islamic messianism, the West was my lodestar, because it stood for science, progress, equality of the sexes, and so on. When I crossed the ocean and saw liberal modernity up close, however, there was no denying that something was amiss.
Enter Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s prophet despises modernity’s “last men”, who boast: “We have invented happiness.” Theirs is a sterile, gray happiness. For the last men, there is no darkness and therefore no light; work is entertainment, and vice versa; and everyone is more or less the same—everyone is equal. “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night,” they say.
Didn’t America—with its frozen burritos and vulgar shows and egalitarian ethos—exemplify the kind of emptiness Nietzsche decried? Americans disagreed vehemently about unimportant things: the weather, cars, football. But when it came to the most important questions, they kept disagreements to a minimum, if they didn’t keep mum altogether. Yes, America was the home of the last men. But what about its religiosity? Didn’t that suggest that there was more to America than endless banality?
Ah, but here Nietzsche made his cleverest move yet. The world of the last men, he said, had come about when two streams merged. One was the stream of biblical religion; the other, egalitarian liberalism. The latter claimed a rupture with the former. But liberalism was an extension of biblical religion. It was from Judeo-Christianity that the liberal-egalitarians had received their egalitarianism, their pity for the poor and the lame, their universalist notions of justice and fairness. The last men were high on the fumes of the slave morality.
To be a Nietzschean, then, was to fight on two fronts, against the liberal-egalitarian last men and the remnants of biblical religion. I was ready to enlist. Alas, there was no Party of Nietzsche accepting recruits in Logan, Utah. So I did next best thing, which was to major in philosophy upon graduating high school. At the time, Utah State University offered full rides, with generous stipends, to the winners of its annual humanities essay contest. I submitted an essay expounding my newfound Nietzschean convictions; it won in the philosophy category. This was no small blessing. Though our financial picture was slowly improving, attending college out of state was yet inconceivable.
* * * * *
I didn’t really go to college, if by “college” is meant a course of preparation for self-government and the examined life. I did go to college, however, in the sense that I attended some classes, first at Utah State University and later at the University of Washington in Seattle; took exams and wrote final papers; did drugs and drank far too much; hooked up randomly if not frequently; and was eventually awarded a degree in philosophy.
The blame for my fruitless university career belongs to me. Although my undergraduate alma maters weren’t top-flight schools, they offered plenty of opportunities for genuine learning, including from some truly exceptional scholars. The trouble was that I entered college convinced that I already knew everything there was to know. The point of higher education, I thought, was to reaffirm and broadcast my own ideas.
Once more, I glided through and, judging by grades, even had a splendid education. My “success” owed mainly to my swift mastery of the art of college writing. I could draft sensible prose or, when necessary, imitate postmodern Academese and hide my intellectual laziness under thick layers of gobbledygook. I suffered from the worst kind of ignorance in college, the kind that is papered over with little bits of erudition and the occasional striking phrase. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
How I wish one of my professors had told me: “No, you are writing shallow nonsense. You need to go back, read such and such, really think this problem through.” Or how I wish there had been a course that would have required me to study the great books, closely and carefully, in some logical order. I doubt that I would have heeded such advice or taken such opportunities, however, even if they had come my way. I arrived on campus with a syllabus of my own, as it were, and the professors were content to let me work through it independently.
Having read much of Nietzsche’s oeuvre in high school, I turned next to the other existentialists: Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre mainly but also Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Hermann Hesse, and Eugene Ionesco. I treated these authors as if they all belonged to a single, cohesive intellectual movement that shared the same beliefs about everything. I posited an existentialist ideology where none existed. Some of these writers had died before the term “existentialism” had even been coined, while others explicitly rejected the appellation.
Still, there was a certain mood of anxiety or despair that tied together the existentialist philosophers and the existential-ish novelists and playwrights. All of them grappled with the consequences of “a world divested of meaning”, as I might have written in one of my college essays. Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were Christians. But even for them, God’s presence was obscured, either because a “chasmic abyss” separated men from the divine (the Dane), or because modern man had tried to make a god of himself (the Russian).
More typical, and more in accord with my own thinking, was Camus’ and Sartre’s insistence that there is no God and therefore that human existence has no metaphysical origin, no destination. “Existence before essence” was Sartre’s handy, if oversimplified, definition of existentialism. Starting from that premise, the two took different paths, morally and politically, a divergence that would eventually put an end to their personal friendship. Faced with the Camus-Sartre fork in the existentialist road, I initially went the way of Camus.
His 1942 novel, The Stranger, was another one of those adolescent masterpieces. It tells of a pied-noir in colonial Algeria who shoots and kills an Arab for no good reason other than that the sun’s glare irritates his eyes. Tried and sentenced to death, Camus’ protagonist, Meursault, remains unrepentant. His moral indifference flows from the “gentle indifference of the world”, as he puts it in his final soliloquy before his execution.
The Stranger painted a bleak picture of modern man’s moral and spiritual landscape. But it was clear that Camus the philosopher didn’t prescribe such monstrous indifference. His point, elucidated in essays such as “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), was that the inevitability of death rendered human existence absurd. Like the mythical Sisyphus, men spent their days toiling against death, only for the boulder to roll back down the mountainside at night, for death to have the final say. Yet human life’s absurdity and fragility lent existence a precious dignity. It was necessary to uphold that dignity, Camus argued, through the ethical exercise of the free will.
For Camus, the morally exemplary man par excellence was the physician who treats patients amid an outbreak of the plague, knowing well he might contract the disease and, moreover, that death renders his good actions ultimately pointless. I am describing, of course, Dr. Bernard Rieux, the protagonist of Camus’ other major novel, The Plague, from 1947. Pressed by a friend about why he displays such devotion to his patients, though he is an unbeliever, Dr. Rieux answers: “Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in him and struggle with all our might against death, without even raising our eyes toward the heaven where he sits in silence?”
For a little while, I adopted this existential humanism a la Rieux as my personal code. I liked to think that I was modeling my life after the doctor’s—that, if faced with a mass catastrophe of some sort, I would act heroically, in the full knowledge that my actions would mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Needless to say, it was easy to think such pleasant thoughts about myself when there was no outbreak of disease or fascist takeover—the plague is also a political metaphor—to test my moral mettle. Meanwhile, I was as selfish as ever when it came to more quotidian moral choices.
Eventually, I traded Camus and his heroic physician for Sartre. The other Frenchman had grander ideas about moral and political commitment in a world without God. Sartre was an ardent Communist. For him, it was class struggle that opened the way to man’s true ground of freedom. Now here was a concrete political project I could sign up for.
He was hardly the only French philosopher of his generation to abandon himself to the Communist cause. With a very few exceptions—Camus among them, hence his rupture with Sartre—Parisian intellectuals postwar looked with admiration to the Marxist experiments in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. Communist regimes, they believed, had broken the shackles of alienation that had bound men since time immemorial. They maintained this faith in the socialist ideal, even as evidence mounted of the inhumanity of actually existing socialism.
Sartre was an especially abject apologist, an expert at passing off slavish defense of Moscow as moral sophistication. Take his play Dirty Hands. The protagonist is an idealistic Communist intellectual, Hugo, whose “bourgeois morality” prevents him from seeing why the party has to forge an alliance with fascist forces in a fictional country in Eastern Europe (much as Joseph Stalin had done with the real-world Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). Hugo is a foil to Hoederer, the charismatic, hardened party apparatchik, who loves “men for what they are” and therefore has no use for idealism. The veteran party man understands that you can’t wage class warfare, and liberate the human race, without getting your hands dirty.
It was obvious which of the two types Sartre thought was up to the responsibilities of the twentieth century. The Hoederer posture—anti-idealism in the name of a deeper idealism, immorality in service of a truer morality—was that of the political fanatic, who is prepared to excuse any crime and violate any principle to bring about utopia, as Sartre indeed was. But how did Sartre square existentialism’s individualistic, lone-man-against-the-void vibe with Marxism-Leninism? For that matter, how did I get over Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian grumblings, which I had taken to heart, and champion an ideology that called for the leveling of all class differences?
Easily. Nietzschean existentialism considered man to be his own moral measure, and it licensed an elite to designate new values and overthrow the old. Communism—a movement led by intellectuals, in the name and at the expense of workers—did just that. Which was why I didn’t bat an eye when Marxism-Leninism presented itself as the next step after existentialism. By the age of eighteen, I was quite literally a card-carrying Communist.
* * * * *
“Hello?”
“Yes, hello, um, is this Worker’s Alliance? I want to, um, join your organization.”
It was an inauspicious start to my career in Marxist politics. Having resolved to dedicate myself to overthrowing capitalism, I went online in search of hard-left organizations in Utah—there weren’t that many—and picked the only one that appeared to consist of more than one cranky fellow operating out of a dank basement.
The outfit, Worker’s Alliance, was the American branch of a global organization known as the World Congress of the Fourth International. Ideologically, the Alliance and WCFI were Trotskyite—that is, they drew inspiration from Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary and martyr to Stalinism. This alleviated somewhat my mother’s apprehensions about my Communist turn. She had no love for Communism, but to her mind Trotsky had been the one good guy in the whole sordid business.
According to a myth cultivated by his Western followers, Trotsky was a friend to artists and a gentle man of letters, who might have built a more humane USSR had he survived Stalin’s depredations. In fact, Trotsky had been as cruel as any of the other leading Bolsheviks before Stalin sidelined him. Yet such was my fervor that I didn’t permit myself to read an objective history of the October Revolution and its aftermath. Instead, I plowed through Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume hagiography of Trotsky, The Prophet. Hot tears filled my eyes when I reached the final pages, which told of how the old man had resisted Stalinism to the last, struggling for hours after an assassin had buried an ice ax two inches into his skull at the behest of the Kremlin.
I wept for a Soviet leader, and became insufferably self-righteous.
The voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as John Smyth (“with a y”). He sounded hesitant at first, as if my straightforward request to join his group had caught him off-guard, but once his Marxist zeal kicked in, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Ours was a critical moment for developing socialism “in this country”, he said, what with the “whole system” in crisis—this was a year after 9/11—and the “forces of capital” no longer able to contain capitalism’s “internal contradictions”. And could I come down to Salt Lake City for some important meetings?
I felt as though I was about to be inducted into a select group that had advance knowledge of the twists and turns of world history before they unfolded. That was precisely what all Communist parties claimed to possess. The key to unlocking this secret knowledge was dialectical materialism. It was a “science of history”, first developed by Karl Marx, that helped the party analyze and predict social change based on the modes and relations of production—that is, how things were produced and who owned the means of production.
Class struggle, according to this theory, was the engine of history. Every age hitherto had been marked by antagonism between social classes, and the modern one was no different. Capitalism, our enemy, had pitilessly destroyed older social forms—good riddance to feudalism and superstition!—and concentrated the factories, firms, and banks in the hands of a greedy few. Everyone else it had reduced to wage slavery. Workers produced the real value, yet the capitalist system alienated them from the fruit of their labor. The stage was set for massive upheaval.
Only, the workers suffered from “false consciousness”. The system hoodwinked them into believing that their interests were aligned with the bosses’; that they were “free” because they retained “bourgeois rights” like free speech and due process; or else that they should await the kingdom of heaven rather than take power on earth. The workers weren’t up for revolution. They were a class “in themselves but not for themselves”, in Marx’ famous expression. Thus, it was up to professional revolutionaries to act as their “vanguard”.
Toward the end of freshman year, I drove my new Honda Civic to Salt Lake, where I was to meet the Worker’s Alliance crew. I had purchased the car with earnings from a part-time market research job. That fact alone illustrated that capitalism in America in 2003 had little to do with the smoggy, grinding Victorian Manchester that had served as Marx’ muse and laboratory. But I wasn’t wise enough yet to judge theory against life experience.
The address I had took me to a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Salt Lake. There, in a modest duplex, a suburban vanguard fantasized about restaging the Ten Days That Shook the World. Smyth greeted me at the door. He must have been in his thirties. He had a limp leg and one eye that was permanently shut and another that bulged out of its socket; various tics convulsed his body every few minutes. Smyth was the practical one. He scouted for recruits, communicated with headquarters in Seattle, represented the party at strikes and protests. In between, he worked at a customer-support call center for a tech company.
His deputy was Markus Van Doren, a forty-something Flemish mathematics lecturer straight out of central casting for Eccentric Marxist Professor. Van Doren had an encyclopedic grasp of the Marxist canon, and he existed in a state of permanent disputation with other theorists, most long dead, over the correct interpretation of, say, Marx’ Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or Trotsky’s Transitional Program. Eating, drinking, socializing, his day job—these were all distractions, which he unfortunately had to put up with. He owned the duplex with a long-suffering wife, whom I would often catch glancing at her husband and his weirdo friends with a look that combined pity and fury in equal measure.
The third member—I would join as a fourth—was Derek. He was a teenage runaway who had dropped out of high school and spent the nights in shelters. Unlike the rest of us, Derek really was dispossessed, and we appreciated his comradeship all the more for that. But I don’t recall us ever doing much to help improve his lot. Then again, spreading goodwill, making human connections, acting charitably—these were ideological constructs that helped perpetuate the system. Charity blunted social antagonisms, when the Marxist’s task was to sharpen them.
We aggressively hawked the latest issues of our newspaper, Equity, which each week told the same stories in slightly repackaged form: Capitalism is in crisis; globalization is a scam; the two major parties are beholden to the same corporate masters. If we got word of a strike action at some Utah mine, we would race to join in. We stuck out like sore thumbs on the picket, but the miners welcomed us, and it was stirring to join our voices to their chants: “Hey-hey! Ho-ho! Corporate greed has got to go!”; “What time is it? union time!”
Then there were the monthly meetings. Smyth and Van Doren ran these according to the Leninist principle of democratic centralism: Disagreement was allowed until a decision was reached, at which point the minority was required to set aside its reservations and endorse the majority position wholeheartedly. Not that there was much disagreement. Whatever the social ill under discussion on a given night—unemployment, poverty, war, environmental degradation—we all concurred that it ultimately traced back to capitalism.
It didn’t matter that our endless talk didn’t solve any problems. We knew that the classless society was the preordained end point of human history. The dialectic would turn and turn until the final triumph of Communism. Gathered in Van Doren’s study or the hipster cafes of Salt Lake, we few were nudging history toward its final destination.
* * * * *
When I dabbled in Marxism, a decade after the end of the Cold War, the ideology had been utterly discredited. Contrary to Marx’ predictions, capitalism hadn’t pauperized workers in the advanced industrial countries. Instead, it had spawned middle classes across the West, people whose material prosperity disinclined them to revolution. Communism had gained a foothold only in undeveloped, agricultural lands like Russia and China—and there, only thanks to the bloody methods of the various Communist parties. Wherever Marx’ economic ideas had been implemented, the gulag, the killing field, the torture chamber, and the man-made famine were never far behind.
Why, then, did I cling to Marxism for years?
The thrill of epater les bourgeois surely had something to do with it. In Utah in those days, identifying as a plain old Democrat marked one as an exotic bird. To espouse Marxism—the ideology of the late, unmourned Evil Empire—was that much more countercultural and, I thought, cool. I remembered how, back in Iran, when one spoke of an intellectual, it was automatically assumed that one meant a chapi, a “leftist”. Thus, I ended up once more borrowing someone else’s identity in service of a dubious individuality.
There were other layers. My childish Americanism, you will recall, was made of light stuff. Faced with America as it really was, it quickly morphed into anti-Americanism. With Marxism, I could oppose the United States as the evil, capitalist hegemon without having to buy into any of the Shiite mumbo jumbo from the old country. Growing up in a totalitarian society, it turned out, didn’t inoculate me against other totalitarian temptations. Marxism, moreover, assuaged my class anxieties: My economic displacement—from a doted-upon son of Iran’s middle class to a trailer-park kid—was but a ripple in the dialectic.
Analytically speaking, Marxism was a useful instrument for a young would-be intellectual. Social class was a significant factor in the lives of people everywhere and at all times, and this meant that the application of Marxist methods to, say, the study of the French novel or Hindu religion or what have you could yield some clever insights. It was satisfying to read a classic, not on its own terms, but as a mirror held up to the economic dynamics of its period, the author’s social class, and so on. Nothing was true for all times and for all people. Everything was historical; everything could be historicized. I retained this Marxist habit of mind—soulless, reductionist, and terribly wrong—long after I left the ideology behind.
Yet Marxism’s greatest attraction was its religious spirit. In those days I couldn’t see how the materialist dialectic and the Marxist science of history were really “secularized theologies”, as the liberal French philosopher Raymond Aron had argued in the 1950s. But I felt in my heart the poetry and metaphysics of Marxism’s secular salvation story, in which history designated the revolutionary party as mankind’s savior. In the Marxist imagination, revolutionary sacrifice would consummate and redeem, violently and spectacularly, every injustice and every tragedy through the ages. History would wipe away every tear.
God was supposed to be dead, yet I was still grasping for him on the darkened road from Zarathustra.