A Word for the Unwise
Letzter Mensch • (létz-ter men-sch) • noun
Definition: “Last Man”; a contemptible person
Origin: German
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the main character Zarathustra leaves the comfort of his home and ascends into the mountains to obtain wisdom. After a decade of solitude, Zarathustra comes down from his mountain with the plan of bestowing his wisdom onto mankind as a gift. He wants to teach humanity how to become an übermensch (Nietzsche’s notion of "self-mastery," "self-cultivation," "self-direction," and "self-overcoming"), yet to his frustration, the townsfolk do not want to receive his gift.
To show the importance of becoming an übermensch, Zarathustra describes to the people the perils of the “most contemptible man” or Letzter Mensch. To Zarathustra, letzter menschen (menschen is the plural of mensch) make everything small and meaningless, and they always yearn for comfort. They embrace the consumption of “poison” to produce pleasant dreams and a pleasant death. They have a herd mentality with no independent values of their own as he says,
“No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse…. They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery.”
When Zarathustra finishes describing the letzter mensch, the townsfolk laugh at him and proclaim that they want to be the letzter mensch instead of the übermensch because the simplistic ease has greater appeal than the effort required to become an übermensch. Soon thereafter, Zarathustra was forced to leave the town because his ideas were “dangerous,” and the townsfolk would physically harm him if he stayed.
America’s ethnocidal way of life encourages people to live as letzter menschen because we corrupt language in a way that makes people want to live contemptible lives.
Letzter Menschen & Lost in American Translation
American society professes the alleged benefit of individualism and comfort to bolster its narrative of American Exceptionalism. We are encouraged to become comfortable individuals who know everything. This is our American essence. This is what supposedly makes America and Americans great, yet according to Nietzsche, it is also what makes us letzter menschen.
As the letzter menschen reject wisdom, they are making a statement about their own supremacy. Their way of life allocated no space for new ideas and terror was used to expel people who deviated from that. America unsurprisingly projects its exceptionalism and supremacy onto how we even translate letzter mensch.
Letzter means “last,” so a letzter mensch would be the “Last Man.” However, if you were the last man standing in an endurance competition for example, then being “last” would also make you the “best” or “ultimate” man. This may be the reason why some English translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra have bizarrely translated “Letzter Mensch” as “Ultimate Man.” On the other hand, if you were the last man standing because your destructive, contemptible nature has destroyed the environment around you as you exiled wisdom, then it is pretty clear that “last” in this context would not equate to “best” or “ultimate.”
“Contemptible” and “ultimate” are subtly made to mean nearly the same thing. This is a discourse that masks the expulsion of wisdom and professes that the most contemptible among us is also the wisest. America linguistically and culturally encourages us to elevate those who race to the bottom.
This translation oversight occurs because our individualism, dependence on comfort, and professed Exceptionalism makes language small and meaningless, and encourages us to distort the meaning of words to comfort the fragile essence of the letzter menschen.
The Last Man & The Essentialist Crisis
In last week’s The Word, we discussed the difference between an Existential and an Essentialist Crisis. An essentialist crisis is a crisis of essence but not existence, and since American ethnocide prioritizes people’s essence ahead of their existence, America frequently has essentialist threats.
For example, America’s white-dominated belief in American Exceptionalism is part of America’s essence, or identity, so anything that challenges this identity will create an essentialist crisis. Since American Exceptionalism is a deception or mauvaise foi, existence and truth will always prompt a crisis of essence. Due to this, the Americans who subscribe to the narrative of American Exceptionalism will always feel under attack.
Race is also another American essence. White Americans who associate their identity with their skin color and prioritize their essence ahead of existence will always feel under attack as more non-white Americans gain agency within society. Their self-inflicted “one-drop” rule means that their essence cannot extend beyond their skin color, and this anxiety makes them feel like the “Last Men” of their people. They fight to sustain their imagined essence, but in order to do so, they destroy the existence of others. They are a contemptible Last Man who will describe themselves as the Ultimate Man as they fondly gaze at the environment they have destroyed.
The language of the Letzter Mensch obviously applies to colonization, but we can clearly see how this manifests in our current political turmoil.
Donald Trump is a contemptible man whose inhumanity elevated him to the pantheon of American political power, and he metaphorically translates letzter mensch as “ultimate man.” Trump sees himself as an ultimate man who must always win because this is what his essence demands. He does not hesitate to destroy our democratic institutions or corrupt language and truth so that he can potentially sustain his essence. Many of his supporters have anxiety about the growing diversity of American society because the existence of non-white people threatens the comfort of believing in the supremacy of their whiteness.
America is being made meaningless and corrupted by letzter menschen having an essentialist crisis, but we can also bring back meaning through the process of examining language and injecting truthful words into the discourse.
