The delicacy -- even more, the tartufferie -- of domestic animals like ourselves shrinks from imagining clearly to what extent cruelty [Gausamkeit] constituted the collective delight [Festfreude] of older mankind, how much it was an ingredient of all their joys [Freuden], or how naïvely they manifested their cruelty, The First Stage of Cruelty While various Scenes of sportive Woe,

The Infant Race employ,

And tortur'd Victims bleeding shew,

The Tyrant in the Boy. Behold! a Youth of gentler Heart,

To spare the Creature's pain,

O take, he cries -- take all my Tart,

But Tears and Tart are vain. Learn from this fair Example -- You

Whom savage Sports delight,

How Cruelty disgusts the view,

While Pity charms the sight. William Hogarth (1697-1764), "The First Stage of Cruelty,"

The Four Stages of Cruelty, 1751 how they considered disinterested malevolence [Bosheit] (Spinoza's sympathia malevolens) a normal trait, something to which one's conscience could assent heartily.... To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure [Leiden-sehn thut wohl, Leiden-machen noch wohler]. [pp.197-198, boldface added; German text, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, pp.55-56] Fast Alles, was wir »höhere Cultur« nennen, beruht auf der Vergeistigung und Vertiefung der Grausamkeit -- dies ist mein Satz; jenes »wilde Thier« ist gar nicht abgetödtet worden, es lebt, es blüht, es hat sich nur -- vergöttlicht. Practically everything that we called "superior culture" rests on the intellectualization and deepening of cruelty: this is my proposition. This is the wild beast that was not slaughtered at all; it lives; it flourishes; it has only been -- deified. [Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan, Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p.156; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.145; emphasis in German; Graus, "horror"; grausam, "cruel, inhuman, fierce, horrible, terrible, gruesome"; Grausamkeit, "cruelty, ferocity"].

A great part of the pleasure that we get, according to Nietzsche, from injustice to others is simply the pleasure of inflicting suffering. In this it is worth recollecting the feminist shibboleth that rape is not about sex, it is about power. Nietzsche would heartily concur. So much the better! And what is more, the value of rape is not just power, it is the chance to cruelly inflict suffering. The rapist who beats and mutilates, perhaps even kills, his victim, has done no evil, he is instead one of the heroes of true historic nobility. And people think that the droit de seigneur represents some "abuse" of power! No! It is the truly noble man as heroic rapist! Nietzsche would turn around Susan Brownmiller, who said that all men are rapists. No, it is just the problem that they are not. Nietzsche would regard most men as virtual castrati (domestic oxen, geldings) for not being rapists.

...it should be clearly understood that in the days when people were unashamed of their cruelty life was a great deal more enjoyable than it is now in the heyday of pessimism.... -- the bog of morbid finickiness and moralistic drivel which has alienated man from his natural instincts... Nowadays, when suffering is invariably quoted as the chief argument against existence, it might be well to recall the days when matters were judged from the opposite point of view; when people would not have missed for anything the pleasure of inflicting suffering, in which they saw a powerful agent, the principal inducement to living. By way of comfort to the milksops, I would also venture the suggestion that in those days pain did not hurt as much as it does today; at all events, such is the opinion of a doctor who has treated Negroes for complicated internal inflammations which would have driven the most stoical Europeans to distraction -- the assumption here being that the negro represents an earlier phase of human development [ der Neger (diese als Repräsentanten des vorgeschichtlichen Menschen genommen --) ] (... For my part, I am convinced that, compared with one night's pain endured by a hysterical bluestocking, all the suffering of all the animals that have been used to date for scientific experiments is as nothing.) [pp. 199-200; German text, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.58; color added]

In this passage, we should recall the quite recent popularity of public executions, especially the ones involving dismemberment, the bearbaiting, the cock fights, etc. etc. In the Greek Olympic games, a boxing match could go to the death, since it would not end until one boxer conceded. Such a death was regarded as noble and lucky. The occasional death in modern boxing is usually regarded as a good reason to end the sport altogether. This is before we even consider the Roman games. The mere fictional representation of such things in movies sparks endless debate about the propriety of even the fictional portrayal of the like. Usually, we would think of these increased sensitivities as evidence of increased civilization. To Nietzsche they are evidence of estrangement from life itself, of the truest failure of will, of spirit, of heart.

At the source of our pessimism and failure of will is the "slave revolt" in morals, the hateful and spiteful conspiracy of the impotent, to win by deceit what they could not win manfully and openly. While Nietzsche identifies the Jews as largely behind this, he must be aware that historically it is found elsewhere. The Egyptian Book of the Dead instructed the recently deceased to protest at their Judgment that they had never oppressed the widow or the orphan. Nietzsche would know that in nature the orphan would ordinarily get killed and the widow raped. Nietzsche certainly is aware that Buddhist and Chinese morals are not that different from what Nietzsche damns in Judaism. So what we get is a generalization of this sin to all priests. The Jews, as the Bible itself says, are a priestly people. Nietzsche's preoccupation with the Jews is their more direct role in the development of Western civilization, especially by perpetrating the greatest Trojan Horse of all, Christianity.

I suspect that a major reason for the popularity of Nietzsche among trendy intellectuals of the last century has been his critique and dismissal of Christianity. However, it is clear here that Christianity was merely a cat's-paw for the concealed hatred, poison, and vindicitiveness of the Jew. Nietzsche's anti-Christian critique simply follows from his anti-Jewish critique. Trendy intellectuals, however, would never want to admit that Nazi anti-Semitism owed any genuine, rather than merely a confused and misrepresented, debt to Nietzsche. If this excuse could be maintained, however, they would have to show that his complaint against Christianity was independent of any complaint against Judaism. This is not the case, as we see here:

From the tree trunk of Jewish vengeance and hatred [aus dem Stamme jenes Baums der Rache und des Haßes, des jüdischen Haßes] -- the deepest and sublimest hatred, since it gave birth to ideals and a new set of values , the like of which has never been seen on earth [des tiefsten und sublimsten, nämlich Ideale schaffenden, Werthe umschaffenden Haßes, dessen Gleichen nie auf Erden degewesen ist] -- grew a branch that was equally unique: a new love, the deepest and sublimest of loves. From what other trunk could this branch have sprung? But let no one surmise that this love represented a denial of the thirst for vengeance, that it contravened the Jewish hatred. Exactly the opposite is true. Love grew out of hatred as the tree's crown, spreading triumphantly in the purest sunlight, yet having, in its high and sunny realm, the same aims -- victory, aggrandizement, temptation -- which hatred pursued by digging its roots ever deeper into all that was profound and evil [böse]. Jesus of Nazareth, the gospel of love made flesh, the "redeemer," who brought blessing and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinner -- what was he but temptation in its most sinister and irresistible form, bringing men by a roundabout way to precisely those Jewish values and renovations of the ideal? Has not Israel, precisely by the detour of this "redeemer," this seeming antagonist and destroyer of Israel, reached the final goal of its sublime vindictiveness [seiner sublimen Rachsucht]? Was it not a necessary feature of a truly brilliant politics of vengeance, a farsighted, subterranean, slowly and carefully planned vengeance, that Israel had to deny its true instrument publicly and nail him to the cross like a mortal enemy, so that "the whole world" (meaning all the enemies of Israel) might naïvely swallow the bait? And could one, by straining every resource, hit upon a bait more dangerous than this? What could equal in debilitating narcotic power the symbol of the "holy cross," the ghastly paradox of a crucified god, the unspeakably cruel mystery of God's self-crucifixion for the benefit of mankind? One thing is certain, that in this sign [sub hoc signo] Israel [mit seiner Rache und Umwerthung aller Werthe bisher -- with its revenge and revaluation of all former values] has by now triumphed over all other, nobler values [Ideale]. [pp.168-169, boldface added, translation modified, deleted section restored; Haßes restored for Hasses]

Thus the vision of Constantine, "By this sign you will conquer," was not even addressed to him, but to the Jews. They conquer, secretly, indirectly, poisonously, and ironically, by way of the Cross. So the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews (well, by the Romans, but because of the Jews) was a clever fraud, by which the gentile could be deceived into taking the bait. Actually, this is not unlike one way that Hinduism saw Buddhism. The Buddha is honored as an incarnation of the Hindu Vishnu, but his task was to destroy the demons by teaching a false and catastrophically destructive doctrine. In Nietzsche's own demonology, Jesus plays a similar role for Judaism.

But in this passage Nietzsche has been incautious in his use of his terminology. He says that the tree of Jewish vengeance was "digging its roots ever deeper into all that was profound and evil." But "evil" is the term used by Jews for their oppressors, not by anyone for them. To the oppressors the Jews are, as Nietzsche argues, merely "bad," schlecht, i.e. mean, ignoble, pathetic, nasty, etc. So if Nietzsche uses "evil," bös, for something about the Jews themselves, it must mean that Nietzsche...what...hates the Jews? Can it be that, after what the Jews have done to "damage the powerful and great," Nietzsche wouldn't mind some vengeance himself? This is an important question, since the best Nietzschean critique of the Nazis might be that they manifest a hatred of the Jews that violates Nietzsche's requirement for healthy and "triumphant self-affirmation":

The slave revolt in morals begins by rancor turning creative and giving birth to values -- the rancor of beings who, deprived of the direct outlet of action, compensate by an imaginary vengeance. All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying no to an "outside," an "other," a non-self, and that no is its creative act. [pp.170-171]

So is Nietzsche himself touched by rancor? His situation does, after all, involve a certain kind of impotence, like his miserable but sublime priests. He was definitely someone "deprived of the direct outlet of action." The Nazis, on the other hand, to say the least, were not. Hitler believed in direct action more than was actually prudent. If he had not been so restless and impatient, he could have done better at key points in the War, like the bombing of England or the invasion of Russia. So I think we would have to say that Hitler may have been a better Nietzschean than Nietzsche. Indeed, what horrifies most people about Hitler, his manifest predation, his ruthlessness, his mercilessness, are things of nobility in Nietzsche -- and foolishly dashing into immediate action, even at the cost of failure, is itself praised in the manual of the Samurai ethic, Hagakure [1716].

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and does not this give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?" there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument -- though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, "We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb." -- to expect that strength will not manifest itself as strength, as the desire to overcome, to appropriate, to have enemies, obstacles, and triumphs, is every bit as absurd as to expect that weakness will manifest itself as strength. [p.178]

One could hardly say that either Nietzsche or Hitler "love" the Jews the way that an eagle loves a small mammalian meal. Some have wondered, however, how much of Hitler's hatred was heartfelt and how much merely cynical. Albert Speer said that Hitler never talked about the Jews in private conversation. Was he really obsessed with them, or were they merely a device in his larger schemes of predation, in which whole nations could be thoughtlessly consumed and expended in the interest of Germany and himself? So much the better would this be, for Nietzsche. One thing must always be kept in view here: Nietzsche provides a feel-good philosophy for predators. There is going to be no fault to find with Hitler if he merely destroys, uses, tortures, kills, etc. Nietzsche himself seems more at fault if the only real sin is impotent resentment and inactive rancor.

Nietzsche did not live to see the Nazis, but he knew of another power that had to deal with the Jews as an alien, hostile, and disruptive force:

The Romans, of course, killed many Jews, and expelled them from Jerusalem and their Temple, but they did not actually try to exterminate them. Perhaps genocide would have been too much for Nietzsche. But exactly how would he object to it? He could not say that mass murder was intrinsically unjust, since that is absurd. The most he could do would be to say, "You're letting them get to you too much." But, Hitler might object, after 2000 (or 3000, who knows?) years of damage done by these people, why not just get rid of them? Couldn't Nietzsche just say, "Why not?" Is it really something to worry about so much? No. And, as Nietzsche says, the "welfare of the human species" may be at stake. [note]

...die letzte politische Vornehmheit, die es in Europa gab, die des siebzehnten und achtzehnten französischen Jahrhunderts brach unter den volksthümlichen Ressentiments-Instinkten zusammen... Wie ein litzter Fingerzeig zum aldern Wege erschien Napoleon, jener einzelnste und spätestgeborne Mensch, den es jemals gab, und in ihm das fleischgewordne Problem des vornehmen Ideals an sich... ...the last political nobility that there was in Europe, that of the French seventeenth and eighteenth-century, collapsed under the popular instincts of resentment... Like a last signpost to another way Napoleon appears, that most unique and anachronistic man, the problem of the noble ideal made flesh in him. [Golffing, pp.186-187; Ansell-Pearson, pp.35-36; translations modified]

Nietzsche didn't know Hitler, but he knew Napoleon, and here we have his judgment "the noble ideal made flesh." To be sure, Napoleon wasn't a mass murderer and genocide on a level with Hitler, but then, in Nietzsche's pantheon, it is not clear that this would be in his favor. Hitler always thought that Napoleon had failed for being insufficiently ruthless. Was Hitler's own failure the result of too little or too much ruthlessness? The only comparison we could make would be with Stalin, who was certainly at least as ruthless, but more patient and devious. "Patient and devious" would not be virtues for Nietzsche, nor would Stalin's communist ideology; but power and success are hard to argue with, especially for Nietzsche. Stalin's creation was more successful and more durable than either Napoleon's or Hitler's, and his own power more absolute and extensive. He got to kill more people and even died in bed.

At the end of the passage above, before the ones about Rome and Napoleon, what more we get is the idea that strength cannot but manifest itself as strength, i.e. there was no choice about the noble terror inflicted by Hitler, or any other predator.

A quantum of strength is equivalent to a quantum of urge, will, activity, and it is only the snare of language (of the arch-fallacies of reason petrified in language), presenting all activity as conditioned by an agent -- the "subject" -- that blinds us to this fact. ....so does popular morality divorce strength from its manifestation, as though there were behind the strong a neutral agent, free to manifest its strength or contain it. But no such agent exists; there is no "being" behind the doing, acting, becoming; the "doer" has simply been added to the deed by the imagination -- the doing is everything. [pp.178-179]

So there is no self, no "neutral agent," of the predator, that is free to choose good or evil. The "doing" is all that there is. So not only cannot Hitler be blamed for being "evil," since that term is only used by the miserable, impotent, and mean, but he cannot even be said to have had a choice in the matter, since the idea of choice itself is an "arch-fallacy" perpetrated by the miserable, impotent, and mean just so that they can blame the strong for acting in their instinctively strong way.

Small wonder, then, that the repressed and smoldering emotions of vengeance and hatred have taken advantage of this superstition [i.e. the existence of an agent or "subject"] and in fact espouse no belief more ardently than that it is within the discretion of the strong to be weak, of the bird of prey to be a lamb. Thus they assume the right of calling the bird of prey to account for being a bird of prey. We can hear the oppressed, downtrodden, violated whispering among themselves with the wily vengefulness of the impotent, "Let us be unlike those evil ones. Let us be good. And the good shall be he who does not do violence, does not attack or retaliate, who leaves vengeance to God, who, like us, lives hidden, who shuns all that is evil, and altogether asks very little of life -- like us, the patient, the humble, the just ones." Read in cold blood, this means nothing more than "We weak ones are, in fact, weak...." [p.179]

This idea that there is no agent gifted with actual choice turns up in recent, trendy theory that the self is "socially constructed" and so represents no real ontological entity. Usually the context of this move is an attempt to remove the individual from political calculation and so make a totalitarian assimilation of the individual to the political whole obvious and natural, and to justify the use of police-state force to "reeducate" individuals and break the hold of "institutional" racism, classism, and heterosexism. Nietzsche would not be interested in abolishing the individuality of the Übermensch, let alone the racism or classism, but it is also clear that individuality for the many -- which could only be defended with the individual rights of Classical Liberalism -- would have no place in Nietzsche's calculations. It thus may not be much of a stretch to see a connection between Nietzsche's despotic Übermensch and the despotism desired by trendy intellectuals with totalitarian hungers. They each are happy to eliminate the Kantian self which is the subject of rights and dignity for all persons, even the bovine masses. Indeed, this connection would be the sort of folie à deux I have noted elsewhere between the Dionysian rejection of personal constraints and the rigidity and fascism that Camille Paglia identifies in the Apollonian temperament. "Dionysian" and "Apollonian" are of course Nietzsche's own terminology from The Birth of Tragedy (a much younger and perhaps saner Nietzsche) for the different sensibilities in Greek art. Where Nietzschean ruthlessness cooperates with Leftist ideology, as in the person of Stalin, it is the true and odd combination of everything of which Nietzsche approved with everything that he detested. Unlike Stalin himself, modern academics, perhaps following in the theoretical footsteps of people like Herbert Marcuse (the oxymoronic Freudian Marxist), can without hesitation embrace both.

Nietzsche's Darwinian affirmation of life seems to have its limits. As noted, Nietzsche himself would fall more in the impotent and resentful than the active and strong camp. Ending his days as the insane ward of his sister was much, much worse and miserable even than the imprisoned tiger of Napoleon on St. Helena or the suicide of Hitler in his Bunker. Also, the absolute Darwinian prerequisite of survival, reproduction, is a particular problem for a person with no intimate relations with the opposite sex. Nietzsche tries to makes a virtue of this:

(The path I am speaking of does not lead to "happiness" but to power, action, to the mightiest action, and in most cases to actual unhappiness [es ist nicht sein Weg zum »Glück«, von dem ich rede, sondern sein Weg zur Macht, zur That, zum mächtigsten Thun, und in den meisten Fällen thatsächlich sein Weg zum Unglück].) Thus the philosopher abhors marriage and all that would persuade him to marriage, for he sees the married state as an obstacle to fulfillment. What great philosopher has ever been married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer -- not one of them was married; moreover, it is impossible to imagine any of them married. I maintain that a married philosopher belongs in comedy, and as for that great exception, Socrates got married in a spirit of irony, precisely in order to prove that contention. Every philosopher would speak as Buddha spoke when he was told that a son had been born to him: "Râhula has been born to me; a fetter has been forged for me" (Râhula means "little daemon" [Râhula bedeutet hier »ein kleiner Dämon«]). [Golffing, p.242; Ansell-Pearson, p.81; translation modified]

Curiously, we go from the lusty and rapacious barbarian, expressing the vital life force, to the ascetic Buddha, whose compassion for the Beings doesn't seem so different from the contemptible and dishonest "love" offered by Jesus. Perhaps Nietzsche would have been more comfortable with a relationship like The Story of O, or like the polygamy endorsed by Schopenhauer and practiced by Islâm: Asceticism was alien to Islâm, and it is unlikely that Islâmic philosophers were as unmarried as Nietzsche's roster. Or maybe women just bothered him:

Man erkennt einen Philosophen daran, daß er drei glänzenden und lauten Dingen aus dem Weg geht, dem Ruhme, den Fürsten und den Frauen. One can know a philosopher, that along the way he avoids three shiny and loud things, fame, princes, and women... [Golffing, p.245; Ansell-Pearson, p.84; translation modified]

Perhaps no one ever told or showed Nietzsche, growing up among women, that loud women can be shut up with a bit of the innocent violence of the wild animal. But then the delicacy of Nietzsche in his personal life is what contrasts with his fantasies of power and domination -- as Will Durant says, "...the soul of a girl under the armor of a warrior" [The Story of Philosophy, The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosphers, Simon and Schuster, 1926, 1933, p.305]. Unlike Heidegger, we cannot say that Nietzsche ever acted out the implications of his thought. His thought is just the kind of exercise in fantasy vengeance that he attributes to the Jews. This may make him a better person, in terms of action, but not in any way that he would have honored or admired himself. Since he didn't become a cheerleader for the German Empire or the typical anti-Semite of the age, he can be credited with a spurious moral discrimination. His objection to both, however, was their moral posturing and Christianity:

And I am equally out of patience with those newest speculators in idealism called anti-Semites, who parade as Christian-Aryan worthies and endeavor to stir up all the asinine elements of the nation by that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude. [p.294]

"Christian-Aryan" will contain for Nietzsche the most antithetical of elements. Far better, indeed, would be the neo-paganism of Hitler -- who liked to invoke moral and Christian precedents or principles in public, but who was rightly suspected by all of putting these only to the most cynical use. A Germany free of Christian and Latin incrustations looks like what Hitler was aiming for, just as Heidegger reached back to the Greek Presocratics to inspire the Dasein of his own philosophical project, which he saw as part of the historic mission of Germany. In this case again, Nietzsche begins to look more conformable to the Nazis, just as Heidegger thought, than to the reasons the enlightened now would give for rejecting German nationalism or anti-Semitism.

Diese Träger der niederdrückenden und vergeltungslüsternen Instinkte, die Nachkommen alles europäischen und nicht europäischen Sklaventhums, aller vorarischen Bevölkerung in Sonderheit -- sie stellen den Rückgang der Menschheit dar! Diese »Werkzeuge der Cultur« sind eine Schande des Menschen, und eher ein Verdacht, ein Gegenargument gegen »Cultur« überhaupt! Man mag im besten Rechte sein, wenn man vor der blonden Bestie auf dem Grunde aller vornehmen Rassen die Furcht nicht los wird und auf der Hut ist: aber wer möchte nicht hundertmal lieber sich fürchten, wenn er zugleich bewundern darf, als sich nicht fürchten, aber dabei den ekelhaften Anblick des Mißrathenen, Verkleinerten, Verkümmerten, Vergifteten nicht mehr los werden können? Und ist das nicht unser Verhängniss? These carriers of the leveling and retributive instincts, these descendants of every European and extra-European slave-dom, and especially of the pre-Aryan populations, represent human retrogression most flagrantly. Such "instruments of culture" are a disgrace to man and might make one suspicious of culture altogether. One might be justified in fearing the blond beast lurking within all noble races and in being on one's guard against it, but who would not a hundred times prefer fear when it is accompanied with admiration, rather than not fear, to security accompanied by the loathsome sight of the miscarried, the stunted, the crooked, the contaminated ? And is not the latter our destiny today? [Golffing, p.176; Ansell-Pearson, p.26; translations modified; Mißrathenen restored for Missrathenen; color added]

"Human retrogression"? Is our "destiny today" really "the miscarried, the stunted, the crooked, and the contaminated"? (Golffing had said, "perversion, dwarfishness" and "degeneracy," leaving out the fourth term.) For all the fevered hallucinations of leftists who find racism in every American heart and schoolhouse, and who demand that society spare no expense in accommodating every blind, deaf, deformed, and crippled person to the point where they can live like anyone else, the only place where Nietzsche's racism and contempt for the sick and suffering is read with pleasure, honor, and praise is in the most fortified strongholds of political correctness and "progressive" politics -- American universities.

All that prevents such people from becoming more honest Nietzscheans and following Heidegger down the path to something like the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism is fashion. Marxism still provides the rhetoric and paradigmata for contemporary "progressive" thought, but it should not be forgotten that the Italian "Futurists" of the 1920's were fascists. People whose every instinct is already totalitarian are vulnerable to who knows what kinds of whims. In a world where liberalism and democracies are now increasingly in violent geopolitical conflict with Islâmic Fascism, and trendy progressives despise liberal capitalism more than misogynistic Islâmic terrorists, the most surprising intellectual developments become possible. In such an ideological mix and ferment, one thing stands clear: Nietzsche's contribution, a morally infantile fantasy of barbarism, will always be dangerous, destructive, and seductive to anyone whose moral maturity is no greater than his.

Editorial Note:

I should pay tribute to my former professor and advisor at UCLA (1968-1969) and the University of Hawai'i (1972-1974), Lenn Goodman (now at Vanderbilt University), who once made what I thought was the most acute observation about Nietzsche -- that he was simply not a morally mature person. I wonder if we can excuse Nietzsche because, after all, he was losing his mind. But this is not an excuse that will work, I hope, for most Nietzsche enthuasiasts.

While Professor Goodman displays exemplary judgment and insight with people like Nietzsche and the appalling Martin Heidegger, I have been alarmed and dismayed at the treatment of Rudolf Otto in his Judaism, A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation, and in his confused ideas about capitalism in references to Bernard Mandeville (also in the same book). He really needs to think better of his approach and understanding in those matters.

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