Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/156

140 only means of counteracting it which the well-to-do have in their power is, not to provoke it, to live temperately and frugally, to avoid all luxurious display and support the state instead of opposing it when it lays taxes on superfluities and luxuries. If they lack the will to do this, the only difference remaining between them and the socialists is that they possess and the socialists want to—the aims are the same. He gives a scathing description of the lives and pleasures of the present possessing class. The unhappy thing is that the workers are now bent on aping them, are becoming "fellow-conspirators in the present folly of nations, who want before everything else to produce as much and to become as rich as possible." Nietzsche's ideals are elsewhere, and he does not think too much comfort and wealth and security good for man. If the socialists and worshipers of the state had their way, they might with their measures for making life happy and secure bring Europe to Chinese conditions and a Chinese "happiness," with dissatisfaction on any great scale and capacity for transformation gone." Ideals of security and comfort are pre-eminently the mark of a commercial age, which wants to have everything easy for trade and the state a sort of arm-chair. He wishes, indeed, a certain measure of comfort and security for the working class, but to make this an absolute ideal, to leave no free, wild spaces in society where risk and danger exist—this, he feels, would be to banish the conditions under which great men and great enterprises arise. To him socialism seems practically identical with a despotic state, in which individuals with individual instincts and aims appear unjustifiable luxuries, and all are turned into organs of the community—a conception the general form of which we saw him questioning at the end of the last chapter. Minor criticism of socialism I pass over. undefined The greatest benefit coming from it is, he thinks, the stimulus it gives—it entertains men and brings to the lowest strata a species of practico-philosophical discussion; so far it is a spring