Ubermensch

Lord Acton's axiom, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men," was penned in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. It is used variously by pundits and doom-sayers within the arena of party politics ever since ... always against their perceived adversary, never as a cautionary word about their own candidate.

But what bothers me with great seriousness is the way this presidential election is bringing to the fore three dangerous dynamics. First, the apparent Democratic candidate, Barack Hussein Obama, a self-proclaimed Christian, nonetheless has a dubious voting record as a Junior Senator that puts him squarely in what John Paul II the Great deemed "the culture of death." With no apology and no qualm, Obama voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act - what would protect an infant who actually survives an attempted abortion. (That he supports abortion is not sufficiently pro-choice, apparently.) By what authority does he square his privatized version of "Christian faith" that does not value the life that God would bring into the world? That places the human will far above the will of God manifest in Natural Law?

Secondly, as a progressive humanist with a thin odor of Christian sanctity, he is a man who granted this power makes no apologies for making tough decisions based on the presuppositions of multicultural ideology. Nietzsche would recognize Senator Obama's operating/system immediately: he is an example of Nietzsche's own brain-child, the ubermensch, and a member of its officer class at that. Tough decisions must be made for the greater good, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few ... we hear these values and we hope that we meet the criteria of the "many", not the "few".

Needless to say, the ethic embodied and proclaimed by Our Lord in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats -- "Lord, when did we see you ... ?" -- is not a part of this worldly "realism".

Thirdly, may I suggest that this mindset will always be found in those who do not know, do not have recourse to, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The leader who knows not the relief, the joy, the gratitude of having one's sins absolved by Christ's power in this Sacrament is the realist. He makes the ubermensch decisions that cut away the unhealthy, the unwanted, the unhelpful, the unadaptable. Mother Teresa would be his exemplary antithesis.

I painted this kind of Nietzschean thinking in The Dionysus Mandate, but we may soon not need to read about it; we may soon see it in its unvarnished realpolitik from the Executive Branch of the United States government.