/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18821919]

I like the feeling of dominating and overpowering other people in life. The only driving force in my life is the nagging desire to be better than other people (self-improvement is a nice but unintended byproduct of that, I only care about being better than others). Are there any books you'd recommend for people like me? They can be either critical of my lifestyle or approving of it

[Anonymous No.18821939]

>>18821919
>The only driving force in my life is the nagging desire to be better than other people
Based and same. I've been trying to build a fortune, with the sole intend of using it to exercise power over others. I don't even need money apart from that.

[Anonymous No.18822046]

Homer and other Classical depictions of pre-Archaic Greece, and the Genealogy of Morals. Maybe Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational and other writings on the ambivalence of homeric virtue, which famously has several categories like τιμή (time), κλέος (kleos), and ἀρετή (arete), but nothing for conventional self-sacrificing moral goodness in the Christian or modern sense.

https://repository.wit.ie/1747/1/Greek%20conceptions%20of%20virtue%20by%20Sean%20Moran.pdf

Most people find Nietzsche's critique of slave morality (and "blond beast") ambivalently to say the least, but you may enjoy reading Homer with it in mind since the Greek Dark Age was definitely dark and it's interesting that we have self-examining heroic literature that doesn't even affect chivalric morality the way that Christian knights did.

You could also read Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror both for her descriptions of what people do in the complete breakdown of order, and of how that breakdown altered the weird mixture of Christian morality, optimism, and total domination of society by warrior elite nobles that preceded the Black Plague. Both the pre-Plague nobility and post-Plague mentalities are interesting. I can't remember if it was Tuchman or someone else who wrote about how it's very hard for us to see ourselves in the pre-Plague noble, who aside from Germanic warbands and Vikings is possibly the closest "Faustian" civilisation has come to homeric heroes. All of them simultaneously unapologetically larger than life, arrogantly larger than the concerns of the masses, but then able to weep uncontrollably when destroyed by τῠ́χη or their own ὑβρίς, or in disputes with their feudal patron. They seem to have taken feudal obligations extremely seriously etc. There's a childish sincerity and naive intensity to it that seem to bear out Nietzsche's blond beast.

After the Plague an interesting thing happens too, the emergence of "postmodern" irony, self-examination, absurdism, etc. Usually this is noted in connection with confessional poetry that abandons optimistic models and shows the seedy underbelly of human existence, but there's another dimension to it: the new form of "aristocratic" culture surrounding pure ability, as opposed to tradition or feudal honour. That's what Nietzsche loved about Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, the description of the condottiere mentality that overtook every sphere of life in Italy, the complete disregard for anything except "whatever works." If it works it works, from the brutality of Ezzelino III and audacity of John Hawkwood to the regimes of the Visconti and Medici built on cleverness and talent rather than tradition. If you really want to go back, Ezzelino's patron Frederick II has often been claimed as the "first modern" for not giving a fuck about anything other than raison d'etat and the sheer will and talent to put a state together that would endure. For that read Kantorowicz' biography.

[Anonymous No.18822065]

>>18821919
I would like to recommend you a book from my favourite author Peter Sloterdijk - Rage and Time

[Anonymous No.18822170]

>>18822065
Based Sloterdijk anon. Are you German? I was thinking about buying some of his books in German (I'm fluent in reading but not in speaking) but they're all pretty expensive for me

[Anonymous No.18822192]

>>18822170
>Are you German?
No, I'm not. I read him in english.
Such a pity that none of his lectures are translated to english on youtube

[Anonymous No.18822211]

>>18821919
Nietzsche and Evola