Ubermensch

By David Gardiner

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Please don’t stare. I don’t like it when people stare. It’s the only thing that still bothers me. They sense that I’m not one of them, like wolves identifying the members of their own pack by their smell. And they’re right of course. I’m as far removed from them as they are from the amoebae. What they have is merely the hidden and unsuspected potential. In me, that potential is realised.

I don’t see my superiority as a blessing, or as something in which I should take a pride. It isn’t my achievement. It’s simply a fact about me, like possessing two lungs and a single liver. It’s a heavy burden and a great responsibility. I alone have moved forward to the next phase of human existence. You can not comprehend the meaning of that, I know. Not yet at any rate. But you shall understand soon. I am the conduit and the instrument.

Once I was an ordinary man like them. No cleverer, no stronger, no more enlightened or reflective. I had a wife like them, and a house, and a daughter… and I lived as one of them. Mindlessly, purposelessly, tossed to and fro like an autumn leaf in the breeze. Every morning I took a smelly train to a pointless job, earning money, borrowing more, telling my family I loved them, watching the news on TV. Voting for corrupt and incompetent politicians so that they might have the opportunity of telling me what to do. Worrying about whether my family was happy or not. I wasn’t any better than them. But I look at them now and it’s like watching the maggots in a tin of fishing bait. I am revolted by the memory of what I used to be.

You don’t want to be one of those people, do you? No, I can see you don’t. Of course not. I knew you weren’t like the others the moment I saw you.

It isn’t difficult to change, once you know how it’s done. For me it was very slow and very subtle at the beginning. My wife noticed it before I did myself. My wife looked quite similar to you. A bit older of course. Her hair was shorter… Physically very attractive. A fine, healthy human animal like you. But she wasn’t able to make the change - to cross the bridge. Instead she died. They both did. Weak people choose death - they don’t know they are doing it but that is what happens. Death is the choice of those who fear life.

She said I had no tenderness any more. That I didn’t caress her, or ask her how she was, or touch her hand. She said that when we had sex now it felt like rape. That I had become a different person. Quite perceptive really. You see, I had indeed become a different person.

Are the nylon ropes too tight on your wrists? Nod your head if you’re in pain. I can loosen them off now if you want me to. After all there’s nowhere for you to go, is there? No reaction? Comfortable then? Good.

It was my wife who made me go to the doctor. I felt perfectly all right and no different to how I had always felt. I don’t really feel very different now. Well, different in a good way perhaps. Because you see I’ve shed all the baggage, the lumber that ordinary people have to carry around with them. All the mindless inhibitions and restraints and affections that hold you back, and stop you achieving greatness. The biological governor on the human engine.

What are we, we human beings? Do you know? "Man is a rope, tied between the beast and the Overman --a rope over an abyss...” That’s what we are: unrealised, just a potentiality, just a creature in the process of becoming. You will not remain mere potential. You should rejoice, young lady. Celebrate! Through me, you will become more than a mere potentiality!

You are listening, aren’t you? Your eyes are open but you seem preoccupied. I suppose you’re distressed. Distress is unnecessary, it serves no purpose, and I am gong to release you from it. I am going to take it away. That and so many other negative things. All the pettiness, the irrational attachments, the pangs of conscience, the illusion of moral meaning in the world. “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” Who said that? Do you know? No? All right, here’s almost the same quotation, you’ll know this one: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” You probably learned that one at School. Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2. Do you know what it means?

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

Sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted at you. That was unnecessary. If you don’t understand now you will very shortly.

I was telling you about the change, wasn’t I? Do you know what the doctor said? He said it was a disease. Some kind of illness. He called it a “lesion”. That means a bit of tissue that’s diseased or injured, that isn’t working properly. He was right at one level but he didn’t understand that my disease was also my gift. I was shedding those few dead cells like a butterfly emerging from its pupa. A process beyond his feeble understanding.

A tiny grey stain on a CT scan, only a few millimetres across. Just here, about one inch above the right eye and another inch in. It’s in an area called the right prefrontal cortex. It’s the bit of the brain that makes us dull and irrational and incapable of ever rising above the ordinary. The bit that holds the human will in check. The bit that makes us slaves to all the narrow little moral conventions of the societies that we are born into. I call it the centre of human stupidity. The centre of ignorance and weakness.

“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out… if thy hand shall offend thee, cut it off…” That’s from Mark, Chapter 9. I haven’t much time for the gospels normally, but I think Mark understood something when he wrote that. It’s the maxim of all surgeons throughout human history. Dead, diseased tissue must be cut out. There’s no place for sentimentality.

So, when I do… what I have to do… I don’t want you to become upset, or to flinch. There will be one brief moment of pain. Then a lifetime of power and enlightenment. The full might of your will shall be realised. That’s what it is to be alive, a living thing strives to impose its will, it creates its own reality, its own morality.

Why are you struggling? It’s only a drill - the same as people use to put up shelves and mend furniture. You can buy them in any do-it-yourself shop. The blow-torch too. It’s the kind that plumbers use to melt solder. The drill needs to be hot, you see. Heat sterilises. Heat cauterises. There will be no infection and no haemorrhage. You must trust me. I know what I’m doing. Stop struggling or you shall injure yourself. How can I perform a precision operation while you are… Oh, you have stopped. That’s good. It’s easier like this. And when you waken… when you waken, my dear, you shall be a goddess. You shall taste divinity!

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