I think we need to have a proper definition of what a fool is.  We often make such a frame of reference when we deal with people who don’t meet our expectations of competency.  But the term itself is often uttered when frustration has strangled our reason leaving us in moments of despair.  Through history the term “fool” has been tossed around a lot.  I’m not a big fan of the Fabian socialists George Bernard Shaw, but I tend not to look at things in hindsight with the lack of understanding.  After all, it is difficult to make the correct decisions while moving forward in uncharted waters and after the concept of the Übermensch in his stage play Man and Superman was explored, it is obvious that Shaw was at least asking the right questions.  He and his Nazi counterparts would completely misinterpret the great work of Friedrich Nietzsche in the pinnacle work of philosophy titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  The idea of an “overman” is a dangerous one.  Shaw was knocking on the door to truth when he used the word fool as the opposite of the superman idea to articulate the nature of power when he said, “power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”  This is an important reference when considering the unleashing of the many sex scandals by household names recently in both politics and entertainment—places where power is often traded, not earned.  The result has been that fools are often in charge and they use power to articulate the corruption inherit in their minds which fall short of human necessity.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/11/16/eyes-wide-shut-actress-sexual-misconduct-in-hollywood-and-how-to-survive-in-world-full-harveys.html

A fool is therefore a person functioning from a lack of individualized values but instead yields to institutional concerns blindly accepting the values of the collective for the benefit of the faceless hordes of reality.   A fool is essentially a person too lazy to think who uses institutional values as a substitute for reason.   Where socialists like Shaw and fascists like Hitler missed the point was that they could not turn off their love of institutional thinking to develop the concept of being “more than human.”  They thought by making the concept of an Übermensch institutionalized, that they could advance mankind into a new century of thought and competency.  Yet all they accomplished was a new kind of tyranny which makes them villains in respect to history.  Shaw was so entrenched in institutionalized thinking that he actually performed his play before the Royal Court so it’s not like he was a fringe thinker. But his idea that a fool corrupts power rather than the other way around is a revolutionary idea and a proper designation of responsibility.

The falsehood that power is in itself the designation of corruption is the old definition of the institutions, politics and the church which sought to keep their flocks under control so they have suppressed us all by purposely putting fools in positions of power to protect the definition leaving always to turn toward them for protection from those in power.  That is the basic premise of the Star Wars movies, which I do not agree with.  But it’s a kid’s show, so teaching children the basics of how power and corruption can be dangerous is important.  It is better to be safe than sorry after all.  But for the rest of us, we seldom have any mechanisms to inform our developing minds of what the true nature of power is, or even what a fool is.  The two are left to linger so that they will find each other in popular culture and protect our institutions from the change that is really needed.

The idea that money corrupts is a popular fictionalization of the institutionalized protection of itself from the notions that individuals don’t need them, especially if they develop in a graduating characteristic of mankind.  Man might be termed as the embodiment of the reproduction cycle, birth, growth, procreation and death.  To be more than man is to extend one’s thoughts beyond these human necessities, such as to contemplate the nature of the universe or to dominate the elusive traits of leadership—an overman is a conscious state of mind to step beyond terrestrial definitions.  People in power obviously don’t want such a thing to happen so they have devised means though politics to clip all our wings through education, media, and religion to keep us all in a substitute of human experience.  And the way they have done that primarily is by putting fools in charge of things and spreading the rumor that the fools became that way because they were corrupted with power making us all fear falling to the same fate.  That is how the institutions protected themselves from us.

It has been safe to look at great minds of the past who might have sought to be overmen—which is kind of an English word for the Übermensch—the best that we have for such a state of existence and to pay respect from hindsight.  But when one exists in our modern times we tend to try to kill them and execute them to preserve our institutions whether it be the church or some country’s government.   That is how so many fools ended up in positions of power and why once they get there they cannot control their decent into corruption.  Because they are not fit for the power—power in and of itself is a value that has meaning in our existence.  Once you mix people who suddenly have this power but are intellectual fools—people like Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose—liberals addicted to institutionalized power, it’s not hard to see why the abuse happens—and it certainly isn’t surprising.

Donald Trump by his own nature has always sought to be more than just human.  As a wealthy man who fought his way through many stages of his life he seems to have arrived at a special place about halfway through his television show The Apprentice.  It took a few years but that show combined with being married to a good woman in Melania seems to have taken him intellectually to that next level.  His story actually reminds me of the story of Siddhārtha Gautama—the prince who would become the future Buddha and sit on the immovable spot under the tree of enlightenment.  Siddhārtha at the tender age of 29 became tired of all the dancing-girls at his father’s palace and so he left to find essentially the meaning of life.  His adventure had many pitfalls and terrors but ultimately he discovered his middle way and the rest is history.  The motivation for this trip was to find a way to deal with the various lifecycles previously mentioned so he sought philosophical atonement for the realities of life—a kind of early overman idea. Trump found his overman idea late in life after he had enjoyed all the sins and flesh of being on top of the food chain.  He had good parents and an intelligent mind so he had the power, but it never corrupted him.  He was a rare example on a public stage for the masses to see who was able to hold power without it corrupting him.  Many of the rumors about sexual misconduct come from institutions assuming that such things occurred because they are not used to people holding power without failing under its weight. Thus, the myth has been broken and people now see it.

This has created an environment where other people in power cannot now compete, because Trump has set such a suddenly high standard. Now that he’s president, which is head of our most beloved institutions of government recognized throughout the world, the comparison is beyond control at this point, and those corrupted by power are failing under the same public scrutiny that was intended to shoot down Trump.  The old institutions crave the stories of how Kennedy had blow jobs given to him in the White House swimming pool by hot young girls looking to use sex as a way to leverage the authenticity of an American president.  And until recently Bill Clinton was forgiven for his sexual proclivities because he defined the essence of the fool who holds power and is corrupted by it—which sent the masses to their churches asking god to save them from the vast evil of our world governments.  What they didn’t know was that the church and the state were essentially the same and both wanted to protect themselves from the overman by promoting the fool in place of the righteous people who were striving to get more out of life.

The fool has been very useful to modern society and you can see them in just about everything created by institutional thinking.  From Six Sigma management classes to the local manager at a McDonald’s the fool is often in charge.  You don’t often find that overman survive the purges they must endure, because society does not want them to emerge.  But when they do, they change everything and that is what we are seeing today.  The institutions that have put fools in their front offices and used the myth of power corrupting their minds are now being snuffed out and reality is taking on new meanings.  It was never power that corrupted.  Power is just a thing of value.  But fools cannot handle it and should never be allowed near it.  Overmen however do quite well and power has a way of finding them whether the world is ready or not for them.  So while Shaw was onto something with his early explorations into this matter of the Übermensch his position as a head of institutionalized thinking prevented him from getting the unified thought out to a public that wanted to rebel against the notion rather than embrace it.  Hitler also missed the mark copying from the American Democrats their segregation strategies to rid their German nation of undesirables that they thought were corrupt with power—because Hitler never understood the nature of power. He was a fool himself allowed to rise to the top because the institutions of the world wanted a fool to have the power, to keep all of Europe under their institutionalized umbrellas.  I’d go so far to say that the institutions wanted Hitler to validate their story of human declination under the influence of power to protect themselves from the kind of reform of thinking that Friedrich Nietzsche was advocating.

Never-the-less, we now know the truth, power does not in and of itself corrupt.  Fools are not equipped to handle power and should not be given access to it.  Fools should always be challenged when they make a grab for power.  But under America’s free market system where fools are often beaten easily by the competent, it was only a matter of time before an overman ended up in the White House.  That very act has changed the world for the better.  For the first time since George Bernard Shaw wrote his play about the nature of the superman, and our comic book media propelled that type of character into popular mainstream mythology, we now have a president who can operate without the fear of becoming corrupt, who is beyond concern and is punching through the limits of human intellect for the first time.  The results are destroying the fools, wherever they may have been hiding right out in the open.  And that is a wonderful thing.

Rich Hoffman
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