Grand Strategy: Or how not to wander and waste life
Grand Strategy. Your life is a fate. Do you have a fate? For many years I wandered aimlessly, through my schooling I had only tactics and it was not until I wandered into a mentor that I learnt strategy and planning. But even with strategy and planning it was not for any Grand Strategy. Any point to my life. Any sharpened blade by which everything hangs in the balance.
Lets rewind, a moment. Tactics, Strategy and Grand Strategy are three ideas that are commonly confused. The tactical man, has perfected his method, his ability to cope and deal with situations... but he has no eye for the future, he only has an eye for the here and now. The Strategic man, has an eye for the future, for a few months or a few years ahead- and many a family is led on the shoulders of the Strategic man as he is the head of any traditional family. He has a strategy for his family, the schooling and mentorship of his children, the qualities of a loving and perfect partner, and what is needed to sustain this from finances, work, visas and so on.
Now Grand Strategy... Nietzsche has in Thus Spoke Zarathustra the concept of Three Metamorphoses, and of the third, the metamorphosis to a child he puts forward the idea of creation as his highest goal. The creation of new virtues. The creation of a world in your will and your image. The creation of new and wonderful works and expressions of the vitality of life and all that affirms it in the face of the bleakness posed by God's corpse tossed into the Abyss.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." This abyss, is the very coffin where all values have died in the consequences of the World Wars. What heroism has been sacrificed to it. And now, our tactics are to battle the very monsters that emerge, and our strategy, is to become as monsters. Our strategies are often vain. Money, for the sake of avarice. Fashion like naked emperors for the sake of impressions. Virtues for the smoke signals they choke with. Our strategy is in service to either our base beastly desires... or the desires of comfort of the Nietzschean Üntermensch.
This is not to devalue Tactics or Strategy. They are exceptionally important. It is instead to put value on the Grand Strategy of life, which few people have eyes for, and fewer people have that sacred Yes for. And even fewer, have retained the Hero within, that will lift out the Sword in the stone and put to the blade their very beliefs and virtues.
Let us consider the Grand Strategy of different parties around the world today. Napoleon Bonaparte is an excellent example- on his will alone he successfully ventured into Egypt on the idealism of his bookish inspiration of Alexander the Great. He strove to reclaim and reassert France as a major European power, challenging the very English at their own game in Europe. Then there is the case Julius Caesar with his Gaellic wars, venturing and claiming more of the Germanic lands, and of course crossing the Rubicon, against impossible odds to claim authority over the path of the Roman Empire. Of course there are modern examples of these Grand Strategists... Elon Musk with his eyes set upon Mars. Xi Jinping with his eyes set upon Chinese expansion and force projection. The names continue and all are examples of men with a Grand Strategy. Even the more ordinary men such as Jordan Peterson have made a Grand Strategy of their lives by speaking to the very hearts and souls of those creative forces at work within the Western world.
It is no easy thing to stake your life upon a Grand Strategy, and to morph both tactics and strategy in service of it. Nietzsche would title a man who has Grand Strategy as at least one of those with arrows of longing for the other shore... arrows of longing, striving for the lightning of the Übermensch. The myth of the hero. In that Heroism there's many forms it takes. I will point here to Thomas Carlye, the oft. overlooked philosopher of England and his conceptions of different kinds of Heros. The divine hero- that hero that is in stories and makes morals and values out of the men they surround. The Hero as prophet- such as the Lord Jesus, such as the Prophet Muhammad, such as the prophet Zoraster. Then there is of course the hero as poet- in the Greek sense of poetry! The poetry in creation of beautiful works! Such as Dante, or that of Mozart! The hero as priest, The hero a man of letters, and the hero as King... such expansion on The Hero drives home a globalised death we have dazed calmly into, and the many roads away from that death.
The hero is dead. "Alas I have known noble men who lost their highest hope. And henceforth they slandered all high hopes. Henceforth they lived impudently in brief pleasures and they hardly an aim beyond the day. 'Spirit is also sensual pleasure' - thus they spoke. Then the wings of their spirit broke: now it creeps around and it makes dirty what it feeds on. Once they thought of becoming heroes: now they are sensualists. The hero is to them an affliction and a terror. But, by my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope!" Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I find here my Grand Strategy in a world bleeding dry all high hopes and all high men.
I find my future here is staked in giving to others what I have received. As I spoke at the start, I was a brash teenager with tactics and malice. I had programming skills and used them to impressionable and nefarious ends. In that, I learnt both skill, power and leadership from my old mentor. Perhaps the most disagreeable man of all disagreeable men I have met, and in him I learnt strategy. It was only upon the blade of strategy did I find and read Nietzsche, among other Philosophy- and learn writing, among other skills- to sharpen the edge of my strategy and soul and in them both I found my Grand Strategy to help more people become those high men- for the darkness of clouds folding over our lands is due to their deaths and the waste and misdirection of their skills.
Thusly, I speak to all those with the Hero in your heart... look upon the videos of this channel and consider them and learn from them. Look below, you'll find a link to a playlist of all these videos. Look below, you'll find a newsletter to learn for what comes next. And I speak to you here earnest and honest- that I stake this channel upon the cynical affirmation of life- to strip away delusion, but to affirm life in creation.
For creation is what makes life worth living, and the high man creates the tallest, and the most beautiful. I speak- nay- preach to the Hero of your Heart!
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