He envisaged masses of people committing suicide because they could not bear the thought of their unhappy lives repeating eternally.
Wait, does this even makes sense? If life repeats eternally, then suicide is a restart of the cycle.
Killing yourself (if you believe in the eternal return, but are otherwise rational) is not about how happy or unhappy you are, but whether you expect the following years to be better or worse than your life until now. So the people killing themselves should be exactly the ones whom Nietzsche admires, when they feel they have already passed their peak creative genius.
Nietzsche certainly respected individual greatness, but I believe his highest respect was reserved for the creators of new value systems, and the leaders and conquerors who made those value systems into the basis of a successful religion or civilization. (...) He saw himself as a philosopher who had imbibed the moral emptiness of a universe of warring wills to power, and summoned up from his own will to power, a new tablet of values.
Guy designed a new moral system putting himself on the top; news at 11.
Nietzsche is popularly associated with Nazism (...) he was also popular among the left-anarchists and the Left generally (...) “if you meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean” (whatever that means). Common sense demands that some of these people are misreading him.
Alternative explanation: all these people understand Nietzsche more or less correctly as saying that geniuses are so awesome that nothing else matters, and all of them think of themselves as geniuses.
Wait, does this even makes sense? If life repeats eternally, then suicide is a restart of the cycle.
Killing yourself (if you believe in the eternal return, but are otherwise rational) is not about how happy or unhappy you are, but whether you expect the following years to be better or worse than your life until now. So the people killing themselves should be exactly the ones whom Nietzsche admires, when they feel they have already passed their peak creative genius.
Guy designed a new moral system putting himself on the top; news at 11.
Alternative explanation: all these people understand Nietzsche more or less correctly as saying that geniuses are so awesome that nothing else matters, and all of them think of themselves as geniuses.