The State
“There are certainly … tremendous forces, but they are savage, primordial, and utterly merciless. One looks upon them with uneasy expectations as upon the seething cauldron of a witch’s kitchen: any moment it may flash and lighten to announce terrible apparitions … the so-called Nation State … is … only an increment of the general insecurity and menace … and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow: because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether. We live in the period of atoms, of atomistic chaos. … Now almost everything on earth is determined by the crudest and most evil forces, by the egotism of the purchasers and the military despots. The State, in the hands of the latter … wishes that people would lavish on it the same idolatrous cult that they used to lavish on the Church.”
Nietzsche objects to the State because it appears to him as the power that intimidates man into conformity. Christianity, as he sees it, was originally a call to man not to conform, to leave father and mother, and to perfect himself.
Nietzsche’s opposition to political liberalism cannot be analyzed in this context either—but one statement that helps to explain his position can be found in the Meditation on Schopenhauer: “How should a political innovation be sufficient to make men once and for all into happy inhabitants of the earth?” (4). Nietzsche opposes not only the State but any overestimation of the political. The kingdom of God is in the hearts of men—and Nietzsche accuses Christianity of having betrayed this fundamental insight from the beginning, whether by transferring the kingdom into another world and thus depreciating this life, or by becoming political and seeking salvation through organizations, churches, cults, sacraments, or priests. He will not put his faith either in a church or in a political party or program, for he believes that the question of salvation is a “question for the single one.”