and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a
certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary
conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals
in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one
organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle
more generally, and if possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF
SOCIETY, it would immediately disclose what it really is--namely, a Will
to the DENIAL of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one
must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental
weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest
of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of
peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest,
exploitation;--but why should one for ever use precisely these words
on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the
organization within which, as was previously supposed, the
individuals treat each other as equal--it takes place in every
healthy aristocracy--must itself, if it be a living and not a dying
organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals
within it refrain from doing to each other it will have to be the
incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground,
attract to itself and acquire ascendancy--not owing to any morality or
immorality, but because it LIVES, and because life IS precisely Will to
Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans
more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter, people now rave
everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of
society in which "the exploiting character" is to be absent--that sounds
to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should
refrain from all organic functions. "Exploitation" does not belong to a
depraved, or imperfect and primitive society it belongs to the nature of
the living being as a primary organic function, it is a consequence
of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to
Life--Granting that as a theory this is a novelty--as a reality it is
the FUNDAMENTAL FACT of all history let us be so far honest towards
ourselves!