Where I’m At; the Paradigm of America
The day after the election, I gave up on America.
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Collection: Resist Rebel Revolt
Format: Article
Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana
Date: May 1, 2025
Tags: Election, Voters, America’s Growth
The day after the election, I gave up on America.
I’m being serious. We’re a decade into the Trump era. By the end of his presidency, it will be 13 years since he began his first MAGA campaign.
Not only is this tremendously sad, because the confederacy only lasted four years. Which means, the America of the 1860s was better at cutting out the shit than we are.
But on a personal level, I was 26 when he was elected. And I’ll be nearly 39 when he’s done. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to waste the most vital decade of my life on this man.
I invested a lot of emotional energy over the years trying to be part of the change. Trying to be part of this progressive movement forward.
But there’s a principle in physics called The Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that, in a closed system, energy cannot be created or destroyed, it has to be transformed.
And it occurs to me that the current American electorate is precisely that. We only get so many new voters and lose so many old voters per election cycle.
Most of our electorate is stable. It includes diehard Republicans; diehard Democrats. Progressives that hate both; Libertarians that hate both. The people who never voted.
The people who have been taught that it’s fruitless - because they either live in California (which always goes blue), or they live in Utah (which always goes red). So they think, what does it matter? (And they’re right!)
Apathy is both a valid and invalid part of our electoral system.
After the 2024 votes were tallied, I made this chart: When someone tells you that Donald Trump is popular with 50% of Americans, show them this:
During this time, Nietzsche wrote many works that bluntly rejected German culture, anti-semitism, and Christianity.
He renounced his Prussian citizenship and spent years traveling to Italy, France, and Switzerland.
(Sounds like he meets the Beat Philosopher criteria)
I suspect that a part of what drove these writings was Nietzsche’s bitterness over his mother, sister, and friends (including Richard Wagner). All of whom shared a distorted German ideology he didn’t relate to, or approve of.
Nietzsche didn’t have very good health during his lifetime. This is one of the reasons he traveled in search of fresh air and solitude. It’s also thought to be the reason for his aphoristic, short-form style––in which he does very little editing.
As someone who had migraines a couple of weeks ago, I now fully empathize with how chronic headaches might have impeded his ability to edit his work into a cohesive ideology.
But it could have also just been his own relationship to the free spirit within him.
He enjoyed following his intuition wherever it took him. Even when this made a lot of his ideas self-negating or self-conflicting.
Because of this, the more you read Nietzsche, the less you might feel you understand him––as you follow his disorganized and difficult-to-abstract ideas.
One way I know someone has never read Nietzsche is by the certainty with which they pronounce a single Nietzschean idea.
As someone who has read thousands of Nietzsche’s aphorisms… I’ve even abstracted and sorted some of them into subjects in order to try to organize his ideas on each topic… I know that Nietzsche was intuitive and insightful. But certainly not self-consistent.
At times, he seems to have fluidly moved with his intellectual impulses. Even if that meant contradicting his former self.
And he certainly wrote with emotional conviction against things that bitterly bothered him. (Meaning, he wrote aphorisms to punish the people he was angry at).
This makes him one of the most organic and fluid writers (right up there with other Stream of Consciousness authors). And it also makes him transparent to a fault.
He also had an open sense of self-grandiosity (something that I think makes him appeal to the bros). Though I immediately get the sense that this is due to low self-esteem, not high self-esteem. (Which the bros might want to take to heart).
But all of this certainly means that there isn’t a single Nietzsche to get to know. He changed during his lifetime––as did his ideas. And a lot of people have a hard time with this fact.
For a short time, he moved in with some friends: Lou Salomé and Paul Rée.
Lou was a psychoanalyst and a feminist (and in the 1880s, that said something). While Paul was Jewish, and, himself, an author and philosopher. Nietzsche wanted to marry Lou, but she rejected him.
One of the reasons might have been the interference from Nietzsche’s mother and sister, both of whom did not like Lou and treated her poorly on a visit.
If you’re wondering––yes, this coincided some of Nietzsche’s misogynistic writings.
Meaning, the period of his life when he was angriest at Lou for rejecting him, and his mother and sister for interfering with his wishes, did coincide some of his harshest philosophical criticisms against women.
Which is funny because in his early works, he, himself, wrote that a man’s impression of women was related to his relationship to his mother. (But he seems to have forgotten this admission with age).
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I.
It’s only those who see subjectivity as an enemy - rather than an inevitability - who will try to belittle the subjective filter that exists in all intelligent human beings.
Nietzsche was one of the few philosophers of his century willing to ignore the claims of objectivity from academic peers.
He wrote:
“Gradually, it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
Also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.
I.
It’s only those who see subjectivity as an enemy - rather than an inevitability - who will try to belittle the subjective filter that exists in all intelligent human beings.
Nietzsche was one of the few philosophers of his century willing to ignore the claims of objectivity from academic peers.
He wrote:
“Gradually, it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
Also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.
II.
Last night I made a joke: In 2025, I've become drunk with power. I've lost track of all the reasons I've blocked people. But I'm pretty sure I blocked someone earlier just for mixing up their, there, and they're.
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