In the Joyous Science, Nietzsche writes: For the longest time in mankind’s history there was nothing more terrible to a person than to feel separate. To be alone, to feel separate, neither to obey or to rule, to signify individuality – that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was condemned to ‘individuality’. Free thinking was regarded inherently disquieting. While we experience law and order as constraint and sacrifice, formerly it was egoism that was considered painful and genuinely distressing. At that time, ‘free will’ was in close proximity to the bad conscience: the less independently a man acted, the more the gregarious [1] instinct expressed itself in his conduct, the less of a sense of personhood he possessed, the more moral he judged himself to be.
It now seems we are flailing towards similar global attitudes in which the individual falls to the margins and those following the herd are those who succeed. Though Nietzsche at the time of writing the Joyous Science (1882) claimed this movement away from the herd towards the individual was the way in which our thinkings as beings changed the most.
In our intricate polities nowadays opinions that diverge themselves away from the core ideology of the herd (of our ruling elites) are punishable by isolation, fragmentation and, in some extreme cases, imprisonment. Are we therefore reverting to a “neolithic” idea of mankind? Those who go against the stream are destined to remain alone, or in a caste of outcasts.
Let us take the case of those few who identify with Cypriotism and not with the concept of Greek and Turkish Cypriot, or even more daringly, Greek and Turk. When a foreigner asks me “Are you Greek?” I always must explain myself and cannot but find myself sounding as a strong nationalist by saying “No, I am a Cypriot”. A Cypriot, meaning I do not differentiate with being Greek or Turkish Cypriot, but I do segregate myself with being Greek, for Cyprus is my nation, all of it, without the political divisions that have been plaguing the islands for decades, even centuries. Such sentiment is hard to come by. Most would make the distinction between Greek and Turk. Some nomads may even go as far as to lay claim to being Greek, although having no ancestral link to the land of Greece and only claim to be so due to an antique narrative of Spartans and Alexander the Great. These ideas all emerged through religious teachings on the island from the 19th century onwards, leading to radicalization of the masses. Political divisions and colonial rule only fed such divisions on the island.
Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks attributes racialization to the values of social understanding inculcated through upbringing, which embody the idea that people have fixed identities that explain their behaviour and sees overcoming those attitudes as the path to liberation. In Cyprus we have been plagued with a constant foretelling of what our identity is, what our behaviour is, but we have never found a cure to this plague. Greek and Turks, Christian and Muslim, Ottoman and Greek, but rarely Cypriot. Our liberation never materialized and the island is still militarily occupied.
The Greekness has roots in the lowest core of antiquity. However, is that true liberation? An elitist force (the Greek Orthodox Church) swayed from above and converted the islanders to Greek Christian Orthodox; Is not the church at the very end of the day one of the imperialist forces of human existence? Like Monarchs or rulers, they dictate how to live and how to die, where to die and how to decompose.
My free will to identify as a sort of Cypriot which falls under the umbrella of a white flag with a yellow print of our island’s map on top of two green olive branches has left me isolated. Not following a stream of radicalized men and women has left me isolated.
Regarding the church as an imperialist force will also stray me further away from my core, for the island remains deeply religious. Yet is this not the main aim of establishing a blind herd of followers? Listen don’t think. Close your eyes and follow my guidance. Is this not an imperialist sentimentality? Sticking to the herd is the safest guarantee of security, of brotherhood, of alliance and communal longevity. In that, should Nietzsche be deemed as outdated on his arguments of the Joyous Science? The moral is nowadays the herd, and independent thinking/ free will is the bad conscience.
Upbringing has taught humankind a multifaceted multitude of extremes. Knowledge that has been used for good and evil. In our given case, however, the identity ideologies that have emerged from our upbringing under the Christian Orthodoxy and the leadership of the Church have radicalised a nation for centuries; and coming out of that radicalisation has been granted to a marginal few, that in order for safeguarding they either keep these thoughts to their innermost core or accept a life on ideological margins.
Footnotes
[1] In existential philosophy, gregariousness isn’t a formal concept, but it relates to the tension between individuality and conformity. Thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger suggest that immersing oneself too fully in social groups can lead to inauthenticity, where a person adopts the beliefs and roles of “the crowd” or “the They” instead of taking personal responsibility for defining their own existence.