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.They monopolize virtue, these weak, hopelessly sick people, there is no doubt of it: “we alone are the good and just,” they say, “we alone are homines bonae voluntatis.”1 They walk among us as embodied reproaches, as warnings to us—as if health, well-constitutedness, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in themselves necessarily vicious things for which one must pay some day, and pay bitterly: how ready they themselves are at bottom to make one pay; how they crave to be hangmen.There is among them an abundance of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly bear the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their way in good spirits.Nor is there lacking among them that most disgusting species of the vain, the mendacious failures whose aim is to appear as “beautiful souls” and who bring to market their deformed sensuality, wrapped up in verses and other swaddling clothes, as “purity of heart”: the species of moral masturbaters and “self-gratifiers.” The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy—where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest!The sick woman especially: no one can excel her in the wiles to dominate, oppress, and tyrannize.The sick woman spares nothing, living or dead; she will dig up the most deeply buried things (the Bogos say: “woman is a hyena”).Examine the background of every family, every organization, every commonwealth: everywhere the struggle of the sick against the healthy—a silent struggle as a rule, with petty poisons, with pinpricks, with sly long-suffering expressions, but occasionally also with that invalid’s Phariseeism of loud gestures that likes best to pose as “noble indignation.” This hoarse, indignant barking of sick dogs, this rabid mendaciousness and rage of “noble” Pharisees, penetrates even the hallowed halls of science (I again remind readers who have ears for such things of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen Dühring, who employs moral mumbo-jumbo more indecently and repulsively than anyone else in Germany today: Dühring, the foremost moral bigmouth today—unexcelled even among his own ilk, the anti-Semites).They are all men of ressentiment, physiologically unfortunate and worm-eaten, a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts against the fortunate and happy2 and in masquerades of revenge and pretexts for revenge: when would they achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said one to another: “it is disgraceful to be fortunate: there is too much misery!”But no greater or more calamitous misunderstanding is possible than for the happy, well-constituted, powerful in soul and body, to begin to doubt their right to happiness in this fashion.Away with this “inverted world”! Away with this shameful emasculation of feeling! That the sick should not make the healthy sick—and this is what such an emasculation would involve—should surely be our supreme concern on earth; but this requires above all that the healthy should be segregated from the sick, guarded even from the sight of the sick, that they may not confound themselves with the sick.Or is it their task, perhaps, to be nurses or physicians?3But no worse misunderstanding and denial of their task can be imagined: the higher ought not to degrade itself to the status of an instrument of the lower, the pathos of distance ought to keep their tasks eternally separate! Their right to exist, the privilege of the full-toned bell over the false and cracked, is a thousand times greater: they alone are our warranty for the future, they alone are liable for the future of man.The sick can never have the ability or obligation to do what they can do, what they ought to do: but if they are to be able to do what they alone ought to do, how can they at the same time be physicians, consolers, and “saviors” of the sick?And therefore let us have fresh air! fresh air! and keep clear of the madhouses and hospitals of culture! And therefore let us have good company, our company! Or solitude, if it must be! But away from the sickening fumes of inner corruption and the hidden rot of disease!…So that we may, at least for a while yet, guard ourselves, my friends, against the two worst contagions that may be reserved just for us—against the great nausea at man! against great pity for man!415If one has grasped in all its profundity—and I insist that precisely this matter requires profound apprehension and comprehension—how it cannot be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick and to make them well, then one has also grasped one further necessity—the necessity of doctors and nurses who are themselves sick; and now we understand the meaning of the ascetic priest and grasp it with both hands.We must count the ascetic priest as the predestined savior, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd: only thus can we understand his tremendous historical mission.Dominion over the suffering is his kingdom, that is where his instinct directs him, here he possesses his distinctive art, his mastery, his kind of happiness
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