Thus Spoke Zarathustra

If this crypto-transhumanism is the best option to nihilism that philosophy can offer, we are in trouble. Just getting to the idea is painful enough with the pseudo-biblical literary style and the intentional obscuring of every important idea in strange, multidimensional metaphors. If however, you wade through all that, you'll need to be convinced that the will to power is every person's secret motivation and that the purpose of life is to create the overman/superman/übermensch as formulated by Nietzsche.

My main problem with the overman is that it's hard for me to grok what exactly he is. The only obvious traits are his overwhelming sense of pride and relative superiority to the weak and lesser evolved. The overman has no concern with an afterlife and prefers to live without regret and an acceptance of everything that happens, regardless of impact.

Those ideas seem to be in conflict though. Pride and superiority engender otherness from the majority of humanity. They are, at their core, anti-empathetic. With us humans being such intensely social creatures, I don't understand how glorifying those attributes is supposed to eventually lead to a life that you'd be happy repeating for eternity as Nietzsche suggests the overman should be cool with doing. When it comes down to it sure, an amoral lack of concern for lesser men is something that Nietzsche can successfully contrast with Christianity, but to what avail? Who does this benefit? Sociopaths?

Based on the non-negligble success Nietzsche's ideas have found, I have no doubt that there are more nuanced ways of interpreting this book, but this is what I got from my first reading of it and as it stands, I really can't ever see reading it again.