Neitzsche’s conclusions are sound, some would argue inexorable, if one grants his fundamental premise, that God is dead. The “good” beyond good and evil is the strong man, the superior man (ubermensch), imposing his will on the weak. In a world without God, there is only power, and those who have it and those who do not. A strong man brutally subjugates a weak man or even a weak people. That is good because it is the natural course of the world once the strong man throws off the fetters of Christianity’s unnatural “slave morality.”
You can have God and the transcendent moral principles that flow from His Being. Or you can have the ubermensch. There is no middle ground. “But atheists can be fine moral people,” I hear someone object. Of course they can so long as the society in which they live has sufficient reserves of moral capital — such as the moral capital that accumulated in the West during centuries of Christian ascendancy — onto which they can latch parasitically. As I have written many times before, I can respect while disagreeing with an atheist who looks unflinchingly into the abyss of his metaphysical commitments. But I detest “what, me worry?” smiley faced atheists who want their nihilism sugar coated with the an appropriated Christian ethic.
Our stock of moral capital is nearly depleted. I look around me and see a generation rising that has been taught to not only to acknowledge but to actively embrace the abyss. There was a time that I could count on a young person repelling in horror at the notion that if morality is subjective, whether the Holocaust was evil is a matter of opinion. No more. Today’s fashionable barbarian is just as likely to respond “I suppose that’s right.” What happens to a parasite when the host dies? Whither a nation when it reaches a critical mass of elites who embrace the abyss? I fear we are about to find out.