/lit/ - Literature

Now the secret of such success could only lie in a certain ascetic regime patiently adhered to, through all kinds of trials and tribulations, in prehistoric times, and then transmitted unchanged from generation to generation, inculcated by an education from a very early age to the point where it becomes second nature. The Brahmins are supposed to have understood that certain partial renunciations—pertaining to diet, sexual activity, and so on—a certain frugality, a disdain for riches and honors insofar as they conduce to ostentation, represent the price that has to be paid for a monopoly on higher and rarer forms of satisfaction: leisure, the respect of all, study, the power to determine values and direct morality. A note from the spring of 1888 takes up this train of thought:
>The highest caste, as the most accomplished one, has also to represent happiness: thus there is nothing less appropriate than pessimism and anger . . . no rage, no nasty retorts—asceticism only as a means to higher happiness, to the redemption from multiplicity. The highest class has to uphold a happiness, at the price of portraying unconditional obedience, every kind of hardness, selfcontrol, and strictness with oneself—they want to be seen as the most venerable type of human being—also as the one most worthy of admiration: as a result they may need just any kind of happiness.