Earlier tonight, I listened to an excellent BBC news program called, “The Power of Nightmares: The Phantom Victory.” It’s part 2 of a three part series which goes into the history of how the USA supported, funded and trained Islamic extremism and terrorism in order to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, and what happened after that. You can download an audio version of it (haven’t found a copy of the video yet) at BreakForNews.com archives. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, one of the interesting things they mention in it is a philosopher named Leo Strauss. One of Strauss’s teachings is that regular people basically need myths basically in order to drive their lives. The myth that they’re talking about was originally communism, but has now been supplanted by terrorism. I started looking into Strauss and one of his students, Allan Bloom a bit more and came across an article with some decent quotes, The Secret Kingdom of Leo Strauss. What they are saying here is that he adapted some ideas from Nietzsche about slaves & supermen:

The philosopher/superman is that rare man who can face the truth: that there is no God; that the universe cares nothing for men or mankind; and that all of human history is nothing more than an insignificant speck in the cosmos, which no sooner began, than it will vanish forever without a trace. There is no morality, no good and evil, and of course any notion of an afterlife is an old wives’ tale.

…

But the great majority of men and women, on the other hand, is so far from ever being able to face the truth, that it it virtually belongs to another species. Nietzsche called it the “herd,” and also the “slaves.” They require the bogeymen of a threatening God and of punishment in the afterlife, and the fiction of moral right and wrong. Without these illusions, they would go mad and run riot, and the social order, any social order, would collapse. And since human nature never changes, according to Strauss, this will always be so.

It is the supermen/philosophers who provide the herd with the religious, moral, and other beliefs they require, but which the supermen themselves know to be lies.

…

This rule of the philosophers through their front-men in government, is what Strauss calls the “secret kingdom” of the philosophers, a “secret kingdom” which is the life’s objective of many of Strauss’s esoteric students.

I’m gonna look around for more stuff on this. Apparently Paul Wolfowitz and some other people were students of these guys and adherents to this tradition, according to things I’ve seen so far.