Transformation I: From Sheep to Camel

“All the sick and sickly instinctively strive after a herd organization as a means of shaking off their dull displeasure and feeling of weakness…For one should not overlook this fact: the strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate.” — Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Before our first transformation, we start out as sheep. These are lazy, unambitious animals that want nothing more out of life than to scrape by. They accomplish nothing, blindly follow the herd, are terrified of taking even the slightest risk, and shirk off as much responsibility as they can — all to achieve the only goal they have: to exert as little effort as possible.

We’ve all been a bit sheepish — when life gets rough, sometimes the allure of a thoughtless, lazy existence gets the better of us. Everything looks like it would be so much easier if we just gave in, if we stopped trying to wander off on different paths and, instead, just fell in with the herd and did as they did.

Wandering off is dangerous, after all. And if our only ambition is to scrape by, then it might seem foolish and unnecessary. But the reward far outweighs the risk — walking our own path is the only way we can feel authentic and useful. It’s the only way we can prove to the world and to ourselves that we’re more than anonymous members of a herd. It’s the only way our lives can become meaningful.

When sheep realize this, they feel ashamed. And that’s a powerful thing, shame — it’s something we ought to listen to. It tells us when we’re selling ourselves short, when we aren’t living up to our true potential. It demands that we strive to be more, or else it’ll do its damnedest to make us suffer. And when we resolve to escape shame — the hard and admirable way — we go through our first transformation. We overcome ourselves for the first time, leaving the safety and comfort of the herd to become something better: camels.

If we’re camels, we’ve overcome the expendable, useless life of the sheep and have found a more constructive way to live. Now, we resolve to be useful, obedient, and hardworking. We fill our once empty days with as many obligations and responsibilities as we possibly can; we walk through the desert with the heaviest loads our backs can take. In short, we overcome the sheepish way of life by striving to become productive members of society. That’s how we fill our once meaningless lives with meaning — with labor and responsibility.

But our solution becomes our problem. In our pursuit of a meaningful life, we end up condemning ourselves to meaninglessness — we’ve made ourselves beasts of other people’s burdens. As camels, we live only for society, never for ourselves; we live only for the acceptance of others, never for own self-acceptance. Worse yet, we’ve baked and struggled in the sun for so long that we’ve come to think that that’s just how life is.

But it isn’t. Life isn’t just laboring away in the sun. It isn’t just living for others. The world becomes a dismal place when that’s all we have to live for. There’s no happiness out in the hot, lonely desert. There’s no meaning when we only live only for others. There’s just endless work and eternal worry. And when we realize this, we start to wonder why we’ve carried others’ burdens, why we’ve lived according to others’ principles, and why we’ve strived to meet others’ expectations. What about us — the individuals, the camels beneath the load?

If something doesn’t change, we’re going to break. If our bodies don’t give, our spirits surely will. We’re on a fast track to growing bitter, hopeless, submissive, and resentful, to falling back into the same meaningless abyss that we lived in as sheep — only now we’ve lost the ignorance that once made it so homely.

Once again, we have to overcome ourselves — to become something more.

Transformation II: From Camel to Lion

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!” — Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

So, the well-loaded camel can become a lion — a fierce creature, a king with nothing to bow down to. As lions, we see that the values, beliefs, and moral codes we once thoughtlessly upheld have no real basis — that truth isn’t the same as tradition, that in all of our work and worry and struggling through that desert, we never found the meaningful life we were promised.

We feel misled, maybe even betrayed. Now, we feel that we have reason to doubt everything. So we do just that — we live the lion’s life of deconstruction and resistance, fighting off the values that we once followed. Or as Nietzsche said, we live to slay the dragon named “Thou Shalt” — a massive, fiery embodiment of society, with thousands of demands written on its scales. We once tried to carry it on our backs, but now we know it can’t and shouldn’t be done. Now we live to fight it.

But that isn’t freedom — eternally wrestling with society. That’s just being bitter. That’s just another way to be a captive. Instead of living for society, we’re living to oppose it. Lions want to dismantle and disrupt, but they have no intentions to fix or rebuild. They want to bring out problems, but they care precious little about finding solutions.

And for this reason, when we finally slay that dragon, fighting tooth-and-claw for our freedom, we find that, once again, our lives have become meaningless.

Just like the sheep lived only to subsist, just like the camel lived only to conform, the lion lives only to fight. And with nothing left to battle, what is there to do? We’ve slain the dragon, but our victory was our defeat — by defeating the dragon, we defeated the only thing we had to live for: something to oppose. And now, we’re left with a profound nothingness, sitting alone in the dragon’s empty cave.

Once again, we’ll have to overcome ourselves if we’re to overcome this nothingness. We’ll have to become children.