The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Let me give you one example, quite provisionally. In all ages there have been people who wished to “improve” mankind: this above all is what was called morality. But the most different tendencies are concealed beneath the same word. Both the taming of the beast man, and the rearing of a particular type of man, have been called “improvement”: these zoological _termini,_ alone, represent real things—real things of which the typical “improver,” the priest, naturally knows nothing, and will know nothing. To call the taming of an animal “improving” it, sounds to our ears almost like a joke. He who knows what goes on in menageries, doubts very much whether an animal is improved in such places. It is certainly weakened, it is made less dangerous, and by means of the depressing influence of fear, pain, wounds, and hunger, it is converted into a sick animal. And the same holds good of the tamed man whom the priest has “improved.” In the early years of the Middle Ages, during which the Church was most distinctly and above all a menagerie, the most beautiful examples of the “blond beast” were hunted down in all directions,—the noble Germans, for instance, were “improved.” But what did this “improved” German, who had been lured to the monastery look like after the process? He looked like a caricature of man, like an abortion: he had become a “sinner,” he was caged up, he had been imprisoned behind a host of apparling notions. He now lay there, sick, wretched, malevolent even toward himself: full of hate for the instincts of life, full of suspicion in regard to all that is still strong and happy. In short a “Christian.” In physiological terms: in a fight with an animal, the only way of making it weak may be to make it sick. The Church undersood this: it ruined man, it made him weak,—but it laid claim to having “improved” him.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.