On Nietzsche’s chair in the midst, Kojève’s snobs, and the pride of wanting less
Nietzsche’s last men weren’t content. They were proud of wanting less, and a society that forbids open ambition has taught us their smirk.
“We set our chair in the MIDST”—so saith their smirking unto me—“and as far from dying gladiators as from satisfied swine.” That, however, is—MEDIOCRITY, though it be called moderation.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III, “The Bedwarfing Virtue,” trans. Thomas Common
Read the sentence slowly and notice what it doesn’t contain. It names no belief, no pleasure, no aim. It gives a position, and the position is defined entirely by two other parties: the men who die in the arena and the animals who feed at the trough. The speakers stand between them, equally far from both, and they know it. The word that carries the passage isn’t “mediocrity,” which is Zarathustra’s verdict on them. It’s “smirking,” which is their own expression. It is the face of people who have measured the distance to everyone else and found it satisfactory.
Nietzsche wrote this in the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in 1884. Nearly a century and a half later, Francis Fukuyama, whose book of 1992 made Nietzsche’s last man famous as the citizen at the end of history, says in a memoir published this month that we have been living in the last man’s realm for some time. He is right about the realm. This essay argues that he has been describing the wrong man.
I
The Herd’s Vanity
The last man first appears in the prologue to Zarathustra, and the reason Zarathustra gives for describing him at all is the place to start. He has come down from ten years in the mountains to a town where a crowd has gathered to watch a rope-dancer, and he has been preaching the Superman to them. They laugh. So he changes tactics, and says to his heart:
They have something whereof they are proud. What do they call it, that which maketh them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguisheth them from the goatherds.
They dislike hearing of contempt for themselves, he reasons, so he will appeal to their pride and speak of the most contemptible thing. What follows is the famous portrait. The last men have discovered happiness, and blink. They have left the regions where it is hard to live, because they need warmth. They still work, but work is a pastime, and they take care the pastime doesn’t hurt. They have their little pleasures for the day and their little pleasures for the night, but a regard for health. “Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal.” And the crowd interrupts him with a shout: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra … make us into these last men!”
The scene is usually read as a scene about comfort. It is also a scene about pride. The speech was aimed at vanity, and the vanity recognized itself.
But a careful reader of the prologue will object at once. The last men are all the same; whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse. How can a creature so perfectly uniform be a snob? Snobbery needs someone to look down on.
The answer is that the last man is not a snob among last men. Last men are snobs about everyone else. Their culture is a collective possession, a herd’s vanity about being a herd, and it points outward, at the goatherds. Inside the herd there is sameness; the contempt is aimed beyond it.
That is the figure Zarathustra meets again in the book’s third part, when he returns from his mountains to learn whether people have grown greater or smaller, and finds rows of new houses that look as if a child took them from a toy-box. Nietzsche never calls the small people of “The Bedwarfing Virtue” last men; joining the two passages is this essay’s reading. But the same habit shows in both. The small people have made modesty and tameness their virtue: “therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s best domestic animal.” They have set their chair in the midst, and they are smirking about it. The prologue’s crowd looked down on goatherds. The small people look down on gladiators and swine. The direction of the glance is the same: outward, and down.
II
Three Ways to Live After History
Fukuyama’s last man is a different creature. In the part of his book that bears the last man’s name, he defines him by subtraction. To the extent that liberal democracy succeeds in purging megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as better than others, and puts rational consumption in its place, we will become last men. His image for that condition comes from Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher whose Paris lectures on Hegel gave “the end of history” its modern life. Men with no great causes left to fight for, Fukuyama writes, would become animals again, like a dog that sleeps in the sun all day provided it is fed, indifferent to how the other dogs are faring.
Kojève changed his mind. In a note added to the second edition of his Hegel lectures, written in 1959 after a visit to Japan, he proposed a second kind of post-historical humanity. The Japanese, he wrote, had lived for centuries in something like the peace that follows history, and they had not become animals. They had become snobs: people living by values “totally formalized,” emptied of historical content. His examples were the Noh theatre, the tea ceremony and the art of arranging flowers, and at the extreme he imagined a suicide committed for form alone, with nothing to do with risking one’s life for a cause.
Fukuyama takes up the note and reads it in his own vocabulary. The tea ceremony serves no political or economic purpose, he writes, and yet it is an arena for megalothymia in the form of pure snobbery, with rival schools, masters, novices and canons of better and worse. Rather than turning into “a society of last men,” the Japanese had found a way to stay human. He predicted that the West would find its own versions: the free-solo climbers whose muscles can tear tendons from the bone, the ironman races whose only purpose is to shake their entrants out of bourgeois comfort. In 2017, a free-solo ascent of El Capitan became a film that won an Academy Award.
So Fukuyama arranges three figures. The dog is content because he doesn’t compare. The snob keeps megalothymia alive in contentless forms. And between them, as the danger, stands the last man, who has lost it. The snob is the last man’s alternative.
It is tempting to guess that Kojève’s snob is Nietzsche’s last man seen a second time, the same creature looked at with sympathy instead of contempt. Kojève never says he is answering Zarathustra, so the guess stays a guess, persuasive at most; but Nietzsche’s text supports something firmer.
Look again at Fukuyama’s snob. He needs a school. He needs masters to aspire to and novices to look down on, and a canon to tell him which is which. Boris Groys, writing on Kojève’s note, draws the conclusion: snobbery, unlike the desire for recognition, cannot be universal. A tea ceremony in which everyone is a master is no longer a hierarchy, and without the hierarchy there is nothing to be snobbish about.
But the last men have solved exactly this problem. Their snobbery needs no school, because it doesn’t rank them against one another. It ranks all of them together against those outside: goatherds, gladiators, swine. It is the one snobbery a whole society can hold at once, because its object is always someone else. The last man is not the snob’s opposite. He is the snob without a school, and that is why there are so many more of him than there are tea masters.
III
Where the Smirk Comes From
If the last man keeps his megalothymia, where does he keep it? Fukuyama’s own pages supply the mechanism. In the aristocratic societies that came before, the desire to be recognized as superior could show itself. In democracies, he writes, it has not been banished but “driven underground.” Nobody is legally prevented from wanting to be recognized as better than others, but “nobody is encouraged to do so,” and its surviving forms live in tension with the society’s stated ideals.
Fukuyama followed it underground to the mountain and the marathon. But a desire forbidden to show itself as a claim can take another route: it can wear the shape of its own opposite. If one may not say I am better because I want more, one may still say, and be admired for saying, I am wiser because I want less. The claim of superiority survives, disguised as its renunciation. This is the snobbery of reduced expectations, and the chair in the midst is its emblem: moderation not as a practice but as a vantage point.
Where does it come from? Zarathustra has an answer, and it is the most humane passage in this whole line of argument. In “The Tree on the Hill,” he meets a young man who wants to climb and is ashamed of his climbing, and he warns him that the danger for a noble spirit is not becoming ordinary. It is becoming a scoffer:
Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then they disparaged all high hopes.
Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the day had hardly an aim.
The snobbery of the middle is not born from contentment. It is born from a hope that failed and then turned on hope itself.
It is hard not to read that sentence against the history of Fukuyama’s own thesis. In 1989 his essay offered a generation the largest political hope it would be given: that the long argument about how people should live together had been settled, and settled well. The decades since have been, among other things, the slow disparagement of that hope, and of hopes of that size.
Two cautions keep this from becoming a sneer. The first is that wanting less can be wisdom, and has been since Epicurus taught that happiness lies in limiting desire. The test is in the grammar of Nietzsche’s sentence. Epicurus limits his own desires and says nothing about those who don’t. The small people set their chair as far from the gladiators and the swine; their moderation is measured by the distance to others. Wanting less is a practice. Wanting less “as far from” is a posture.
The second caution is that many people in 2026 expect less than their parents did because rents, wages and debt lowered those expectations for them. That is not this essay’s subject. Expectations lowered for people are a grievance, and a just one. Only expectations worn as a badge are a snobbery.
IV
The Other Snobbery
None of this makes Nietzsche the hero of the story, because Nietzsche has a snobbery of his own. In “The Spirit of Gravity,” Zarathustra turns on the palate that accepts everything:
All-satisfiedness, which knoweth how to taste everything,—that is not the best taste! I honour the refractory, fastidious tongues and stomachs, which have learned to say “I” and “Yea” and “Nay.”
This is snobbery too, of the older kind: the conviction that the discriminating few are better than the many who swallow whatever they are given. Nietzsche lived it. Fukuyama records that his fingers turned blue in winter because he wouldn’t heat his room, and that before his madness he scarcely passed one day in ten without crushing headaches, a life softened neither by comfort nor by peace. In the same passage he concedes the psychology: some people deliberately refuse comfort and security, and aren’t satisfied with happiness as the utilitarians define it.
If the essay stopped here, it would have taken Nietzsche’s side against the middle, and Fukuyama’s last chapter explains why it shouldn’t. He sees two dangers at the end of history and insists they are linked: that we become secure, self-absorbed last men, or that we return to bloody and pointless prestige battles. The first may produce the second, because megalothymia denied regular outlets may come back in a pathological form. People who can no longer struggle for a just cause, he writes, will struggle “against the just cause,” for the sake of struggle, out of boredom. His example is August 1914. After a century of peace and rising prosperity, crowds filled the streets of Berlin, Paris, Petrograd, London and Vienna demanding war, and on Fukuyama’s reading of the evidence, part of what moved them was weariness with the dullness of middle-class life and a hunger for the community that war seemed to promise.
That is the strongest defence the chair in the midst will ever have. The dying gladiators are not a figure of speech. A society that rewards the snobbery of the heights may get its tea masters and its mountaineers; it may also get its crowds outside the Kaiser’s residence. And a society of smirking moderates, whatever else can be said of it, does not march.
The essay declines to judge between the two snobberies, because it doesn’t need to. Both are forms of the same desire: the one Fukuyama says has been driven underground, and Nietzsche never believed could be driven anywhere. The question is not which snobbery is right, but which one a society rewards, and where the ambition it disdains will go.
V
The Rope-Dancer
The prologue to Zarathustra has one figure whom Zarathustra honours without reservation, and he isn’t a philosopher. He is the rope-dancer the crowd came to see. While Zarathustra is still speaking of the last man, the performance begins: the rope-dancer walks out on a rope stretched between two towers above the market. Halfway across, a buffoon bursts out behind him and leaps over him, and he falls. The crowd, Nietzsche writes, flew apart like the sea in a storm. Zarathustra stays. The broken man, not yet dead, says he is not much more than an animal taught to dance by blows and scanty fare.
“Not at all,” said Zarathustra, “thou hast made danger thy calling; therein there is nothing contemptible. Now thou perishest by thy calling: therefore will I bury thee with mine own hands.”
Later the market empties, because, Nietzsche says, even curiosity and terror become fatigued. Zarathustra is still sitting beside the body.
The rope-dancer has descendants, and Fukuyama has already met them: the climber whose danger he calls purely formal, an outlet for megalothymia whose object has ceased to be historical. Zarathustra would call the same danger a calling. The two books pass opposite verdicts on the same man, and this essay leaves both standing.
What Nietzsche holds in contempt is not the watching. It is the scattering: the crowd that came for the danger, fled when it became real, and went home tired. The free-solo climber’s audience is the same crowd with a subscription.
There is another rope, in another century, that belongs beside this one. In the summers of 1859 and 1860, thousands of people lined the banks of the Niagara gorge, many of them betting on his death, to watch a French acrobat called Blondin cross on a rope. He carried a man on his back. He crossed blindfolded. He cooked an omelette halfway over. And on one crossing, high above the river, he set a chair on the rope and stood on it.
There are two places to put a chair. One is in the midst, as far from the gladiators as from the swine. The other is on the rope.
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Written in full collaboration with the machine, and the ledger requires the names be exact: drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Opus 5; copy editing by Gemini. No quotation in this essay was recalled; each was copied from a text in hand, with the one exception noted below. Nietzsche is quoted from Thomas Common’s 1909 translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra, from the open text at Project Gutenberg. Francis Fukuyama is quoted and paraphrased from The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Part V, “The Last Man,” pp. 305–331; he quotes Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Nietzsche, in which the last men “invented” happiness, where in Common’s they “discovered” it. Kojève’s note is the “Note to the Second Edition” of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, in James H. Nichols Jr.’s translation; its phrase “totally formalized” is quoted as it appears in published excerpts of that translation, not from the printed page. Boris Groys’s reading is from “Romantic Bureaucracy,” Radical Philosophy. Blondin’s feats are given only where more than one account attests them. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini for this essay; they illustrate its argument and depict no real place or event. On the collaboration → “The Third Thing”