I came across a post: Bukowski in one corner, Nietzsche in the other. Both talking about morality, freedom, emptiness. Two men who could never meet, yet somehow they collide.
Bukowski’s line: people with no morals don’t end up free. They end up hollow, without love or feeling. He’s thinking of the psychopath who mistakes numbness for liberty.
Nietzsche’s punch is harder: morality itself is a trick. A herd-code, built so the strong don’t run too far ahead. He’s saying: the shoebox is safe, but it isn’t living.
I thought of an article I read in the daily newspaper. A lawyer said she started to learn Latin because of the Harry Potter books. That’s the shoebox talking. Society claps for it — Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Marvel or DC, Pepsi or Coke. Choices that aren’t choices. Trivialities dressed up as destiny. Nietzsche would spit on it. Life isn’t a multiple-choice quiz on mainstream culture. Life is not Ibiza versus London. It could be Gonder. It could be Hakkone. It could be anywhere outside the box.
That’s where Nietzsche is right: we are human beings, not consumers trapped in brand aisles. Bukowski, though, keeps us from slipping into another trap: the hollow freedom of the sociopath, the man who cuts loose from morality only to discover he’s cut loose from himself.
So who wins? Neither. Both. They draw blood from different veins. Nietzsche reminds you not to waste your life in the shoebox. Bukowski reminds you that freedom without love is just another kind of prison. There’s no judge to call it. The fight follows you out of the ring, into the street, into the desperate hours when you wonder what freedom really costs once you’ve walked out of your preprogrammed Themepark.