The Last Man Has Arrived: What Nietzsche Saw Coming
Nietzsche warned that democratic societies would eventually produce “last men”—creatures so comfortable and risk-averse they would trade freedom for security without a second thought. Read in the long arc of political philosophy, his “Last Man” is not just a satire of modern life; it is a diagnosis of how democracies dissolve from the inside: prosperity produces complacency, complacency produces indifference, and indifference becomes a political opening.
The Prophet of Democratic Exhaustion
In 1883, Friedrich Nietzsche introduced one of philosophy’s most unsettling archetypes: der letzte Mensch—the Last Man. Writing in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagined the terminal point of democratic-nihilistic culture: a being who has traded aspiration for security, excellence for mediocrity, and struggle for managed contentment.
"'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small."
The “blinking” gesture signifies not innocence but spiritual exhaustion. The Last Man has extinguished depth and danger. His defining proclamation: “We have invented happiness.” And then he blinks.
Nietzsche’s point is not merely cultural snobbery. It’s political psychology: when a citizenry comes to treat risk as an intolerable scandal, freedom starts to feel like an unnecessary stressor.
The Will to Comfort
Nietzsche saw modern democratic culture producing beings characterized by:
Enforced conformity: “Everyone wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily to the madhouse.”
Abolition of hierarchy: “Who still wants to rule, who obey? Both require too much exertion.”
Managed contentment: “No shepherd and one herd!”
The Last Man represents the ultimate victory of what Nietzsche called the will to comfort over the will to power. Where the will to power drives humans to overcome, create, and assert values, the will to comfort seeks only the elimination of risk—“universal green pasture-happiness.”
Most chillingly, when Zarathustra warns the crowd about this degraded future, they respond: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra!” The masses actively choose their own diminishment.
Slave Morality and the Engine of Ressentiment
Nietzsche’s critique of democracy connects to his genealogy of morality. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he traces how ressentiment—the creative revenge of the powerless—produced a moral revolution that inverted all values:
| Evaluative Mode | Core Driver | Definition of "Good" | Definition of "Bad/Evil" |
|---|---|---|---|
| Master Morality | Will to Power | Noble, Powerful, Beautiful | Common, Weak, Wretched |
| Slave Morality | Ressentiment | Meek, Humble, Suffering | Strong, Powerful, Fear-inspiring |
“The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values,” Nietzsche wrote. Where noble morality affirms itself—saying “Yes” to life—slave morality begins with negation: “While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different.’”
Democracy, for Nietzsche, extends this psychology into politics. Under the guise of “justice” and “equality,” the democratic “herd” uses the power of the state to restrain anyone who rises above mediocrity.
But there is a second twist that matters for modern politics: reactive valuation does not remain the monopoly of the weak. A politics saturated with grievance can produce competing ressentiments—each side treating the other as “the Evil One,” each defining itself more by opposition than by creation. The result is not just polarization; it’s exhaustion.
The Democratic Movement as Decay
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche states bluntly:
"We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value."
The democratic imperative becomes the elimination of all danger: “We want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!” This abolition of risk is called “progress.”
That line is the hinge between Nietzsche and the older classical diagnosis: when freedom is understood primarily as freedom from fear, the demand for politics becomes the demand for management.
From “Last Man” to “Protector”
Plato, writing two millennia earlier, described democracy as intoxicated by liberty and equality—until the “insatiable desire for freedom” dissolves authority and discipline, and the city becomes unable to “care even for the laws.” At that moment, the people seek a rescuer—someone to end the chaos. The paradox is brutal: “the excess of liberty… seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”
Nietzsche’s Last Man is not Plato’s street-fighter. He’s more dangerous precisely because he doesn’t need violence. He needs convenience. He doesn’t demand a tyrant; he demands a reduction in friction. In that sense, the Last Man becomes the perfect electorate for a “protector” who promises calm, order, and comfort—especially if those promises arrive through normal procedures and familiar rituals.
The Contemporary Resonance
Read Nietzsche’s description of the Last Man against contemporary democratic malaise:
- Politics reduced to a background stressor to be minimized, not a shared project to be sustained
- Engagement displaced into spectacle: outrage without sacrifice, opinion without participation
- Safety and comfort elevated into supreme political values
- The stigmatizing of “difference” and demanding excellence as pathology—“whoever feels different goes voluntarily to the madhouse”
- A slow atrophy of civic muscle: fewer associations, thinner community ties, less shared reality
The Last Man doesn’t storm capitals or burn constitutions. He simply stops caring whether freedom survives, because freedom is burdensome. Freedom requires judgment, responsibility, risk. The Last Man has discovered you can have small pleasures without any of that.
Forgetting Freedom
There’s a final piece Nietzsche anticipates psychologically, even if he doesn’t theorize it historically: democratic decline relies on forgetting. When freedom becomes background infrastructure, citizens lose living memory of what it cost—what it required—and they interpret incremental encroachments as “efficiency,” “normalization,” or “just how things work now.”
The Last Man’s horizon is short. He lives inside the present tense. He forgets that liberty is not a possession but a practice.
Why It Often Doesn’t Look Like Collapse
Modern scholars of backsliding emphasize that democracies frequently erode through “piecemeal” retrogression—changes that appear innocuous in isolation and are harder for the public to evaluate than a single dramatic rupture. Unwritten norms—treating rivals as legitimate competitors, exercising restraint even when law permits maximal aggression—often function as “guardrails.” When those fail, formal institutions struggle to compensate.
Nietzsche’s contribution is to show the human material those processes require: citizens habituated to comfort, averse to responsibility, and emotionally exhausted by conflict—ready, finally, to be governed as a matter of administration.
Did Nietzsche Offer Any Antidote?
Nietzsche’s critique is fundamentally aristocratic and cannot provide a democratic political program. His contempt for “the herd” and rejection of human equality have been appropriated by authoritarian movements throughout history.
Yet his diagnosis retains value. He reveals:
- The spiritual costs of comfort
- The nihilism embedded in modernity’s triumph over traditional meaning-systems
- The danger that democracy’s success abolishes the conditions for human excellence
- How the “will to comfort” can make citizens complicit in their own unfreedom
If there is a democratic lesson to extract, it’s not “become an Übermensch.” It’s this: democratic renewal requires a culture willing to treat freedom as a demanding practice—something that costs, something that asks more than preference and consumption.
The Diagnosis Stands
Nietzsche does not offer a systematic political philosophy aimed at forecasting regime trajectories. But he describes a recognizable temptation: when equality and safety become the supreme goods, citizens can experience freedom—with its burdens of judgment and responsibility—as an avoidable stressor. They may then accept a politics of management that reduces agency.
The Last Man doesn’t need to be conquered. He simply needs to be kept comfortable while his freedom is dismantled around him. He will blink, and blink, and blink—and call it happiness.
This is the first article in a series examining the philosophical foundations of democratic decline. The next article explores Tocqueville's concept of "soft despotism"—the tyranny that doesn't feel like one.