Osho, Zarathustra & Klaus Schwab

Reflections on the "Last Man"

Osho

For the last couple of decades, I have been into the controversial Indian mystic, Osho, who was the subject of the Netflix series, Wild, Wild Country. It started for me when I took the decision that I wanted to heal the mess that my life had become, back at the end of the nineties.

Although I was touched by some of Osho’s words very deeply, it was not really his teachings or vision of the world that attracted me. Rather, I wanted to take part in intense therapy workshops. And I had found that the “Osho therapists” were the most exciting people who also offered the most profound process work at the time. I ended up doing about eight years of group therapy with one, excellent school based in the Netherland. And this led to me becoming a therapist myself, something I had never considered before.

These days, I’m not attached to any school, whether related to Osho or otherwise. But I still regularly listen to Osho’s discourses. It was reading a couple of Osho books, back in the late nineties, that initially touched me so deeply that I realised that another type of life was possible. If I’m honest, taking the drug Ecstasy had its role too.

One theme that often recurs in his talks is that of man being “a bridge.” By this, it seems clear that he means that we are not, as a people, complete. That current humanity is like a tightrope, strung between our primate ancestors and some form of new human being. And that we must individually walk this tightrope to become whole and to thus complete our journey, and the journey of mankind.

Osho expounds on this topic frequently. He makes it clear that this journey is individual. He also says that the journey is into the unknown, and finally the unknowable. The journey cannot be mapped out by the mind, for it requires progressively leaving our thinking mind behind. Osho envisioned a “New Man” - symbolising those who were willing and courageous enough to take the journey.

Towards the end of his life, after being thrown out of America and placed on the Interpol wanted list, Osho ended up back in his Pune ashram. He began speaking again, as usual doing free-form commentaries on notable spiritual works. One book he discoursed about extensively at this time was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Nietzsche’s book, written almost exactly a century before Osho created his commentary, also examines extensively this notion that man is unfinished.

Zarathustra

Nietzsche chose Zarathustra, a pre-Christian Persian prophet, to be the mouthpiece for his own teachings about both the “superman” and the “last man” - two versions of humanity, in opposition to one another.

The “superman” - later to fall into controversy for being misinterpreted by Hitler and the Nazis - was pretty much identical with Osho’s notion of the “New Man.” It was someone who lived in the moment and who worked hard to deepen his or her consciousness. It was not someone content to remain in abstract thinking and concepts, rather a person deeply embedded in experiencing the world in its fullness.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, having spent a decade living alone on a mountain, decides one day that the time has come to descend to the town and there teach people about the “superman.” This, predictably, goes not well! And Zarathustra finds himself ridiculed by a crowd of people gathered in the town square, after he has delivered various discourses to them. They appear completely uninterested in taking up the challenges required to aspire to be the superman, but more wishing to become like the “last man.” This “last man” was the subject of Zarathustra’s final talk to them, and intended as a warning of what could happen if they didn’t challenge themselves.

Who was Zarathustra’s “last man?” He was a man simply content to live a comfortable life, to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay and to come home to his or her partner and children. He or she has no interest in self-development or challenge, and openly ridicules or marginalises anyone perceived as striving for anything more from life. He or she seeks only to be left alone to try and fulfil his or her social contract.

Both Osho and Nietzsche were highly concerned that, one day, a society would emerge that allowed only these “last men” to flourish. A society where the human spirit died and was replaced by an automated, “steady-state” culture.

Which brings us to Klaus.

Klaus Schwab

As head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and principle architect of the “Great Reset,” Klaus Schwab these days finds himself to be the butt of more conspiracy theories than Bill Gates and Tony Fauci combined, no small achievement!

I don’t believe that Klaus is a “bad” human being in the slightest. To me, he is simply the product of a guilt-ridden and controlling German culture, terrified less it repeat the horrors of its past.

Schwab’s “Great Reset” proposes a global communist superstate (something he prefers to term “stakeholder capitalism”) as being the only means via which humanity might deal with the numerous challenges that it currently faces.

Deep inside the psyche of Klaus Schwab, and multitudes of Europeans, lurks the core belief that humanity is essentially “bad” or “dangerous” and that it must submit to top-down control in order for it to survive.

To me, such a belief says very little about humanity and a great deal more about the north European childhood. A childhood where our first impulses of aggression and self-expression are driven out of us, leaving millions of infants terrified to ever allow themselves to freely express. The fear that a two-year old experiences when he or she feels their parents are going to leave unless he or she submits to their control is immense. And it does not leave the psyche once childhood ends. It endures.

The underlying belief that results is that we must submit to hierarchical control in order to survive. That this is simply “the way things are.”

Schwab’s “Great Reset” is Zarathustra’s “Last Man.” It’s a “steady-state” communist culture where individuality is recognised as inherently dangerous and needing to be challenged. It is what Nietzsche and Osho were concerned about.

Whether in reality such a “steady-state” culture could actually be imposed long-term, or whether humanity would anyway find a way out, I don’t know. And, having lived communally for the majority of my adult life, I’m actually not against social justice or even social credit systems. I even quite like Klaus Schwab and absolutely think he does care about people. It is also the case that the Chinese Communist Party have similar ambitions for society. It is not just Klaus.

But I do feel that the natural fear that so many of us have of finding ourselves “trapped” in a steady-state technocracy has its roots deep within our psyche; in a place where we all recognise the immense, unrealised potential of mankind.