Crafted Self-Importance

In Slate, Matt Feeney destroys the notion held by some that there is something deeper to Jared Loughner's rage than mania and narcissism. Or, that somehow, his nihilism developed from reading Nietzsche. The destruction of these myths and the cultish following of Nietzsche by the young and disaffected make "Angry Nerds" a must read. Some quotes:

The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men is obvious, but it isn't exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces. Nietzsche mocks convention and propriety (and mocks difficult writers you'd prefer not to bother with anyway). He's funny and (deceptively) easy to read, especially compared to his antecedents in German philosophy, who are also his flabby and lumbering targets: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and, especially, Kant. If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. . . .

If you're a thoughtful and unhappy young man, in other words, why wouldn't you want to read someone who seems to reflect both your alienation and your uncontainable desire back to you as masculine bravery and strength? Indeed, there's something in every book you're likely to pick up—some enticement of form or content or both—that addresses your horniness/alienation and flatters you in the pretense that, though you have no formal training and are actually kind of a crappy and distracted reader, you are doing philosophy. . . .

. . . in Beyond Good and Evil, it's the aphorisms—a section entitled "Epigrams and Interludes" comprising over a hundred one- and two-sentence masterworks of moral paradox and counterintuition, calculated outrage and elegant eye-poking. Nietzsche is aphoristic even when he's being systematic, and when he's being aphoristic, his writing is simply unmatched in its beauty and mayhem, its uncanny mix of compression and infinite suggestion. And for a young guy who's intellectually hungry but doesn't much enjoy reading, finding this section of philosophy-bits in the middle of this famous book is like a homecoming. You don't even have to know what these epigrams mean to enjoy them. You just feel manly and brave in entertaining them at all, not flinching but laughing when Nietzsche says: "One is best punished for ones virtues." (You even get to work out some of your girl-troubles by lingering over Nietzsche's several jabs at women.)

It's definitely worth the few minutes it will take to read the entire article. Enjoy!