Nietzsche was the first to draw a frightening picture of the modern world, which has been relentlessly repeated by everyone ever since: the collapse of culture: education is replaced by empty knowledge; spiritual substance — by the universal facade of fake life; boredom is drowned out by drugs of all kinds and thrills; every living spiritual germ is suppressed by the noise and rumble of the illusory spirit; everyone talks, but no one listens; everything decays in the flow of words; everything is blabbed and betrayed. None other than Nietzsche showed the desert of the mad race for profit; showed the meaning of the machine and the mechanization of labor; showed the meaning of the emerging phenomenon — the masses. But all this is for Nietzsche in the foreground, a ripple on the surface. Today, "when the whole earth is trembling, when everything is cracking at the seams," the main events take place in the depths, and what we observe are only consequences; a resident of a cozy age of calm and complacent bourgeoisie, Nietzsche writes with a shudder of genuine horror about what no one has yet noticed: the main event is that "God is dead". "Here is the monstrous news that will not reach the consciousness of Europeans until a few centuries from now; but then — then it will long seem to them that things have lost their reality...". "The rise of nihilism," Nietzsche predicts, "will be the history of the next two centuries. Our whole European culture has long been moving with agonizing tension, with trembling and grinding, increasing from decade to decade, toward catastrophe; not moving calmly, but convulsively, in rapid spurts, as if by force: "I wish it would end sooner rather than later, if only to avoid waking up, because it is so terrible to wake up and come to your senses"... Whereas for Christianity the general course of history was predetermined and the question of the salvation of the soul remained open for each individual, for Nietzsche the direction of the general process is in question: in which direction it will go depends on the will and activity of man. Hegel refused to pose the question of the future; Marx urged to hasten the coming of what was already coming by virtue of necessity, which, as it seemed to him, was irrefutably proven by his science; but Nietzsche saw in the future the most terrible danger: man can perish, can become an ape again, if at the last moment he does not succeed in decisively changing the direction of history.

— Karl Jaspers

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