BIll Branyon

By JIM GENARO

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche might seem like strange bedfellows to many. But according to author and historian Bill Branyon, King was, in many ways, the very epitome of the Nietzschian Übermensch, or “overman.”

Branyon discussed the philosophical links between King and Nietzsche at a meeting of the Ethical Culture Society of Asheville last Sunday. About 25 people attended the meeting at the Botanical Gardens at Asheville.
He began by presenting a question to the members of the ECS, which bills itself as “A humanist alternative to tradition.”

“Can a secular humanist ... even an atheist, have an opportunity to follow King’s example?” Branyon asked. He joked that he would “be an atheist if I wasn’t such a skeptic.”

But he noted that King’s beliefs were firmly rooted in his Christian theology and in the belief that the Bible is the irrefutable word of God.

This belief, he said, is directly opposite to Nietzsche’s concept of the Void that is the fundamental reality of existence.

However, Branyon argued that this did not mean Nietzsche was inherently opposed to those who held religious beliefs. Nietzsche wrote admiringly of both Jesus and Moses, whom he believed to be “the most successful inventors of moral values in human history,” Branyon said. “He just wanted them to be recognized as such,” rather than as exclusive representatives of divine values, he added.

Nietzsche believed that failure to recognize the fundamental meaninglessness of existence was the cause of countless neuroses, Branyon told the audience.

However, that lack of absolute meaning allows the individual to create his or her own meaning and thus live a life that is unrestrained by traditions or moral obligations.

“How can you have a self-esteem problem if all else is meaningless?” Branyon asked, rhetorically. It is this kind of drive to create meaning that motivated King, he said.

In his quest to manifest his ideals, King often “showed an amazingly brazen innocence,” Branyon noted. He risked the lives and safety of countless people, including adolescents, in protests that he knew would result in police brutality. Nothing was too important to sacrifice — even his own life — in King’s quest to realize his values.

But perhaps it was a more earthly drive that gave King the energy to fight for these values, Branyon suggested. King also was driven by lust, he noted.

“I wonder if it wasn’t the guilt King felt over his very active sex life that drove him to decide that 1968 was the year” to make his stand, Branyon said.

He noted that King’s affairs, while not common knowlege at the time, are well-documented. King’s widow, Loretta King, had the FBI records of his trysts in hotels during his travels legally sequestered until 2027, he said.

When asked by a friend about this apparent hypocrisy on the part ot a married clergyman, King made “a very Nietzschian, very unromantic statement on sex,” Branyon said. King told the friend, “I’m on the road 25-27 days each month. Sex is a form of anxiety reduction.”

This statement would seem reasonable to Nietzsche, who believed that Christianity’s subjugation of primal urges was a way of damping vast resources of energy that could be tapped into if one were liberated from a sense of moral duty, Branyon argued.

Branyon also noted that King chose, as his role model, not Jesus or any Christian mentor, but the “polytheistic, Hindu Gandhi.”

King “was a secular humanist disguised as a Southern Baptist,” Branyon said. He did not see his movement in religious terms, as a battle for salvation, but as a battle for economic justice.

King had wanted to expand his movement beyond the battle over race in the U.S., taking it to oppressed peoples everywhere, Branyon said. “He viewed his movement as part of the Third World’s effort to escape First-World imperialism.”

Quoting Nietzsche’s characterization of the world, Branyon said, “One becomes a ‘monster of energy’ that requires a monster of a task.”

In that effort, King defied three American presidents — Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, Branyon noted. At a time when the country was fracturing over the escalating war in Vietnam, King chose to interject even further conflict by marching on Washington and demanding social justice at home.

Branyon said that in doing so, King was, in a sense, issuing a challenge to a whole nation: “It’s either you, or me, America. Either get right with poverty or kill me.”

“We killed him,” Branyon added.

The ensuing chaos took more than 40 lives, with riots in 110 cities across the U.S. and thousands of people arrested. King undoubtedly knew this would be the result of his challenge, Branyon said, “but he considered his ideals more important.”

If there ever existed “the overman that Nietzsche predicted, it was King,” Branyon elaborated.

He added that those who long for social change can take comfort from the unpredictability of King’s movement. Radical changes often happen unexpectedly, such as the civil rights movement, the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the European Union with a stabilized economic and political system, Branyon said.

“Thus, miracles happen, and they’ve happened recently,” he concluded.