Parmenides and the priests

So I have just read articles that Parmenides was a materialist who opposed the notion and practice of crude empiricism. Good for him.

The eyes and ears often deceive, and are especially deceptive to those whose educations have turned out to be cursory and superficial. To doubt one's first perceptions is the beginning of wisdom. This pertains especially to social life.

To doubt everything that seems plain to one's eyes is actually necessary, to untangle oneself from perceptions that have been conditioned by priests.

As Nietzsche points out below, not everyone who lacks public approval is deserving of scorn or being socially outcast. Rather, they are outcasts because priests have usurped their rightful authority:


[See: Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of men so constituted that for one reason or another, they lack public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficent or useful—that chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an outcast, unworthy, contaminating. All men so constituted have a subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once lived in this half tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer ... As long as the priest was considered the supreme type, every valuable kind of human being was devaluated ... The time will come—I promise—when the priest will be considered the lowest type, as our chandala, as the most mendacious, the most indecent kind of human being ... I call attention to the fact that even now—under the mildest regimen of morals which has ever ruled on earth, or at least in Europe—every deviation [Abseitigkeit], every long, all-too-long sojourn below, every unusual or opaque form of existence, brings one closer to that type which is perfected in the criminal. All innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the chandala on their foreheads—not because they are considered that way by others, but because they themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates them from everything that is customary or reputable.]



So long as priests are in charge, ones eyes and ears a likely to deceive one, for a battle is being fought on a "subterranean" level, and it is between the priests and those whose rightful authority has been usurped.

***

But how does one tell who is who, if the battle being fought is inherently "subterranean"?

I decide the difference between a friend and an enemy in precisely THIS way:

 A priestly type NEEDS me, to assert his authority. His authority does not stand alone, but requires various captives -- a herd or a flock he has trapped.

Somebody who speaks from his or her own authority, however, does not emit an aura of neediness even as they grasp for power and for an image of domination and control. They do not need to take away my power to feel powerful. They already have enough of their own.

 This is how I know that patriarchy is related to the priests -- those who are craven and in need of power --because they have no inherent authority, but only authority based on deception.



The difference between the two demeanors is as clear to me as night and day.